Is there an international duty to protect persons in the event of an epidemic?

In 2006, the International Law Commission began a study into the role of states and international organizations in protecting persons in the event of a disaster. Special Rapporteur Mr. Eduardo Valencia-Ospina was appointed to head the study, and in 2011 the findings of the study will be presented to the United Nations General Assembly. Of interest to this paper has been the inclusion of “epidemics” under the natural disaster category in all of the reports detailing the Commission’s program of work on the protection of persons. This paper seeks to examine the legal and political ramifications involved in including “epidemic” into the concept of protection by exploring where sovereign responsibility for epidemic control begins and ends, particularly in light of the revisions to the International Health Regulations by the World Health Assembly in 2005. The paper will first analyze the findings already presented by the Special Rapporteur, examining the existing “responsibilities” of both states and international organizations. Then, the paper will consider to what extent the concept of protection entails the duty to assist individuals when an affected state proves unwilling or unable to assist their own population in the event of a disease outbreak. In an attempt to answer this question, the third part of the paper will examine the recent cholera outbreak in Zimbabwe.

Advanced mass spectrometry-based multi-omics technologies for exploring the pathogenesis of hepatocellular carcinoma

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is one of the primary hepatic malignancies and is the third most common cause of cancer related death worldwide. Although a wealth of knowledge has been gained concerning the initiation and progression of HCC over the last half century, efforts to improve our understanding of its pathogenesis at a molecular level are still greatly needed, to enable clinicians to enhance the standards of the current diagnosis and treatment of HCC. In the post-genome era, advanced mass spectrometry driven multi-omics technologies (e.g., profiling of DNA damage adducts, RNA modification profiling, proteomics, and metabolomics) stand at the interface between chemistry and biology, and have yielded valuable outcomes from the study of a diversity of complicated diseases. Particularly, these technologies are being broadly used to dissect various biological aspects of HCC with the purpose of biomarker discovery, interrogating pathogenesis as well as for therapeutic discovery. This proof of knowledge-based critical review aims at exploring the selected applications of those defined omics technologies in the HCC niche with an emphasis on translational applications driven by advanced mass spectrometry, toward the specific clinical use for HCC patients. This approach will enable the biomedical community, through both basic research and the clinical sciences, to enhance the applicability of mass spectrometry-based omics technologies in dissecting the pathogenesis of HCC and could lead to novel therapeutic discoveries for HCC.

Planning to Learn : Creating and Using a Personal Planner with Young People on the Autism Spectrum

Late intervention often means that young people on the autism spectrum appear to act on impulse, seem disorganized, or fail to learn from past experiences. In this practical, effective resource, the authors share tried and tested techniques for creating and using a personal planner to help individuals on the autism spectrum to develop independence. "Planning to Learn" is split into three parts. The first part guides adults in helping young people to make sense of the world and to develop and practise coping strategies for any given situation. The authors also explain how simple visual and verbal cues can help people to cope successfully in stressful situations. The second part provides worksheets for the young person to complete to learn how to use plans in different situations, for example staying calm when waiting for a doctor, or coping with a change in the school timetable. Each individual makes a unique planner with procedures to refer to, such as responding to pressure, calming down, being organised, and being around people. The third part includes useful cards, schedules and plans for photocopying and including in the planner. This illustrated photocopiable workbook is packed with guidance, support and helpful notes for those new to, or experienced in, working with children and young people with ASD. It can be used within educational and community settings or at home.

Essays in the political economy of voting and reforms

This thesis presents four essays in the political economy of elections and reforms. The first study exploits discontinuities around school entry cut-off dates to show that early childhood conditions can impact the probability to become a top-flight politician. The second study provides empirical estimates of the effect of sequential voting on turnout and bandwagon voting outside the laboratory. The third work describes a novel nonparametric strategy to identify tactical voting patterns directly from balloting results using British election data. Finally, a study is put forward that examines the political feasibility of reforms.

One-stop shopping : some notes on the concept and some Australian initiatives

This paper aims to review the notion of the one-stop shop, particularly as it has developed in Australia. It has three main components. The first focuses on a significant initiative taken by the Coombs Royal Commission on Australian Government Administration as a form of action research in the mid-1970s. The second highlights the associated work on access theory by the late Bernard Schaffer and his associates and explains why this work was of fundamental importance for the development of the idea of the one-stop shop. The third deals with subsequent Australian understandings and a pp lications of the idea.

