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Gender Gap in Agricultural Productivity and Differences in Crop Choice within the farm household in Burkina Faso
Get PDFapplication/pdfIDP000947_001The question of whether observed or unobserved factors contribute to gender productivity differences in agriculture remains unresolved. This study uses individually managed plots of data collected in Burkina to decompose the gender productivity gap. As opposed to the existing literature, we find that female-managed plots are on average 9.4% more productive than male-managed plots. Next, the results reveal that differences in observable factors account for about 123% of this productivity gap. Consistent with the existing literature, smaller plot sizes managed by female farmers contribute to closing a large portion of the productivity gap associated with this endowment effect. Another key finding from this study is that crop choice seems to play a critical role in explaining the gender productivity differential. Staple food crops, in particular, contribute to reducing the productivity differential, while cash and semi-cash crops contribute to widening it. A deeper analysis suggests that men and women do not always cultivate the same type of crops. Male farmers are more likely to plant staple food crops and pure cash crops, while women widely cultivate semi-cash crops. This gender crop preference provides a potential explanation of the narrow gender productivity gap among small-scale farmers in Burkina Faso. Lastly, in line with previous literature, non-labor inputs increase the portion of the gender gap that observable differences explain. On the other hand, we do not find evidence of heterogenous returns in the use of non-labor inputstechnical repor
“For the Good of Mankind”: Marshallese, Missionaries, Militaries and the Making of American Empire in the Pacific, 1857-1957
No full textDuring the 1940s and 1950s, the United States conducted sixty-seven nuclear tests on the atmosphere, land, waters, and people of the Marshall Islands. The U.S. military told the Marshallese people—and the world—the atomic experiments were “for the good of mankind.” Based on extensive archival research in the United States and the Marshall Islands, I argue that United States nuclear testing marked the culmination of a longer history between Marshallese people and American Christianity that began in 1857, when American Protestant missionaries first arrived in the Marshall Islands. My dissertation demonstrates how the missionaries’ errand—undertaken for what they hoped would be the good of mankind and to advance the kingdom of God on earth—and stories about the nineteenth-century encounter between American missionaries and Marshallese people were deployed in the service of twentieth-century American imperialism in the Pacific and, in particular, United States nuclear testing.
American missionaries and Protestant Christianity did not exclusively serve American imperial or American Protestant ends. These encounters and the relationships and faith commitments that resulted from them have also formed the basis of a profound rebuke to American power—religious and political—and underpinned Marshallese nuclear and climate activism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
As an examination of the relationships between Marshallese people, American Protestant missionaries, and the United States military in the Marshall Islands during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, my project interrogates the theoretical, theological, and the imperial logics that shaped these relationships and the conditions of power that have rendered this history of American religion and imperialism in the Marshall Islands invisible within contemporary American political, religious, and historical discourse
The structure of fitness landscapes across genotypes and environments
No full textOver the last 20 years, advances in experimental genetics have allowed us to map fitness landscapes
at a scale and resolution that the likes of Fisher, Haldane, and Wright could not have even
dreamed of a hundred years ago. These cutting-edge experimental methods have empowered us to
try and understand the features of the evolutionary process in the wild by using experiments in the
lab. In this dissertation, I will describe three such experimental projects that I undertook to map the
fitness landscape across many different genotypes and environments in budding yeast.
In chapter 2, I describe the process of molecular and phenotypic adaptation in the longest-running
laboratory evolution experiment in budding yeast. In chapter 3, I report work in which
we constructed, genotyped, and phenotyped ≈ 100,000 F1 offspring from a budding yeast cross and
mapped the highly polygenic and epistatic fitness landscape in different environments at a resolution
≈ 10 times better than the previous state of the art. In chapter 4, I detail further experiments
using the 100,000 F1 offspring where we measured their fitness in an extremely large panel of structured
environments to understand the pleiotropic structure across environments and used it to map
the functional organization of the cell. Finally, in chapter 5, I briefly summarize our results and
mention promising future avenues for this body of work
Who Neglects Risk? Investor Experience and the Credit Boom
No full textMany have argued that overoptimistic thinking on the part of lenders helps fuel credit booms. We use new microdata on mutual funds' holdings of securitizations to examine which investors are susceptible to such boom-time thinking. We show that firsthand experience plays a key role in shaping investors' beliefs. During the 2003–2007 mortgage boom, inexperienced fund managers loaded up on securitizations linked to nonprime mortgages, accumulating twice the holdings of more seasoned managers. Moreover, inexperienced managers who personally experienced severe or recent adverse investment outcomes behaved more like seasoned managers. Training and institutional memory can serve as partial substitutes for personal experience.Author's Origina
Methods for the design and analysis of disease-oriented multi-sample single-cell studies
No full textRecent advances in single-cell technologies have enabled the characterization of
heterogeneous cell types in human diseases by measuring various features of individual cells,
such as their transcriptomic, proteomic, and epigenomic profiles in the context of their spatial
location in tissue. Due to the expensive cost and the high-dimensionality, sparsity, and noisiness
of single-cell data investigators who wish to use single-cell technologies face key challenges in
designing single-cell studies, performing integrative analysis of cells from multiple samples, and
gleaning biological understanding from these data. In this dissertation, I present the development
and application of novel computational methods and analysis frameworks that help address these
challenges.
