Transport for Exports.

A symposium address by Rhodesian minister of Transport & Power on the importance of transport infrastructure development to his government's export earnings. Paper Presented On Day 2 Of Symposium on: Current Economic Problems: Export Development, Nov. 3, 1972

DEVELOPING THE SACRED: Local & Global Bikas in the Nepali Bhotkhola

The purpose of this paper is to study the effects of bikas on community and culture. Research was conducted from 9-30 November 2010 in the Bhotia village Chyamtang in the Sankhuwasabha district of Northeastern Nepal. The forms of development observed at the site are separated into local bikas and global bikas, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. Research focused on a two-year old development project initiated by The Mountain Institute (TMI) using medicinal plant cultivation and community participation. Methods for studying Bhotia culture and development took the form of interviews with local healers, religious figures, farmers, and TMI staff. While ancient, their culture is as fragile as it has ever been and is threatened with extinction, much like chiraito in recent years, the medicinal plant that is being used for local development. In this way, by respecting Bhotia’s culture sanctity, recognizing their need for economic development, and making the people their own change agents, this project is helping to preserve their culture during this collision of global ideas that is pushing and pulling apart indigenous cultures

Cerebrovascular disease associated with antiphospholipid antibodies: more questions than answers

Neurological syndromes occur in a significant number of patients with antiphospholipid antibodies. The optimal management for these patients however remains uncertain. Our study is a descriptive analysis looking retrospectively at 45 patients who presented to the principal tertiary referral centre in the Australian Capital Territory, with either cerebral arterial or venous thrombosis for which there was no obvious cause for their presentation when initially reviewed. The diagnosis was based on the clinical findings made by one of three neurologists attached to our centre. Radiological findings and the presence of either IgM or IgG anticardiolipin antibodies, IgG anti-beta-2 glycoprotein 1 antibodies or a lupus anticoagulant were then documented. In this group of patients three subgroups were identified: 1. Individuals that fulfilled the Sapporo Classification Criteria 2. Individuals with transiently positive antiphospholipid antibodies and 3. Individuals with persistently low positive antiphospholipid antibodies. The most interesting of these three groups are those individuals with transiently positive antiphospholipid antibodies. A potential cause for presentation was identified in only one patient of this group with documented infective endocarditis and bacteraemia. Comparison with the other two groups suggested that there was little in terms of clinical presentation, radiological findings or intercurrent risk factors for thrombotic disease to distinguish between them. With disappearance of antiphospholipid antibodies, the individuals within this group have not had further thrombotic events. Our observations emphasise the problems that continue to exist in relation to the occurrence of cerebrovascular disease in the context of antiphospholipid antibodies and the optimal management of these stratified groups. Our findings also raise an as yet unanswered question as to the signficance of these transiently positive antiphospholipid antibodies. In the absence of significant intercurrent risk factors our findings would suggest that in the group we describe that they are likely to be of clinical significance

Eliminating grammatical function assignment from hierarchical models of speech production: Evidence from the conceptual accessibility of referents

ABSTRACTThe assignment of grammatical functions has been a key feature of hierarchical (serial) models of speech production since their inception in the 1970s. This article argues that grammatical function assignment is neither sufficient nor necessary in such models. It reports a study of the effects of the conceptual accessibility of referents on the selection of English dative syntactic frames in production and shows that the effects relate to linear precedence rather than grammatical function assignment. A secondary topic addressed in the same study is whether second language speakers of English have difficulty integrating syntactic knowledge where it interfaces with conceptual accessibility in speech production. Findings suggest that advanced proficiency speakers do not and are qualitatively similar to native speakers. The implications of this for the interface hypothesis about second language acquisition are discussed.</jats:p

Impacts and effects of ocean warming on intertidal rocky habitats.

• Intertidal rocky habitats comprise over 50% of the shorelines of the world, supporting a diversity of marine life and providing extensive ecosystem services worth in the region of US$ 5-10 trillion per year. • They are valuable indicators of the impacts of climate change on the wider marine environment and ecosystems. • Changes in species distributions, abundance and phenology have already been observed around the world in response to recent rapid climate change. • Species-level responses will have considerable ramifications for the structure of communities and trophic interactions, leading to eventual changes in ecosystem functioning (e.g. less primary producing canopy-forming algae in the North-east Atlantic). • Whilst progress is made on the mitigation1 required to achieve goals of a lower-carbon world, much can be done to enhance resilience to climate change. Managing the multitude of other interactive impacts on the marine environment, over which society has greater potential control (e.g. overfishing, invasive non-native species, coastal development, and pollution), will enable adaptation1 in the short and medium term of the next 5-50 years

Revisiting the Evidence for Collapsing Boundaries and Urgency Signals in Perceptual Decision-Making

For nearly 50 years, the dominant account of decision-making holds that noisy information is accumulated until a fixed threshold is crossed. This account has been tested extensively against behavioral and neurophysiological data for decisions about consumer goods, perceptual stimuli, eyewitness testimony, memories, and dozens of other paradigms, with no systematic misfit between model and data. Recently, the standard model has been challenged by alternative accounts that assume that less evidence is required to trigger a decision as time passes. Such "collapsing boundaries" or "urgency signals" have gained popularity in some theoretical accounts of neurophysiology. Nevertheless, evidence in favor of these models is mixed, with support coming from only a narrow range of decision paradigms compared with a long history of support from dozens of paradigms for the standard theory. We conducted the first large-scale analysis of data from humans and nonhuman primates across three distinct paradigms using powerful model-selection methods to compare evidence for fixed versus collapsing bounds. Overall, we identified evidence in favor of the standard model with fixed decision boundaries. We further found that evidence for static or dynamic response boundaries may depend on specific paradigms or procedures, such as the extent of task practice. We conclude that the difficulty of selecting between collapsing and fixed bounds models has received insufficient attention in previous research, calling into question some previous results