557 research outputs found
Austin Papers: Series III, 1835
No full textCopy of transcript for a letter from David Garner to Stephen F. Austin, requesting that he and his company be allowed to report to Austin and be attached to his army
Developing a New Poverty Line for the USA: Are There Lessons for India?
No full textThis paper reviews a procedure that is being followed in the United States of America (USA) to experimentally test and evaluate recommendations made for redefining poverty measurement in that country. The recommendations were made in 1995 by the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) Panel on poverty measurement. In this paper these recommendations are reviewed and the impact of implementing the recommendations on measures of inequality and poverty are examined. In conclusion, a discussion concerning possible lessons for India is provided. The recommended poverty measure (based on new measures of thresholds and resources) is examined in terms of its impact on inequality statistics, as well as poverty statistics, and results are compared to similar statistics based on the official measure. The standard Gini index, and three generalized entropy inequality measures are used to examine inequality. For the poverty analysis simple head count ratios, poverty gaps, and Foster-Greer-Thorbecke poverty measures are computed. Data from the 1991 U.S. Consumer Expenditure Survey (CE) Interview are used to produce the thresholds, and data from the 1992 through 1997 Current Population Survey (CPS), and in some analyzes, the 1991 panel of the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), are used to define resources. The proposed measure produces a distribution of resources that is, in general, more equal than is the distribution of official income. The poverty analysis reveals that changes in the poverty rates based on the official and the experimental measures are similar over time. However, poverty as measured by the NAS measure is greater than official poverty. The experimental poverty measure yields a poverty population that looks slightly more like the total U.S. population in terms of various demographic and socioeconomic characteristics than does the current official measure. Geographically adjusting the thresholds results in greater equality and lower poverty rates than when non-adjusted thresholds are used. With regard to India, poverty measurement is likely not to be based on income and expenditures primarily. Alternative measures based on other needs and resources are reviewed. However, regardless of the measure used, systematic evaluations of the measure are necessary and the USA model may be one to consider in this evaluation process.poverty, Consumer Expenditure Survey, India
National nanotechnology research prominence
No full textA new bibliometric technique enables one to distinguish high emergence topical content. This technique can be applied to sets of research publication abstracts reflecting a given technical domain (here, nanotechnology) to score cutting edge research terms. The resulting high emergence terms warrant special consideration in setting R&D priorities. The researchers (individuals, organizations, or countries) whose publications address those emergent terms heavily deserve consideration as possible leaders in that technical domain. This paper studies nanotechnology research publications using the new emergence scoring in conjunction with established bibliometric publication and citation measures. Findings challenge U.S. superiority in cutting edge nanotechnology research. China shows strongest at addressing emergent nanotechnology topics, followed by the U.S., South Korea, India, and, surprisingly, Iran.
Institutional repositories: review and an information systems perspective
No full textPurpose: To review the current literature and discussion on institutional repository (IR) and open access (OA) issues, to provide examples from the Information Systems (IS) literature, and to propose the use of IS literature and further research to inform understanding of institutional repository implementations for library managers.
Methodology/Approach: Recent literature is reviewed to provide the background to, and current issues in, the development of institutional repositories to support open access to refereed research output.
Practical implications: Existing research is identified, as are areas for potential research.
Brief examples from IS literature are provided which may provide strategies for libraries and other organisations to speed up their implementation of IR to provide access to, and management of, their own institutions refereed research output.
