Assessing institutional relations in development partnerships: the Land Development Corporation and the Hong Kong Government prior to 1997

This paper interprets and develops contemporary notions of partnership in relation to Hong Kong's Land Development Corporation. It demonstrates how such agencies are likely to become overdependent on their private-sector partners or ineffective in policy delivery, unless endowed with adequate powers and resources. In this context, it suggests that the LDC's capacity to promote urban renewal was undermined particularly by the institutional requirement to assemble redevelopment sites in multiple ownership principally through negotiation. While seeking to explain this weakness in relation to the socio-cultural context of Hong Kong, it warns that, in applying the Western experience of partnership elsewhere, full account must be taken of local circumstances and constraints

Diets containing high-quality animal proteins increase growth of early-weaned pigs

A production experiment was conducted with 96 fourteen-day-old weaned male piglets to compare diets containing preparations of freeze-dried porcine plasma (P) and freeze-dried bovine colostrum (C) for 35 days after weaning. These diets were compared with a diet consisting of soybean meal (SP) and a diet with animal protein sources (AP). All diets contained varying proportions of bloodmeal, fishmeal, meat and bone meal, and skim milk powder. The levels of colostrum and porcine plasma were reduced from 60 g/kg to 25 g/kg after the first week of weaning. There were no effects of diet on performance in the first 4 days after weaning. However, between 18 and 21 days of age, pigs fed the SP diet ate less (P 0.05) in feed intake and growth rate between 28 and 35 days of age, and feed conversion efficiency was not altered by dietary protein source. Under these experimental conditions the use of bovine colostrum and a combination of animal protein sources was comparable with using freeze-dried porcine plasma in diets for early-weaned pigs. Inclusion of soybean meal in diets, however, resulted in inferior performance

Assessing the User Satisfaction with an Ontology Engineering Tool Based on Social Processes

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Modelling the formation of optical waveguides produced in LiNbO₃ by laser induced thermal diffusion of lithium ions

Analytical and numerical modelling of the fabrication of optical waveguides in lithium niobate (LiNbO3) through direct writing with a continuous wave ultraviolet (UV) laser has been performed. It is proposed that the UV illumination induces heating of the surface and subsequent thermal diffusion of lithium which alters the refractive index in accordance with the lithium concentration dependence of the Sellmeier equations