Social Network Capital and Academic Careers

Social Network Capital and Academic Careers: The Case of a College of Agriculture ABSTRACT The relationship between economic performance and various forms of capital anchors a significant portion of mainstream economic theory and applied economics. Human, physical and financial capital represent important factors in the production of goods and services. The label “capital” implies characteristics such as investment, accumulation, maintenance, depreciation, and transfer. Recently, social capital or social network capital (SNC) has received increased scholarly attention in the literature of sociology, business, and economics. Limited analysis, however, has been directed at the role of SNC in the academy. We hypothesize that academic success at the professorial level is determined by the stock of human (HC) and SNC and the value flows emerging from these stocks. We view SNC as a complement to HC, increasing the productivity of HC while holding all other factors constant. An analysis of SNC’s importance to academic career success should interest the academy as well as other large organizations (i.e. research laboratories, government agencies) with similar structures and incentive systems.Social capital, academic networks, human capital, Institutional and Behavioral Economics, Labor and Human Capital, Teaching/Communication/Extension/Profession,

DISTRIBUTION OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT, CHILD LABOR AND POVERTY IN INDIA

This paper contributes to the growing debate on regional economic inequality and polarization in India. The specific objectives of this paper are to: (1) analyze regional development disparities amongst various states in India to determine if they are on a convergent course; (2) analyze the evolution of regional inequalities amongst states with respect to a number of socioeconomic indicators and factors that have been suggested to affect the incidence of child labor; (3) investigate and test empirically whether polarization is taking place in Indian states; and (4) investigate whether regional indices of human development and child labor incidence follow similar patterns. Using a consistent data series and applying a number of recently developed measures, trends over the decades of 1961-1991 are documented. The results show that there is little evidence to suggest that any convergence of either the Ò or ã type is taking place amongst the states in India and while there has been no significant decrease in regional inequalities relating to human development, inequalities relating to child labor incidence have increased.Labor and Human Capital,

Socioeconomic Status, Neighborhood, Household Behavior, and Children's Health in the United States: Evidence from Children's Health Survey Data

Using insights from economics, pediatrics, psychology, and sociology, this paper examines the effects of income, income inequality, neighborhood characteristics, maternal health, the participation in religious services, breastfeeding, household smoking, and racial/ethnic composition of population on child health. Using aggregate data on children's health and well-being for 50 U.S. states derived from the National Survey of Children's Health (NSCH, 2005), we document the following results: (1) the independent effects of income inequality on children's health vary across domains of child health outcomes, as some aspects of child health (mental health) are more responsive to the immediate environment of family and neighborhood than others; (2) neighborhood characteristics are powerful predictors of children's health; (3) there is a large effect of maternal health on children's health; (4) children who participate in religious services at least once a week have less socio-emotional difficulties compared to children who do not, and (5) breastfeeding has beneficial effect on children's health, while household smoking has negative effect on children's health and well-being.Consumer/Household Economics, Health Economics and Policy,

DECOMPOSING WELL-BEING INDICATORS USING DISTRIBUTIONAL DATA

This paper makes two principal contributions: first, we propose a method for representing well-being aggregates and estimating population subgroup decompositions when data is available on population distributions across subgroups; second, we analyze the Quality of Life (QOL) of 'poor' and 'non-poor' population segments of 86 countries for the years 1980s and 1990s. The three major findings of this paper are as follows: First, nearly every well-being indicator declines as poor's population share increases; second, evidence of a significant difference in the QOL-poor's population share relationship between Asian and nonAsian countries is present for only few QOL indicators. In other words, the tendency for QOL to decline with increasing poor's population share is common to the Asian and nonAsian countries; third, women suffer a double QOL disadvantage in areas of health and education as the poor's share of population increases. This is due to the existence of relatively wider gender gaps in the well-being indicators among poor populations in Asia and elsewhere.Research Methods/ Statistical Methods,

