Vulnerability of Women and Climate Change in Coastal Bangladesh

This paper focuses on providing a comprehensive scenario of women’s vulnerabilities based on the effects of climate change in Bangladesh. To address the problem, this study focuses on the nature of suffering and how they have tried to mitigate it. This study followed the purposive sampling method of a total of sixty respondents from the Satkhira district. Primary data were collected through a structured questionnaire, survey, and observation method. Besides these, secondary sources of national and international levels have been used in this study. This study found that sanitation problems of women and young girls as well as the lack of pure drinking water are common during the disaster time in the study area. In the context of a patriarchal society like Bangladesh, women are compelled to be submissive and obey the decision of male members due to prevalent social and cultural norms and conditions. As a result, most of the time, even when problem arise, women do not take any decision about whether they would stay at their home or seek shelter. The study uses an exploratory approach, and it will provide an insight into different sorts of sufferings as well as the detrimental effects of such natural disasters. It will also provide a better understanding and intensity of the problem. Although innumerable studies of climate change and its effects have been published, underlying scenarios are not properly focused on. Therefore, it would obviously help for further study as well as policymaking

La paradoja del tiempo en la educación estoica

This paper aims to analyse the relation between education and time in the writings of Seneca. The Roman philosopher distinguishes real life (vita otiosa) and unreal life (vita desidiosa). In this way, he associates time with virtue or with vice. But the time of virtue isn’t in fact eternity? And is time of vice nothing, non-existence? Education represents a transition from vice to virtue, and in this process the really important is the scope. Education, since it represents transition, should evolve in time. Given the fact that the end of the educational process at Seneca is virtue, as likeness to God, the situation could be diferent.En este artículo me propongo analizar la relación entre educación y tiempo en la obra de Seneca. El filósofo romano distingue entre la vida real (vita otiosa) y la vida imaginaria (vita desidiosa). A este respecto, Seneca relaciona el concepto del tiempo con la virtud o con el vicio. Mientras que el tiempo de la virtud no es realmente eternidad? Y lo del vicio no es nada, inexistencia? La educación es el paso del vicio hacia la virtud y, en este proceso, lo que es realmente importante es el objetivo. La educación, por ser transición, tendrá que realizarse con el paso del tiempo. Dado que, según Séneca, el fin del proceso educativo es la virtud, proveyendo analogía con la Deidad, la situación podría resultar diferente

Spirometric reference equations for First Nations children and adolescents living in rural Saskatchewan

Background: The spirometric reference values are of great importance for diagnosis and treatment of lung diseases. At present, there are no spirometric reference values for First Nations children and adolescents living in Canada. Objectives: The objectives of the present study were (1) to identify the flexible and efficient statistical method to derive lung function reference equations that can be used to obtain the predicted values and Lower Limit of Normal (LLN) for lung function in children and adolescents, and (2) to obtain prediction equations for FVC, FEV1 and FEV1=FVC for First Nations children and adolescents living in rural Saskatchewan, Canada. Methods: Spirometric results from a prospective cohort study, "First Nations Lung Health Project" were used to identify 130 healthy non-smoking children and adolescents. The predicted values and LLN of spirometric indices [Forced Vital Capacity (FVC), Forced Expiratory Volume at one second (FEV1) and FEV1 and FVC ratio (FEV1=FVC)] were calculated for school-going children and adolescents ages 6-17 years. The subjects participating in the study were from two Cree First Nations on-reserve communities located in rural Saskatchewan, Canada. All lung function values were reviewed by a respirologist for acceptability of the test. Following an extensive literature review, the Generalized Additive Models for Location, Scale and Shape (GAMLSS) was identified as a flexible statistical tool to model the lung function variables. The lung function indices were assumed to follow a Box-Cox-Cole-Green (BCCG) distribution with median, , coe ffcient of variation and skewness . Akaike Information Criteria (AIC) approach was used to obtain the reference models. The LLN was calculated by taking the fifth percentile of the prediction equations of the lung function variables. The above approach is recommended for the prediction of lung function of multi-ethnic people aged 3-95 years from different ethnic groups by the Global Lung Function Initiative (GLI). Results: Significant differences were observed in lung function (FVC, FEV1 and FEV1=FVC) and anthropometric measurements between both boys and girls. Therefore, fitting separate equations for both sexes are justified. In GLI, polynomial bases of order 6-7 were used for modeling the meadian, coefficient of variation and skewness . In this study, lower order polynomial bases (up to order 4) were enough to obtain the reference models. In GLI, the polynomial bases were divided by 100 to let it lie within 0 to 1. In this study, the polynomials were divided by 20 to lie these between 0 and 1. The predicted values of FVC was higher than the values for FEV1 in both boys and girls. Therefore the values of FEV1=FVC ratios is less than 100% in this population. In girls, the difference between the curves of FVC and FEV1 was smaller compared to boys. Thus, the total volume of air for girls during exhalation are close to the volume of air exhaled at the first second. The estimated curves showed that the models fitted the lung function data reasonably well. Conclusions: The results in this study showed that the optimum model for the prediction of lung function were almost similar to the ones used by GLI for the prediction of lung function of all-age multi-ethnic populations.The predicted values and LLN values of the lung function variables reported in this study can be recommended to health-care providers for the use in diagnosis respiratory diseases in First Nations children and adolescents in rural Saskatchewan. Small sample (n < 150) was a limitation of this study. This study limitation can be overcome by including more individuals from the follow-up study, which will be conducted in 2016

