Carbon Property Rights in Soil

The commodification of soil to permit carbon sequestration and hence trading in the resultant carbon rights is examined as an emerging facet of climate change management. As the developed world moves towards carbon offsets and decarbonisation, the Australian continent provides a capacity to be a land based repository of carbon in either select species of vegetation grown specifically for this purpose, or where soil is conserved to sequestrate carbon. A presumption exists that carbon is sequestrated differentially in various soil landscapes, which typically comprise a mixture of different soil types. Diffuse boundaries between soil landscapes and significant differences assigned to same soil landscapes, albeit in different areas, significantly impacts sequestration of carbon

Castro\u27s Shifters: Locating Variation in Political Discourse

In his trademark speeches, Fidel Castro casts himself in a variety of roles: supreme leader, member of government, revolutionary, worker, member of the Cuban populace, and the embodiment of the Cuban nation. Transcripts of Castro’s major speeches provide a rich data set that spans five decades (1959-present). Initial readings reveal his prominent use of the first person plural nosotros , which suggests an intriguing discourse of inclusiveness for this long-time authoritarian leader. In this poster, we identify Castro’s variable discursive referents for nosotros verbs in relation to era and topic of speech (i.e., history of the revolution, national goals and progress, or trouble talk). Variable rule analysis shows that in Castro’s earlier speeches, use of the royal we variant is favored: Llamábamos al Partido por la noche, y le preguntábamos si había llovido o no ( We called the Party the other night, and we asked if it had rained or not ). In contrast, the use of what we term the collective we is favored most heavily in speeches after the fall of the Soviet Union: No estamos produciendo para los burgueses, estamos produciendo para el pueblo ( We’re not producing for the bourgeoisie, we’re producing for the people ). The variation we encounter reflects Castro’s positioning of self relative to the people he is addressing. Castro, as leader of the perpetual revolutionary state, ostensibly erases the possibility of a public sphere existing apart from the government by constructing what the public thinks/expresses/wants as what the government [naturally] does. This is as we might expect in a Marxist dictatorship of the proletariat. Castro, however, achieves this conflation of public sphere and public authority in two ways in his speeches: first, he relocates public authority outside of the immediate social context, so that the role played by the Cuban public and the revolutionary government is one and the same when viewed in opposition to Yankee imperialism or memories of the Batista regime, for example. Second, by including himself in nosotros talk about workers and revolutionaries while standing over and addressing the Cuban public, Castro projects himself into the crowd. The effect of such talk is to offer an answer to the question, Who mediates between the private sphere and the government in a socialist society where each one is identified with the other? Castro proposes himself as the answer; he, not any autonomous, Habermasian sphere of rational debate, mediates between people’s private lives and the actions of state authority. Thus, what we term a personal public sphere provides a context for understanding the pattern of variation we observe in Castro’s speeches

An all-Ireland epidemiological study of MND, 2004-2005

Background and methods: We conducted an all-Ireland population-based prospective epidemiological survey of motor neurone disease (MND) using the Northern Ireland and Republic of Ireland MND registers to examine the incidence and prevalence of the disease over the period 2004–2005.Results and conclusions: Incidence of MND was 1.9 per 100 000 person-years and rates were comparable in both the north and south of Ireland. Prevalence of MND was 5.0 per 100 000 population. When compared with previous published surveys of MND performed in the Republic of Ireland over the last 10 years, rates of disease have remained relatively constant. When standardized to the 1990 US population, the incidence of MND in Ireland was found to be consistent with other European prospective surveys of MND

Evaluation of the Impact of Transthoracic Endoscopic Sympathectomy on Patients with Palmar Hyperhydrosis

AbstractObjectives. We assessed the impact of transthoracic endoscopic sympathectomy (TES) on the quality of life of patients with palmar hyperhydrosis.Design. A retrospective questionnaire based study.Methods. Patients undergoing TES at our institution between 1997 and 2002 received a SF-36 quality of life postal questionnaire. The pre- and post-operative symptoms were assessed. Statistical analysis was by means of the Student's t test.Results. Ninety-four TES were carried out in 62 patients. Forty-one cases were female. The age range was 17–64 years. The mean follow-up period was 38.46 months. Mean hospital stay was 3 days. Compensatory hyperhydrosis was reported in 29 cases and only considered severe in four cases (9.7%). Forty-one patients replied to the questionnaire (66%). The overall quality of life (as assessed by the SF-36 form) was unanimously improved (p<0.0009) and demonstrated significant improvements in social functioning (p<0.0002), physical role limitations (p<0.0007), emotional well-being (p<0.0007) and overall energy levels (p<0.05).Conclusion. TES resulted in significant improvements inpatient's overall quality of life, social and emotional functioning. The procedure is associated with minimal morbidity and only a short inpatient stay is required. Patients should be cautioned on the possibility of compensatory hyperhydrosis which may occur in a small number of cases

