Trust in the psychological contract: an international employee perspective

The results of 37 medial canthal resection procedures performed for the correction of severe paralytic or involutional medial ectropion are presented with an average follow-up of 5.4 years. Epiphora was improved in 33 out of the 37 cases and all but one patient had an anatomically improved lid-globe apposition, medial canthal angle, and posterofixation of the medial canthus. These results confirmed the long-term value of the operation

In Search of a Meaningful Story: Oral History and Triathlon Memory in Australia

High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) is currently being prepared as the newest video coding standard of the ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group and the ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group. The main goal of the HEVC standardization effort is to enable significantly improved compression performance relative to existing standards-in the range of 50% bit-rate reduction for equal perceptual video quality. This paper provides an overview of the technical features and characteristics of the HEVC standard

The Asymptotic distribution of circles in the orbits of Kleinian groups

Let P be a locally finite circle packing in the plane invariant under a non-elementary Kleinian group Gamma and with finitely many Gamma-orbits. When Gamma is geometrically finite, we construct an explicit Borel measure on the plane which describes the asymptotic distribution of small circles in P, assuming that either the critical exponent of Gamma is strictly bigger than 1 or P does not contain an infinite bouquet of tangent circles glued at a parabolic fixed point of Gamma. Our construction also works for P invariant under a geometrically infinite group Gamma, provided Gamma admits a finite Bowen-Margulis-Sullivan measure and the Gamma-skinning size of P is finite. Some concrete circle packings to which our result applies include Apollonian circle packings, Sierpinski curves, Schottky dances, etc.Comment: 31 pages, 8 figures. Final version. To appear in Inventiones Mat

Religious faith in education: enemy or asset?

In this article I hope to cast some light on the relationship between religious faith and education by a preliminary mapping of the field. There are three parts to the article. First, I lay out the assumptions from which the rest of the article builds. Second, I seek to identify possible links between religion and education. As a sub-set of this, I explore a range of ways that theology might relate to education. Third, as a step towards a more healthy relationship between education and religious faith, I offer reasons why the church needs the academy and the academy needs the church. In the light of a convergence of the concerns that I show are shared by religious believers and educators, it is suggested that religious faith in the context of education should be considered an asset rather than an enemy

Charge asymmetry ratio as a probe of quark flavour couplings of resonant particles at the LHC

We show how a precise knowledge of parton distribution functions, in particular those of the u and d quarks, can be used to constrain a certain class of New Physics models in which new heavy charged resonances couple to quarks and leptons. We illustrate the method by considering a left-right symmetric model with a W' from a SU(2)_R gauge sector produced in quark-antiquark annihilation and decaying into a charged lepton and a heavy Majorana neutrino. We discuss a number of quark and lepton mixing scenarios, and simulate both signals and backgrounds in order to determine the size of the expected charge asymmetry. We show that various quark-W' mixing scenarios can indeed be constrained by charge asymmetry measurements at the LHC, particularly at 14 TeV centre of mass energy.Comment: 14 pages, 3 figure

Running into New Territory in SUSY Parameter Space

The LEP-II bound on the light Higgs mass rules out the vast majority of parameter space left to the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM) with weak-scale soft-masses. This suggests the importance of exploring extensions of the MSSM with non-minimal Higgs physics. In this article, we explore a theory with an additional singlet superfield and an extended gauge sector. The theory has a number of novel features compared to both the MSSM and Next-to-MSSM, including easily realizing a light CP-even Higgs mass consistent with LEP-II limits, tan(beta) < 1, and a lightest Higgs which is charged. These features are achieved while remaining consistent with perturbative unification and without large stop-masses. Discovery modes at the Tevatron and LHC are discussed.Comment: 15 pages, 5 figures; Typo in equation (4.5) corrected; submitted to JHE

High Speed Traveling Wave Electrooptic Intensity Modulator with a Doped PIN Semiconductor Junction

