Search Results for: Research

BANGLADESH’S apparel exporters are contemplating diversifying their past tight focus on western markets to include buyers serving southeast Asia as they emerge from the Covid-19 crisis. The move has been prompted by frosty relations with international retailers in Europe and the USA who scrapped or suspended shipments worth USD3 billion following the outbreak of the global coronavirus pandemic.  …

Somaliland’s higher education capacity may have been growing, but a lack of financial and human resources and the continued lack of international recognition of its country’s self-declared independent status continue to impede progress, say local education leaders.

Ahmed Musa, director-general at the ministry of higher education of the Republic of Somaliland, said infrastructure weaknesses and a shortage of qualified teaching and non-teaching staff were to blame.…

The halting of physical access to universities in Somalia by the Covid-19 pandemic is widening social-economic inequalities in Somalia, a country slowly emerging from a long civil war, a new study has argued. While some universities have worked hard to continue teaching and researching through online services, these are only available to students with sufficient finances to access them.…

INTRODUCTION

Quantum computers were once the stuff of science fiction, the technology that was always 10 years away from fruition. But now they are real and operating. Google last October announced it had developed a device of 53-qubits (quantum computers’ ability to express a signal), nicknamed Sycamore, which it claimed in a Nature article [1] took 200 seconds to sample one instance of a quantum circuit a million times, which the IT major claimed would take 10,000 years for a state-of-the-art digital supercomputer to achieve.…

THE EUROPEAN Union (EU) is funding an international research project that is developing new fast ways of making colloids – mixtures of one substance comprising insoluble microscopic particles suspended in another substance – the building blocks of most coatings. It is the nature of paints and coatings are that they are colloids – liquids that contain ingredients that give paints and coatings their colours, textures and functional abilities.…

ITALY’s paint industry is hopeful that the end of the country’s Covid-19 lockdown will herald a surge in business, interrupted by the pandemic. Gianni Martinetti, president of the Paints and Varnishes Group of AVISA, the adhesives and sealants, paints and varnishes and inks division of national chemicals industry association, Federchimica said: “The hope is that, after two very hard months of lockdown, we can start again with the same liveliness that was found in the first quarter of 2020.”…

Forensic linguistics is a new field, aiding detection of lies and deception within verbal and written statements, but it is developing, and artificial intelligence/machine learning offers new opportunities for this technique to become increasingly useful.

That is the view of Professor Jack Grieve, Professorial Fellow in Corpus Linguistics, University of Birmingham, UK, who sees a “great opportunity” in such work, although significant research is needed before such studies can yield useful work.…

THE ASIA nonwovens sector has been reaping the benefits of booming demand for protective medical materials during the Covid-19 crisis. But like the pandemic, this roaring demand will end, and nonwovens producers need to ready to a post-Covid-19 market.

This will mean reining in growth, but as David Price, founding partner of US-based management consultancy specialising in nonwovens Price Hanna Consultants, said, with regional nonwovens sales per person still low in global terms, the “market penetration for disposable and durable nonwovens in southeast Asia and China” is likely to grow regardless.…

THE NORDIC region’s beauty market has, like every other country, been hit by the Covid-19 pandemic. However, the stability of societies in Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark and Iceland has meant that their retail sectors have avoided some of the chaos linked to the health emergency that that has harmed other markets.…

With China turning from capital inflow to outflow amid Chinese companies’ global expansion programs, Chinese financial institutions are facing closer anti-money laundering scrutiny, as they, too, expand globally. Indeed, China’s top five banks had 1, 270 overseas branches at the end of 2017 (according to FATF (the Financial Action Task Force).…