Community-based financial organizations

Community-based financial organizations (CBFOs) are user-owned and -operated groups that provide mainly saving and lending services but may also offer other financial services such as insurance. These independent organizations are based in local communities, with local governance and management. CBFOs range in size. They can take the form of informal and unregistered groups of five to seven people, usually women, who meet weekly to save small amounts of money that they then lend to each other and possibly to other members of the community. They also include larger, slightly more formal groups of up to 40 people who have written by-laws, and they include small financial cooperatives. CBFOs flourish among people who have poor access to banks and nonbank financial institutions such as microfinance institutions (MFIs).Community-based financial organizations (CBFOs), Insurance, lending, saving,

Examining the role of Scotland’s telephone advice service (NHS 24) for managing health in the community : analysis of routinely collected NHS 24 data

Date of Acceptance: 15/06/2015 Funding This work was supported by the Chief Scientist Office, ScottishExecutive (grant no. CZH/4/692). Published by the BMJ Publishing Group Limited. For permission to use (where not already granted under a licence) please go to http://group.bmj.com/group/rights-licensing/permissions.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Protein-protein docking based on shape complementarity and Voronoi fingerprint

National audiencePredicting the three-dimensional structures of protein-protein complexes is a major challenge for computational biology. Using a Voronoi tessellation model of protein structure, we showed previously that it was possible to use an evolutionary algorithm to train a scoring function to distinguish reliably between native and non-native docking conformations. Here, we show that this approach can be further improved by combining it with rigid body docking predictions generated by the Hex docking algorithm. This new approach is able to rank an acceptable or better conformation within the top 10 predictions for 7 out of the 9 targets available from rounds 8 to 18 of the CAPRI docking experiment.La prédiction de la structure tri-dimensionnelle des complexes protéine-protéine est un enjeu majeur pour la bioinformatique. Nous avions montré dans des travaux précédents que grâce à la modélisation par un diagramme de Voronoï de la structure des protéines, et à l'utilisation d'algorithmes génétiques, il était possible d'optimiser des fonctions de score permettant de distinguer avec une bonne fiabilité les conformations natives des conformations non-natives. Nous montrons dans cet article que cette approche peut être sensiblement améliorée en combinant celle-ci avec des modèles en corps rigide générés par l'algorithme de docking Hex. Cette nouvelle approche, testée sur les cibles CAPRI des rounds 8 à 18, permet de classer dans les 10 meilleures, une conformation quasi-native pour 7 cibles sur les 9 disponibles

The construction, implementation and evaluation of a transactional analysis stress management course for adolescents

Stress is a problem in today's world and adolescents are not exempt from suffering its ill effects. Currently no stress management courses are offered as part of the formal guidance programme in high schools or in the community. This pilot study is an attempt to construct a stress management course based on the concepts of Transactional Analysis. The course was implemented with a multi-racial, standard eight group of nine boys and girls. The course was evaluated qualitatively and quantitatively. The quantitative measures proved to be inappropriate to this study and did not render any useful information. The study found that the scholars expressed that they had changed in their handling of their daily stressors as a result of the course. Personal growth had also taken place. The findings of this research are discussed in terms of the important implications they have for school guidance programmes

The Kleinian Subject in the Anthropocene: Posthumanism, Narration of Crisis, and the Ethics of Reparative Care

This dissertation utilizes psychoanalytic theory to understand the anxieties that construct narrations of and demand intervention into the Anthropocene, a period marked by crises associated with human impact. I specifically bring Melanie Klein's theory of object relations to this contemporary sociopolitical context by analyzing the role of subjectivity in posthumanist theorizing, focusing on new materialism and object-oriented ontology. In response to feminist, queer, decolonial, and critical race concerns for the intersectional human within the posthumanities, this research questions the sociopolitical impact of human desires, fears, and defences on conceptions of repair in anthropocentric crisis and subsequent calls for care-taking in our more-than-human world. First, I explore how the foundational arguments of the posthumanities resonate with the anxieties of Klein's paranoid-schizoid position and the subsequent defence mechanism of manic reparation. I humanize the drive of posthumanist theorizing through Klein's subject and its constitutive formation around a fear of annihilation, positioning the desire to be posthuman as a collective negotiation of threat and security in the face of crisis. Next, I discuss Klein's conception of non-manic reparation and the sociopolitical import of reparative aspirations for the Anthropocene. I specifically focus on the nature of reparative desires in the face of ecological crisis and climate change and argue for the critical necessity of reconciling with reality's ambivalence. Finally, I speculate on the how the individuated conceptualization of Kleinian subjectivity can be brought to notions of collective care in the context of the Anthropocene. I provide a close reading of reparation as a matter of care, politicizing Klein for this contemporary sociopolitical moment and contemplating both the psychic life of engaging in ethical obligations of care for ecological crisis and the critical role of narration in fostering care. Throughout, I illustrate the sociopolitical consequences of calls for caretaking in the Anthropocene through reference to museology as an exemplary realm for the public interpretation and curation of narratives of external reality. I analyze how storytelling practices are tethered to ontological conditions and consider how the perception of crisis impacts the activation of different capacities for engagement or intervention into crisis

An Optimization Model for Processed Food-grade Flour from Off-grade Cavendish Banana Supply Chain Network Design