Design and Interpretability of Contour Lines for Visualizing Multivariate Data

Multivariate geospatial data are commonly visualized using contour plots, where the plots for various attributes are often examined side by side, or using color blending. As the number of attributes grows, however, these approaches become less efficient. This limitation motivated the use of glyphs, where different attributes are mapped to different pre-attentive features of the glyphs. Since both contour plot overlays and glyphs clutter the underlying map, in this paper we examine whether contour lines, which are already present in map space, can be leveraged to visualize multivariate geospatial data. We present five different designs for stylizing contour lines, and investigate their interpretability using three crowdsourced studies. We evaluated the designs through a set of common geospatial data analysis tasks on a four-dimensional dataset. Our first two studies examined how the contour line width and the number of contour intervals affect interpretability, using synthetic datasets where we controlled the underlying data distribution. Study 1 revealed that the increase of width improves the task performance in most of the designs, specially in completion time, except some scenarios where reducing width does not affect performance where the visibility of the background is critical. In Study 2, we found out that fewer contour intervals lead to less visual clutter, hence improved performance. We then compared the designs in a third study that used both synthetic and real-life meteorological data. The study revealed that the results found using synthetic data were generalizable to the real-life data, as hypothesized. Moreover, we formulated a design recommendation table tuned to give users task- and category-specific design suggestions under various environment constraints. At last, we discuss the comparison between the lab and online versions of study 1 with respect to display size (lab study was done on big screen and vice versa). Our studies show the effectiveness of stylizing contour lines to represent multivariate data, reveal trade-offs among design parameters, and provide designers with important insights into the factors that influence multivariate interpretability. We also show some real-life scenarios where our visualization approach may improve decision making

Comparative Price Forecast Model of Conventional and Islamic Bank Stock Prices

Islamic finance and conventional finance are two different processes. After using the data into forecasting model one gets the dynamics of stock price of two financial systems what is present in this paper. The data has been taken from two banks stock price from London stock exchange for a six year period staring from1st of March 2003 to 31 of December 2010. Eviews software was used to analyze the data and found ARIMA(1,1,1) for Islamic Bank of Britain and ARIMA(2,1,2) for Barclays Bank. It presents a comparative status having the fact that Islamic stock is very young in the capital market area in Europe. We hope this analysis should be further reference for direction of future research for Islamic Capital Market in relation with Conventional Capital Market and innovation of competitive capital market instruments

Economic Valuation of Small Scale Water Management Intervention in Barind Area, Bangladesh

An Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) project is being implemented by DASCOH in the north-western part called Barind tract in Bangladesh. The primary goal of the project is to help local government institutions to contribute to the increasing availability of water for disadvantaged people in the Barind area through sustainable, effective, and inclusive management and usage of water resources. This study is designed under the scope of this project and cross-checks the achieved objectives in terms of how much benefit the project drips down to the targeted population. For all of the interventions implemented by the project, health and household labor cost reduction is found to be very significant. However, some interventions have a skewed impact on some particular parameters while others have a partial impact