Detection and characterisation of strong resistance to phosphine in Brazilian Rhyzopertha dominica (F.) (Coleoptera: Bostrychidae)

As failure to control Rhyzopertha dominica (F.) with phosphine is a common problem in the grain-growing regions of Brazil, a study was undertaken to investigate the frequency, distribution and strength of phosphine resistance in R. dominica in Brazil. Nineteen samples of R. dominica were collected between 1991 and 2003 from central storages where phosphine fumigation had failed to control this species. Insects were cultured without selection until testing in 2005. Each sample was tested for resistance to phosphine on the basis of the response of adults to discriminating concentrations of phosphine (20 and 48 h exposures) and full dose-response assays (48 h exposure). Responses of the Brazilian R. dominica samples were compared with reference susceptible, weak-resistance and strong-resistance strains from Australia in parallel assays. All Brazilian population samples showed resistance to phosphine: five were diagnosed with weak resistance and 14 with strong resistance. Five samples showed levels of resistance similar to the reference strong-resistance strain. A representative highly resistant sample was characterised by exposing mixed-age cultures to a range of constant concentrations of phosphine for various exposure periods. Time to population extinction (TPE) and time to 99.9% suppression of population (LT99.9) values of this sample were generally similar to those of the reference strong-resistance strain. For example, at 0.1, 0.5 and 1.0 mg L-1, LT99.9 values for BR33 and the reference strong-resistance strain were respectively 21, 6.4 and 3.7 days and 17, 6.2 and 3.8 days. With both strains, doubling phosphine concentrations to 2 mg L -1 resulted in increased LT99.9 and TPE. High level and frequency of resistance in all population samples, some of which had been cultured without selection for up to 12 years, suggest little or no fitness deficit associated with phosphine resistance. The present research indicates that widespread phosphine resistance may be developing in Brazil. Fumigation practices should be monitored and resistance management plans implemented to alleviate further resistance development.

“We don’t tell people what to do”: Ethical practice and Indigenous health promotion

Health promotion aspires to work in empowering, participatory ways, with the goal of supporting people to increase control over their health. However, buried in this goal is an ethical tension: while increasing people’s autonomy, health promotion also imposes a particular, health promotion-sanctioned version of what is good. This tension positions practitioners precariously, where the ethos of empowerment risks increasing health promotion’s paternalistic control over people, rather than people’s control over their own health. Here in we argue that this ethical tension is amplified in Indigenous Australia, where colonial processes of control over Indigenous lands, lives and cultures are indistinguishable from contemporary health promotion ‘interventions’. Moreover, the potential stigmatisation produced in any paternalistic acts ‘done for their own good’ cannot be assumed to have evaporated within the self-proclaimed ‘empowering’ narratives of health promotion. This issue’s guest editor’s call for health promotion to engage ‘with politics and with philosophical ideas about the state and the citizen’ is particularly relevant in an Indigenous Australian context. Indigenous Australians continue to experience health promotion as a moral project of control through intervention, which contradicts health promotion’s central goal of empowerment. Therefore, Indigenous health promotion is an invaluable site for discussion and analysis of health promotion’s broader ethical tensions. Given the persistent and alarming Indigenous health inequalities, this paper calls for systematic ethical reflection in order to redress health promotion’s general failure to reduce health inequalities experienced by Indigenous Australians.

Economic theory informing approaches to phoenix activity in small business: A neo-Schumpeterian analysis

The adequacy and efficiency of existing legal and regulatory frameworks dealing with corporate phoenix activity have been repeatedly called into question over the past two decades through various reviews, inquiries, targeted regulatory operations and the implementation of piecemeal legislative reform. Despite these efforts, phoenix activity does not appear to have abated. While there is no law in Australia that declares ‘phoenix activity’ to be illegal, the behaviour that tends to manifest in phoenix activity can be capable of transgressing a vast array of law, including for example, corporate law, tax law, and employment law. This paper explores the notion that the persistence of phoenix activity despite the sheer extent of this law suggests that the law is not acting as powerfully as it might as a deterrent. Economic theories of entrepreneurship and innovation can to some extent explain why this is the case and also offer a sound basis for the evaluation and reconsideration of the existing law. The challenges facing key regulators are significant. Phoenix activity is not limited to particular corporate demographic: it occurs in SMEs, large companies and in corporate groups. The range of behaviour that can amount to phoenix activity is so broad, that not all phoenix activity is illegal. This paper will consider regulatory approaches to these challenges via analysis of approaches to detection and enforcement of the underlying law capturing illegal phoenix activity. Remedying the mischief of phoenix activity is of practical importance. The benefits include continued confidence in our economy, law that inspires best practice among directors, and law that is articulated in a manner such that penalties act as a sufficient deterrent and the regulatory system is able to detect offenders and bring them to account. Any further reforms must accommodate and tolerate legal phoenix activity, at least to some extent. Even then, phoenix activity pushes tolerance of repeated entrepreneurial failure to its absolute limit. The more limited liability is misused and abused, the stronger the argument to place some restrictions on access to limited liability. This paper proposes that such an approach is a legitimate next step for a robust and mature capitalist economy.

