The triangle of microfinance

The initial success of microfinance programs in the 1970s led pioneers to think that many essential problems of the poor might be resolved by access to credit alone the ability to acquire assets, to start businesses, to finance emergency needs and to insure against illness and disaster. Part of that vision has certainly been realized. But much remains to be done. Most microfinance institutions (MFIs) are still small and vulnerable to constraints on their resources and to the risks inherent in single-issue portfolios. Most depend upon donors and governments to remain in operation. There is much waste and duplication, and some mature programs have declining loan recovery rates, even as competition for borrowers rises from conventional banks and finance companies. Analyzing the failures of credit programs aimed at small farmers and the successes of other programs showed the need for new understanding of the ways that poor households make spending, borrowing, and saving decisions. This area was previously neglected in policymaking on food security issues. The International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) supported household surveys in nine Asian and African countries during the 1990s that analyzed formal and informal financial transactions, and it also evaluated the success of innovative approaches at some MFIs. The overall goal was to clarify the conditions under which state investment in microfinance programs might improve life for poor people more than state investment of the same funds in education, health, nutrition, or infrastructure development. The research led to the concept of the "critical triangle of microfinance" the need for any MFI to manage simultaneously the problems of outreach (reaching the poor both in terms of numbers and depth of poverty), financial sustainability (meeting operating and financial costs over the long term), and impact (having discernible effect upon clients' quality of life). This book elaborates on these objectives and shows that the most successful MFIs expand all sides of that triangle. Tradeoffs are sometimes inevitable, but even so, synergies among the three make the concept valuable from Author's Abstract.Microfinance ,

Using hierarchical constraint satisfaction for lathe-tool selection in a CIM environment

In this paper we shall discuss how to treat the automatic selection of appropriate lathe tools in a computer-aided production planning (CAPP) application as a constraint satisfaction problem (CSP) over hierarchically structured finite domains. Conceptually it is straightforward to formulate lathe-tool selection in terms of a CSP, however the choice of constraint and domain representations and of the order in which the constraints are applied is nontrivial if a computationally tractable system design is to be achieved. Since the domains appearing in technical applications often can be modeled as a hierarchy, we investigate how constraint satisfaction algorithms can make use of this hierarchical structure. Moreover, many real-life problems are formulated in a way that no optimal solution can be found which satisfies all the given constraints. Therefore, in order to bring AI technology into real-world applications, it becomes very important to be able to cope with conflicting constraints and to relax the given CSP until a (suboptimal) solution can be found. For these reasons, the constraint system CONTAX has been developed, which incorporates an extended hierarchical arc-consistency algorithm together with discrete constraint relaxation and has been used to implement the lathe-tool selection module of the ARC-TEC planning system

iDataCool: HPC with Hot-Water Cooling and Energy Reuse

iDataCool is an HPC architecture jointly developed by the University of Regensburg and the IBM Research and Development Lab B\"oblingen. It is based on IBM's iDataPlex platform, whose air-cooling solution was replaced by a custom water-cooling solution that allows for cooling water temperatures of 70C/158F. The system is coupled to an adsorption chiller by InvenSor that operates efficiently at these temperatures. Thus a significant portion of the energy spent on HPC can be recovered in the form of chilled water, which can then be used to cool other parts of the computing center. We describe the architecture of iDataCool and present benchmarks of the cooling performance and the energy (reuse) efficiency.Comment: 12 pages, 7 figures, proceedings of ISC 201

Weak looking-ahead and its application in computer-integrated process planning

Constraint logic programming has been shown to be a very useful tool for knowledge representation and problem-solving in different areas. Finite Domain extensions of PROLOG together with efficient consistency techniques such as forward-checking and looking-ahead make it possible to solve many discrete combinatorial problems within a short development time. In this paper we present the weak looking-ahead strategy (WLA), a new consistency technique on finite domains combining the computational efficiency of forward-checking with the pruning power of looking-ahead. Moreover, incorporating weak looking-ahead into PROLOG\u27s SLD resolution gives a sound and complete inference rule whereas standard looking-ahead itself has been shown to be incomplete. Finally, we will show how to use weak looking-ahead in a real-world application to obtain an early search-space pruning while avoiding the control overhead involved by standard looking-ahead

Issues in concurrent knowledge engineering : knowledge sharing and knowledge base evolution

The development of knowledge-based (KB) systems for solving real-world problems has become a very time-consuming and expensive task. Over the last years, more and more people started to investigate how to share and reuse knowledge once it has been formally represented. Moreover, as the world around is changing continuously, the KB system and its knowledge base have to change, too. Thus, recently the issue of knowledge base evolution came up that deals with the continuous improvement of a KB system during its entire life-time starting with the first formalizations and still continuing along its practical use. We discuss the current efforts in knowledge sharing and reuse and then study the knowledge evolution approach, that can be seen more technically as an interleaved combination of knowledge validation and exploration techniques

