Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, 3219 College St. Box 20389, Savannah State University, Savannah, GA 31404 ([email protected]) This article was edited by Jay Teachman. Forthcoming, Journal of Marriage and Family Fragile Families Working Paper: WP11-15-FF

The recent Mexican presidential elections and the fiasco that followed demonstrate the difficulties involved in making a fledgling democracy successful. With its unique history of turmoil and bloodshed, corruption and autocracy, Mexico has a lot to prove to the world and itself if it is to create trust in its new political structure. Despite the government’s extensive preparations, the most rec...

It has recently been proposed that the epileptic cortex is fragile in the sense that seizures manifest through small perturbations in the synaptic connections that render the entire cortical network unstable. Closed-loop therapy could therefore entail detecting when the network goes unstable, and then stimulating with an exogenous current to stabilize the network. In this study, a non-linear st...

Strength of attractor is studied by the return rate to itself after perturbations, for a multi-attractor state of a globally coupled map. It is found that fragile (Milnor) attractors have a large basin volume at the partially ordered phase. Such dominance of fragile attractors is understood by robustness of global attraction in the phase space. Change of the attractor strength and basin volume ...

SETH KAPLAN ABSTRACT Seth Kaplan describes how understanding the relationship between identities, institutions, social cohesion, and state legitimacy is vital to spurring economic and political development in fragile states. The international community needs to stop imposing inflexible formulas for development and to start helping weak countries build on their own people’s capacities for good g...

We describe several architectural features of the Athos agentbased framework for the construction of spoken dialogue systems, and additional features in two application demonstrators, AthosMail and AthosNews, that contribute to the robustness of their operation. These include adaptation of recognition resources to personal and application data, use of a broad-coverage robust parser as an interm...

The discovery of stable miRNA species circulating in blood has led to increased research focus on disease-related variations in serum and plasma miRNA expression and the possibility that such variations could serve as noninvasive biomarkers for disease. Working with serum and plasma miRNA presents various challenges in purification and characterization. In this paper, we outline QIAGEN® recomme...

This rapid review identifies evidence on the role of economic growth and economic development in helping countries break out of fragility. There is no commonly agreed definition of the terms ‘fragile states’ or ‘fragility’, and use of the terms are contested Most development agencies define fragility as ‘a fundamental failure of the state to perform functions necessary to meet citizens’ basic n...

Fragile X syndrome, as well as other forms of mental retardation and autism, is associated with altered dendritic spine number and structure. Fragile X syndrome is caused by loss-of-function mutations in Fragile X mental retardation protein (FMRP), an RNA-binding protein that regulates protein synthesis in vivo. It is unknown whether FMRP plays a direct, cell-autonomous role in regulation of sy...

The main objective of an ecosystem sustainable management is to preserve itscapacity to respond and adapt to current disturbances and/or future changes, and maintain theprovision of environmental goods and services. Two very important properties linked to thisobjective are the ecosystem resilience and resistance to disturbance factors. The objective ofthis paper is to recommend conceptual modif...