ERAWATCH country reports 2011 : Malta

Acknowledgement: The University of Malta would like to acknowledge its gratitude to the European Commission, Joint Research Centre for their permission to upload this work on OAR@UoM. Further reuse of this document can be made, provided the source is acknowledged. This work was made available with the help of the Publications Office of the European Union, Copyright and Legal Issues Section.The main objective of the ERAWATCH Annual Country Reports is to characterise and assess the performance of national research systems and related policies in a structured manner that is comparable across countries. EW Country Reports 2011 identify the structural challenges faced by national innovation systems. They further analyse and assess the ability of the policy mix in place to consistently and efficiently tackle these challenges. The annex of the reports gives an overview of the latest national policy efforts towards the enhancement of European Research Area and further assess their efficiency to achieve the targets. These reports were originally produced in November - December 2011, focusing on policy developments over the previous twelve months. The reports were produced by the ERAWATCH Network under contract to JRC-IPTS. The analytical framework and the structure of the reports have been developed by the Institute for Prospective Technological Studies of the Joint Research Centre (JRC-IPTS) and Directorate General for Research and Innovation with contributions from ERAWATCH Network Asblpeer-reviewe

Mathematical analysis of blood flow model through channels with flexible walls

A simplified mathematical model of blood flow through flexible arteries is developed and analyzed. The resulting system of non-linear, non-homogeneous PDE\u27s is analyzed numerically using the Richtmyer Lax-Wendroff method. Numerical and theoretical results show excellent agreement suggesting that in physiologically relevant situations shocks only develop outside the domain of interest. These results suggest that when the model assumptions are satisfied the model provides sufficient regularity to yield a physically reasonable representation of flow through a flexible artery. We conclude with a discussion of future directions for this model

Discounting Women: Doubting Domestic Violence Survivors’ Credibility and Dismissing Their Experiences

In recent months, we’ve seen an unprecedented wave of testimonials about the serious harms women all too frequently endure. The #MeToo moment, the #WhyIStayed campaign, and the Larry Nassar sentencing hearings have raised public awareness not only about workplace harassment, domestic violence, and sexual abuse, but also about how routinely women survivors face a Gaslight-style gauntlet of doubt, disbelief, and outright dismissal of their stories. This pattern is particularly disturbing in the justice system, where women face a legal twilight zone: laws meant to protect them and deter further abuse often fail to achieve their purpose, because women telling stories of abuse by their male partners are simply not believed. To fully grasp the nature of this new moment in gendered power relations—and to cement the significant gains won by these public campaigns—we need to take a full, considered look at when, how, and why the justice system and other key social institutions discount women’s credibility. We use the lens of intimate partner violence to examine the ways in which women’s credibility is discounted in a range of legal and social service system settings. First, judges and others improperly discount as implausible women’s stories of abuse, based on a failure to understand both the symptoms arising from neurological and psychological trauma, and the practical constraints on survivors’ lives. Second, gatekeepers unjustly discount women’s personal trustworthiness, based on both inaccurate interpretations of survivors’ courtroom demeanor and negative cultural stereotypes about women and their motivations for seeking assistance. Moreover, even when a woman manages to overcome all the initial modes of institutional skepticism that minimize her account of abuse, she often finds that the systems designed to furnish her with help and protection dismiss the importance of her experiences. Instead, all too often, the arbiters of justice and social welfare adopt and enforce legal and social policies and practices with little regard for how they perpetuate patterns of abuse. Two distinct harms arise from this pervasive pattern of credibility discounting and experiential dismissal. First, the discrediting of survivors constitutes its own psychic injury—an institutional betrayal that echoes the psychological abuse women suffer at the hands of individual perpetrators. Second, the pronounced, nearly instinctive penchant for devaluing women’s testimony is so deeply embedded within survivors’ experience that it becomes a potent, independent obstacle to their efforts to obtain safety and justice. The reflexive discounting of women’s stories of domestic violence finds analogs among the kindred diminutions and dismissals that harm so many other women who resist the abusive exercise of male power, from survivors of workplace harassment to victims of sexual assault on and off campus. For these women, too, credibility discounts both deepen the harm they experience and create yet another impediment to healing and justice. Concrete, systematic reforms are needed to eradicate these unjust, gender-based credibility discounts and experiential dismissals, and to enable women subjected to male abuses of power at long last to trust the responsiveness of the justice system

Energy dependence of the freeze out eccentricity from the azimuthal dependence of HBT at STAR

Non-central heavy ion collisions create an out-of-plane-extended participant zone that expands toward a more round state as the system evolves. The recent RHIC Beam Energy Scan at sqrt{s_{NN}} of 7.7, 11.5, and 39 GeV provide an opportunity to explore the energy dependence of the freeze out eccentricity. The new low energy data from STAR complements high statistics data sets at sqrt{s_{NN}} of 62.4 and 200 GeV. Hanbury-Brown-Twiss (HBT) interferometry allows to determine the size of pion emitting source regions. The dependence of the HBT radius parameters on azimuthal angle relative to the reaction plane have been extracted. These dependencies can be related to the freeze out eccentricity. The new results from STAR are consistent with a monotonically decreasing freeze out eccentricity and constrain any minimum, suggested by previously available data, to lie in the range between 11.5 and 39 GeV. Of several models UrQMD appears to best predict the STAR and AGS data.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures, Proceedings for the XXII International Conference on Ultra-relativistic Nucleus-Nucleus Collisions (Quark Matter 2011), 22-28 May 2011, Annecy, Franc

"Family Structure, Race, and Wealth Ownership: A Longitudinal Exploration of Wealth Accumulation Processes"

Researchers have documented racial inequalities in wealth ownership and have offered a variety of explanations to account for these differences. One potentially important contributing factor that has received little attention is racial differences in family structure. This paper explores racial differences in the structure of family of origin and family in adulthood and examines the impact of these differences on wealth accumulation patterns. Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, I find that large family size and family disruptions in childhood are negatively associated with wealth accumulation, portfolio behavior, and wealth mobility in adulthood. My analyses suggest that family size is a more important factor determining wealth accumulation for whites than for blacks or Hispanics and that family disruption is most strongly related to wealth outcomes for Hispanics. I find that family structure in adulthood is only modestly associated with overall wealth but strongly related to portfolio behavior and wealth mobility and that these relationships are relatively fixed across racial groups. My findings lend support to arguments about the importance of the role that resource dilution plays in determining life outcomes. They also suggest that efforts to reduce racial inequality in wealth ownership may be most effective if they seek to reduce the impact of deprivation early in life.