Military expenditure and economic development, the case of Greece: 1952-1987

Throughout the post-war period, Greece has allocated between five and six per cent of her annual Gross Domestic Product to defence. On many occasions she had the highest defence burden in NATO and Europe. There is evidence that the level, form and content of this defence expenditure have been determined by a combination of both external and internal factors. Greek military spending needs to be understood in relation to external security concerns and in particular in terms of her relations with Turkey. Membership of NATO, U.S. foreign policies and internal security factors have also influenced military expenditure. There is no substantial evidence to suggest that military expenditure has so far been used as a tool of economic policy. Dependency on imported weapons systems will not be substantially reduced by domestic arms production. It will merely be replaced by another form of dependency. Neither will domestic arms production generate appreciable backward and forward linkages which could pull the country out of the present economic crisis. The peculiarities of Greek development have created long term dependency on imported technology and capital goods which will not be reduced by arms production. Foreign military transfers have been instrumental in forging these dependency links and keeping the country open to foreign capital to operate under free and unregulated conditions. The links between military expenditure and economic growth are first established at the growth model level. They are then estimated in the context of a growth model directly and indirectly through the effect on savings and investment. The growth rate is treated as a function of both exogenous and endogenous variables and the impact of defence spending is estimated by two stage least squares in a series of equations. The results indicate that military expenditure has adversely affected growth in the period 1953-84 mainly through the crowing out of investment

Factors Involved in Selection of a Career in Surgery and Orthopedics for Medical Students in Malawi

AimsThere is a critical shortage of Orthopedic Surgeons in Malawi as well as all countries in sub-Saharan Africa. To date, there is no published literature that has investigated surgical or Orthopedic career selection amongst African medical trainees. With the goal of facilitating recruitmentinto Surgery and Orthopedics in Malawi, we explored the key aspects of Malawian Medical Students’ choice of careers in surgical disciplines.MethodsAn on-line survey of all students in clinical years at the College of Medicine in Blantyre, Malawi was performed. The survey was anonymous and constructed de novo by a stringent process including Item Generation, Item reduction, Survey composition, Pre-testing, Assessment of Validity by a recognized survey expert, Pilot testing in on-line format byseveral Malawian Medical Students, and then formal survey testing.ResultsSurgery was the most popular specialty choice among the medical trainees (46%). General Surgery was the popular surgical specialty (27%), followed by Neurosurgery (22%) and Orthopedics (19%). The majority of students (67%) feared occupational exposure to HIV but this did not appearto be a factor in specialty choice (p=0.9). Students with Orthopedic mentors were significantly more likely to choose Orthopedics as their first choice surgical specialty (p = 0.01). Despite limited resources and surgeons in sub-Saharan Africa, surgical specialties are desirable career choices.ConclusionsThis is the first evaluation of factors involved in surgical or Orthopedic career selection in any African context. Future initiatives to improve exposure and mentorship in Orthopedics are fundamental to recruitment into the specialty

A Splicing Mutation in the Novel Mitochondrial Protein DNAJC11 Causes Motor Neuron Pathology Associated with Cristae Disorganization, and Lymphoid Abnormalities in Mice

Mitochondrial structure and function is emerging as a major contributor to neuromuscular disease, highlighting the need for the complete elucidation of the underlying molecular and pathophysiological mechanisms. Following a forward genetics approach with N-ethyl-N-nitrosourea (ENU)-mediated random mutagenesis, we identified a novel mouse model of autosomal recessive neuromuscular disease caused by a splice-site hypomorphic mutation in a novel gene of unknown function, DnaJC11. Recent findings have demonstrated that DNAJC11 protein co-immunoprecipitates with proteins of the mitochondrial contact site (MICOS) complex involved in the formation of mitochondrial cristae and cristae junctions. Homozygous mutant mice developed locomotion defects, muscle weakness, spasticity, limb tremor, leucopenia, thymic and splenic hypoplasia, general wasting and early lethality. Neuropathological analysis showed severe vacuolation of the motor neurons in the spinal cord, originating from dilatations of the endoplasmic reticulum and notably from mitochondria that had lost their proper inner membrane organization. The causal role of the identified mutation in DnaJC11 was verified in rescue experiments by overexpressing the human ortholog. The full length 63 kDa isoform of human DNAJC11 was shown to localize in the periphery of the mitochondrial outer membrane whereas putative additional isoforms displayed differential submitochondrial localization. Moreover, we showed that DNAJC11 is assembled in a high molecular weight complex, similarly to mitofilin and that downregulation of mitofilin or SAM50 affected the levels of DNAJC11 in HeLa cells. Our findings provide the first mouse mutant for a putative MICOS protein and establish a link between DNAJC11 and neuromuscular diseases

Chondrocytes respond to adenosine via A2receptors and activity is potentiated by an adenosine deaminase inhibitor and a phosphodiesterase inhibitor

