TOWARD A SYNTHESIS OF FEMINIST AND DEMOGRAPHIC PERSPECTIVES ON FERTILITY

In explaining fertility and reproduction and emerging patterns of childbearing, both demographers and feminists have centered their thinking on women's status (economic and social), women's changing roles and life experiences (increased labor force participation, increased availability of reproductive options, declining marriage rates in many parts of the industrialized world, and the centrality of women to development), and women as agents in micro- and macrolevel changes in family, fertility, and economic change. Although demography has recently begun to integrate feminist perspectives into fertility explanations, there is not yet a synthesis of feminist theoretical insights with demographic questions. Drawing from recent thinking on global and national political and policy challenges in the less and more developed worlds, to the epistemological shifts in knowledge of reproduction/mothering, to changes in the technologies of reproduction, this article moves toward an integration of feminist and demographic perspectives on fertility.
…far from the economic dependence of women working in the interests of motherhood, it is the steadily acting cause of a pathological maternity and a declining birthrate.
Charlotte Perkins Stetson, Women and Economics , 1899     

非线性热传导方程u_t-Δu=D~βf(u)的Cauchy问题的整体解及渐近性

本文利用压缩映象原理及线性方程 Cauchy 问题的解的衰减性佶计,研究了一类非线性热传导方程 Cauchy 问题的整体解的存在唯一性及渐近性,得到当初值及非线性项满足一定条件之下Cauchy 问题的适当性。从而补充了文[3]的结果,首次指出了文[1]的结果是对半线性方程独有的。     

AIDS as a political issue: working with the sexually prostituted in the Philippines

An estimated 200,000-500,000 men, women, and children work in prostitution in the Philippines in a variety of venues, including brothels, nightclubs, pubs, massage parlors, and other legitimate entertainment establishments. Few, however, are voluntary prostitutes. Many people who work as prostitutes have been recruited from the provinces, kept in conditions similar to slavery, and forced to earn money from prostitution to pay for their transportation, board, and lodging. Many prostitutes work in urban centers and tourist resorts in the countryside. During the 1970s, then President Ferdinand Marcos promoted tourism as a major industry, effectively marketing attractive Filipinas to tourists. Sex tourism has flourished in the country ever since. Thousands of prostitutes are also located in Olongapo and Angeles, 2 cities north of Manila, from where they serve the sexual desires of US military personnel. The presence of US military personnel in the Philippines has always been associated with prostitution. The country's social hygiene centers, prostitutes in Manila and Davao, and AIDS education are briefly discussed.     

苏州市人口老龄化分析

基于对苏州市第四次人口普查人口年龄结构的分析,本文认为苏州市已进入人口老年型早期。文中论述了该市人口老龄化的现状、过程及趋势,剖析了过去与未来主导这一进程的不同的人口学因素,特别强调了控制人口增长对这一进程的作用。文中预测现在和今后的二十年内人口老龄化发展较缓,总抚养比较低,正届人口构成上的“黄金时期”,面临着实现经济跃升的契机。其后,人口老龄化将以空前的速度进行。抓住当前的契机也是今后从根本意义上解决好老龄人口问题所必需的。     

The new treatment mode research of hepatitis B based on ant colony algorithm

Hepatitis B (HB) is a deadly disease that has a severe impact on infected individuals. In China, not only are the incidence and infection rates of HB very high, but also many HB patients suffer from mental illness associated with anxiety and fear because of HB-associated symptoms. This exacerbates the patients’ condition, potentially increasing the risk of mortality. In this paper, we propose a new treatment mode to improve the therapeutic efficiency and patients’ satisfaction with their healthcare. In a single process of this new treatment, several patients with similar disease symptoms are treated by one doctor at the same time. This new treatment mode can not only relieve the anxiety and fear of HB patients, and improve patients’ cognition rate of HB, but also reduce the HB infection rate, slow down the progression of disease symptoms, and shorten the course. If patients with similar disease symptoms are to be grouped together, there is a need to determine the optimal patient batch combination, which can be solved in the new mode, called patient combined problem (PCP). We also constructed a mathematical model of PCP, and present the ant colony (AC) algorithm and Enhanced AC with a P-3-exchange operator for PCP in the new treatment mode in this paper. We also performed an experiment that showed that our proposed algorithms are very fast and effective for solving this problem.

