A Roadmap for Promoting Women's Economic Empowerment

This document summarizes findings of 18 research studies commissioned across 4 categories (entrepreneurship, farming, wage employment, young women's employment) to find out what works to empower women, for whom (categories of women), and where (country scenarios). The Roadmap is designed to guide investments from private sector and public-private partnerships, and highlights 9 proven, 9 promising, and 6 high-potential interventions to increase women's productivity and earnings in developing countries

MARKETING IN AN AUTOMOBILE DEPENDENT SOCIETY: AN ANALYSIS OF CONSUMER-ORIENTED, INDUSTRY-PRODUCED ADVERTISING MATERIAL

Despite the best intentions of public policy to cure societal ills, for the individual American consumer, the solution to the problem of automobile dependence is simple: buy an automobile. Consumers are alleviating societal pressure of not having a car rather than focusing on the negative impacts of vehicle usage after the purchase. Marketing and advertising play an important role in portraying how the public views transportation. Marketing reinforces automobile dependence and automobility by creating images and messages that say the norm of American life requires an automobile; therefore, marketing creates, controls, and reinforces values within the automobile consumer culture. Addressing automobile marketing as a part of transportation discourse is applied and applicable to a broader population, which can potentially shift the approach to automobile dependence and automobility. It offers a new approach that can expand the way planners approach automobile dependency. The objective of this research was to identify a relationship between automobility as a cultural norm and the ideology of marketed images of private vehicles. The two goals this study achieved were: 1) to characterize the message and ideology of vehicle marketing to inform a portion of the American mobility discourse and 2) to evaluate how the differences in the discourse of vehicle types interact with American values. This study examined automobile manufacturers\u27 marketing materials used to advertise vehicles of two distinct fuel-efficiency categories: passenger vehicles and light-duty trucks. A content analysis of marketing materials showed the dominant ideologies in these advertisements, such as land-use settings and values attributed to specific vehicles, while the theoretical lens of critical discourse analysis investigated the underlying power and ideology of the advertising media (Fairclough, 1989, 1995). The study found marketing has created specific links between vehicle types and land use and a connection and conflict with specific vehicles and nature; passenger vehicles were removed from rural landscapes, and messages presented to consumers conflicted with official designations in the federal Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) system. Planners often view education as the means of convincing the public to support initiatives that reduce negative impacts of human activity; however, automobile marketing inundates the consumer public with messages of the automobile as a preferred travel mode serving as a critical part of American life. As a result, vehicle marketing contributes to the automobile-dependence discourse in a significant way that requires attention

Non-elitist Evolutionary Multi-objective Optimizers Revisited

Since around 2000, it has been considered that elitist evolutionary multi-objective optimization algorithms (EMOAs) always outperform non-elitist EMOAs. This paper revisits the performance of non-elitist EMOAs for bi-objective continuous optimization when using an unbounded external archive. This paper examines the performance of EMOAs with two elitist and one non-elitist environmental selections. The performance of EMOAs is evaluated on the bi-objective BBOB problem suite provided by the COCO platform. In contrast to conventional wisdom, results show that non-elitist EMOAs with particular crossover methods perform significantly well on the bi-objective BBOB problems with many decision variables when using the unbounded external archive. This paper also analyzes the properties of the non-elitist selection.Comment: This is an accepted version of a paper published in the proceedings of GECCO 201

Chromosome segregation and recombination in human meiosis: Clinical applications and insight into disjunction errors