Measuring the Impact of Globalization on the Well-being of the Poor: Methodology and an Application to Africa

Whereas a large number of empirical studies have been devoted to analyzing the relationship between measures of income and globalization (defined by openness to international trade), much less attention has been paid to the analysis of well-being for the various subgroups of population and their causal associations with globalization. To address this gap in the literature, this paper first analyzes the quality of life (QOL) of 'poor' and 'non-poor' population segments of 40 African countries over a period of 1980-2000, and then examines their causal association with openness to trade. In order to understand the impact of openness to trade on the well-being of poor, we assume the causal chain Openness_ Income_ Poverty_ Well-being of poor and empirically examine link by link for Africa. The first link of the chain is from openness to growth. The second link in the causal chain from openness to well-being is the interrelationship between growth and poverty. The third link of the chain is from reduction in poverty to improvement of well-being. The major findings of this paper are: First, nearly every well-being indicator declines as the poor's population share increases; second, the tendency for QOL to decline with increasing poor's population share is common to the African and non-African countries; third, women suffer a double QOL disadvantage in areas of health and education as the poor's share of population increases; and fourth, globalization has improved incomes of African countries, however, there is a no significant decline in poverty and improvement in well-being of the poor over the period. We discuss the key challenges faces by African countries to beneficially engage in the world economy.International Relations/Trade,

Non-invasive Techniques Towards Recovering Highly Secure Unclonable Cryptographic Keys and Detecting Counterfeit Memory Chips

Due to the ubiquitous presence of memory components in all electronic computing systems, memory-based signatures are considered low-cost alternatives to generate unique device identifiers (IDs) and cryptographic keys. On the one hand, this unique device ID can potentially be used to identify major types of device counterfeitings such as remarked, overproduced, and cloned. On the other hand, memory-based cryptographic keys are commercially used in many cryptographic applications such as securing software IP, encrypting key vault, anchoring device root of trust, and device authentication for could services. As memory components generate this signature in runtime rather than storing them in memory, an attacker cannot clone/copy the signature and reuse them in malicious activity. However, to ensure the desired level of security, signatures generated from two different memory chips should be completely random and uncorrelated from each other. Traditionally, memory-based signatures are considered unique and uncorrelated due to the random variation in the manufacturing process. Unfortunately, in previous studies, many deterministic components of the manufacturing process, such as memory architecture, layout, systematic process variation, device package, are ignored. This dissertation shows that these deterministic factors can significantly correlate two memory signatures if those two memory chips share the same manufacturing resources (i.e., manufacturing facility, specification set, design file, etc.). We demonstrate that this signature correlation can be used to detect major counterfeit types in a non-invasive and low-cost manner. Furthermore, we use this signature correlation as side-channel information to attack memory-based cryptographic keys. We validate our contribution by collecting data from several commercially available off-the-shelf (COTS) memory chips/modules and considering different usage-case scenarios

A hybrid multi objective cellular spotted hyena optimizer for wellbore trajectory optimization

Cost and safety are critical factors in the oil and gas industry for optimizing wellbore trajectory, which is a constrained and nonlinear optimization problem. In this work, the wellbore trajectory is optimized using the true measured depth, well profile energy, and torque. Numerous metaheuristic algorithms were employed to optimize these objectives by tuning 17 constrained variables, with notable drawbacks including decreased exploitation/exploration capability, local optima trapping, non-uniform distribution of non-dominated solutions, and inability to track isolated minima. The purpose of this work is to propose a modified multi-objective cellular spotted hyena algorithm (MOCSHOPSO) for optimizing true measured depth, well profile energy, and torque. To overcome the aforementioned difficulties, the modification incorporates cellular automata (CA) and particle swarm optimization (PSO). By adding CA, the SHO\u27s exploration phase is enhanced, and the SHO\u27s hunting mechanisms are modified with PSO\u27s velocity update property. Several geophysical and operational constraints have been utilized during trajectory optimization and data has been collected from the Gulf of Suez oil field. The proposed algorithm was compared with the standard methods (MOCPSO, MOSHO, MOCGWO) and observed significant improvements in terms of better distribution of non-dominated solutions, better-searching capability, a minimum number of isolated minima, and better Pareto optimal front. These significant improvements were validated by analysing the algorithms in terms of some statistical analysis, such as IGD, MS, SP, and ER. The proposed algorithm has obtained the lowest values in IGD, SP and ER, on the other side highest values in MS. Finally, an adaptive neighbourhood mechanism has been proposed which showed better performance than the fixed neighbourhood topology such as L5, L9, C9, C13, C21, and C25. Hopefully, this newly proposed modified algorithm will pave the way for better wellbore trajectory optimization

