Addressing the Burden of Education Financing in Low and Lower-Middle-Income Countries: The Role of Savings Accounts,Cash Transfers,and Other Income Sources

Journal of Family and Economic Issues - Cost-sharing between governments and families remains a strategic part of many governments’ post-secondary education funding policies in low-income...     

Probabilistic-Based Structural Specifications

The construction industry is both the largest civilian industry and the most unique in terms of fragmentation and its approach to controlling risk. Structural specifications establish nominal safety factors and design criteria for engineered structures such as buildings, bridges, dams, and power facilities. The goal is satisfactory strength capacity to safely and economically meet the demands of structural performance. Structures must resist the highly uncertain effects of combined gravity, earthquakes, wind, and snow loads supported by natural and human-made materials. The public's expectation is that structures should last a long time and have low lifetime risk of structural failure. Historically, specifications have contained safety factors which evolved from past experiences and provided adequate safety or low risk. Due to pressures of economy and the need to optimize structural performance, structural specifications have recently been developed and accepted by industry based on structural reliability and risk-assessment principles. This paper reviews developments of probabilistic applications in structural specifications including specification format, database, implementation examples, target risk levels, present research activities, and future goals for establishing optimal risk-design procedures.     

What Women Do,Believe in,and Financially Contribute—What Matters More in Couples' Decision Making? Gender Inequality in Ghana's Small-Scale Fisheries☆

Studies of couple's decision-making power consistently show that women disproportionately occupy subordinate positions. Using survey data (N = 400) from an ethnographic study on Ghanaian female fisherfolk, we examine the influences of women's financial contributions, ownership of production assets and gender role attitudes, and how they interact with the bodily capacities required to perform different fishery tasks to shape women's decision-making power. Findings show that financial contributions and ownership of production assets remain salient determinants of women's fishery decision-making power. However, their participation in strenuous tasks dampens the positive relationship between their financial contributions, gender role attitudes and decision-making power, such that financial contributions become insignificant. Women's decision-making power varies according to the sex-typed division of labor in small-scale fishing, and those who violate it are ‘punished’—as evident in their decreased decision-making power. Attention to the co-implications of socio-economic forces and material factors such as women's embodied experiences highlights (1) the specificities of occupational sex segregation and decision-making in agricultural sectors of developing economies and (2) how such entanglements can be reconfigured to enhance women's decision-making power in such contexts.     

Horizontal plane sound source localization and auditory enhancement

Accurate sound source localization has advantages for the performance of work by humans. The ability to accurately localize sound sources contributes to perception, decision making and task performance. Two studies were conducted to investigate the prevalence of accurate sound source localization and the enhancement that spatially separated sound source locations can have on speech perception. The first study was conducted to characterize the ability to detect the location of horizontal plane sound sources. A sample of 117 participants with the hearing capacity within the normal limits participated in the study. The results indicated that sound sources located towards the front of the participant were identified more frequently than those sound sources located towards the rear positions. Based on the results found in the first study, a second study was conducted to assess performance within a listening task. Three different spatial configurations were used to assess if similar trends in performance translated to sound sources through headphones. Fifteen research participants performed a Coordinated Response Measure (CRM) task requiring the identification of a speech phrase and its associated information for a diotic configuration and two different spatial sound source configurations. Performance measured for the diotic configuration was significantly (p(0.05) less than for the two spatial configurations. The current studies indicate distinct advantages of utilizing localized sound sources to present auditory signal and speech to listeners.     

Demographics, Parenting, and Theory of Mind in Preschool Children

This research examined associations among demographic variables, parenting strategies, and a theory of mind battery including measures of perception, desire, belief, and emotion understanding in 142 preschool‐aged children. In correlational analyses, maternal education and, to a lesser extent, income were associated with a number of aspects of theory of mind. Additionally, mothers’ use of instruction in response to child misbehavior was positively associated with perception and desire understanding whereas mothers’ use of consequences and power assertion were negatively associated with aspects of theory of mind. In regression analyses controlling for children's cognitive ability and age, maternal education continued to be positively associated with perception understanding. Power assertion was negatively associated with belief understanding, but positively associated with emotion understanding. Finally, mothers’ use of consequences in response to child misbehaviors was negatively related to emotion understanding.     

The (em)bodiment of blackness in a visceral anti-black racism and ableism context

Over the years, many scholarly publications have extensively discussed disability ‘diagnoses’ and placement practices in special education programs in the United States and the United Kingdom. These publications argue that racism and classism rather than clinically predetermined factors appear to influence the disability diagnosis and placement practices in special education. The present essay is contributing to the debate by critically exploring the relationship(s) between race, class, and disability ‘diagnoses’ and placement practices in special education programs in Toronto, Canada. The core ideas noted in the essay are drawn from a personal story of an African-Canadian parent – a story of a daughter with a diagnosed disability and her mother’s struggle to resist the disability ‘diagnosis’ as well as her battle rejecting her daughter’s placement in the special education program in a Toronto public school. Using this personal account, other literature, and anti-black racism theory, I argue that special education programming in Toronto, Canada helps white middle/upper class Canadians achieve a de facto race/class-based segregation in the Toronto public school system. Whereas the Supreme Courts’ rulings on Brown vs. the Board of Education in the United States and Washington vs. the Trustees of Charlottesville in Canada have insisted that whites and non-whites attend the same school, special education identification practices ensure that whites and non-whites do not have to belong to the same classroom. I conclude that when educational practices move into spaces of pathologization, blacks and working-class students are continually at risk of facing exclusionary practices. One thing is clear: the significance of skin color in the mind of the racist cannot easily be dismissed.     

Early Steps toward a National Energy Information System

The Energy Information Administration, which is the statistical arm of the Department of Energy, inherited many data-collection forms, files, and publications from predecessor agencies. There is a legislative mandate to establish a National Energy Information System (NEIS). This obligation demands attention to certain issues: (a) scope of NEIS, (b) methods of collection, (c) methods of storing information, (d) classification and indexing, (e) methods of access, and (f) reporting and publication. Early stages of dealing with most of these matters are underway.     

Poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa: The Role of Business Regulations,Policies and Institutions

Social Indicators Research - The study investigates the impact of business regulations, policies and institutions on welfare in Sub-Saharan Africa. The HDI and GDP per capita are used as measures...