Taxi Licensing Follow-Up Study: Summary of Main Results

This paper presents the findings of a survey of taxi licensing policy in England and Wales in mid 1989. The survey acts partly as a follow-up study to earlier work reported earlier in this series (Toner 1989 WP 273) and partly as a vehicle for the assessment of a number of additional issues. These issues form the key to an understanding of the consequences to both consumers of taxi services and road users more generally of the decision to either retain or remove restrictions on entry to the hackney carriage trade. The results presented are purely corss-sectional in nature and do not include a treatment of the important issues of price and service effects. These topics will form the basis of further papers (see, for example Pells, (1990) WP 290 for initial findings on values of waiting time and price elasticities in the hackney market)

Taxi Licensing Follow-Up Study: Summary of Main Results

This paper presents the findings of a survey of taxi licensing policy in England and Wales in mid 1989. The survey acts partly as a follow-up study to earlier work reported earlier in this series (Toner 1989 WP 273) and partly as a vehicle for the assessment of a number of additional issues. These issues form the key to an understanding of the consequences to both consumers of taxi services and road users more generally of the decision to either retain or remove restrictions on entry to the hackney carriage trade. The results presented are purely corss-sectional in nature and do not include a treatment of the important issues of price and service effects. These topics will form the basis of further papers (see, for example Pells, (1990) WP 290 for initial findings on values of waiting time and price elasticities in the hackney market)

Contextualising fisheries policy in the Lower Mekong Basin

Development policies for fishery resources within the Mekong River Basin are increasingly divided between aquaculture and capture fisheries. The modern production orientation of aquaculture has been adopted by government and NGOs and justified by the rhetoric of poverty alleviation and rural development. In contrast, capture fisheries has been subjugated as an activity that reaffirms the dependency of the rural poor on natural resources. This paper critically analyses the division between aquaculture and capture fisheries in Cambodia, Thailand and Lao PDR by tracing the emergence and influence of `development narratives¿ used to justify contemporary policy and practice

Air investigation of some alternative methods to agrobacterium and protoplast transformation for introducing exogenous genes into plants, based on the use of pollen as a vector

Some of the problems involved in the search for alternative plant transformation vectors have been examined. In particular the use of pregerminated pollen as a direct transformation vector has been investigated. It has been shown that the protocols of Hess et al (1985) and De Vet et al (1985) are not easy to repeat with the levels of success claimed by the authors, and that these methods are unlikely to find general applicability to plant transformation in unmodified form. It has not been shown conclusively that these methods do not work, although the true levels of transformation may be considerably lower than those claimed. Some of the basic information required for application of the methods of de la Pefia et al (1987) to Petunia has been elucidated

Mass dependence of the hairpin vertex in quenched QCD

The pseudoscalar ``hairpin'' vertex (i.e. quark-disconnected vertex) plays a key role in quenched chiral perturbation theory. Direct calculations using lattice simulations find that it has a significant dependence on quark mass. I show that this mass dependence can be used to determine the quenched Gasser-Leutwyler constant L5. This complements the calculation of L5 using the mass dependence of the axial decay constant of the pion. In an appendix, I discuss power counting for quenched chiral perturbation theory and describe the particular scheme used in this paper.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figures. Version to appear in Phys. Rev. D. Central result unchanged, but explanation of calculation improved and minor errors corrected. New appendix discusses power counting schemes in quenched chiral perturbation theor

Sowing in the autumn season : exploring benefits of green care farms for dementia patients

