The Interests of Children and the Interests of the State: Rethinking the Conflict between Child Welfare Policy and Foster Care Practice

The social welfare literature -- whether embodied in the ideology of the profession, claimed in its social policy, substantiated through empirical research, or espoused in practice -- suggests that children should not be removed from their natural hones as a solution to economic woes or to the unavailability of social support services. This apparent convergence of ideology, policy and practice -- buttressed by social values which recognize the importance of family life -- would suggest that few children, if any, would enter foster care because of inadequate income or the absence of social services. Yet, in 1977, between one quarter and one half a million children in the United States are in foster care and most of them are children of the poor. While policy statements claim that substitute care should be a last resort, it is more often than not the only resource available to child welfare practitioners

Variations in Dimensions and Shape of Thoracic Cage with Aging: An Anatomical Review

The thoracic cage variations in dimensions and proportions are influenced by age, sex and race. The objective of the present review was to describe the age related changes occurring in thoracic wall and its influence on the pattern of respiration in infants, adult and elderly. We had systematically reviewed, compared and analysed many original and review articles related to aging changes in chest wall images and with the aid of radiological findings recorded in a span of four years. We have concluded that alterations in the geometric dimensions of thoracic wall, change in the pattern and mechanism of respiration are influenced not only due to change in the inclination of the rib, curvature of the vertebral column even the position of the sternum plays a pivotal role. Awareness of basic anatomical changes in thoracic wall and respiratory physiology with aging would help clinicians in better understanding, interpretation and to differentiate between normal aging and chest wall deformation.Key words: Thoracic wall; Respiration; Ribs; Sternum; vertebral colum

A cadaveric exposure of an oblique inguinoscrotal hernia

We present a rarest exposure of an untreated indirect inguinal hernia in a seventy year old formalin fixed male cadaver. Even though inguinal hernia is a common finding, the challenge lies in its surgical reduction. Present report not only emphasizes on the content of the hernia sac but also on the morphological and structural alterations occurring in the abdominal cavity to accommodate a longstanding, untreated, non-obstructed inguinal hernia.Keywords: Oblique Hernia; Indirect Inguinal hernia; Inguinoscrotal Herni

Growth and yield potential of Echinochloa pyramidalis (Lam.) Hitchc & Chase: A forage plant used in verticalflow constructed wetlands in Cameroon

This work aims at assessing growth and productivity of Echinochloa pyramidalis in the saline and saline-flooded processes of wetland treatment. Growth characteristics such as density, number of dead plants, height and number of new shoots and biomass production of the plant were studied using 24 laboratory-scale units of vertical-flow constructed wetlands fed with faecal sludge supernatant. Plants collected from the surrounding wetlands were subjected to four salinity levels with electrical conductivity of 2, 3, 6 and 9 dS.m-1 under both drained and flooded conditions for a 100 day period. The results revealed that salinity and flooding combined with salinity stresses had similar effect on plant survival, height and density, leading to growth and biomass reduction at the higher salinity level than under natural growth conditions. Despite these stress effects, E. pyramidalis remained healthy with no signs of salt or saline-flooding stress injury but higher biomass production. As E. pyramidalis is a forage plant its high biomass production in the wetland treatment systems shows the potential of wetland systems to create a local economy based on forage production and thus the opportunity to link sanitation stewardship to food production. This may contribute to sustain sanitation infrastructures at the same time as increasing food security, especially in developing countries.Key words: Constructed wetlands, Echinochloa pyramidalis, faecal sludge, flooding, growth, salinity, yield potential

A theoretical study of non-adiabatic surface effects for a model in the NTF cryogenic wind tunnel

A theoretical analysis was made of the severity and effect of nonadiabatic surface conditions for a model in the NTF cryogenic wind tunnel. The nonadiabatic condition arises from heaters that are used to maintain a constant thermal environment for instrumentation internal to the model. The analysis was made for several axi-symmetric representations of a fuselage cavity, using a finite element heat conduction code. Potential flow and boundary layer codes were used to calculate the convection condition for the exterior surface of the model. The results of the steady state analysis show that it is possible to maintain the surface temperature very near the adiabatic value, with the judicious use of insulating material. Even for the most severe nonadiabatic condition studied, the effects on skin friction drag and displacement thickness were only marginally significant. The thermal analysis also provided an estimate of the power required to maintain a specified cavity temperature

