HIV/AIDS, growth and poverty in KwaZulu-Natal and South Africa: Integrating firm-level surveys with demographic and economywide modeling

"This paper estimates the economic impact of HIV/AIDS on KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) and the rest of South Africa (RSA). We extend previous studies by employing an integrated analytical framework that combines the following: firm-level surveys of workers' HIV prevalence by sector and occupation; a demographic model that produces both population and workforce projections; and a regionalized economywide model linked to a survey-based micro-simulation module. This framework permits a full macro-microeconomic assessment. The results indicate that HIV/AIDS greatly reduces annual economic growth, mainly by lowering the long-term rate of technical change. However, the impacts on income poverty are small, and inequality is reduced by HIV/AIDS. This is because high unemployment among low-income households minimizes the economic costs of increased mortality. In contrast, slower economic growth hurts higher-income households despite the lower prevalence of HIV among these households. We conclude that the increase in economic growth achieved through addressing HIV/AIDS is sufficient to offset the population pressure this move will place on income poverty. Moreover, incentives to mitigate HIV/AIDS lie not only with poorer infected households, but also with uninfected higher-income households. Our findings reveal that HIV/AIDS will place a substantial burden on future economic development in KZN and RSA, confirming the need for policies to curb the economic costs of this pandemic." from authors' abstractHIV/AIDS, Growth, Poverty, Development strategies, KwaZulu-Natal,

Diffractive Vector Meson Production with a Large Momentum Transfer

We summarise recent progress in the computation of helicity amplitudes for diffractive vector meson production at large momentum transfer and their comparison to data collected at the HERA collider.Comment: Talk presented at EPS2003, Aachen, July 2003. 4 page

South Africa's private sector investment in training and its erosion as a result of HIV and AIDS

South Africa’s economic prospects depend on the productivity of its labour, and productivity can only be maximised when the labour force possess the appropriate skills. Business is playing its part by offering training opportunities to employees. Collectively, they are spending more than the government’s mandated level on training. However, the HIV and AIDS epidemic is eroding this investment in southern Africa where the HIV epidemic is at its worst. While there has been empirical work that provides estimates on the cost of HIV and AIDS to business, there is very little data on the actual amounts large companies spend on training, and how much of this investment is eroded as a result of HIV and AIDS deaths. Using an estimate of the HIV and AIDS death rate in the private sector and survey data which identifies training expenditure by sector, the authors estimate the extent to which HIV and AIDS has potentially eroded this investment. The loss for all sectors was estimated at almost R10 million (R9,871,732) during the study year, which equates to USD1,183,661 per annum. This amount represented on average 0.73 per cent of the actual investment in training. The real costs of HIV and AIDS on business, which includes absenteeism, declining productivity and other costs are difficult to quantify, but they are likely to significantly exceed this lost training investment as a result of increasing morbidity and mortality rates due to HIV. It is therefore in a company’s best interest to: (1) ensure that a sound HIV and AIDS policy is in place; (2) invest in effective prevention programmes; and (3) provide the appropriate ARV treatment to infected employees if this treatment is not easily accessible through the public health sector

HIV/AIDS, growth and poverty in KwaZulu-Natal and South Africa: an integrated survey, demographic and economy-wide analysis

Background: This paper estimates the economic impact of HIV/AIDS on the KwaZulu-Natal province and the rest of South Africa. Methods: We extended previous studies by employing: an integrated analytical framework that combined firm surveys of workers' HIV prevalence by sector and occupation; a demographic model that produced both population and workforce projections; and a regionalized economy-wide model linked to a survey-based micro-simulation module. This framework permits a full macromicroeconomic assessment. Results: Results indicate that HIV/AIDS greatly reduces annual economic growth, mainly by lowering the long-run rate of technical change. However, impacts on income poverty are small, and inequality is reduced by HIV/AIDS. This is because high unemployment among low-income households minimises the economic costs of increased mortality. By contrast, slower economic growth hurts higher income households despite lower HIV prevalence. Conclusion: We conclude that the increase in economic growth that results from addressing HIV/AIDS is sufficient to offset the population pressure placed on income poverty. Moreover, incentives to mitigate HIV/AIDS lie not only with poorer infected households, but also with uninfected higher income households. Our findings reveal the substantial burden that HIV/AIDS places on future economic development in KwaZulu-Natal and South Africa, and confirms the need for policies to curb the economic costs of the pandemi

Men’s perspectives on their grooming practices and appearance concerns: A mixed methods study

This mixed method study explores importance of and influences on men’s grooming behaviors and appearance concerns. Survey data from 83 men based in the United Kingdom showed high social media users engaged in significantly more grooming behaviors than low users. Gay men viewed grooming as significantly more important and implemented more grooming habits than straight men. Qualitative responses yielded themes relating to standards set by traditional media and the blurring of boundaries between traditional and new forms of (social) media. Themes reflected the freedom and constraints of sexuality in relation to grooming as well as the management of attraction and status. More research is needed to consider the impact grooming pressures and influences might have on men in the future

redbiom: a Rapid Sample Discovery and Feature Characterization System.

