Are Foster Children Made Better Off by Informal Fostering Arrangements?

Research on the effects of informal child fostering arrangements on the welfare of the children involved highlights cross-country disparities. Why may there be differences across countries with regard to the effects of informal child fostering arrangements? If in all countries reporting a high incidence of foster children Hamilton’s rule applies, then these cross-country differences are puzzling. Our model of child fostering arrangements builds on the fact that a child’s school performance is jointly influenced by his nutrition status and the time he has available at home to develop his learning skills and prepare for national school tests. Given this feature of academic performance, fostering out may become a poor parent’s best option for enhancing his child’s academic excellence, by trading off study time for better nutrition. We show that child fostering arrangements embedding this human capital motive for out-fostering make the foster child better off when nutrition is paramount to a child’s ability to achieve academic excellence.Child fostering, child nutrition, foster child's welfare

DYNAMICS OF CURRENT-INDUCED SWITCHING IN SPIN-ORBIT TORQUE MAGNETIC DEVICES

Master'sMASTER OF ENGINEERIN

Characterization of expressed sequence tags obtained by SSH during somatic embryogenesis in Cichorium intybus L

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Somatic embryogenesis (SE) is an asexual propagation pathway requiring a somatic-to-embryonic transition of differentiated somatic cells toward embryogenic cells capable of producing embryos in a process resembling zygotic embryogenesis. In chicory, genetic variability with respect to the formation of somatic embryos was detected between plants from a population of <it>Cichorium intybus </it>L. landrace Koospol. Though all plants from this population were self incompatible, we managed by repeated selfing to obtain a few seeds from one highly embryogenic (E) plant, K59. Among the plants grown from these seeds, one plant, C15, was found to be non-embryogenic (NE) under our SE-inducing conditions. Being closely related, we decided to exploit the difference in SE capacity between K59 and its descendant C15 to study gene expression during the early stages of SE in chicory.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Cytological analysis indicated that in K59 leaf explants the first cell divisions leading to SE were observed at day 4 of culture. In contrast, in C15 explants no cell divisions were observed and SE development seemed arrested before cell reactivation. Using mRNAs isolated from leaf explants from both genotypes after 4 days of culture under SE-inducing conditions, an E and a NE cDNA-library were generated by SSH. A total of 3,348 ESTs from both libraries turned out to represent a maximum of 2,077 genes. <it>In silico </it>subtraction analysis sorted only 33 genes as differentially expressed in the E or NE genotype, indicating that SSH had resulted in an effective normalisation. Real-time RT-PCR was used to verify the expression levels of 48 genes represented by ESTs from either library. The results showed preferential expression of genes related to protein synthesis and cell division in the E genotype, and related to defence in the NE genotype.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>In accordance with the cytological observations, mRNA levels in explants from K59 and C15 collected at day 4 of SE culture reflected differential gene expression that presumably are related to processes accompanying early stages of direct SE. The E and NE library obtained thus represent important tools for subsequent detailed analysis of molecular mechanisms underlying this process in chicory, and its genetic control.</p

The Global Fight against Child Trafficking: How Can It Be Won?

We study how countries can coordinate their national action plans so as to fight global child trafficking. As both the demand and supply of trafficked children are transboundary in scope, international cooperation may be necessary to mitigate cross-country externalities. We show that specialization is the main feature of international cooperation. We also show that the pattern of specialization depends only on the level of economic development of state-parties. In particular, specialization leads to asymmetric national action plans when state-parties have different levels of economic development: the governments of poorer countries specialize on fighting the supply of trafficked children from their territories, while the governments of richer countries specialize on fighting the demand arising within their territories

Are Foster Children Made Better Off by Informal Fostering Arrangements?