Using old concepts to gain new insights: Addressing the issue of consistency

Purpose – This paper aims to go beyond a bookkeeping approach to evolutionary analysis whereby surviving firms are better adapted and extinct firms were less adapted. From discussion of the preliminary findings of research into the Hobart pizza industry, evidence is presented of the need to adopt a more traditional approach to applying evolutionary theories with organizational research. Design/methodology/approach – After a brief review of the relevant literature, the preliminary findings of research into the Hobart pizza industry are presented. Then, several evolutionary concepts that are commonplace in ecological research are introduced to help explain the emergent findings. The paper concludes with consideration given to advancing a more consistent approach to employing evolutionary theories within organizational research. Findings – The paper finds that the process of selection cannot be assumed to occur evenly across time and/or space. Within geographically small markets different forms of selection operate in different ways and degrees requiring the use of more traditional evolutionary theories to highlight the causal process associated with population change. Research limitations/implications – The paper concludes by highlighting Geoffrey Hodgson’s Principle of Consistency. It is demonstrated that a failure to truly understand how and why theory is used in one domain will likely result in its misuse in another domain. That, at present, too few evolutionary concepts are employed in organisational research to ensure an appreciation of any underlying causal processes through which social change occurs. Originality/value – The concepts introduced throughout this paper, whilst not new, provide new entry points for organizational researchers intent on employing an evolutionary approach to understand the process of social change.

Contingent sensitivity to configuration in a nonlinear evolution system

A trans-scopic sensitivity of macroscopic failure to slight differentiation in the meso-scopic structure of a system with nonlinear evolution is reported. A periodical chain following a non-local load-sharing evolution was applied as a propotype in failure study. The results demonstrate that there is a transition region composed of globally stable (GS) and evolution induced catastrophic (EIC) modes. That is different from a critical threshold as predicted by percolation and renormalization group theories. Moreover, the EIC mode shows a distinctive sample specific behaviour. For instance, some neighbouring initial states may evolve into completely different final states, though different initial states can evolve into the same final states. As an example, a marginal configuration of EIC mode, a quasi-Fibonacci skeleton, is constructed.

Adaptation of coastal communities in the Philippines to the impacts climate change

The Quedan and Rural Credit Guarantee Corporation (Quedancor) of the Philippine Department of Agriculture has the critical responsibility of providing and improving credit assistance to fishers, it also has the task of helping its beneficiaries meet the repayment obligations of their loans. One reason for defaults can be attributed to the devastating impact of natural calamities. Schemes in place are still insufficient to help safeguard lending programs and operations from non-repayment of loans due to production losses and damages to personal properties.(PDF contains 5 pages) Natural calamities include the uncertainties and vagaries of weather and climate that bring about typhoons, floods, and drought; earthquakes; volcanic eruption as well as pests and diseases that affect the productivity of fisheries. When natural calamities occur, small fishers are unable to pay their loans from Quedancor, moreover they have difficulty renewing their loan applications from Quedancor or accessing credit from other sources. Failure to access credit could disable them to continue venture on fishing activities and could eventually jeopardize the welfare of their entire household. The inability of creditors to pay their loans and meet their obligations also impair, to a large extent, the financial operation and viability of the lending institutions. Risk management schemes currently employed include price stabilization measures, targeted relief` to typhoons and drought victims, and crop insurance systems, to name a few. Some of these schemes are becoming very expensive to implement. Moreover, they fail to enable fishers regain sufficient resources so that they may continue production.

Design, construction and evaluation of systems to predict risk in obstetrics.

We present a systematic, practical approach to developing risk prediction systems, suitable for use with large databases of medical information. An important part of this approach is a novel feature selection algorithm which uses the area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve to measure the expected discriminative power of different sets of predictor variables. We describe this algorithm and use it to select variables to predict risk of a specific adverse pregnancy outcome: failure to progress in labour. Neural network, logistic regression and hierarchical Bayesian risk prediction models are constructed, all of which achieve close to the limit of performance attainable on this prediction task. We show that better prediction performance requires more discriminative clinical information rather than improved modelling techniques. It is also shown that better diagnostic criteria in clinical records would greatly assist the development of systems to predict risk in pregnancy.

