Expenditure elasticities for rural households in the Embo ward, Umbumbulu, KwaZulu-Natal

Household consumption patterns were investigated to determine the impact of an income shock on household expenditure and to establish the potential for demand-led growth in a rural area of KwaZulu-Natal. Household consumption data were collected from sample households in the Embo ward of Umbumbulu, KwaZulu-Natal during October 2004 and March 2005. Budget shares and expenditure elasticities were estimated for household consumption categories for the two study periods, allowing for a comparison of expenditure elasticities between the two seasons. Results suggest that expenditure elasticities for consumer expendables, durables and transport were highly elastic, while expenditure elasticities for the aggregate food category were negative (October) and highly inelastic (March). Analysis of the expenditure categories of tradable and non-tradable goods and services showed expenditure on tradable non-farm goods and services to have the greatest potential for demand-led growth with expenditure elasticities of 2.88 and 2.91, respectively. The category of non-tradable non-farm goods and services was not statistically significant for both periods and the category non-tradable farm goods and services was not statistically significant for October. A seasonal difference in expenditure patterns was apparent, suggesting that responses to income changes vary at different times of the year.Expenditure elasticities, demand-led growth, Umbumbulu region, KwaZulu-Natal, Consumer/Household Economics,

The Co-occurrence of child and intimate partner maltreatment in the family: characteristics of the violent perpetrators

This study considers the characteristics associated with mothers and fathers who maltreat their child and each other in comparison to parents who only maltreat their child. One hundred and sixty-two parents who had allegations of child maltreatment made against them were considered. The sample consisted of 43 fathers (Paternal Family—PF) and 23 mothers (Maternal Family—MF) who perpetrated both partner and child maltreatment, together with 23 fathers (Paternal Child—PC) and 26 mothers (Maternal Child—MC) who perpetrated child maltreatment only. In addition, 2 fathers (Paternal Victim—PV) and 23 mothers (Maternal Victim—MV) were victims of intimate partner maltreatment and perpetrators of child maltreatment and 7 fathers (Paternal Non-abusive Carer—PNC) and 15 mothers (Maternal Non-abusive Carer—MNC) did not maltreat the child but lived with an individual who did. Within their family unit, 40.7% of parents perpetrated both intimate partner and child maltreatment. However, fathers were significantly more likely to maltreat both their partner and child than mothers and mothers were significantly more likely to be victims of intimate partner violence than fathers. PF fathers conducted the highest amount of physical and/or sexual child maltreatment while MC and MV mothers perpetrated the highest amount of child neglect. Few significant differences between mothers were found. PF fathers had significantly more factors associated with development of a criminogenic lifestyle than PC fathers. Marked sex differences were demonstrated with PF fathers demonstrating significantly more antisocial characteristics, less mental health problems and fewer feelings of isolation than MF mothers. MC mothers had significantly more childhood abuse, mental health problems, parenting risk factors and were significantly more likely to be biologically related to the child than PC fathers. This study suggests that violent families should be assessed and treated in a holistic manner, considering the effects of partner violence upon all family members, rather than exclusively intervening with the violent man

Specifications and programs for computer software validation

Three software products developed during the study are reported and include: (1) FORTRAN Automatic Code Evaluation System, (2) the Specification Language System, and (3) the Array Index Validation System

Potential Tension Between a Free Marketplace of Ideas and the Fundamental Purpose of Free Speech

The authors argue that the marketplace of ideas is not competitive in the economic sense. Yet the Court often rules as if it is. What are the implications?By assuming often that the idea market is competitive, Justices are committing the reification fallacy. They are treating an abstract belief or hypothetical construct as if it represented a concrete event or physical entity. In this instance, the Justices assume that existing markets are structured the same way idealized competitive markets are. In doing so, they treat the marketplace of ideas as inherently good, when in fact one must first determine what structure actually exists

Designing calibration and expressivity-efficient instruction sets for quantum computing

