The Environmental Implications of Redistributive Land Reform

Acknowledgements Thank you to the two anonymous referees who commented on this piece. Conflict of interest The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. Funding The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.Peer reviewedPostprin

The Indycamp : Demonstrating Access to Land and Access to Justice

Peer reviewedPostprin

The Postmodern Paradox: How the Christian Scholar has Both Declined and Thrived as a Result of Postmodernism’s Influence in Higher Education

The Christian scholar faces an interesting paradox concerning postmodernism’s influence in higher education (Edlin, 2009). One of the key components of the modernism paradigm was the ability for humans to reason (Pells, 2007). Universities were based largely on a model in which young adults were expected to first acquire knowledge, principles, and skills, and then later apply that which was learned to their career ambitions, citizenship, or professional development (Willis, 1995). But in the 1960s and 1970s, higher education began to face increasing social pressure as the ideas of modernism associated with knowledge acquisition, power, and authority came under scrutiny and were replaced with plurality and skepticism (Maranto, Redding, & Hess, 2009). This trend largely grew out of the ideas of French philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard and his work The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Cary, 1999). Postmodernism has declared Christian scholarship null and void. Conversely, it has unintentionally reignited the quest to understand the spiritual nature of mankind and the world. Thus, Christian scholars have an opportunity to re-engage in a dialogue that had appeared to be closing (Martini, 2008). Ultimately, the Christian scholar must be grounded in an understanding of Biblical principles and open to the empowerment of the Holy Spirit if in fact they are to carry forth the great task of protecting the Truth with which they have been entrusted (2 Timothy 1:14) and they must not shy away from the conversation

Biomedical Community and the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention

YesNegotiations to find a legally binding way to strengthen the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BTWC) of 1972 [1]are in danger of failing. The crisis was precipitated during the current round of talks, now in its final week in Geneva, when the US, alone amongst the negotiating States, rejected the text of a protocol that has taken six and a half years to negotiate

Non-linear autopilot design using the philosophy of variable transient response

The novel non-linear controller design methodology of Variable Transient Response (VTR) is presented in this research. The performance of VTR is compared to that of successful non-linear controller designs (such as Robust Inverse Dynamics Estimation and a traditional autopilot design) by application to a non-linear missile model. The simulated results of this application demonstrate that the inclusion of VTR into the RIDE design results in a 50% improvement in response time and 100% improvement in settling time whilst achieving stable and accurate tracking of a command input. Analysis demonstrates that VTR dynamically alters the system's damping, resulting in a non-linear response. The system stability is analysed during actuator saturation using non-linear stability criteria. The results of this analysis show that the inclusion of VTR into the RIDE design does not compromise non-linear system stability

In-Depth Implementation of the BTWC: Education and Outreach

Ye

An investigation into the use of 3G mobile communications to provide telehealth services in rural KwaZulu-Natal

This article has been made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund.Abstract Background: We investigated the use of third-generation (3G) mobile communications to provide telehealth services in remote health clinics in rural KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Materials and Methods: We specified a minimal set of services as our use case that would be representative of typical activity and to provide a baseline for analysis of network performance. Services included database access to manage chronic disease, local support and management of patients (to reduce unnecessary travel to the hospital), emergency care (up to 8 h for an ambulance to arrive), e-mail, access to up-to-date information (Web), and teleclinics. We made site measurements at a representative set of health clinics to determine the type of coverage (general packet radio service [GPRS]/3G), its capabilities to support videoconferencing (H323 and Skype™ [Microsoft, Redmond, WA]) and audio (Skype), and throughput for transmission control protocol (TCP) to gain a measure of application performance. Results: We found that none of the remote health clinics had 3G service. The GPRS service provided typical upload speed of 44 kilobits per second (Kbps) and download speed of 64 Kbps. This was not sufficient to support any form of videoconferencing. We also observed that GPRS had significant round trip time (RTT), in some cases in excess of 750 ms, and this led to slow start-up for TCP applications. Conclusions: We found audio was always so broken as to be unusable and further observed that many applications such as Web access would fail under conditions of very high RTT. We found some health clinics were so remote that they had no mobile service. 3G, where available, had measured upload speed of 331 Kbps and download speed of 446 Kbps and supported videoconferencing and audio at all sites, but we frequently experienced 3G changing to GPRS. We conclude that mobile communications currently provide insufficient coverage and capability to provide reliable clinical services and would advocate dedicated wireless services where reliable communication is essential and use of store and forward for mobile applications.The Royal Society, United Kingdom

HOUSEHOLD DEMAND FOR PET FOOD AND THE OWNERSHIP OF CATS AND DOGS: AN ANALYSIS OF A NEGLECTED COMPONENT OF U.S. FOOD USE

Demand and Price Analysis,

Optical, gravitational, and kinesthetic determinants of judged eye level

Subjects judged eye level, defined in three distinct ways relative to three distinct reference planes: a gravitational horizontal, giving the gravitationally referenced eye level (GREL); a visible surface, giving the surface-referenced eye level (SREL); and a plane fixed with respect to the head, giving the head-referenced eye level (HREL). The information available for these judgements was varied by having the subjects view an illuminated target that could be placed in a box which: (1) was pitched at various angles, (2) was illuminated or kept in darkness, (3) was moved to different positions along the subject's head-to-foot body axis, and (4) was viewed with the subjects upright or reclining. The results showed: (1) judgements of GREL made in the dark were 2.5 deg lower than in the light, with a significantly greater variability; (2) judged GREL was shifted approximately half of the way toward SREL when these two eye levels did not coincide; (3) judged SREL was shifted about 12 percent of the way toward HREL when these two eye levels did not coincide, (4) judged HREL was shifted about half way toward SREL when these two eye level did not coincide and when the subject was upright (when the subject was reclining, HREL was shifted approx. 90 percent toward SREL); (5) the variability of the judged HREL in the dark was nearly twice as great with the subject reclining than with the subject upright. These results indicate that gravity is an important source of information for judgement of eye level. In the absence of information concerning the direction of gravity, the ability to judge HREL is extremely poor. A visible environment does not seem to afford precise information as to judgements of direction, but it probably does afford significant information as to the stability of these judgements