Delayed discharges and unplanned admissions from the Day Care Unit at Mater Dei Hospital, Malta

Day care units are playing an increasingly important role in healthcare provision, however they require the development of specialised resources to fulfil their role. The rate of unplanned admissions following day-case procedures is considered as one of several indicators of the quality of day-case services available.1 The aim of this study is to identify how often there are delayed discharged or unplanned admissions following day-cases at the Day Care Unit at Mater Dei Hospital (MDH), Malta. A list of patients whose discharge did not go as planned was forwarded daily to the authors by the Bed Management Unit at MDH. The medical files of these patients were then reviewed and data collected. This included demographics, type of procedure carried out and reasons for delayed discharge or unplanned admission. The study was carried out over 45 days.peer-reviewe

Methodologies to develop quantitative risk evaluation metrics

The goal of this work is to advance a new methodology to measure a severity cost for each host using the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) based on base, temporal and environmental metrics by combining related sub-scores to produce a unique severity cost by modeling the problem's parameters in to a mathematical framework. We build our own CVSS Calculator using our equations to simplify the calculations of the vulnerabilities scores and to benchmark with other models. We design and develop a new approach to represent the cost assigned to each host by dividing the scores of the vulnerabilities to two main levels of privileges, user and root, and we classify these levels into operational levels to identify and calculate the severity cost of multi steps vulnerabilities. Finally we implement our framework on a simple network, using Nessus scanner as tool to discover known vulnerabilities and to implement the results to build and represent our cost centric attack graph

Mixed emotions : anthropological studies of feeling

Starting with Aristotle's suggestion that thought plays a central role in emotion, this chapter explores how in the absence of the bodies of missing persons, mourners find it difficult to express their emotions by 'conventional' means, either through ritual, however inadequate, or through spectacles, however cathartic. In such situations there is a strong tension between emotions-as-beliefs (that the person might return) and intuitive knowledge (that the person is lost forever). The consequent anaesthetization of thought and emotion in attempting to resolve this aporia (the recovery of something which has disappeared) is nevertheless a particularly fertile domain for the cognitive manipulation of the two concepts of "loss" and "absence" through (popular) "naive" art, especially where conventional religion cannot offer soteriological solutions to emotional and symbolic collapse. Emotion, therefore, is not just personal, but sustained through social scaffolding, which provides ways to conceptualise and 'resolve' apories.peer-reviewe

Religion, politics and ethnicity in Cyprus during the Turkocratia (1571-1878)

This paper examines the relationship between religion, ethnicity and politics in Cyprus during the Turkocratia (1571–1878), the period of Ottoman rule. Its major thesis is that in the pre-industrial framework of Ottoman rule in Cyprus neither religion nor ethnicity were major sources of conflict in a society composed of two ethnic groups (Greeks and Turks) and following two monotheistic faiths(Christianity and Islam) in marked contrast to the recent history of Cyprus. In broad outline it closely parallels Gellner's thesis (1983) that nationalism is a by-product of industrialization, extensive education literacy and geographical and social mobility, and it seeks to show that the major cleavages in Cyprus were mainly intraethnic rather than interethnic.peer-reviewe

Bloodmoney and brideprice have no merit : marriage, manipulation, and the transmission of resources in a S. Tunisian village

This paper is about the presentation and manipulation of the exchange of goods and services in Southern Tunisian marriages. It is also an attempt to explain the rationality of such presentations by reference to the transmission of property and to domestic politics. Most discussions on marriages among the Arabs have noted that the size of marriage payments are no necessary reliable guide to the social position of the contracting parties (Comaroff, 1980; Peters, 1980) as seems to occur in the European Mediterranean, although ethnographies on Tunisia (e.g. Cuisenier, 1976; Abu Zahra, 1982) are silent on this point. Tapper (1981) has even suggested that direct exchanges and brideprice are 'alternative forms' of marriage, the former egalitarian the latter hierarchical. Even where brideprice is exchanged, 'the complicated system of gifts and countergifts allows of great variations, so that it is extremely difficult for an outsider to know how great are the expenses which a bridegroom in any one case really has for his bride when everything is taken into account' (Granqvist, 1931:126).peer-reviewe

Farm management in relation to land use, soil conservation and soil type, Crockett county, Tennessee

In some sections of the country agriculture has not been able to keep pace with industry and commerce in the advance of living conditions and cultural opportunities and in some sections agriculture has become extractive in character, rather than a permanently sustained industry. This is not conducive to the best permanent development of farm life, nor in harmony with the principles of farm management and agricultural policy. The purpose of this study is to analyze farm organization and farm practices in West Tennessee, in relation to land use and determine their effect on the soil with a view to determining the different kinds and amounts of the several crops and classes livestock that may best be combined in order to secure the most continuous profitable operation of the farms. To do this it has been necessary to study needed soil conservation practices, proper land use, desirable fertility measures, approved crop rotations, profitable degree of diversity, and other farm practices in relation to the region and so far as possible to individual farms

