text stringlengths 59 1.12k |
|---|
interact with the political system? O.S.: Yes, corruption and bureaucracy influence how people interact with the political system; however other factors are important, too, including people’s ignorance of the political system, mutual bias and stereotypes, lack of activism and some |
“activist depression” after the Orange Revolution. AWID: Has the presence of a prominent woman leader, Yulia Tymoshenko, made any difference in terms of women’s rights? O.S.: No and yes. Yulia Tymoshenko is not considered by most to be a leader |
with feminist thinking and declarations. Usually she is gender neutral in her expressions and approaches, avoiding raising issues of women’s leadership and sometimes pointing out the masculinity of her own actions and those of “real men”. At the same time, |
by example, she has encouraged women to get more involved in politics and motivated women to be more insistent, confident and forthcoming in their career advancement. In my opinion, Tymoshenko walks a feminist path but is not ready to declare |
it. In previous years, she did a lot to support “big wise men” even after many of them betrayed her, but lately, she has finally understood that she needs to leave behind the “supportive” gender role. Now, she often talks |
about how badly men have managed our country and why we need to give women an opportunity. AWID: Ukraine has experienced much economic transition since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. What kinds of occupations do women work |
in? And what is the situation of women economically more recently amidst the global economic crisis? O.S.: Women in Ukraine have been economically active for many generations, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union has not decreased this. Still, most |
women work in “female” fields like education, trade and the hospitality industry. Now, though, more women work in “male” dominated fields like the military and information technology. There is not yet much research on the influence of the global economic |
crisis in Ukraine from a gender perspective, but, in general, the crisis has not hit Ukraine as hard as many other countries. We are not as integrated into the global economy as many other countries. Also, we went through a |
very harsh “vaccination” period during the first years after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, when our economy experienced many shocks. Inflation rates during those years reached 1000%, and unemployment increased from practically zero to 5 – 10%. Women did |
a lot of compensating during this time. These economic shocks were compounded by a cultural shock in which people had to reformulate their words, actions and lives. So the current economic crisis is not as difficult as what we went |
through nearly 20 years ago. AWID: Does the Eastern Orthodox Church exert much influence on women’s rights today? O.S.: The influence of the Eastern Orthodox Church on women’s rights is not substantive in general. Traditional values such as the prohibition |
of abortion and the subordination of women are not visible in society as a whole and not aggressive. The church could have much influence within some families, but this is more exception than the rule. AWID: What is the status |
of sexual and reproductive rights for women in Ukraine? And are these rights complicated by Ukraine’s low birth rates and natalist policies? O.S.: Sexual and reproductive rights for women are not limited by law, and Ukraine has one of the |
highest abortion rates in the world. The government has been trying to encourage women to have children through financial incentives, but this policy has not been very effective, because, even with the incentives, people cannot afford to have children. Moreover, |
in rural areas, there is limited access to hospitals and health care. AWID: How strong are civil society and the women’s movement in Ukraine? Are they adequately resourced? And is the spirit of the Orange Revolution still alive in these |
movements? O.S.: Civil society in Ukraine has had more and less favorable times during its 20 years in existence. The Orange Revolution could be considered as an opportune moment for civil society despite deep disappointment among population related to lost |
expectations. The number of active NGOs including women’s ones is less than it was 10 years ago; however the quality of NGO work has grown. Because of the Orange Revolution, government bodies are more open and this has given civil |
society organizations more space to make change, including pushing for a more tolerant and human society. Some women’s NGOs became the first gender advisors of governors after the Equal Opportunity Law entered into force after the Orange Revolution in 2005. |
AWID: Is the concept of “rights” well received in Ukraine? O.S.: The perception of the concept of human rights in Ukraine has changed over time. In the first years after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, donors and other stakeholders |
were excited to make it a “cure–all” for the ills of the dictatorship; later, it brought a lot of disappointment because changes didn’t take root and did not come so fast. Also, donors declared and supported this concept, but in |
practice were very often not sensitive; they ended up themselves violating these human rights. This led to a period when NGOs did not address rights visibly and directly. Now, we see some maturity of civil society in Ukraine, and this |
gives us the opportunity to return to this concept again at more deep and reflective level, converting it into more practical steps. The author would like to thank Betsy Hoody at the Global Fund for Women for her support with |
