From sari to salwar kameez : changes in the lives of female garment workers in Bangladesh : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Philosophy in Development Studies at Massey University

This thesis aims to give voice to what female garment workers attending the Working Women's Education Centre in Dhaka, Bangladesh perceive as personal changes that have occurred in their lives since taking up employment in the Ready Made Garment Industry. It examines these changes to see whether they are indicative of personal, relational or collective empowerment of these women and attempts to ascertain if there is any relationship between the type of clothing worn by the garment worker and aspects of her empowerment. Changes most often mentioned by these women were earning personal money, increased decision making power, self-confidence, self-reliance and freedom: in sum a greater sense of control over their own lives and hope for the future. Personal empowerment of most of the women studied was evident in a heightened sense of self, built on greater awareness of one's own capacities and value as a person. The ability of many of these women to negotiate and get support within the marriage relationship and family was indicative of some degree of relational empowerment. These garment workers, by reconstructing purdah to suit their work situation, were shown to be gradually gaining the support of Bangladesh society for women working outside of the home. There was little evidence of collective empowerment apart from attendance at the WWEC Centre which could be seen as a first step in this direction. This thesis also explored whether the trend for married garment workers to wear salwar kameez rather than a sari as work attire was a reflection of these women's increasing sense of confidence and control over their own lives. It concluded that the wearing of a salwar kameez was indicative of women's ability to challenge cultural traditions imposed on them by men and negotiate with their husbands the right to make this personal decision. Such a choice could therefore be seen as being related to aspects of the worker's personal and relational empowerment

Feeling good and feeling safe in the landscape: a `syntactic' approach

Space syntax is a theory and set of tools and techniques for the analysis of spatial configurations. It was developed at UCL in the late 1970s, as an approach to understanding human spatial organisation and to help architects and urban designers to simulate the likely social consequences of their projects. The fundamental proposition of space syntax is that a building or place can be broken down into spatial components, so that an analysis of the interrelations of the components will yield information about the pattern of space that is meaningful and functionally relevant. Over the past thirty years, space syntax has been successfully applied to resolve problems as diverse as master planning entire cities or revealing the imprint of culture in domestic settings. With this in mind, this paper will explore opportunities and challenges of taking a syntactic approach to the spatial analysis of landscape. To the extent that people avoid walking through landscapes in which they feel apprehensive, understanding the spatial characteristics of such environments should enable landscape designers to create vital landscapes that support healthy lifestyles and avoid those conditions where people may feel insecure. The paper will focus on how the tools/techniques of space syntax can be adapted to understand the circumstances in which people feel motivated to explore their local landscape and the spatial factors that may deter people from incorporating walking into their everyday routines

Multiple-use forest management in Central Africa: Perceptions, implementation and evolution

Although multiple-use forest management (MUFM) is supported by forestry laws in the Congo Basin countries, this approach remains confused, misunderstood and little implemented. We conducted a survey with 62 people concerned or in charge of forest management in Cameroon, Gabon and DRC. Three conceptions of MUFM are expressed: (1) an intentional and formal management of the main forest goods and services; (2) an informal use of forest resources; (3) timber management with limited integration of other secondary goods, like NTFP or bushmeat. The first perception is supported by NGOs, research institutes and projects, the second by the communities' representatives, and the third by logging companies and forestry administration. Actual implementation of MUFM was reviewed in eight forest management initiatives - six logging concessions and two community forests. Timber production, biodiversity conservation, protection of sensitive areas and exploitation of NTFPs are the main uses integrated in MUFM. However their implementation faces various barriers: an inadequate legislation that prevents locally extracted resources from being traded when they come from logging concessions, precarious rights on forest resources for communities, and lack of economic profitability. In contrast, three approaches favor the adoption of MUFM, respectively forest certification, enforcement of traditional use rights in logging concessions, and the tentative REDD schemes. (Résumé d'auteur

Universal rate constants for reactive collisions of ultracold molecules

A simple quantum defect model gives analytic expressions for the complex scattering length and threshold collision rates of ultracold molecules. If the probability of reaction in the short-range part of the collision is high, the model gives universal rate constants for s- and p-wave collisions that are independent of short-range dynamics. This model explains the magnitudes of the recently measured rate constants for collisions of two ultracold 40K87Rb molecules, or an ultracold 40K atom with the 40K87Rb molecule [Ospelkaus et al., Science 327, 853 (2010)].Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures; v2: final version, accepted for publication in Physical Review Letter

Role of access charges in the migration from copper to FTTH

We consider a horizontally and vertically differentiated duopoly model in order to analyze both intra- and inter-platform competition in an always corvered broadband access market (Copper-Copper, Copper-FTTH and FTTH-FTTH competitions). The model is purely static and does not address dynamic efficiency issues. It shows that the access charges play a significant role in the migration from copper to FTTH and in FTTH investment incentives, provided that consumers are segmented. In FTTH-infrastructure-based competition, investment incentives tend to increase with the copper access charge, while in FTTH-servicebased competition, FTTH investment incentives are much more sensitive to the FTTH access charge than to the copper access charge. A comparison of FTTH-infrastructure-based and FTTH-service-based competition in terms of nationwide FTTH coverage and social welfare indicates that FTTH-infrastructure-based competition leads to a higher level of nationwide FTTH coverage and social welfare. --

The Accessible Toilet Design Resource

This Accessible Toilet Design Resource has been produced from new primary research carried out within VivaCity 2020, a large university-based research consortium that is developing tools and resources to support the design of socially inclusive cities. The consortium is funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). It was set up in 2003 and will complete its work in 2008. The Resource is concerned primarily with the design of the accessible toilet cubicle that should be provided for customer or public use wherever there is standard toilet provision. Though it may make reference to other types of toilet cubicles, urinals, automatic public conveniences (APCs) or grouped toilet provision, the location and design of these facilities are not addressed in great detail here. The location and design of accessible toilet facilities merits this independent, detailed scrutiny because it is essential to provide these facilities and to design them correctly, so that disabled people can participate on equal terms to able-bodied people in every aspect of city life

Two-body transients in coupled atomic-molecular BECs

We discuss the dynamics of an atomic Bose-Einstein condensate when pairs of atoms are converted into molecules by single-color photoassociation. Three main regimes are found and it is shown that they can be understood on the basis of time-dependent two-body theory. In particular, the so-called rogue dissociation regime [Phys. Rev. Lett., 88, 090403 (2002)], which has a density-dependent limit on the photoassociation rate, is identified with a transient regime of the two-atom dynamics exhibiting universal properties. Finally, we illustrate how these regimes could be explored by photoassociating condensates of alkaline-earth atoms.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures - typos corrected in formula