Mass schooling, empowerment, and demographic and economic outcomes: a note of disent

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The International Conference on Population and Development, Cairo, 1994. Is its Plan of Action important, desirable and feasible?

A Postscript to Our Forum of Volume 6(1):71-122. We received two further contributions to the debate featured in the Forum in our last issue. The papers speak for themselves and I will not attempt any further synthesis, except to note that each brings up important issues not fully covered in the previous Forum. John C. Caldwel

Women's economic roles and child survival: the case of India

This article provides evidence that women’s employment, in spite of its other benefits, probably has one crucial adverse consequence: a higher level of child mortality than is found among women who do not work. We examine various intermediate mechanisms for this relationship and conclude that a shortage of time is one of the major reasons for this negative relation between maternal employment and child survival. However, even in the area of child survival, there is one aspect which is positively affected by female employment: the disadvantage to girls in survival which is characteristic of South Asia seems to be smaller among working mothers. This is in contrast to the effect of maternal education which may often have no clear relation to the sex ratio of childhood mortality even though absolute levels of child mortality are lower for educated mothers

The new international population movement: a framework for a constructive critique

This paper suggests that the old (neo-Malthusian) ideological orthodoxy which informed much of the population policy debate until the mid-1980s is in danger of being replaced by a new orthodoxy which is also unduly one-sided and simplistic. In addition, this new ideology, which received such a boost at the Cairo conference, is under even less pressure to re-evaluate some of its premises because it is motivated by more obviously altruistic and egalitarian concerns, and a challenge to its premises runs the risk of being interpreted as a challenge to these humane goals. However, letting ideology inform research and policy can have self-defeating consequences when it ignores the complexity of the real world, the frequency of trade-offs, and the many ways in which there may be a conflict between policy-relevant empirical findings and these ideological goals. The paper explores some of these issues in the context of Cairo and presents a framework which may be used to develop a constructive critique of the new international population policy agenda

Opening the Black Box: Explaining the Process of Basing a Health Recommender System on the I-Change Behavioral Change Model

Recommender systems are gaining traction in healthcare because they can tailor recommendations based on users' feedback concerning their appreciation of previous health-related messages. However, recommender systems are often not grounded in behavioral change theories, which may further increase the effectiveness of their recommendations. This paper's objective is to describe principles for designing and developing a health recommender system grounded in the I-Change behavioral change model that shall be implemented through a mobile app for a smoking cessation support clinical trial. We built upon an existing smoking cessation health recommender system that delivered motivational messages through a mobile app. A group of experts assessed how the system may be improved to address the behavioral change determinants of the I-Change behavioral change model. The resulting system features a hybrid recommender algorithm for computer tailoring smoking cessation messages. A total of 331 different motivational messages were designed using 10 health communication methods. The algorithm was designed to match 58 message characteristics to each user pro le by following the principles of the I-Change model and maintaining the bene ts of the recommender system algorithms. The mobile app resulted in a streamlined version that aimed to improve the user experience, and this system's design bridges the gap between health recommender systems and the use of behavioral change theories. This article presents a novel approach integrating recommender system technology, health behavior technology, and computer-tailored technology. Future researchers will be able to build upon the principles applied in this case study.European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under Grant 68112

Kinetics of phycocyanobilin cleavage from C-phycocyanin by methanolysis

Phycocyanobilin (PCB) is an important linear tetrapyrrolic molecule for food as well as pharmaceutical industry. It is obtained from blue-green algae, where it is attached covalently to phycobiliproteins (C-PC and APC) present in the light harvesting complexes. In this work, cleavage of PCB from phycobiliproteins present in the extract of Arthrospira platensis by methanolysis is investigated. Different initial concentrations (25 mg/mL, 10 mg/mL, and 5 mg/mL) of proteins are used in order to investigate the effect of protein aggregation on process yield. A kinetic model is developed by fitting the experimental data for methanolysis. Results show that the kinetics follows a pseudo first order kinetics and remains unaffected due to the different initial concentration ofphycobiliproteins. Moreover, yield of PCB in the cleavage process is found to beproportional to the initial concentration of phycobiliproteins