Women Fighting Poverty in Cameroon: A Legal Perspective!

Poverty in Sub Saharan Africa has many causes, which range from the impact of the Structural Adjustment Programs, the huge foreign debt and policies that encourage mismanagement of state resources. This growing poverty and underdevelopment has attracted the attention of the international community to pursue programs aimed at attaining the UN Millennium Development Goals, foreign debt relief and increased development aid. During the introduction of policies that brought about economic hardship, African women were not consulted and their voices were not heard. Yet it is these women who feel most of the impact of these policies. During the period of the economic crisis, women did not remain silent in the face of the growing poverty. As a response, they organized themselves into groups for financial and self-help purposes. These organized women’s groups if legally and financially empowered will contribute a great deal in the fight against poverty in Cameroon. Micro financing is an important tool common in these groups, but it must be supported by the provision of basic resources and infrastructure. Women make up more than75% of subsistence farmers and are mostly found in the informal sector, their contribution helps to sustain the economy greatly, but it is still insufficient to make any significant improvement in their living standards. The inhibition stems from traditional and cultures practices that hinder women from claiming equal ownership and equal representation in decision-making settings. Hence, a good economic regulatory framework by any government fighting poverty should incorporate the economic and legal empowerment of women and target mostly rural women and their basic needs

Critical velocity for superfluid flow across the BEC-BCS crossover

Critical velocities have been observed in an ultracold superfluid Fermi gas throughout the BEC-BCS crossover. A pronounced peak of the critical velocity at unitarity demonstrates that superfluidity is most robust for resonant atomic interactions. Critical velocities were determined from the abrupt onset of dissipation when the velocity of a moving one dimensional optical lattice was varied. The dependence of the critical velocity on lattice depth and on the inhomogeneous density profile was studied

Mapping functions and critical behavior of percolation on rectangular domains

The existence probability $E_p$ and the percolation probability $P$ of the bond percolation on rectangular domains with different aspect ratios $R$ are studied via the mapping functions between systems with different aspect ratios. The superscaling behavior of $E_p$ and $P$ for such systems with exponents $a$ and $b$, respectively, found by Watanabe, Yukawa, Ito, and Hu in [Phys. Rev. Lett. \textbf{93}, 190601 (2004)] can be understood from the lower order approximation of the mapping functions $f_R$ and $g_R$ for $E_p$ and $P$, respectively; the exponents $a$ and $b$ can be obtained from numerically determined mapping functions $f_R$ and $g_R$, respectively.Comment: 17 pages with 6 figure

Influence of Promoter Type on Bimetallic Co-Ni/Al 2O3 Catalyst for Steam Reforming of Glycerol

Biodiesel is produced from a variety of renewable sources including waste cooking oil. However, its production has led to a glut of glycerol (a by-product, in the amount of 1 mol of glycerol for every three of fatty acid methyl esters). Glycerol presently has low-level and limited use in pharmaceuticals production. The present work deals with steam reforming of glycerol over a bimetallic Co-Ni/Al2O3 catalyst system promoted by 2.5wt% alkaline earth oxides (AEO) and lanthanide oxides (LO). The addition of metal oxide from these two groups reportedly minimizes carbon deposition with possible improvement in product selectivity and syngas production rate. Our objective was to provide a systematic correlation between physicochemical properties of the promoted catalyst and reaction metrics

The intermediate evolution phase in case of truncated selection

Using methods of statistical physics, we present rigorous theoretical calculations of Eigen's quasispecies theory with the truncated fitness landscape which dramatically limits the available sequence space of a reproducing quasispecies. Depending on the mutation rates, we observe three phases, a selective one, an intermediate one with some residual order and a completely randomized phase. Our results are applicable for the general case of fitness landscape.Comment: 8 page

Geometry, thermodynamics, and finite-size corrections in the critical Potts model

We establish an intriguing connection between geometry and thermodynamics in the critical q-state Potts model on two-dimensional lattices, using the q-state bond-correlated percolation model (QBCPM) representation. We find that the number of clusters of the QBCPM has an energy-like singularity for q different from 1, which is reached and supported by exact results, numerical simulation, and scaling arguments. We also establish that the finite-size correction to the number of bonds, has no constant term and explains the divergence of related quantities as q --> 4, the multicritical point. Similar analyses are applicable to a variety of other systems.Comment: 12 pages, 6 figure

The Growth Of Highly Doped p-GaN On Sapphire By RF Plasma-Assisted Molecular Beam Epitaxy.

In this paper, we present the study of the electrical, structural and optical properties of p-type GaN grown on sapphire by RF plasma-assisted molecular beam epitaxy (RF-MBE)