The parliamentary election and referendum in Belarus, October 2004

Belarus became an independent state in December 1991 on the dissolution of the USSR; and it became a presidential state under its constitution of March 1994. At the first election under that constitution, in July 1994, Alexander Lukashenko won a convincing mandate with 80% of the vote in a second-round runoff against the then prime minister, Vyacheslav Kebich. Once elected, Lukashenko moved quickly to extend the powers of his office, which soon brought him into conflict with the Belarusian parliament (then known as the Supreme Soviet) and the Constitutional Court. He sought to resolve this by calling a referendum, in May 1995, when a positive vote allowed him to expand his presidential powers. In November 1996, a further and more controversial referendum approved an extension of the presidential term and replaced the parliament with a smaller and wholly subordinate National Assembly (Natsional'noe Sobranie). This was effectively a constitutional coup, which paved the way for the establishment of an increasingly authoritarian regime

Obtaining quasi-static models using a frequency domain extraction methodology

© 2018 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.”This contribution illustrates how a realistic nonlinear quasi-static model for FET-type devices can be extracted using an original frequency domain extraction technique. An ideal ‘made-up’ device is built from the measured bias dependence of a GaN medium power device. This ideal device is excited by two ideal voltage sources and its response (drain current) is used to illustrate how the extraction procedure can separate conduction and displacement current components provided the total current spectrum (or, alternatively, waveform) and control voltages are known.This work has been supported by the Junta de Andalucía under Grant (TIC2012-1237). Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Validation of the relationship between MRCI polymorphisms with dengue disease in a Brazilian population

Dengue is a viral disease characterized by mild febrile illness in the majority of cases. In a small percent of cases, it manifests more severe symptoms, and it can be fatal without proper treatment and support. It is a vector borne disease that is transmitted by the Aedes mosquitos. Currently up to 4 billion of the world’s population lives in areas at risk for dengue transmission. This represents a public health risk. The objective of this study was to evaluate the association of two single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) located in the MRCI gene, rs2296414 and rs34039386, with dengue virus infection in a sample of patients from a cohort study of dengue patients and controls from Recife, Brazil. The MRCI gene codes for the mannose receptors of macrophages, which have been demonstrated to play an important role in viral infections. DNA was amplified using PCR. Genotyping of 179 individuals was done by three methods, fluorescence polarization, restriction digests, and sequencing. All samples were found to be in Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium across the sample population and when classified as cases of controls. No significant departures from Hardy-Weinberg were seen when samples were broken down by disease status. Odds ratios were calculated with novel data and combined with data from a previous study. The previous study examined the same two polymorphisms using a different sample from the same cohort study. A statistically significant difference was found in the combined samples for the rs2296414 site with regards to case or control status, OR=1.46, p=.035. A statistically significant difference was also found for the rs34039386 site with regards to case/control status OR=2.76, p=.0029. This difference was only found in the novel data. Further research with larger samples sized is needed to continue to understand the relationships between these sites and dengue infection, as the sample size for this study was small. Even when combined with data from the previous study, the data set was not particularly large. The public health significance of this research is produced by the increasing global importance of dengue and the need for more effective treatments and the development of a vaccine; advancement of the understanding of the relationships between the dengue virus and the MRCI gene may lead to improvements in the treatments available and in the production of a vaccine with high efficacy

Greenhouse gas emissions from laboratory-scale fires in wildland fuels depend on fire spread mode and phase of combustion

© Author(s) 2015. Free-burning experimental fires were conducted in a wind tunnel to explore the role of ignition type and thus fire spread mode on the resulting emissions profile from combustion of fine (2, CH4 and N2O) and CO were quantified using off-axis integrated-cavity-output spectroscopy. Emissions factors calculated using a carbon mass balance technique (along with statistical testing) showed that most of the carbon was emitted as CO2, with heading fires emitting 17% more CO2 than flanking and 9.5% more CO2 than backing fires, and about twice as much CO as flanking and backing fires. Heading fires had less than half as much carbon remaining in combustion residues. Statistically significant differences in CH4 and N2O emissions factors were not found with respect to fire spread mode. Emissions factors calculated per unit of dry fuel consumed showed that combustion phase (i.e. flaming or smouldering) had a statistically significant impact, with CO and N2O emissions increasing during smouldering combustion and CO2 emissions decreasing. Findings on the equivalence of different emissions factor reporting methods are discussed along with the impact of our results for emissions accounting and potential sampling biases associated with our work. The primary implication of this study is that prescribed fire practices could be modified to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions from forests by judicial use of ignition methods to induce flanking and backing fires over heading fires

Creación de una herramienta para comunicación de aplicaciones basada en UDP (SRC).