Population Study of the Variation in Monochromatic Aberrations of the Normal Human Eye Over the Central Visual Field

Abstract We present data analysis for ocular aberrations of 60 normal eyes measured with a Hartmann-Shack (HS) wavefront sensor (WFS). Aberration measurements were made on-axis and at 5 degree field angles in the nasal, inferior, temporal and superior semi-meridians. Particular attention is given to aberration distributions and possible strategies for aberration correction are discussed. A versatile HS WFS was designed and constructed with features of simultaneous pupil centre determination, off-axis capability, real-time data displays, and efficient lenslet sampling orientation. The subject alignment is achieved by the use of a parallel channel that is recombined with the sensing channel to simultaneously image the eye and the HS spots onto a single CCD. The pupil centre is determined using this image of the eye (iris edge), rather than the HS spots. The optical design includes a square lenslet array positioned with its diagonals aligned with the most typical principal astigmatic meridians of the eye. This favourable orientation helps to enlarge the dynamic range of the WFS. The telecentric re-imaging of the HS spots increases the robustness of the system to defocus in the event of CCD misalignment

Mind the Gap: Integration of International Students

The international mobilisation of tertiary students is increasing from 0.8 million in 1975 to 3.5 million worldwide by 2016 (OECD, 2018). This increasingly fluid student migration, supported with various European initiatives, the Erasmus exchange program (since 1987) and the Bologna Declaration (since 1999), have influenced the profile of students within the Irish higher education system. By 2016, international students comprised 5.1% of total tertiary students in Ireland (OECD, 2018). According to Irish and UK research, lecturers have an important role in facilitating integration (British Council, 2014; Irish Council for International Students, 2017). However, for most faculty, the term internationalisation of the curriculum was unfamiliar (Clarke, Hui Yang & Harmon, 2018) and faculty also had mixed views on a need to explicitly address cultural and language issues in their learning outcomes or assessment tasks. Although some faculty viewed intercultural training as important most had not received this kind of support (Clarke et al., 2018). This report focuses on the integration challenges international students face, and what best-practice recommendations are available to assist lecturers in aiding integration

Evaluation of Random Early Detection and Adaptive Random Early Detection in Benchmark Scenarios

In this paper, we evaluate Random Early Detection (RED) and Adaptive RED (ARED) in Benchmark Scenarios as detailed in RFC 7928. RED is one of the early proposed AQM mechanisms, which attains high throughput and keeps average delay low. Moreover, ARED is an extension to RED which eliminates the parameter sensitivity to improve the performance of RED. The results indicate that RED outperforms ARED in scenarios with abrupt changes in traffic load. ARED is known to reduce the packet drops and therefore, in rest of the scenarios it can be observed that ARED outperforms RED

Performance Evaluation of Bluetooth Low Energy Communication

Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), also known as Bluetooth Smart is the new power efficient version of Bluetooth. With the massive increase in the use of IoT devices, their compatibility and suitability for use with BLE, it has become an important protocol for communication. The performance of the protocol in terms of throughput, however, remains untested. Several parameters like connection interval, packet size per connection interval, data length extension and others constitute the implementation of the BLE protocol on a device. These parameters directly or indirectly effect the throughput of devices communicating over BLE. In this paper, we evaluated BLE performance by performing experiments to calculate throughput with varying values of connection interval and MTU size of application payload. We provide experimental values of throughput and compare it with the theoretically expected results and discuss the pattern and aberration found

Performance Evaluation of HTTP/2 over TLS+TCP and HTTP/2 over QUIC in a Mobile Network

With the development of technology and the increasing requirement for Internet speed, the web page load time is becoming more and more important in the current society. However, with the increasing scale of data transfer volume, it is hard for the current bandwidth used on the Internet to catch the ideal standard. In OSI protocol stack, the transport layer and application layer provide the ability to determine the package transfer time. The web page load time is determined by the header of the package when the package is launched into the application layer. To improve the performance of the web page by reducing web page load time, HTTP/2 and QUIC has been designed in the industry. We have shown experimentally, that when compared with HTTP/2, QUIC results in lower response time and better network traffic efficiency

Coevolution of religious and political authority in Austronesian societies

Authority, an institutionalized form of social power, is one of the defining features of the large-scale societies that evolved during the Holocene. Religious and political authority have deep histories in human societies and are clearly interdependent, but the nature of their relationship and its evolution over time is contested. We purpose-built an ethnographic dataset of 97 Austronesian societies and used phylogenetic methods to address two long-standing questions about the evolution of religious and political authority: first, how these two institutions have coevolved, and second, whether religious and political authority have tended to become more or less differentiated. We found evidence for mutual interdependence between religious and political authority but no evidence for or against a long-term pattern of differentiation or unification in systems of religious and political authority. Our results provide insight into how political and religious authority have worked synergistically over millennia during the evolution of large-scale societies