Lifelong Disadvantage and Late Adulthood Frailty

Frailty is a complex state of objective and subjective vulnerability. It tends to increase with age, but the process is influenced by previous life course, especially previous disadvantages. The aim of this paper is to examine how the disadvantages suffered in adulthood (25 to 59 years) in four domains (unemployment, financial hardship, stress, and bad health) affect frailty in late adulthood (60 to 79 years). Using linear regression models on data from the Survey of Health, Ageing, and Retirement in Europe (2004–2017), we estimate frailty levels for several age groups (60–64, 65–69, 70–74, 75–79) accounting for both the persistence of these disadvantages over time and their coexistence, i.e., the number of years when they were simultaneously experienced. Results show that while frailty increases with age, as expected, there is also evidence of an accumulation of risks: the longer the periods of adult life affected by unemployment, stress, financial hardship or, most importantly, bad health, the frailer individuals are in their late years. Furthermore, periods of coexisting disadvantages in adulthood translate into additional frailty in late life. Our findings highlight the importance of fighting disadvantages early in life: long-term improvements in terms of reduced frailty (a concept interrelated with health) may be substantial.

EXECUTIVE AUTHORITY OF THE REPUBLIC OF KIRIBATI

Проблемы исполнительной власти всегда находились в центре внимания юридической науки. Им посвящены сотни статей и книг. Тем временем теория государственного управления все еще не предложила законченных определений во многих вопросах. Не случайно понятие и сущность исполнительной власти являются в известной мере дискуссионными. Статья посвящена раскрытию полномочий и организации деятельности исполнительной власти в Республике Кирибати. Знание политической системы других государств, и в частности такого территориально сложного государства, вполне естественно может помочь в моделировании оптимальной системы вертикали власти и для отечественного государствоведения. The problems of the executive branch have always been at the center of attention of legal science. Hundreds of articles and books are devoted to them. In the meantime, government theory still has not offered complete definitions on many issues. It is no coincidence that the concept and essence of the executive branch are, to a certain extent, controversial. The article is devoted to the disclosure of the powers and organization of the activities of the executive branch in the Republic of Kiribati. Knowledge of the political system of other states, and in particular of such a territorially complex state, can quite naturally help in modeling the optimal system of the vertical of power for national state studies.

Hierarchical learning from human preferences and curiosity

Recent success in scaling deep reinforcement algorithms (DRL) to complex problems has been driven by well-designed extrinsic rewards, which limits their applicability to many real-world tasks where rewards are naturally extremely sparse. One solution to this problem is to introduce human guidance to drive the agent’s learning. Although low-level demonstrations is a promising approach, it was shown that such guidance may be difficult for experts to demonstrate since some tasks require a large amount of high-quality demonstrations. In this work, we explore human guidance in the form of high-level preferences between sub-goals, leading to drastic reductions in both human effort and cost of exploration. We design a novel hierarchical reinforcement learning method that introduces non-expert human preferences at the high-level, and curiosity to drastically speed up the convergence of subpolicies to reach any sub-goals. We further propose a strategy based on curiosity to automatically discover sub-goals. We evaluate the proposed method on 2D navigation tasks, robotic control tasks, and image-based video games (Atari 2600), which have high-dimensional observations, sparse rewards, and complex state dynamics. The experimental results show that the proposed method can learn significantly faster than traditional hierarchical RL methods and drastically reduces the amount of human effort required over standard imitation learning approaches.

Modeling the Electronic Properties for CNT Interacted with ZnO, CuO and Co3O4

Because of the wide applications of carbon nanotubes (CNTs) and magic properties of metal oxides, Hartree-Fock (HF)/STO-3G quantum mechanical calculations were applied to study the electronic properties of CNTs and its interaction with ZnO, CuO and Co3O4. Calculations were conducted to calculate HOMO/LUMO band gap energy ∆E, moleculare electrostatic potential (MESP) and total dipole moment (TDM) for CNTs, CNT-Zn-O, CNT-Cu-O, CNT-Co-O and CNT-O-Zn, CNT-O-Cu, CNT-O-Co following the two mechanism of interaction as adsorbed and complex state. The calculations show that the interaction of CNTs with metal oxides increases its reactivity where MESP indicated to more distribution charges and an increasing in the TDM value after interaction of CNTs with metal oxides. Where, the interaction of CNT-Co-O as adsorbed state has the highest TDM with lowest band gap ∆E which confirms that CNT-Co3O4 can be used in sensing devices.

Solution of the Problem of Operational Reliability and Environmental Safety of Transport Pipeline Systems

Ensuring technogenic and environmental safety of transport pipeline systems is a complex state task. The main group of reasons leading to failures, accidents and other incidents in these systems is associated with the quality of manufacture (repair) of equipment, as well as the level of operation of transport pipeline systems. At the present stage of transport pipeline systems development, the design-technological approach, including the maintenance and repair of valves, is significantly changing. Particular attention is paid to the abrasive finishing and lapping treatment, which allows, in one operation, carrying out first the roughing (allowance removal), and then the final finishing with achievement of the shape and dimensional accuracy of the workpiece. The proposed calculated dependences allow predicting the operation reliability and durability of high-precision products of transport pipeline systems valves and, thus, increase the level of environmental safety of transport pipeline systems.