Space: Irrealis objects in technology policy and their role in a new political economy

In this article, I show how new spaces are being prefigured for colonization in new economy policy discourses. Drawing on a corpus of 1.3 million words collected from legislatures throughout the world, I show the role of policy language in creating the foundations of an emergent form of political economy: The analysis is informed by principles from critical discourse analysis (CDA), classical political economy and critical media studies. It foregrounds a functional aspect of language called process metaphor to show how aspects of human activity are prefigured for mass commodification by the manipulation of realis and irrealis spaces. I also show how the fundamental element of any new political economy, the property element, is being largely ignored. Current moves to create a privately owned global space, which is as concrete as landed property - namely, the electromagnetic spectrum - has significant ramifications for the future of social relations in any global knowledge economy.

Using the World Wide Web to revolutionise technology transfer and training in the water and wastewater industries

Industry professionals of the near future will be supported by an IT infrastructure that enables them to complete a task by drawing on resources and people with expertise anywhere in the world, and access to knowledge through specific training programs that address the task requirements. The increasing uptake of new technologies enables information to reach a diverse population and to provide flexible learning environments 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. This paper examines one of the key areas where the World Wide Web will impact on the water and wastewater industries, namely technology transfer and training. The authors will present their experiences of developing online training courses for wastewater industry professionals over the last two years. The perspective is that of two people working at the coalface.

An optimal level of technology reliance on foreign partners in a global sourcing partnership: components procurement, technology management and market performance

Existing studies on global sourcing strategy have implicitly adopted a cJosed-systems perspective in which sourcing activities are managed within a multinational company across national boundaries. Produd and process innovations and components procurement that are jointly managed by a consortium of cooperating firms have not been examined. In this paper, we empiricallyexamine the issues concerning sourcing partnerships in an open-systems perspective. Findings suggest that even in a sourcing partnership arrangement with a foreign supplier, the principal firm's ability to procure and control the supply of major components has a positive bearing on its market performance.

Fractional order calculus: basic concepts and engineering applications

The fractional order calculus (FOC) is as old as the integer one although up to recently its application was exclusively in mathematics. Many real systems are better described with FOC differential equations as it is a well-suited tool to analyze problems of fractal dimension, with long-term “memory” and chaotic behavior. Those characteristics have attracted the engineers' interest in the latter years, and now it is a tool used in almost every area of science. This paper introduces the fundamentals of the FOC and some applications in systems' identification, control, mechatronics, and robotics, where it is a promissory research field.