Corporate sustainability reporting for water : water footprint, global reporting initiative and the water accounting framework

Three initiatives with respect to water reporting in the mining sector are compared in this paper to understand the quantities that are asked for by each initiative and the guidelines of those initiatives through means of a case study. The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) was chosen because it has achieved widespread acceptance amongst mining companies and its water-related indicators are widely reported in corporate sustainability reporting. In contrast, the Water Footprint Network, which has been an important initiative in food and agricultural industries, has had low acceptance in the mining industry. The third initiative is the Water Accounting Framework, a collaboration between The Minerals Council of Australia and the Sustainable Minerals Institute of the University of Queensland. A water account had previously been created according to the Water Accounting Framework for the case study site, an open pit coal mine in the Bowen Basin. The resulting account provided consistent data for the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) and the Water Footprint attributable to mining but in particular, a deficiency in the GRI indicator of EN10 reuse and recycling efficiency was illustrated quantitatively. This has far-reaching significance due to the widespread use of GRI indicators in mining corporate reports.

Human resource management and entrepreneurship : building theory at the intersection

In 2008 we brought together much work at the intersection of entrepreneurship and human resource management (HRM) (Barrett & Mayson, 2008), after calls for more research (Baron, 2003; Katz, Aldrich, Welbourne & Williams, 2000; Tansky & Heneman, 2003). More has been collated since (Soriano, Dobon & Tansky, 2010; Tansky, Soriano & Dobon, 2010). We think it is now time again to regroup, pull conversational threads together and have a critical look at recent research at the intersection of HRM and Entrepreneurship. As editors of International Handbook of Entrepreneurship and HRM (Barrett & Mayson, 2008) we were privileged to collect 23 wonderfully diverse chapters from scholars around the globe addressing a range of issues at the intersection of the two pertinent disciplines or fields: HRM and entrepreneurship. This edition represented a coalescing of ideas that had been swirling about for some time. In three sections, the first dealt with theory and research methods, the second with the nature of HRM in small and entrepreneurial firms and the third with the functional aspects of HRM. At the time we were aware that the handbook did not cover the entire field and many topics were left unexplored. For example, the topic of regulation was generally absent while issues such as career advancement, performance management, organisational change and gender, diversity and ethnicity were also missing. In essence, the majority of those contributions sought to develop an understanding of the context in which particular aspects of HRM can be played out.

On the design of power buffer and its applications

A power electronics-based buffer is examined in which through control of its PWM converters, the buffer-load combination is driven to operate under either constant power or constant impedance modes. A battery, incorporated within the buffer, provides the energy storage facility to facilitate the necessary power flow control. Real power demand from upstream supply is regulated under fault condition, and the possibility of voltage or network instability is reduced. The proposed buffer is also applied to a wind farm. It is shown that the buffer stabilizes the power contribution from the farm. Based on a battery cost-benefit analysis, a method is developed to determine the optimal level of the power supplied from the wind farm and the corresponding capacity of the battery storage system.

What is the apparent angle of a Kelvin ship wave pattern?

While the half-angle which encloses a Kelvin ship wave pattern is commonly accepted to be 19.47 degrees, recent observations and calculations for sufficiently fast-moving ships suggest that the apparent wake angle decreases with ship speed. One explanation for this decrease in angle relies on the assumption that a ship cannot generate wavelengths much greater than its hull length. An alternative interpretation is that the wave pattern that is observed in practice is defined by the location of the highest peaks; for wakes created by sufficiently fast-moving objects, these highest peaks no longer lie on the outermost divergent waves, resulting in a smaller apparent angle. In this paper, we focus on the problems of free surface flow past a single submerged point source and past a submerged source doublet. In the linear version of these problems, we measure the apparent wake angle formed by the highest peaks, and observe the following three regimes: a small Froude number pattern, in which the divergent waves are not visible; standard wave patterns for which the maximum peaks occur on the outermost divergent waves; and a third regime in which the highest peaks form a V-shape with an angle much less than the Kelvin angle. For nonlinear flows, we demonstrate that nonlinearity has the effect of increasing the apparent wake angle so that some highly nonlinear solutions have apparent wake angles that are greater than Kelvin's angle. For large Froude numbers, the effect on apparent wake angle can be more dramatic, with the possibility of strong nonlinearity shifting the wave pattern from the third regime to the second. We expect our nonlinear results will translate to other more complicated flow configurations, such as flow due to a steadily moving closed body such as a submarine.

Capital-C culture : the perfect American at the Brisbane Festival

A review of Philip Glass's opera The Perfect American. The Brisbane Festival’s production of Philip Glass’s opera The Perfect American is only the third production of the 2012 work ever to be staged. That’s quite a coup for the Brisbane Festival and Opera Queensland. The Perfect American was commissioned by Madrid’s Teatro Real and London’s English National Opera to mark the American composer’s 75th birthday. Glass’s telling of the Disney myth focuses on the final stages of Walt Disney’s life and career – a high art critique of a popular culture icon...

