Living in a “Parallel World”: Disability in Post-Soviet Ukraine

[Excerpt] These are challenges that are familiar to disabled people all over the world. Challenges such as these make many persons with disabilities in Ukraine feel as if they live in a “parallel world,” one separate from that enjoyed by “able-bodied” people. The disabled in Ukraine face both hidden and open discrimination in their daily lives, and they are stigmatized through popular stereotypes of disabled persons as inferior, deformed, and even contaminating. These attitudes stem in part from the Soviet-era policies towards the disabled, which perpetuated such harmful stereotypes. Persons with visible disabilities (i.e., spinal injuries, cerebral palsy, multiple sclerosis, mental problems, and others) were isolated in their homes, hidden from the public and thus made seemingly invisible. Since disability was seen as a defect and as a tragedy, the Soviet regime pursued a policy of compensation. The invisibility of disabled persons positioned them as a non-problem. Their lives were not discussed, and there was practically no public debate about their needs. When attempts were made to rehabilitate people with disabilities, rehabilitation was primarily medical and vocational in nature, an approach that reflects the ideology that the problem is located within the individual, who needs to be changed/improved (i.e., given maximum physical functioning or gainful employment)

Disability and Citizenship in Post-Soviet Ukraine: An Anthropological Critique

[Excerpt] In this paper I examine Ukraine’s burgeoning disability rights movement through the lens of citizenship to illustrate the complex processes through which certain categories of people (here, persons with disabilities) are transforming themselves—and being transformed— into particular types of citizens in a changing welfare state. I take an institutional and relational approach to understanding “citizenship,” a tack that has recently been suggested by scholars such as Margaret Somers (1994, 1995) and Allison Carey (2003), to suggest approaches to understanding citizen-state relations that shed light on the complex intersections of agency, power, and personhood that post-socialist social justice struggles entail

Incorporation of star measurements for the determination of orbit and attitude parameters of a geosynchronous satellite: An iterative application of linear regression

Currently on NOAA/NESS's VIRGS system at the World Weather Building star images are being ingested on a daily basis. The image coordinates of the star locations are measured and stored. Subsequently, the information is used to determine the attitude, the misalignment angles between the spin axis and the principal axis of the satellite, and the precession rate and direction. This is done for both the 'East' and 'West' operational geosynchronous satellites. This orientation information is then combined with image measurements of earth based landmarks to determine the orbit of each satellite. The method for determining the orbit is simple. For each landmark measurement one determines a nominal position vector for the satellite by extending a ray from the landmark's position towards the satellite and intersecting the ray with a sphere with center coinciding with the Earth's center and with radius equal to the nominal height for a geosynchronous satellite. The apparent motion of the satellite around the Earth's center is then approximated with a Keplerian model. In turn the variations of the satellite's height, as a function of time found by using this model, are used to redetermine the successive satellite positions by again using the Earth based landmark measurements and intersecting rays from these landmarks with the newly determined spheres. This process is performed iteratively until convergence is achieved. Only three iterations are required

Birth of a station: the impact of Nova on the Perth radio market

At the end of 2002 a new player entered the Perth radio market. The launch of Nova threatened to create ripples in the relatively calm waters of the radio pool which had become comfortably settled since the last new entrant twenty years before. Researchers had a chance to observe the impact on the market, the products, the formats and the audiences and this paper describes the highs and lows of the market players during Nova's first year

Labour supply and taxes

In this paper we provide an overview of the literature relating labour supply to taxes and welfare benefits with a focus on presenting the empirical consensus. We begin with a basic continuous hours model, where individuals have completely free choice over their hours of work. We then consider fixed costs of work, the complications introduced by the benefits system, dynamic aspects of labour supply and we place the analysis in the context of the family. The key conclusion of this work is that in order to estimate the impact of tax reform and be able to generalise results, a structural approach that takes account of many of these issues is desirable. We then discuss the 'new Tax Responsiveness' literature which uses the response of taxable income to the marginal tax rate as a summary statistic of the behavioural response to taxation. Underlying this approach is the unsatisfactory nature of using hours as a proxy for labour effort for those with high levels of autonomy on the job and who already work long hours, such as the self employed or senior executives. After discussing relevant theory we then provide a summary of empirical estimates and the methodology underlying the studies. Our conclusion is that hours of work are relatively inelastic for men, but are a little more responsive for married women and lone mothers. On the other hand, participation is quite sensitive to taxation and benefits for women. Within this paper we present new estimates form a discrete participation model for both married and single men based on the numerous reforms over the past two decades in the UK. We find that the participation of low education men is somewhat more responsive to incentives than previously thought. For men with high levels of education, participation is virtually unresponsive; here the literature on taxable income suggests that there may be significant welfare costs of taxation, although much of this seems to be a result of shifting income and consumption to non-taxable forms as opposed to actual reductions in work effort

Approximate neutral point of a subsonic canard aircraft

An approximate formula is derived for the position of the neutral point in canard aircraft. This formula accounts for the aerodynamic interference between the wing (rear wing) and the canard (forward wing). Topics covered include determination of the canard downwash derivative, determination of the canard and wing liftslopes including the aerodynamic interference, and calculation of the neutral point position

Measurement science and manufacturing science research

The research program of Semiconductor Research Corp. is managed as three overlapping areas: Manufacturing Sciences, Design Sciences and Microstructure Sciences. A total of 40 universities are participating in the performance of over 200 research tasks. The goals and direction of Manufacturing Sciences research became more clearly focused through the efforts of the Manufacturing Sciences Committee of the SRC Technical Advisory Board (TAB). The mission of the SRC Manufacturing Research is the quantification, control, and understanding of semiconductor manufacturing process necessary to achieve a predictable and profitable product output in the competitive environment of the next decade. The 1994 integrated circuit factory must demonstrate a three level hierarchy of control: (1) operation control, (2) process control, and (3) process design. These levels of control are briefly discussed