Selection Of Members Research Articles

Berlin New York: A Few Observations on Germany in the United Nations

Beginning in January 2019, the new German government will face a particular new responsibility for world affairs: provided the elections in June 2018 lead to the desired result, Germany will be an elected member of the UN Security Council for two years from January 2019 until December 2020. However, Germany has been a respected and highly relevant member of the United Nations not only during its terms on the Security Council but also in “normal” times. The present article attempts to shed light on a few aspects of Germany’s role in the UN during Merkel’s chancellorship with an emphasis on her third term (2014-2017), such as the cooperative relationship between Germany and the UN Secretary-General in important policy fields, Germany’s financial contributions to the UN, the impact of Germany’s EU membership on its UN membership and the country’s efforts with regard to the reform of the Security Council. The paper further provides context for Germany’s abstention in the vote on Security Council Resolution 1973 on Libya in 2011. It concludes by ascertaining that Germany with its approach of active multilateralism has taken its place as one of the leading nations in Europe and is ready to take on responsibility with its partners to achieve a peaceful and stable world order.

Editorial introductions

Editorial introductions

A STUDY ON PROBLEMS OF ELECTED WOMEN GRAMA PANCHAYATHH MEMBERS DURING GRAMA PANCHAYATHH ELECTION IN DAKSHINA KANNADA DISTRICT

The term development is no meaning without inclusion of all sections of society. Women contribute a lot to the whole society, but it is invisible. Panchayath Raj Institutions, now a day’s equally (elected members) dominated by Women representation. Few important problems have been listed in tools and listed opinion of respondents whether the problem was extreame, moderate or on problem. It helped to understand, which the extreme problem, moderate is and no problem. Majority of the respondents were educated and their age was in-between 28 to 47.Political pressure and problems from political leaders have been identified as the major problems. Remaining problems were minimum. The study was focused on the problems of elected women Grama Panchayathh members during Grama Panchayathh election. The study was descriptive and mainly studied about their social, political and cultural problems. Contents of the questionnaire include respondent’s age, education, marital status and the type of family. Problems during election were divided into three points. First one was no problem, second was about moderate problem and third one was extreme problem.

The impact of public pension board of trustee composition on state bond ratings

The declining financial health of public pension systems is increasingly becoming a budgetary concern for many state and local governments. While the academic literature has identified several factors behind the growth in unfunded state and local public pension liabilities, there is mixed evidence on how the composition of a pension system’s board of trustees affects a pension’s financial health. This article contributes to this literature by measuring how public pension board composition affects fund financial health as measured by state bond ratings. With a panel dataset of state pensions between 2001 and 2014 our results indicate that elected board members are consistently associated with lower bond ratings (and thus higher borrowing costs) while appointed and ex-officio board members are associated with higher bond ratings. These results are robust to a number of specifications.

Participation of Elected Women in Panchayati Raj System in Bihar

The present study was undertaken to know the extent of participation of elected women members in Panchayati Raj institutions. Atotal of seventy five women representative randomly selected from all the panchayats of Pusa and Kalyanpur block of Samastipur district in Bihar from forty villages selected randomly from two blocks. An interview schedule was used to collect the necessary data. In order to determine the conditions governing the participation of women, the data were subjected to multiple correlation, regression and path analysis. Participation was taken as dependent variable. The findings revealed that maximum 8.0 per cent of these elected women village members “Always” participated in “Construction, repair and maintenance” of public property. More than ninety per cent respondents spoke positively with respect to different life situation as a consequence of their association with Gram Panchayats. The results of correlations and multiple regression analysis between participation and socio-economic and psychological variables of elected village panchayat was positively and significantly correlated with caste (r = 0.668) and interaction style (r = 0.353) at 1 present level of probability and value of social linkage was negative but significant at 5 present level of probability.

