Scaling up Access to Misoprostol at the Community Level to Improve Maternal Health Outcomes in Ethiopia, Ghana, and Nigeria

Over the past decade (2004–2014), the Population and Reproductive Health area of the MacArthur Foundation has focused on supporting projects aimed at reducing maternal mortality. In particular, it has supported efforts to use misoprostol to prevent postpartum hemorrhage, the anti-shock garment to aid in the treatment of hemorrhage, and magnesium sulfate to decrease deaths from eclampsia. In recent years, the Foundation has invested in a range of research and evaluation efforts to better understand these interventions, their effectiveness, and the extent to which successful pilot projects have been scaled up.In 2014, the Foundation commissioned the Public Health Institute to evaluate the grants it had made to increase community-based access to misoprostol for postpartum hemorrhage prevention in Ethiopia, Ghana, and Nigeria. Specifically, the Foundation was interested in documenting the models and approaches used and the progress toward scaling up the respective models in the three countries. Between June and November 2014, the evaluation team reviewed grantee reports, proposals, and the literature; interviewed key informants and global, national, and local stakeholders; conducted focus group discussions with local stakeholders; and made observations during site-visits in each country. From this the team produced case study reports relating to misoprostol use in each country. This report is a synthesis of those three case studies, highlighting the common findings across the projects, identifying differences, and interpreting the lessons learned for broader use and scale up of misoprostol at the community level in Africa and globally

Evaluation of anti-smoking television advertising on tobacco control among urban community population in Chongqing, China

Background China is the largest producer and consumer of tobacco in the world. Considering the constantly growing urban proportion, persuasive tobacco control measures are important in urban communities. Television, as one of the most pervasive mass media, can be used for this purpose. Methods The anti-smoking advertisement was carried out in five different time slots per day from 15 May to 15 June in 2011 across 12 channels of Chongqing TV. A cross-sectional study was conducted in the main municipal areas of Chongqing. A questionnaire was administered in late June to 1,342 native residents aged 18–45, who were selected via street intercept survey. Results Respondents who recognized the advertisement (32.77 %) were more likely to know or believe that smoking cigarettes caused impotence than those who did not recognize the advertisement (26.11 %). According to 25.5 % of smokers, the anti-smoking TV advertising made them consider quitting smoking. However, females (51.7 %) were less likely to be affected by the advertisement to stop and think about quitting smoking compared to males (65.6 %) (OR = 0.517, 95 % CI [0.281–0.950]). In addition, respondents aged 26–35 years (67.4 %) were more likely to try to persuade others to quit smoking than those aged 18–25 years (36.3 %) (OR = 0.457, 95 % CI [0.215–0.974]). Furthermore, non-smokers (87.4 %) were more likely to find the advertisement relevant than smokers (74.8 %) (OR = 2.34, 95 % CI [1.19–4.61]). Conclusions This study showed that this advertisement did not show significant differences on smoking-related knowledge and attitude between non-smokers who had seen the ad and those who had not. Thus, this form may not be the right tool to facilitate change in non-smokers. The ad should instead be focused on the smoking population. Gender, smoking status, and age influenced the effect of anti-smoking TV advertising on the general population in China

U.S. Radio in the 21st Century: Staying the Course in Unknown Territory

This essay examines the development of the radio industry in the United States as it makes its way into the 21st century. Issues of regulation, technology, commerce, and culture are addressed

Is 'Teach for All' knocking on your door?

Over the past few decades there has been a rapid expansion in alternative 18fast track 19 routes for teacher preparation. Among the most aggressive of these are Teach for All (TFA) schemes characterized not only by their ultra fast entry to teaching (6 - 7 week course) but also by their underlying philosophy that the so called 18crisis 19 in poor rural and urban schools can be solved by attracting the 18best and brightest 19 university graduates for a two year appointment in 18difficult to staff 19 schools. With its missionary zeal TFA is heralded by some as one way to solve socio- -educational problems that governments cannot. Others condemn such schemes as not only patronizing, but also as part of an ideologically driven and deliberate neoliberal attack on public education, teachers, teacher professionalism and working class or 18other 19 communities. Recently Teach for All came knocking on New Zealand 19s door. Concerned about the possible implications of this for the teaching profession and education more generally, the New Zealand Post Primary Teachers Association (PPTA) Te Wehengarua commissioned a review of the international literature on TFA schemes. This paper synthesizes some of the key findings of this review with particular focus on TFA 19s marketing strategies and the connections TFA schemes have with so called social entrepreneurs or venture philanthropists, many of whom are actively and aggressively engaged in shaping educational reforms in line with neoliberal agendas

Build an app and they will come? Lessons learnt from trialling the GetThereBus app in rural communities

Acknowledgements The research described here was supported by the award made by the RCUK Digital Economy programme to the dot.rural Digital Economy Hub; award reference: EP/G066051/1.Peer reviewedPostprin

Revitalizing the Retail Trade Sector in Rural Communities: Experiences of 13 North Dakota Towns

Community/Rural/Urban Development,

Showboater: Insight into sustainable rural community display networks from a longitudinal study

This paper describes Showboater, a simple system architecture for rural community display networks. We outline the context of our 2-year longitudinal study and outline five design goals: a functional, sustainable, scalable, resilient networked display solution which affords roles for the distribution of governance. We describe the design and implementation of Showboater and how it aligns to the design goals, as well as describing two separate deployments. We reflect on evaluation feedback and provide insight into the implications of deploying Showboater as rural community display system, respective of the initial design goals, and present our recommendations for future improvements

De-westernizing creative labour studies: The informality of creative work from an ex-centric perspective

Creative labour studies focus almost exclusively on Euro-American metropolitan ‘creative hubs’ and hence the creative worker they theorize is typically white, middle-class, urban and overwhelmingly male. This article outlines the contours of a de-Westernizing project in creative labour studies while introducing a special journal issue that examines the lived dynamics of creative work outside the West. The article advocates an ‘ex-centric perspective’ on creative work. An ex-centric perspective does not merely aim at multiplying non-West empirical case studies. Rather, it aims at destabilizing, decentring and provincializing the taken-for-grantedness of some entrenched notions in creative labour studies such as informality and precarity. An ex-centric perspective, we contend, offers a potential challenge to many of the claims about creative work that have taken on the status of general truths and universal principles in spite of them being generated from limited empirical evidence gleaned from research sites situated almost exclusively in the creative hubs of Euro-America

In Vivo Evaluation of the Secure Opportunistic Schemes Middleware using a Delay Tolerant Social Network

Over the past decade, online social networks (OSNs) such as Twitter and Facebook have thrived and experienced rapid growth to over 1 billion users. A major evolution would be to leverage the characteristics of OSNs to evaluate the effectiveness of the many routing schemes developed by the research community in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we showcase the Secure Opportunistic Schemes (SOS) middleware which allows different routing schemes to be easily implemented relieving the burden of security and connection establishment. The feasibility of creating a delay tolerant social network is demonstrated by using SOS to power AlleyOop Social, a secure delay tolerant networking research platform that serves as a real-life mobile social networking application for iOS devices. SOS and AlleyOop Social allow users to interact, publish messages, and discover others that share common interests in an intermittent network using Bluetooth, peer-to-peer WiFi, and infrastructure WiFi.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures, accepted in ICDCS 2017. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1702.0565