SOCIAL PROTECTION AND CHILDREN’S RIGHTS IN ZAMBIA

Social protection and the issue of children’s rights have been on the development agenda for over three decades. In the late 1980s and early 1990s social protection emerged as a critical response to the “social safety nets” discourse. More recently however, slow progress towards reaching the Millennium Development Goals has rekindled interest in social transfers as a means of reducing poverty and as a strategy for accelerating progress towards meeting the Millennium Development Goals. ‘ There are a number of global, regional and national initiatives that have dramatically influenced the nature, scope and direction of social protection and the rights of the child in the health and education sectors in Zambia. At the international level, the World Bank is considering the scaling up of its support to social transfers as a key policy response to inequities in health and education for the poorest and socially excluded groups. At the continental and regional level, the Commission for Africa has called for a major scaling up of social assistance to vulnerable children. Within the United Nations organizations, bodies like the World Health Organization have launched a Commission on Social Determinants of Health that will review the potential of social transfer programmes to improve health. Similarly, the United Nations Children’s Educational Fund is promoting the development of a rights-based approach to social protection, education and health. At the national level, the development of a policy framework for social protection has boosted the prospects of reducing extreme poverty in incapacitated households. In addition, the incorporation of the social protection policy as a chapter in the Fifth National Development Plan has boosted the prospects of enhancing access to health and education facilities for vulnerable children. Overall, there has been an emerging consensus around the view that social protection can be an effective response to persistent poverty, vulnerability and policy shocks. The proliferation of social protection Interventions in the agriculture, health and education sectors in Zambia attests to this emerging consensus.SAVE THE CHILDREN-SWEDE

History on the Line: time as dimension

Boyd Davis’s work concerns representation, principally visual and spatial. This article discusses mapping historical time to a graphical surface, such as in timelines, focusing on the orientation of the time axis. Boyd Davis gained a £92K EPSRC grant to develop these inquiries into digital formats in 2012, and £70K from the Leverhulme Trust ending in 2010. It contrasts the paucity of intellectual debate on mapping time with the controversies over competing geographic projections, a dearth that Boyd Davis’s work is dedicated to correcting. The article proposes a research agenda derived from a synthesis of the literatures of cognitive science and gesture studies, revealing that the metaphorical direction of time differs between verbal and gestural usage, and to a lesser extent between cultures. It features original archive research into the emergence of modern chronographics in the mid-18th century, a shift from typographic, tabular layouts to truly graphical time-maps based on a changing model of time spawned by Descartes and Newton. Research into the timelines of Nicole Oresme (1350s) and Jacques Barbeu-Dubourg and Joseph Priestley (1750s) reveals their difficulties in finding the ‘right’ direction for time. Related work included a co-written paper for ‘Electronic Visualisation and the Arts’, London (2010), selected for the 2013 Springer book of best full papers (21 of c.160); a paper for the 26th ‘Computers and the History of Art’, London (2010); experimental work using virtual environments to represent historic time, a Leverhulme project co-led by Boyd Davis: two co-written articles for Computers & Education (2012); a chapter in Huang (ed.), Handbook of Human Centric Visualization (2013); a guest article for Joseph Priestley House Museum, PA, USA (2011); an invited talk on original research into French 18th-century contributions to chronographics, Centre de Recherches Texte/Image/Langage, Université de Bourgogne (2012); and a paper for ‘EVA2013’, London (2013)

Widespread mistaken identity in tropical plant collections

Specimens of plants and animals preserved in museums are the primary source of verifiable data on the geographical and temporal distribution of organisms. Museum datasets are increasingly being uploaded to aggregated regional and global databases (e.g. the Global Biodiversity Information Facility; GBIF) for use in a wide range of analyses. Thus, digitisation of natural history collections is providing unprecedented information to facilitate the study of the natural world on a global scale. The digitisation of this information utilises information provided on specimen labels, and assumes they are correctly identified. Here we evaluate the accuracy of names associated with 4,500 specimens of African gingers from 40 herbaria in 21 countries. Our data show that at least 58% of the specimens had the wrong name prior to a recent taxonomic study. A similar pattern of wrongly named specimens is also shown for Dipterocarps and Ipomoea (morning glory). We also examine the number of available plant specimens worldwide. Our data demonstrate that, while the world’s collections have more than doubled since 1970, more than 50% of tropical specimens, on average, are likely to be incorrectly named. This finding has serious implications for the uncritical use of specimen data from natural history collections.

Model predictive control of low earth orbiting spacecraft with magneto-torquers

The problem of attitude control using magnetic torque rods is addressed, in order to demonstrate predictive control as a suitable and effective technique of magnetic attitude control. The study addresses the key issues of magnetic field modeling, controller stability and implementation. Two controller designs are implemented, the first adopting an MPC approach with a constant magnetic field assumption, while the second method includes the true variation of the magnetic field within the control law. Both methods demonstrate significantly improved performance over PD control with the inclusion of the true magnetic field variation leading to the best results. Controller stability is considered with and without terminal penalty within the cost function. Floquet analysis demonstrates both methods to be stable, however the terminal penalty based method leads to a more stable controller

Cognitive Self-Enhancement as a Duty to Oneself: A Kantian Perspective

Recently some bioethicists and neuroscientists have argued for an imperative of chemical cognitive enhancement. This imperative is usually based on consequentialist grounds. In this paper, the topic of cognitive self-enhancement is discussed from a Kantian point of view in order to shed new light on the controversial debate. With Kant, it is an imperfect duty to oneself to strive for perfecting one's own natural and moral capacities beyond one's natural condition, but there is no duty to enhance others. A Kantian approach does not directly lead to a duty of chemical cognitive self-enhancement, but it also does not clearly rule out that this type of enhancement can be an appropriate means to the end of self-improvement. Th

