Egypt’s civil society crackdown: A test for US-Egyptian relations

By Sarah E. Yerkes. The relationship between the United States and Egypt has reached one of its lowest points in decades following a series of steps by the Egyptian military to prevent the operation of both international and domestic civil society organisations. Culminating in a raid on the offices of several NGOs on December 29, the Egyptian military regime (known as the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, or SCAF) has initiated a harsh crackdown on Egyptian human rights organisations as well as US and European NGOs operating in Egypt. This crackdown is a test for the US-Egyptian relationship. Will the United States stand by as the SCAF rolls back Egyptian rights of association and expression? Or will the US government use the large weapon in its arsenal – $1.3 billion in military aid – to show the SCAF that its behavior has consequences

A forest working plan for the Fort Riley Military Reservation

Citation: Hoffman, Emmett Vivian. Three characteristic women of Shakespeare. Senior thesis, Kansas State Agricultural College, 1898.Morse Department of Special CollectionsIntroduction: The Fort Riley Reservation, composing an area of about 32,000 Acres, is located in Central Kansas. The topography of the land makes it peculiarly well adapted for maneuvers of Cavalry and Field Artillery, the School of Application for these branches of the regular Army being located here. To assist in obscuring the movements of troops, it is proposed to establish belts of trees on the open ridges, particularly those on the North part of the Reserve. Brigadier General E. S. Godfrey, Post Commandant, who is in charge of the work, wishes also to place the woodland of the Reserve under conservative management for the production of fuel, and post and pole timber. The woodland is mostly on the bottom land, and covers about 850 Acres. This working plan provides for the beginning of forestry on the woodland, and for the formation of about fourteen (14) miles of screen -belts. The reservation includes two classes of soil formation - river bottom and upland. Approximately, one-third of the South part of the tract is bottom land, along the Kansas River, which forms part of the boundary of the Reserve. The soil is a fertile sandy loam, formed by alluvial deposits from the river. The sub-soil is coarse sand or gravel. The surface is nearly level, about twelve to sixteen feet above the water table. The greater part of the woodland is on this bottom land. The upland is separated from the river bottom by abrupt rocky slopes, capped with limestone. The surface is rolling or hilly, and is much broken by rocky ravines and gullies. The soil is a clay loam, varying in depth and fertility. The sub-soil is clay or rock. On the ridges, where screen-belts are wanted, no obstruction such as rocks are offered to plowing, and the soil is suitable for tree growth

1897 Ruby Yearbook

A digitized copy of the 1897 Ruby, the Ursinus College yearbook.https://digitalcommons.ursinus.edu/ruby/1003/thumbnail.jp

Heat exchange mediated by a quantum system

We consider heat transfer between two thermal reservoirs mediated by a quantum system using the generalized quantum Langevin equation. The thermal reservoirs are treated as ensembles of oscillators within the framework of the Drude-Ullersma model. General expressions for the heat current and thermal conductance are obtained for arbitrary coupling strength between the reservoirs and the mediator and for different temperature regimes. As an application of these results we discuss the origin of Fourier's law in a chain of large, but finite subsystems coupled to each other by the quantum mediators. We also address a question of anomalously large heat current between the STM tip and substrate found in a recent experiment. The question of minimum thermal conductivity is revisited in the framework of scaling theory as a potential application of the developed approach.Comment: 16 pages, 6 figure

Paid parental leave evaluation: Phase 2 report

Since 1 January 2011, most Australian families in which a mother was in paid employment before the birth or adoption of a child have been eligible for the new Australian Government funded Paid Parental Leave (PPL) scheme.2 The scheme provides eligible parents with up to 18 weeks of Parental Leave Pay (PLP), paid at the rate of the National Minimum Wage, following the birth or recent adoption of a child. The PPL scheme brings Australia into line with all other Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries, except the United States, in having a national scheme for paid leave available to mothers following childbirth. This report describes the results of an evaluation of the initial operation of the scheme

Meaningful public engagement in the context of open science: reflections from early and mid-career academics

