Gender, difference and urban change: implications for the promotion of well-being?

Time poverty methodologies are a response to the failure of income-based measures of poverty to reflect gendered aspects of well-being. However, national time use surveys normally fail to examine issues around women and men's qualitative evaluation of their time uses, or the extent of their control over their own time. The result could be distorted policy responses which lose sight of the original intentions of time poverty as a tool to reveal gendered elements of well-being. This paper draws on the findings of a qualitative survey to asses a rural health promotion programme in Kyrgyzstan to demonstrate this point

Mental illness, poverty and stigma in India: a case-control study

OBJECTIVE: To assess the effect of experienced stigma on depth of multidimensional poverty of persons with severe mental illness (PSMI) in Delhi, India, controlling for gender, age and caste. DESIGN: Matching case (hospital)–control (population) study. SETTING: University Hospital (cases) and National Capital Region (controls), India. PARTICIPANTS: A case–control study was conducted from November 2011 to June 2012. 647 cases diagnosed with schizophrenia or affective disorders were recruited and 647 individuals of same age, sex and location of residence were matched as controls at a ratio of 1:2:1. Individuals who refused consent or provided incomplete interview were excluded. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Higher risk of poverty due to stigma among PSMI. RESULTS: 38.5% of PSMI compared with 22.2% of controls were found poor on six dimensions or more. The difference in multidimensional poverty index was 69% between groups with employment and income of the main contributors. Multidimensional poverty was strongly associated with stigma (OR 2.60, 95% CI 1.27 to 5.31), scheduled castes/scheduled tribes/other backward castes (2.39, 1.39 to 4.08), mental illness (2.07, 1.25 to 3.41) and female gender (1.87, 1.36 to 2.58). A significant interaction between stigma, mental illness and gender or caste indicates female PSMI or PSMI from ‘lower castes’ were more likely to be poor due to stigma than male controls (p<0.001) or controls from other castes (p<0.001). CONCLUSIONS: Public stigma and multidimensional poverty linked to SMI are pervasive and intertwined. In particular for low caste and women, it is a strong predictor of poverty. Exclusion from employment linked to negative attitudes and lack of income are the highest contributors to multidimensional poverty, increasing the burden for the family. Mental health professionals need to be aware of and address these issues

Coulomb Distortion Effects for (e,e'p) Reactions at High Electron Energy

We report a significant improvement of an approximate method of including electron Coulomb distortion in electron induced reactions at momentum transfers greater than the inverse of the size of the target nucleus. In particular, we have found a new parametrization for the elastic electron scattering phase shifts that works well at all electron energies greater than 300 $MeV$. As an illustration, we apply the improved approximation to the $(e,e'p)$ reaction from medium and heavy nuclei. We use a relativistic ``single particle'' model for $(e,e'p)$ as as applied to $^{208}Pb(e,e'p)$ and to recently measured data at CEBAF on $^{16}O(e,e'p)$ to investigate Coulomb distortion effects while examining the physics of the reaction.Comment: 14 pages, 3 figures, PRC submitte

Disabled women’s attendance at community women’s groups in rural Nepal

There is strong evidence that participatory approaches to health and participatory women’s groups hold great potential to improve the health of women and children in resource poor settings. It is important to consider if interventions are reaching the most marginalized, and therefore we examined disabled women’s participation in women’s groups and other community groups in rural Nepal. People with disabilities constitute 15% of the world’s population and face high levels of poverty, stigma, social marginalization and unequal access to health resources, and therefore their access to women’s groups is particularly important. We used a mixed methods approach to describe attendance in groups among disabled and non-disabled women, considering different types and severities of disability. We found no significant differences in the percentage of women that had ever attended at least one of our women’s groups, between non-disabled and disabled women. This was true for women with all severities and types of disability, except physically disabled women who were slightly less likely to have attended. Barriers such as poverty, lack of family support, lack of self-confidence and attendance in many groups prevented women from attending groups. Our findings are particularly significant because disabled people’s participation in broader community groups, not focused on disability, has been little studied. We conclude that women’s groups are an important way to reach disabled women in resource poor communities. We recommend that disabled persons organizations help to increase awareness of disability issues among organizations running community groups to further increase their effectiveness in reaching disabled women

