Social capital contributes to the alleviation of poverty but evidence on how to strengthen it remains scarce. This article describes strategies to strengthen social capital developed by a nongovernmental organization (NGO) and women as part of a development programme in rural Bangladesh between 2006 and 2012. The NGO and the women involved leveraged bonding (familial), bridging (peers) and link...

Technical assistance (TA) has a long and varied history as a development practice. It initially emerged as a set of ‘hard’ programs, tools, and technologies delivered to developing countries by imported First World experts, typically in the agricultural and resource sectors. Later, in response to critical and antidevelopment theories, TA morphed into its ‘soft’ version, attempting to empower ma...

Cath volunteers with the PONT Mbale (www.PONT-mbale.org) link and chairs their primary care committeewhich is embedded in a community to community partnership between Rhondda Cynon Taf in SouthWales and a district in Uganda called Mbale. Since 2005,PONThave trained60operational level health workers (OHWs) across three nongovernmental organisations (NGOs), 450 community health workers (CHWs) acr...

Although many governmental institutions have provided their costumers with access to electronic government documents there is still a lack of accessibility for handicapped citizens. In this paper we present an approach to improve access to governmental forms for handicapped citizens, in particular for people with visual impairments, elderly people, illiterates or immigrants. We describe a syste...

Inhalation Toxicology In article number 2100633 by Ajay Vikram Singh, Byung-Wook Park, and co-workers, a systematic approach is taken to discuss the bottleneck, pros cons of current technologies pertaining organ-on-a-chip systems for inhalation toxicology. Design processes inspired from soft robotics actuation with attention exposure, lung cells, materials used are presented.

The Asian Society of Toxicology (ASIATOX), which consists of the seven national toxicology member societies of Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan, Thailand, Singapore, and Iran, now boasts of more than 3,000 members from a variety of industries, academia, and regulatory organizations. ASIATOX congresses are spaced three years apart and rotated among the member societies. In 1995, ASIATOX joined the In...

Toxicology testing of fatally injured workers is not routinely conducted. We completed a case-series study of 2005-2009 occupational fatalities captured by Iowa's Fatality Assessment and Control Evaluation (FACE) Program. The goals of our research were to: (1) measure the proportion of FACE cases that undergo toxicology testing, and describe the factors associated with being tested, and (2) mea...

the school environment is an environment wherein a student spends one third of his life with teachers and other students. in the present study, the safety levels of governmental and non-governmental schools were studied and compared. in a descriptive cross-sectional study we assessed schools safety using fire and life safety inspection checklist presented by the national fire prevention agency ...

In recent years, public donation has already been widely accepted as an effective and efficient way to help people or communities who are in urgent needs of public help considering their current financial situations. The great influence of mass media has strongly raised people’s awareness of public donation. Many people are enthusiastic about public donation but have no idea about where to dona...

Slooten et al. (1) claim the survey respondents from New Zealand, one of 28 countries considered in our paper in PNAS (2), were strongly biased toward the fishing industry. The six survey responses comprised a range of background experience: three government/science respondents (added here as coauthors), including the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research’s Chief Scientist–Fisher...