Gender, migration and social change: the return of Filipino women migrant workers

This study is about the consequences of feminised migration on migrant women workers, on their families and on the Philippine society as a whole. The continued dependence on migration and increasingly, women‘s migration, by the Philippine government to address unemployment on one hand, and by the Filipino families on the other hand, to secure employment and a better life, has led to social change: change in migrant women‘s sense of identity and personhood; restructuring of households and redefinition of families and gender relations and the rise of a culture of migration. To understand these social changes, the study focuses on the return phase of migration situated within the overall migration process and adopts a gendered and feminist approach. Existing theories of return migration cannot adequately capture the meanings of the return of migrant women workers. Studying return through a gendered approach allows us to reflect on the extent migration goals have been achieved or not, the conditions under which return takes place for a migrant woman worker and various factors affecting life after migration for the migrant women and their families. Return of the women migrant workers cannot be neatly categorised as voluntary or involuntary. It is gendered. It is involuntary, voluntary, and mainly ambivalent. Involuntary return was influenced by structural limitations arising from the temporary and contractual type of migration in jobs categorised as unskilled. Voluntary return was mainly determined by the achievement of migration goals, the psychological need to return after prolonged absence and by the need to respond to concerns of families left behind. Ambivalent return was caused by the desire to maintain the status, economic power, freedom and autonomy stemming from the migrants' breadwinning role; the need to sustain the families‘ standard of living; as well as the apprehensions of a materially insecure life back home. The socio-psychological consequences on families and children of migrant women are deep and wide-ranging. Similarly, women migrants, though empowered at a certain level, had to face psychological and emotional consequences upon return influenced by persistent gender roles and gender regimes. By analysing the impact of gendered migration and return on the societal level, the study has broadened and deepened the conceptualisation of the phenomenon of culture of migration by bringing other elements and factors such as the role of the state, human resources, sustainable livelihood, national identity and governance

Preserved Priming of Novel Objects in Patients with Memory Disorders

Amnesic patients perform poorly on explicit memory tests that require conscious recollection of recent experiences, but frequently show preserved facilitations of performance or priming effects on implicit memory tasks that do not require conscious recollection. We examined implicit memory for novel visual objects on an object decision test in which subjects decide whether structurally possible and impossible objects could exist in three-dimensional form. Patients with organic memory disorders showed robust priming effects on this task---object decision accuracy was higher for previously studied objects than for nonstudied objects---and the magnitude of priming did not differ from matched control subjects or college students. However, patients showed impaired explicit memory for novel visual objects on a recognition test. We argue that priming is mediated by the structural description system, a subsystem of the perceptual representation system, that operates at a presemantic level and is preserved in amnesic patients.Psycholog

Mitigating Instability in Electric Drive Vehicles Due to Time Varying Delays with Optimised Controller

The instability in the Electric vehicle would reduce the performance and even severely damage the system. This instability is mainly due to the random time-varying delays occurring in CAN network and the improper efficiency of controllers. This uncertainty and error occurrence makes it difficult to design the electric vehicles considering the advantages of Electric Vehicles being, the future to reduce harmful emissions due to fossil fuels, the instability can be mitigated by using optimized H∞ controller. The results of Simulations through MATLAB demonstrate the Effectiveness of the improved controller by comparing with the normal PI controller. The results of comparison illustrate the strength of explicitly

Delamination suppression in tapered unidirectional laminates with multiple ply drops using a tape scarfing technique

Composite laminate thickness tapering is essential for weight efficient structures. This is achieved by terminating specific plies, but these can in turn act as sites for delamination initiation. One area of importance is the spacing between adjacent ply drops, which can have a significant impact on the delamination stress. In this work, a novel tape scarfing method that applies a tapered profile to dropped ply ends was used on unidirectional tapered laminate specimens with multiple ply drops. The effect of ply drop spacing on the delamination stress of both conventional and scarfed plies in tension was studied experimentally. The results showed that the scarfed ply drop configurations can completely suppress delamination in certain configurations. The scarfed ply drops also retained higher performance with smaller ply drop spacings. This indicates that in using scarfed plies, conventional laminate design rules could be relaxed and the weight of the structure could be further reduced. The underlying failure mechanisms were also investigated using both analytical and numerical methods. A simple stress-based formula for estimating the delamination stress of scarfed plies was introduced and shown to be consistent with both experimental and numerical results, which could be used (and further developed) to make tapered laminate design easier

Global analysis of SUMO chain function reveals multiple roles in chromatin regulation.

Like ubiquitin, the small ubiquitin-related modifier (SUMO) proteins can form oligomeric chains, but the biological functions of these superstructures are not well understood. Here, we created mutant yeast strains unable to synthesize SUMO chains (smt3(allR)) and subjected them to high-content microscopic screening, synthetic genetic array (SGA) analysis, and high-density transcript profiling to perform the first global analysis of SUMO chain function. This comprehensive assessment identified 144 proteins with altered localization or intensity in smt3(allR) cells, 149 synthetic genetic interactions, and 225 mRNA transcripts (primarily consisting of stress- and nutrient-response genes) that displayed a \u3e1.5-fold increase in expression levels. This information-rich resource strongly implicates SUMO chains in the regulation of chromatin. Indeed, using several different approaches, we demonstrate that SUMO chains are required for the maintenance of normal higher-order chromatin structure and transcriptional repression of environmental stress response genes in budding yeast

Talking with consumers about energy reductions: Recommendations from a motivational interviewing perspective

Reduction of energy costs has become a concern for many organizations. First, we review energy-saving studies in organizations in which consumers showed resistance to change their behavior. Second, we relate resistance to change to the psycholinguistic construct "sustain talk" that describes verbal arguments against behavior change (e.g., "Work processes have priority here"). Third, we argue how Motivational Interviewing (MI)-an interaction-approach to facilitate behavior change-might be helpful in dealing with this behavior. We transfer MI to interactions about energy-savings in organizations and demonstrate how qualification in MI for energy managers may affect these interactions. Therefore, we present three short case scenarios (i.e., video vignettes) that demonstrate socio-interactional mechanisms underlying energy-relevant decisions and behaviors. Consumer' verbal responses are graphed as one single time-variant index of readiness versus resistance (R-index) in order to illustrate interactional dynamics. In sum, we combine theoretical and empirical perspectives from multiple disciplines and discuss an innovative socio-interaction approach that may facilitate energy-efficient behavior in organizations