Does the group leader matter? The impact of monitoring activities and social ties of group leaders on the repayment performance of groupbased lending Eritrea

This paper analyzes whether the effects of monitoring and social ties of the group leader and other group members on repayment performance of groups differ, using data from an extensive questionnaire held in Eritrea among participants of 102 groups. We hypothesize that the monitoring activities and social ties of the group leader have a stronger positive impact on the repayment performance of groups. The results show that social ties of the group leader do have a positive effect on repayment performance of groups, whereas this is not true for social ties of other group members. We do not find evidence for the hypothesis that monitoring activities of the group leader have a stronger positive impact on group repayment performance. All variables measuring monitoring activities, either of the group leader or the other group members, are found to be statistically insignificant.

諷刺と警告の書 : アーサー・ミラー『復活ブルース』

Resurrection Blues is Arthur Miller's penultimate play. It is an extreme satirical farce about modern politics, faith and contemporary media-obsessed society. The story is set in an unnamed Latin American country that is a so-called banana republic. A Christ-like man was arrested. He is said to be able to perform miracles and has achieved popularity among the impoverished citizens. The military dictator of the country, Felix, has sentenced him to be crucified and comes up with an idea of selling the rights to broadcast the crucifixion to an American television production team, which would offer big money to him and his country to help the national economy. There are many conflicts among people who urge the crucifixion or try to prevent it. At the end of the play, the Christ-like man disappears without giving any message. Critics have criticized this playas feeble, week. lumbering, rambling or unfinished. Certainly we needn't compare this play with Death of the Salesman or The Crucible. But is this "the great man's Swan song"? Even if it is, this swan is angry against the commercialism of opportunistic media, the venality of politicians, a media-obsessed society, blood-thirsty common people, obsessive religion, and art which takes people's eyes away from the actual reality. This is an imaginary story of an imaginary country, but by writing this play Miller is directing his attention to actual societies, especially the U.S.A. In fact, his characters say, for example, "after they kicked Nixon out of the White House he had one of the biggest funerals since Abraham Lincoln. … nobody clearly remembers anything" or "it's now a quite certain the attack [by a Vietnamese gunboat in the Gulf of Tonkin] never happened. This was a fiction, a poem," or "people are shot on television every ten minutes; bang-bang, and they go down like dolls, it's meaningless." Resurrection Blues makes us recognize our actual worlds - for example, the American media that accompanied by bids to carry the execution of the Oklahoma bomber, Timothy James McVeigh live on the internet, or countries rushing to war under false pretenses after 9/11, or common people concerned about money more than a life or moral. It seems obvious that Miller was conscious of The Crucible when writing Resurrection Blues. Both plays center on religious folks and crushing governors, an injudicious witch-hunt and the planned execution of a seemingly God-like prisoner, as one critic writes. Furthermore, Miller is writing Resurrection Blues in the context of his contemporary worlds, as he was writing The Crucible in the face of McCarthyism. This play gives us a question, "what would happen if Christ were to appear in the world today?" After the Christ-like man disappeared without showing himself and giving any message, a character, who has professed to be his disciple, says, "the actual improvements would just have to be up to us." This satirical farce is Miller's rebuke to the contemporary society and a serious warning to us all. He wants all of us bear responsibility for our future

Differential expression of collectins in human placenta and role in inflammation during spontaneous Labor.

© 2014 Yadav et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.Collectins, collagen-containing Ca2+ dependent C-type lectins and a class of secretory proteins including SP-A, SP-D and MBL, are integral to immunomodulation and innate immune defense. In the present study, we aimed to investigate their placental transcript synthesis, labor associated differential expression and localization at feto-maternal interface, and their functional implication in spontaneous labor. The study involved using feto-maternal interface (placental/decidual tissues) from two groups of healthy pregnant women at term (≥37 weeks of gestation), undergoing either elective C-section with no labor ('NLc' group, n = 5), or normal vaginal delivery with spontaneous labor ('SLv' group, n = 5). The immune function of SP-D, on term placental explants, was analyzed for cytokine profile using multiplexed cytokine array. SP-A, SP-D and MBL transcripts were observed in the term placenta. The 'SLv' group showed significant up-regulation of SP-D (p = 0.001), and down-regulation of SP-A (p = 0.005), transcripts and protein compared to the 'NLc' group. Significant increase in 43 kDa and 50 kDa SP-D forms in placental and decidual tissues was associated with the spontaneous labor (p<0.05). In addition, the MMP-9-cleaved form of SP-D (25 kDa) was significantly higher in the placentae of 'SLv' group compared to the 'NLc' group (p = 0.002). Labor associated cytokines IL-1α, IL-1β, IL-6, IL-8, IL-10, TNF-α and MCP-1 showed significant increase (p<0.05) in a dose dependent manner in the placental explants treated with nSP-D and rhSP-D. In conclusion, the study emphasizes that SP-A and SP-D proteins associate with the spontaneous labor and SP-D plausibly contributes to the pro-inflammatory immune milieu of feto-maternal tissues.Funding provided by BT/PR15227/BRB/10/906/2011) Department of Biotechnology (DBT), Government of India http://dbtindia.nic.in/index.asp (TM) and Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) Junior Research Fellowship (JRF)/Senior Research Fellowship (SRF), Government of India, www.icmr.nic.in (AKY)

Efficiency of European public higher education institutions: a two-stage multicountry approach

The purpose of this study is to examine efficiency and its determinants in a set of higher education institutions (HEIs) from several European countries by means of non-parametric frontier techniques. Our analysis is based on a sample of 259 public HEIs from 7 European countries across the time period of 2001–2005. We conduct a two-stage DEA analysis (Simar and Wilson in J Economet 136:31–64, 2007), first evaluating DEA scores and then regressing them on potential covariates with the use of a bootstrapped truncated regression. Results indicate a considerable variability of efficiency scores within and between countries. Unit size (economies of scale), number and composition of faculties, sources of funding and gender staff composition are found to be among the crucial determinants of these units’ performance. Specifically, we found evidence that a higher share of funds from external sources and a higher number of women among academic staff improve the efficiency of the institution