Moving Beyond Income: Neighborhood Structure, Household Behavior, and Children's Health in the United States

Using insights from economics, pediatrics, psychology, and sociology, this paper examines the effects of income, income inequality, participation in religious services, maternal health, breastfeeding, household smoking, neighborhood characteristics, and racial/ethnic composition of population on child health. Using aggregate data on children's health and well-being for 50 U.S. states derived from the National Survey of Children's Health (NSCH, 2005), we document the following results: (1) neighborhood characteristics are a more powerful predictor of children's health than income; (2) there is a large effect of mother's health on children's health; (3) the independent effect of income inequality on children's health vary across domains of child health outcomes, as some aspects of child health (mental health) are more responsive to the immediate environment of family and neighborhood than others; (4) breastfeeding has beneficial effect on children's health, while household smoking has negative effect on children's health and well-being; and (5) childrens who participate in religious services at least once a week have less socio-emotional difficulties compared to children who do not.children's health, neighborhood characteristics, socioeconomic status, Health Economics and Policy, I1,

Antimicrobial activity of kojic acid from endophytic fungus Colletotrichum gloeosporioides isolated from Sonneratia apetala, a mangrove plant of the Sundarbans

Objective: To isolate and evaluate the antimicrobial activity of the active principle(s) from the ethyl acetate (EtOAc) extract of endophytic fungus Colletotrichum gloeosporioides (C. gloeosporioides) isolated from Sonneratia apetala. Methods: Water agar technique was used to isolate the fungus, and both microscopic and molecular techniques were used for identification of the strain. Potato dextrose broth was used to grow the fungus in large-scale. Reversed-phase preparative HPLC analysis was performed to isolate the major active compound, kojic acid. The EtOAc extract and kojic acid were screened for their antimicrobial activity against two Gram-positive and two Gram-negative bacteria as well as a fungal strain using the resazurin 96-well microtitre plate antimicrobial assay. Results: The fungus C. gloeosporioides was isolated from the leaves of Sonneratia apetala. Initial identification of the fugal isolate was carried out using spore characteristics observed under the microscope. Subsequently, the ITS1-5.8S-ITS2 sequencing was employed for species-level identification of the fungus C. gloeosporioides. Five litres of liquid culture of the fungus produced approximately 610 mg of a mixture of secondary metabolites. Kojic acid (1) was isolated as the main secondary metabolite present in the fungal extract, and the structure was confirmed by 1D, 2D NMR and mass spectrometry. The EtOAc extract and compound 1 exhibited considerable antimicrobial activity against all tested microorganisms. Whilst the minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) values from the EtOAc extract ranged between 2.4× 10-4 mg/mL and 2.5 mg/mL, those of kojic acid (1) were between 0.125 mg/mL and 1 mg/mL. The EtOAc extract and kojic acid (1) were most active against Pseudomonas aeruginosa (MIC = 2.4×10-4 mg/mL) and Micrococcus luteus (MIC = 0.125 mg/mL), respectively. Conclusions: The results revealed that the endophytic fungus C. gloeosporioides could be a good source of commercially important kojic acid, which exhibited antimicrobial properties