AbstractObjective To test the mechanisms by which adenosine and adenosine analogues stimulate adenylate cyclase and suppress lipopolysaccharide (LPS)-induced production of nitric oxide (NO) by chondrocytes.Methods Primary chondrocytes isolated from equine articular cartilage were plated in monolayer. Intracellular cyclic-AMP (cAMP) accumulation was measured following exposure to medium containing adenosine, the non-hydrolyzable adenosine analogue N6-methyladenosine, the A2Aspecific agonist N6-(dimethoxyphenyl)-ethyl]adenosine (DPMA), the adenosine deaminase inhibitor erythro-9-(2-Hydroxy-3-nonyl)adenine hydrochloride (EHNA), or forskolin, a potent stimulator of adenylate cyclase. Regulation of NO production by LPS-stimulated chondrocytes, as determined by nitrite concentration, was assessed in the presence of adenosine, N6-methyladenosine, DPMA, the broad agonist 5′-N-ethylcarboxamidoadenosine (NECA), or forskolin. Alternatively, LPS-stimulated chondrocytes were exposed to EHNA or the phosphodiesterase inhibitor rolipram in the presence or absence of supplemental adenosine.Results Adenosine, N6-methyladenosine, DPMA, and forskolin each increased intracellular cAMP accumulation in a concentration-dependent manner and suppressed NO production by LPS-stimulated chondrocytes. NECA also decreased NO production by chondrocytes stimulated with LPS. Incubation with EHNA, to protect endogenously produced adenosine, or rolipram, which prevents the degradation of cAMP, similarly suppressed LPS-stimulated NO production. The addition of exogenous adenosine with EHNA or rolipram further suppressed NO production.Conclusions This study documents functional responses to adenosine by articular chondrocytes. These responses are mimicked by the A2Areceptor agonist, DPMA. Effects were enhanced by protecting adenosine using an adenosine deaminase inhibitor or by potentiating the cAMP response with rolipram. These experiments suggest that adenosine may play a physiological role in regulation of chondrocytes and that adenosine pathways could represent a novel target for therapeutic intervention

Noise-based core monitoring and diagnostics: overview of the cortex project

This paper gives an overview of the CORTEX project, which is a Research and Innovation Action funded by the European Union in the Euratom 2016-2017 work program, under the Horizon 2020 framework. CORTEX, which stands for CORe monitoring Techniques and EXperimental validation and demonstration, aims at developing an innovative core monitoring technique that allows detecting anomalies in nuclear reactors, such as excessive vibrations of core internals, flow blockage, coolant inlet perturbations, etc. The technique is based on primarily using the inherent fluctuations in neutron flux recorded by in-core and ex-core instrumentation (often referred to as neutron noise), from which the anomalies will be differentiated depending on their type, location and characteristics. In addition to be non-intrusive and not requiring any external perturbation of the system, the method allows the detection of operational problems at a very early stage. Proper actions could thus be taken by utilities before such problems have any adverse effect on plant safety and reliability

Morphological differences in Parkinson's disease with and without rest tremor

Background : Rest tremor is a hallmark of Parkinson's disease (PD), but its pathogenesis remains incompletely understood. Nigro-striatal dopamine deficiency correlates best with bradykinesia, but not with tremor. Oscillating neurons in one or multiple localizations within the basal gangliathalamo-cortical loop may cause rest tremor, and an active contribution of the cerebellum and the cerebello-thalamo-cortical projections has been postulated. Objective : To compare the pattern of grey matter volume in PD patients with and without tremor to identify structural correlates of rest tremor. Methods : Voxel-based morphometry (VBM) of a high-resolution 3 Tesla, T1-weighted MR images, pre-processed according to an optimized protocol using SPM2, was performed in 24 patients with mild to moderate PD comparing local grey matter volume in patients with (n = 14) and without rest tremor (n = 10). Results : Grey matter volume is decreased in the right quadrangular lobe and declive of the cerebellum in PD with tremor compared to those without (PFDR < 0.05). Conclusions : These results demonstrate for the first time morphological changes in the cerebellum in PD patients with rest tremor and highlight the involvement of the cerebellum and cerebello- thalamo-cortical circuit in the pathogenesis of parkinsonian rest tremo

Detection and localisation of multiple in-core perturbations with neutron noise-based self-supervised domain adaptation

The use of non-intrusive techniques for monitoring nuclear reactors is becoming more vital as western fleets age. As a consequence, the necessity to detect more frequently occurring operational anomalies is of upmost interest. Here, noise diagnostics — the analysis of small stationary deviations of local neutron flux around its time-averaged value — is employed aiming to unfold from detector readings the nature and location of driving perturbations. Given that in-core instrumentation of western-type light-water reactors are scarce in number of detectors, rendering formal inversion of the reactor transfer function impossible, we propose to utilise advancements in Machine Learning and Deep Learning for the task of unfolding. This work presents an approach to such a task doing so in the presence of multiple and simultaneously occurring perturbations or anomalies. A voxel-wise semantic segmentation network is proposed to determine the nature and sourcelocation of multiple and simultaneously occurring perturbations in the frequency domain. A diffusion-based core simulation tool has been employed to provide simulated training data for two reactors. Additionally, we work towards the application of the aforementioned approach to real measurements, introducing a self-supervised domain adaptation procedure to align the representation distributions of simulated and real plant measurements

G band atmospheric radars: new frontiers in cloud physics

Clouds and associated precipitation are the largest source of uncertainty in current weather and future climate simulations. Observations of the microphysical, dynamical and radiative processes that act at cloud scales are needed to improve our understanding of clouds. The rapid expansion of ground-based super-sites and the availability of continuous profiling and scanning multi-frequency radar observations at 35 and 94 GHz have significantly improved our ability to probe the internal structure of clouds in high temporal-spatial resolution, and to retrieve quantitative cloud and precipitation properties. However, there are still gaps in our ability to probe clouds due to large uncertainties in the retrievals. The present work discusses the potential of G band (frequency between 110 and 300 GHz) Doppler radars in combination with lower frequencies to further improve the retrievals of microphysical properties. Our results show that, thanks to a larger dynamic range in dual-wavelength reflectivity, dual-wavelength attenuation and dual-wavelength Doppler velocity (with respect to a Rayleigh reference), the inclusion of frequencies in the G band can significantly improve current profiling capabilities in three key areas: boundary layer clouds, cirrus and mid-level ice clouds, and precipitating snow