Performance of panchayati raj institutions members in indira awaas yojana scheme

Panchayati Raj Institutions (PRIs) have three tier systems with governmental powers. To fulfil the housing needs of rural people, government launched Indira Awaas Yojana scheme in which house and land are provided to the below poverty line landless people in order to improve the quality of life. PRIs play a vital role in implementation and monitoring of IAY scheme so it was felt necessary to assess the knowledge of PRI members about the scheme and their performance. A descriptive research design was used in four districts with two blocks in each district and three villages from each block were selected randomly. A sample of 184 elected PRI members was selected which consisted of 40 Zilla Parishad, 48 Panchayat Samiti and 96 Gram Panchayat members. The data were collected by using self-structured interview schedule and was analyzed by using frequency, percentage and mean score. It was found that less than 36 per cent of PRI members knew about different aspects of the scheme. Nearly one third of PRI members were knowledgeable about the role of PRI members in implementation and monitoring of IAY scheme. Majority of the PRI members who were knowledgeable about their expected roles were always performing their roles. The percentage of Panchayat Samiti members was higher than Zilla Parishad and Gram Panchayat in performing their respective roles.

Assessment of Equipment Trip Probability Due to Voltage Sags Based on Fuzzy Possibility Distribution Function

Assessment of equipment trip is needed for proper estimation of interruption/disruption cost and voltage sag mitigation. The equipment trip depends on the severity of voltage sag and the tolerance of the equipment toward the sag. However, the occurrence of voltage tolerance of an equipment in between the two known bound levels is uncertain in nature. The existing evaluation methods for equipment trip analysis fail to properly assess this uncertain property of voltage tolerance curves. This paper presents a novel approach to assess the equipment trip by handling the uncertainties by using fuzzy probability and possibility distribution. A new method is proposed to transform a rigorously performed statistical data into a fuzzy possibility distribution function, which eliminates the ambiguity that comes with the non-standardized selection of membership function/possibility function. With the proposed method, the statistical data are used to extract the fuzzy probability distribution of voltage sag intensity, which is given by both the magnitude and time duration of voltage sags, while the concept of fuzzy probability is used to calculate the fuzzy trip probability or equipment failure probability. The proposed method is finally applied to estimate the number of trips for six different sensitive equipments connected to two practical Indian distribution systems.

Bamboo Specialists from Two Mammalian Orders (Primates, Carnivora) Share a High Number of Low-Abundance Gut Microbes.

Bamboo specialization is one of the most extreme examples of convergent herbivory, yet it is unclear how this specific high-fiber diet might selectively shape the composition of the gut microbiome compared to host phylogeny. To address these questions, we used deep sequencing to investigate the nature and comparative impact of phylogenetic and dietary selection for specific gut microbial membership in three bamboo specialists-the bamboo lemur (Hapalemur griseus, Primates: Lemuridae), giant panda (Ailuropoda melanoleuca, Carnivora: Ursidae), and red panda (Ailurus fulgens, Carnivora: Musteloideadae), as well as two phylogenetic controls-the ringtail lemur (Lemur catta) and the Asian black bear (Ursus thibetanus). We detected significantly higher Shannon diversity in the bamboo lemur (10.029) compared to both the giant panda (8.256; p = 0.0001936) and the red panda (6.484; p = 0.0000029). We also detected significantly enriched bacterial taxa that distinguished each species. Our results complement previous work in finding that phylogeny predominantly governs high-level microbiome community structure. However, we also find that 48 low-abundance OTUs are shared among bamboo specialists, compared to only 8 OTUs shared by the bamboo lemur and its sister species, the ringtail lemur (Lemur catta, a generalist). Our results suggest that deep sequencing is necessary to detect low-abundance bacterial OTUs, which may be specifically adapted to a high-fiber diet. These findings provide a more comprehensive framework for understanding the evolution and ecology of the microbiome as well as the host.

