Making Waves: Media's Potential for Girls in the Global South

There are around 600 million adolescent girls living in developing countries. Doubly marginalised because oftheir gender and age, many live a bleak existence -- excluded from access to basic public services, unable to shape the decisions that affect their lives and vulnerable to violence at home and on the street. Their voices often go unheard.Slowly, this is beginning to change. Over the past two decades girls have become a growing priority for the international development community. Investing in their health education and employment prospects is nowwidely considered to have an important ripple effect on other development outcomes such as economic growth and social equality. As a result, development assistance programmes that support girls' empowerment are now seen by many as not just the "right" thing to do, but a necessity Less well understood is where media fits into this equation The interplay between media and gender norms has long been recognised and a substantial literature explores how media affects girls in the Global North But against a backdrop of rapidly changing media landscapes -- characterised by increasing competition for audiences sensationalism and expanding access to new technologies -- the role that media plays in girls' lives in the Global South demands further examination.Drawing on expert interviews as well as insights from the media and development literature, this policy briefing seeks to fill this gap. It argues that media -- whether traditional or online -- matters a great deal in the lives of girls in the developing world. It matters because it has the ability to be harmful to girls' interests and self-esteem, and it matters because it can also be so effective in playing a positive role in girls' lives. Specifically, media can influence girls' aspirations and behaviours around their health and livelihoods open the door to greater participation in society and ensure that girls' issues move higher up the public agenda. If challenges around media access and control and the extent to which media organisations value girls as part of their audience, are addressed head on, media can play a vital role in helping to advance the wellbeing of adolescent girls in regions of the world where their interests have traditionally been most neglected

Finding Balance: Agricultural Residues, Ethanol, and the Environment

Outlines the environmental impact of using wheat straw or corn stover for ethanol production. Makes policy recommendations for ensuring the adoption of best management practices such as no-till production, cover crops, and precision fertilizer management

Fields of Fuel: Market and Environmental Implications of Switching to Grass for U.S. Transport

Analyzes how increased commercial switchgrass production for biofuel affects land use, commodity prices, and the environment. Suggests policy actions on research, carbon impact estimates, mitigation payments, and air, soil, and water quality protection

Scale factor gage for fiber optics inspection device

Flexible wire device, fastened along outside of fiber bundle from viewing portion to tip, positions calibrated adjustable gage in field of view. Scale factor is determined from known magnification characteristics of fiber optics system or from graduations on gage tip

Acoustic emission frequency discrimination

In acoustic emission nondestructive testing, broadband frequency noise is distinguished from narrow banded acoustic emission signals, since the latter are valid events indicative of structural flaws in the material being examined. This is accomplished by separating out those signals which contain frequency components both within and beyond (either above or below) the range of valid acoustic emission events. Application to acoustic emission monitoring during nondestructive bond verification and proof loading of undensified tiles on the Space Shuttle Orbiter is considered

Real time statistical analysis of acoustic emission signals for flaw monitoring systems

Small structures are checked by monitoring samples for acoustical signal count. Flaws are located by observing relatively high acoustical activity within given area. Acoustical monitoring has been extended to large structures by dividing large samples into small areas and then monitoring each area separately

Kinetics of the reactions of the acid anhydrides with aromatic amines in aprotic solvents

Work has revealed that diamine derivatives of diphenylmethane (IV), diphenyl ether (V), benzophenone (IV), fluorene (VII), and fluorenone (VIII) polymerizations with pyromellitic dianhydride in DMA were dependent on the basicity of the amine compound. The correlation between the basicity of the amine and its reactivity with phthalic anhydride was determined. Basicity measurements were made by potentiometric titration of each amine in an acetonitrile-water solvent system, from which the pKa of the amine could be determined. Reactivity was defined in terms of the second order rate constant derived form spectrophotometric examination of the reaction between each amine and phthalic anhydride in DMA. This reaction was expected to proceed in either one (for a monoamine) or two (for a diamine) stages

Standardized Pearson type 3 density function area tables

Tables constituting extension of similar tables published in 1936 are presented in report form. Single and triple parameter gamma functions are discussed. Report tables should interest persons concerned with development and use of numerical analysis and evaluation methods

Saturn S-2 quality assurance techniques: Nondestructive testing processes. Volume 1: Requirements and procedures

The methods and procedures used to perform nondestructive testing inspections of the Saturn S-2 liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen tank weldments during fabrication and after proof testing are described to document special skills developed during the program. All post-test inspection requirements are outlined including radiographic inspections procedures

Convolutional Support Vector Machines For Image Classification

The Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is a machine learning model which excels in tasks that exhibit spatially local correlation of features, for example, image classification. However, as a model, it is susceptible to the issues caused by local minima, largely due to the fully-connected neural network which is typically used in the final layers for classification. This work investi- gates the effect of replacing the fully-connected neural network with a Support Vector Machine (SVM). It names the resulting model the Convolutional Support Vector Machine (CSVM) and proposes two methods for training. The first method uses a linear SVM and it is described in the primal. The second method can be used to learn a SVM with a non-linear kernel by casting the optimisation as a Multiple Kernel Learning problem. Both methods learn the convolutional filter weights in conjunction with the SVM parameters. The linear CSVM (L-CSVM) and kernelised CSVM (K-CSVM) in this work each use a single convolutional filter, however, approaches are described which may be used to extend the K-CSVM with multiple filters per layer and with multiple convolutional layers. The L-CSVM and K-CSVM show promising results on the MNIST and CIFAR-10 benchmark datasets