Chromosome copy number errors (or aneuploidy) of gametes and embryos occurs in humans more frequently than in any other studied species, with a spectrum of manifestations from implantation failure to affected live births. It is predominantly problem arising in maternal meiosis with at least 20% of oocytes being aneuploid, a proportion that increases dramatically with advancing maternal age. Currently the only intervention to reduce the chances of transmitting aneuploidy is by invasive embryo biopsy procedures in high-risk groups (mainly patients with advanced maternal age) undergoing in-vitro fertilisation. Despite the severity of this problem, aneuploidy of the human preimplantation embryo is relatively poorly understood. With this in mind the purpose of this thesis is to explore the premise underpinning the use of preimplantation genetic screening (PGS) in human embryos and investigate its clinical applications and current methodologies. A series of published works demonstrate what I believe to be a significant contribution to the development of applications for studying human preimplantation aneuploidy, also providing insight into its origins and mechanisms at the earliest stages of human development. Specifically, I present a novel standard set of protocols as a general reference work from practitioners in the fields of embryo biopsy and array comparative genomic hybridisation (CGH - the current ‘gold standard’ for preimplantation aneuploidy screening). I present a summary of work encapsulated in three published clinical papers using a linkage based analysis of Single Nucleotide Polymorphism (SNP) karyotypes (Karyomapping). Karyomapping was designed as a near-universal approach for the simultaneous detection of chromosomal and monogenic disorders in a PGS setting and these results demonstrate the utility of the technique in three separate scenarios. In order to study the underlying mechanisms of female meiosis I present my findings on the use of a calcium ionophore to activate human oocytes artificially. An algorithm based on Karyomapping (termed MeioMapping) is demonstrated for the first time specifically to investigate human female meiosis. By recovering all three products of human female meiosis (oocyte, and both polar biopsies – herein termed “Trios”) using calcium ionophore, I present a novel protocol (commissioned by Nature Protocols) to allow exploration of the full extent of meiotic chromosome recombination and segregation that occurs in the female germline. Finally I present a published set of experiments using this protocol to provide new insight into meiotic segregation patterns and recombination in human oocytes. This work uncovers a previously undescribed pattern of meiotic segregation (termed Reverse Segregation), providing an association between recombination rates and chromosome mis-segregation (aneuploidy). This work demonstrates that there is selection for higher recombination rates in the female germline and that there is a role for meiotic drive for recombinant chromatids at meiosis II in human female meiosis. The work presented in this thesis provides deeper understanding of meiotically derived maternal aneuploidy and recombination. More importantly it provides a vehicle within an ethical framework to continue to expand our knowledge and uncover new insights into the basis of meiotic errors that may aid future reproductive therapies

The evolutionary patterns of barley pericentromeric chromosome regions, as shaped by linkage disequilibrium and domestication

The distribution of recombination events along large cereal chromosomes is uneven and is generally restricted to gene-rich telomeric ends. To understand how the lack of recombination affects diversity in the large pericentromeric regions, we analysed deep exome capture data from a final panel of 815 Hordeum vulgare (barley) cultivars, landraces and wild barleys, sampled from across their eco-geographical ranges. We defined and compared variant data across the pericentromeric and non-pericentromeric regions, observing a clear partitioning of diversity both within and between chromosomes and germplasm groups. Dramatically reduced diversity was found in the pericentromeres of both cultivars and landraces when compared with wild barley. We observed a mixture of completely and partially differentiated single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) between domesticated and wild gene pools, suggesting that domesticated gene pools were derived from multiple wild ancestors. Patterns of genome-wide linkage disequilibrium, haplotype block size and number, and variant frequency within blocks showed clear contrasts among individual chromosomes and between cultivars and wild barleys. Although most cultivar chromosomes shared a single major pericentromeric haplotype, chromosome 7H clearly differentiated the two-row and six-row types associated with different geographical origins. Within the pericentromeric regions we identified 22 387 non-synonymous SNPs, 92 of which were fixed for alternative alleles in cultivar versus wild accessions. Surprisingly, only 29 SNPs found exclusively in the cultivars were predicted to be 'highly deleterious'. Overall, our data reveal an unconventional pericentromeric genetic landscape among distinct barley gene pools, with different evolutionary processes driving domestication and diversification.</p

Networks in the shadow of markets and hierarchies : calling the shots in the visual effects industry

The nature and organisation of creative industries and creative work has increasingly been at the centre of academic and policy debates in recent years. The differentiation of this field, economically and spatially, has been tied to more general arguments about the trend towards new trust-based, network forms of organization and economic coordination. In the first part of this paper, we set out, unpack and then critique the conceptual and empirical foundations of such claims. In the main section of the paper, we draw on research into a particular creative sector of the economy - the visual effects component of the film industry - a relatively new though increasingly important global production network. By focusing both on firms and their workers, and drawing on concepts derived from global value chain, labour process and institutional analysis, we aim to offer a more realistic and grounded analysis of creative work within creative industries. The analysis begins with an attempt to explain the power dynamics and patterns of competition and collaboration in inter-firm relations within the Hollywood studio-dominated value chain, before moving to a detailed examination of how the organisation of work and reemployment relations are central to the capturing of value. On the basis of that evidence, we conclude that trust-based networks and collaborative communities play some part in accessing and acquiring leverage in the value chain, but do not explain the core mechanisms of resource allocation, coordination and work organisation