The effect of visual impairment on quality of life of children aged 3-16 years

Background: It is well known that visual impairment (VI) has a detrimental effect on Quality of Life (QoL) in adults. Little is known about the effects of VI in childhood. Aims: To evaluate the effects of VI on QoL of children. To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study containing a comparison arm for children with VI. Methods: QoL in children with VI (n¼24, age 10.1362.89, 18 male, 6 female) was compared with an age-matched comparison group (n¼24, age 9.8362.81, 18 male, 6 female) using the Low Vision Quality of Life Questionnaire. Factors (distance and near visual acuity and age) that could be used as predictors of QoL were assessed. These were measured with standard clinical tests. Results: Children with VI had significantly lower QoL scores than the comparison group (p<0.001), resulting in a 35.6% reduction in total QoL score. QoL scores in children with VI were correlated with distance and near visual acuity (p<0.05). 38% of the variance could be predicted by these factors and age. Conclusions: Consideration of the effects of this reduced QoL must be made. Further studies are needed to establish the benefit to QoL of different habilitation strategies

Competition Policy Reform in Agriculture: A Comparison of the BRICs Countries

This paper forms part of a project titled ‘Facilitating Efficient Agricultural Markets in India: An Assessment of Competition and Regulatory Reform Requirements funded by the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR). The project follows from previous research which found that India’s border reforms need to be complemented by ‘behind-the-border’ domestic reforms if government policy objectives of improved productivity, higher rural employment and incomes and enhanced food security are to be met. The project is being undertaken by Indian and Australian collaborators with expertise in agricultural policy development. Stage 1 of the project is designed to develop a common understanding among those collaborators of contemporary market based policy development principles and the extent to which they have been adopted in other developing countries. The BRICs economies of Brazil, Russia, India and China, as well as South Africa, were chosen for this purpose. A comparative overview of agricultural policy developments in these economies is underway drawing observations about policy reform impacts on agricultural production and the extent to which policy reforms have been consistent with competition policy and microeconomic reform principles applied in developed economies, such as Australia. The extent to which trade practices law has emerged in developing economies as an alternative to direct regulation is also considered. Preliminary findings are reported to facilitate broader discussion and encourage input from interested parties. Stage 2 of the project, commencing later in 2009, will involve the application of competition policy principles to the marketing regulations of a selection of agricultural industries in India. Consideration will be given to clarifying regulatory objectives, assessing their consistency with accepted forms of ‘market failure’ and assessing whether regulatory measures address those policy objectives in a manner least restrictive on competition. As well as facilitating efficient policy reform within India’s agricultural sector, the project aims to enhance the development of market based agricultural policy frameworks and the policy development skills of Indian and Australian policy makers.

A Computational and Experimental Investigation into Radial Injection for Suspension High Velocity Oxy-Fuel (SHVOF) Thermal Spray

Suspension high velocity oxy-fuel thermal spray typically utilizes axial injections of suspension into the combustion chamber. There are certain cases where the oxygen-sensitive nanoparticles benefit from a reduction in the time and temperature spent in the gas flow. Therefore, a radial injection outside of the nozzle can enable deposition of oxygen-sensitive nanomaterials. This study investigated the effect of the suspension flow rate, angle of injection and the injector diameter on the in-flight particle conditions. The combustion reaction is modeled using the eddy dissipation concept model with a robust reaction mechanism and compared to the current approach within the literature. This approach has not been employed within SHVOF thermal spray and provides a robust treatment of the reaction mechanisms. The suspension was modeled using a two-way coupled discrete particle model. Experimental observations were obtained using high-speed imaging, and observations of the liquid jet were compared to the numerical values

