Drug Testing in the Workplace - Drug Screening in the Public Sector: Municipalities and Government Workers

Certainly, there are appealing rationales for drug testing many government employees and few would dispute that police and fire personnel should be free of any substances which might undermine their job effectiveness. But while government employees may have lesser expectations of privacy than those in the private sector, the courts readily recognize that they have not abandoned all of their individual rights, and do not hesitate to enforce constitutional protections

Sequence analysis of the cis-regulatory regions of the bithorax complex of Drosophila

The bithorax complex (BX-C) of Drosophila, one of two complexes that act as master regulators of the body plan of the fly, has now been entirely sequenced and comprises approximate to 315,000 bp, only 1.4% of which codes for protein. Analysis of this sequence reveals significantly overrepresented DNA motifs of unknown, as well as known, functions in the nonprotein-coding portion of the sequence. The following types of motifs in that portion are analyzed: (i) concatamers of mono-, di-, and trinucleotides; (ii) tightly clustered hexanucleotides (spaced less than or equal to 5 bases apart); (iii) direct and reverse repeats longer than 20 bp; and (iv) a number of motifs known from biochemical studies to play a role in the regulation of the BX-C. The hexanucleotide AGATAC is remarkably overrepresented and is surmised to play a role in chromosome pairing. The positions of sites of highly overrepresented motifs are plotted for those that occur at more than five sites in the sequence, when <0.5 case is expected. Expected values are based on a third-order Markov chain, which is the optimal order for representing the BXCALL sequence

Maternal and perinatal outcome in severe preeclampsia and eclampsia at the Rivers State university teaching hospital, Nigeria

Background: Severe preeclampsia and eclampsia remain a challenge in tropical obstetric practice. It is a major contributor to feto-maternal morbidity and mortality in developing countries. This study seeks to determine the prevalence, associated risk factors and the feto-maternal outcome of severe preeclampsia and eclampsia at the rivers state university teaching hospital (RSUTH).Method: A retrospective study of all women who had severe preeclampsia and eclampsia and were delivered at the RSUTH in a two-year period, 1ST January 2018 to 31ST December 2019, was carried out. Data on patients’ age, parity, education, booking status, gestational age at delivery, diagnosis, complications, mode of delivery and fetal sex, birth weight and Apgar scores were retrieved using structured pro-forma. Data were analyzed using SPSS version 20.Results: There were 4496 deliveries of which 128 had severe preeclampsia and eclampsia, giving a prevalence of 2.85%. Of these, 94 (73.4%) had severe preeclampsia and 34 (26.6%) had eclampsia. The mean age of the women ± SD was 29.84±5.44 years, median parity was para 1, and mean gestational age ± SD was 35.38±3.84 weeks. There were 10 maternal deaths giving case fatality of 7.8%. The mean birth weight ± SD was 2.61±0.91 kg and stillborn rate was 14.4%. There was significant association with maternal age, education, booking status, method of delivery and Apgar score of the baby.Conclusion: The prevalence in this study is high with associated high maternal mortality and stillborn rates. Timely and appropriate intervention including primary management and judicious termination of pregnancy will reduce mortality of mother and fetus

Stochastic Theories of Participation

A recent mathematical model by Horvath which predicts the process of participation in group discussions is compared to several alternative models. The models can be applied to data for which the basic unit is the act and to data for which the basic unit is a continuous sequence of acts. In both cases, when statistical tests of significance are employed, most of the more restrictive models are rejected

Circular 64

Treatment of Alaska-produced food products by ionizing radiation may benefit the seafood and agricultural industries and the Alaskan consumer. A feasibility study to evaluate the potential social and economic benefits and risks as well as the costs of using the process in Alaska on Alaskan products is being coordinated by the Institute of Northern Engineering. A research and development project to determine effects on the quality o f Alaskan products could be the next phase in the introduction o f a new food-preservation technique to Alaska

Raman Spectroscopic Analysis of Geological and Biogeological Specimens of Relevance to the ExoMars Mission

H.G.M.E., I.H., and R.I. acknowledge the support of the STFC Research Council in the UK ExoMars programme. J.J. and P.V. acknowledge the support of the Grant Agency of the Czech Republic (210/10/0467) and of the Ministry of Education of the Czech Republic (MSM0021620855).Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Large UK retailers' initiatives to reduce consumers' emissions: a systematic assessment

In the interest of climate change mitigation, policy makers, businesses and non-governmental organisations have devised initiatives designed to reduce in-use emissions whilst, at the same time, the number of energy-consuming products in homes, and household energy consumption, is increasing. Retailers are important because they are at the interface between manufacturers of products and consumers and they supply the vast majority of consumer goods in developed countries like the UK, including energy using products. Large retailers have a consistent history of corporate responsibility reporting and have included plans and actions to influence consumer emissions within them. This paper adapts two frameworks to use them for systematically assessing large retailers’ initiatives aimed at reducing consumers’ carbon emissions. The Framework for Strategic Sustainable Development (FSSD) is adapted and used to analyse the strategic scope and coherence of these initiatives in relation to the businesses’ sustainability strategies. The ISM ‘Individual Social Material’ framework is adapted and used to analyse how consumer behaviour change mechanisms are framed by retailers. These frameworks are used to analyse eighteen initiatives designed to reduce consumer emissions from eight of the largest UK retail businesses, identified from publicly available data. The results of the eighteen initiatives analysed show that the vast majority were not well planned nor were they strategically coherent. Secondly, most of these specific initiatives relied solely on providing information to consumers and thus deployed a rather narrow range of consumer behaviour change mechanisms. The research concludes that leaders of retail businesses and policy makers could use the FSSD to ensure processes, and measurements are comprehensive and integrated, in order to increase the materiality and impact of their initiatives to reduce consumer emissions in use. Furthermore, retailers could benefit from exploring different models of behaviour change from the ISM framework in order to access a wider set of tools for transformative system change