Abraham Lilienfeld Award address: 2017 Annual Meeting of the American College of Epidemiology

The address was delivered by Roberta B. Ness, MD MPH at the Annual Meeting of the American College of Epidemiology in New Orleans, Louisiana on September 26, 2017. Dr. Ness is James W. Rockwell Professor of Public Health and Vice-President for Innovation at the University of Texas School of Public Health. Recognized nationally and internationally for her expertise in women's health research, Dr. Ness pioneered the area of "gender-based biology". In more recent years, she developed an innovative program at the UT School of Public Health aimed at cultivating "outside the box" thinking among training scientists. Dr. Ness has authored a range of books on her work, including Health and Disease among Women (1999), Innovation Generation (2012), Genius Unmasked (2013) and The Creativity Crisis: Reinventing Science to Unleash Possibility (2014). Dr. Ness is Past-President of both the American College of Epidemiology and American Epidemiological Society, an honorary society of epidemiologists. She is also former Dean of UTHealth School of Public Health and former Interim Dean at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health. Dr. Ness is a frequent advisor to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), and US Department of Defense (DOD). She has an MD from Cornell University and MPH from Columbia University. Dr. Ness is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine, American Society of Clinical Investigation (ASCI), and Delta Omega honorary society.

About Testing, Tracking, and School Choice with Professor Adam Gamoran

Professor Adam Gamoran is the president of the William T. Grant Foundation (http://wtgrantfoundation.org/whoweare). He came to the Foundation from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he held the John D. MacArthur Chair in Sociology and Educational Policy Studies. In a research career spanning three decades, Adam conducted a wide range of studies focusing on inequality in education and school reform. Among his major works were a series of studies on tracking and ability grouping that identified consequences for student achievement and revealed the mechanisms through which those consequences occurred. Subsequent studies examined interventions to improve performance and reduce learning gaps, assessed through large-scale cluster-randomized trials. He was a Fulbright Scholar in the United Kingdom. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Education and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and was twice appointed by President Obama to serve on the National Board for Education Sciences. As president of the William T. Grant Foundation, Professor Gamoran has prioritized supporting research to deepen our understanding of the programs, policies, and practices that reduce inequality in youth outcomes, and to understand and improve the use of research evidence in decisions that affect young people. In 2013, Professor Gamoran received the Spencer Foundation Award for contributions to research on education policy from the Association for Public Policy and Management, and in 2014 he was honored with the award for Distinguished Contributions to Research in Education from the American Educational Research Association. In May 2015, he was a key-note speaker at the conference “School tracking: diverse mechanisms, effects and policy responses” that took place at the Faculty of Education, Charles University in Prague. His presence in Prague was a valuable opportunity to discuss approaches to tracking, school choice and educational policy in general and ask him many questions from the perspective of a small educational researchers’ community in Central Europe with its limited research funding and rather heated debate about equity and tracking. Nevertheless, we believe that Professor Adam Gamoran’s deep insight might be an eye-opening experience and an inspiring reading also for many other readers of our journal. (The second part of the interview about the research-policy relationships and research funding in the United States will be published in some of the next issues of our journal.) The questions were asked by David Greger (DG) and Jaroslava Simonova (JS).

