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Female Genital Mutilation is a cultural and historical practice engrained in the African Culture.This practice is part of the African Rite of Passage; where a young girl passes on from being a child into being a grown woman. According to Martha Nussbaums's Capability Approach this practice undermines the woman and violates her rights as a human being, on the other hand Melville Herskovits' Cultural Relativist theory encourages acceptance and respect of the various cultures and their beliefs; thus making female genital mutilation a cultural tradition that should be respected like any other tradition around the world.

Baseline survey data are integrated into an ethnographic understanding of locally situated knowledge to evaluate how radio entertainment-education regarding reproductive health is socially constructed in the riverine communities of the Peruvian Amazon. Focus group interviews, sustained participant observation, in-depth interviews, letters from radio listeners, and input from trained peer promoters complement the survey data. Employment of culturally sensitive, multiple methods makes findings more intelligible and coherent, provides practical wisdom for action, and heightens awareness of the joint ownership of ethical responsibilities on the part of the researcher and the researched.

The Block-Oriented Network Simulator (BONeS) may be viewed as an integrated system that provides a complete graphical environment for the description and simulation of communications networks.There are many existing techniques for describing communications networks; including state transition diagrams, state transition tables, Petri networks, high level general purpose languages, and special purpose high level languages.Each of these techniques have their merits. However, none of these methods provide a an integrated, visual, hierarchical framework f o r the modeling and simulation of communications networks.The integrated environment of BONeS includes the capability to describe protocol functions, layers of the IS0 model, and network transmission effects in a heirarchical fashion using block diagrams; configure and execute a discrete event simulation of the network; perform design iterations; and analyze the system performance.Each of these capabilities is provided through a consistent user interface that relies on the extensive use of graphics, windows, and consistency checking to provide a visual environment for describing networks and their protocols.The environment makes extensive use of software engineering, workstation technology, and expert systems to provide an intelligent, user friendly and flexible tools for simulating communication networks. INTRODUCTILN-Often simulation provides the only feasible method f o r analyzing the performance of communications networks.There are several software packages [Ref. 1-81 now in use that, to varying degrees, aid the system analyst in performing these simulation studies.However, none of these methods provides an integrated, visual, hierarchical framework f o r the modeling and simulation of communications networks.The Block-Oriented Network Simulator (BONeS) described in this paper does provide the advanced environment needed to describe and simulate communications networks. BONeS is a natural extension of the block oriented system simulator [Ref. 91 (BOSS).BONeS has many of the attributes of BOSS including: a block diagram approach to system specification (this is a unique approach for cnmnunication network), extensive error and consistency checking, and an integrated environment for the specification of the system, execution of the simulation model and the examination of the results. BONeS builds upon the BOSS structure.Features such as asynchronous execution of blocks and specification of data (message) structures are added.The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the BONeS network modeling philosophy and structure. ? --I BONeS NETWORK MODELING PHILOSWI?BONeS network descriptions are: 1.A visual display of all information, i.e., the user will not write in a simulation language as in [Ref. 1, 2, 3, 41, rather he will describe the system graphically as in [Ref. 5,6, and 81. BONeS provides, for the first time, a block diagram approach for describing communications network and their protocols in a unified manner. This approach is superior to other net...

eproductive rights ... rest on the recognition of the basic right of couples and individuals to decide freely and responsibly the number, spacing and timing of their children and to have the information and means to do so, and the right to attain the highest standard of sexual and reproductive health. .. [taking] into account the needs of their living and future children and their responsibilities towards the community. The promotion of the responsible exercise of these rights for all people should be the fundamental basis for ... community-supported policies and programmes in the area of reproductive health....