     

Contextualizing the Employment Decisions of New Mothers

This paper suggests that the employment behavior and stated preferences of new mothers are not simply a product of choices that individual women make or characteristics that they have. Rather, using qualitative interview data from a sample of new parents, this paper illustrates some of the interactional and institutional contexts in which new mothers' approaches to paid work are embedded, with a particular focus on gender. Among the themes explored are the influence of husbands' preferences on women's decisions, the role of economic processes in structuring parenting arrangements, as well as the prominence of gendered cultural imagery in new parents' accounts about their work and family arrangements.     

Blacks, whites, and attitudes towards abortion

This article examines patterns of black and white support forabortion from 1972 to 1980. The findings reveal that black-whitedifferences are present on the abortion issue. Many of the differencesare due to the different demographic characteristics of blacksand whites and the greater degree of religiosity of blacks.     

The impact of revolution on social welfare in Latin America

Conclusion The foregoing analysis assessed ways that revolutions affected the social welfare of Latin Americans. It compared differences between societies of roughly similar levels of economic development that did and did not have revolutions, revolutions ushered in by different class alliances, revolutions instituting different modes of production, and revolutions occurring in countries differently situated within the world economy. The class transformations in Mexico, Bolivia, Cuba, and Peru gave rise to more egalitarian societies than they displaced, but low income groups in each country gained most during the new regimes' consolidation of power. Subsequently, the interests of the popular sectors were sacrificed to those of middle and upper income groups. The rural masses benefited from revolution mainly in conjunction with agrarian reforms.Agrarian reforms have been promulgated in all the countries under study, but a much larger proportion of the agrarian population and a much larger proportion of the farmland has been redistributed in the four countries that had political upheavals than in the paired countries that did not. Whereas all the land reforms perpetuate minifundismo, recipients of land titles enjoy a modicum of security and the opportunity to appropriate the full product of their labor, which rural wage workers and peasants dependent on usufruct arrangements do not.Examining the countries that have had revolutions shows that peasants and workers do not necessarily benefit most when they participate in the destruction of the old order. Peasants and rural farm laborers gained land where they were disruptive, but in Mexico only after a global Depression weakened the ability of large landowners to resist expropriation. The Peruvian experience demonstrates that rural laborers may benefit even if they are politically quiescent at the time of the extralegal takeover of power, and that they may, under certain conditions, gain benefits sooner after revolutions from above than after revolutions from below. The level of development of the economy and the way the societies have been integrated into the world economy historically limit what Third World revolutions can accomplish, quite independently of how the upheavals originated. The four revolutionary governments adapted land policies to property relations under the anciens régimes, and they reorganized agriculture to profit from trade. Global constraints have also been one factor restricting labor's ability to improve its earning power and influence over the organization of production. Labor did benefit from the upheavals, but as the postrevolutionary governments became concerned with attracting foreign investment and foreign financial assistance, and with improving profits from trade, labor was marginalized. The Mexican-Brazilian comparison, however, suggests that the middle class and the small proportion of workers employed in the oligopolistic sector benefit more and the richest 5% less in societies where civilian groups have been incorporated into the political apparatus as a result of revolution than in equally industrialized societies where they have been excluded, in the absence of revolution.Revolutionary-linked forces may modify the income generating effect of capitalist industrial dynamics, though not to the advantage of the lowest income earners.The dominant mode of production instituted under the new order is the aspect of revolution most affecting patterns of land and income distribution and health care. To the extent that ownership of the economy is socialized the state has direct access to the surplus generated. Although the Cuban state has not consistently allocated the resources it controls to low income groups, because the Castro regime need not provide a favorable investment climate, it can more readily redistribute wealth downward than can the capitalist regimes. It accordingly has also been freer to redesign the health care delivery system in accordance with societal needs rather than business interests and market power. But the Cuban experience suggests that the distributive effects even of socialist revolutions can be limited. Although socialism allows certain allocative options that capitalism does not, the capacity to improve the welfare of Third World people by any revolutionary means is constricted by the weak position of less developed nations within the global economy, by investment-consumption tradeoffs, and by internal political and economic pressures.