Good Food Safety Practices: Managing Risks to Reduce or Avoid Legal Liability

Legal aspects related to food contamination are discussed, including potential causes of legal action, management of risks, use of contracts with vendors, types of insurance, and the hazard analysis and critical control points (HACCP) process

Managerial Turnover in the English Premier League and the Subsequent Results

Efficient productivity often relies upon the matching of managerial skills and the resources available for production. Often, poor production outcomes can be attributed to those not directly involved in the production: the managers. Similarly, poor results in professional sports are often attributed to the men and women who never play a minute of a game: the managers/coaches. Managers are routinely blamed for performance and are often the first change an owner or a club will make to improve results. This paper will attempt to determine the performance effects of changing a club’s manager in soccer’s English Premier League (EPL). Further, this paper will attempt to determine the length of time an EPL manager can reasonably expect to remain employed by his club based upon his and the team’s characteristics. Utilizing panel data from seasons spanning the EPL era, we attempt to analyze if clubs act rationally or emotionally in deciding to terminate their managers

The neurological underpinnings of cluttering: Some initial findings

Background Cluttering is a fluency disorder characterised by overly rapid or jerky speech patterns that compromise intelligibility. The neural correlates of cluttering are unknown but theoretical accounts implicate the basal ganglia and medial prefrontal cortex. Dysfunction in these brain areas would be consistent with difficulties in selection and control of speech motor programs that are characteristic of speech disfluencies in cluttering. There is a surprising lack of investigation into this disorder using modern imaging techniques. Here, we used functional MRI to investigate the neural correlates of cluttering. Method We scanned 17 adults who clutter and 17 normally fluent control speakers matched for age and sex. Brain activity was recorded using sparse-sampling functional MRI while participants viewed scenes and either (i) produced overt speech describing the scene or (ii) read out loud a sentence provided that described the scene. Speech was recorded and analysed off line. Differences in brain activity for each condition compared to a silent resting baseline and between conditions were analysed for each group separately (cluster-forming threshold Z > 3.1, extent p 30 voxels, uncorrected). Results In both conditions, the patterns of activation in adults who clutter and control speakers were strikingly similar, particularly at the cortical level. Direct group comparisons revealed greater activity in adults who clutter compared to control speakers in the lateral premotor cortex bilaterally and, as predicted, on the medial surface (pre-supplementary motor area). Subcortically, adults who clutter showed greater activity than control speakers in the basal ganglia. Specifically, the caudate nucleus and putamen were overactive in adults who clutter for the comparison of picture description with sentence reading. In addition, adults who clutter had reduced activity relative to control speakers in the lateral anterior cerebellum bilaterally. Eleven of the 17 adults who clutter also stuttered. This comorbid diagnosis of stuttering was found to contribute to the abnormal overactivity seen in the group of adults who clutter in the right ventral premotor cortex and right anterior cingulate cortex. In the remaining areas of abnormal activity seen in adults who clutter compared to controls, the subgroup who clutter and stutter did not differ from the subgroup who clutter but do not stutter. Conclusions Our findings were in good agreement with theoretical predictions regarding the neural correlates of cluttering. We found evidence for abnormal function in the basal ganglia and their cortical output target, the medial prefrontal cortex. The findings are discussed in relation to models of cluttering that point to problems with motor control of speech

Optimizing fire station locations for the Istanbul metropolitan municipality

Copyright @ 2013 INFORMSThe Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality (IMM) seeks to determine locations for additional fire stations to build in Istanbul; its objective is to make residences and historic sites reachable by emergency vehicles within five minutes of a fire station’s receipt of a service request. In this paper, we discuss our development of a mathematical model to aid IMM in determining these locations by using data retrieved from its fire incident records. We use a geographic information system to implement the model on Istanbul’s road network, and solve two location models—set-covering and maximal-covering—as what-if scenarios. We discuss 10 scenarios, including the situation that existed when we initiated the project and the scenario that IMM implemented. The scenario implemented increases the city’s fire station coverage from 58.6 percent to 85.9 percent, based on a five-minute response time, with an implementation plan that spans three years

Paleoindian and Early Archaic Hunter-Gatherer Landscape Use: A Case Study from the Brier Creek Drainage in Burke County, Georgia

Artifact collections in museum repositories and those held by private individuals are numerous. Often these collections are analyzed and then reshelved by curators. In the case of private collections, the artifacts are assembled through purchase, avocational field work, or by hobbyists and can have limited or provenience. Despite this, these collections are valuable to current and future scholarship in archaeology. In this thesis I investigate and summarize three different legacy collections and groups of data that have limited and disparate information known about them yet were all sourced from the same general location of Burke County, Georgia. Each collection contains artifacts dating to the Paleoindian and Early Archaic periods (13,400-8,900 ca. BP). By investigating these artifacts and the details of their procurement locations in the context of existing theoretical models of hunter-gatherer mobility strategies, I can better contextualize Burke County, Georgia’s place in the larger Paleoindian and Early Archaic Southeast

The Aesthetics, Sanctity, and Utility of Jihad in the Earliest Biography of Muhammad

This thesis is an examination of the way jihad is portrayed in the earliest surviving biography of Muhammad. Sirat Rasul Allah is the oldest most complete biography of Muhammad to which we still have access to today, and in this biography wars, raids, and other violent acts are treated as something that is morally good, beautiful, and rewarded. To engage in violence, war, and raids, on behalf of Allah, is seen as a mark of the pious, courageous, and noble-born. Jiha is also seen as Allah’s punishment of the wicked and those who enact jihad are depicted as being directly controlled by Allah when partaking in those actions. To avoid engaging in jihad is synonymous with being a hypocrite, coward, and base-born. The acts of jihad are praised as beautiful throughout the text. Those participating in jihad are rewarded both on earth and in heaven. In defense of this thesis the author quotes directly from Sirat Rasul Allah, looking extensively at the text itself. This is done in three sections. The first section looks at the metaphysical and ontological structure of morality that allows for jihad within Sirat Rasul Allah. The next section uses direct quotes to demonstrate that jihad is portayed as beautiful. This section is then followed by a final section showing how jihad is rewarded on earth and in heaven