A Report on Mexican Multidimensional Poverty Measurement

This report addresses the challenges arising from a change in Mexico’s official poverty methodology from an income-only basis to a multidimensional basis that includes education, access to health services, access to social security, shelter characteristics, access to basic services, access to food, and level of social cohesion. The concept of poverty underlying this report is drawn from Amartya Sen’s capability approach. The specific multidimensional measurement framework used is that of Alkire and Foster (2007). Special emphasis is placed on the measure’s population decomposability and dimensional decomposability. The new identification and aggregation methods are then applied to 2005 data provided by CONEVAL to illustrate the feasibility of the methodology and the kinds of results that one might obtain.

On measuring literacy

The authors present a new approach to evaluating the level of effective literacy in a region or country, one that takes into account the presence in a household of a literate person. They characterize the approach and give an empirical illustration of its use. They designed the new measures of literacy because traditional measures of the literacy rate (R) ignore how the presence of literate person in the household affects literacy. They contend that literate household members generate a positive externality -- a kind of public good - for illiterate members. They believe their new measures will be superior to R in predicting or explaining other achievements that depend on literacy. They expect the rate of diffusion of a new technology for farming, for example, to be more closely linked to the effective literacy rate than to the usual literacy rate. If an agricultural extension worker leaves behind a brochure explaining how to plant and care for high-yielding varieties, an illiterate person who lives in a household with at least one literate member has access to that public good; an isolated illiterate - whose household has not literate members - may not have. Similarly, if the presence ( or absence) of one literate household member increases the chance of a child becoming literate, so the effective literacy rate should be a better predictor of future generations'literacy rate should be a better predictor of future generations'literacy levels. Some changes in policy emphasis might be expected if the new effective literacy measures are used. There might be a shift, for example, toward ensuring a better distribution of literacy across households or toward addressing more seriously the problem of female illiteracy. More work is needed to determine if a child in a household with a higher percentage of literate adults has more frequent access to literacy skills.Adult Outreach,Nonformal Education,ICT Policy and Strategies,Primary Education,Curriculum&Instruction,Nonformal Education,Gender and Education,Primary Education,Curriculum&Instruction,ICT Policy and Strategies

Ranking Investment Projects

This paper describes conditions under which one investment project dominates a second project in terms of net present value, irrespective of the choice of the discount rate. The resulting partial ordering of projects has certain similarities to stochastic dominance. However, the structure of the net present value function leads to characterizations that are quite specific to this context. Our theorems use Bernstein's (1915) innovative results on the representation and approximation of polynomials, as well as other general results from the theory of equations, to characterize the partial ordering. We also show how the ranking is altered when the range of discount rates is limited or the rate varies period by period.

Dwarfism in beef cattle and the influence of dwarfism genes on physiological response to hormone-induced stress

This bulletin reports on Department of Animal Husbandry research project 198, 'Improvement of Beef Cattle Through Breeding'--P. [2].Digitized 2007 AES.Includes bibliographical references (pages 50-55)

Cornea organoids from human induced pluripotent stem cells.

The cornea is the transparent outermost surface of the eye, consisting of a stratified epithelium, a collagenous stroma and an innermost single-cell layered endothelium and providing 2/3 of the refractive power of the eye. Multiple diseases of the cornea arise from genetic defects where the ultimate phenotype can be influenced by cross talk between the cell types and the extracellular matrix. Cell culture modeling of diseases can benefit from cornea organoids that include multiple corneal cell types and extracellular matrices. Here we present human iPS cell-derived organoids through sequential rounds of differentiation programs. These organoids share features of the developing cornea, harboring three distinct cell types with expression of key epithelial, stromal and endothelial cell markers. Cornea organoid cultures provide a powerful 3D model system for investigating corneal developmental processes and their disruptions in diseased conditions

Longitudinal-stability Investigation of High-lift and Stall-control Devices on a 52 Degree Sweptback Wing with and Without Fuselage and Horizontal Tail at a Reynolds Number of 6.8 x 10(exp 6).

Contains low-speed longitudinal stability characteristics of a 52 degree sweptback wing of aspect ratio 2.88, taper ratio 0.625, and NACA 64 (sub 1)-112 airfoil sections normal to the 0.282-chord line, in combination with split flaps, leading-edge flaps, and upper-surface fences. Low-wing and midwing-fuselage aerodynamic characteristics are presented with and without a horizontal tail at various vertical locations. Tests were conducted at a Reynolds number of 6.8 x 10(exp 6)