In the Netherlands an increasing number of farms combine agricultural production with care services for people with care needs. It is generally believed that these green care farms (GCFs) have beneficial effects on the health status of a diversity of target groups. At present, empirical studies testing this hypothesis are scarce. The main objective of the studies described in this thesis was to gain insight into the potential benefits of day care at GCFs for community‐dwelling older dementia patients. Day care at GCFs was therefore compared with day care at regular day care facilities (RDCFs). In view of the differences between both day care types regarding the day care setting and day care program it was hypothesized that they would differ in their effects on the health status of dementia patients. In two cross‐sectional studies it was tested to what extent the day program of dementia patients at GCFs differed from those at RDCFs. It appeared that at GCFs, dementia patients were (physically) more active, participated in more diverse activities, were more outdoors, and had more opportunities to perform activities in smaller groups than those at RDCFs. It was tested whether these differences resulted into different effects for five domains of health: dietary intake, cognition, emotional well‐being, behaviour, and functional performance. In a comparative cross‐sectional study dietary intake of dementia patients attending day care at GCFs or RDCFs was recorded both at home and during their time at the day care facility. The study showed that dementia patients attending day care at GCFs had significantly higher intakes of energy, carbohydrate, and fluid than their counterparts attending day care at RDCFs. In a cohort study, rates of change during 1 year in cognitive functioning, emotional well‐being, behavioural symptoms, and functional performance were compared between dementia patients attending day care at GCFs and RDCFs. Functioning in these domains remained rather stable and no differences were observed between subjects from GCFs and RDCFs. In the cohort study, also caregiver burden of family caregivers of these dementia patients was assessed. Caregivers’ quality of life, emotional distress, and feelings of competence remained rather stable in family caregivers of dementia patients from both day care settings. In conclusion, the present work has shown that GCFs exceeded RDCFs in offering older dementia patients a diverse day program and in stimulating their dietary intake. The latter may result into a better preserved nutritional status in dementia patients attending day care at GCFs than in those attending day care at RDCFs. GCFs and RDCFs were equally effective in preventing significant decrease of cognitive functioning, emotional well‐being, and functional performance and in preventing significant increase of the number of behavioural symptoms. Both day care types further prevented significant increase of caregiver burden. Day care at GCFs is a new and valuable addition to the present care modalities for community‐dwelling older dementia patients and their caregiver

Alleviation of experimental allergic encephalomyelitis in C57BL/6 mice by Soy Daidzein

Experimental allergic encephalomyelitis (EAE) is considered as the murine model of multiple sclerosis. Daidzein a phytostrogenic compound of soy is known to impose immunomodulatory and antioxidative effects. We conducted this study to assess the potential protective and therapeutic effects of daidzein on allergic encephalomyelitis. C57BL/6 mice were induced with allergic encephalomyelitis using myelin oligodendrocyte glycoprotein (35-55) and received daidzein or dimethyl sulfoxide as the vehicle control. To assess the protective effect of daidzein, the mice were administered with 20 mg/kg of daidzein from 21 days prior to 21 days post EAE induction on a daily basis. To evaluate the therapeutic effect of daidzein, mice were fed with 300 mg/kg daidzein after the appearance of the first clinical signs for 10 days. One day after the last gavage, the mice were sacrificed. Spleen and brain were removed for further histological and immunological analysis. Feeding mice with low dose of daidzein prior to disease induction did not affect disease severity. However, treating with high dose of daidzein after the onset of the disease reduced interferon-3 and interleukin-12 secretion, enhanced interleukin-10 production, suppressed lymphocyte proliferation, and decreased cytotoxicity as judged by lactate dehydrogenase release. In conclusion, daidzein reduced the extent of demyelination and disease severity. Chronic oral therapy with low dose of daidzein did not prevent experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis. However, high doses of daidzein could prohibit disease exacerbation. © Summer 2014, Iran J Allergy Asthma Immunol. All rights reserved

Ground State Properties of the Doped 3-Leg t-J Ladder

Results for a doped 3-leg t-J ladder obtained using the density matrix renormalization group are reported. At low hole doping, the holes form a dilute gas with a uniform density. The momentum occupation of the odd band shows a sharp decrease at a large value of k_F similar to the behavior of a lightly doped t-J chain, while the even modes appear gapped. The spin-spin correlations decay as a power law consistent with the absence of a spin gap, but the pair field correlations are negligible. At larger doping we find evidence for a spin gap and as x increases further we find 3-hole diagonal domain walls. In this regime there are pair field correlations and the internal pair orbital has d_x^2-y^2 - like symmetry. However, the pair field correlations appear to fall exponentially at large distances.Comment: 14 pages, 11 postscript figure

Modelling and identification of non-linear deterministic systems in the delta-domain

This paper provides a formulation for using the delta-operator in the modelling of non-linear systems. It is shown that a unique representation of a deterministic non-linear auto-regressive with exogenous input (NARX) model can be obtained for polynomial basis functions using the delta-operator and expressions are derived to convert between the shift- and delta- domain. A delta-NARX model is applied to the identification of a test problem (a Van-der-Pol oscillator): a comparison is made with the standard shift operator non-linear model and it is demonstrated that the delta-domain approach improves the numerical properties of structure detection, leads to a parsimonious description and provides a model that is closely linked to the continuous-time non-linear system in terms of both parameters and structure