Improving the provision of financial services to micro-entrepreneurs, emerging farmers and agribusiness: Lessons from Kwazulu-Natal

Three development finance institutions (DFIs) which operate in KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) province were assessed in 1996/97 to see how they could improve financial viability and outreach to emerging farmers, agribusiness and micro-entrepreneurs. Improved service quality and emphasis on mobilising savings would help clients and enable the DFIs to diversify their portfolios. Better access to branches and lower loan approval times (improved screening and administrative procedures) could also lower client transaction costs. Charging a suitable interest rate spread is necessary but not sufficient for lenders to achieve subsidy independence. Reducing arrears through stricter loan contract enforcement (borrower accountability for loan repayment, lower collateral specific risks, secure and transferable collateral) will also promote financial viability. Providing both savings and loan services together would reduce borrower access costs, and allow savings to serve as a form of collateral and borrower information for lenders.Agricultural Finance,

G97-1319 Management of Smooth Sumac on Grasslands

The herbicide 2,4-D LV4 ester provides excellent low-cost smooth sumac control. Prescribed burning before herbicide application does not substantially improve sumac control, but may ease herbicide application and provide other benefits. Smooth sumac (Rhus glabra L.) is a native deciduous shrub that forms dense thickets from widely spreading roots. It is found in the Sandhills, mixed-grass, and tallgrass areas throughout Nebraska. Introduced cool-season grasses, such as Kentucky bluegrass (Poa pratensis L.), invade the thickets, and production of desirable forage species is reduced below the dense canopies. Trees and other shrubs readily establish in aging sumac thickets, accelerating the conversion of grassland to woodland. Small amounts of smooth sumac may be desirable because it provides wildlife habitat and food and has attractive fall foliage

Long-term course and outcome of obsessive-compulsive patientsafter cognitive-behavioral therapy in combination with eitherfluvoxamine or placebo: A 7-year follow-up of a randomized double-blind trial

Longitudinal studies with very long follow-up periods of patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) who have received adequate treatment are rare. In the current study, 30 of 37 inpatients (81%) with severe OCD were followed up 6-8 years after treatment with cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) in combination with either fluvoxamine or placebo in a randomized design. The significant improvements (with large effectsizes) in obsessive-compulsive symptoms from pre- to post-treatment (41% reduction on the Y-BOCS) remained stable at follow-up (45 %). Responder rates, defined as ≥35% reduction on the Y-BOCS, were 67% and 60%, respectively. Depressive symptoms decreased significantly not only from pre- to post-treatment but also during follow-up. Re-hospitalization, which occurred in 11 patients (37 %), was associated with more severe depressive symptoms at pre-treatment and living without a partner. Full symptom remission at follow-up, defined as both Y-BOCS total score ≤ 7 and no longer meeting diagnostic criteria for OCD, was achieved by 8 patients (27 %). Patients without full remission at follow-up had a significantly longer history of OCD, assessed at pretreatment, compared to remitted patients. The shortterm treatment outcome had no predictive value for the long-term course. Throughout the naturalistic follow-up, nearly all patients (29 patients) received additional psychotherapy and/or medication. This might indicate that such chronic OCD patients usually need additional therapeutic support after effective inpatient treatment to maintain their improvements over long period

Graphene: Piecing it together

Graphene has a multitude of striking properties that make it an exceedingly attractive material for various applications, many of which will emerge over the next decade. However, one of the most promising applications lie in exploiting its peculiar electronic properties which are governed by its electrons obeying a linear dispersion relation. This leads to the observation of half integer quantum hall effect and the absence of localization. The latter is attractive for graphene-based field effect transistors. However, if graphene is to be the material for future electronics, then significant hurdles need to be surmounted, namely, it needs to be mass produced in an economically viable manner and be of high crystalline quality with no or virtually no defects or grains boundaries. Moreover, it will need to be processable with atomic precision. Hence, the future of graphene as a material for electronic based devices will depend heavily on our ability to piece graphene together as a single crystal and define its edges with atomic precision. In this progress report, the properties of graphene that make it so attractive as a material for electronics is introduced to the reader. The focus then centers on current synthesis strategies for graphene and their weaknesses in terms of electronics applications are highlighted.Comment: Advanced Materials (2011