Serious head injuries are rare in the wilderness. But get hit square on the melon by a falling rock, and the resulting brain swelling can cause dangerous intracranial pressure. Unlike |
skin gashes and broken bones, traumatic brain injuries don't always bleed or even cause pain, making early diagnosis tricky. Since brain injuries can occur without exterior wounds, the best indicator |
of serious trauma is a person's level of consciousness, says Jeffrey Isaac, curriculum director at Wilderness Medical Associates. Use the AVPU scale to establish a person's alertness and monitor any |
deterioration in brain function. The farther down the scale (A is the best, U the worst) the person registers, the more serious the brain injury. (A) Victim is Alert and |
oriented; he knows who he is, where he is, and what happened. (V) You get a response to Verbal stimuli, but victim is confused and disoriented. (P) Victim responds only |
to Painful stimuli, like pinching his arm or rubbing his breastbone. (U) Victim is Unresponsive to all of the above. Record any periods of unconsciousness. Blackouts lasting longer than two |
to three minutes indicate a serious head injury, especially if accompanied by persistent disorientation. Because brain swelling can develop slowly, evaluate the victim's mental state for 24 hours after the |
injury. Watch for behavioral indicators like combativeness, restlessness, or acting drunk, as well as severe headache, nausea, and persistent vomiting. Move the victim to a safer location if necessary. Don't |
leave a victim in a dangerous place or where you can't treat life-threatening injuries just because you are unable to stabilize the spine, says Isaac. Recent studies have shown that |
cervical spine damage occurs in a tiny percentange of victims with traumatic head injuries. As a result, new first aid protocols recommend spine "protection" over stabilization when hazardous conditions require |
moving the victim. Monitor a victim's breathing and pulse rate, and keep him hydrated and warm. Treat for shock by raising the legs while you gauge his level of consciousness. |
Initial disorientation or confusion can improve in a short period. The duration a person remains unconscious isn't as important as how quickly he returns to normal brain functioning, says Isaac. |
Contrary to popular belief, the victim of a head injury can doze or sleep as long as he is monitored and woken up every few hours to check alertness. Initiate |
immediate evacuation for victims whose alertness or memory remains severely altered, or worsens over time. Even if a victim recovers enough to walk out, he should still seek medical attention. |
Is the evidence strong enough to support a medieval Welsh settlement in North America? First recorded almost four hundred years after the lifetime of Madoc ap Owain Gwynedd, there is little to indicate that the story was known before Humphrey Llwyd. While there certainly were medieval stories about a Madoc, who seems t... |
than in Wales, it is by no means certain that the Madoc of the stories and poems was Madoc ap Owain. All that can be said of the medieval romances is that they concern a sea-farer of some renown. That is as far as the medieval sources go. Where Humphrey Llwyd got the story is unknown. It is in none |
of the sources he translated into English and it is so far from the medieval versions that they cannot have been the sole inspiration. It is possible, perhaps even probable, that he simply made it up. As a proud Welshman at a time when the English government was doing its best to anglicise the recently-created province... |
Lawes & Justice to be ministred in Wales in like fourme as it is in this Realme of 1536), making a claim that the Welsh had discovered the New World long before the English (and, indeed, the Spanish) had ever set foot there would have been a strike by Llwyd in favour of national pride. The flawed evidence of the |
Bat Creek Stone In 1991, archaeologists Robert C Mainfort Jr. and Mary L Kwas, writing in The Tennessee Anthropologist 16 (1) identified the hoaxer of the Bat Creek Stone as John Emmert, the assistant who claimed to have found it. Cyrus Thomas had doubts about Emmert’s abilities, believing his judgement to be impaired ... |
to his sacking. Following a series of begging letters to Thomas, Emmert was reinstated in 1888, promising to give him “greater satisfaction than I ever did before” and agreeing with Thomas’s hypothesis that the Cherokees were the moundbuilders. Emmert certainly had the motive for producing a spectacular find and despit... |
passable for the Cherokee syllabary. Alas, the Cherokee syllabary was invented in 1819 by the native American silversmith Sequoyah (c 1767-1843, also known as George Gist/Guess/Guest) and a radiocarbon date on material from Mound 3 of 1605 ± 170 bp (409 ± 174 CE) is much too early. So, could Blackett and Wilson be righ... |
sixth-century Welsh, in the Coelbren script? Once again, we find Coelbren to be a modern invention, having been first published in 1791 by Edward Williams (1747-1826, better known as Iolo Morganwg), a serial forger. Although claims have been made for an earlier origin (such as in the “Welsh runes” attributed to the sch... |
been invented because an Englishman had taunted him that the Welsh had no writing system), nothing like Coelbren is attested before the time of Edward Williams. It is also evident that if it incorporates symbols for mutated consonants and such mutations are not written before the period of Middle Welsh orthography (twe... |
claimed for the Bat Creek inscription by Wilson and Blackett, then Coelbren can be no earlier that the twelfth century CE. Dismissing the recent claims Wilson and Blackett are keen promoters of an alternative Arthurian archaeology that uses some very poor evidence that does not stand up to critical scrutiny. Indeed, th... |
