Women’s Cooperatives in Greece: An On-going Story of Battles, Successes and Problems

Women’s cooperatives are the most original type of cooperatives in Greece in terms of planning, organization and management, aimed at increasing their family income and upgrading their social status. In most cases, national or European Union projects financed the cooperatives. The aim of this article is to examine the women’s cooperatives and identify the factors that exhorted farm-women to join them, the effects of such a decision on their lives, as well as the problems they faced during their operation. Forty out of seventy-one cooperatives were examined by means of a structured questionnaire in February 2000. The results indicate that the participation of farm-women in these cooperatives provided them a source of income and gave them independence, power of control and self-esteem. However, efforts must be made in order that their members consider them as enterprises that can operate, survive and develop in a competitive environment.Women’s cooperatives, Women’s agrotourist cooperatives, Farmwomen, Greece., Agribusiness,

Nested Distributed Gradient Methods with Adaptive Quantized Communication

In this paper, we consider minimizing a sum of local convex objective functions in a distributed setting, where communication can be costly. We propose and analyze a class of nested distributed gradient methods with adaptive quantized communication (NEAR-DGD+Q). We show the effect of performing multiple quantized communication steps on the rate of convergence and on the size of the neighborhood of convergence, and prove R-Linear convergence to the exact solution with increasing number of consensus steps and adaptive quantization. We test the performance of the method, as well as some practical variants, on quadratic functions, and show the effects of multiple quantized communication steps in terms of iterations/gradient evaluations, communication and cost.Comment: 9 pages, 2 figures. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1709.0299

The genetic basis of cleft lip and cleft palate

Η χειλεοσχιστία και η υπερωιοσχιστία μαζί ή σαν μεμονωμένες περιπτώσεις αποτελούν ένα μεγάλο τμήμα των σχιστιών του προσώπου, που παρατηρούνται κατά τη γέννηση. Πρόκειται για μια ιατρική κατάσταση, που έχει τύχει εκτεταμένης έρευνας από την επιστημονική κοινότητα λόγω των επιπτώσεων στην υγεία καθώς και των κοινωνικών επιπτώσεων στην καθημερινή ζωή των ασθενών. Υπάρχουν πολλές υποθέσεις και πολλά επιστημονικά δεδομένα για τα γονίδια που εμπλέκονται στη γένεσή τους. Η χειλεοσχιστία και η υπερωιοσχιστία μπορούν να αποτελούν κλινικές εκφράσεις σε πολλά σύνδρομα, αλλά μπορούν επίσης να εμφανιστούν και σαν μεμονωμένες περιπτώσεις και σε αυτή την περίπτωση θεωρούνται μη συνδρομικές. Ειδικά στις μη συνδρομικές μορφές η γενετική ετερογένεια και οι διαφορές ανάμεσα στους μελετώμενους πληθυσμούς μας παρέχουν πολλές φορές αντικρουόμενα αποτελέσματα για τα εμπλεκόμενα γονίδια. Είναι επίσης ευρέως αποδεκτό ότι η χειλεοσχιστία και η υπερωιοσχιστία είναι μια πολυπαραγοντική ιατρική κατάσταση, στην παθογένεση της οποίας και οι περιβαλλοντικοί παράγοντες παίζουν σπουδαίο ρόλο.Cleft lip and cleft palate (CLP) together or as isolated incidents constitute a large proportion of orofacial deformities which are observed during birth. It is a medical condition widely researched in the scientific community primarily because of health effects but also social effects on the everyday life of the affected children. There is wide speculation and much scientific data about the genes which are implicated on its genesis. CLP can be a clinical feature in many syndromes, but they can also be observed as isolated incidents in cases considered as non syndromic. Especially in non syndromic forms genetic heterogeneity and the differences among studied populations provide us with sometimes conflicting results about the implicated genes. It is also widely accepted that CLP is a multifactorial medical condition and in its pathogenesis, environmental factors also play a crucial role

The Author as Reader: the case of Margarita Karapanou

The publication of the journal and notes that Margarita Karapanou kept during her adolescence revealed an early and acute reader. Beyond her lineage, it is the range and speed of consumption of books (as well as other writers’ journals) that determined her literary destiny. What is striking, however, is her reading preferences: steering clear of Greek literature, which she blames for political polarisation, she almost exclusively focuses on foreign writers, mainly English and French-speaking ones – and she always reads them from the original. Such is proved to be also her own “literary citizenship” when she attempts her creative take-off with her first literary book. Kassandra and the wolf is namely her own rebirth by means of writing. It is also her proper portrait of the artist in early childhood. I will examine the ways in which she attempts to “correct” her own biography through her own readings. I will elaborate on three dimensions: a) re-writing her childhood, which was proven to be equally fascinating and traumatic, using as a projection screen of her own experiences The Turn of the Screw by H. James, a novel haunting her entire work, b) the theory about writing and reading that she develops through another child, daughter of another famous writer in Kassandra and c) the way she is led to choose the career of a creative fiction writer over the one of a literary critic or academic

Cathepsins H and L in colorectal cancer

Cysteine cathepsins are important regulators and signaling molecules of an unimaginable number of biologi­cal processes while they also play an essential role in cancer progression, invasion and metastasis. The purpose of our study was: first to compare the expression levels of cathepsins H and L in the supernatants of colon cancer tissues from 74 patients versus the same enzymic expressions of the supernatants of the adjacent normal colorectal tissues and second to correlate our findings to the grade of the malignancy by using an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). The results indicated that the cathepsins H and L of all malignant tissues presented significant higher expression’s values than the corresponding control. Specifically the concentration of cathepsin H that has been found increased significantly as malignancy proceeded, was higher than the corresponding control as following: 155% in B1 stage and 204,44% in D stage. Between the two inves­tigated proteases cathepsin L has showed the greatest increase, which in D stage was 261,03% higher than the corresponding control. According to these results, the expression of cysteine proteases H and L could be of critical value in the diagnosis and progression of colon cance

In vitro genotoxicity of two widely used benzodiazepines: alprazolam and lorazepam

Alprazolam (AZ) and Lorazepam (LZ) belong to benzodiazepines, a multi-membered group of biologically active substances. Even though they are widely used as drugs for the relief of anxiety, sedation and in the treatment of epilepsy, knowledge about their cytogenetic activity is limited.Materials and Methods: In the present study the cytotoxic and cytostatic actions of AZ and LZ have been evaluated in normal human lymphocyte cultures of peripheral blood at final concentrations (0.16-3.84 μM for AZ and 0.62-3.72 μΜ for LZ) equivalent to oral dosage (for AZ 0.25-6 mg/day and for LZ 1-6 mg/day), employing Sister Chromatid Exchanges (SCEs), one of the most sensitive methods reflecting instability of DNA or a deficiency in DNA repair mechanisms, and Proliferation Rate Index (PRI), a valuable indicator of cytostatic activity.Results: After 72h incubation in the cultures, both AZ and LZ caused a dose-dependent, statistically significant increase of SCE frequency (p < 0.001) followed by a statistically significant decrease of PRI (p < 0.001) of lymphocytes.Conclusions: Our results suggest that AZ and LZ at oral doses exhibit statistically significant genotoxicity in normal human lymphocyte cultures