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Malaria ecology, child mortality & fertility.
The broad determinants of fertility are thought to be reasonably well identified by demographers, though the detailed quantitative drivers of fertility levels and changes are less well understood. This paper uses a novel ecological index of malaria transmission to study the effect of child mortality on fertility. We find that temporal variation in the ecology of the disease is well-correlated to mortality, and pernicious malaria conditions lead to higher fertility rates. We then argue that most of this effect occurs through child mortality, and estimate the effect of child mortality changes on fertility. Our findings add to the literature on disease and fertility, and contribute to the suggestive evidence that child mortality reductions have a causal effect on fertility changes
Transport in ultradilute solutions of He in superfluid He
We calculate the effect of a heat current on transporting He dissolved in
superfluid He at ultralow concentration, as will be utilized in a proposed
experimental search for the electric dipole moment of the neutron (nEDM). In
this experiment, a phonon wind will generated to drive (partly depolarized)
He down a long pipe. In the regime of He concentrations and temperatures K, the phonons comprising the heat current
are kept in a flowing local equilibrium by small angle phonon-phonon
scattering, while they transfer momentum to the walls via the He first
viscosity. On the other hand, the phonon wind drives the He out of local
equilibrium via phonon-He scattering. For temperatures below K, both
the phonon and He mean free paths can reach the centimeter scale, and we
calculate the effects on the transport coefficients. We derive the relevant
transport coefficients, the phonon thermal conductivity and the He
diffusion constants from the Boltzmann equation. We calculate the effect of
scattering from the walls of the pipe and show that it may be characterized by
the average distance from points inside the pipe to the walls. The temporal
evolution of the spatial distribution of the He atoms is determined by the
time dependent He diffusion equation, which describes the competition
between advection by the phonon wind and He diffusion. As a consequence of
the thermal diffusivity being small compared with the He diffusivity, the
scale height of the final He distribution is much smaller than that of the
temperature gradient. We present exact solutions of the time dependent
temperature and He distributions in terms of a complete set of normal
modes.Comment: NORDITA PREPRINT 2015-37, 9 pages, 6 figure
The nature of the red disk-like galaxies at high redshift: dust attenuation and intrinsically red stellar populations
We investigate which conditions of dust attenuation and stellar populations
allow models of dusty, continuously star-forming, bulge-less disk galaxies at
0.8<z<3.2 to meet the different colour selection criteria of high-z ``red''
galaxies (e.g. Rc-K>5.3, Ic-K>4, J-K>2.3). As a main novelty, we use stellar
population models that include the thermally pulsating Asymptotic Giant Branch
(TP-AGB) phase of stellar evolution. The star formation rate of the models
declines exponentially as a function of time, the e-folding time being longer
than 3 Gyr. In addition, we use calculations of radiative transfer of the
stellar and scattered radiation through different dusty interstellar media in
order to explore the wide parameter space of dust attenuation. We find that
synthetic disks can exhibit red optical/near-infrared colours because of
reddening by dust, but only if they have been forming stars for at least about
1 Gyr. Extremely few models barely exhibit Rc-K>5.3, if the inclination i=90
deg and if the opacity 2*tauV>6. Hence, Rc-K-selected galaxies at 1<z<2 most
probably are either systems with an old, passively evolving bulge or
starbursts. Synthetic disks at 1<z<2 exhibit 4<Ic-K<4.8, if they are seen edge
on (i.e. at i about 90 deg) and if 2*tauV>0.5. This explains the large fraction
of observed, edge-on disk-like galaxies with Ks4. Finally,
models with 2<z<3.2 exhibit 2.3<J-K<3, with no bias towards i about 90 deg and
for a large range in opacity (e.g. 2*tauV>1 for i about 70 deg). In conclusion,
red disk-like galaxies at 0.8<z<3.2 may not necessarily be dustier than nearby
disk galaxies (with 0.5<2*tauV<2) and/or much older than about 1 Gyr. This
result is due both to a realistic description of dust attenuation and to the
emission contribution by TP-AGB stars... (Abridged)Comment: 16 pages, 8 ps figures, accepted for publication in MNRA
Measuring Extinction Curves of Lensing Galaxies
We critique the method of constructing extinction curves of lensing galaxies
using multiply imaged QSOs. If one of the two QSO images is lightly reddened or
if the dust along both sightlines has the same properties then the method works
well and produces an extinction curve for the lensing galaxy. These cases are
likely rare and hard to confirm. However, if the dust along each sightline has
different properties then the resulting curve is no longer a measurement of
extinction. Instead, it is a measurement of the difference between two
extinction curves. This "lens difference curve'' does contain information about
the dust properties, but extracting a meaningful extinction curve is not
possible without additional, currently unknown information. As a quantitative
example, we show that the combination of two Cardelli, Clayton, & Mathis (CCM)
type extinction curves having different values of R(V) will produce a CCM
extinction curve with a value of R(V) which is dependent on the individual R(V)
values and the ratio of V band extinctions. The resulting lens difference curve
is not an average of the dust along the two sightlines. We find that lens
difference curves with any value of R(V), even negative values, can be produced
by a combination of two reddened sightlines with different CCM extinction
curves with R(V) values consistent with Milky Way dust (2.1 < R(V) < 5.6). This
may explain extreme values of R(V) inferred by this method in previous studies.
