Microfinance and Third World Development: A Critical Analysis

Microfinance is emerging as an integral part of the new development paradigm, described by the phrase participation and development. Although the idea has become quite popular among donor agencies, development practitioners, and academicians, theoretical premises on which this idea is founded seem entirely unexamined. Accordingly, this article investigates the academic merits, as well as potential consequences, of this popular poverty alleviating model from the supply-side perspective and asks a provocative question: Do the microfinance ventures have features which suggest that the establishment of this new finance industry in the Third World countries might further complicate their pervasive poverty problems? The answer to this question appears affirmative to be affirmative. First, the microfinance idea is founded on two theoretical premises, both of which are very controversial. Second, the lack of microcredit is not the cause of the Third World\u27s deplorable poverty situation--a fact that suggests that the supply of microcredit cannot alleviate poverty in these countries. Finally, the promotion of the microfinance ventures in the Third World has potentials to create private groups, which have vested interests in perpetuating their prevailing poverty situation

Semantic technologies to support the user-centric analysis of activity data

There is currently a trend in giving access to users of on-line services to their own data. In this paper, we consider in particular the data which is generated from the interaction between a user and an organisation online: activity data as held in websites and Web applications logs. We show how we use semantic technologies including RDF integration of log data, SPARQL and lightweight ontology reasoning to aggregate, integrate and analyse activity data from a user-centric point of view

Risk and Business Goal Based Security Requirement and Countermeasure Prioritization

Companies are under pressure to be in control of their assets but at the same time they must operate as efficiently as possible. This means that they aim to implement “good-enough security” but need to be able to justify their security investment plans. Currently companies achieve this by means of checklist-based security assessments, but these methods are a way to achieve consensus without being able to provide justifications of countermeasures in terms of business goals. But such justifications are needed to operate securely and effectively in networked businesses. In this paper, we first compare a Risk-Based Requirements Prioritization method (RiskREP) with some requirements engineering and risk assessment methods based on their requirements elicitation and prioritization properties. RiskREP extends misuse case-based requirements engineering methods with IT architecture-based risk assessment and countermeasure definition and prioritization. Then, we present how RiskREP prioritizes countermeasures by linking business goals to countermeasure specification. Prioritizing countermeasures based on business goals is especially important to provide the stakeholders with structured arguments for choosing a set of countermeasures to implement. We illustrate RiskREP and how it prioritizes the countermeasures it elicits by an application to an action case

Transforming the Einstein static Universe into physically acceptable static fluid spheres II: A two - fold infinity of exact solutions

Following a solution generating technique introduced recently by one of us, we transform the Einstein static Universe into a two - fold infinity class of physically acceptable exact perfect fluid solutions of Einstein's equations. Whereas the entire class of solutions can be considered as generalizations of the familiar Tolman IV solution, no member of the class can be written explicitly in isotropic coordinates. Further, except for a set of measure zero, no member of the class can be written explicitly in curvature coordinates either.Comment: 6 pages, 6 figures, revtex4,improved figures. To appear in Phys. Rev.