Anxious states : culture and politics in Singapore and Hong Kong

Since Singapore and Hong Kong are the two most economically successful, ethnic Chinese dominant city-states in Asia, comparisons have always been made between these locations. Fundamental to the Singaporean collective social life is a realization that ‘the world does not need Singapore but Singapore needs the world’. The demand for immigrants to supplement the small local workforce is constant, adding complexity to the domestic multi-ethnic population and geopolitical situation, and confounding the processes of individual and national identity formation. The constant demand of physical space threatens to erase heritage, social memories and individual biographies, yet simultaneously encourages a progressive future-mindedness. The prevalent social anxieties undergird a wide political consensus that emphasizes stability, cohesion and political order. This has engendered a ‘politics of the middle ground’, favoured by the long governing single-party dominant parliament, that marginalizes liberal individual rights and individuals who falls out of the ‘middle’. Are such anxieties broadly shared by Hong Kong and its people? And, if they are, how might some of these anxieties be culturally and politically expressed, and in what institutional structural configurations

Time and frequency characterization of the high speed I/O data bus

High speed data transfer between the CPU and peripherals on the PC motherboard is needed to support data traffic in future generation applications such as multimedia, games and broadband networks. The High Speed I/O data bus is developed to meet these applications. At high speed with multi Gbits/sec, impedance mismatch between the CPU and peripherals becomes critical and limits the possible maximum throughput. This effect can be modeled as a convolution process where the I/O bus behaves as a linear time invariant system that is defined by a channel impulse and frequency response. Since there are variations in the characteristic of the motherboards due to the fabrication and assembly process, it is desired to estimate the impulse response and frequency response of the High Speed I/O bus. This information can be used to gage the capability of the motherboard and use it as feedback to the relevant fabrication and assembly processes. By using simulation on MATLAB and EDA tools, two candidate methods will be evaluated: Impulse response and correlation method using simulated channel characteristics. Robustness of both methods will be evaluated in the presence of noise and cross talk. Further evaluation will be performed on data collected from actual production test of the I/O Bus. This is to evaluate the capability of the evaluated methods under actual manufacturing environment

Overnutrition among older persons in a Maltese nursing home

Background: International studies on nursing home residents have demonstrated that undernutrition is a prevalent and serious health issue among this population of older persons. On the other hand, obesity is prevalent among the elderly in Malta. However, to date, there has been no published study on the nutritional status of elderly nursing home residents in Malta. Objective: To assess the nutritional status of Maltese nursing home residents and determine the prevalence of underweight, overweight and obesity. Method: Cross-sectional quantitative survey research was undertaken from 19 Jan to 23 Feb 04 using the full MiniNutritional Assessment (MNA) tool which includes Body Mass Index (BMI) measurement. Subjects: 43 eligible residents (23 females and 19 males) from one female and one male ward of St Vincent de Paul Residence (SVPR). Results: The prevalence of undernutrition was 9.5% and risk of undernutrition was 71.5%. The prevalence of underweight, overweight and obese residents was 7.1%, 35.7% and 26.2% respectively.peer-reviewe

Dynamic program linkage and multi-layer protection in a multi-access computer operating system

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