First, I introduce scPOST, an algorithm for simulating large-scale, multi-sample singlecell
RNA-sequencing datasets. scPOST enables investigators to simulate their future single-cell
studies with different parameters, such as the number of cells, number of cells per sample, and
number of batches. This allows investigators to determine the optimal design parameters for their
study.
Next, I introduce the development and application of two algorithms, Harmony and
Crescendo, which are batch correction algorithms designed to help remove the batch effects that
are prominent in single-cell data. I show that these algorithms feature superior performance in removing batch effects and are fast and scalable to large single-cell datasets that contain
hundreds of thousands or even millions of cells.
Finally, I showcase the application of these methods to analyzing a large 82-sample
cohort of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) patients containing 314,000 cells. After performing batch
correction with Harmony and a prospective power analysis with scPOST, I introduce a novel
framework called cell-type abundance phenotypes (CTAPs) for classifying samples based on the
abundance of cell types present in the sample. I then discuss how we used the CTAP framework
to characterize the diversity of synovial inflammation in RA, identify disease-relevant cell states
and transcriptomic signatures for different phenotypes of RA, and predict disease response.
Overall, this work features a collection of computational methods that investigators can
use to design their studies and analyze their single-cell data. These approaches are broadly
applicable to many single-cell technologies and different diseases and will help investigators
gain a greater understanding of how cells contribute to the pathology of a disease.Medical SciencesMedical Science
Engineering a Biomimetic Adventitia to Model Fibrosis in a Tissue-Engineered Blood Vessel
No full textCardiovascular disease (CVD) is the global leading cause of death. CVD is commonly caused by fibrosis, or the stiffening of arterial vessel walls. While arterial fibrosis has several pathophysiologies, the outermost vessel layer, the tunica adventitia, has gained interest as a critical player in arterial fibrosis. Due to the simplicity and lack of tunability of existing fibrosis models, it remains difficult to understand the significance of the adventitia in fibrosis development. Thus, there exists a need to create an in vitro model of the adventitia to better understand its role in the development of vascular fibrosis. Towards this end, this project includes working in the Chaikof Lab to optimize the fabrication of the adventitial layer itself and its incorporation into the current TEBV model. On a larger scale, the goals of this project are to use a tri-layered TEBV to study arterial fibrosis in vitro and screen anti-fibrotic drug candidates
American Women and the Oregon Trail: 1840-1860
No full textToday Americans have little knowledge or understanding of the migration of Americans into the West during the 1840’s and 1850’s. In particular, Americans are not aware of the contribution that women made to the development of the American West during this period. For a woman, migrating to, and settling in, the West was a frightening and exhausting ordeal; but an ordeal over which they prevailed, decisively. The objective of this thesis is to bring about a better understanding of the women who journeyed to the West; what they endured during the journey, and the contribution they made to the development of a civilized American society at their destinations.
For purposes of achieving this thesis’ objective we will examine women’s experiences before, during and after what is known as the Oregon Trail; a two thousand one-hundred-mile journey, undertaken during the 1840’s and 1850’s, across absolute wilderness, from points on the Missouri River to the Willamette River Valley, in the Oregon Territory. This thesis is focused upon the Oregon Trail, in particular, because it was undertaken not for the purpose of religious separation such as the Mormon’s journey to Salt Lake, nor was it undertaken for the mining of gold as was the case for much of the travel to California during this period, nor was it undertaken for the purpose of trade as was the case for what was known as the Santa Fe Trail. Rather, the Oregon Trail was undertaken primarily to travel from one homestead in order to create another homestead: a homestead requiring the presence of a family; a husband, and a wife, and children, all prepared to make their respective contributions to the success of the enterprise. With the Oregon Trail we have a ‘clearer slide’ for our analytical microscope.
