“How am I supposed to feel?”: Social Support and Black Mothers’ Infant Feeding Decisions

Background: Many of the adverse health outcomes that breastfeeding protects against disparately affect black mothers and children; however, black mothers are the least likely racial group in the U.S. to breastfeed. Black mothers have indicated that breastfeeding barriers include a lack of social support. Qualitative studies examining such breastfeeding barriers often focus on women who have unsuccessfully breastfed and fail to define the experiences of women who have successfully breastfed. This study aims to identify the impacts of social support on the infant feeding decisions of black women with varying levels of breastfeeding success. Methods: Twenty-five black women were interviewed in mini-focus groups and were recruited according to three categorizations of breastfeeding duration: formula-fed only, breastfed for ≤3 months, or breastfed for ≥4 months. Focus group questions addressed mothers’ perceptions, attitudes, intentions, experiences, and perceived barriers and facilitators regarding infant feeding practices. Group interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed, and then analyzed specific to social support using a grounded theory approach. Results: Mothers in all three breastfeeding categorizations reported experiences with tangible, emotional, and informational support from members across sectors of their social networks. Additionally, mothers reported dissonance between informational support received and their personal infant feeding intentions as well as a need for increased social support regardless of infant feeding method. Conclusions: This study provides an in-depth analysis of social support as a facilitator and barrier to infant feeding decisions for black mothers. Given the findings, it is suspected that experiences with social support are integral to women’s infant feeding decisions.https://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/gradposters/1083/thumbnail.jp

Regional Strategies of Multinational Pharmaceutical Firms

This paper examines the R&D and strategies of the world’s largest firms in the pharmaceuticals sector and finds a high degree of intra-regional sales. R&D and sales are more concentrated within North America and Europe than in Asia. In addition, the relative size of the U.S. market, compared to other parts of the triad, creates imbalances with respect to R&D, sales and international strategy.

Rain driven by receding ice sheets as a cause of past climate change

The Younger Dryas cold period, which interrupted the transition from the last ice age to modern conditions in Greenland, is one of the most dramatic incidents of abrupt climate change reconstructed from paleoclimate proxy records. Changes in the Atlantic Ocean overturning circulation in response to freshwater fluxes from melting ice are frequently invoked to explain this and other past climate changes. Here we propose an alternative mechanism in which the receding glacial ice sheets cause the atmospheric circulation to enter a regime with greater net precipitation in the North Atlantic region. This leads to a significant reduction in ocean overturning circulation, causing an increase in sea ice extent and hence colder temperatures. Positive feedbacks associated with sea ice amplify the cooling. We support the proposed mechanism with the results of a state-of-the-art global climate model. Our results suggest that the atmospheric precipitation response to receding glacial ice sheets could have contributed to the Younger Dryas cooling, as well as to other past climate changes involving the ocean overturning circulation

Improving the Company Profile of PT. Goldfindo Intikayu Pratama: a Way to Make IT More Interesting

PT. Goldfindo Intikayu Pratama is a company which manufactures many kinds of furniture of good quality such as beds, tables, chairs, wardrobes, and etc. The company mainly sells its products to distributors of furniture products in the USA. The problem that the company is facing is that its sales have been decreasing lately. This is due to some reasons, one of which is the promotion tool that the company uses. So far, the company has been using its company profile to promote its products. The problem is that the company profile is neither up to date nor interesting in terms of content and design. Some of the information is also irrelevant to the customers. For these reasons, the company needs to modify or change its company profile. The company needs to have a company profile that is much more impressive and interesting so that its potential customers will be interested and buy the company\u27s products. To realize this, the pictures of the furniture products displayed in the new company profile should be those which the company is currently producing, and which are in trend today or more demanded by most potential customers. In addition, the sentences in the new company profile are supposed to be communicative, simple, and impressive. With the new company profile, it is expected that more customers will be interested and buy the products of PT. Goldfindo Intikayu Pratama. As a result, the company will increase its sales and earn more profit from selling its furniture produc

A distributional checklist of the spider wasps (Hymenoptera: Pompilidae) of Florida

The Florida fauna of Pompilidae is investigated and a total of 115 species are recorded. Among them, 30 are new records for the state. The species and subspecies are presented by subfamily and tribe accompanied by county-based distributional accounts for each of the lower taxa.Se investiga la fauna de Pompilidae de Florida, reportándose un total de 115 especies. De estas, 30 especies son nuevos registros para el estado. Se presenta la subfamilia y tribu correspondiente a las especies y subespecies. La distribución en condados se enumera para los taxones de más bajo rango