Public Health Ethics: Cases Spanning the Globe

Public health ethics can be seen both as the application of principles and norms to guide the practice of public health and as a process for identifying, analyzing, and resolving ethical issues inherent in the practice of public health. Public health ethics helps us decide what we should do and why. Although the practice of public health has always considered ethical issues, the emergence of public health ethics as a discipline is relatively new. Although rooted in bioethics and clinical and research ethics, public health ethics has many characteristics that set it apart. The defining characteristics are its focus on achieving social goods for populations while respecting individual rights and recognizing the interdependence of people. Currently there are few practical training resources for public health practitioners that consider ethical issues and dilemmas likely to arise in the practice of public health. In public health ethics training, we have found it advantageous to use cases to illustrate how ethical principles can be applied in practical ways to decision making. The use of cases encourages reflection and discussion of ethics, reinforces basic ethical concepts through application to concrete examples, highlights practical decision making, allows learners to consider different perspectives, and sensitizes learners to the complex, multidimensional context of issues in public health practice. The case-based approach (known as casuistry) contrasts with the theoretical approach to considering moral principles, rules, and theories. By describing scenarios, cases allow the learner to use ethical principles in the context of a realistic situation that sheds light on ethical challenges and illustrates how ethical principles can help in making practical decisions. This casebook comprises a broad range of cases from around the globe to highlight the ethical challenges of public health. For those new to public health ethics, Section I introduces public health ethics. Chapter 1, “Public Health Ethics: Global Cases, Practice, and Context” by Ortmann and colleagues, summarizes basic concepts and describes how public health ethics differ from bioethics, clinical ethics, and research ethics. The chapter also includes an approach for conducting an ethical analysis in public health. In Chap. 2, “Essential Cases in the Development of Public Health Ethics,” Lee, Spector-Bagdady, and Sakhuja highlight important events that shaped the practice of public health and explain how practitioners address and prevent ethical challenges. Section II is organized into chapters that discuss the following public health topics: • Resource allocation and priority setting • Disease prevention and control • Chronic disease prevention and health promotion • Environmental and occupational public health • Vulnerability and marginalized populations • International collaboration for global public health • Public health research We have invited some of the leading writers and thinkers in public health ethics to provide an overview of the major ethical considerations associated with each topic. The topic overviews offer the authors’ perspectives about applicable ethical theories, frameworks, and tools and draw attention to the cases that follow. The cases are meant to highlight the ethical issues in practice. Each represents the work of authors from around the globe who responded to a solicitation from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. We worked with the authors to ensure that each case included a concise articulation of a public health situation that raises ethical tensions, challenges, or concerns that require decisions or recommendations from public health officials or practitioners. The cases are presented in a standard format that includes a background, case description, discussion questions, and references. However, we also allowed for variation in the amount of detail provided in each section and the approach used to set up the case. Our goal was to include just enough contextual information to orient the reader who is not an expert in the case topic. We include the case setting, population, or intervention in question, legal or regulatory landscape, and questions to stimulate discussion on core ethical issues. Each case—although fictionalized—is as realistic as possible to reflect the ethical challenges that public health practitioners face daily. Sometimes the cases were based on actual or composite events. In these instances, the case details were modified to exclude identifying information that could be considered private, sensitive, or disputable by others involved in the case. We deliberately did not attempt to provide a resolution or solution for the cases. Often in public health practice, there is no single correct answer. Instead, ethical analysis in public health is a process to identify the ethical dimensions of the options available and to arrive at a decision that is ethically justifiable, through deliberation and consideration of relevant facts, values, and contexts. The cases and other writings in this book represent the opinions, findings, and conclusions of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official position, views, or policies of the editors, the editors’ host institutions, or the authors’ host institutions. We decided which topic category to place the case in to best distribute the cases across chapters. However, you may note that some cases cross topic areas and could just as easily have been included in another chapter. This casebook is written for public health practitioners, including frontline workers, field epidemiology trainers and trainees, and managers, planners, and decision makers with an interest in learning about how to integrate ethical analysis in their day-to-day public health practice. However, the casebook will also be useful to instructors in schools of public health and public health students as well as to academic ethicists who can use the book to teach public health ethics and distinguish it from clinical and research ethics. Our hope is that the casebook will increase awareness and understanding of public health ethics and the value of ethical analysis in public health practice in all of its forms. This includes applied public health research; public health policy development, implementation, and evaluation; and public health decision making in national and international field settings and training programs. By emphasizing prospective practical decision making, rather than just presenting a theoretical academic discussion of ethical principles, we hope this casebook will serve as a useful tool to support instruction, debate, and dialogue about the nature of ethical challenges encountered in public health practice and how to resolve these challenges. We recommend discussing the cases in small groups and using the discussion questions, the ethical framework described in Chap. 1, and the information provided in the topic area overview sections as a starting place for exploring the ethical issues reflected in the cases. The ultimate goal of case-based learning is to develop skills in ethical analysis and decision making in daily public health practice. The ethical framework provides a convenient tool for putting our ideas into practice

Key ethical issues discussed at CDC-sponsored international, regional meetings to explore cultural perspectives and contexts on pandemic influenza preparedness and response