Semantics of Input-Consuming Logic Programs

Input-consuming programs are logic programs with an additional restriction on the selectability (actually, on the resolvability) of atoms. this class of programs arguably allows to model logic programs employing a dynamic selection rule and constructs such as delay declarations: as shown also in [5], a large number of them are actually input-consuming. \ud in this paper we show that - under some syntactic restrictions - the tex2html_wrap_inline117-semantics of a program is correct and fully abstract also for input-consuming programs. this allows us to conclude that for a large class of programs employing delay declarations there exists a model-theoretic semantics which is equivalent to the operational one

Agricultural growth and structural changes in the Punjab economy: an input-output analysis

Agriculture Economic aspects India Punjab., Punjab (India) Economic conditions., Input-output analysis India Punjab.,

Modelling the hydromechanical response in the vicinity of the Koyna reservoir (India): results for the initial filling period

International audienceThe seismic activity in the Koyna area is clearly related to the water impoundment of the Koyna dam in 1962, and has reached a remarkable level with the occurrence of a major event of magnitude 6.3 in 1967 December 10. We present a homogeneous poroelastic model based on analysis of the first eight years of seismicity, which aims to link the water-level fluctuations of the reservoir with the seismicity. Starting from a discretized lake,we calculate the stress field resulting from the water-level fluctuations and the pore pressure changes due to the undrained and the diffusive responses of the medium. Then, we compare the Coulomb stress variations with a set of relocated seismic events. We find that more than 80 per cent of the relocated events before the M6.3 event are well described by this poroelastic model, leading us to derive a suitable diffusivity cp = 0.2m2 s-1. Then, we model the response of the system after the M6.3 event of 1967 December 10, by comparing the variation of the Coulomb stress field with the spatio-temporal characteristics of the relocated post-seismic events and the decay of aftershocks with time. We find that compared to before the main event a tenfold increase in hydraulic diffusivity is required to satisfactorily describe the aftershock decay with the appropriate Omori exponent. Although this increase in diffusivity may be physically related to the main shock we also note that events later than 9 months after the main shock are not well explained. We therefore propose an alternative hydrological model, which involves two compartments of contrasting diffusivities

A Hybrid Intuitionistic Logic: Semantics and Decidability

An intuitionistic, hybrid modal logic suitable for reasoning about distribution of resources was introduced by Jia and Walker. The modalities of the logic allow validation of properties in a particular place, in some place and in all places. We give a sound and complete Kripke semantics for the logic extended with disjunctive connectives. The extended logic can be seen as an instance of Hybrid IS5. We also give a sound and complete birelational semantics, and show that it enjoys the finite model property: if a judgement is not valid in the logic, then there is a finite birelational counter-model. Hence, we prove that the logic is decidable

A Distributed Kripke Semantics

An intuitionistic, hybrid modal logic suitable for reasoning about distribution of resources was introduced in [10]. We extend the Kripke semantics of intuitionistic logic, enriching each possible Kripke state with a set of places, and show that this semantics is both sound and complete for the logic. In the semantics, resources of a distributed system are interpreted as atoms, and placement of atoms in a possible state corresponds to the distribution of the resources. The modalities of the logic allow us to validate properties in a particular place, in some place and in all places. We extend the logic with disjunctive connectives, and refine our semantics to obtain soundness and completeness for extended logic. The extended logic can be seen as an instance of Hybrid IS5 [2, 18]

A reduced semantics for deciding trace equivalence using constraint systems

Many privacy-type properties of security protocols can be modelled using trace equivalence properties in suitable process algebras. It has been shown that such properties can be decided for interesting classes of finite processes (i.e., without replication) by means of symbolic execution and constraint solving. However, this does not suffice to obtain practical tools. Current prototypes suffer from a classical combinatorial explosion problem caused by the exploration of many interleavings in the behaviour of processes. M\"odersheim et al. have tackled this problem for reachability properties using partial order reduction techniques. We revisit their work, generalize it and adapt it for equivalence checking. We obtain an optimization in the form of a reduced symbolic semantics that eliminates redundant interleavings on the fly.Comment: Accepted for publication at POST'1