evidence they use is fraudulent. Their frequent complaint that they are not taken seriously by academe is typical of Bad Archaeologists: they tell their readers that the reasons for being ignored are professional jealousies, an inability to see beyond accepted ideas and even darkly political conspiracies. Like so many ... |
Household Dust and Allergies in Children The use of mattress covers on children’s beds, along with intensive education and assistance in dust-reduction measures in the home, prevents the development of allergies in children at high risk, according to a recent article in Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine (20... |
suffer from allergies frequently develop chronic allergic conditions, including asthma. In the United States, asthma is the most commonly diagnosed chronic disease of childhood, affecting nearly nine million children. Conventional medical management of childhood allergies and asthma includes the use of antihistamines, ... |
have serious side effects, and a child’s likelihood of needing to continue treatment into adulthood is high. Antihistamines can affect the central nervous system, causing either overstimulation or sedation; bronchodilators can also stimulate the nervous system, causing anxiety and insomnia. Over long periods of time, i... |
of infections, and oral steroids have negative effects on adrenal function and the entire immune system. For these reasons, preventive approaches should be pursued whenever possible. According to some, but not all, studies, dust mite allergy is a predictor of asthma and other types of chronic allergies such as eczema. ... |
in children’s home environments prevented the development of dust mite allergies. Another study found that the use of mattress covers effectively reduced dust mite exposure in the home. In the current study, the combined effect of mattress covers and intensive dust reduction measures on the development of dust mite all... |
one-year study were between 18 months and five years of age. All had some allergy symptoms, such as asthma, hay fever, or eczema, but tests for dust mite allergy were negative. Each had at least one parent with allergy symptoms and positive results on the dust mite allergy test, putting these children at high risk for ... |
mites themselves. The children were randomly assigned to one of two groups. Both groups’ parents received standard information about environmental influences on children’s health and recommendations for allergy prevention. Recommendations for allergy prevention included avoiding exposure to pets in bedrooms, ventilatin... |
children in the intervention group were given more detailed dust-reduction instructions and assistance, and a mattress cover to prevent dust accumulation on children’s beds. The children were evaluated for allergy symptoms after six months, and tests for dust mite allergies were repeated after one year. The percentage ... |
the trial was 6.5% in the group that received standard instructions, compared with only 3% in the intervention group. The results of this study add to a growing body of evidence that preventing exposure to house dust mites may significantly reduce the development of dust mite allergies, and therefore might decrease the... |
should be recommended in conjunction with other allergy prevention approaches that have been shown to be effective. For example, observational studies have shown a 30 to 50% reduction in childhood asthma in those who receive exclusive breastfeeding for three months. Several studies have demonstrated a protective effect... |
of nursing mothers and infants has been shown to prevent some types of allergies. Controlled trials have shown that probiotic supplements (which support the growth of healthy gut bacteria) and hydrolyzed milk formulas (in which potentially allergenic proteins are broken down to smaller, non-allergenic sizes) reduce all... |
be evaluated. Maureen Williams, ND, received her bachelor’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania and her Doctorate of Naturopathic Medicine from Bastyr University in Seattle, WA. She has a private practice in Quechee, Vermont, and does extensive work with traditional herbal medicine in Guatemala and Honduras. Dr.... |
All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of the Healthnotes® content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Healthnotes, Inc. Healthnotes Newswire is for educational or informational purposes only, and is not intended to diagnose or provide treatment for any condition. If you have any ... |
Inc. shall not be liable for any errors or delays in the content, or for any actions taken in reliance thereon. Healthnotes and the Healthnotes logo are registered trademarks of Healthnotes, Inc. |
Black-Scholes: The maths formula linked to the financial crash It's not every day that someone writes down an equation that ends up changing the world. But it does happen sometimes, and the world doesn't always change for the better. It has been argued that one formula known as Black-Scholes, along with its descendants... |
down in the early 1970s but its story starts earlier than that, in the Dojima Rice Exchange in 17th Century Japan where futures contracts were written for rice traders. A simple futures contract says that I will agree to buy rice from you in one year's time, at a price that we agree right now. By the 20th Century the C... |
was providing a marketplace for traders to deal not only in futures but in options contracts. An example of an option is a contract where we agree that I can buy rice from you at any time over the next year, at a price that we agree right now - but I don't have to if I don't want to. You can imagine why |
