Mission Drift of large MFIs?

Since the Mexican Microfinance Institution (MFI) Compartamos went public in 2007 – whereby promoting NGOs and private investors earned about USD 425 million – leading journals and magazines have repeatedly run rather sceptical articles about microfinance. They are mostly inspired by antagonists of MFIs growing into market driven enterprises. This antagonism has been blended with contemplation about assumed “subprime issues” of microfinance. However, the sector showed a steady performance, different from most other segments of the financial sector. The unholy blend of these two lines of thought risks to create an unwarranted image of microfinance.Microfinance; Mission Drift; Subprime; Sustainability

Colored Pseudo-Goldstone Bosons and Gauge Boson Pairs

If the electroweak symmetry breaking sector contains colored particles weighing a few hundred GeV, then they will be copiously produced at a hadron supercollider. Colored technipions can rescatter into pairs of gauge bosons. As proposed by Bagger, Dawson, and Valencia, this leads to gauge boson pair rates far larger than in the standard model. In this note we reconsider this mechanism, and illustrate it in a model in which the rates can be reliably calculated. The observation of both an enhanced rate of gauge-boson-pair events and colored particles would be a signal that the colored particles were pseudo-Goldstone bosons of symmetry breaking.Comment: 10 pages, 2 figures not include

Time Delay Induced Death in Coupled Limit Cycle Oscillators

We investigate the dynamical behaviour of two limit cycle oscillators that interact with each other via time delayed coupling and find that time delay can lead to amplitude death of the oscillators even if they have the same frequency. We demonstrate that this novel regime of amplitude "death" also exists for large collections of coupled identical oscillators and provide quantitative measures of this death region in the parameter space of coupling strength and time delay. Its implication for certain biological and physical applications is also pointed out.Comment: 4 aps formatted revtex pages; 3 figures; to be published in Phys. Rev. Let

A Doctor\u27s Sabbatical on a Pirate Ship

This is a fantasy poem about a doctor and his adventures with piracy on the high seas

Management of lower respiratory tract infections (LRTI’s): clinical microbiologists’ perspective

In the era of emergence and re-emergence of newer and existing microorganisms, clinical and laboratory diagnosis of LRTI’s requires regular evaluation. Elaborating on possible predisposing factors will be critical to health care workers in the better management of patients suffering with Lower Respiratory Tract Infections (LRTI’s). Microbiologist’s role becomes crucial in deciding the culture methods to be employed to isolate the suspected causative microorganism and identification of the probable pathogen among mixed growth of the isolated bacteria/fungi. Antimicrobial therapy should necessarily be guided by the susceptibility patterns of various antibiotics against different microorganisms from a given geographical region, which should be regularly updated

Radiation and Chemical Reaction Effects on Unsteady MHD Free Convective Periodic Heat Transport Modeling In a Saturated Porous Medium for Arotating System

A rotating model is extended for a two-dimensional, unsteady, incompressible electrically conducting, laminar immediate convection boundary layer flow of light and mass communicate in a saturated porous crystal ball gazer, among an overall vertical porous surface in the perseverance of radiation and vicious circle effects was considered. The fundamental equations governing the flow are in the art an element of partial differential equations and have been reduced to a inhere of non-linear ordinary differential equations by applying suitable similarity transformations. The problem is tackled analytically using classical two term perturbation technique. Pertinent results with respect to embedded parameters are displayed through graphically for the velocity, Temperature, concentration, skin friction, Sherwood number, Nusselt number are discussed qualitatively