Search

This study is an attempt to explain the nexus between health expenditures, GDP, human development index (HDI), CO2 emissions (COEM), renewable energy (RENE), financial development (FD) and electricity consumption (EC) using data from 2000Q1 to 2014Q4 for Brazil, India, China and South Africa. The study applies CIPS and CADF to determine the integration order. The tests confirmed the unique order of integration. The study further uses the Westerlund panel cointegration, which suggests the existence of a long-run relationship. Moreover, the panels dynamic ordinary least squares (DOLS) and fully modified ordinary least squares (FMOLS) are applied to ascertain the long-run elasticity. The health expenditure and electricity consumption affect the COEM positively. Moreover, HDI and RE affect COEM negatively. The study further confirms the existence of an N-shaped EKC in the long run. The pairwise Dumitrescu and Hurlin, Econ Model 29:1450-1460, (2012) test is used to uncover the direction of the association between the variables. The findings obtained from DH confirm a bidirectional causality between HDI and FD. Likewise, another bidirectional causal relationship has also been found between FD and EC. The findings of our study advocate policies in the direction of HDI and health expenditure by adopting RENE. This study highlights the importance of RENE, which can facilitate a reduction in carbon emissions and decreasing health expenditures. Moreover, the financial sector needs to be improved to create entrepreneurship opportunities for the public in improving the HDI in ensuring sustainable development.

The finance and natural resources revenue nexus play a critical role in an economy. The recent development and significant increase in academic literature regarding the resource-finance nexus are the primary motivations for conducting this study. This study aims to conduct a bibliometric analysis of 363 documents published between 1976 and 2021 collected from the Scopus database. The results have been demonstrated via graphs, tables, knowledge maps about the past trends, growth, and prospects using co-occurrence, co-authorship, and co-citation analysis via the VOSviewer tool. This study has identified prolific authors, journals, countries, academic institutions, and future pathways. The findings indicate that China has the highest share of publications (88, 24.2%), followed by Pakistan (58, 15.9%) and Turkey (37, 10.2%). The most productive academic institution is the Beijing Institute of Technology in China (13, 3.6%). This study proposes new avenues for further research concerning the resource-finance nexus, such as ecological footprint, sustainability, fiscal decentralization, green investment, energy prices, environmental quality, technological innovation, financial resource curse (especially the stock market resource curse), human capital, and renewable energy in policy development and sustainability towards the achievement of the SDGs.

Automatic gunshot detection technology allows incidence response system to counteract the potential of crimes. However, the surveillance systems suffer from various detection problems, such as difficulty in differentiating gunshot, fire work and other similar sounds. To improves the accuracy and reduces processing time, we have proposed hybrid algorithm for automatic detection of gunshots in indoor environment. In the proposed approach, we have used pre-processing steps which filters the input audio signals with a threshold. During pre-processing, the signals having smaller energy than the threshold value are discarded because these low energy signals are normal sound signals. When energy of audio signal is more than the threshold value and deemed ambiguous audio, such signal is forwarded to next step for further processing. The second step of the proposed approach is based on features based algorithm, in which antilog energy features are implemented to increase accuracy. These features extend energy band to easily differentiate between gunshot and normal scream. For classification purpose, SVM, Tree and KNN classifiers are used comparatively to differentiate a classifier which will show more accuracy with minimal computational cost. The proposed approach provides 94.97% accuracy for SVM,92.56% accuracy for KNN classifier, and 91.65% accuracy for Tree classifier. The pre-processing step reduces computational time by 5%, 13.61% and 34.56% for KNN, Tree and SVM classifiers respectively. The pre-processing step in the proposed algorithm requires 5.80% processing time of features based approach to filter an audio signal.

In the present study, mixed-metal ceramic Fe0.01Al0.5La.0.01Zn0.98O particles and their composites with polyaniline (PANI) were prepared via sol-gel and in situ free-radical polymerization techniques, respectively. Particles and composite formation was confirmed by FT-IR spectroscopy. SEM studies showed the Fe0.01Al0.5La.0.01Zn0.98O particle’s homogeneous dispersion in the polymer matrix. Ceramic particles were found to be in microdimensions. XRD analysis confirmed crystallite size in the range from 22 to 28 nm. Extensive rheological characterization was performed to check the durability of the materials for possible applications. Flow-curve tests suggested that the prepared materials are non-Newtonian (shear thinning) in nature. Increasing temperature have no appreciable effect on the viscosity which confirmed the mechanical stability of the materials. Based on frequency sweep test findings, the mechanical rigidity of the polymer has been enhanced (G′ = 2 × 102−5.22 × 103 Pa) by the introduction of ceramic particles. Conversely, creep compliance has been decreased considerably.

Navigation is moving inside a virtual environment to reach to a desired object or location. This paper presents a new egocentric navigation technique for exploring a virtual scene by tracking the 3DOF moves of index finger along x, y and z axis. With image processing at backend, the finger’s position in 2D image frame is traced dynamically to travel inside the designed frontend 3D scene. Mimicking a camera in hand, the system can also support Panning. Dynamic mapping is performed to interactively follow the trajectory of index finger. For either of the interactions, movement of index finger controls orientation and position of virtual camera. Linking the libraries of OpenCV and OpenGL, the technique is implemented in a visual studio project navigation by index tracing (NBIT). With NBIT, parallel processing is performed for backend index tracking and front-end rendering of virtual scene. The system was evaluated by fourteen participants for a total of 336 trails whereas applicability of the approach in virtual reality based computer aided design was assessed by five professional designers. Un-biased statistical evaluation of the system reveals that the approach suits well for interactive virtual and augmented reality applications.