One of the fundamental issues in Philippine agriculture is the low income of small-scale farmers of Cavendish banana despite the increasing demand for it. The AMS Employees’ Fresh Fruits Producers Cooperative (AMSEFFPCO), for instance, was observed to generate unpleasing profit in the production process of converting off-grade Cavendish banana into food-grade flour. We hypothesized that the profit may be increased by determining the optimal number of components of the production process, i.e., the number of delivery trucks and mills to be operated, as well as the number of nonregular (e.g., peelers, washers) and regular laborers (e.g., slicers, dryers) to be hired. From the constructed supply chain network design of the production process, we formulated and solveda mixed integer linear programming model to obtain the optimal values of the components. Our findings showed that the profit of the cooperative can be maximized if they operate two trucks and one mill and hire nine nonregular laborers and fourteen regular laborers. Moreover, we also studied how the changes in the volume of supplied off-grade bananas affect the values of the optimal components of the supply chain. By implementing the results of this study, the cooperative is expected to generate approximately PhP 9000 per batch delivery, i.e., 4000 kg of off-grade bananas. The methodology developed in this study can also be applied in other banana producer’s organization with similar supply chain network

Health literacy, cognitive ability and health

Poorer health literacy—the ability to acquire, understand and use health information to make better health decisions—has been associated with worse health outcomes. Poorer cognitive ability has also been found to predict increased risk of morbidity and mortality. Health literacy is often assessed using brief tests of health-related reading comprehension and numeracy. Scores on tests of health literacy have moderate-to-strong correlations with cognitive ability test scores. Despite this, few studies have investigated the associations of both health literacy and cognitive ability with respect to health outcomes. This thesis examined whether health literacy and cognitive ability, when studied together, have unique associations with health. The first study in this thesis investigated the unique contributions of health literacy and cognitive ability to smoking status in a sample of 8,734 middle-aged and older adults from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA). Limited health literacy (OR=1.13, 95% CI 1.03-1.25) and poorer cognitive ability (OR per SD=0.94, 95% CI 0.89-0.99) were associated with increased odds of reporting ever smoking. These associations were attenuated and non-significant after adjusting for education and social class. In participants who reported ever smoking, limited health literacy (OR=1.34, 95% CI 1.17-1.54) and poorer cognitive ability (OR=0.88, 95% CI 0.81- 0.95) were associated with being a current smoker, and this remained significant even after adjusting for socioeconomic variables. The second study investigated whether health literacy and cognitive ability were independently associated with diabetes, using a sample of ELSA participants (n=8,669). When examined concurrently, adequate health literacy (OR=0.82, 95% CI 0.69-0.98) and higher cognitive ability (OR per SD=0.78, 95% CI 0.70-0.86) were independently associated with lower odds of self-reported diabetes. Adjusting for health behaviours attenuated these associations and they were no longer significant. Individuals who did not have diabetes were then followed up for up to 10 years. Adequate health literacy (HR=0.72, 95% CI 0.59-0.87) and higher cognitive ability (HR=0.79, 95% CI 0.71-0.88) were associated with a lower risk of developing diabetes. These associations were attenuated by health behaviours and education. The third study sought to determine the role of cognitive ability, measured in childhood and in older age, in the association between health literacy and mortality. Using data from 795 elderly participants from the Lothian Birth Cohort 1936, this study found that lower scores on two tests of health literacy—the Newest Vital Sign (OR per 1 point increase=0.89, 95% CI 0.80-0.99) and the shortened Test of Functional Health Literacy in Adults (OR per 1 point increase=0.95, 95% CI 0.91- 0.98)—were significantly associated with increased risk of mortality. These associations were almost unchanged when childhood cognitive ability was added to the model. When additionally adjusting for cognitive ability in older age, the health literacy-mortality associations were attenuated and no longer significant. Cognitive ability in older adulthood, but not childhood cognitive ability, accounted for most of the association between health literacy and mortality. The genetic architecture of health literacy, cognitive ability, and health was examined in the fourth study. This study investigated whether polygenic profile scores for cognitive, education, and health-related traits were associated with performance on a test of health literacy using 5,783 ELSA participants. Greater odds of having adequate health literacy were associated with higher polygenic scores for better cognitive ability (OR per SD increase=1.34, 95% CI 1.26-1.42) and more years of schooling (OR=1.29, 95% CI 1.21-1.36). Reduced odds of having adequate health literacy were associated with higher polygenic scores for poorer self-rated health (OR=0.92, 95% CI 0.87-0.99) and schizophrenia (OR=0.91, 95% CI 0.85- 0.96). The association between health literacy, cognitive ability and health may, in part, be due to shared genetic influences. This thesis provided an examination of the role of health literacy and cognitive ability in various aspects of health, including health behaviours, morbidity, and mortality. The findings suggest that that at least some of the associations between health literacy and health may be accounted for by cognitive ability, and that the association between health literacy and cognitive ability may be partly due to shared genetic aetiology. The degree of attenuation may depend on the health outcome used and the health literacy and cognitive ability measures used

Evaluating conditions for transboundary Marine Spatial Planning: Challenges and opportunities on the island of Ireland

Transboundary cooperation is viewed as an essential element of Marine Spatial Planning (MSP). While much of the MSP literature focuses on the need for, and benefits of, transboundary MSP, this paper explores the political and institutional factors that may facilitate the effective transition to such an approach. Drawing on transboundary planning theory and practice, key contextual factors that are likely to expedite the transition to transboundary MSP are reviewed. These include: policy convergence in neighbouring jurisdictions; prior experience of transboundary planning; and good working relations amongst key actors. Based on this review, an assessment of the conditions for transboundary MSP in the adjoining waters of Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland is undertaken. A number of recommendations are then advanced for transboundary MSP on the island of Ireland, including, the need to address the role of formal transboundary institutions and the lack of an agreed legal maritime boundary. The paper concludes with some commentary on the political realities of implementing transboundary MSP