699 research outputs found
Early Childhood Education And Development In Malawi: Major Challenges And Prospects
A ZJER article on early childhood development in the Malawi education system.Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) is an integral part of basic education and represents the first essential step in achieving the goals of education for all. The child’s future personality is determined to a large extent by the learning capacity and value orientation of his/her first five years. ECEC enhances children’s readiness for school and positively influences later school and academic achievement. This article provides an overview of the status of ECEC in Malawi and then discusses the main challenges and perceived prospects. ECEC was an initiative of Christian churches in the late 1960’s. Consequently, collaborative efforts among various interested groups and organisations led to the creation of a coordinating body, the Association of Pre-school Playgroups in Malawi (APPM) in 1974. Up until the early 1990s, conventional forms of ECEC included nursery schools, kindergarten, playgroups, and creche.
Few individuals and organisations in the urban areas mostly privately owned these ECEC Centres. The main challenges are those of access, service delivery, equity and staffing
Social Quality and Work: What Impact Does Low Pay Have on Social Quality?
Using Confirmatory Factor Analysis models in conjunction with the British Household Panel
Survey (BHPS) this paper reports the first application of the concept of social quality to a UK
data set. Social quality is concerned with the quality of society, or social relations, and
consists of both a theoretical model and an empirically tested set of measures. Social quality
is explored in relation to the policy issues of low pay and the working poor given the
challenges presented by the rising number of households in work and in poverty. This
analysis reveals several striking characteristics. In terms of poverty per se poor employees are
worse off in terms of economic security, housing, health, human capital, trust, voluntarism,
citizenship, knowledge and culture whichever part of the employment structure they belong
to. However, in addition, even those in the so-called upper level of the labour market
(professional, managerial occupations which require reasonably high levels of skill and
motivation) are significantly worse off on these dimensions if they are low paid. Therefore it
suggests that measures to raise low pay, such as the living wage, are likely to have
considerable implications for social quality
Lumbar spine fusion surgery versus best conservative care for patients with severe, persistent low back pain
Aims
People with severe, persistent low back pain (LBP) may be offered lumbar spine fusion surgery if they have had insufficient benefit from recommended non-surgical treatments. However, National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) 2016 guidelines recommended not offering spinal fusion surgery for adults with LBP, except as part of a randomized clinical trial. This survey aims to describe UK clinicians’ views about the suitability of patients for such a future trial, along with their views regarding equipoise for randomizing patients in a future clinical trial comparing lumbar spine fusion surgery to best conservative care (BCC; the FORENSIC-UK trial).
Methods
An online cross-sectional survey was piloted by the multidisciplinary research team, then shared with clinical professional groups in the UK who are involved in the management of adults with severe, persistent LBP. The survey had seven sections that covered the demographic details of the clinician, five hypothetical case vignettes of patients with varying presentations, a series of questions regarding the preferred management, and whether or not each clinician would be willing to recruit the example patients into future clinical trials.
Results
There were 72 respondents, with a response rate of 9.0%. They comprised 39 orthopaedic spine surgeons, 17 neurosurgeons, one pain specialist, and 15 allied health professionals. Most respondents (n = 61,84.7%) chose conservative care as their first-choice management option for all five case vignettes. Over 50% of respondents reported willingness to randomize three of the five cases to either surgery or BCC, indicating a willingness to participate in the future randomized trial. From the respondents, transforaminal interbody fusion was the preferred approach for spinal fusion (n = 19, 36.4%), and the preferred method of BCC was a combined programme of physical and psychological therapy (n = 35, 48.5%).
Conclusion
This survey demonstrates that there is uncertainty about the role of lumbar spine fusion surgery and BCC for a range of example patients with severe, persistent LBP in the UK
Experimental tests of slender reinforced concrete columns under combined axial load and lateral force
The use of high strength concrete (HSC) in columns has become more frequent since a substantial reduction of the cross-section is obtained, meaning that slenderness increases for the same axial load and length, producing higher second order effects. However, the experimental tests in the literature of reinforced concrete columns subjected to axial load and lateral force focus on shear span ratios, according to Eurocode 2 (2004), clause 5.6.3., (M/(V·h)) lower than 6.5. This gap in the literature limits technological development for the construction of these structural elements. This paper presents 44 experimental tests on reinforced concrete columns subjected to constant axial load and monotonic lateral force. The aim of this is to gain greater knowledge of the types of elements which will also be of use in calibrating the numerical models and validating the simplified methods. The test parameters are strength of concrete (normal- and high-strength concrete), shear span ratio, axial load level and longitudinal and transversal reinforcement ratios. The strength and deformation of the columns were studied, and an analysis of the simplified methods from Eurocode 2 (2004) and ACI-318 (2008) concluded that both are very conservative. © 2011 Elsevier Ltd.The authors wish to express their sincere gratitude to the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation for the help provided through project BIA2009-10207 and to the European Union for the financial support from Feder funds.Barrera Puerto, A.; Bonet Senach, JL.; Romero, ML.; Miguel Sosa, P. (2011). Experimental tests of slender reinforced concrete columns under combined axial load and lateral force. Engineering Structures. 33(12):3676-3689. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.engstruct.2011.08.003S36763689331
The identification of poultry processing in archaeological ceramic vessels using in-situ isotope references for organic residue analysis.
