Mrs. Teale

Fiction by Ruth Palle

What clean sewers tell us about development in African slums

Development scholars advocate community mobilisation for effective home-grown solutions to local problems. In this post, Jeffrey Paller explores mitigating factors that determine how community leaders wield power to generate collective action. He finds that whether they serve private, club, or the public interest, shapes the betterment or detriment of their communities

Regina-Oh No!

Fiction by Ruth Palle

A Sketch

Fiction by Ruth Palle

Public health in Hungary – current status and future plans

The population of Hungary in proportion to its present territory was at its historical peak in the 80s with a number of 10.7 million people and has declined to approx. 10 million. A drop below 10 million is expected by this year. Until 1980 the birth rates have outnumbered death rates in Hungary. The trend has changed and since the 1980’s the number of births has been decreasing. The reason is: Hungarian women are elder when they have their first baby compared to European trends. According to the present fertility rates a Hungarian woman statistically gives birth to 1.3 babies in her life. The low number of births prognosticated the unfavourable changes in our demography and in longer term it may lead to the significant ageing and decreasing of the population in addition to socio-economical problems based on the disadvantageous composition of age groups. It means Hungarians are decreasing in number and have an aging society. Death rates have shown a declining tendency since 2000. In 2007 the average life expectancy for men was 67.52 years and 75.34 years for women. Early death is strikingly high especially in case of chronic non-communicable diseases, as cardiovascular diseases cause 50.6% while malignant tumours cause 24.6% of the total death rate. The cardiovascular diseases mean a significant individual and social burden affecting negatively not only the sustainable development but the chances of international competitiveness of the Hungarian economy. Furthermore they have a profound negative impact on both the working capacity and the quality of human resources including their multiplying economical effect on the family, the community and the whole society. The high prevalence of cardiovascular and malignant diseases in Hungary can be traced back to the complex system of genetic, environmental, social, cultural and lifestyle factors. The national and international experiences obtained in the last decades underlined the high prevalence of these diseases are directly influenced by the so-called risk factors originated from the above listed factors/elements. These risk factors can be improved by health promotion. The Hungarian population has a high number of risk factors with unfavourable temporal tendencies compared to the European situation. Surveying the state of health of the population is essential to make decisions concerning health issues but it is also important in the decision on investments, developments and financial supports affecting indirectly health, such as transportation, agriculture and taxing

Fire and Life Safety Analysis- Building 310- The Landing

The purpose of this report is to analyze Building 310 with regards to fire and life safety. Analysis was done both prescriptively and from a performance based design standpoint. The prescriptive based analysis includes review of the building’s design with regards to egress, fire alarm systems, suppression systems, and structural fire protection. The building was reviewed against current NFPA codes and the International Building Code to examine compliance. The performance-based analysis consists of two different fire scenarios that were examined. The goal was to show that the building met safety criteria and does not pose undue risk to occupants. This method employs alternate criteria and strategies to prove safety in ways other than the prescriptive based codes. The fire scenarios consist of a fire originating in a small office, and another fire originating in the kitchen of a restaurant area. The building was designed in compliance with all applicable codes, with one exception. A mezzanine located in one of the restaurant areas is under designed and requires another exit. This is shown using both prescriptive codes and performance-based analysis. Other areas of the overall fire protection system of the building are over designed. The sprinkler system has at least one unnecessary branch line. The separating walls of the building have a higher fire rating than is required as well. This report recommends adding one more exit to the mezzanine

Sleep preserves original and distorted memory traces

Retrieval facilitates the long-term retention of memories, but may also enable stored representations to be updated with new information that is available at the time of retrieval. However, if information integrated during retrieval is erroneous, future recall can be impaired: a phenomenon known as retrieval-induced distortion (RID). Whether RID causes an “overwriting” of existing memory traces or leads to the co-existence of original and distorted memory traces is unknown. Because sleep enhances memory consolidation, the effects of sleep after RID can provide novel insights into the structure of updated memories. As such, we investigated the effects of sleep on memory consolidation following RID. Participants encoded word locations and were then tested before (T1) and after (T2) an interval of sleep or wakefulness. At T2, the majority of words were placed closer to the locations retrieved at T1 than to the studied locations, consistent with RID. After sleep compared with after wake, the T2-retrieved locations were closer to both the studied locations and the T1-retrieved locations. These findings suggest that RID leads to the formation of an additional memory trace that corresponds to a distorted variant of the same encoding event, which is strengthened alongside the original trace during sleep. More broadly, these data provide evidence for the importance of sleep in the preservation and adaptive updating of memories

The benefits of targeted memory reactivation for consolidation in sleep are contingent on memory accuracy and direct cue-memory associations

Objectives: To investigate how the effects of targeted memory reactivation (TMR) are influenced by memory accuracy prior to sleep and the presence or absence of direct cue-memory associations. Methods: 30 participants associated each of 50 pictures with an unrelated word and then with a screen location in two separate tasks. During picture-location training, each picture was also presented with a semantically related sound. The sounds were therefore directly associated with the picture locations but indirectly associated with the words. During a subsequent nap, half of the sounds were replayed in slow wave sleep (SWS) (TMR). The effect of TMR on memory for the picture locations (direct cue-memory associations) and picture-word pairs (indirect cue-memory associations) was then examined. Results: TMR reduced overall memory decay for recall of picture locations. Further analyses revealed a benefit of TMR for picture locations recalled with a low degree of accuracy prior to sleep, but not those recalled with a high degree of accuracy. The benefit of TMR for low accuracy memories was predicted by time spent in SWS. There was no benefit of TMR for memory of the picture-word pairs, irrespective of memory accuracy prior to sleep. Conclusions: TMR provides the greatest benefit to memories recalled with a low degree of accuracy prior to sleep. The memory benefits of TMR may also be contingent on direct cue-memory associations

THE RAFAEL MULTI-TARGET HETEROGENEOUS SIGNAL-FLOW GRAPH COMPILER

This paper describes a signal-flow graph compiler which produces distributed code for heterogeneous target systems. The compiler is devoted for mainly Digital Signal Process- ing problems. The code generator features reprogrammable operation library, the static scheduler supports fully heterogeneous systems and the input graph may contain run-time decisions in a limited way. The system has been implemented on IBM PC compatibles under MS-VVindows so it does not require expansive host computer