CDFIs serve an important social function because they provide access to financial services to underserved low-income individuals and households. Understanding which governance mechanisms promote efficient use of scarce resources that these organizations control is important because only sustainable institutions have the potential to revitalize low-income communities and change low-income indivi...

Karl J. Niklas*, Jeremy J. Midgley and Richard H. Rand Department of Plant Biology, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY USA Department of Botany, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa Department of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics, Cornell University, Ithaca NY, USA *Correspondence: E-mail: [email protected] Abstract We show that explicit mathematical and biological relationships exist am...

Body size has long been hypothesized to play a major role in community structure and dynamics. Two general hypotheses exist for how resources are distributed among body sizes: (1) resources are equally available and uniformly utilized across body sizes and (2) resources are differentially available to organisms of different body sizes, resulting in a nonuniform or modal distribution. It has als...

Massive anthropogenic and climate-related disturbances are now common in ecosystems worldwide, generating widespread die-off and subsequent community recovery dominated by remnant-patch dynamics rather than open-gap dynamics. Whether communities can recover and, if so, which factors mediate recolonization rate and extent remain unresolved. Here we evaluate recolonization dynamics of southern U....

Understanding community structure in social media is critical due to its broad applications such as friend recommendations, link predictions and collaborative filtering. However, there is no widely accepted definition of community in literature. Existing work use structure related metrics such as modularity and function related metrics such as ground truth to measure the performance of communit...

The dynamical process of epidemic spreading has drawn much attention of the complex network community. In the network paradigm, diseases spread from one person to another through the social ties amongst the population. There are a variety of factors that govern the processes of disease spreading on the networks. A common but not negligible factor is people's reaction to the outbreak of epidemic...

Models of biomass size spectra assume that organisms with higher body mass feed at higher trophic levels, but explicit empirical tests of this pattern are rare. We used nitrogen stable isotopes (δ15N) as an index of the trophic level in a benthic fish and invertebrate size-spectrum, and demonstrated that body mass was positively and significantly related to trophic level. This pattern was consi...

Although nonylphenol is known to have estrogenic effects in aquatic biota, little is known about the exposure of nonylphenol ethoxylates to insectivorous birds. This two-year study examined reproductive success, growth and immunological endpoints in Tree Swallows (Tachycineta bicolor) potentially exposed to nonylphenol and other contaminants located in sewage lagoons at a wastewater treatment p...

BACKGROUND In Pakistan, where gendered norms restrict women's mobility, female community health workers (CHWs) provide doorstep primary health services to home-bound women. The program has not achieved optimal functioning. One reason, I argue, may be that the CHWs are unable to make home visits because they have to operate within the same gender system that necessitated their appointment in the...