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Despite considerable economic growth and development over decades in large developing economies, there remain substantial intra-country regional disparities. An increasing body of literature suggests that improving aggregate state capacity is critical in delivering efficient and effective development outcomes and last-mile delivery of public services. However, the role of enhancing local state capacity targeting such regional imbalances and activating a catch-up effect, in terms of economic development, is understudied. We examine this in the context of India’s ‘Backward Regions Grant Fund’ (BRGF) policy, an intervention aimed at enhancing the capabilities and effectiveness of local governments and village councils. We use a synthetic difference-in-differences (SDiD) econometric technique to estimate the causal effects of this policy on average luminosity density and growth in total night-time lights. We find that there is a 5–7 per cent increase in the average night-time lights and a 3–4 p.p. growth in total night-time lights. We provide supportive empirical evidence that improved provision of public goods, such as the availability of schools and road infrastructure, and enhanced local state capacity, serve as a potential mechanism causing this effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several machine learning algorithms have been developed for the prediction of Alzheimer’s disease and related dementia (ADRD) from spontaneous speech. However, none of these algorithms have been translated for the prediction of broader cognitive impairment (CI), which in some cases is a precursor and risk factor of ADRD. In this paper, we evaluated several speech-based open-source methods originally proposed for the prediction of ADRD, as well as methods from multimodal sentiment analysis for the task of predicting CI from patient audio recordings. Results demonstrated that multimodal methods outperformed unimodal ones for CI prediction, and that acoustics-based approaches performed better than linguisticsbased ones. Specifically, interpretable acoustic features relating to affect and prosody were found to significantly outperform BERTbased linguistic features and interpretable linguistic features, respectively. All the code developed for this study is available at https://github.com/JTColonel/catch.

In demersal trawls, ground gears are typically fixed to the fishing line to protect against the seabed and ensure seabed contact. Rockhoppers (RH) are among the most applied types of ground gears, especially in fisheries with rough seabed. However, their use has earlier been associated with substantial loss of catch under the fishing line and low catch efficiency. A new ground gear concept known as the semicircular spreading gear (SCSG) has been documented to reduce this loss, but the catch efficiency of RH and SCSG gears has never been directly compared in a systematic commercial scale trial. Using twin trawl configuration, the present study compared the catch efficiency of a RH gear and a SCSG gear with both size selective and blinded trawls. Eighteen hauls were conducted in the Barents Sea demersal trawl fishery where cod (Gadus morhua) and haddock (Melanogrammus aeglefinus) are target species and redfish (Sebastes spp.) is an important commercial bycatch species. Using size selective trawls, the catches with the trawl equipped with the SCSG resulted in an average increase of 25.44 for cod, 32.04 for haddock and 64.34% for redfish compared to the trawl equipped with the RH gear. With blinded trawls, the increase changed to 41.35, 65.76 and 44.23% for cod, haddock and redfish, respectively. Despite the significant increase in catch efficiency observed for the trawl equipped with the SCSG, it also caught significantly more undersized fish than the trawl equipped with the RH gear. This increase illustrates the importance of size selective devices, especially if the use of the SCSG is widely adopted by industry.

We support a preliminary determination of the catch-bond character of a mechanical–chemical toy model using a tweezers construction with some modifications. We discuss a theoretical analysis of the problem using Newton trajectories. We propose a two-dimensional potential energy surfaces for this model. We discuss the slip, ideal and catch-bonds for this model using the previous potential parts of Dansuk and Keten (Matter 1:911, 2019). Chemical examples of the ansatz are allosteric reactions, especially FimH proteins. We note again that Newton trajectories provide the theoretical background of mechanochemistry. Construction of a potential energy surface and use of Newton trajectories by Wolfram Mathematica. Calculation of real catch bond behavior. We get for a tweezers model the catch bond behavior.Graphical abstract: Two barriers under external force, F. The catch-bond barrier increases.

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From lowcountry writer William Baldwin comes a new edition of his 1993 Lillian Smith Award-winning novel, The Hard to Catch Mercy. Including a new introduction by the author, this Southern Revivals edition makes available once more a story that touches on the issues of religion, race, and coming-of-age in the post-Civil War South, when the lines between these issues were not always clear. Set in fictional Cedar Point, a small southern community in the early 1900s, The Hard to Catch Mercy is told through the eyes of a young boy, Willie T., who is forced to confront the changing world around him. Including a cast of incredibly outlandish characters, Baldwin's novel is a wild, darkly comic tale rich with trick mules, Christian voodoo, fire, brimstone, first love, death, and the end of the world as Willie T. knows it.