Research on the effects of informal child fostering arrangements on the welfare of the children involved highlights cross-country disparities. Why may there be differences across countries with regard to the effects of informal child fostering arrangements? If in all countries reporting a high incidence of foster children Hamilton’s rule applies, then these cross-country differences are puzzling. Our model of child fostering arrangements builds on the fact that a child’s school performance is jointly influenced by his nutrition status and the time he has available at home to develop his learning skills and prepare for national school tests. Given this feature of academic performance, fostering out may become a poor parent’s best option for enhancing his child’s academic excellence, by trading off study time for better nutrition. We show that child fostering arrangements embedding this human capital motive for out-fostering make the foster child better off when nutrition is paramount to a child’s ability to achieve academic excellence

The Ultralight project: the network as an integrated and managed resource for data-intensive science

Looks at the UltraLight project which treats the network interconnecting globally distributed data sets as a dynamic, configurable, and closely monitored resource to construct a next-generation system that can meet the high-energy physics community's data-processing, distribution, access, and analysis needs

miRkwood: a tool for the reliable identification of microRNAs in plant genomes

International audienceBackground: MicroRNAs (miRNAs) play crucial roles in post-transcriptional regulation of eukaryotic gene expression and are involved in many aspects of plant development. Although several prediction tools are available for metazoan genomes, the number of tools dedicated to plants is relatively limited. Results: Here, we present miRkwood, a user-friendly tool for the identification of miRNAs in plant genomes using small RNA sequencing data. Deep-sequencing data of Argonaute associated small RNAs showed that miRkwood is able to identify a large diversity of plant miRNAs and limits false positive predictions. Moreover, it outperforms current tools such as ShortStack and contrary to ShortStack, miRkwood provides a quality score allowing users to rank miRNA predictions. Conclusion: miRkwood is a very efficient tool for the annotation of miRNAs in plant genomes. It is available as a web server, as a standalone version, as a docker image and as a Galaxy tool

The Design and Demonstration of the Ultralight Testbed

In this paper we present the motivation, the design, and a recent demonstration of the UltraLight testbed at SC|05. The goal of the Ultralight testbed is to help meet the data-intensive computing challenges of the next generation of particle physics experiments with a comprehensive, network- focused approach. UltraLight adopts a new approach to networking: instead of treating it traditionally, as a static, unchanging and unmanaged set of inter-computer links, we are developing and using it as a dynamic, configurable, and closely monitored resource that is managed from end-to-end. To achieve its goal we are constructing a next-generation global system that is able to meet the data processing, distribution, access and analysis needs of the particle physics community. In this paper we will first present early results in the various working areas of the project. We then describe our experiences of the network architecture, kernel setup, application tuning and configuration used during the bandwidth challenge event at SC|05. During this Challenge, we achieved a record-breaking aggregate data rate in excess of 150 Gbps while moving physics datasets between many Grid computing sites

The Motivation, Architecture and Demonstration of Ultralight Network Testbed

In this paper we describe progress in the NSF-funded Ultralight project and a recent demonstration of Ultralight technologies at SuperComputing 2005 (SC|05). The goal of the Ultralight project is to help meet the data-intensive computing challenges of the next generation of particle physics experiments with a comprehensive, network-focused approach. Ultralight adopts a new approach to networking: instead of treating it traditionally, as a static, unchanging and unmanaged set of inter-computer links, we are developing and using it as a dynamic, configurable, and closely monitored resource that is managed from end-to-end. Thus we are constructing a next-generation global system that is able to meet the data processing, distribution, access and analysis needs of the particle physics community. In this paper we present the motivation for, and an overview of, the Ultralight project. We then cover early results in the various working areas of the project. The remainder of the paper describes our experiences of the Ultralight network architecture, kernel setup, application tuning and configuration used during the bandwidth challenge event at SC|05. During this Challenge, we achieved a record-breaking aggregate data rate in excess of 150 Gbps while moving physics datasets between many sites interconnected by the Ultralight backbone network. The exercise highlighted the benefits of Ultralight's research and development efforts that are enabling new and advanced methods of distributed scientific data analysis