Sudan's infrastructure : a continental perspective

Improvements in infrastructure across Sudan in recent years have contributed 1.7 percentage points to the country's per capita growth. Consistent with trends in other countries, the ICT revolution that swept Africa contributed more than any other sector to growth in Sudan. Raising the infrastructure endowment of all parts of Sudan to that of the region's best performer -- Mauritius -- could boost annual growth by about 3.5 percentage points. Sudan has heavily invested in infrastructure in recent years. Notable achievements include tripling power-generation capacity, liberalizing the ICT sector, and connecting to an undersea fiber-optic cable. Looking ahead, Sudan's most pressing infrastructure challenges lie in the water and transport sectors. In the water sector, the country needs to dramatically improve access to safe sources of water and sanitation while improving utility efficiency. In the transport sector the country needs to vastly expand rural and international connectivity and improve quality across the network. Sudan presently spends about $1.5 billion per year on infrastructure, with$580 million a year lost to inefficiencies. Even if the inefficiencies were eliminated, however, Sudan would face an infrastructure funding gap of $2.9 billion per year. This gap could be reduced by half by choosing lower-cost water, sanitation, and road-surfacing technologies, and could be bridged by continuing to capture financing from the private sector and abroad.Transport Economics Policy&Planning,Infrastructure Economics,Energy Production and Transportation,E-Business,Banks&Banking Reform

South Sudan's infrastructure : a continental perspective

Newly independent South Sudan faces a challenge in making its own way in infrastructure development. Despite earning $6 billion in oil revenues since 2005, South Sudan's spending has not been proportional to its income, but rather has lagged behind North Sudan's development of infrastructure and social support. South Sudan benefitted from strong donor support during 2004-10, the interim period defined by the Comprehensive Peace Agreement. It focused on reestablishing regional transport links and access to seaports as well as rehabilitating its ports, airstrips, and single rail line. South Sudan also successfully liberalized the ICT sector. Nonetheless, the new country's infrastructure remains in such a dismal state that it is difficult to pinpoint a single most pressing challenge. The transport sector accounts for half of the country's spending needs, and water and sanitation account for a further quarter of the total. But so many improvements are needed that the nation cannot realistically catch up with its neighbors within 10 years, or even longer. South Sudan's annual infrastructure funding gap is$879 million per year. Given that the country's total needs are beyond its reach in the medium term, it must adopt firm priorities for its infrastructure spending. It also must attract international and private-sector investment and look to lower-cost technologies to begin to close its funding gap. Although South Sudan loses relatively little to inefficiencies, redressing those inefficiencies will be vital to creating solid institutions to attract new investors and get the most out of their investments.Transport Economics Policy&Planning,E-Business,Infrastructure Economics,Energy Production and Transportation,Roads&Highways

Applying ACO To Large Scale TSP Instances

Ant Colony Optimisation (ACO) is a well known metaheuristic that has proven successful at solving Travelling Salesman Problems (TSP). However, ACO suffers from two issues; the first is that the technique has significant memory requirements for storing pheromone levels on edges between cities and second, the iterative probabilistic nature of choosing which city to visit next at every step is computationally expensive. This restricts ACO from solving larger TSP instances. This paper will present a methodology for deploying ACO on larger TSP instances by removing the high memory requirements, exploiting parallel CPU hardware and introducing a significant efficiency saving measure. The approach results in greater accuracy and speed. This enables the proposed ACO approach to tackle TSP instances of up to 200K cities within reasonable timescales using a single CPU. Speedups of as much as 1200 fold are achieved by the technique

The republic of Congo's infrastructure : a continental perspective

Infrastructure contributed half a percentage point to the Republic of Congo's annual per capita GDP growth from 2001 to 2006. If the country's infrastructure were improved to the level seen in Mauritius, the regional leader, it could contribute more than 3 percentage points to annual per capita growth. The Republic of Congo's existing infrastructure is concentrated in the developed south, reflecting the country's urbanization patterns. Links spread from there to the less-developed north, where there are vast areas of underexploited dense forest. The Republic of Congo's power sector offers the greatest potential for infrastructure-based economic growth, but major inefficiencies need to be addressed. Transit improvements would also make significant contributions to growth by improving connections to the north and to neighboring countries. Additional opportunities include rehabilitating the fixed-line telephone operator to spread Internet access. The country's water and sanitation infrastructure is in relatively good shape. Spending on infrastructure was $460 million per year in the Republic of Congo during the mid-2000s. Based on these spending levels, if all inefficiencies were eliminated, the country would face an infrastructure funding gap of$270 million a year and would not meet infrastructure targets for 31 years. Spending rose to $550 million per year in 2008-09. If the Republic of Congo could maintain these higher spending levels, the funding gap would essentially disappear. The nation could further reduce the funding gap by adopting lower-cost technologies to meet infrastructure targets.Transport Economics Policy&Planning,Infrastructure Economics,Public Sector Economics,Banks&Banking Reform,Energy Production and Transportation