this kind of contract might be useful. If I am running a big chain of hamburger restaurants, but I don't know how much beef I'll need to buy next year, and I am nervous that the price of beef might rise, well - all I need is to buy some options on beef. But then that leads to a very ticklish problem. How much |
should I be paying for those beef options? What are they worth? And that's where this world-changing equation, the Black-Scholes formula, can help. "The problem it's trying to solve is to define the value of the right, but not the obligation, to buy a particular asset at a specified price, within or at the end of a spe... |
professor of finance at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business and - of course - co-inventor of the Black-Scholes formula. The young Scholes was fascinated by finance. As a teenager, he persuaded his mother to set up an account so that he could trade on the stock market. One of the amazing things about Sch... |
and then a doctoral student, he was half-blind. And so, he says, he got very good at listening and at thinking. When he was 26, an operation largely restored his sight. The next year, he became an assistant professor at MIT, and it was there that he stumbled upon the option-pricing puzzle. One part of the puzzle was th... |
of an option to buy beef at a price of - say - $2 (£1.23) a kilogram presumably depends on what the price of beef is, and how the price of beef is moving around. But the connection between the price of beef and the value of the beef option doesn't vary in a straightforward way - it depends how likely the option is |
to actually be used. That in turn depends on the option price and the beef price. All the variables seem to be tangled up in an impenetrable way. Scholes worked on the problem with his colleague, Fischer Black, and figured out that if I own just the right portfolio of beef, plus options to buy and sell beef, I have a d... |
risk-free portfolio. Since I already know the price of beef and the price of risk-free assets, by looking at the difference between them I can work out the price of these beef options. That's the basic idea. The details are hugely complicated. "It might have taken us a year, a year and a half to be able to solve and ge... |
formula," says Scholes. "But we had the actual underlying dynamics way before." The Black-Scholes method turned out to be a way not only to calculate value of options but all kinds of other financial assets. "We were like kids in a candy story in the sense that we described options everywhere, options were embedded in ... |
Quote Professor Ian Stewart Warwick University By 2007 the trade in derivatives worldwide was one quadrillion (thousand million million) US dollars ” But Black and Scholes weren't the only kids in the candy store, says Ian Stewart, whose book argues that Black-Scholes was a dangerous invention. "What the equation did w... |
financial options known as derivatives," he says. Scholes thought his equation would be useful. He didn't expect it to transform the face of finance. But it quickly became obvious that it would. "About the time we had published this article, that's 1973, simultaneously or approximately a month thereafter, the Chicago B... |
had just moved to the University of Chicago. He and his colleagues had already been teaching the Black-Scholes formula and methodology to students for several years. "There were many young traders who either had taken courses at MIT or Chicago in using the option pricing technology. On the other hand, there was a group... |
in a very short period of time, the intuitive players were essentially eliminated by the more systematic players who had this pricing technology." More or Less: Behind the stats Listen to More or Less on BBC Radio 4 and the World Service, or download the free podcast That was just the beginning. "By 2007 the trade in d... |
million) US dollars - this is 10 times the total production of goods on the planet over its entire history," says Stewart. "OK, we're talking about the totals in a two-way trade, people are buying and people are selling and you're adding it all up as if it doesn't cancel out, but it was a huge trade." The Black-Scholes... |
test. But as banks and hedge funds relied more and more on their equations, they became more and more vulnerable to mistakes or over-simplifications in the mathematics. "The equation is based on the idea that big movements are actually very, very rare. The problem is that real markets have these big changes much more o... |
problem is that everyone's following the same mathematical principles, so they're all going to get the same answer." Now these were known problems. What was not clear was whether the problems were small enough to ignore, or well enough understood to fix. And then in the late 1990s, two remarkable things happened. "The ... |
argue they thoroughly deserved to get it." End Quote Ian Stewart University of Warwick Long-Term Capital Management showed the danger of this kind of algorithmically-based trading” Fischer Black died young, in 1995. When in 1997 Scholes won the Nobel memorial prize, he shared it not with Black but with Robert Merton, a... |
Wall Street, and by this stage both he and Merton were players in the world of finance, as partners of a hedge fund called Long-Term Capital Management. "The whole idea of this company was that it was going to base its trading on mathematical principles such as the Black-Scholes equation. And it actually was amazingly ... |
