Large Surveys and Small Voices: Meanings of Hunger in Pakistan

DFI

Pakistan: Year 3 Findings from the Life in a Time of Food Price Volatility Study

Major shifts in food prices are significant events in people’s lives; in 2012 researchers at the Institute of Development Studies, Sussex (IDS) and Oxfam started a four-year project to track the impacts of this volatility. This project, Life in a Time of Food Price Volatility, aims to monitor and record how Food Price Volatility (FPV) changes everyday life becauseso many of the social costs of managing change are invisible to policy makers. Nutritional or poverty measures may indicate that people living in poverty have coped well and appear to be ‘resilient’, but only because such measures often neglect the costs of this apparent resilience, including the increased time and effort required to feed and look after people; the non-monetary effects on family, social, or gender relations; mental health costs, such as stress; reductions in quality of life; and cultural issues, such as the pressure to eat ‘foreign’ fare, or food considered inferior. These issues tend to be neglected in nutrition and poverty impact studies, but they tend to matter a great deal to those affected.DFI

Seeing the Unseen: Breaking the Logjam of Undernutrition in Pakistan

After a lost decade, there is clearly a groundswell of momentum for nutrition in Pakistan, driven by a confluence of policy, evidence and events. This momentum needs to be sustained at the national level, reinforced at the provincial and sub?provincial levels, and converted into action. The articles in this IDS Bulletin highlight some of the key features of undernutrition in Pakistan and its drivers. The correlates of undernutrition in Pakistan are no different than any other country: infection, poor diet quantity and quality, and unequal gender relations. High levels of poverty and fragility make the context for undernutrition reduction more difficult. Yet, the articles here also show that government nutrition interventions can work. But if the logjam of malnutrition in Pakistan is to be broken for good, malnutrition will have to be viewed as a development outcome – one that is a foundation for other outcomes such as economic growth and social cohesion – and this will only be achieved by viewing nutrition through a political?economy lens

Linear iterated pushdowns

This paper discusses variants of nondeterministic one-way S-automata and context-free S-grammars where S is a storage type. The framework that these systems provide can be used to give alternative formulations of embedded pushdown automata and linear indexed grammars. The embedded pushdown automata is obtained by means of a linear version of a class of storage types called iterated pushdowns. Linear indexed grammar is obtained by using the pushdown storage type and restricting the way in which the grammar uses its storage

The equivalence of four extensions of context-free grammars

There is currently considerable interest among computational linguists in grammatical formalisms with highly restricted generative power. This paper concerns the relationship between the class of string languages generated by several such formalisms, namely, combinatory categorial grammars, head grammars, linear indexed grammars, and tree adjoining grammars. Each of these formalisms is known to generate a larger class of languages than context-free grammars. The four formalisms under consideration were developed independently and appear superficially to be quite different from one another. The result presented in this paper is that all four of the formalisms under consideration generate exactly the same class of string languages