This thesis examines scholarly work on the subject as well as individual diaries, journals and letters written by women who travelled the Oregon Trail. In getting to Oregon between 1840 and 1860, and in creating successful homesteads, businesses, political structures, and an encompassing, supportive society, women made an effort and contribution that should be better appreciated by Americans. Professor John M. Faragher wrote in the introduction to his book Women and Men on the Overland Trail, “Still, despite the thousands of pages in print [of diaries, journals, letters by travelers], interesting scholarly interpretations of the Overland Trail experience are a relatively rare commodity and there is ample room for new scholarship.
Spatiotemporal Reassortment of Th1 Migratory Receptors in Inflamed Skin
No full textCD4+ T helper (Th) cells search a vast tissue area to find sites of infection or inflammation. The distribution of Th cells in tissues is shaped by tissue architecture, chemotactic cues, adhesion molecules, and the location of antigen (Ag). How Th cells integrate these signals to optimize tissue entry, exploration, and correct positioning for delivery of effector function is poorly understood. To gain insight into the stages of Th cell migration, an optogenetic tool based on the photoconvertible Kaede protein was used to spatiotemporally mark or “timestamp” type 1 Th (Th1) cells in inflamed skin. The timestamp enabled analysis of Th1 cells that recently entered tissue, Th1s that spent >24 hours in tissue, and Th1s that exited to the draining lymph node. Flow cytometry analysis revealed distinct changes in surface chemokine receptors (CCRs), integrin receptors, and markers of costimulation and activation based on tissue dwell time. CCRs were upregulated in inflamed skin, with a surprising exception – the canonical Th1 CCR CXCR3 was rapidly lost upon tissue entry. In tissue, integrins were most upregulated after entry, and costimulatory receptors and activation markers were upregulated over time. Some of these changes occurred within 4 hours of tissue entry. Both non-Ag signals and encounters with cognate Ag influenced receptor expression. These data suggest that one set of proteins is utilized in tissue entry while another combination is used to traffick through the skin or remain in tissue. The spatiotemporal sequence uncovered by this work may point to novel therapeutic targets, which could be manipulated to enhance or regulate Th cell effector function in treatments for infection, inflammation, and cancer
IG# & IG% in Upper Urinary Tract Infection with Sirs Syndrome Diagnosis, a Retrospective Research at Binh Dan Hospital
No full textHello DASH, This is Dr Thach Nguyen MD FACC FSCAI. This is the 3rd time I submitted my publications to DASH (more than 15 papers). I am attending the Effective Writing for Healthcare Professional so I am eligible to submit my papers to DASH
AlWAYS APPRECIATE YOUR HELPIntroduction: There have been studies examining the application of immature granulocyte counts (IG#) and immature granulocyte percentage (IG%) indexes, especially in the setting of sepsis originating from various sources. However, to the extent of our knowledge, there are no studies on applying these new indices in sepsis originating from the upper urinary tract. Thus, we conduct this research to evaluate the application IG# & IG% in diagnosing sepsis originating from the upper urinary tract at Binh Dan Hospital.
Purposes: To investigate the role IG# and IG% in diagnosing sepsis in patients with upper urinary tract infection. Research Methods: A cross-sectional retrospective research of patients diagnosed with sepsis/septic shock caused by upper urinary tract infection, admitted to Binh Dan Hospital from January 1, 2020, to the end of December 31, 2022. Sepsis 2 (1992) was used to classify those patients into two groups: one with systemic inflammatory response syndrome (SIRS) syndrome and the other with SIRS negative.
Results: 464 cases met the inclusion criteria. 219 patients had SIRS, of which 19 had positive blood cultures and 226 UTIs without SIRS. Results show that IG# and IG% are valuable tools for the initial screening of sepsis originating from upper urinary tract infections. The sensitivity of IG# was 59.7%, and the specificity was 74.3%at the cut-off point of 0.075 x 103/µL. The sensitivity of IG% was 69.3%, and the specificity was 61.9% at the recommended cut-off point of 0.55. When raising the cut-off point of IG% to 1.95, the specificity was 93%. IG#’s AUC is 0.734, IG%’s AUC is 0.692.
Conclusion: Although IG# & IG% cannot be used as a sole biomarker in diagnosing sepsis originating from the upper urinary tract, IG# & IG% are convenient, earliest markers that can help clinicians distinguish between infectious and non-infectious diseases at the time of admission point.Version of Recor