Ab initio calculations of electron affinity and ionization potential of carbon nanotubes

By combining ab initio all-electron localized orbital and pseudopotential plane-wave approaches we report on calculations of the electron affinity (EA) and the ionization potential (IP) of (5, 5) and (7, 0) single-wall carbon nanotubes. The role played by finite-size effects and nanotube termination has been analysed by comparing several hydrogen-passivated and not passivated nanotube segments. The dependence of the EA and IP on both the quantum confinement effect, due to the nanotube finite length, and the charge accumulation on the edges, is studied in detail. Also, the EA and IP are compared to the energies of the lowest unoccupied and highest occupied states, respectively, upon increasing the nanotube length. We report a slow convergence with respect to the number of atoms. The effect of nanotube packing in arrays on the electronic properties is eventually elucidated as a function of the intertube distance

DYNAMICS OF TIDALLY CAPTURED PLANETS IN THE GALACTIC CENTER

Recent observations suggest ongoing planet formation in the innermost parsec of the Galactic center. The supermassive black hole (SMBH) might strip planets or planetary embryos from their parent star, bringing them close enough to be tidally disrupted. Photoevaporation by the ultraviolet field of young stars, combined with ongoing tidal disruption, could enhance the near-infrared luminosity of such starless planets, making their detection possible even with current facilities. In this paper, we investigate the chance of planet tidal captures by means of high-accuracy N-body simulations exploiting Mikkola's algorithmic regularization. We consider both planets lying in the clockwise (CW) disk and planets initially bound to the S-stars. We show that tidally captured planets remain on orbits close to those of their parent star. Moreover, the semimajor axis of the planetary orbit can be predicted by simple analytic assumptions in the case of prograde orbits. We find that starless planets that were initially bound to CW disk stars have mild eccentricities and tend to remain in the CW disk. However, we speculate that angular momentum diffusion and scattering by other young stars in the CW disk might bring starless planets into orbits with low angular momentum. In contrast, planets initially bound to S-stars are captured by the SMBH on highly eccentric orbits, matching the orbital properties of the clouds G1 and G2. Our predictions apply not only to planets but also to low-mass stars initially bound to the S-stars and tidally captured by the SMBH

Adiabatic description of nonspherical quantum dot models

Within the effective mass approximation an adiabatic description of spheroidal and dumbbell quantum dot models in the regime of strong dimensional quantization is presented using the expansion of the wave function in appropriate sets of single-parameter basis functions. The comparison is given and the peculiarities are considered for spectral and optical characteristics of the models with axially symmetric confining potentials depending on their geometric size making use of the total sets of exact and adiabatic quantum numbers in appropriate analytic approximations

Community based system dynamic as an approach for understanding and acting on messy problems: a case study for global mental health intervention in Afghanistan

BACKGROUND: Afghanistan lacks suitable specialized mental healthcare services despite high prevalence of severe mental health disorders which are aggravated by the conflict and numerous daily stressors. Recent studies have shown that Afghans with mental illness are not only deprived of care but are vulnerable in many other ways. Innovative participatory approaches to the design of mental healthcare policies and programs are needed in such challenging context. METHODS: We employed community based system dynamics to examine interactions between multiple factors and actors to examine the problem of persistently low service utilization for people with mental illness. Group model building sessions, designed based on a series of scripts and led by three facilitators, took place with NGO staff members in Mazar-I-Sharif in July 2014 and in Kabul in February 2015. RESULTS: We identified major feedback loops that constitute a hypothesis of how system components interact to generate a persistently low rate of service utilization by people with mental illness. In particular, we found that the interaction of the combined burdens of poverty and cost of treatment interact with cultural and social stigmatizing beliefs, in the context of limited clinical or other treatment support, to perpetuate low access to care for people with mental disorders. These findings indicate that the introduction of mental healthcare services alone will not be sufficient to meaningfully improve the condition of individuals with mental illness if community stigma and poverty are not addressed concurrently. CONCLUSIONS: Our model highlights important factors that prevent persons with mental illness from accessing services. Our study demonstrates that group model building methods using community based system dynamics can provide an effective tool to elicit a common vision on a complex problem and identify shared potential strategies for intervention in a development and global health context. Its strength and originality is the leadership role played by the actors embedded within the system in describing the complex problem and suggesting interventions