Contribution of zooplankton to the fishery of Dharamtar Creek, adjoining Bombay Harbour

The rich zooplankton standing stock of Dharamtar Creek showed a variation of 8 to 5261 (av. 1032) mg C/100 m super(3)/d which led to a turnover of 29 tonnes C/km super(2)/y. The estimated fishery potential from zooplankton production was 0.079 tonnes C/km super(2) or 29.00 tonnes/km/y. The worked out yield in terms of wet weight of fish was 0.059 tonnes/km2u2/d. Experimental trawling within the creek showed a potential of 0.19 tonnes/km super(2)/d suggesting a transfer coefficient of only 31.4% form secondary to tertiary level. Fish eggs and larvae were very common in the area but contributed collectively only 1% to the total zooplankton population. On an average the outer zone sustained relatively higher population of fish eggs and larvae than the interior zone. The mean population density of larvae (334/100 m super(3)) was 3.5 times higher than fish eggs (93/100 m super(3)) suggesting the good survival rate and a congenial environment for larvae to thrive.

Rethinking the digital divide: from philanthropy to isonomia..

The digital divide has been, at least until very recently, a major theme in policy as well as interdisciplinary academic circles across the world, as well as at a collective global level, as attested by the World Summit on the Information Society. Numerous research papers and volumes have attempted to conceptualise the digital divide and to offer reasoned prescriptive and normative responses. What has been lacking in many of these studies, it is submitted, is a rigorous negotiation of moral and political philosophy, the result being a failure to situate the digital divide - or rather, more widely, information imbalances - in a holistic understanding of social structures of power and wealth. In practice, prescriptive offerings have been little more than philanthropic in tendency, whether private or corporate philanthropy. Instead, a theory of distributive justice is required, one that recovers the tradition of emancipatory, democratic struggle. This much has been said before. What is new here, however, is that the paper suggests a specific formula, the Rawls-Tawney theorem, as a solution at the level of analytical moral-political philosophy. Building on the work of John Rawls and R. H. Tawney, this avoids both the Charybdis of Marxism and the Scylla of liberalism. It delineates some of the details of the meaning of social justice in the information age. Promulgating a conception of isonomia, which while egalitarian eschews arithmetic equality (the equality of misery), the paper hopes to contribute to the emerging ideal of communicative justice in the media-saturated, post-industrial epoch.

An analysis of the changes to the mechanical and acoustical properties of paper caused by the damage mechanisms present in the fibre structure

This paper will analyse two of the likely damage mechanisms present in a paper fibre matrix when placed under controlled stress conditions: fibre/fibre bond failure and fibre failure. The failure process associated with each damage mechanism will be presented in detail focusing on the change in mechanical and acoustic properties of the surrounding fibre structure before and after failure. To present this complex process mathematically, geometrically simple fibre arrangements will be chosen based on certain assumptions regarding the structure and strength of paper, to model the damage mechanisms. The fibre structures are then formulated in terms of a hybrid vibro-acoustic model based on a coupled mass/spring system and the pressure wave equation. The model will be presented in detail in the paper. The simulation of the simple fibre structures serves two purposes; it highlights the physical and acoustic differences of each damage mechanism before and after failure, and also shows the differences in the two damage mechanisms when compared with one another. The results of the simulations are given in the form of pressure wave contours, time-frequency graphs and the Continuous Wavelet Transform (CWT) diagrams. The analysis of the results leads to criteria by which the two damage mechanisms can be identified. Using these criteria it was possible to verify the results of the simulations against experimental acoustic data. The models developed in this study are of specific practical interest in the paper-making industry, where acoustic sensors may be used to monitor continuous paper production. The same techniques may be adopted more generally to correlate acoustic signals to damage mechanisms in other fibre-based structures.

Identifying strategies to maximise recruitment and retention of practices and patients in a multicentre randomised controlled trial of an intervention to optimise secondary prevention for coronary heart disease in primary care.

Background Recruitment and retention of patients and healthcare providers in randomised controlled trials (RCTs) is important in order to determine the effectiveness of interventions. However, failure to achieve recruitment targets is common and reasons why a particular recruitment strategy works for one study and not another remain unclear. We sought to describe a strategy used in a multicentre RCT in primary care, to report researchers’ and participants’ experiences of its implementation and to inform future strategies to maximise recruitment and retention. Methods In total 48 general practices and 903 patients were recruited from three different areas of Ireland to a RCT of an intervention designed to optimise secondary prevention of coronary heart disease. The recruitment process involved telephoning practices, posting information, visiting practices, identifying potential participants, posting invitations and obtaining consent. Retention involved patients attending reviews and responding to questionnaires and practices facilitating data collection. Results We achieved high retention rates for practices (100%) and for patients (85%) over an 18-month intervention period. Pilot work, knowledge of the setting, awareness of change in staff and organisation amongst participant sites, rapid responses to queries and acknowledgement of practitioners’ contributions were identified as being important. Minor variations in protocol and research support helped to meet varied, complex and changing individual needs of practitioners and patients and encouraged retention in the trial. A collaborative relationship between researcher and practice staff which required time to develop was perceived as vital for both recruitment and retention. Conclusions Recruiting and retaining the numbers of practices and patients estimated as required to provide findings with adequate power contributes to increased confidence in the validity and generalisability of RCT results. A continuous dynamic process of monitoring progress within trials and tailoring strategies to particular circumstances, whilst not compromising trial protocols, should allow maximal recruitment and retention.