the traditional companies quite noticeably and everything looked great." But it didn't end well. Long-Term Capital Management ran into, among other things, the Russian financial crisis. The firm lost $4bn (£2.5bn) in the course of six weeks. It was bailed out by a consortium of banks which had been assembled by the Fed... |
big story indeed. This was all happening in August and September of 1998, less than a year after Scholes had been awarded his Nobel prize. Stewart says the lessons from Long-Term Capital Management were obvious. "It showed the danger of this kind of algorithmically-based trading if you don't keep an eye on some of the ... |
says. "They [Long-Term Capital Management] were committed, pretty much, to just ploughing ahead with the system they had. And it went wrong." Scholes says that's not what happened at all. "It had nothing to do with equations and nothing to do with models," he says. "I was not running the firm, let me be very clear abou... |
withstand the shock that occurred in the market in the summer and fall of late 1998. So it was just a matter of risk-taking. It wasn't a matter of modelling." This is something people were still arguing about a decade later. Was the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management an indictment of mathematical approaches to fi... |
of traders taking too much risk against the better judgement of the mathematical experts? Ten years after the Long-Term Capital Management bail-out, Lehman Brothers collapsed. And the debate over Black-Scholes and LTCM is now a broader debate over the role of mathematical equations in finance. Ian Stewart claims that t... |
crisis? "It was abuse of their equation that caused trouble, and I don't think you can blame the inventors of an equation if somebody else comes along and uses it badly," he says. End Quote Myron Scholes The fundamental issue is that quantitative technologies in finance will survive, and will grow” "And it wasn't just ... |
mathematical models and all sorts of other techniques that followed on its heels. But it was one of the major discoveries that opened the door to all this." Black-Scholes changed the culture of Wall Street, from a place where people traded based on common sense, experience and intuition, to a place where the computer s... |
blame Black-Scholes for what followed it? "The Black-Scholes technology has very specific rules and requirements," says Scholes. "That technology attracted or caused investment banks to hire people who had quantitative or mathematical skills. I accept that. They then developed products or technologies of their own." No... |
used data incorrectly to calibrate their models, or people who used [the] models didn't know how to use them." Scholes argues there is no going back. "The fundamental issue is that quantitative technologies in finance will survive, and will grow, and will continue to evolve over time," he says. But for Ian Stewart, the... |
is a kind of morality tale. "It's very tempting to see the financial crisis and various things which led up to it as sort of the classic Greek tragedy of hubris begets nemesis," he says. "You try to fly, you fly too close to the sun, the wax holding your wings on melts and you fall down to the ground. My personal view ... |
that it's not just tempting to do that but there is actually a certain amount of truth in that way of thinking. I think the bankers' hubris did indeed beget nemesis. But the big problem is that it wasn't the bankers on whom the nemesis descended - it was the rest of us." Additional reporting by Richard Knight |
Purim is a holiday celebration like no other Surrounded by a natural arena of sunset-tinged and snow-capped peaks, it is impossible to imagine a more wild and spectacular location than Lago Pehoé in southern Chile’s Torres del Paine National Park. The jaw-dropping scenery is also filled with wildlife, so between bouts ... |
fauna comes remarkably easily to the curious traveller. Just a few decades ago the llama’s close cousin the guanaco was endangered, but now there are more than 3,000 of the camelids (also close relatives of the camel) living in the Torres del Paine National Park. They are a deceptively compact animal - just over 1m-hig... |
the grassy tundra punctuating Torres del Paine’s dramatic combination of alpine lakes, soaring peaks and turquoise-tinged glaciers. Count on being greeted with a look that is a quizzical cross between “Can I help you?” and “What are you staring at?” More than 3,000 guanacos are apparently more than enough to sustain a ... |
mountain lions, and also one of the largest. Like any cat they are solitary and independent creatures, so any sightings are likely to be restricted to bigger than expected paw prints in the snow. Keep your eyes peeled for the more delicate prints of puma cubs, padding along beside their graceful, but powerful mothers. ... |
it is not just pumas targeting the guanacos. Getting close to a sleek Andean grey fox is surprisingly straight forward, especially if they are hungry and preoccupied with eating. They prefer target hares and rodents, but will happily chow down on any guanacos that have already been killed by pumas. The Andean Condor Th... |
are the perfect environment for the mighty Andean condor. A wing-span of more than 3m – the largest of any land bird – enables these impressive scavengers to stay aloft with minimal effort. Explorer and naturalist Charles Darwin actually noted watching one soar for half an hour without moving its wings. Pack good binoc... |
Andean Deer There are only around 2,000 of the endangered South Andean deer or huemul alive, which together with the Andean condor, is featured on Chile’s National Coat of Arms. Like the guanaco, the huemul is a relatively compact animal, standing around 1m high. Keep an eye on the stunning lakeside trek from Lago Peho... |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.