In Memoriam

In Memoriam

New Honorary Member of BSPP

Dr Avice Hall does not consider hers a conventional career, in that she has worked in the same place for over 45 years. Avice was given her first hand lens when she was eight and always had a love of flowers. She obtained her BSc in Botany and Zoology in 1966 from the University of Leicester. The lectures in mycology led her to read That Great Hunger by Cecil Woodham Smith, which covers not only the potato famine in Ireland but also some of the social history surrounding the famine. After obtaining a place to do a PGCE, she went to see her ‘moral’ tutor, Dr Elizabeth Wangerman, and admitted that she really wasn't interested in school teaching. Her tutor opened her desk, took out a small leaflet and said, ‘I think that you would like this’; it was about the MSc in Plant Pathology at the University of Exeter. Avice changed career direction and found this new world of plant pathology fascinating. The Advance of the Fungi by E. C. Large, proved to be even more inspiring than That Great Hunger had been. She obtained her MSc in 1967 and then a PhD in 1971 studying clubroot of crucifers. After a short period of work as a plant pathologist at NAAS at Woodthorne, Wolverhampton, where she collected samples for the first cereal leaf pathogen survey, assessed some of the first field trials for fungicides in wheat as well as assessing an early take-all experiment, she started lecturing in Plant Pathology at Hatfield Polytechnic, where she has stayed as the institution has developed and become the University of Hertfordshire. Her lecturing has covered a wide range of subjects including mycology, mycological ecology, plant pathology and the effect of diseases in semi-natural plant communities. Her phytopathological education continued in a variety of ways. An important moment was the discovery that the motto of the plant pathology department in Wisconsin was ‘Keep one foot in the furrow’, which she realized described a way of life for all plant pathologists: research must always benefit the grower. Alongside the lecturing she has supervised sandwich students at the PBI Cambridge and also at several agrochemical companies, research institutes and NAAS (ADAS). All of these varied industrial contacts helped her to follow the motto. In 1990 she had a sabbatical based in the Plant Pathology Laboratory at Hatching Green, Harpenden where she noted that rhododendron had a developing problem with a powdery mildew. From 1991 to 2001, as well as lecturing at Hatfield, she also lectured in plant pathology to all three levels of the BSc horticulture degrees at Writtle Agricultural College. This gave her a good understanding of the horticultural industry that complemented her understanding of arable agriculture. It was from this time that she became more orientated to diseases of horticultural crops. She has supervised over a dozen PhDs and had grants to work on rhododendron powdery mildew, rose black spot and, since 2003, strawberry powdery mildew. Whilst she still uses the phrase ‘keep one foot in the furrow’, she has coined some other important maxims that her students hear frequently: ‘Lower the initial inoculum’, i.e. attack the pathogen as early as possible in the growing season or prevent it overwintering; and ‘There's danger in the debris’. A further observation is that any change in cultivation practices is likely to cause a change in the diseases occurring on a particular crop. Dr Hall has served twice on the Board of the British Society of Plant Pathology, once as an elected member and then for a 5-year period as Secretary. In 2010 she was awarded the Vice Chancellor's Award for educational engagement with business and the professions and in 2012 she was awarded an MBE for her contribution to higher education at the University of Hertfordshire and the community in St Albans. Since September 2010, Avice has been semi-retired and is pleased to be able to spend time on her research on strawberry powdery mildew, more time with her research students, only giving the lectures that she wants to, as well as refusing to go most departmental meetings! Another perk of semi-retirement has been to fulfil a lifelong ambition to see the spring flowers of the Mediterranean.

For director-at-large: Barbara A. Sawrey

For director-at-large: Barbara A. Sawrey

Economic Analysis of Crowdsourced Wireless Community Networks

Crowdsourced wireless community networks can effectively alleviate the limited coverage issue of Wi-Fi access points (APs), by encouraging individuals (users) to share their private residential Wi-Fi APs with others. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive economic analysis for such a crowdsourced network, with the particular focus on the users' behavior analysis and the community network operator's pricing design. Specifically, we formulate the interactions between the network operator and users as a two-layer Stackelberg model, where the operator determining the pricing scheme in Layer I, and then users determining their Wi-Fi sharing schemes in Layer II. First, we analyze the user behavior in Layer II via a two-stage membership selection and network access game, for both small-scale networks and large-scale networks. Then, we design a partial price differentiation scheme for the operator in Layer I, which generalizes both the complete price differentiation scheme and the single pricing scheme (i.e., no price differentiation). We show that the proposed partial pricing scheme can achieve a good tradeoff between the revenue and the implementation complexity. Numerical results demonstrate that when using the partial pricing scheme with only two prices, we can increase the operator's revenue up to 124.44% comparing with the single pricing scheme, and can achieve an average of 80% of the maximum operator revenue under the complete price differentiation scheme.

