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Transportation in Mauritania (lead)

Citizens of Mauritania have various transportation methods. Railways and highways connect major cities in the country. Mauritania is a coastal country so there are many ports along its coast and there are a few big rivers that run through the country. Lastly, there are 26 airports spread out throughout the country.

Telecommunications in Switzerland

Telecommunication is communication over a distance by cable, telegraph, telephone, or broadcasting. Switzerland is a very well developed and technologically advanced country. In this century, there are many different ways to interact and communicate with others, even if you live on other sides of the world. Today many people find it easiest to communicate by using social media such as popular sites like Facebook and Instagram, as well as through email.

Ethnicity

Ethnicity, ethnic groups, ethnic minority groups and migrant groups are used interchangeably to describe research communities in this issue. Agyemang et al. (forthcoming) define ethnicity as ‘the group a person belongs to as a result of a mix of cultural factors including language, diet, religion and ancestry’ and ethnic Ethnicity & Health 555 minority group, in the European context, as ‘minority populations of non European origin’. Ethnicity is a useful concept for public health research because, as a social construct, it facilitates the examination of attitudes, beliefs and practices relevant to a delineated group (Oppenheimer 2001). However, ethnicity is also a problematic concept because, as Agyemang et al. (forthcoming) point out, there are no appropriate terms for its use in the scientific study of health. On the one hand, the constituents of ethnicity presented in the first definition � shared language, diet, religion and ancestry � are very similar to the constituents of culture. At a conceptual and methodological level it raises questions about where culture ends and ethnicity begins in contexts of social diversity. On the other hand, the use of ethnicity within the context of ‘ethnic minority’ discourse in Europe and North America tends to obscure national differences (e.g. Nigerian versus Ghanaian, Jamaican versus Trinidadian and Indian versus Bangladeshi) and ethnic differences within different nationalities (e.g. Yoruba versus Ibo within the Nigerian nationality).

For most racial and ethnic populations in the United States, classification problems also arise because of the progress of amalgamation and assimilation. The significant exception remains African Americans. Because of the rigidity of the boundary between blacks and whites, few definitional problems arise: rates of intermarriage between blacks and others have historically been low. Even with recent increases, in 1983-86, only 5% of African American males had marriages involving white spouses, and 2% of African American females had white spouses (Kalmijn 1993). Further, the common use in the United States of the rule of hypodescent (the one-drop rule) to classify persons of remote black African descent as African American reduces ambiguity about the boundaries of this population (Davis 1991). Annu. Rev. Sociol. 1995.21:419-446. Downloaded from arjournals.annualreviews.org by HARVARD UNIVERSITY on 07/27/09. For personal use only. 422 WATERS & ESCHBACH At the other extreme, white ancestry groups have experienced extremely high rates of intermarriage with one another, so that many members of the conventional European national descent populations are of mixed ethnic descent. Scholars have debated whether the patterns of intermarriage and ambiguity about identity among white ethnics mean that assimilation theory accurately portrays the fate of the European descent ethnicities (Greeley 1974, Gans 1979, Alba 1990). Intermarriage may be especially important in the future evolution of ethnic categories that are neither European nor African. As we discuss in this review, current conditions of incorporation may sustain the structural segregation and the social significance of ethnic descent for these other groups that on average are much greater than for European Americans, but much less than for African Americans. American Indians, for example, remain the most disadvantaged of major American ethnic categories on census measures of poverty and educational attainment. The persistence of the social significance of a Native American ethnic category 500 years after Columbus's voyage is evidence that ethnic distinctions may in some cases be durable. Yet one of the mechanisms that has sustained the distinctiveness of American Indian communities has been the spinoff of many migrants from these communities into the general American population. Because of the subsequent amalgamation and assimilation of many of these off-reservation migrants and their descendants, far more of the descendants of the inhabitants of North America self-identify as whites rather than as American Indians (Snipp 1989, Eschbach 1995). Thus the assimilation process walks hand in hand with the maintenance of ethnic boundaries. New immigrant populations from Asia and Latin America may well experience processes of incorporation into the United States that will create considerable confusion about who is a member of a given ethnic population. Data from 1990 showed that because of intermarriage "about one quarter of the 2 million children with at least one Asian parent, and of the 5.4 million with at least one Hispanic parent live in inter-racial households with a white parent or step parent" (Harrison & Bennett 1995: 40). These percentages will be likely to increase in subsequent generations of descendants. Available evidence suggests that Americans do not consistently use the rule of hypodescent to classify persons of part-Hispanic or part-Asian descent with the 'minority' component of their descent (Davis 1991); ethnic self-identification is inconsistent in these mixed descent populations (Harrison & Bennett 1995). These facts suggest the need for considerable caution in making comparisons of different racial and ethnic populations.