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This paper analyzes Chinese aid allocation from 2013 to 2021 and compares it to traditional as well as emerging donors. In 2013, China launched the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) which is considered one of China’s most ambitious development initiatives in the 21st century. To explore how the BRI reshaped China’s motives for aid allocation, I employ a two-part model to explain not only which countr
This study examines the impact of newly built parks on housing prices in New York City between 2011 and 2023. The case of New York City is especially interesting due to its high amount of new urban greening projects during the last few decades. Related to the different benefits of urban greening, there is evidence that parks increase the desirability of a neighborhood and thereby raise property va
Throughout history, human civilisation and wildlife have instinctively settled close to water and coastlines out of necessity for resources. It has always been a natural instinct, yet we have also continually adapted to weather conditions and relocated when resources were found elsewhere. We have always been flexible and mobile, adapting to nature and allowing it to lead and guide us. With the ris
Global post-industrial cities face the dual challenge of sustaining growth while repairing damaged ecosystems. Industrialization has left profound scars on both ecological networks and the urban fabric, demanding systematic spatial regeneration and environmental repair. Among these, abandoned brownfields hold unique potential: they offer opportunities to reshape urban structures, restore ecologica
Drawing on concepts from cognitive semiotics and phenomenology, this thesis investigates how Japanese ideophones are perceived by non-speakers of Japanese, aiming to clarify key concepts such as iconicity, cross-modality/unimodality and the ultimately the nature of language as a semiotic system. Three research questions guided the study: (1) What is the relation between primary and secondary iconi
A critical challenge in developing anion exchange membrane (AEM) water electrolysis is to design high-performance AEMs with chemical and mechanical stability under harsh alkaline environments. Herein, we report the rational design and synthesis of QP(T-3-Pip) featuring flexibly linked isomeric piperidinium cations via a Friedel-Crafts polyhydroxyalkylation between terphenyl and commercial 3-piperi
Situated at the junction of Cognitive Semantics and Experimental Phenomenology, this study investigates how participants perceive the structure of 18 perceptual dimensions of opposites across the visual, auditory, tactile, gustatory and olfactory sensory modalities. The structures include three components: two poles (HIGH; LOW) and an intermediate (NEITHER HIGH NOR LOW). Participants were asked to
The Age of Liberty gave rise to a unique form of government in Sweden, the world’s first Freedom of the Press Act and civil rights. Beliefs that those in power should be loyal to the people not to God or the monarch, mark the beginning of profound social changes that took hold with the European Enlightenment.
This article examines how Swedish social democratic women used the enactment of universal suffrage in 1919/1921 as an argument to gain support for separate organising. The article also analyses the extent to which the Swedish National Federation of Social Democratic Women, founded in 1920, used direct (personal) and indirect (media) channels for voter communication. Both scarce economic resources
Objective. This study aimed to investigate the potential of contrastive learning to improve auditory attention decoding (AAD) using electroencephalography (EEG) data in challenging cocktail-party scenarios with competing speech and background noise. Approach. Three different models were implemented for comparison: a baseline linear model (LM), a non-LM without contrastive learning (NLM), and a no
Research on early postwar documentation efforts related to the Second World War and the Holocaust conducted by survivors of Nazi persecution has expanded over the past two decades. Yet, research on how knowledge circulatedtween these efforts – especially across various “borders” – is still nascent. This chapter seeks to gain a better understanding of the role of women’s informalworks during the ea
The fourth issue of the yearbook History of Intellectual Culture (HIC) features a thematic section on the production of knowledge related to the Holocaust. The contributions focus on the circulation of knowledge via letters and other forms of written communication within and among survivor historical commissions after the Second World War with an emphasis on the interplay of gender and other diffe
In this review essay, the authors discuss new scholarly literature on the Europeanisation of the universities. This field has recently started to attract increasinginterest among historians, partly as a new way of writing the history ofthe European integration and the so-called knowledge society. The authors reviewfive books that approach these questions by means of different methods and perspecti
The ability to navigate in an environment is essential to the autonomy of mobile robots and unmanned autonomous vehicles. Informally, path planning computes a collision-free path from a start location to a goal location in a known environment. Computing such paths accounting for the kinematics of the robot is a problem widely addressed in the literature, often focusing on feasibility and optimalit
In the Multiagent Connected Path Planning problem (MCPP), a team of agents moving in a graph-represented environment must plan a set of start-goal joint paths which ensures global connectivity at each time step, under some communication model. The decision version of this problem asking for the existence of a plan that can be executed in at most a given number of steps is claimed to be NP-complete
In many real-world problems stochasticity is a critical issue for the learning process. The sources of stochasticity come from the transition model, the explorative component of the policy or, even worse, from noisy observations of the reward function. For a finite number of samples, traditional Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods provide biased estimates of the action-value function possibly lead
We present a model-free method for solving the Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) problem given a set of trajectories generated by different experts' policies. In many applications, the observed demonstrations are not produced by the same policy. In fact, they may be provided by multiple experts that follow different (but similar) policies or even by the same expert that does not always replicat