Political Representation on the New Auckland Council – Has Amalgamation Led to Greater Diversity?

AbstractThis paper explores the diversity of local government electoral candidates and elected members, in Auckland – one of the world's most diverse cities (Chen 2015: 56) – following the 2010 amalgamation. It responds to questions raised over the democratic gaps created by enlarged wards, a lack of diverse representation, and higher elected member ratios. The research asks the question – who stood and who was elected in the election following the Auckland 2010 reforms, and how does this compare with the city's diverse population. Pitkin's (1967) concept of descriptive representation provides the foundation for a comparison of the gender, age, and ethnicity of local population, local government candidates, and elected members, to ascertain descriptive representation. The human rights framework provides a theoretical foundation to examine the diversity of representation. Preliminary findings support the view that under the shared governance model, electoral candidates are becoming more ethnically and gender diverse at the local level; while at the regional level, the dominance of the archetypal councillor as European, middle‐aged and male, prevails.

People in the News

Sandra Franklin, director of the Woodruff Health Sciences Center Library at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, has been selected as a fellow of the Medical Library Association (MLA). The designation is the group’s highest honor, bestowed on members who are chosen by the Board of Directors for sustained and outstanding contributions to health sciences librarianship and to the advancement of the purposes of MLA. Franklin has been a member of MLA since 1984 and a distinguished member of its Academy of Health Information Professionals since 1997. She served as an elected member of MLA’s Board of Directors (2013–16) and has been a member of MLA’s Southern chapter since 1983, serving as president (2004–05). Franklin is chairing the local assistance committee for the 2018 MLA Annual Meeting, to be held in Atlanta.

On the Origin of Sub-subgiant Stars. I. Demographics

Abstract Sub-subgiants are stars that are observed to be redder than normal main-sequence stars and fainter than normal subgiant (and giant) stars in an optical color–magnitude diagram (CMD). The red straggler stars, which lie redward of the red giant branch, may be related and are often grouped together with the sub-subgiants in the literature. These stars defy our standard theory of single-star evolution and are important tests for binary evolution and stellar collision models. In total, we identify 65 sub-subgiants (SSG) and red stragglers (RS) in 16 open and globular star clusters from the literature; 50 of these, including 43 sub-subgiants, pass our strict membership selection criteria (though the remaining sources may also be cluster members). In addition to their unique location on the CMD, we find that at least 58% (25/43) of sub-subgiants in this sample are X-ray sources with typical 0.5–2.5 keV luminosities of order 1030–1031 erg s−1. Their X-ray luminosities and optical–to–X-ray flux ratios are similar to those of RS CVn active binaries. At least 65% (28/43) of the sub-subgiants in our sample are variables, 21 of which are known to be radial-velocity binaries. Typical variability periods are ≲15 days. At least 33% (14/43) of the sub-subgiants are Hα emitters. These observational demographics provide strong evidence that binarity is important for sub-subgiant formation. Finally, we find that the number of sub-subgiants per unit mass increases toward lower-mass clusters, such that the open clusters in our sample have the highest specific frequencies of sub-subgiants.

TheGaia-ESO Survey: Structural and dynamical properties of the young cluster Chamaeleon I