But lens difference curves with more normal values of R(V) are just as likely
to be composed of two dust extinction curves with R(V) values different than
that of the lens difference curve. While it is not possible to determine the
individual extinction curves making up a lens difference curve, there is
information about a galaxy's dust contained in the lens difference curves.Comment: 15 pages, 4 figues, ApJ in pres
Low Temperature Transport Properties of Very Dilute Classical Solutions of He in Superfluid He
We report microscopic calculations of the thermal conductivity, diffusion
constant and thermal diffusion constant for classical solutions of He in
superfluid He at temperatures T \la 0.6~K, where phonons are the dominant
excitations of the He. We focus on solutions with He concentrations
\la \,10^{-3}, for which the main scattering mechanisms are phonon-phonon
scattering via 3-phonon Landau and Beliaev processes, which maintain the
phonons in a drifting equilibrium distribution, and the slower process of
He-phonon scattering, which is crucial for determining the He
distribution function in transport. We use the fact that the relative changes
in the energy and momentum of a He atom in a collision with a phonon are
small to derive a Fokker-Planck equation for the He distribution function,
which we show has an analytical solution in terms of Sonine polynomials. We
also calculate the corrections to the Fokker-Planck results for the transport
coefficients.Comment: 29 pages, 2 figure
Transport in very dilute solutions of He in superfluid He
Motivated by a proposed experimental search for the electric dipole moment of
the neutron (nEDM) utilizing neutron-He capture in a dilute solution of
He in superfluid He, we derive the transport properties of dilute
solutions in the regime where the He are classically distributed and rapid
He-He scatterings keep the He in equilibrium. Our microscopic
framework takes into account phonon-phonon, phonon-He, and He-He
scatterings. We then apply these calculations to measurements by Rosenbaum et
al. [J.Low Temp.Phys. {\bf 16}, 131 (1974)] and by Lamoreaux et al.
[Europhys.Lett. {\bf 58}, 718 (2002)] of dilute solutions in the presence of a
heat flow. We find satisfactory agreement of theory with the data, serving to
confirm our understanding of the microscopics of the helium in the future nEDM
experiment.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures, v
Scaling Up Malaria Control in Africa: An Economic and Epidemiological Assessment
This paper estimates the number of people at risk of contracting malaria in Africa using GIS methods and the disease's epidemiologic characteristics. It then estimates yearly costs of covering the population at risk with the package of interventions (differing by level of malaria endemicity and differing for rural and urban populations) for malaria as recommended by the UN Millennium Project. These projected costs are calculated assuming a ramp-up of coverage to full coverage by 2008, and then projected out through 2015 to give a year-by-year cost of meeting the Millennium Development Goal for reducing the burden of malaria by 75% We conclude that the cost of comprehensive malaria control for Africa is US4.02 per African at risk.
Africa's Lagging Demographic Transition: Evidence from Exogenous Impacts of Malaria Ecology and Agricultural Technology
Much of Africa has not yet gone through a "demographic transition" to reduced mortality and fertility rates. The fact that the continent's countries remain mired in a Malthusian crisis of high mortality, high fertility, and rapid population growth (with an accompanying state of chronic extreme poverty) has been attributed to many factors ranging from the status of women, pro-natalist policies, poverty itself, and social institutions. There remains, however, a large degree of uncertainty among demographers as to the relative importance of these factors on a comparative or historical basis. Moreover, econometric estimation is complicated by endogeneity among fertility and other variables of interest. We attempt to improve estimation (particularly of the effect of the child mortality variable) by deploying exogenous variation in the ecology of malaria transmission and in agricultural productivity through the staggered introduction of Green Revolution, high-yield seed varieties. Results show that child mortality (proxied by infant mortality) is by far the most important factor among those explaining aggregate total fertility rates, followed by farm productivity. Female literacy (or schooling) and aggregate income do not seem to matter as much, comparatively.
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