Social Deprivation and Exclusion of Immigrants in Germany

This paper aims at providing empirical evidence on social exclusion of immigrants in Germany. We demonstrate that when using a conventional definition of the social inclusion index typically applied in the literature, immigrants appear to experience a significant degree of social deprivation and exclusion, confirming much of the economic literature examining the economic assimilation of immigrants in Germany. We propose a weighting scheme that weights components of social inclusion by their subjective contribution to an overall measure of life satisfaction.Using this weighting scheme to calculate an index of social inclusion, we find that immigrants are in fact as "included" as Germans. This result is driven strongly by the disproportionately positive socio-demographic characteristics that immigrants possess as measured by the contribution to their life satisfaction.Social Exclusion, International Migration, Integration

Social Deprivation and Exclusion of Immigrants in Germany

This paper aims at providing empirical evidence on social exclusion of immigrants in Germany. We demonstrate that when using a conventional definition of the social inclusion index typically applied in the literature, immigrants appear to experience a significant degree of social deprivation and exclusion, confirming much of the economic literature examining the economic assimilation of immigrants in Germany. We propose a weighting scheme that weights components of social inclusion by their subjective contribution to an overall measure of life satisfaction. Using this weighting scheme to calculate an index of social inclusion, we find that immigrants are in fact as "included" as Germans. This result is driven strongly by the disproportionately positive socio- demographic characteristics that immigrants possess as measured by the contribution to their life satisfaction.Social exclusion, international migration, integration

Contentious Ethics Creativity and Persuasion among Environmental Organizers in South India

What makes a person take up a cause? This ethnographic study of environmental and social activists in Kerala, India examines how they commit themselves to normative visions for social transformation and how they attempt to persuade others to take up these causes as well. Through thick description of the causal forces at play in these processes, I attempt to push beyond the binary between freedom and determinism in ethical life. This study is based on thirty-two months of fieldwork conducted between 2005 and 2014 with activists in Kerala’s “people's struggles,” a mode of grassroots community organizing primarily concerned with the impacts of industrial pollution, land rights, and other environmental conflicts. Fieldwork focused on two groups of activists as they collaborated on a campaign to stop pollution from a suburban gelatin factory. The first group was a local action council formed by nearby residents to protest the health effects of the factory’s emissions. The second group was a network of environmentalists who supported such campaigns as part of a broader effort at radically transforming environmental values. Making use of archival data, recordings of face-to-face interaction, participant observation, and interviews, the study follows activists as they transformed their own ethical lives—learning protest songs, going to marches instead of going to work, or giving up tea and Western medicine—and also as they attempted to persuade others with magazine articles, roadside speeches, and guided tours of pollution. This dissertation challenges dominant accounts of purpose and agency in literatures on social movements, community organizing, and the anthropology of ethics. Drawing on moral philosophy and the linguistic anthropology of stance, I trace relations of influence from evaluating subject to evaluated object, object to subject, and between subjects. I show that the causes of people’s struggle activists are best understood not as functions of predetermined interests, nor as the creations of radically free subjects, but as products of activists’ interactions with social others and a value-laden world. Describing the entanglements of changing oneself and changing others in people’s struggle activism, I argue for the importance of various “unfreedoms” in even the most strategic, norm-contesting ethical projects.PHDSocial Work & AnthropologyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/138708/1/jmathias_1.pd

Extracting partition statistics from semistructured data

The effective grouping, or partitioning, of semistructured data is of fundamental importance when providing support for queries. Partitions allow items within the data set that share common structural properties to be identified efficiently. This allows queries that make use of these properties, such as branching path expressions, to be accelerated. Here, we evaluate the effectiveness of several partitioning techniques by establishing the number of partitions that each scheme can identify over a given data set. In particular, we explore the use of parameterised indexes, based upon the notion of forward and backward bisimilarity, as a means of partitioning semistructured data; demonstrating that even restricted instances of such indexes can be used to identify the majority of relevant partitions in the data

UV spectra of iron-doped carbon clusters FeC_n n = 3-6

Electronic transitions of jet-cooled FeC$_n$ clusters ($n = 3 - 6$) were measured between 230 and 300 nm by a mass-resolved 1+1 resonant two-photon ionization technique. Rotational profiles were simulated based on previous calculations of ground state geometries and compared to experimental observations. Reasonable agreement is found for the planar fan-like structure of FeC$_3$. The FeC$_4$ data indicate a shorter distance between the Fe atom and the bent C$_4$ unit of the fan. The transitions are suggested to be $^{3}$A$_{2} \leftarrow ^{3}$B$_{1}$ for FeC$_3$ and $^{5}$A$_{1} \leftarrow ^{5}$A$_{1}$ for FeC$_4$. In contrast to the predicted C$_{\infty \text{v}}$ geometry, non-linear FeC$_5$ is apparently observed. Line width broadening prevents analysis of the FeC$_6$ spectrum.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figure

Evaluation of melanin-targeted radiotherapy in combination with radiosensitizing drugs for the treatment of melanoma

