Richard Nzerem

Profile of Richard Nzerem, the Director of the Legal and Constitutional Affairs Division of the Commonwealth Secretariat in London. Published in the First Page feature of Amicus Curiae - Journal of the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies and its Society for Advanced Legal Studies. The Journal is produced by the Society for Advanced Legal Studies at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, University of London

Performance Considerations for Gigabyte per Second Transcontinental Disk-to-Disk File Transfers

Moving data from CERN to Pasadena at a gigabyte per second using the next generation Internet requires good networking and good disk IO. Ten Gbps Ethernet and OC192 links are in place, so now it is simply a matter of programming. This report describes our preliminary work and measurements in configuring the disk subsystem for this effort. Using 24 SATA disks at each endpoint we are able to locally read and write an NTFS volume is striped across 24 disks at 1.2 GBps. A 32-disk stripe delivers 1.7 GBps. Experiments on higher performance and higher-capacity systems deliver up to 3.5 GBps

Unequal Spending, Aggregate Demand and International Financial Stability

Währungskrise, Ausgaben, Gesamtwirtschaftliche Nachfrage, Preisniveaustabilität, Vereinigte Staaten, Currency crisis, Expenditure, Aggregate demand, Price stability, United States

Masters' courses in the education of adults in the UK

This is a paper from the Academic Papers Online series from ESCalate, written by John Field, Richard Dockrell, Peter Gray in 2005. Universities provide a range of advanced qualifications for professionals who support adult learners. Describing and evaluating this body of work, though, poses something of a challenge. The field of continuing education is a broad one, which has been widened further by current government policies promoting lifelong learning, as well as by increased concerns for quality improvement among providers in further and higher education. Qualifications are accordingly offered under a variety of different titles: many universities now offer taught postgraduate courses in areas such as lifelong learning, continuing education, post-compulsory education and training or adult education. This report examines the background against which these courses developed, and explores a number of curricular and organisational issues associated with them. It includes, as an appendix, a list of courses currently offered in British higher education institution

Bulgaria's evolving legal framework for private sector development

Bulgaria is in the midst of a historic transformation from a planned to a market economy. The Bulgarian government is working steadily to create a legal framework in which the private sector can develop. The authors describe the current legal framework in Bulgaria in the areas of constitutional, real property, intellectual property, company, foreign investment, bankruptcy, contract, and antimology law. These areas of law define property rights, the means for exchanging property rights, and the rules for competitive market behavior - the bedrock of a legal system for a market economy. But the administrative and judicial machinery for implementing these laws is slower to develop. Laws by themselves are only paper; the legal framework comes to life only when legal and administrative institutions can enforce the laws and readily resolve the disputes they inevitably spur, and only when the public accepts that the laws are binding. Moreover, the laws by necessity provide only a general framework. Their content must be filled by more detailed regualtions and practice in individual cases, a process that takes time. The challenge of legal development is as immense as that of economic reform, and the two are inexorably intertwined.Municipal Housing and Land,Municipal Financial Management,National Governance,Environmental Economics&Policies,Banks&Banking Reform

The application of a thermoplastic recording material to holographic filtering

Imperial Users onl

Idealised simulations of cyclones with robust symmetrically-unstable sting jets

Idealised simulations of Shapiro-Keyser cyclones developing a sting jet (SJ) are presented. Thanks to an improved and accurate implementation of thermal wind balance in the initial state, it has been possible to use more realistic environments than in previous idealised studies. As a consequence, this study provides further insight in SJ evolution and dynamics and explores SJ robustness to different environmental conditions, assessed via a wide range of sensitivity experiments. The control simulation contains a cyclone that fits the Shapiro-Keyser conceptual model and develops a SJ whose dynamics are associated with the evolution of mesoscale instabilities along the airstream, including symmetric instability (SI). The SJ undergoes a strong descent while leaving the cloud-head banded tip and markedly accelerating towards the frontal-fracture region, revealed as an area of buckling of the already-sloped moist isentropes. Dry instabilities, generated by vorticity tilting via slantwise frontal motions in the cloud head, exist in similar proportions to moist instabilities at the start of the SJ descent and are then released along the SJ. The observed evolution supports the role of SI in the airstream’s dynamics proposed in a conceptual model outlined in a previous study. Sensitivity experiments illustrate that the SJ is a robust feature of intense Shapiro-Keyser cyclones, highlighting a range of different environmental conditions in which SI contributes to the evolution of this airstream, conditional on the model having adequate resolution. The results reveal that several environmental factors can modulate the strength of the SJ. However, a positive relationship between the strength of the SJ, both in terms of peak speed and amount of descent, and the amount of instability occurring along it can still be identified. In summary, the idealised simulations presented in this study show the robustness of SJ occurrence in intense Shapiro-Keyser cyclones and support and clarify the role of dry instabilities in SJ dynamics

An Exploration of Attitudes toward Dogs among College Students in Bangalore, India

Conversations in the field of anthrozoology include treatment and distinction of food animals, animals as workers versus pests, and most recently, emerging pet trends including the practice of pet parenting. This paper explores attitudes toward pet dogs in the shared social space of urban India. The data include 375 pen-and-paper surveys from students at CHRIST (Deemed to be University) in Bangalore, India. Reflecting upon Serpell’s biaxial concept of dogs as a relationship of affect and utility, the paper considers the growing trend of pet dog keeping in urban spaces and the increased use of affiliative words to describe these relationships. The paper also explores potential sex differences in attitudes towards pet and stray dogs. Ultimately, these findings suggest that the presence of and affiliation with pet dogs, with reduced utility and increased affect, is symptomatic of cultural changes typical of societies encountering the second demographic transition. Despite this, sex differences as expected based upon evolutionary principles, remain present, with women more likely to emphasize health and welfare and men more likely to emphasize bravery and risk taking