Queensland farmers rise up to take on the miners

Queensland’s Surat Basin has the third largest energy resource in the world — with vast coal seam gas and coal reserves — but farm groups are warning that mining areas, which are prime farm land, risk catastrophic environmental damage to food-producing areas. Mining development is moving very quickly with 36,000 wells due to be sunk in the next few years. A Senate inquiry into the impacts of mining in the Murray-Darling Basin heard evidence from farm and mining industry representatives in Oakey on the Darling Downs yesterday.

Metal Skin and the cinema of noise

In traditional communication and information theory, noise is the demon Other, an unwelcome disruption in the passage of information. Noise is "anything that is added to the signal between its transmission and reception that is not intended by the source...anything that makes the intended signal harder to decode accurately". It is in Michel Serres' formulation, the "third man" in dialogue who is always assumed, and whom interlocutors continually struggle to exclude. Noise is simultaneously a condition and a by-product of the act of communication, it represents the ever present possibility of disruption, interruption, misunderstanding. In sonic or musical terms noise is cacophony, dissonance. For economists, noise is an arbitrary element, both a barrier to the pursuit of wealth and a basis for speculation. For Mick (Jeremy Sims) and his mate Kev (Ben Mendelsohn) in David Caesar's Idiot Box (1996), as for Hando (Russell Crowe) and his gang of skinheads in Geoffrey Wright's Romper Stomper (1992), or Dazey (Ben Mendelsohn) and Joe (Aden Young) in Wright's Metal Skin (1994) and all those like them starved of (useful) information and excluded from the circuit - the information poor - their only option, their only point of intervention in the loop, is to make noise, to disrupt, to discomfort, to become Serres' "third man", "the prosopopoeia of noise" (5).

Can’t we all just get along? A qualitative investigation of the cognitive processes motivating driver aggression.

Although driver aggression has been identified as contributing to crashes, current understanding of the fundamental causes of the behaviour is poor. Two key reasons for this are evident. Firstly, existing research has been largely atheoretical, with no unifying conceptual framework guiding investigation. Secondly, emphasis on observable behaviours has resulted in limited knowledge of the underlying thought processes that motivate behaviour. Since driving is fundamentally a social situation, requiring drivers to interpret on-road events, insight regarding these perception and appraisal processes is paramount in advancing understanding of the underlying causes. Thus, the current study aimed to explore the cognitive appraisal processes involved in driver aggression, using a conceptual model founded on the General Aggression Model (Anderson & Bushman, 2002). The present results reflect the first of several studies testing this model. Participants completed 3 structured driving diaries to explore perceptions and cognitions. Thematic analysis of diaries identified several cognitive themes. The first, ‘driving etiquette’ concerned an implied code of awareness and consideration for other motorists, breaches of which were strongly associated with reports of anger and frustration. Such breaches were considered intentional; attributed to dispositional traits of another driver, and precipitated the second theme, ‘justified retaliation’. This theme showed that drivers view their aggressive behaviour as warranted, to convey criticism towards another motorist’s etiquette violation. However, the third theme, ‘superiority’ suggested that those refraining from an aggressive response were motivated by a desire to perceive themselves as ‘better’ than the offending motorists. Collectively, the themes indicate deep-seated and complex thought patterns underlying driver aggression, and suggest the behaviour will be challenging to modify. Implications of these themes in relation to the proposed model will be discussed, and continued research will explore these cognitive processes further, to examine their interaction with person-related factors.

The global burden attributable to low bone mineral density

Introduction The Global Burden of Disease Study 2010 estimated the worldwide health burden of 291 diseases and injuries and 67 risk factors by calculating disability-adjusted life years (DALYs). Osteoporosis was not considered as a disease, and bone mineral density (BMD) was analysed as a risk factor for fractures, which formed part of the health burden due to falls. Objectives To calculate (1) the global distribution of BMD, (2) its population attributable fraction (PAF) for fractures and subsequently for falls, and (3) the number of DALYs due to BMD. Methods A systematic review was performed seeking population-based studies in which BMD was measured by dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry at the femoral neck in people aged 50 years and over. Age- and sex-specific mean ± SD BMD values (g/cm2) were extracted from eligible studies. Comparative risk assessment methodology was used to calculate PAFs of BMD for fractures. The theoretical minimum risk exposure distribution was estimated as the age- and sex-specific 90th centile from the Third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES III). Relative risks of fractures were obtained from a previous meta-analysis. Hospital data were used to calculate the fraction of the health burden of falls that was due to fractures. Results Global deaths and DALYs attributable to low BMD increased from 103 000 and 3 125 000 in 1990 to 188 000 and 5 216 000 in 2010, respectively. The percentage of low BMD in the total global burden almost doubled from 1990 (0.12%) to 2010 (0.21%). Around one-third of falls-related deaths were attributable to low BMD. Conclusions Low BMD is responsible for a growing global health burden, only partially representative of the real burden of osteoporosis.