Solenopsis invicta, the red imported fire ant, has recently become associated with Antonina graminis, an invasive pest, and Neodusmetia sangwani, biological control agent, and maybe negatively affecting established biological control. A preliminary survey outlined the range of A. graminis and its parasitoids, and found N. sangwani was present at a reduced rate in South Texas and in the southeastern United States. A greenhouse experiment demonstrated that S. invicta decreased the rate of parasitism of A. graminis by N. sangwani, with S. invicta directly interfering with oviposition. Interactions between S. invicta and A. gaminis may be facilitating the spread and establishment of two invasive pests which has a negative impact on established classical biological control of A. graminis by N. sangwani. algorithm, assumptions, and significance level. In addition, two graphs were built from a combination of the data from Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa. Results show only one variable (birth rate), out of a possible fourteen, to be a possible cause of poverty. This possible causal relationship showed up four times out of the six graphs built. Poverty was actually shown to be a cause of birth rates in two of the graphs that were built. These results also show that the poor do not necessarily benefit from an increase in GDP or an influx of foreign aid as is commonly thought.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--State University of New York at Binghamton, Anthropology Department, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (D.Com.) -- University of Pretoria, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references. Available on the Internet via the World Wide Web.

Thesis (Th. M.)--Western Conservative Baptist Seminary, 1991. / Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 84-88).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2006. / Title from first page of PDF file. Includes bibliographical references (p. 127-133).

Thesis (M.A.)--Catholic Theological Union, 1981. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves [81-83]).

Parkwood Estate in the municipality of Cape Town is part of the Wynberg Ward. It is bounded on the west by the Prince George Drive, an arterial road to the False Bay Suburbs, on the north by the Golf Links Estate and on the other side by farmlands not as yet sub-divided into plots. Parkwood Estate, in spite of its prepossessing name, is a typical "pondokkie settlement" on the Cape Flats, housing some 1,100 people, mainly Coloured. The Estate is forty-three acres in extent and has about 185 houses, making it one of the more densely populated areas in the vicinity. The dwellings are of very poor construction, consisting almost entirely of roughly built wood and iron structures. The area is singularly deficient in municipal services, there being no system of sewerage and no provision for stormwater drainage. This latter municipal deficiency has meant that annual flooding is inevitable for the people of Parkwood but the seriousness of the consequences was only brought to the notice of the public in the winter of 1941 when the rains were particularly severe. The water level was so high that houses were rendered totally uninhabitable and two children in the district met their death through drowning. The conditions of life are backward, the roads are only tracks in the prevailing sandy littoral drift characteristic of the Cape Flats, the water supply is drawn from wells open to contamination, and the homes are illuminated at night by candlelight.

Undergraduate honors paper--Mount Holyoke College, 2006. Program in Critical Social Thought. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 120-122).

Published Article / The aim of this article is to examine the concept of poverty in terms of definition, types, causes, determinants and indicators. The relationship between inequality and poverty is also visited. The absolute and relative approaches to the definition of poverty are examined. Poverty is defined as the inability of individuals or households to attain sufficient resources to satisfy a socially acceptable minimum standard of living. Characteristics which determine poverty include individual, community, household and regional characteristics. Lack of access to basic services such as dwelling, electricity, water and sanitation was found to aggravate poverty. Socio-economic factors such as unemployment, education level, gender, income and household size also affect poverty. Causes, determinants and types of poverty must first be understood before poverty can be alleviated. Poverty remains a problem in South Africa twenty years after the transition to democracy. This article is thus intended to provide the public, politicians and policy makers with a better understanding of the word “poverty” and, therefore, help alleviation of poverty.

The Poverty Stoplight is a tool that has been implemented in Paraguay since 2010 to measure poverty. It is a self-diagnostic visual survey to assist poor families to assess their level of poverty across the 50 indicators and to develop personalized poverty elimination plans. The tool uses stoplight colors (red, yellow, and green), illustrations, maps, electronic tablets, and simple software to create dashboards and indexes. Although it can be used in a wide variety of settings, it was created in order to fill a gap that exists among poverty measurement tools that are used by the microfinance industry. Most of these tools are focused on monetary poverty, and only one uses a constructivist approach to understand poverty. Despite trends in academic literature to consider poverty a multidimensional phenomenon and to measure poverty through hybrid positivist and constructivist methods, the Poverty Stoplight is the only tool used by the microfinance industry that attempts to accomplish this. The aim of this dissertation is to contribute to the academic literature by analyzing the practical benefits and difficulties that measuring multidimensional poverty through a combination of epistemological paradigms entails. To do so, in this dissertation I evaluate the robustness of a specific implementation of these two trends: the metric aspect of the Poverty Stoplight. In order to do this, I seek to answer four research questions: is the Poverty Stoplight (1) reliable, (2) valid, (3) practical and (4) does it have discriminatory power"u2014from a positivist and constructivist point of view. My analysis is based on data I collected through four methods: (1) application of the visual survey tool, (2) focus groups, (3) semi-structured interviews, and a (4) participatory wealth ranking. While results suggest that there is test-retest reliability, consequential validity, content validity and criterion-related validity, problems related to generalizability compromise internal consistency reliability and construct validity. Taken as a whole, the Poverty Stoplight has limited robustness. I end this dissertation with recommendations to make it a more robust tool, such as separating the Poverty Stoplight metric from the coaching methodology or reformulating indicators and dimensions in order for these to better represent poverty. / Martin Burt