A high-electrooptic-efficiency Mach-Zehnder intensity modulator is demonstrated with a bandwidth exceeding 40 GHZ. The 1 mm-long modulator has a switching voltage comparable to undoped semiconductor designs of much greater length

Same-sign W pair production as a probe of double parton scattering at the LHC

We study the production of same-sign W boson pairs at the LHC in double parton interactions. Compared with simple factorised double parton distributions (dPDFs), we show that the recently developed dPDFs, GS09, lead to non-trivial kinematic correlations between the W bosons. A numerical study of the prospects for observing this process using same-sign dilepton signatures, including same-sign WWjj, di-boson and heavy flavour backgrounds, at 14 TeV centre-of-mass energy is then performed. It is shown that a small excess of same-sign dilepton events from double parton scattering over a background dominated by single scattering WZ(gamma*) production could be observed at the LHC.Comment: 14 pages, 8 figures. Added references, slight changes in the text

Virtual Effects of Split SUSY in Higgs Productions at Linear Colliders

In split supersymmetry the gauginos and higgsinos are the only supersymmetric particles possibly accessible at foreseeable colliders like the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and the International Linear Collider (ILC). In order to account for the cosmic dark matter measured by WMAP, these gauginos and higgsinos are stringently constrained and could be explored at the colliders through their direct productions and/or virtual effects in some processes. The clean environment and high luminosity of the ILC render the virtual effects of percent level meaningful in unraveling the new physics effects. In this work we assume split supersymmetry and calculate the virtual effects of the WMAP-allowed gauginos and higgsinos in Higgs productions e+e- -> Z h and e+e- -> \nu_e \bar_\nu_e h through WW fusion at the ILC. We find that the production cross section of e+e- -> Zh can be altered by a few percent in some part of the WMAP-allowed parameter space, while the correction to the WW-fusion process e+e- -> \nu_e \bar_\nu_e h is below 1%. Such virtual effects are correlated with the cross sections of chargino pair productions and can offer complementary information in probing split supersymmetry at the colliders.Comment: more discussions added (7 pages, 10 figs

Immunohistochemical detection of macrophage migration inhibitory factor in fetal and adult bovine epididymis: Release by the apocrine secretion mode?

Originally defined as a lymphokine inhibiting the random migration of macrophages, the macrophage migration inhibitory factor (MIF) is an important mediator of the host response to infection. Beyond its function as a classical cytokine, MIF is currently portrayed as a multifunctional protein with growth-regulating properties present in organ systems beyond immune cells. In previous studies, we detected substantial amounts of MIF in the rat epididymis and epididymal spermatozoa, where it appears to play a role during post-testicular sperm maturation and the acquisition of fertilization ability. To explore its presence in other species not yet examined in this respect, we extended the range of studies to the bull. Using a polyclonal antibody raised against MIF purified from bovine eye lenses, we detected MIF in the epithelium of the adult bovine epididymis with the basal cells representing a prominently stained cell type. A distinct accumulation of MIF at the apical cell pole of the epithelial cells and in membranous vesicles localized in the lumen of the epididynnal duct was obvious. In the fetal bovine epididymis, we also detected MIF in the epithelium, whereas MIF accumulation was evident at the apical cell surface and in apical protrusions. By immuno-electron microscopy of the adult bovine epididymis, we localized MIF in apical protrusions of the epithelial cells and in luminal membrane-bound vesicles that were found in close proximity to sperm cells. Although the precise origin of the MIF-containing vesicles remains to be delineated, our morphological observations support the hypothesis that they become detached from the apical surface of the epididymal epithelial cells. Additionally, an association of MIF with the outer dense fibers of luminal spermatozoa was demonstrated. Data obtained in this study suggest MIF release by an apocrine secretion mode in the bovine epididymis. Furthermore, MIF localized in the basal cells of the epithelium and in the connective tissue could be responsible for regulating the migration of macrophages in order to avoid contact of immune cells with spermatozoa that carry a wide range of potent antigens. Copyright (c) 2006 S. Karger AG, Basel