No abstract

Public funding to non-governmental development organisations (NGDOs) influences their allocation choices regarding preferred recipient countries for development aid. Instead of strict poverty-orientation criteria for aid allocation, NGDO country choice becomes increasingly aligned with bilateral priorities. Based on original data on Dutch aid delivery to developing countries, combined with detailed information on NGDOs financial structure and country characteristics, we analyse whether and how donor dependency and public subsidies influence NGDO country choice. Independent NGDOs appear strongly inclined to follow public aid priorities. This is attributed to risk-avoidance and complementarity-seeking of independent NGDOs and deliberate non-alignment for identity-seeking of dependent NGDOs.

The Raman spectra of polycrystalline anhydrous orotic acid have been also recorded and compared to the SERS data. These form are found to chemisorb on Ag colloidal nanoparticles exhibiting different SERS spectral pattern. SERS of orotic acid analysis suggested a titled geometry orientation with respect to the surface. Different adsorption behavior of these molecular species is discussed in the present study based on the Raman and SERS vibrational analysis of the related species.

Taking into account the advantages of Maximum Likelihood Method (most precise estimation), the statistical properties of MLEs (unbiasedness, consistency, efficiency, invariance, asymptotic normality) this paper aim is to present MLE in the context of estimate the recombination fraction r in linkage analysis. Maximum Likelihood Method follows some steps: specifies the likelihood function; takes derivatives of likelihood with respect to the parameters; sets the derivatives equal to zero and finally generates a likelihood equation, that maximized provides the most precise estimation of the recombination fraction. Generally, it is solved by iterative procedures, if no, closed form solution exists for likelihood equation. In this work we discuss comparatively two iterative optimization methods useful in computing MLE of the recombination fraction: Newton-Raphson method and Fisher's Method of Scoring. We implemented these two methods in Maple application and we illustrated them by an example: the estimation of the recombination fraction in the case of the Morgan (1909) experiment on fruit flies. The Maple code for these two methods connected with the Morgan example is given in the appendix. We can not guarantee which of the two presented methods give us an optimal maximum.

Crystallite size strain effect the mechanical, electric, magnetic and optical properties of many kind of the nanomaterials. The effects of the finite crystallite size and lattice strain can be very well observed as the deformation in the shape of the X-ray line profile (XRLP). In this contribution we have used the fundamental parameter (FP) [1,2] method to evaluate the nanostructure materials assuming a theoretical model of experimental XRLP.  In this contribution we have used various distribution functions such as normal, lognormal, Gumbel, Maxwell and Student. The best values of the crystallite size of nanostructued materials are chosen by analysis of root mean squares of residuals and by correlation matrix of the fit parameters. The entire procedure was implemented in the GnuPlot script.