Model predictive control of low earth orbiting spacecraft with magneto-torquers

The problem of attitude control using magnetic torque rods is addressed, in order to demonstrate predictive control as a suitable and effective technique of magnetic attitude control. The study addresses the key issues of magnetic field modeling, controller stability and implementation. Two controller designs are implemented, the first adopting an MPC approach with a constant magnetic field assumption, while the second method includes the true variation of the magnetic field within the control law. Both methods demonstrate significantly improved performance over PD control with the inclusion of the true magnetic field variation leading to the best results. Controller stability is considered with and without terminal penalty within the cost function. Floquet analysis demonstrates both methods to be stable, however the terminal penalty based method leads to a more stable controller

The Association between Sagittal Index, Canal Compromise, Loss of Vertebral Body Height, and Severity of Spinal Cord Injury in Thoracolumbar Burst Fractures

Aim: Our aim was to determine whether a combination of sagittal index (SI), canal compromise (CC), and loss of vertebral body height (LVBH) is associated with the severity of neurological injury in patients with thoracolumbar burst fractures. Materials and Methods: Seventy-four patients with thoracolumbar burst fracture undergoing instrumentation between 2010 and 2015 were analyzed retrospectively. The degree of neurological injury was determined using the American Spinal Injury Association (ASIA) scoring system. The association between the morphology of the fracture and the severity of neurological injury was analyzed. Results: There was a strong association between fracture morphology and the severity of neurological injury. Of the patients, 77.5% with SI >= 20 degrees, 81.6% with CC >= 40%, and 100% with LVBH >= 50% had lesion according to ASIA. All of 7 patients with ASIA A had SI >= 20 degrees w, CC >= 40%, and LVBH >= 50%. On the other hand, 79% of the patients with ASIA E had SI 25 degrees, the patients with CC >40%, and the patients with LVBH >50% are likely to have a more severe neurological injury

On the making and taking of professionalism in the further education workplace

This paper examines the changing nature of professional practice in English further education. At a time when neo-liberal reform has significantly impacted on this under-researched and over-market-tested sector, little is known about who its practitioners are and how they construct meaning in their work. Sociological interest in the field has tended to focus on further education practitioners as either the subjects of market and managerial reform or as creative agents operating within the contradictions of audit and inspection cultures. In challenging such dualism, which is reflective of wider sociological thinking, the paper examines the ways in which agency and structure combine to produce a more transformative conception of the further education professional. The approach contrasts with a prevailing policy discourse that seeks to re-professionalise and modernise further education practice without interrogating either the terms of its professionalism or the neo-liberal practices in which it resides

Mechanotransductive feedback control of endothelial cell motility and vascular morphogenesis

Vascular morphogenesis requires persistent endothelial cell motility that is responsive to diverse and dynamic mechanical stimuli. Here, we interrogated the mechanotransductive feedback dynamics that govern endothelial cell motility and vascular morphogenesis. We show that the transcriptional regulators, YAP and TAZ, are activated by mechanical cues to transcriptionally limit cytoskeletal and focal adhesion maturation, forming a conserved mechanotransductive feedback loop that mediates human endothelial cell motility in vitro and zebrafish intersegmental vessel (ISV) morphogenesis in vivo. This feedback loop closes in 4 hours, achieving cytoskeletal equilibrium in 8 hours. Feedback loop inhibition arrested endothelial cell migration in vitro and ISV morphogenesis in vivo. Inhibitor washout at 3 hrs, prior to feedback loop closure, restored vessel growth, but washout at 8 hours, longer than the feedback timescale, did not, establishing lower and upper bounds for feedback kinetics in vivo. Mechanistically, YAP and TAZ induced transcriptional suppression of myosin II activity to maintain dynamic cytoskeletal equilibria. Together, these data establish the mechanoresponsive dynamics of a transcriptional feedback loop necessary for persistent endothelial cell migration and vascular morphogenesis

Simulations of idealised 3D atmospheric flows on terrestrial planets using LFRic-Atmosphere

We demonstrate that LFRic-Atmosphere, a model built using the Met Office's GungHo dynamical core, is able to reproduce idealised large-scale atmospheric circulation patterns specified by several widely-used benchmark recipes. This is motivated by the rapid rate of exoplanet discovery and the ever-growing need for numerical modelling and characterisation of their atmospheres. Here we present LFRic-Atmosphere's results for the idealised tests imitating circulation regimes commonly used in the exoplanet modelling community. The benchmarks include three analytic forcing cases: the standard Held-Suarez test, the Menou-Rauscher Earth-like test, and the Merlis-Schneider Tidally Locked Earth test. Qualitatively, LFRic-Atmosphere agrees well with other numerical models and shows excellent conservation properties in terms of total mass, angular momentum and kinetic energy. We then use LFRic-Atmosphere with a more realistic representation of physical processes (radiation, subgrid-scale mixing, convection, clouds) by configuring it for the four TRAPPIST-1 Habitable Atmosphere Intercomparison (THAI) scenarios. This is the first application of LFRic-Atmosphere to a possible climate of a confirmed terrestrial exoplanet. LFRic-Atmosphere reproduces the THAI scenarios within the spread of the existing models across a range of key climatic variables. Our work shows that LFRic-Atmosphere performs well in the seven benchmark tests for terrestrial atmospheres, justifying its use in future exoplanet climate studies.Comment: 34 pages, 9(12) figures; Submitted to Geoscientific Model Development; Comments are welcome (see Discussion tab on the journal's website: https://egusphere.copernicus.org/preprints/2023/egusphere-2023-647