Arctic passages: liminality, Iñupiat Eskimo mothers and NW Alaska communities in transition

Background. While the primary goal of the NW Alaska Native maternal transport is safe deliveries for mothers from remote villages, little has been done to question the impact of transport on the mothers and communities involved. This study explores how presence of Iñupiat values influences the desire of indigenous women of differing eras and NW Alaska villages to participate in biomedical birth, largely made available by a tribal health-sponsored transport system. Objective. This paper portrays how important it is (and why) for Alaska Native families and women of different generations from various areas of Iñupiat villages of NW Alaska to get to the hospital to give birth. This research asks: How does a community’s presence of Iñupiat values influence women of different eras and locations to participate in a more biomedical mode of birth? Design. Theoretical frameworks of medical anthropology and maternal identity work are used to track the differences in regard to the maternal transport operation for Iñupiat mothers of the area. Presence of Iñupiat values in each of the communities is compared by birth era and location for each village. Content analysis is conducted to determine common themes in an inductive, recursive fashion. Results. A connection is shown between a community’s manifestation of Iñupiat cultural expression and mothers’ acceptance of maternal transport in this study. For this group of Iñupiat Eskimo mothers, there is interplay between community expression of Iñupiat values and desire and lengths gone to by women of different eras and locations. Conclusions. The more openly manifested the Iñupiat values of the community, the more likely alternative birthing practices sought, lessening the reliance on the existing transport policy. Conversely, the more openly western values are manifested in the village of origin, the less likely alternative measures are sought. For this study group, mothers from study villages with openly manifested western values are more likely to easily acquiesce to policy, and “make the best” of their prenatal travel

A Decade of Research Progress in Chickpea and Lentil Breeding and Genetics

This paper summarizes achievements of chickpea and lentil breeding during the last decade /2005-2015/ in Ethiopia. Gentic yield gains from decadal breeding efforts were 80 kg/ha/year for chickpea and 52 kg/ha/yr for lentil. The germplasm enhancment and subsequent variety evaluation verification programs during the decade resulted in releases of 17 chickpea and 2 lentil varieties. These advanced varieties, when applied in production system with proper crop managment and protection practices, almost doubled productivity per unit area at farm level

Managing a Retailer's Shelf Space, Inventory, and Transportation

Retailers must constantly strive for excellence in operations; extremely narrow profit margins leave little room for waste and inefficiency. This article reports a retailer's challenge to balance transportation, shelf space, and inventory costs. A retailer sells multiple products with stochastic demand. Trucks are dispatched from a warehouse and arrive at a store with a constant lead time. Each truck has a finite capacity and incurs a fixed shipping cost, no matter the number of units shipped. There is a per unit shelf-space cost as well as holding and backorder penalty costs. Three policies are considered for dispatching trucks: a minimum quantity continuous review policy, a full service periodic review policy, and a minimum quantity periodic review policy. The first policy ships a truck when demand since the previous shipment equals a fixed fraction of a truck's capacity, i.e., a minimum truck utilization. The exact analysis of that policy is the same as the analysis of reorder point policies for the multiechelon problem with one-warehouse, multiple retailers, and stochastic demand. That analysis is not computationally prohibitive, but the minimum quantity level can be chosen with a simple economic order quantity (EOQ) heuristic. An extensive numerical study finds the following: Either of the two periodic review policies may have substantially higher costs than the continuous review policy, in particular when the warehouse to store lead time is short; the EOQ heuristic performs quite well; the minimum quantity policy's total cost is relatively insensitive to the chosen transportation utilization, and its total cost is close to a lower bound developed for this problem.Inventory Management, Stochastic Demand, Joint Setup Cost

Postures of the socio-critical paradigm as contributions to education and educational management in Colombia

Este ensayo de investigaci?n se presenta como aporte de los autores en el marco de la filosof?a de la ciencia, con el prop?sito de reflexionar sobre el llamado de m?ltiples comunidades educativas colombianas a una genuina y determinante revoluci?n cient?fica en educaci?n. Los autores describen los enfoques y tendencias de investigaci?n, filosof?a y ciencia, de grandes representantes que realizaron aportes te?ricos significativos mediante el paradigma socio-cr?tico en general y luego en Latinoam?rica. Seguidamente, se caracterizan aportes espec?ficos a la educaci?n y gesti?n educativa, finalizando con las posturas de un proponente influyente en Colombia. El paradigma socio-cr?tico pretende desde la teor?a cr?tica, la liberaci?n en cuanto al pensamiento y emancipaci?n de los actores educativos en los contextos que estos vivencian, a trav?s de la raz?n comunicativa y argumentaci?n de las posturas que conlleven a la transformaci?n social de su entorno mediante el intercambio de intersubjetividades que redunden en la reestructuraci?n del sistema educativo. Desde las posturas del paradigma socio-cr?tico expuestas, los autores concluyen el art?culo, con el cap?tulo que presenta dichos aportes frente a la gu?a 34 (Gu?a para el mejoramiento institucional de la autoevaluaci?n al plan de mejoramiento, establecida por el Ministerio de Educaci?n colombiano) como insumo para concretar procesos de mejoramiento continuo, ajustados a la realidad institucional de la gesti?n educativa en Colombia.This research essay is presented as a contribution of the authors within the framework of the philosophy of science, with the purpose of reflecting on the call of multiple Colombian educational communities to a genuine and decisive scientific revolution in education. The authors describe the research approaches and trends, philosophy and science, of great representatives who made significant theoretical contributions through the socio-critical paradigm in general and later in Latin America. Then, specific contributions to education and educational management are characterized, ending with the positions of an influential proponent in Colombia. The socio-critical paradigm pretends from critical theory, liberation in terms of thought and emancipation of educational actors in the contexts that they experience, through the communicative reason and argumentation of positions that involve the social transformation of their environment through the exchange of intersubjectivities that result in the restructuring of the educational system. From the positions of the socio-critical paradigm exposed, the authors conclude the article, with the chapter that presents these contributions in front of the guide 34 (Guide for the institutional improvement of the self-assessment to the improvement plan, established by the Colombian Ministry of Education) as an input for the realization of continuous improvement processes, adjusted to the institutional reality of educational management in Colombia