Value of paper: The paper brings together recent opinion and research on IR and OA to provide librarians and other information managers with a review of the field, and proposes research on IR and OA building on existing IS as well as information management and librarianship research
When King Arthur met the Venus : Romantic Antiquarianism and the Illustration of Anne Bannerman’s “The Prophecy of Merlin”
No full textThe first edition of Bannerman’s Tales of Superstition and Chivalry (1802) contained an erotic engraving of a naked Venus figure, which was declared ‘offensive to decency’ by Scottish audiences in the poet’s native Edinburgh. Garner’s account investigates the controversy surrounding the engraving and the puzzling disparity between it and the ballad it illustrated: the Arthurian-themed ‘Prophecy of Merlin’. Using evidence from Bannerman’s correspondence with noted Scottish male publishers and antiquarians, this essay argues that decision to include the dangerous engraving was symptomatic of current anxieties surrounding a female-authored text which threatened to encroach on antiquarian and Arthurian enquiry.Peer reviewe
Experimental evidence in support of single host maintenance of a multihost pathogen
No full textCopyright: 2014 Duffus et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the
original author and source are credited. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0
Ultrashort electric pulse induced changes in cellular dielectric properties
No full textThe interaction of nanosecond duration pulsed electric fields (nsPEFs) with biological cells, and the models describing this behavior, depend critically on the electrical properties of the cells being pulsed. Here, we used time domain dielectric spectroscopy to measure the dielectric properties of Jurkat cells, a malignant human T-cell line, before and after exposure to five 10 ns, 150 kV/cm electrical pulses. The cytoplasm and nucleoplasm conductivities decreased dramatically following pulsing, corresponding to previously observed rises in cell suspension conductivity. This suggests that electropermeabilization occurred, resulting in ion transport from the cell’s interior to the exterior. A delayed decrease in cell membrane conductivity after the nsPEFs possibly suggests long-term ion channel damage or use dependence due to repeated membrane charging and discharging. This data could be used in models describing the phenomena at work
Tandem repeat copy-number variation in protein-coding regions of human genes
No full textBACKGROUND: Tandem repeat variation in protein-coding regions will alter protein length and may introduce frameshifts. Tandem repeat variants are associated with variation in pathogenicity in bacteria and with human disease. We characterized tandem repeat polymorphism in human proteins, using the UniGene database, and tested whether these were associated with host defense roles. RESULTS: Protein-coding tandem repeat copy-number polymorphisms were detected in 249 tandem repeats found in 218 UniGene clusters; observed length differences ranged from 2 to 144 nucleotides, with unit copy lengths ranging from 2 to 57. This corresponded to 1.59% (218/13,749) of proteins investigated carrying detectable polymorphisms in the copy-number of protein-coding tandem repeats. We found no evidence that tandem repeat copy-number polymorphism was significantly elevated in defense-response proteins (p = 0.882). An association with the Gene Ontology term 'protein-binding' remained significant after covariate adjustment and correction for multiple testing. Combining this analysis with previous experimental evaluations of tandem repeat polymorphism, we estimate the approximate mean frequency of tandem repeat polymorphisms in human proteins to be 6%. Because 13.9% of the polymorphisms were not a multiple of three nucleotides, up to 1% of proteins may contain frameshifting tandem repeat polymorphisms. CONCLUSION: Around 1 in 20 human proteins are likely to contain tandem repeat copy-number polymorphisms within coding regions. Such polymorphisms are not more frequent among defense-response proteins; their prevalence among protein-binding proteins may reflect lower selective constraints on their structural modification. The impact of frameshifting and longer copy-number variants on protein function and disease merits further investigation
The influence of demographics and household specific price indices on expenditure based inequality and welfare : a comparison of Spain and the United States.
No full textPrevious research has suggested that inequality is lower in Spain than in the United States when it is based on income. For the present article, both inequality and social welfare are examined, with household consumption expenditures used as a proxy for household welfare. For tractability, equivalence scales depended only on the number of people in the household. Household-specific price indices were used to express the 1990–1991 expenditure distributions in 1981 and 1991 winter prices. Our results reveal that inequality and welfare comparisons are drastically different for smaller and larger households. When all households are considered, the two-country comparison suggests that the income inequality ranking can only be maintained for expenditure distributions when economies of scale are small or nonexistent. However, welfare is always higher in the United States than in Spain. Because inflation during the 1980s in both countries was essentially distributionally neutral, all results appear to be robust to the choice of time period.
Recall this Book 31: A Conversation with Vanessa Smith
No full textU. Sydney professor Vanessa Smith-author of Intimate Strangers, and also of a lovely short piece about Marion Milner-joins John to discuss her pandemic reading. She praises a Milner (quasi)travel book, but she also makes the case for M F K Fisher and a book about the glories of hypochondria. Then the old friends share their newfound love for spiky Australian novelist Helen Garner, doyenne of share-house feminism
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