Poultry products are rarely considered when reconstructing pottery use through organic residue analysis, impinging upon our understanding of the changing role of these animals in the past. Here we evaluate an isotopic approach for distinguishing chicken fats from other animal products. We compare the carbon isotopes of fatty acids extracted from modern tissues and archaeological bones and demonstrate that archaeological bones from contexts associated with pottery provide suitable reference ranges for distinguishing omnivorous animal products (e.g. pigs vs. chickens) in pots. When applied to pottery from the Anglo-Saxon site of Flixborough, England, we succeeded in identifying residues derived from chicken fats that otherwise could not be distinguished from other monogastric and ruminant animals using modern reference values only. This provides the first direct evidence for the processing of poultry or their products in pottery. The results highlight the utility of ‘in-situ’ archaeological bone lipids to identify omnivorous animal-derived lipids in archaeological ceramic vessels
An Updated Description of Heavy-Hadron Interactions in Geant-4
Exotic stable massive particles (SMP) are proposed in a number of scenarios
of physics beyond the Standard Model. It is important that LHC experiments are
able both to detect and extract the quantum numbers of any SMP with masses
around the TeV scale. To do this, an understanding of the interactions of SMPs
in matter is required. In this paper a Regge-based model of R-hadron scattering
is extended and implemented in Geant-4. In addition, the implications of
-hadron scattering for collider searches are discussed
Anthropogenic Space Weather
Anthropogenic effects on the space environment started in the late 19th
century and reached their peak in the 1960s when high-altitude nuclear
explosions were carried out by the USA and the Soviet Union. These explosions
created artificial radiation belts near Earth that resulted in major damages to
several satellites. Another, unexpected impact of the high-altitude nuclear
tests was the electromagnetic pulse (EMP) that can have devastating effects
over a large geographic area (as large as the continental United States). Other
anthropogenic impacts on the space environment include chemical release ex-
periments, high-frequency wave heating of the ionosphere and the interaction of
VLF waves with the radiation belts. This paper reviews the fundamental physical
process behind these phenomena and discusses the observations of their impacts.Comment: 71 pages, 35 figure
The Global Gridded Crop Model Intercomparison: Data and modeling protocols for Phase 1 (v1.0)
We present protocols and input data for Phase 1 of the Global Gridded Crop Model Intercomparison, a project of the Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project (AgMIP). The project includes global simulations of yields, phenologies, and many land-surface fluxes using 12–15 modeling groups for many crops, climate forcing data sets, and scenarios over the historical period from 1948 to 2012. The primary outcomes of the project include (1) a detailed comparison of the major differences and similarities among global models commonly used for large-scale climate impact assessment, (2) an evaluation of model and ensemble hindcasting skill, (3) quantification of key uncertainties from climate input data, model choice, and other sources, and (4) a multi-model analysis of the agricultural impacts of large-scale climate extremes from the historical record
The structure of the Yang-Mills spectrum for arbitrary simple gauge algebras
The mass spectrum of pure Yang-Mills theory in 3+1 dimensions is discussed
for an arbitrary simple gauge algebra within a quasigluon picture. The general
structure of the low-lying gluelump and two-quasigluon glueball spectrum is
shown to be common to all algebras, while the lightest three-quasigluon
glueballs only exist when the gauge algebra is A, that is in
particular . Higher-lying glueballs are shown to
exist only for the A, D and E gauge
algebras. The shape of the static energy between adjoint sources is also
discussed assuming the Casimir scaling hypothesis and a funnel form; it appears
to be gauge-algebra dependent when at least three sources are considered. As a
main result, the present framework's predictions are shown to be consistent
with available lattice data in the particular case of an
gauge algebra within 't Hooft's large- limit.Comment: 21 pages, 4 figures; remarks added, typos corrected in v2. v3 to
appear in EPJ
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