"To be accepted as normal": Public understanding and misconceptions concerning survivors of brain injury.

PRIMARY OBJECTIVE: To determine the views held by the general public in Northern Ireland towards survivors of brain injury. RESEARCH DESIGN: Qualitative semi-structured interviews. METHODS AND PROCEDURES: Interviews were conducted with 16 members of the general public. Ten questions addressed issues such as the role of survivors of brain injury in society, the challenges they face and the characteristics ascribed to them. MAIN OUTCOMES AND RESULTS: When asked to describe someone with a brain injury participants typically used negative labels and identified the most common problems as relating to physical, cognitive, emotional and social functioning. There was a general failure to recognize that brain injury was a 'hidden' disability, with most participants expecting some outward manifestation. Relatively few previous studies have employed a qualitative approach to explore how the public perceives survivors of brain injury. CONCLUSION: Members of the public have an increasing awareness of the challenges faced by survivors of brain injury. However, in spite of this, perceptions of aggressiveness, dependency and unhappiness were still evident, suggesting potential problems in reintegrating survivors of brain injury with their communities.

From a ‘borderless world’ to a ‘world of borders’: ‘bringing history back in’

The first part of the paper explores some of the reasons why contemporary border studies understate the full significance of state borders and their global primacy. It is argued that this failing is rooted in a much wider lack of historical reflexivity-a reluctance to acknowledge the historical positioning (the 'where and when') of contemporary border studies themselves. This reluctance encourages a form of pseudohistory, or 'epochal thinking', which disfigures perspective on the present. Among the consequences are (a) exaggerated claims of the novelty of contemporary border change, propped up by poorly substantiated benchmarks in the past; (b) an incapacity to recognise the 'past in the present' as in the various historical deposits of state formation processes; and (c) a failure to recognise the distinctiveness of contemporary state borders and how they differ from other borders in their complexity and globality. The second part of the paper argues for a recalibration of border studies aimed at balancing their spatial emphases with a much greater, and more critical, historical sensitivity. It insists that 'boundedness', and state boundedness in particular, is a variable that must be understood historically. This is illustrated by arguing that a better analysis of contemporary border change means rethinking the crude periodisation which distinguishes the age of empire from the age of nation-states and, in turn, from some putative contemporary era 'beyond nation-states' and their borders.

Platinum resistant cancer cells conserve sensitivity to BH3 domains and obatoclax induced mitochondrial apoptosis

Resistance to cisplatin chemotherapy remains a major hurdle preventing effective treatment of many solid cancers. BAX and BAK are pivotal regulators of the mitochondrial apoptosis pathway, however little is known regarding their regulation in cisplatin resistant cells. Cisplatin induces DNA damage in both sensitive and resistant cells, however the latter exhibits a failure to initiate N-terminal exposure of mitochondrial BAK or mitochondrial SMAC release. Both phenotypes are highly sensitive to mitochondrial permeabilisation induced by exogenous BH3 domain peptides derived from BID, BIM, NOXA (which targets MCL-1 and A1), and there is no significant change in their prosurvival BCL2 protein expression profiles. Obatoclax, a small molecule inhibitor of pro-survival BCL-2 family proteins including MCL-1, decreases cell viability irrespective of platinum resistance status across a panel of cell lines selected for oxaliplatin resistance. In summary, selection for platinum resistance is associated with a block of mitochondrial death signalling upstream of BAX/BAK activation. Conservation of sensitivity to BH3 domain induced apoptosis can be exploited by agents such as obatoclax, which directly target the mitochondria and BCL-2 family.

Northern Ireland's Consent to the Climate Change Act 2008: An Illusion?

This is the first in a two-part analysis of Northern Ireland’s engagement with the climate governance regime created by the UK Climate Change Act 2008. It contends that UK devolution has shaped this national regime and may itself be shaped by the national low carbon transition, particularly in the case of the UK’s most devolved region. In essence, while Northern Ireland’s consent to the application of the Act appeared to represent a long-term commitment to share power in the interests of present and future generations and thus to devolution itself, this first article argues that it was also potentially illusory. The second article argues that making an effective commitment to climate governance will require its devolved administration to allow constitutional arrangements designed for conflict resolution to mature. Failure to do so will have important implications for the UK’s putative ‘national’ low carbon transition and the longer term viability of devolution in the region.