Background: Recognizing the importance of having a broad exploration of how cultural perspectives may shape thinking about ethical considerations, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) funded four regional meetings in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Eastern Mediterranean to explore these perspectives relevant to pandemic influenza preparedness and response. The meetings were attended by 168 health professionals, scientists, academics, ethicists, religious leaders, and other community members representing 40 countries in these regions. Methods: We reviewed the meeting reports, notes and stories and mapped outcomes to the key ethical challenges for pandemic influenza response described in the World Health Organization’s (WHO’s) guidance, Ethical Considerations in Developing a Public Health Response to Pandemic Influenza: transparency and public engagement, allocation of resources, social distancing, obligations to and of healthcare workers, and international collaboration. Results: The important role of transparency and public engagement were widely accepted among participants. However, there was general agreement that no “one size fits all” approach to allocating resources can address the variety of economic, cultural and other contextual factors that must be taken into account. The importance of social distancing as a tool to limit disease transmission was also recognized, but the difficulties associated with this measure were acknowledged. There was agreement that healthcare workers often have competing obligations and that government has a responsibility to assist healthcare workers in doing their job by providing appropriate training and equipment. Finally, there was agreement about the importance of international collaboration for combating global health threats. Conclusion: Although some cultural differences in the values that frame pandemic preparedness and response efforts were observed, participants generally agreed on the key ethical principles discussed in the WHO’s guidance. Most significantly the input gathered from these regional meetings pointed to the important role that procedural ethics can play in bringing people and countries together to respond to the shared health threat posed by a pandemic influenza despite the existence of cultural differences

Linear scaling quantum transport methodologies

Altres ajuts: SR, AWC and JHG acknowledge PRACE and the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (Project No. 2015133194). ICN2 is funded by the CERCA Programme/Generalitat de Catalunya.In recent years, predictive computational modeling has become a cornerstone for the study of fundamental electronic, optical, and thermal properties in complex forms of condensed matter, including Dirac and topological materials. The simulation of quantum transport in realistic models calls for the development of linear scaling, or order-N, numerical methods, which then become enabling tools for guiding experimental research and for supporting the interpretation of measurements. In this review, we describe and compare different order-N computational methods that have been developed during the past twenty years, and which have been used extensively to explore quantum transport phenomena in disordered media. We place particular focus on the zero-frequency electrical conductivities derived within the Kubo-Greenwood​ and Kubo-Streda formalisms, and illustrate the capabilities of these methods to tackle the quasi-ballistic, diffusive, and localization regimes of quantum transport in the noninteracting limit. The fundamental issue of computational cost versus accuracy of various proposed numerical schemes is addressed in depth. We then illustrate the usefulness of these methods with various examples of transport in disordered materials, such as polycrystalline and defected graphene models, 3D metals and Dirac semimetals, carbon nanotubes, and organic semiconductors. Finally, we extend the review to the study of spin dynamics and topological transport, for which efficient approaches for calculating charge, spin, and valley Hall conductivities are described

Multidrug- and extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis

We evaluated risk factors and treatment outcomes associated with multidrug-resistant (MDR) and extensively drug-resistant (XDR) tuberculosis (TB) in Germany in 2004–2006. In 177 (4%) of 4,557 culture-positive TB cases, Mycobacterium tuberculosis isolates were identified as MDR TB; an additional 7 (0.15%) met criteria for XDR TB. Of these 184 patients, 148 (80%) were born in countries of the former Soviet Union. In patients with XDR TB, hospitalization was longer (mean ± SD 202 ± 130 vs. 123 ± 81 days; p = 0.015) and resistance to all first-line drugs was more frequent (36% vs. 86%; p = 0.013) than in patients with MDR TB. Seventy-four (40%) of these 184 patients received treatment with linezolid. Treatment success rates ranged from 59% for the entire cohort (59% for MDR TB and 57% for XDR TB) to 87% for those with a definitive outcome (n = 125; 89% for MDR TB and 80% for XDR TB). Extensive drug susceptibility testing and availability of second- and third-line drugs under inpatient management conditions permit relatively high treatment success rates in MDR- and XDR TB

Identifying the Azobenzene/Aniline reaction intermediate on TiO2-(110) : a DFT Study

Density functional theory (DFT) calculations, both with and without dispersion corrections, have been performed to investigate the nature of the common surface reaction intermediate that has been shown to exist on TiO2(110) as a result of exposure to either azobenzene (C6H5N═NC6H5) or aniline (C6H5NH2). Our results confirm the results of a previous DFT study that dissociation of azobenzene into two adsorbed phenyl imide (C6H5N) fragments, as was originally proposed, is not energetically favorable. We also find that deprotonation of aniline to produce this surface species is even more strongly energetically disfavored. A range of alternative surface species has been considered, and while dissociation of azobenzene to form surface C6H4NH species is energetically favored, the same surface species cannot form from adsorbed aniline. On the contrary, adsorbed aniline is much the most stable surface species. Comparisons with experimental determinations of the local adsorption site, the Ti–N bond length, the molecular orientation, and the associated C 1s and N 1s photoelectron core level shifts are all consistent with the DFT results for adsorbed aniline and are inconsistent with other adsorbed species considered. Possible mechanisms for the hydrogenation of azobenzene required to produce this surface species are discussed