El objetivo del presente trabajo es conseguir una herramienta que permita a los desarrolladores de aplicaciones realizar una comunicación efectiva utilizando el protocolo de transporte de red UDP/IP. Con dicha herramienta pretendemos que los programadores dispongan de un sistema sencillo y eficaz para la realización de comunicaciones en entornos en los que la conexión segura y/o continua no es necesaria o importante. Asimismo se pretende que dichos programadores puedan sacar provecho a las mejoras introducidas en el protocolo TCP/IP especialmente de aquellas referidas al multicast y de las que actualmente se hace un uso muy pequeño. Para ello se desarrollara un conjunto de herramientas mediante las cuales un programador poco avezado podrá construir desde los entornos de aplicación cooperativos más simples a los más complejos sin necesidad de tener conocimientos del medio de transmisión, de las complejidades de la programación en red o de adquirir un conocimiento especializado del software de comunicación implementado. Los programadores más preparados dispondrán de una flexibilidad total para adaptar o modificar el comportamiento del software para adaptarlo a las necesidades más especificas o los problemas más complejos mediante el acceso rápido y sin enmascarar a los recursos de la red. El objetivo final es por tanto ambicioso ya que se pretende dotar a la comunidad de un instrumento que simultáneamente resuelva las complejidades de la comunicación entre aplicaciones y además de uso sencillo y de fácil adaptación para los casos extremos. En el desarrollo de este trabajo podremos ver como se va consiguiendo este objetivo mediante por un lado la simplificación (el 1% de los problemas suele representar el 99% de la complejidad) y por otro lado mediante la utilización de soluciones software flexibles en su diseño. Los capítulos subsiguientes explicarán las alternativas estudiadas para conseguirlo así como la solución finalmente adoptada y la forma en que la misma se va resolviendo paso a paso. Además se dota a esta memoria de un catalogo de problemas de comunicación y su solución mediante el uso de la herramienta y de una comparativa con otro tipo de soluciones existentes actualmente de forma que el lector pueda verificar la eficacia del resultado obtenido

Incorrect interpretation of carbon mass balance biases global vegetation fire emission estimates

© 2016, Nature Publishing Group. All rights reserved. Vegetation fires are a complex phenomenon in the Earth system with many global impacts, including influences on global climate. Estimating carbon emissions from vegetation fires relies on a carbon mass balance technique that has evolved with two different interpretations. Databases of global vegetation fire emissions use an approach based on 'consumed biomass', which is an approximation to the biogeochemically correct 'burnt carbon' approach. Here we show that applying the 'consumed biomass' approach to global emissions from vegetation fires leads to annual overestimates of carbon emitted to the atmosphere by 4.0% or 100 Tg compared with the 'burnt carbon' approach. The required correction is significant and represents ∼9% of the net global forest carbon sink estimated annually. Vegetation fire emission studies should use the 'burnt carbon' approach to quantify and understand the role of this burnt carbon, which is not emitted to the atmosphere, as a sink enriched in carbon

Exploring the properties of pyrogenic carbon with solid state ¹³C nuclear magnetic resonant spectroscopy: A combustion wind tunnel study

© Asia-Pacific Conference on Combustion, ASPACC 2019.All right reserved. Increasing the production of aryl carbon from wildland fire may be beneficial since it can be stored in soils for long periods of time rather than being emitted to the atmosphere or stored in soils in a less recalcitrant form. In this study, solid state 13C nuclear magnetic resonant spectroscopy is used to explore the properties of pyrogenic carbon produced by fires burning with different fire spread modes. Forest litter fuels were burnt using in a combustion wind tunnel using a replicated experimental design. Experiments were performed with three different fire spread modes, involving heading fires that spread with the wind, backing fires that spread against the wind and flanking fires that spread perpendicular to the wind. Results show that heading fires produce significantly more aryl carbon than flanking fires. Analysis of the results with principal component analysis show that maximising the residence time of high temperature combustion and the combustion factor could be an effective method for increasing the production of aryl carbon from fire

Explaining party system development in post-communist Belarus

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