The economic potential of Echinochloa pyramidalis (Lam.) Hitchc & Chase forage plant used in liquid waste treatment in Cameroon: Opportunity to link sanitation to food security

Cameroon, like other developing countries, faces major problems in the urban centres such as high rate of population increase, food and ruminant feed shortages as well as inadequate access to sanitation. However, Echinochloa pyramidalis, well-known forage adapted to the drying vegetated beds for wastewater and faecal sludge treatments with similar characteristics as Typha sp., Phragmites sp., might be used in the dual purpose as animal feed and as support material in sanitation treatment. This study aimed at linking sanitation technology to forage production. A socio-economic survey conducted in Douala, Yaoundé and Garoua to evaluate the economic potential of E. pyramidalis showed the daily quantities of marketed forage between 5 and 8-tons of fresh weight (FW) respectively during dry and rainy season. The forage price varies with season and species from USD 0.1–0.2 to USD 0.2–0.3/kg FW with daily income of USD 800–1’600 and USD 500–1’500 respectively to rainy and dry season. While comparable to most tropical forages, the nutritional values of E. pyramidalis after 45 and 100 days of wetland treatment were only affected by the advancing maturity. Thus, E. pyramidalis can be easily grown in wetland systems and sold for animal feeding in the local market.Keywords: Echinochloa pyramidalis, economic potential, forage production, nutritional values, sanitation technology, vertical-flow constructed wetland

3D Geometric Analysis of Tubular Objects based on Surface Normal Accumulation

This paper proposes a simple and efficient method for the reconstruction and extraction of geometric parameters from 3D tubular objects. Our method constructs an image that accumulates surface normal information, then peaks within this image are located by tracking. Finally, the positions of these are optimized to lie precisely on the tubular shape centerline. This method is very versatile, and is able to process various input data types like full or partial mesh acquired from 3D laser scans, 3D height map or discrete volumetric images. The proposed algorithm is simple to implement, contains few parameters and can be computed in linear time with respect to the number of surface faces. Since the extracted tube centerline is accurate, we are able to decompose the tube into rectilinear parts and torus-like parts. This is done with a new linear time 3D torus detection algorithm, which follows the same principle of a previous work on 2D arc circle recognition. Detailed experiments show the versatility, accuracy and robustness of our new method.Comment: in 18th International Conference on Image Analysis and Processing, Sep 2015, Genova, Italy. 201

Instabilities of dispersion-managed solitons in the normal dispersion regime

Dispersion-managed solitons are reviewed within a Gaussian variational approximation and an integral evolution model. In the normal regime of the dispersion map (when the averaged path dispersion is negative), there are two solitons of different pulse duration and energy at a fixed propagation constant. We show that the short soliton with a larger energy is linearly (exponentially) unstable. The other (long) soliton with a smaller energy is linearly stable but hits a resonance with excitations of the dispersion map. The results are compared with the results from the recent publicationsComment: 20 figures, 20 pages. submitted to Phys. Rev.

The Gordon-Haus effect for modified NLS solitons

Random jitter in the soliton arrival time (the Gordon-Haus effect) is analyzed for solitons being solutions of the integrable modified nonlinear Schroedinger equation. It is shown that the mean square fluctuation of the soliton position depends on the soliton parameters which can be properly adjusted to suppress the Gordon-Haus jitter.Comment: LaTeX, 7 pages, 3 figures, to be published in Europhys. Let

Stimulus - response curves of a neuronal model for noisy subthreshold oscillations and related spike generation

We investigate the stimulus-dependent tuning properties of a noisy ionic conductance model for intrinsic subthreshold oscillations in membrane potential and associated spike generation. On depolarization by an applied current, the model exhibits subthreshold oscillatory activity with occasional spike generation when oscillations reach the spike threshold. We consider how the amount of applied current, the noise intensity, variation of maximum conductance values and scaling to different temperature ranges alter the responses of the model with respect to voltage traces, interspike intervals and their statistics and the mean spike frequency curves. We demonstrate that subthreshold oscillatory neurons in the presence of noise can sensitively and also selectively be tuned by stimulus-dependent variation of model parameters.Comment: 19 pages, 7 figure