Conditions of Teaching and Research in Economics: Some Preliminary Findings

This paper reports onthe preliminary findings of a study initiated two years ago, at the initiative of the P.LD.E. to review the problems of teaching and research in economics and related subjects (ERS)! during the last two decades. The need for such a study has been felt for some time not only because of the common perception of declining standards in higher education generally and, economics, in particular, but also from the perceived competition economics has faced from other disciplines, especially business studies and computer science as a passport to the job market. After having enjoyed a relatively robust period of growth in the 1960s largely through the assistance of foreign donors such as the Ford Foundation, ERS in Pakistan have suffered in their development not only from the comparative paucity of resources allocated to them, but also as a result of an adverse change in the perceptions about the primacy of their usefulness for policy purposes. The demand for economics has also suffered some decline as a result of the diminished importance of the public sector and of planned development during the last two decades. While special branches of economics, such as finance, project evaluation, transport and energy economics have shown increased demand, mainly in the private sector or donor-related institutions, the demand for general economic analysts is not as strong as in the past and does not provide many gainful opportunities for professional advancement. Due to the continued disadvantage in terms of salaries and other rewards, the academic profession, remains unattractive

Choc anaphylactique au cours de la chirurgie de kyste hydatique du foie: &#192 propos d’un cas

Nous rapportons l’observation d’un choc anaphylactique survenue au cours d’une chirurgie de kystes hydatiques hépatiques multiples. Il s’agit d’un enfant de 13 ans, de sexe féminin, sans antécédents pathologiques notables, en particulier allergique, programmé pour cure chirurgicale de kystes hydatiques hépatiques multiples. L’examen préopératoire est strictement normal. La patiente est classée ASA (American Society of Anaesthesiologists) I. L’intervention est réalisée sous anesthésie générale. Au moment de la manipulation du deuxième kyste, une augmentation des pressions d’insufflation apparaît, avec des râles sibilants au niveau des deux champs pulmonaires et une désaturation, suivi d’un collapsus vasculaire avec hypotension artérielle 50/30. La prise en charge est débutée aussitôt par un remplissage vasculaire par du sérum salé 9%, suivi par des bolus d’adrénaline de 0,1mg à trois reprises, puis d’une perfusion continue à raison. L’adrénaline est arrêtée au bout de 48 heures et la patiente est adressée au service de chirurgie à j+4 de l’intervention. Le choc anaphylactique est une complication connue de la rupture intra péritonéale spontanée ou post-traumatique du kyste hydatique du foie. Sa survenue en peropératoire est devenue exceptionnelle, grâce aux mesures de prévention chirurgicale entretenues en peropératoire par l’éviction de manipulation du kyste, de le vider avant d’injecter le scolicide, et de ne pas l’administrer sous forte pression

Choc anaphylactique au cours de la chirurgie de kyste hydatique du foie : à propos d’un cas

Nous rapportons l’observation d’un choc anaphylactique survenue au cours d’une chirurgie de kystes hydatiques hépatiques multiples. Il s’agit d’un enfant de 13 ans, de sexe féminin, sans antécédents pathologiques notables, en particulier allergique, programmé pour cure chirurgicale de kystes hydatiques hépatiques multiples. L’examen préopératoire est strictement normal. La patiente est classée ASA (American Society of Anaesthesiologists) I. L’intervention est réalisée sous anesthésie générale. Au moment de la manipulation du deuxième kyste, une augmentation des pressions d’insufflation apparaît, avec des râles sibilants au niveau des deux champs pulmonaires et une désaturation, suivi d’un collapsus vasculaire avec hypotension artérielle 50/30. La prise en charge est débutée aussitôt par un remplissage vasculaire par du sérum salé 9%, suivi par des bolus d’adrénaline de 0,1mg à trois reprises, puis d’une perfusion continue à raison. L’adrénaline est arrêtée au bout de 48 heures et la patiente est adressée au service de chirurgie à j+4 de l’intervention. Le choc anaphylactique est une complication connue de la rupture intra péritonéale spontanée ou post-traumatique du kyste hydatique du foie. Sa survenue en peropératoire est devenue exceptionnelle, grâce aux mesures de prévention chirurgicale entretenues en peropératoire par l’éviction de manipulation du kyste, de le vider avant d’injecter le scolicide, et de ne pas l’administrer sous forte pression

An unsupervised data-driven method to discover equivalent relations in large linked datasets

This article addresses a number of limitations of state-of-the-art methods of Ontology Alignment: 1) they primarily address concepts and entities while relations are less well-studied; 2) many build on the assumption of the ‘well-formedness’ of ontologies which is unnecessarily true in the domain of Linked Open Data; 3) few have looked at schema heterogeneity from a single source, which is also a common issue particularly in very large Linked Dataset created automatically from heterogeneous resources, or integrated from multiple datasets. We propose a domain- and language-independent and completely unsupervised method to align equivalent relations across schemata based on their shared instances. We introduce a novel similarity measure able to cope with unbalanced population of schema elements, an unsupervised technique to automatically decide similarity threshold to assert equivalence for a pair of relations, and an unsupervised clustering process to discover groups of equivalent relations across different schemata. Although the method is designed for aligning relations within a single dataset, it can also be adapted for cross-dataset alignment where sameAs links between datasets have been established. Using three gold standards created based on DBpedia, we obtain encouraging results from a thorough evaluation involving four baseline similarity measures and over 15 comparative models based on variants of the proposed method. The proposed method makes significant improvement over baseline models in terms of F1 measure (mostly between 7% and 40%), and it always scores the highest precision and is also among the top performers in terms of recall. We also make public the datasets used in this work, which we believe make the largest collection of gold standards for evaluating relation alignment in the LOD context

Inhibition in production of cellulolytic and pectinolytic enzymes of Colletotrichum gloeosporioides isolated from dragon fruit plants in response to submicron chitosan dispersions

In vitro and in vivo antifungal potential of submicron chitosan dispersions (SCD) was studied in order to investigate the effect of SCD on cell wall degrading enzymes of Colletotrichum gloeosporioides and to control anthracnose of dragon fruit under field conditions. Four concentrations of chitosan (0.5, 1.0, 1.5 and 2.0%) were used to prepare submicron dispersions with droplet sizes of 200, 400, 600, 800 and 1000 nm. The highest inhibition in cellulolytic and pectinolytic enzymes was observed with 600 nm droplet size of 1.0% chitosan concentration. In case of in vivo studies,the area under disease progress curve (AUDPC) showed a reduction of approximately 66% of disease incidence (DI). The lower level of production of cell wall degrading enzymes in response to SCD resulted in less disease on dragon fruit plants and sustained in increasing the effective resistance against the irresistible disease of anthracnose