How is public engagement perceived to contribute to open science? This commentary highlights common reflections on this question from interviews with 12 public engagement fellows in Utrecht University’s Open Science Programme in the Netherlands. We identify four reasons why public engagement is an essential enabler of open science. Interaction between academics and society can: (1) better align science with the needs of society; (2) secure a relationship of trust between science and society; (3) increase the quality and impact of science; and (4) support the impact of open access and FAIR data practices (data which meet principles of findability, accessibility, interoperability and reusability). To be successful and sustainable, such public engagement requires support in skills training and a form of institutionalisation in a university-wide system, but, most of all, the fellows express the importance of a formal and informal recognition and rewards system. Our findings suggest that in order to make public engagement an integral part of open science, universities should invest in institutional support, create awareness, and stimulate dialogue among staff members on how to ‘do’ good public engagement

Egalitarian despots: hierarchy steepness, reciprocity and the grooming-trade model in wild chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes)

Biological-markets theory models the action of natural selection as a marketplace in which animals are viewed as traders with commodities to offer and exchange. Studies of female Old World monkeys have suggested that grooming might be employed as a commodity to be reciprocated or traded for alternative services, yet previous tests of this grooming-trade model in wild adult male chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) have yielded mixed results. Here we provide the strongest test of the model to date for male chimpanzees: we use data drawn from two social groups (communities) of chimpanzees from different populations, and give explicit consideration to variation in dominance hierarchy steepness as such variation results in differing conditions for biological markets. First, analysis of data from published accounts of other chimpanzee communities, together with our own data, showed that hierarchy steepness varied considerably within and across communities and that the number of adult males in a community aged 20-30 years predicted hierarchy steepness. The two communities in which we tested predictions of the grooming-trade model lay at opposite extremes of this distribution. Second, in accord with the grooming-trade model, we found evidence that male chimpanzees trade grooming for agonistic support where hierarchies are steep (despotic) and consequent effective support is a rank-related commodity, but not where hierarchies are shallow (egalitarian). However, we also found that grooming was reciprocated regardless of hierarchy steepness. Our findings also hint at the possibility of agonistic competition, or at least exclusion, in relation to grooming opportunities compromising the free market envisioned by Biological Markets theory. Our results build on previous findings across chimpanzee communities to emphasise the importance of reciprocal grooming exchanges among adult male chimpanzees, which can be understood in a biological markets framework if grooming by or with particular individuals is a valuable commodity

Resetting of Auditory and Visual Segregation Occurs After Transient Stimuli of the Same Modality

In the presence of a continually changing sensory environment, maintaining stable but flexible awareness is paramount, and requires continual organization of information. Determining which stimulus features belong together, and which are separate is therefore one of the primary tasks of the sensory systems. Unknown is whether there is a global or sensory-specific mechanism that regulates the final perceptual outcome of this streaming process. To test the extent of modality independence in perceptual control, an auditory streaming experiment, and a visual moving-plaid experiment were performed. Both were designed to evoke alternating perception of an integrated or segregated percept. In both experiments, transient auditory and visual distractor stimuli were presented in separate blocks, such that the distractors did not overlap in frequency or space with the streaming or plaid stimuli, respectively, thus preventing peripheral interference. When a distractor was presented in the opposite modality as the bistable stimulus (visual distractors during auditory streaming or auditory distractors during visual streaming), the probability of percept switching was not significantly different than when no distractor was presented. Conversely, significant differences in switch probability were observed following within-modality distractors, but only when the pre-distractor percept was segregated. Due to the modality-specificity of the distractor-induced resetting, the results suggest that conscious perception is at least partially controlled by modality-specific processing. The fact that the distractors did not have peripheral overlap with the bistable stimuli indicates that the perceptual reset is due to interference at a locus in which stimuli of different frequencies and spatial locations are integrated

The interaction of gambling outcome and gambling harm-minimisation strategies for electronic gambling: the efficacy of computer generated self-appraisal messaging

It has been argued that generating pop-up messages during electronic gambling sessions, which cause a player to engage in self-appraisal of their gambling behaviour, instil greater control and awareness of behaviour (Monaghan, Computers in Human Behaviour, 25, 202–207, 2009). Consideration for the potential interaction between the messaging’s efficacy and gambling outcome (winning or losing) is lacking however. Thirty participants took part in a repeated-measures experiment where they gambled on the outcome of a computer-simulated gambling task. Outcome was manipulated by the experimenter to induce winning and losing streaks. Participants gambled at a significantly faster speed and a higher average stake size, which resulted in a greater betting intensity in the Loss condition compared to the Win condition. Computer generated self-appraisal messaging was then applied during the gambling session, which was able to significantly reduce the average speed of betting in the Loss condition only, demonstrating an interaction effect between computer generated messaging and gambling outcome