Patrolling society’s borders : slavery, apostasy and the Inquisition

Walter Benjamin once famously remarked that we write books because we wish to read them. Not being able to read them, as they have never been written, we write them. In the case of history, we write books perhaps because we wish someone had then written an account of what we now wish to explore. Lacking that, we write such books for the people of, and from, the past. At least we can give them a voice their contemporaries and time had denied them. Imagine that as historians we were to be offered an opportunity to b, presented with a mass of undreamt of data from, say the Malta National Archives. Let us take the period when the Order of St John ruled Malta between 1530 and 1798 as an example. We are sure that each one of us could imagine an ideal text, which would shed light on some particular aspect of their research. One could even imagine writing a history of unwritten histories. It is precisely when we begin to pose these types of questions that we realize only too uncomfortably that the mass of data that we possess deriving as they do from legal records, notarial archives, and other written sources, rich as they are, clearly deal with matters that concerned the economy, the elite, trade, booty, the church, family properties, and such like information. These are all very important, but let us imagine some hypothetical text that could have been useful to highlight the life and times of the mass of the population, or even of some particularly underprivileged group of Maltese society. One immediately thinks of slaves. They were clearly the most underprivileged group in Maltese society, they were on the margins, their lives were apparently ‘nasty, brutish and short’. Yet they were central for the economy, both in their capture and in the labour they performed, and by the end of the sixteenth century, a mere two generations after the knights Set foot in Malta, they constituted some ten percent of the population.peer-reviewe

A case of “plus ça change”, a “missed opportunity”, or a “new land-grab”?

This was submitted as part of a call for papers by The Ministry for Agriculture, Fisheries and Animal Rights, Malta on the ‘Agricultural Land Reform White Paper’.This is an anthropological analysis of the White Paper on Agricultural Land Reform. It is not a legal analysis, and legal experts may well be dissatisfied with its lack of discernment with respect to land lease law in Malta. Its basic premise is that law cannot be seen in isolation to its social and economic effects, particularly one that deals with land and its exploitation. Certain interpretations of the law here may be wrong or tempered by other aspects. But popular views of what the law entails, as explored in this submission paper, still have a social reality that influences people’s perceptions, and actions, even if they may be erroneous. In that respect the law has a reality and social effects independent of the legislators’ intentions and the legal experts’ interpretations. One of the most surprising aspects of this White Paper (WP) is that it treats land tenancy primarily as a legal issue quite independently of its agricultural implications. And yet, on the other hand, it justifies itself by the need to provide a ‘secure food supply’. This necessitated enquiring not just whether Malta has ever been able to provide for itself, but also whether the actual land tenure regime that the WP attempts to shore up has ever been adequate for this purpose. The answer to both questions is negative. Malta has never been able to supply itself food wise, and I argue that the current land tenure regime is a significant contributory factor to Malta’s agricultural underdevelopment. Our current land tenure rental regime can never supply the country with an ample food supply; it also supplies us with the ‘wrong products’, shadowing and trying to compete with cheap food imports rather than concentrating on niche markets. This is not the fault of the tenants. It is the fault of the State that, in the name of ‘protection’, turned tenants not into commercially oriented farmers but into part-time cultivators who progressively considered the land they worked ultimately more significant for its transmissible (and divisible) capitalizable value as potential real estate, rather than in terms of its productive agricultural income through cumulative investment. Nor is there any evidence that the agricultural authorities ever previously explicitly oriented their policies, efforts, and announcements, towards the aim of a ‘secure food supply’. The conclusion is that the authorities were obliged to scrabble around to find a quick legitimating fix and alighted on ‘food supply’ as the widest, most populist, and most unassailable argument to fix what they considered a legal problem. The authorities claim that they desire to protect agricultural land. This may be disingenuous. Rather, they seem intentioned to shore up a monopolistic land tenure system through the White Paper. Ironically, it is this land tenure system itself that (in my opinion) is a major cause of Malta’s agricultural underperformance. This is an odd blind spot given that the White Paper is issued by the Ministry of Agriculture. It is also unfortunate because any legal tenancy regime has direct causative effects on the type of agriculture that emerges, e.g., whether it is dynamic, static, or even regressive, the level of investment, innovation, and the introduction of new ideas, crops, niche products or cabbages. This paper thus explores the structure of Maltese agriculture arguing that it evolved into two segments: (i) the private more professional sector innovating in new crops and products oriented towards the market such as wineries, olive oil producers, intense greenhouse horticulture, etc, and (ii) what I label a ‘simulated peasant mode of production’, where the ultimate capitalisable value of the land is more important to the protected part-time cultivating tenant than its agricultural output. The latter is largely the consequence of the protected private land tenure regime and explains why “farmers” (often employees deriving their main income elsewhere) try to hold on to it so tenaciously. The full-time farmer presents a different profile. This paper is both a political economic and an anthropological treatment of the motivations, effects and implications of the Private Land Rental Regime on agriculture It is political economic in that it looks at the State’s motivations in framing and sustaining it in the name of “protection”, as well as the rental regime’s effects on agricultural development; anthropological in that it explores some of the attitudes and dispositions of tenants and landlords emerging from this framework in which they have been enmeshed sometimes uncomfortably for generations. It is far from extensive. The literature quoted is strictly limited to the task: official papers, reports, comments etc. It does not compare the local scene to other examples of land tenure reform. That would have necessitated more than the 4 weeks available for comments and submission. Nevertheless, it is hoped that these observations will be useful for policy makers, legislators, and the interested public, and contribute to a positive resolution of what is more than a legal challenge despite what most participants seem to believe.peer-reviewe

The discovery of Malta : nature, culture and ethnicity in 19th century painting (a review article)

The publication of `The International Dictionary of Artists who painted Malta` by Nicholas de Piro (Malta, 1988) deserves our warmest welcome. Here for the first time in a lavish presentation are grouped a large number of paintings produced by the most varied artists and dilettanti (both Maltese and foreign) depicting Malta over a considerable time periods, but mainly from the 19th century.peer-reviewe