Engineering bio-based polymers using alternative solvents and processes

The work presented in this thesis explores novel routes for the processing of bio-based polymers, developing a sustainable approach based on the use of alternative solvents such as supercritical carbon dioxide (scCO2), ionic liquids (ILs) and deep eutectic solvents (DES). The feasibility to produce polymeric foams via supercritical fluid (SCF) foaming, combined with these solvents was assessed, in order to replace conventional foaming techniques that use toxic and harmful solvents. A polymer processing methodology is presented, based on SCF foaming and using scCO2 as a foaming agent. The SCF foaming of different starch based polymeric blends was performed, namely starch/poly(lactic acid) (SPLA) and starch/poly(ε-caprolactone) (SPCL). The foaming process is based on the fact that CO2 molecules can dissolve in the polymer, changing their mechanical properties and after suitable depressurization, are able to create a foamed (porous) material. In these polymer blends, CO2 presents limited solubility and in order to enhance the foaming effect, two different imidazolium based ILs (IBILs) were combined with this process, by doping the blends with IL. The use of ILs proved useful and improved the foaming effect in these starch-based polymer blends. Infrared spectroscopy (FTIR-ATR) proved the existence of interactions between the polymer blend SPLA and ILs, which in turn diminish the forces that hold the polymeric structure. This is directly related with the ability of ILs to dissolve more CO2. This is also clear from the sorption experiments results, where the obtained apparent sorption coefficients in presence of IL are higher compared to the ones of the blend SPLA without IL. The doping of SPCL with ILs was also performed. The foaming of the blend was achieved and resulted in porous materials with conductivity values close to the ones of pure ILs. This can open doors to applications as self-supported conductive materials. A different type of solvents were also used in the previously presented processing method. If different applications of the bio-based polymers are envisaged, replacing ILs must be considered, especially due to the poor sustainability of some ILs and the fact that there is not a well-established toxicity profile. In this work natural DES – NADES – were the solvents of choice. They present some advantages relatively to ILs since they are easy to produce, cheaper, biodegradable and often biocompatible, mainly due to the fact that they are composed of primary metabolites such as sugars, carboxylic acids and amino-acids. NADES were prepared and their physicochemical properties were assessed, namely the thermal behavior, conductivity, density, viscosity and polarity. With this study, it became clear that these properties can vary with the composition of NADES, as well as with their initial water content. The use of NADES in the SCF foaming of SPCL, acting as foaming agent, was also performed and proved successful. The SPCL structure obtained after SCF foaming presented enhanced characteristics (such as porosity) when compared with the ones obtained using ILs as foaming enhancers. DES constituted by therapeutic compounds (THEDES) were also prepared. The combination of choline chloride-mandelic acid, and menthol-ibuprofen, resulted in THEDES with thermal behavior very distinct from the one of their components. The foaming of SPCL with THEDES was successful, and the impregnation of THEDES in SPCL matrices via SCF foaming was successful, and a controlled release system was obtained in the case of menthol-ibuprofen THEDES.

Concepts and objects of awareness in Alzheimer’s disease: an updated systematic review

ABSTRACT Objectives To compare and discuss the objects of awareness in Alzheimer’s disease (AD): awareness of cognitive deficits, of functional activities, of social-emotional functioning and behavioral impairment. Methods A search in the PsycINFo, Pilots, PubMed/Medline and ISI electronic databases according to Prisma methodology was performed. We included studies about awareness in people with AD published between 2010 and 2015, with the combination of keywords: “Alzheimer AND awareness of deficits”, “Alzheimer AND anosognosia”, “Alzheimer AND insight”, “dementia AND awareness of deficits”, “dementia AND anosognosia”, “dementia AND insight”. The articles were categorized according to the specific object of awareness. Results Seven hundred and ten records were identified and, after application of the exclusion criteria, 191 studies were retrieved for potential use. After excluding the duplicates, 46 studies were included. Most studies assessed the cognitive domain of awareness, followed by the functional, social-emotional, and behavioral impairment domains. Memory deficits were not sufficient to explain impaired awareness in AD. Longitudinal studies did not find discrepancies between patients and caregivers’ reports, indicating that awareness is not related to cognition. Conflicting findings were observed, including the relation between awareness, mood, severity of disease, and personal characteristics. Conclusions The studies show lack of conceptual consensus and significant methodological differences. The inclusion of samples without differentiation of dementia etiology is associated to symptomatic differences, which affect awareness domains. Awareness in AD is a complex and multidimensional construct. Different objects elicit different levels of awareness.

Tropical American Myrtaceae; notes on generic concepts and descriptions of previously unrecognized species.

v.29:no.3(1956)

Tropical American Myrtaceae, II ; notes on generic concepts and descriptions of previously unrecognized species / Rogers McVaugh.

v.29:no.8(1963)

Technology shocks and aggregate fluctuations in an estimated hybrid RBC model

This paper contributes to the on-going empirical debate regarding the role of the RBC model and in particular of technology shocks in explaining aggregate fluctuations. To this end we estimate the model’s posterior density using Markov-Chain Monte-Carlo (MCMC) methods. Within this framework we extend Ireland’s (2001, 2004) hybrid estimation approach to allow for a vector autoregressive moving average (VARMA) process to describe the movements and co-movements of the model’s errors not explained by the basic RBC model. The results of marginal likelihood ratio tests reveal that the more general model of the errors significantly improves the model’s fit relative to the VAR and AR alternatives. Moreover, despite setting the RBC model a more difficult task under the VARMA specification, our analysis, based on forecast error and spectral decompositions, suggests that the RBC model is still capable of explaining a significant fraction of the observed variation in macroeconomic aggregates in the post-war U.S. economy.