Meta-analyses at the whole-community level have been important in microbiome studies, revealing profound features that structure Earth's microbial communities, such as the unique differentiation of microbes from the mammalian gut relative to free-living microbial communities, the separation of microbiomes in saline and nonsaline environments, and the role of pH in driving soil microbial compositions. However, our ability to identify the specific features of a microbiome that differentiate these community-level patterns have lagged behind, especially as ever-cheaper DNA sequencing has yielded increasingly large data sets. One critical gap is the ability to search for samples that contain specific features (for example, sub-operational taxonomic units [sOTUs] identified by high-resolution statistical methods for removing amplicon sequencing errors). Here we introduce redbiom, a microbiome caching layer, which allows users to rapidly query samples that contain a given feature, retrieve sample data and metadata, and search for samples that match specified metadata values or ranges (e.g., all samples with a pH of >7), implemented using an in-memory NoSQL database called Redis. By default, redbiom allows public anonymous sample access for over 100,000 publicly available samples in the Qiita database. At over 100,000 samples, the caching server requires only 35 GB of resident memory. We highlight how redbiom enables a new type of characterization of microbiome samples and provide tutorials for using redbiom with QIIME 2. redbiom is open source under the BSD license, hosted on GitHub, and can be deployed independently of Qiita to enable search of proprietary or clinically restricted microbiome databases.IMPORTANCE Although analyses that combine many microbiomes at the whole-community level have become routine, searching rapidly for microbiomes that contain a particular sequence has remained difficult. The software we present here, redbiom, dramatically accelerates this process, allowing samples that contain microbiome features to be rapidly identified. This is especially useful when taxonomic annotation is limited, allowing users to identify environments in which unannotated microbes of interest were previously observed. This approach also allows environmental or clinical factors that correlate with specific features, or vice versa, to be identified rapidly, even at a scale of billions of sequences in hundreds of thousands of samples. The software is integrated with existing analysis tools to enable fast, large-scale microbiome searches and discovery of new microbiome relationships

Attributions of victim responsibility in revenge pornography

Purpose: Revenge pornography is a growing risk among adolescents and young adults. Often stemming from sexting, some victims of revenge pornography report experiencing victim-blame similar to that accompanying the reporting of rape. This study explores the assumptions that underlie attributions of victim-blame, with a focus on perpetrator and victim responsibility, as well as gendered assumptions surrounding sexting. Design: 222 UK university students (111 male, 111 females) read one of two versions of a hypothetical revenge pornography scenario, one involving a male victim of a female perpetrator, the other a female victim of a male perpetrator. They then responded to an open ended question regarding responsibility. Findings: Qualitative content analysis of these responses identified three inter-related themes: the victim’s behaviour, mitigating victim responsibility, and minimising the behaviour. Social implications: The majority of participants in this study attributed at least some responsibility to the victims of revenge porn depicted in the scenarios. Sex of the victim played a less important role than assumptions around sexting. Originality/value: The study suggests that victim-blame is linked to the consent implied by sharing intimate images with a partner, but is also mitigated by the normative nature of this relationship practice. There was some evidence that the experience of male victims of revenge pornography is trivialised. These findings have implications for e-safety and victim support

Revenge pornography: The influence of perpetrator-victim sex, observer sex and observer sexting experience on perceptions of seriousness and responsibility

Drawing on gender-role stereotypes and defensive attribution theory, this study investigates the influence of perpetrator-victim sex, observer sex and observer sexting experience on perceptions of seriousness and responsibility in the context of revenge pornography. Two-hundred and thirty-nine university students read one of two versions of a hypothetical scenario, responded to items concerning their perceptions of the situation described, and responded to items concerning their sexting experience. Men were more likely to believe the situation was serious when it involved a male perpetrator and a female victim rather than vice versa. However, perpetrator-victim sex did not influence women’s perceptions. Participants without sexting experience were more likely than participants with sexting experience to believe the situation was serious, and to hold the victim responsible. Whilst there is a growing body of literature regarding revenge pornography from a legal perspective, there is little or no research on perceptions of revenge pornography situations. As the use of intimate images in relationships continues to rise, it is important to understand people’s attitudes and the extra-legal factors that shape them

Implementation and analysis of a spatial skills course for Secondary level STEM education

High spatial skills have been directly linked to enhanced performance in STEM disciplines, with improvements in spatial skills linked to an increase in female retention at the university level. Spatial skills development and direct training are well researched and implemented within university level engineering education but are less defined at earlier stages of education. It is hypothesised that a spatial intervention implemented at the secondary level could be beneficial in order to boost student performance in STEM, where it still influences their interest in subjects and future career paths. The purpose of this paper is to present the implementation process of a spatial intervention in Irish secondary schools and the initial analysis of combined teacher and student data. The intervention was implemented with Transition Year (aged ~15 to 16 years old) students. Fifty teachers undertook a tailored professional development training to prepare them to deliver the spatial skills intervention, some of which then took part in various qualitative data gathering activities. The intervention was delivered to approximately 1500 students. They were administered a range of psychometric tests, including multiple spatial tests and a fluid reasoning test to investigate their development in a variety of cognitive aspects. This paper will focus on investigating the possible relationships between teacher spatial ability and student gains in spatial ability. The findings of the study were positive, indicating the successful implementation of the intervention and showing promise for future iterations

Overview of Polkadot and its Design Considerations

In this paper we describe the design components of the heterogenous multi-chain protocol Polkadot and explain how these components help Polkadot address some of the existing shortcomings of blockchain technologies. At present, a vast number of blockchain projects have been introduced and employed with various features that are not necessarily designed to work with each other. This makes it difficult for users to utilise a large number of applications on different blockchain projects. Moreover, with the increase in number of projects the security that each one is providing individually becomes weaker. Polkadot aims to provide a scalable and interoperable framework for multiple chains with pooled security that is achieved by the collection of components described in this paper