Fertility developments in Morocco: progression to third birth

Nowadays, throughout Morocco a dynamic process of modernization is embracing fertility and nuptial behaviors, family planning, contraceptive use, the role and status of women in the family as well as in society, and political orientations, challenging the foundations of the patriarchal system. The progression from second to third birth is a crucial step in fertility change during fertility transition since the reduction especially in third and higher-order births maintains fertility decline. For these reasons, the study aims at analyzing the main determinants of third-birth intensities, applying an event-history analysis to the most recent retrospective Moroccan survey data. The findings show that differences among social groups still persist: higher risks of giving birth to the third child characterize women with a lower educational level and experiencing a rural background. Nevertheless, within the framework of the ongoing process of modernization in the country and geared to promote women’s status, all segments of the population are rapidly changing their fertility behaviors. Third-birth fertility appears to decline monotonically for all educational groups. This suggests that the general drop in Morocco is due to general period effects that affect all strata of the population and various composition effects where increasingly large groups join the socio-economic groups that have the lowest fertility. Moreover, the analysis shows no consistent or clear evidence of sex preference among Moroccan mothers in the progression to the third child. There seems to be a slight aversion towards having two girls; however, this tendency admittedly is not statistically significant.Morocco, fertility

Towards smaller family size in Egypt, Morocco and Turkey: overall change over time or socio-economic compositional effect?

The whole region of the South and East Mediterranean exhibits a profound fertility transition with marked differences in the pace of fertility declines among the countries. The authors choose three representative countries: Egypt, Morocco and Turkey. Determinants of the propensity towards smaller family size are investigated as scrutinizing the development in the pattern of third births, which represents the critical step in the transitional process for these countries. The authors are particularly interested in verifying whether the decline of higher-order births is significantly driven by an overall societal change over time or by compositional change over different socio-economic segments of the female population. Evidence is found that overall societal changes have mainly driven the decline in large family size, though, to a much lesser extent, compositional changes are important too.Egypt, Morocco, Turkey, childbearing, family size, fertility decline

Dairy supply chain restructuring and its impact on farmers' revenues in Poland

Supply chain restructuring and its impact on farmers’ situation have become the subject of vast interest among agricultural economists. However, there have been relatively few studies trying to quantitatively asses this issue. This paper analyses the impact of supply chain modernisation on dairy farmers in Poland. It is shown that joining the modern marketing channel positively affects farmers’ revenues. The decision to enter the modern channel is crucially dependent on access to funds and facilitated by having larger cow herds.Supply chain, restructuring, dairy sector, Poland, Agribusiness, Livestock Production/Industries,

Thermal light cannot be represented as a statistical mixture of single pulses

We ask whether or not thermal light can be represented as a mixture of single broadband coherent pulses. We find that it cannot. Such a mixture is simply not rich enough to mimic thermal light; indeed, it cannot even reproduce the first-order correlation function. We show that it is possible to construct a modified mixture of single coherent pulses that does yield the correct first-order correlation function at equal space points. However, as we then demonstrate, such a mixture cannot reproduce the second-order correlation function.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures. Published versio

Spontaneous emission of color centers at 4eV in hexagonal boron nitride under hydrostatic pressure

The light emission properties of color centers emitting in 3.3-4 eV region are investigated for hydrostatic pressures ranging up to 5GPa at liquid helium temperature. The light emission energy decreases with pressure less sensitively than the bandgap. This behavior at variance from the shift of the bandgap is typical of deep traps. Interestingly, hydrostatic pressure reveals the existence of levels that vary differently under pressure (smaller increase of the emission wavelength compared to the rest of the levels in this energy region or even decrease of it) with pressure. This discovery enriches the physics of the color centers operating in the UV in hBN.Comment: 16 pages, 3 figure

Biased random walks on complex networks: the role of local navigation rules

We study the biased random walk process in random uncorrelated networks with arbitrary degree distributions. In our model, the bias is defined by the preferential transition probability, which, in recent years, has been commonly used to study efficiency of different routing protocols in communication networks. We derive exact expressions for the stationary occupation probability, and for the mean transit time between two nodes. The effect of the cyclic search on transit times is also explored. Results presented in this paper give the basis for theoretical treatment of the transport-related problems on complex networks, including quantitative estimation of the critical value of the packet generation rate.Comment: 5 pages (Phys. Rev style), 3 Figure

Analysis of complete positivity conditions for quantum qutrit channels

We present an analysis of complete positivity (CP) constraints on qutrit quantum channels that have a form of affine transformations of generalized Bloch vector. For diagonal (damping) channels we derive conditions analogous to the ones that in qubit case produce tetrahedron structure in the channel parameter space.Comment: 12 pages, 8 figures (.eps), minor changes in the text and formula

Thermodynamic forces, flows, and Onsager coefficients in complex networks

We present Onsager formalism applied to random networks with arbitrary degree distribution. Using the well-known methods of non-equilibrium thermodynamics we identify thermodynamic forces and their conjugated flows induced in networks as a result of single node degree perturbation. The forces and the flows can be understood as a response of the system to events, such as random removal of nodes or intentional attacks on them. Finally, we show that cross effects (such as thermodiffusion, or thermoelectric phenomena), in which one force may not only give rise to its own corresponding flow, but to many other flows, can be observed also in complex networks.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figure