Extending contingency: the impact of strategy, technology, size and business environment on the organisational form of small Chinese firms

This paper is inspired by articles in the last decade or so that have argued for more attention to theory, and to empirical analysis, within the well-known, and long-lasting, contingency framework for explaining the organisational form of the firm. Its contribution is to extend contingency analysis in three ways: (a) by empirically testing it, using explicit econometric modelling (rather than case study evidence) involving estimation by ordered probit analysis; (b) by extending its scope from large firms to SMEs; (c) by extending its applications from Western economic contexts, to an emerging economy context, using field work evidence from China. It calibrates organizational form in a new way, as an ordinal dependent variable, and also utilises new measures of familiar contingency factors from the literature (i.e. Environment, Strategy, Size and Technology) as the independent variables. An ordered probit model of contingency was constructed, and estimated by maximum likelihood, using a cross section of 83 private Chinese firms. The probit was found to be a good fit to the data, and displayed significant coefficients with plausible interpretations for key variables under all the four categories of contingency analysis, namely Environment, Strategy, Size and Technology. Thus we have generalised the contingency model, in terms of specification, interpretation and applications area.

Tax evasion, technology shocks, and the cyclicality of government revenues

This paper analyzes the behavior of the tax revenue to output ratio over the business cycle. In order to replicate the empirical evidence, we develop a simple model combining the standard Ak growth model with the tax evasion phenomenon. When individuals conceal part of their true income from the tax authority, they face the risk of being audited and hence of paying the corresponding fine. Under the empirically plausible assumptions that the intertemporal elasticity of substitution exhibits a sufficiently small value and that productivity shocks are serially correlated, we show that the elasticity of government revenue with respect to output is larger than one, which agrees with the empirical evidence. This result holds even if the tax system displays flat tax rates. We extend the previous setup to generate larger fiscal deficits when the economy experiences a recession.

WePreserve 2009: DPE/Planets/CASPAR/nestor Joint Training Event: The Preservation challenge: basic concepts and practical applications (Barcelona, 23-27 març 2009)

Reseña del congreso WePreserve 2009 que tuvo lugar los pasados 23 al 27 de marzo en Barcelona, organizadopor la Facultad de Biblioteconomía y Documentación de la Universitat de Barcelona, con la colaboración del Institut d'Estudis Catalans, la Biblioteca de Catalunya y el Consorci de Biblioteques de Barcelona. El seminario 2009 WePreserve se celebra anualmente desde el año 2007 y participan todas las figuras de referencia europeas en materia de investigación en sistemas y metodologías que garantizan la preservación digital de los documentos: Digital Preservation Europe (DPE), Preservation and Long-term Access Through Networked Services (Planets), Cultural Artistic and Scientific Knowledge for Preservation, Access and Retrieval (CASPAR), y Network of expertise in Digital long-term preservation (nestor).

Direct analysis of dried blood spots coupled with mass spectrometry: concepts and biomedical applications.

Because of the emergence of dried blood spots (DBS) as an attractive alternative to conventional venous plasma sampling in many pharmaceutical companies and clinical laboratories, different analytical approaches have been developed to enable automated handling of DBS samples without any pretreatment. Associated with selective and sensitive MS-MS detection, these procedures give good results in the rapid identification and quantification of drugs (generally less than 3 min total run time), which is desirable because of the high throughput requirements of analytical laboratories. The objective of this review is to describe the analytical concepts of current direct DBS techniques and to present their advantages and disadvantages, with particular focus on automation capacity and commercial availability. Finally, an overview of the different biomedical applications in which these concepts could be of major interest will be presented.