Emerging Measurement Techniques for Airborne Pollutants

The quality of the air we breathe in many parts of the world has been improved dramatically by a series of clean air regulations dating back over fifty years, including the “clean air acts ” passed by the UK government (1956) [1], the federal governments of USA (1963), and those passed by many other countries. As a result, the health of the human population and our surrounding aquatic and terrestrial biosystems has benefited. However, several factors underpin the continued and increasing global effort to measure pollutants in ambient air: (i) burgeoning and more exacting national and international legislation governing the allowable concentration of pollutants in ambient air and in emissions, (ii) a greater understanding of the detrimental effects of a variety of pollutants on human health and environmental sustainability, (iii) significant improvements in technology allowing an increasing range and complexity of pollutants to be measured at ever lower concentrations, including real-time and automatic analyses, (iv) recognition that many pollutants undergo long-range transport and must be considered as a global issue requiring integrated and transboundary solutions, for example, mercury vapour, (v) the need to perform source apportionment studies to correctly target emissions abatement an

A Measure of Perceived Severity in Organizational Crises: A Multidimensional Scale Development and Validation

This study proposed a definition of perceived crisis severity and created a valid and reliable scale to measure the construct following Churchill’s scale development procedure. The proposed scale, after rigorous pilot testing and exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis, contains 3 factors with 12 items. This study discusses potential applications of the developed measures and provides future research directions

Qualitons At High Density

In the color-flavor-locked (CFL) phase of the QCD superconductor we show that baryons behave as qualitons (called "superqualitons") with quantum numbers $B=(1 {\rm mod} 2)/3$, S=1/2 and Y=B. An intriguing possibility implied by this identification is that light baryonic modes in the form of superqualitons could be excited below the (color) superconducting gap in the CFL phase, a novel phenomenon foreign to normal superconductors.Comment: 13 pages, no figure, LaTeX. slight modifications in the manuscrip

Higher order corrections to Color superconducting gaps

We find a (nonlocal) gauge where the wavefunction renormalization constant does not get any corrections for all momenta in the hard-dense loop approximation. In this gauge, we solve the Schwinger-Dyson equations for the diquark condensate in dense QCD to calculate the Cooper pair gap. We determine not only the exponent but also the prefactor of the gap in a gauge independent way. We find that the higher order corrections increase the gap only by about 1.6 times to the leading order gap at Coulomb gauge.Comment: 9 pages, 2 figures, RevTeX, Minor modification

KINEMATIC ANALYSIS OF THE MOVEMENT PATTERNS OF STROKE PATIENTS USING AN AQUA-REHABILITATION PROGRAM

This study analyzed the effect of a BK Aquatic Protocol (aqua-rehabilitation program) on the gait patterns of stroke patients. Seven subjects were divided into three stages on the basis of initial assessment of motor ability. The program varied on the basis of motor ability group. The subjects exercised three times a week for 12 weeks. Each exercise bout lasted 50 minutes. The BK Aquatic Protocol (as the motor skills improved, the graded exercise program appropriately changed) was followed. Four digital camcorders were used to obtain the kinematics of the patients’ gait before and after participation in the aqua-rehabilitation program. Several positive kinematic changes occurred in the gait patterns of the stroke patients from pre- to post test in association with the intervention of the aqua-rehabilitation program

Duality of Quasilocal Gravitational Energy and Charges with Non-orthogonal Boundaries

We study the duality of quasilocal energy and charges with non-orthogonal boundaries in the (2+1)-dimensional low-energy string theory. Quasilocal quantities shown in the previous work and some new variables arisen from considering the non-orthogonal boundaries as well are presented, and the boost relations between those quantities are discussed. Moreover, we show that the dual properties of quasilocal variables such as quasilocal energy density, momentum densities, surface stress densities, dilaton pressure densities, and Neuve-Schwarz(NS) charge density, are still valid in the moving observer's frame.Comment: 19pages, 1figure, RevTe

Supernovae, Hypernovae and Color Superconductivity

We argue that Color Superconductivity (CSC, Cooper pairing in quark matter leading to the breaking of SU(3) color symmetry) may play a role in triggering the explosive endpoint of stellar evolution in massive stars (M > 8 M_{\odot}). We show that the binding energy release in the transition of a sub-core region to the CSC phase can be of the same order of magnitude as the gravitational binding energy release from core collapse. The core temperature during collapse is likely below the critical temperature for CSC, and the transition is first order, proceeding on Fermi timescales when the pressure reaches a critical value of several times nuclear density. We also discuss the implications for hypernova events with total ejecta energy of 10-100 times that of type II supernova.Comment: 8 pages, LaTe

The responsibility to protect and the use of force: remaking the procrustean bed?

The emergence of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) owed much to the need to enhance the UN’s ability to act forcibly in the face of the most extreme cases of gross human suffering. Too often in the past such responses were emasculated or thwarted by the necessity to successfully navigate the UN Charter’s prescriptions over the use of force, by the unwillingness of member states to provide military forces, or by a combination of the two. In accepting that certain types of inhuman activity can lead to the legitimate use of force within the UN Charter framework, the adoption of R2P appeared to resolve at least some of these problems, and as such it offered hope to those wishing to see the UN adopt a more assertive response to the grossest of human rights abuses. But, using stalemate over Syria as its backdrop, this article demonstrates the dubiousness of the claim that such a normative development can ever trump the hard edged political and strategic factors which determine when states will accept and/or participate in the use of force, and it suggests a radical solution to the dangers inherent in R2P’s intimate association with military intervention

Aspects of high density effective theory in QCD

We study an effective theory of QCD at high density in detail, including the finite temperature effects and the leading order correction in $1/\mu$ expansion. We investigate the Cooper pair gap equation and find that the color-flavor locking phase is energetically preferred at high density. We also find the color-superconducting phase transition occurs in dense quark matter when the chemical potential is larger than $250\pm 100~{\rm MeV}$ and the temperature is lower than 0.57 times the Cooper pair gap in the leading order in the hard-dense-loop approximation. The quark-neutrino four-Fermi coupling and the quark-axion coupling receive significant corrections in dense quark matter.Comment: 23 pages, 5 figures. The gap equations are re-analyzed in the HDL approximatio