Urban Poverty and Health in Developing Countries: Household and Neighborhood Effects

In the U.S. and other high-income countries, where most of the population lives in urban areas, there is intense scholarly and program interest in the effects of household and neighborhood living standards on health. Yet very few studies of developing-country cities have examined these issues. This paper investigates whether in these cities, the health of women and young children is influenced by both household and neighborhood standards of living. Using data from the urban samples of some 85 Demographic and Health surveys, and modelling living standards using factor-analytic MIMIC methods, we find, first, that the neighborhoods of poor households are more heterogeneous than is often asserted. To judge from our results, it appears that as a rule, poor urban households do not tend to live in uniformly poor communities; indeed, about 1 in 10 of a poor household's neighbors is relatively affluent, belonging to the upper quartile of the urban distribution of living standards. Do household and neighborhood living standards influence health? Applying multivariate models with controls for other socioeconomic variables, we discover that household living standards have a substantial influence on three measures of health: unmet need for modern contraception; birth attendance by doctors, nurses, or trained midwives; and children's height for age. Neighborhood living standards exert significant additional influence on health in many of the surveys we examine, especially in birth attendance. There is considerable evidence, then, indicating that both household and neighborhood living standards can make a substantively important difference to health.poverty, health, developing countries, urban, factor analysis, neighborhood

Poverty and public services in developing-country cities

This paper examines the availability of basic public services such as water supply and sanitation in the cities and towns of developing countries, using data drawn from the Demographic and Health Surveys. Inadequate provision of public services can compromise health, hinder economic growth, and stymie efforts to reduce poverty. We find that wide rural-urban gaps remain in service delivery, and that smaller cities-where about half of urban residents live-are notably under-served by comparison with larger cities

Global Seismicity: Three New Maps Compiled with Geographic Information Systems

This paper presents three new maps of global seismicity compiled from NOAA digital data, covering the interval 1963-1998, with three different magnitude ranges (mb): greater than 3.5, less than 3.5, and all detectable magnitudes. A commercially available geographic information system (GIS) was used as the database manager. Epicenter locations were acquired from a CD-ROM supplied by the National Geophysical Data Center. A methodology is presented that can be followed by general users. The implications of the maps are discussed, including the limitations of conventional plate models, and the different tectonic behavior of continental vs. oceanic lithosphere. Several little-known areas of intraplate or passive margin seismicity are also discussed, possibly expressing horizontal compression generated by ridge push

Experimental Investigation of a 0.35 Hub-Tip Radius Ratio Transonic Axial Flow Rotor Designed for 40 Pounds per Second per Square Foot with a Design Tip Diffusion Factor of 0.20

In order to determine the effect of a low design diffusion factor on the performance of a transonic axial-flow compressor rotor, a high-specific-flow rotor with a 0.35 hub-tip radius ratio was designed, fabricated and tested. This rotor used a design tip diffusion factor of 0.20 with a design corrected specific weight flow of 40 pounds per second per square foot of frontal area, a total-pressure ratio of 1.27, and an adiabatic efficiency of 0.96. The design, rotor performance, and blade element performance are presented with a discussion on rotor shock losses and a comparison with a similarly designed rotor with a tip diffusion factor of 0.35. At the design corrected tip speed of 1100 feet per second, a peak rotor adiabatic efficiency of 0.88 was attained at a corrected specific weight flow of 39 pounds per second per square foot of frontal area with a mass-averaged total-pressure ratio of 1.27. The blade element tip diffusion factor was 0.281, which is 0.08 higher than the design value of 0.20. Peak efficiencies of 0.95, 0.91, 0.89, and 0.85 were obtained at 70, 80, 90, and 110 percent of design speed, respectively. Comparison of the performance of the rotor reported herein and a similarly designed rotor with increased blade loading indicates that higher blade loading results in a more desirable rotor because of a higher pressure ratio and equivalent efficiency. Computed values of shock losses at the rotor tip section indicate that the losses at peak efficiency are primarily a function of shock losses since the profile losses are only a small percentage of the total loss

Pressure and particle motion detection thresholds in fish: A re-examination of salient auditory cues in teleosts

The auditory evoked potential technique has been used for the past 30years to evaluate the hearing ability of fish. The resulting audiograms are typically presented in terms of sound pressure (dB re. 1Pa) with the particle motion (dB re. 1ms–2) component largely ignored until recently. When audiograms have been presented in terms of particle acceleration, one of two approaches has been used for stimulus characterisation: measuring the pressure gradient between two hydrophones or using accelerometers. With rare exceptions these values are presented from experiments using a speaker as the stimulus, thus making it impossible to truly separate the contribution of direct particle motion and pressure detection in the response. Here, we compared the particle acceleration and pressure auditory thresholds of three species of fish with differing hearing specialisations, goldfish (Carassius auratus, weberian ossicles), bigeye (Pempheris adspersus, ligamentous hearing specialisation) and a third species with no swim bladder, the common triplefin (Forstergyian lappillum), using three different methods of determining particle acceleration. In terms of particle acceleration, all three fish species have similar hearing thresholds, but when expressed as pressure thresholds goldfish are the most sensitive, followed by bigeye, with triplefin the least sensitive. It is suggested here that all fish have a similar ability to detect the particle motion component of the sound field and it is their ability to transduce the pressure component of the sound field to the inner ear via ancillary hearing structures that provides the differences in hearing ability. Therefore, care is needed in stimuli presentation and measurement when determining hearing ability of fish and when interpreting comparative hearing abilities between species

The alpha-1A adrenergic receptor agonist A61603 reduces cardiac polyunsaturated fatty acid and endocannabinoid metabolites associated with inflammation in vivo

Alpha-1-adrenergic receptors (α1-ARs) are G-protein coupled receptors (GPCRs) with three highly homologous subtypes (α1A, α1B, and α1D). Of these three subtypes, only the α1A and α1B are expressed in the heart. Multiple pre-clinical models of heart injury demonstrate cardioprotective roles for the α1A. Non-selective α1-AR activation promotes glycolysis in the heart, but the functional α1-AR subtype and broader metabolic effects have not been studied

Continuity of Optimal Control Costs and its application to Weak KAM Theory

We prove continuity of certain cost functions arising from optimal control of affine control systems. We give sharp sufficient conditions for this continuity. As an application, we prove a version of weak KAM theorem and consider the Aubry-Mather problems corresponding to these systems.Comment: 23 pages, 1 figures, added explanations in the proofs of the main theorem and the exampl