The relevance of creation and righteousness to intervention for the poor and needy in the Old Testament

The text of the dissertation divides into two parts. Part One examines the relevance of human creation to intervention for the poor and needy in the Old Testament, and Part Two investigates the relevance of the roots [] and [] to the same theme. The study of the relevance of human creation to the concern for the poor and needy in the Old Testament (Part One) takes into account two streams of tradition. The first of these is centred on Genesis 1 and the creation of []. The relevance of this theme to the ethic of concern for the poor is never made explicit. Nevertheless, Genesis 9:6 clearly advocates a moral principle intended to govern the treatment of human beings, and it does so on the basis of human creation. This investigation concludes that the link between creation and the value God places on human life in this text owes something to the fact that creation established a relationship between God and mankind that is analogous to that of a father and child. The second stream of tradition, within the theme of human creation, deals with the creation of individuals in the womb. This tradition is explicitly related to the ethic of concern for the poor and needy, and is most clearly attested in Old Testament Wisdom literature. It is concluded that this theme is best understood in the context of family religion and the commitment of an individual's personal god to the protection of the individual. The association between the roots [] and [] and intervention for the poor and needy in the Old Testament is relatively easy to demonstrate, but more difficult to explain. Part Two of this dissertation investigates the connection. The meaning of the derivatives of each of these roots is examined in contexts dealing with intervention for the poor and needy. It is concluded that these terms have a strong juridical flavour in these contexts, and that this reflects how much the poor and needy depended on the judicial system to deliver them when they are in need of intervention by someone more powerful.Cambridge Commonwealth Trust, Selwyn College, Frazer-Peckham Trust, Peter and Ann Wells, David and Janet Bousfield, Anonymous benefactor

Assessing the impact of the Australia-United States Free Trade Agreement on Australian and global medicines policy

On 1 January 2005, a controversial trade agreement entered into force between Australia and the United States. Though heralded by the parties as facilitating the removal of barriers to free trade (in ways not achievable in multilateral fora), it also contained many trade-restricting intellectual property provisions and others uniquely related to altering pharmaceutical regulation and public health policy in Australia. The latter appear to have particularly focused on the world-respected process of federal government reimbursement after expert cost-effectiveness evaluation, popularly known as the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme ('PBS'). It remains uncertain what sort of impacts – if any – the Australia-United States Free Trade Agreement ('AUSFTA') will have on PBS processes such as reference pricing and their important role in facilitating equitable and affordable access to essential medicines. This is now the field of inquiry for a major three year Australian Research Council ('ARC')-funded study bringing together a team of senior researchers in regulatory theory from the Australian National University and pharmacoeconomics from the University of Newcastle. The project proposes to monitor, assess and analyse the real and potential impacts of the AUSFTA in this area, providing Australian policy-makers with continuing expertise and options. To the extent that the AUSFTA medicines provisions may represent an important precedent in a global strategy by industry on cost-effectiveness evaluation of pharmaceuticals, the study will also be of great interest to policy makers in other jurisdictions

Governments, decentralisation, and the risk of electoral defeat

<p>In the last three decades several countries around the world have transferred authority from their national to their regional governments. However, not all their regions have been empowered to the same degree and important differences can be observed between and within countries. Why do some regions obtain more power than others? Current literature argues that variation in the redistribution of power and resources between regions is introduced by demand. Yet these explanations are conditional on the presence of strong regionalist parties or territorial cleavages. This article proposes instead a theory that links the government’s risk of future electoral defeat with heterogeneous decentralisation, and tests its effects using data from 15 European countries and 141 regions. The results provide evidence that parties in government protect themselves against the risk of electoral defeat by selectively targeting decentralisation towards regions in which they are politically strong. The findings challenge previous research that overestimates the importance of regionalist parties while overlooking differences between regions.</p

EFSA Panel on Dietetic Products, Nutrition and Allergies (NDA); Scientific Opinion on Dietary Reference Values for energy

Following a request from the European Commission, the Panel on Dietetic Products, Nutrition and Allergies (NDA) derived dietary reference values for energy, which are provided as average requirements (ARs) of specified age and sex groups. For children and adults, total energy expenditure (TEE) was determined factorially from estimates of resting energy expenditure (REE) plus the energy needed for various levels of physical activity (PAL) associated with sustainable lifestyles in healthy individuals. To account for uncertainties inherent in the prediction of energy expenditure, ranges of the AR for energy were calculated with several equations for predicting REE in children (1-17 years) and adults. For practical reasons, only the REE estimated by the equations of Henry (2005) was used in the setting of the AR and multiplied with PAL values of 1.4, 1.6, 1.8 and 2.0, which approximately reflect low active (sedentary), moderately active, active and very active lifestyles. For estimating REE in adults, body heights measured in representative national surveys in 13 EU Member States and body masses calculated from heights assuming a body mass index of 22 kg/m2 were used. For children, median body masses and heights from the WHO Growth Standards or from harmonised growth curves of children in the EU were used. Energy expenditure for growth was accounted for by a 1 % increase of PAL values for each age group. For infants (7-11 months), the AR was derived from TEE estimated by regression equation based on doubly labelled water (DLW) data, plus the energy needs for growth. For pregnant and lactating women, the additional energy for the deposition of newly formed tissue, and for milk output, was derived from data obtained by the DLW method and from factorial estimates, respectively. The proposed ARs for energy may need to be adapted depending on specific objectives and target populations

Tag clouds in software visualisation.

Software visualisation employs techniques from the more general information visualisation field to help software engineers comprehend and manage the size and complexity of software systems. In this paper, we explore the use of tag clouds for software visualisation. We describe a tool which implements our approach and illustrate its operation with examples from our software engineering research programme

Restructuring tertiary education in Malaysia

The Malaysian Government is currently implementing policies aimed at major restructuring of tertiary education throughout the country. The stimulus for change derives from the needs of rapid economic development, and in particular a demand for a skilled and well-educated professional labour force, a long-established shortfall in the number of domestic places available in higher education, and a desire to raise participation rates. Measures include corporatisation of the universities in the public sector and active encouragement of state-owned enterprises and private corporations to establish universities in the private sector. While such changes represent a radical departure from the structure of the earlier system, retention of principles favouring such measures as affirmative action for student places and entry requirements for the majority bumiputera and promotion of Bahasa Malaysia as the predominant medium of instruction is likely to limit the effectiveness of the anticipated revolution in higher education which the Government proclaims this to be.