Does China Pakistan Economic Corridor become an avenue to achieve sustainable development goal no. 2 (food security) in Pakistan: Under the condition of COVID-19?

The post Covid-19 era steer towards stakeholder thinking, which demands to look for sustainable solutions in terms of other epidemics and food security is one of the most notable for the developing world. In South Asia, China Pakistan Economic Corridor could be an avenue for multi-layered socio-economic assistance where Pakistan can seek solution for one epidemic (food security) while engaged with the effects of pandemic through studying all the stakeholders. This could be a roadmap for the west-east or developed-underdeveloped countries reliance on one another for food security through economic corridor alike settings. Academically, it has been projected by the plethora of research that holistically and inclusively, stakeholder analysis is lacking in the available reservoir of research. Methodologically, the stakeholder analysis was performed in three layers-identification, investigation through social networks, and communication by prioritization matrix. The findings suggested that apart from stakeholders' differences in regard to interest, influence and knowledge, all of them agreed with the argument that China Pakistan Economic Corridor has enviably and irrefutably positive effects on food security. The policy implications project the need for integrated reports of various ministries to be unidirectional for having synergical effect and taking all the stakeholders into consideration as leaving any group behind will repeat the past results.

Social identity loss and reverse culture shock: Experiences of international students in China during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Background: International students are often exposed to various challenges during life transitions. The 'mindsponge' mechanism suggests that individuals absorb and integrate new cultural values that are compatible with their core values while rejecting those of lesser importance. On the basis of this notion, this article explores the experiences of international students in China regarding their unplanned return to their home countries during the COVID-19 pandemic through the lens of the mindsponge mechanism. Aim: This article aims to highlight the experiences of international students in China who are going through life transitions due to the global pandemic. The study focuses on the experiences of two groups of international students: (1) Those who remained in China during the pandemic, and (2) those who had left China and were stranded in their home countries due to a ban on international travel amid COVID-19. Method: This qualitative study comprised of in-depth semi structured in-person and online interviews. Thematic Analysis was used to analyze the data in order to generate study themes. Results: The results revealed that students who remained in China experienced challenges which included anxiety, closure of campuses, lockdown, their parents' concern regarding health issues, and not being able to meet with friends. On the other hand, students who had left China during the pandemic were confined to their home countries. This group of students experienced more severe problems than the students who remained in China. Since the transition to home countries was "unplanned," they were not ready to readjust to their native culture and were vulnerable to severe reverse culture shock. Upon returning to their home countries, international students faced a number of challenges, including readjustment to their home countries and changes in their lives in host and home countries. In addition, they lost social and academic resources, such as the disruption of study environment, losing important group memberships, financial constraints, visa expiry, graduation delay, and academic suspension. Conclusion: This study concluded that the international students experienced cultural problems after unplanned transition to their home countries during the pandemic. They described effects of reverse culture shock as being more distressing. They perceived dissatisfaction due to loss of previously held social identities and sense of belonging to the traditional society they left behind. There is a need of future studies on the long-term effect of unplanned transition on psychological, social and professional experiences. The process of readjustment has proven to be a challenging endeavor.

Adaptive changes in neuronal synchronization in macaque V4.

A fundamental property of cortical neurons is the capacity to exhibit adaptive changes or plasticity. Whether adaptive changes in cortical responses are accompanied by changes in synchrony between individual neurons and local population activity in sensory cortex is unclear. This issue is important as synchronized neural activity is hypothesized to play an important role in propagating information in neuronal circuits. Here, we show that rapid adaptation (300 ms) to a stimulus of fixed orientation modulates the strength of oscillatory neuronal synchronization in macaque visual cortex (area V4) and influences the ability of neurons to distinguish small changes in stimulus orientation. Specifically, rapid adaptation increases the synchronization of individual neuronal responses with local population activity in the gamma frequency band (30-80 Hz). In contrast to previous reports that gamma synchronization is associated with an increase in firing rates in V4, we found that the postadaptation increase in gamma synchronization is associated with a decrease in neuronal responses. The increase in gamma-band synchronization after adaptation is functionally significant as it is correlated with an improvement in neuronal orientation discrimination performance. Thus, adaptive synchronization between the spiking activity of individual neurons and their local population can enhance temporally insensitive, rate-based-coding schemes for sensory discrimination.

Finite volume and asymptotic methods for stochastic neuron models with correlated inputs.

We consider a pair of stochastic integrate and fire neurons receiving correlated stochastic inputs. The evolution of this system can be described by the corresponding Fokker-Planck equation with non-trivial boundary conditions resulting from the refractory period and firing threshold. We propose a finite volume method that is orders of magnitude faster than the Monte Carlo methods traditionally used to model such systems. The resulting numerical approximations are proved to be accurate, nonnegative and integrate to 1. We also approximate the transient evolution of the system using an Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process, and use the result to examine the properties of the joint output of cell pairs. The results suggests that the joint output of a cell pair is most sensitive to changes in input variance, and less sensitive to changes in input mean and correlation.

Delay for the capacity-simplicity dilemma in associative memory attractor networks.

We consider the issue of how a simple network with delayed feedback can exhibit complex but desired dynamical behaviors for memory storage and retrieval. We discuss the simplicity-capacity dilemma arising from the requirement of both large capacity and easy implementation in additive networks. We then propose a novel approach based on signal processing delay and show that the interaction of delay, feedback and refractoriness in a simple inhibitory network of three neurons can generate mathematically trackable coexisting periodic patterns. Therefore, a simple and small network with delayed feedback can process a large amount of information, and time lag in our biological or artificial neural nets is useful for information processing. How the connection topology of a large network enhances the network's capacity for memory storage and retrieval remains to be an interesting task.

Multistability in spiking neuron models of delayed recurrent inhibitory loops.

We consider the effect of the effective timing of a delayed feedback on the excitatory neuron in a recurrent inhibitory loop, when biological realities of firing and absolute refractory period are incorporated into a phenomenological spiking linear or quadratic integrate-and-fire neuron model. We show that such models are capable of generating a large number of asymptotically stable periodic solutions with predictable patterns of oscillations. We observe that the number of fixed points of the so-called phase resetting map coincides with the number of distinct periods of all stable periodic solutions rather than the number of stable patterns. We demonstrate how configurational information corresponding to these distinct periods can be explored to calculate and predict the number of stable patterns.