Levels and Differentials in Maternal Mortality in Rural India:New Evidence from Sisterhood Data

The paper presents estimates of maternal mortality derived from the NCAER-HDI survey (1994) for rural areas of India by broad geographical regions and by some selected background characteristics of respondents. According to these estimates, maternal mortality was 544 deaths per one lakh births roughly 12 years before the survey. The maternal mortality ratio was more than 600 in eastern and north-central India, while it was between 300 and 400 in north-western and southern India. The survey data suggest that maternal mortality levels were higher among the scheduled tribes and scheduled castes and low among Muslims. The level of maternal mortality was strongly related to amenities and infrastructure available in the village. However, its relationship with poverty and educational levels of respondents was found to be weak perhaps because the characteristics of respondents were not the ideal surrogates for sisters’ attributes.Health CareMortality RateMaternal Mortality

Demographic transition, family size and child schooling

This paper first presents evidence to show that in recent years there has been a substantial fall in fertility among illiterate women in India. Subsequently, using the data from the Human Development Profile Survey of 1994, it shows that child schooling among illiterate parents is inversely related to family size and positively related to contraceptive use. By connecting these two pieces of evidence, the paper argues that fertility is falling and child schooling is rising among illiterate couples because of the quantity-quality trade-off. The detrimental effect of family size on child schooling is found to be more severe on female children and on the first-born of either sex. Perhaps this is because when family size is large, these children are either not sent to school at all or withdrawn early, to supplement the family income or to look after the younger siblings. Consequently, it is argued that the first female child would particularly stand to gain from declines in fertility.EducationDemographic Transition

An application of semigroup theory to a fragmentation equation

The process of fragmentation arises in many physical situations, including polymer degradation, droplet breakage and rock crushing and grinding. Under suitable assumptions, the evolution of the size distribution c(x, t), where x represents particle size and t is time, may be described by the linear integro-differential equation

High-energy laser-pulse self-compression in short gas-filled fibers

We examine the spatiotemporal compression of energetic femtosecond laser pulses within short gas-filled fibers. The study is undertaken using an advanced nonlinear pulse propagation model based on a multimode generalized nonlinear Schrödinger equation that has been modified to include plasma effects. Plasma defocusing and linear propagation effects are shown to be the dominant processes within a highly dynamical mechanism that enables 100-fs pulses to be compressed into the few-cycle regime after <50 mm of propagation. Once the mechanism has been introduced, parameter spaces are explored and compressor designs suitable for performing high-field experiments in situ are presented. We finish by showing how these designs may be extended to novel wavelengths and driving pulses delivered by state-of-the-art high-repetition-rate lasers

Combining vocal tract length normalization with hierarchial linear transformations

Recent research has demonstrated the effectiveness of vocal tract length normalization (VTLN) as a rapid adaptation technique for statistical parametric speech synthesis. VTLN produces speech with naturalness preferable to that of MLLR-based adaptation techniques, being much closer in quality to that generated by the original av-erage voice model. However with only a single parameter, VTLN captures very few speaker specific characteristics when compared to linear transform based adaptation techniques. This paper pro-poses that the merits of VTLN can be combined with those of linear transform based adaptation in a hierarchial Bayesian frame-work, where VTLN is used as the prior information. A novel tech-nique for propagating the gender information from the VTLN prior through constrained structural maximum a posteriori linear regres-sion (CSMAPLR) adaptation is presented. Experiments show that the resulting transformation has improved speech quality with better naturalness, intelligibility and improved speaker similarity. Index Terms — Statistical parametric speech synthesis, hidden Markov models, speaker adaptation, vocal tract length normaliza-tion, constrained structural maximum a posteriori linear regression 1

Quantitative microbiological risk assessment as a tool to obtain useful information for risk managers - specific application to Listeria monocytogenes and ready-to-eat meat products

The presence of Listeria monocytogenes in a sliced cooked, cured ham-like meat product was quantitatively assessed. Sliced cooked, cured meat products are considered as high risk products. These ready-to-eat, RTE, products (no special preparation, e.g. thermal treatment, before eating is required), support growth of pathogens (high initial pH = 6.2–6.4 and water activity = 0.98–0.99) and has a relatively long period of storage at chilled temperatures with a shelf life equal to 60 days based on manufacturer's instructions. Therefore, in case of post-process contamination, even with low number of cells, the microorganism is able to reach unacceptable levels at the time of consumption. The aim of this study was to conduct a Quantitative Microbiological Risk Assessment (QMRA) on the risk of L. monocytogenes presence in RTE meat products. This may help risk managers to make decisions and apply control measures with ultimate objective the food safety assurance. Examples are given to illustrate the development of practical risk management strategies based on the results obtained from the QMRA model specifically developed for this pathogen/food product combinatio

The Effects of Crop Type and Production Systems on the Activity of Beneficial Invertebrates

Beneficial invertebrate activity (13 groups) was assessed in five crop types on a split-plot experimental system in northern England using pitfall trapping and suction sampling in May-October 2005. Very significant differences were detected in activity between crop type, and in the preference of groups for individual crops. Within crop types, differences in fertiliser and crop protection approaches appeared to significantly affect activity, with preferences for either organic or conventional management differing between groups. In general, inorganic fertiliser application had more effect on activity than pesticide, herbicide and fungicide use