The incidence of malignant melanoma is rising faster than that of any other cancer in the United States. An [131I]-labeled benzamide - [131I]MIP-1145 - selectively targets melanin, reduces melanoma tumor burden and increases survival in preclinical models. Our purpose was to determine the potential of radiosensitizers to enhance the anti-tumor efficacy of [131I]MIP-1145. Melanotic (A2058) and amelanotic (A375 and SK-N-BE(2c)) cells were treated with [131I]MIP-1145 as a single agent or in combination with drugs with radiosenitizing potential. Cellular uptake of [131I]MIP-1145 and toxicity were assessed in monolayer culture. The interaction between radiosensitizers and [131I]MIP-1145 was evaluated by combination index analysis in monolayer cultures and by delayed growth of multicellular tumor spheroids. [131I]MIP-1145 was taken up by and was toxic to melanotic cells but not amelanotic cells. Combination treatments comprising [131I]MIP-1145 with the topoisomerase inhibitor topotecan or the PARP-1 inhibitor AG014699 resulted in synergistic clonogenic cell kill and enhanced delay of the growth of spheroids derived from melanotic melanoma cells. The proteasome inhibitor bortezomib had no synergistic cytotoxic effect with [131I]MIP-1145 and failed to enhance the delay of spheroid growth. Following combination treatment of amelanotic cells, neither synergistic clonogenic cell kill nor enhanced growth delay of spheroids was observed

Shareholder Protection and Stock Market Development: An Empirical Test of the Legal Origins Hypothesis

We test the 'law matters' and 'legal origin' claims using a newly created panel dataset meas-uring legal change over time in a sample of developed and developing countries. Our dataset improves on previous ones by avoiding country-specific variables in favour of functional and generic descriptors, by taking into account a wider range of legal data, and by considering the effects of weighting variables in different ways, thereby ensuring greater consistency of cod-ing. Our analysis shows that legal origin explains part of the pattern of change in the adop-tion of shareholder protection measures over the period from the mid-1990s to the present day: in both developed and developing countries, common law systems were more protective of shareholder interests than civil law ones. We explain this the result on the basis of the head start common law systems had in adjusting to an emerging 'global' standard based mainly on Anglo-American practice. Our analysis also shows, however, that civil law origin was not much of an obstacle to convergence around this model, since civilian systems were catching up with their counterparts in the common law. We then investigate whether there was a link in this period between increased shareholder protection and stock market devel-opment, using a number of measures such as stock market capitalisation, the value of stock-trading and the number of listed firms, after controlling for legal origin, the state of economic development of particular countries, and their position on the World Bank rule of law index. We find no evidence of a long-run impact of legal change on stock market development. This finding is incompatible with the claim that legal origin affects the efficiency of legal rules and ultimately economic development. Possible explanations for our result are that laws have been overly protective of shareholders; transplanted laws have not worked as ex-pected; and, more generally, the exogenous legal origin effect is not as strong as widely sup-posed.Law and finance, shareholder rights, corporate governance, corporate finance, legal origins, comparative law.

Enacting student partnership as though we really mean it: Some Freirean principles for a pedagogy of partnership

The idea of student-staff partnership working is becoming increasingly popular in higher education. However, there is a risk that, as the idea spreads, the radical nature of partnership working can be diluted and domesticated by established power structures. This article explores the theoretical and practical implications of adopting approaches to partnership working informed by the ideas of Paulo Freire. This is partnership working with a political point—consciously seeking to resist the forces of neoliberalism and any attempts to domesticate partnership to that paradigm. Instead, a pedagogy of partnership, informed by Freire, is juxtaposed with neoliberal domesticated partnership, and six principles are offered for enacting partnership as though we really mean it

Computational analysis of the <i>Caenorhabditis elegans</i> genome sequence.

The genomic sequencing of the model genetic organism, the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans is now essentially complete, representing the first genome sequence to be derived for a multicellular organism. This thesis describes the strategies and software tools that have been utilized in the analysis of the genomic sequence: Preliminary analysis of genomic organisation is also presented. C. elegans chromosomes do not store genetic information in a uniform manner. Gene density varies between different chromosomal regions and between chromosomes. The highly recombinagenic autosomal arms possess more repetitive elements and generally have a lower gene density than the recombinationally suppressed central regions. Although, the gene density within autosomal arms is higher than had been previously expected. A positive correlation is observed between the number of genetically defined loci from a chromosomal region and the expression rate of a region as estimated by the abundance of Expressed Sequence Tags (ESTs). A similar positive correlation is observed with the proportion of genes possessing similarity to rion-nematoda proteins. Chromosomal regions with a high density of gene clusters have fewer genetically derived loci. Demonstrating that redundancy reduces the genetic accessibility of a region towards classical genetic approaches. Introns are larger on the autosomal arms than the central clusters. Exon length shows no correlation with chromosomal position but increases with expression rate. Stop codon preference is also influenced by expression rate. Clusters of similar genes are also found on the C. elegans chromosomes although their distribution is not random. The majority of gene clusters have been determined to lie on chromosome V and the left arm of II. The orientation of the genes within gene clusters suggests that inversion events are common and provide a selective advantage. Alternative splicing has also been studied and the results suggest that many alternative transcripts can be attributed to errors in splice acceptor processing