COLAB : a hybrid knowledge representation and compilation laboratory

Knowledge bases for real-world domains such as mechanical engineering require expressive and efficient representation and processing tools. We pursue a declarative-compilative approach to knowledge engineering. While Horn logic (as implemented in PROLOG) is well-suited for representing relational clauses, other kinds of declarative knowledge call for hybrid extensions: functional dependencies and higher-order knowledge should be modeled directly. Forward (bottom-up) reasoning should be integrated with backward (top-down) reasoning. Constraint propagation should be used wherever possible instead of search-intensive resolution. Taxonomic knowledge should be classified into an intuitive subsumption hierarchy. Our LISP-based tools provide direct translators of these declarative representations into abstract machines such as an extended Warren Abstract Machine (WAM) and specialized inference engines that are interfaced to each other. More importantly, we provide source-to-source transformers between various knowledge types, both for user convenience and machine efficiency. These formalisms with their translators and transformers have been developed as part of COLAB, a compilation laboratory for studying what we call, respectively, "vertical\u27; and "horizontal\u27; compilation of knowledge, as well as for exploring the synergetic collaboration of the knowledge representation formalisms. A case study in the realm of mechanical engineering has been an important driving force behind the development of COLAB. It will be used as the source of examples throughout the paper when discussing the enhanced formalisms, the hybrid representation architecture, and the compilers

Enatiomerically pure hydroxycarboxylic acids: current approaches and future perspectives

The growing awareness of the importance of chirality in conjunction with biological activity has led to an increasing demand for efficient methods for the industrial synthesis of enantiomerically pure compounds. Polyhydroxyalkanotes (PHAs) are a family of polyesters consisting of over 140 chiral R-hydroxycarboxylic acids (R-HAs), representing a promising source for obtaining chiral chemicals from renewable carbon sources. Although some R-HAs have been produced for some time and certain knowledge of the production processes has been gained, large-scale production has not yet been possible. In this article, through analysis of the current advances in production of these acids, we present guidelines for future developments in biotechnological processes for R-HA productio

The piranha genome provides molecular insight associated to its unique feeding behavior

The piranha enjoys notoriety due to its infamous predatory behavior but much is still not understood about its evolutionary origins and the underlying molecular mechanisms for its unusual feeding biology. We sequenced and assembled the red-bellied piranha (Pygocentrus nattereri) genome to aid future phenotypic and genetic investigations. The assembled draft genome is similar to other related fishes in repeat composition and gene count. Our evaluation of genes under positive selection suggests candidates for adaptations of piranhas’ feeding behavior in neural functions, behavior, and regulation of energy metabolism. In the fasted brain, we find genes differentially expressed that are involved in lipid metabolism and appetite regulation as well as genes that may control the aggression/boldness behavior of hungry piranhas. Our first analysis of the piranha genome offers new insight and resources for the study of piranha biology and for feeding motivation and starvation in other organisms

Application of Activated Charcoal in the Downstream Processing of Bacterial Olefinic Poly(3-hydroxyalkanoates)

Medium chain length poly(hydroxyalkanoates) (mcl-PHAs) are bacterial thermoplastic elastomers with a large potential in medical applications. The present study provides a novel process to isolate and purify poly([ R]3-hydroxy-w-undecenoate-co-3-hydroxy-w-nonenoate-co-3-hydroxy-w-heptenoate) (PHUE) and poly([R]-3hydroxy-w-undecenoate-co-3-hydroxy-w-nonenoate-co-3-hydroxyoctanoate- co-3-hydroxy-w-heptenoate-co 3-hydroxyhexanoate) (PHOUE) from Pseudomonas putida species. Three different types of activated charcoal were compared with regard to their capability to selectively remove impurities. The product 'Charcoal activated, powder, pure' from Merck was found to be most suitable. Using ethyl acetate as solvent, the polyesters were extracted from freeze-dried biomass at room temperature and simultaneously purified by addition of activated charcoal at the beginning of the extraction. The period of extraction was one hour and the ratio solvent to biomass was 15:1 (vol/wt). After extraction, the solids were separated by pressure filtration through a metallic lace tissue. The filtrate was again passed through the previously accumulated filter cake, followed by a second filtration through a 0.45 mm membrane to remove finest coal particles. The resulting filtrate was concentrated, thus yielding polyesters whose quality and yield depended on the quantity of activated charcoal applied. For highly pure PHUE and PHOUE with low endotoxin levels, the optimum ratio of activated charcoal to solvent for extraction (V/V) was found to be 0.5 for PHUE and 0.25 for PHOUE. The yields with regard to the raw polymers amounted to 55 wt% for PHUE and 75 wt% for PHOUE, which are acceptable for polymers that can be used for medical applications