Letter from John F. Kelly, Postmaster of New York City, to Geraldine Ferraro

Letter from John F. Kelly, Postmaster of New York City, to Geraldine Ferraro. Includes data entry sheet.https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/vice_presidential_campaign_correspondence_1984_new_york/1238/thumbnail.jp

IDENTIFYING POLICY RELEVANT VARIABLES FOR REDUCING CHILDHOOD MALNUTRITION IN RURAL MALI

The paper uses OLS and Logit analyses of household survey data to identify and compare determinants of the health and nutritional status of Malian children living in three distinct agricultural production zones (cotton, millet/sorghum, and irrigated rice). These preliminary results suggest that improvements in health center coverage (e.g., reducing the average distance to a health center from 20 to 10 kilometers) and more diversity in complementary foods after six months of age (two or more different foods during a 24 hour period) have the potential to significantly improve standardized height for age scores. Other factors of importance are mother's incomes, prenatal visits, and parents' standardized heights (reflecting either genetic traits or generations of poor nutrition). Recommendations for reducing Mali's high prevalence of malnutrition include the need to raise awareness of the problem among rural populations. Because rural health workers, local administrators, and parents do not recognize malnutrition as a problem, newly empowered decentralized governments will need some external assistance to get the issue on local agendas and identify potential solutions.Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety,

Intermolecular interactions in N-(ferrocenylmethyl)anthracene-9-carboxamide

The title compound, [Fe(C₅H₅)(C₂₁H₁₆NO)], was synthesized from the coupling reaction of anthracene-9-carboxylic acid and ferrocenylmethylamine. The ferrocenyl (Fc) group and the anthracene ring system both lie approximately orthogonal to the amide moiety. An amide-amide interaction (along the a axis) is the principal interaction [N...O = 2.910 (2) Å]. A C-H...π(arene) interaction [C...centroid = 3.573 (2) Å] and a C-H...O interaction [C...O = 3.275 (3) Å] complete the hydrogen bonding; two short (Fc)C...C(anthracene) contacts are also present

Knowledge, Attitudes and Practices on Child Feeding and Care: Preliminary Insights from the Project on Linkages between Child Nutrition and Agricultural Growth

Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety, Downloads May 2008-June 2009: 46,

Hypergeometric decomposition of symmetric K3 quartic pencils

We study the hypergeometric functions associated to five one-parameter deformations of Delsarte K3 quartic hypersurfaces in projective space. We compute all of their Picard--Fuchs differential equations; we count points using Gauss sums and rewrite this in terms of finite field hypergeometric sums; then we match up each differential equation to a factor of the zeta function, and we write this in terms of global L-functions. This computation gives a complete, explicit description of the motives for these pencils in terms of hypergeometric motives.Comment: 70 pages, minor revision, to appear in Research in the Mathematical Science

On the importance of balancing selection in plants

This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: Delph, L. F. and Kelly, J. K. (2014), On the importance of balancing selection in plants. New Phytol, 201: 45–56. doi:10.1111/nph.12441, which has been published in final form at http://doi.org/10.1111/nph.12441. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-Archiving.Balancing selection refers to a variety of selective regimes that maintain advantageous genetic diversity within populations. We review the history of the ideas regarding the types of selection that maintain such polymorphism in flowering plants, notably heterozygote advantage, negative frequency-dependent selection, and spatial heterogeneity. One shared feature of these mechanisms is that whether an allele is beneficial or detrimental is conditional on its frequency in the population. We highlight examples of balancing selection on a variety of discrete traits. These include the well-referenced case of self-incompatibility and recent evidence from species with nuclear-cytoplasmic gynodioecy, both of which exhibit trans-specific polymorphism, a hallmark of balancing selection. We also discuss and give examples of how spatial heterogeneity in particular, which is often thought unlikely to allow protected polymorphism, can maintain genetic variation in plants (which are rooted in place) as a result of microhabitat selection. Lastly, we discuss limitations of the protected polymorphism concept for quantitative traits, where selection can inflate the genetic variance without maintaining specific alleles indefinitely. We conclude that while discrete-morph variation provides the most unambiguous cases of protected polymorphism, they represent only a fraction of the balancing selection at work in plants

Improved procedures for valuation of the contribution of recreation to national economic development

Improved procedures are presented for evaluating the contribution of recreation to national economic development. These procedures are to replace those outlined in the Principles and Standards for Planning Water and Related Land Resources. Desirable criteria for valuation procedures are specified. Variation procedures currently used by federal agencies make almost exclusive use of the “interim unit day value approach,” sometimes augmented by point systems. This approach has little theoretical or empirical justification and does not encourage efficient allocation of resources. Revision and modification of the “interim unit day value approach” and the use of point systems is not a useful method of developing improved procedures. Rather, it is recommended that models be developed to predict individual willingness-to-pay for many types of recreation as functions of site characteristics, the characteristics of the individual user (including the history of the previous use), the availability of substitute activities and sites, and the location of the individual in relation to the resources under study. The total value of the resource would then be a function of these variables, the number of users, and the distribution of users within the market area. These functions may be derived from regional travel cost demand functions (which would also provide estimates of use) or could be explicit willingness-to-pay functions derived from the survey method (which must be supplemented by a use estimate). Examples of the desired models are provided along with guidelines for their development and use. Needs for further research are identified.U.S. Department of the InteriorU.S. Geological SurveyOpe

AGRICULTURE AND RELATED SECTORS IN THE CILSS COUNTRIES: PAST PERFORMANCE AND STRATEGIC CHOICES FOR THE FUTURE

The document identified five priority areas on which to focus future development plans and projects: 1) human resource development; 2)institutional capacity building; 3) rapid and sustainable development of agricultural production; 4) economic growth and diversification; 5) greater regional integration and ties to the world economy. Recognizing that several of these priorities reached beyond its mandate, CILSS recommended that other more qualified regional organizations (ECOWAS, UEMOA) assume their responsibilities in pursuing these objectives. This paper analyzes the past performance, potential for and challenges facing the agricultural sector in the Sahel, focusing on the factors critical to increasing household income and improving food security in the Sahel. It is divided in four parts.Industrial Organization,

The costs of accessible quality assured syphilis diagnostics: informing quality systems for rapid syphilis tests in a Tanzanian setting.

OBJECTIVES: To determine the costs of Rapid Syphilis Test (RSTs) as compared with rapid plasma reagin (RPR) when implemented in a Tanzanian setting, and to determine the relative impact of a quality assurance (QA) system on the cost of RST implementation. METHODS: The incremental costs for RPR and RST screening programmes in existing antenatal care settings in Geita District, Tanzania were collected for 9 months in subsequent years from nine health facilities that varied in size, remoteness and scope of antenatal services. The costs per woman tested and treated were estimated for each facility. A sensitivity analysis was constructed to determine the impact of parameter and model uncertainty. FINDINGS: In surveyed facilities, a total of 6362 women were tested with RSTs compared with 224 tested with RPR. The range of unit costs was $1.76-$3.13 per woman screened and $12.88-$32.67 per woman treated. Unit costs for the QA system came to $0.51 per woman tested, of which 50% were attributed to salaries and transport for project personnel. CONCLUSIONS: Our results suggest that rapid syphilis diagnostics are very inexpensive in this setting and can overcome some critical barriers to ensuring universal access to syphilis testing and treatment. The additional costs for implementation of a quality system were found to be relatively small, and could be reduced through alterations to the programme design. Given the potential for a quality system to improve quality of diagnosis and care, we recommend that QA activities be incorporated into RST roll-out