The young (~2 Myr) cluster Chamaeleon I is one of the closest laboratories to study the early stages of star cluster dynamics in a low-density environment. We studied its structural and kinematical properties combining parameters from the high-resolution spectroscopic survey Gaia-ESO with data from the literature. Our main result is the evidence of a large discrepancy between the velocity dispersion (sigma = 1.14 \pm 0.35 km s^{-1}) of the stellar population and the dispersion of the pre-stellar cores (~0.3 km s^{-1}) derived from submillimeter observations. The origin of this discrepancy, which has been observed in other young star clusters is not clear. It may be due to either the effect of the magnetic field on the protostars and the filaments, or to the dynamical evolution of stars driven by two-body interactions. Furthermore, the analysis of the kinematic properties of the stellar population put in evidence a significant velocity shift (~1 km s^{-1}) between the two sub-clusters located around the North and South main clouds. This result further supports a scenario, where clusters form from the evolution of multiple substructures rather than from a monolithic collapse. Using three independent spectroscopic indicators (the gravity indicator $\gamma$, the equivalent width of the Li line, and the H_alpha 10\% width), we performed a new membership selection. We found six new cluster members located in the outer region of the cluster. Starting from the positions and masses of the cluster members, we derived the level of substructure Q, the surface density \Sigma and the level of mass segregation $\Lambda_{MSR}$ of the cluster. The comparison between these structural properties and the results of N-body simulations suggests that the cluster formed in a low density environment, in virial equilibrium or supervirial, and highly substructured.

Can organisation development principles in India's local governments improve governance?

This paper examines the application of organisation development principles to rural local self-government bodies in Karnataka, India with the objective of developing their organisational capacity and improving their efficiency. The premise is that strong gram panchayats (village councils) can address issues hindering service delivery and governance at the grass roots.The paper illustrates the methodology used in the development of an innovative framework called Gram Panchayat Organisation Development (GPOD) and its implementation in action research mode in two village councils since 2011. It further explores the wider applicability of this framework, which has been extended to over 50 gram panchayats (GPs) since 2014. GPOD works towards strengthening the panchayat as an organisation in its entirety, rather than by tackling stand-alone components. It includes building a shared vision in the panchayat, mapping and re-engineering key processes, developing accountability and incentive structures, and supporting the village body in developing and implementing its annual plans. The approach has evolved to its present form based on real-time change management initiatives in GPs in which politically elected members participated in decision-making and implementation. We argue that by following the principles of organisation development and aligning the panchayat’s organisational components, marked improvements in local governance and service delivery were achieved. Impact is captured in terms of systemic outputs such as annual plans, accountability structures and activation of defunct committees, as well as improvements in services such as health, sanitation, drinking water, etc. The paper also includes a critique of the challenges faced as GPOD was scaled up to include new areas.

Racial Disparities in Medical Student Membership in the Alpha Omega Alpha Honor Society

Previous studies have found racial and ethnic inequities in the receipt of academic awards, such as promotions and National Institutes of Health research funding, among academic medical center faculty. Few data exist about similar racial/ethnic disparities at the level of undergraduate medical education. To examine the association between medical student race/ethnicity and induction into the Alpha Omega Alpha (AΩA) honor society. This study analyzed data from the Electronic Residency Application Service, the official service used by US medical students to apply to residency programs. A total of 4655 US medical students from 123 allopathic US medical schools who applied to 12 distinct residency programs associated with one academic health center in the 2014 to 2015 academic year were studied. Membership in the AΩA society among black, white, Hispanic, and Asian medical students. A total of 4655 unique applications were analyzed in the study (median age, 26 years; 2133 women [45.8%]). Overall, self-reported race/ethnicity in our sample was 2605 (56.0%) white (691 [71.5%] of AΩA applicants were white), 276 (5.9%) black (7 [0.7%] AΩA), 186 (4.0%) Hispanic (27 [2.8%] AΩA), and 1170 (25.1%) Asian (168 [17.4%] AΩA). After controlling for US Medical Licensing Examination Step 1 scores, research productivity, community service, leadership activity, and Gold Humanism membership, the study found that black (adjusted odds ratio [aOR], 0.16; 95% CI, 0.07-0.37) and Asian (aOR, 0.52; 95% CI, 0.42-0.65) medical students remained less likely to be AΩA members than white medical students. No statistically significant difference was found in AΩA membership between white and Hispanic medical students (aOR, 0.79; 99% CI, 0.45-1.37) in the adjusted model. Black and Asian medical students were less likely than their white counterparts to be members of AΩA, which may reflect bias in selection. In turn, AΩA membership selection may affect future opportunities for minority medical students.