Near-term quantum computing (QC) systems have limited qubit counts, high gate (instruction) error rates, and typically support a minimal instruction set having one type of two-qubit gate (2Q). To reduce program instruction counts and improve application expressivity, vendors have proposed, and shown proof-of-concept demonstrations of richer instruction sets such as XY gates (Rigetti) and fSim gates (Google). These instruction sets comprise of families of 2Q gate types parameterized by continuous qubit rotation angles. That is, it allows a large set of different physical operations to be realized on the qubits, based on the input angles. However, having such a large number of gate types is problematic because each gate type has to be calibrated periodically, across the full system, to obtain high fidelity implementations. This results in substantial recurring calibration overheads even on current systems which use only a few gate types. Our work aims to navigate this tradeoff between application expressivity and calibration overhead, and identify what instructions vendors should implement to get the best expressivity with acceptable calibration time.Studying this tradeoff is challenging because of the diversity in QC application requirements, the need to optimize applications for widely different hardware gate types and noise variations across gate types. Therefore, our work develops NuOp, a flexible compilation pass based on numerical optimization, to efficiently decompose application operations into arbitrary hardware gate types. Using NuOp and four important quantum applications, we study the instruction set proposals of Rigetti and Google, with realistic noise simulations and a calibration model. Our experiments show that implementing 4-8 types of 2Q gates is sufficient to attain nearly the same expressivity as a full continuous gate family, while reducing the calibration overhead by two orders of magnitude. With several vendors proposing rich gate families as means to higher fidelity, our work has potential to provide valuable instruction set design guidance for near-term QC systems

Delocalization power of global unitary operations on quantum information

We investigate how originally localized two pieces of quantum information represented by a tensor product of two unknown qudit states are delocalized by performing two-qudit global unitary operations. To characterize the delocalization power of global unitary operations on quantum information, we analyze the necessary and sufficient condition to deterministically relocalize one of the two pieces of quantum information to its original Hilbert space by using only LOCC. We prove that this LOCC one-piece relocalization is possible if and only if the global unitary operation is local unitary equivalent to a controlled-unitary operation. The delocalization power and the entangling power characterize different non-local properties of global unitary operations.Comment: 14 pages, 1 figur

The Potential Tension Between a Free Marketplace of Ideas and the Fundamental Purpose of Free Speech

The authors argue that the marketplace of ideas is not competitive in the economic sense. Yet the Court often rules as if it is. What are the implications? By assuming often that the idea market is competitive, Justices are committing the reification fallacy. They are treating an abstract belief or hypothetical construct as if it represented a concrete event or physical entity. In this instance, the Justices assume that existing markets are structured the same way idealized competitive markets are. In doing so, they treat the marketplace of ideas as inherently good, when in fact one must first determine what structure actually exists. By committing the reification fallacy, here meaning assuming existing markets are competitive, the Court is thereby affirming the existing structure as socially legitimate. By assuming competition, the Court does not then need to call for any change to the existing market. If the Court assumed the existing idea marketplace was monopolistic, where one voice had significant market power, the Court would likely call for more restrictions and oversight of this market. If the market is competitive, however, no changes are needed and legislators and courts would do better to keep their hands off as the Court has traditionally done. The goal of regulation is to make sure all ideas are heard that are necessary for self-government (as Meiklejohn says that “everything worth saying shall be said”), but that nobody dominates the debate through resource advantages. Meiklejohn uses a town-meeting metaphor where the government plays the role of moderator. Under this role as moderator, the government “may prevent some participants from dominating the deliberation . . . but it may not decide which ideas are acceptable or unacceptable.” The procedural protections may be necessary to insure fair access and maintain equal opportunity for the broad range of substantive points among speakers. Paradoxically, the very benefits often touted by those resisting regulation of speech in non-competitive markets are rarely realized because of the structural flaws in the extant market for ideas. When the Court relies on the laissez-faire approach to the First Amendment, the marketplace metaphor is ideological as opposed to utopian. The marketplace metaphor acts as a cleansing device, a soothing agent, one that helps citizens swallow, digest, and accept the end product of the “competition” of ideas to stabilize, rather than challenge, the existing order. Without a careful consideration of the actual structure of the marketplace of ideas, the Supreme Court is failing to make first Amendment rulings in favor of the democratic, truth-oriented interest of the demos, and may instead be serving, protecting, and entrenching the interests of the few

Professional Doctorate in Educational and Child Psychology at the University of East London: Position Statement on Anti-Racism and Decolonisation

This position paper aims to set out our understanding of important issues around “race” (racialisation), inequality and decolonisation in the context of our Professional Doctorate in Educational and Child Psychology at the University of East London (UEL). When we write about the programme this encompasses the wider tutor team, trainees and interns. The paper was written to crystallise our thinking and set out actions for change. The process of change is ongoing, and this position paper represents one step in our journey of decolonisation