Positive Effects of Corporate Social Responsibility on Youth Development A Case Study of the Royal Swazi Sugar Corporation in Swaziland

What is corporate social responsibility (CSR)? How does it directly affect the youth in the areas where corporations come in to set up factories or farms? When one thinks of corporations operating in Africa, only those examples from the news come to mind, and they are all negative. One example is the recent strikes at the Marikana Mines in the Gauteng province of South Africa due to unfair wages and sanitation issues in the camps where employees live. I intend in this capstone to paint a picture of a corporation in Africa that strives to work towards best practices, and to talk about the youth who benefit from their measures. While living in one of these communities, I gained a rare insight that one cannot report with a mere visit

Lax-Phillips scattering theory for PT-symmetric \rho-perturbed operators

The S-matrices corresponding to PT-symmetric \rho-perturbed operators are defined and calculated by means of an approach based on an operator-theoretical interpretation of the Lax-Phillips scattering theory

Reducing Our Waste in Bloomington-Normal, IL

The purpose of this report is to inform public officials, the Ecology Action Center, and Bloomington/Normal residents of current habits, unmet needs and areas for improvement concerning community recycling programs. The findings are based on a survey of 290 Bloomington/Normal households, as well as interviews conducted with key stakeholders in the community. One of the more significant findings was the almost universal support for the expansion of the curbside recycling program in the area. Respondents also reported a general dissatisfaction with the current state of apartment recycling efforts, and support of the implementation of mandatory recycling in school districts. To conclude, we make recommendations for improvement of the Bloomington/Normal recycling programs

AP-PA field orientation followed by IMRT reduces lung exposure in comparison to conventional 3D conformal and sole IMRT in centrally located lung tumors

Little attention has been paid to the fact that intensity modulated radiation therapy (IMRT) techniques do not easily enable treatment with opposed beams. Three treatment plans (3 D conformal, IMRT, and combined (anterior-posterior-posterio-anterior (AP-PA) + IMRT) of 7 patients with centrally-located lung cancer were compared for exposure of lung, spinal cord and esophagus. Combined IMRT and AP-PA techniques offer better lung tissue sparing compared to plans predicated solely on IMRT for centrally-located lung tumors

Personalized radiation dosimetry for PRRT : how many scans are really required?

Purpose Over recent years, peptide receptor radiotherapy (PRRT) has been recognized as an effective treatment for patients with metastatic neuroendocrine tumors (NETs). Personalized dosimetry can contribute to improve the outcome of peptide receptor radiotherapy (PRRT) in patients with metastatic NETs. Dosimetry can aid treatment planning, ensuring that absorbed dose to vulnerable normal organs (kidneys and bone marrow) does not exceed safe limits over serial treatments, and that absorbed dose to tumor is sufficient. Absorbed dose is estimated from a series of post-treatment SPECT/CT images. Total self-dose is proportional to the integral under the time activity concentration curve (TACC). Method dependence of image-based absorbed dose calculations has been previously investigated, and we set out here to extend previous work by examining implications of number of data points in the TACC and the numerical integration methods used in estimating absorbed dose. Methods In this retrospective study, absorbed dose estimates and effective half-lives were calculated by fitting curves to TACCs for normal organs and tumors in 30 consecutive patients who underwent a series of 4 post-treatment SPECT/CT scans at 4 h, 24 h, 4–5 days, and 1 week following 177Lu-DOTATATE PRRT. We examined the effects of including only 2 or 3 rather than all 4 data points in the TACC, and the effect of numerical integration method (mono-exponential alone or in combination with trapezoidal rule) on the absorbed dose and half-life estimates. Our current method is the combination of trapezoidal rule over the first 24 h, with mono-exponential fit thereafter extrapolated to infinity. The other methods were compared to this current method. Results Differences in absorbed dose and effective half-life between the current method and estimates based only on the second, third, and fourth scans were very small (mean differences < 2.5%), whereas differences between the current method and 4-point mono-exponential fit were higher (mean differences < 5%) with a larger range. It appears that in a 4-point mono-exponential fit the early (4 h) time point may skew results, causing some large errors. Differences between the current method and values based on only 2 time points were relatively small (mean differences < 3.5%) when the 24 h and 1 week scans were used, but when the 24 h and 4–5 days scans, or the 4–5 days and 1 week scans were used, differences were greater. Conclusion This study indicates that for 177Lu-DOTATATE PRRT, accurate estimates of absorbed dose for organs and tumors may be estimated from scans at 24 h, 72 h, and 1 week post-treatment without an earlier scan. It may even be possible to cut out the 72 h scan, though the uncertainty increases. However, further work on more patients is required to validate this