Genetic polymorphism of drug oxidation in the rat

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L’Irak au bord de l’éclatement « Les dix péchés capitaux d’une reconstruction ratée »

Les causes de la crise irakienne actuelle sont multiples. Au-delà des implications immédiates, les séquelles de l’intervention militaire de 2003 sont les plus déterminantes. L’échec du processus de reconstruction institutionnelle a donné lieu à un État déficient, dysfonctionnel et corrompu offrant ainsi un terreau fertile à l’implantation et à la prolifération des mouvements terroristes et mafieux. L’auteur tente, dans la présente contribution, d’identifier « les raisons profondes » du drame actuel en tenant compte de l’impact des bouleversements intervenus depuis la chute du régime baathiste en avril 2003 sur les structures étatiques.The current Iraqi crisis has several causes. Looking beyond short-term implications, the consequences of the military intervention of 2003 are the most significant. The failure of the process of institutional reconstruction gave birth to a weak, dysfunctional and corrupt state; a fertile ground for the establishment and the proliferation of terrorist and criminal movements. In this working paper, the author attempts to identify the ‘’profound reasons’’ of the current drama while taking into account the impacts of the multiple transformations that have affected state structures since the fall of the Baathist regime in April 2003

The distributed p-median problem in computer networks

The exponential growth of the Internet over the last decades has led to a significant evolution of the network services and applications. One of the challenges is to provide better services scalability by placing service replica in appropriate network locations. Finding the optimal solution to the facility location problem is particularly complex and is not feasible for large scale systems. Locating facilities in near-optimal locations have been extensively studied in many works and for different application domains. This work investigates one of the most notable problems in facility location, i.e. the p-median problem, which locates p facilities with a minimum overall communication cost. All previous studies on the p-median problem used a centralised approach to find the near-optimal solution. In this case the required information needs to be collected in order to apply a sequential algorithm to find a solution. The centralised approach is infeasible in large-scale networks due to the time and space complexity of the sequential algorithms as well as the large communication cost and latency to aggregate the global information. Therefore, this work investigates the p-median problem in a distributed environment. To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first work to study the distributed pmedian problem for large-scale computer networks. Solving the p-median problem in a fully distributed way is a challenging task due to the lack of global knowledge and of a centralised coordinator. Two new approaches for solving the p-median problem in a distributed environment are proposed in this thesis. Both are designed to be executed without any centralised collection of the data in a single node. These methods apply an iterative heuristic approach to improve a random initial solution and to converge to a final solution with a local minimum of the cost. The first approach builds a global view of the system and improves the current solution by replacing a single facility at each iteration. The second approach, is designed according to the well-known k-medoids clustering algorithm. At each iteration a local view of each cluster is generated and all facilities can be updated to optimise the solution. Both approaches were implemented within the Java-based PeerSim network simulator for investigating the performance in large-scale systems and tested against different parameters such as the size of networks, number of facilities to be placed and different initial solutions. The results have shown that the first protocol is better at addressing locations for facilities since it converges to a lower total cost of the solution than the second protocol. However, the second one is faster in optimising the solution

The Development of Renewable Energy in Buildings in UAE

 Low energy buildings Projects focuses on active houses, which are not only buildings, but active components in the overall integrated energy systems. The target is to demonstrate affordable solutions for social housing and revitalization of town areas. The solutions will reduce CO2 at no or negative cost seen in a total perspective. Targeted CO2 reduction cost, the reason is because UAE     having one of the largest carbon footprints on the planet, and it can be minus taking the benefits of lower energy bills into account, to even better figures when national grants are included. It is possible to simultaneously save CO2 and money! Key barrier is the initial investment, few technologies are being developed in buildings such as photovoltaic building elements, dual function insulation, double glazed windows, and ICT solutions. demonstration projects were independent from each other, being designed to fulfil local energy needs and using local resources, there were many similarities between them. It’s not easy being green, at least in the UAE, where scorching summers make air conditioning as essential as the millions of gallons of desalinated seawater which keep most of the country’s plant life from turning brown and crispy. But while the region has a well-founded reputation for having one of the largest carbon footprints, a number of projects demonstrate how environmental principles are at the foundation of many of the country’s most exciting new developments

“Just What Were You Expecting From Your Experience Anyway?” University Expectations and Subsequent Adjustment in Visible Minority Students

Pre-enrollment university expectations can influence subsequent adjustment levels during the first year of postsecondary studies (Aspinwall & Taylor, 1992). There is very limited literature studying the expectation levels of visible minority students in the U.S., and no literature at all in a Canadian context. We were interested in examining expectation differences between visible minority students and majority students attending Canadian universities, as well as exploring the influence of residence status and campuswide diversity on these expectation levels. We further used regression analyses to predict subsequent university adjustment using pre-enrollment expectations as predictor variables, and used structural equation modeling (SEM) to explore the role of students’ perceptions of university support as a mediator for the expectations-adjustment relationship. Using an initial sample of 2913 students from six campuses across Canada, we found that: a) visible minority students expected a less academically successful experience when compared to majority students, but there were no differences between minority and majority students in social expectations; b) students planning to live at home (more often visible minority students) were not as prepared for the upcoming experience as the students planning to live on campus during university; c) students attending schools with greater ethnic and cultural diversity in our sample reported lower levels ofpositive academic and social expectations than students attending predominantly White schools; d) university expectations predicted adjustment levels across four years of university, and e) perceived university support mediated the relationship between preenrollment expectations and subsequent adjustment levels across time. These patterns of support and adjustment predictions did not differ by minority/majority status

Thyroidectomy Result of 560 Operations

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Interrelationship among magnesium, potassium and platelets in hypomagnesemic ewes

Sixteen Finnish cross bred ewes were used as models of cows on pasture in two experiments to investigate relationships between dietary magnesium (0.04 and 0.24% Mg), previous Mg status, potassium (0.7 and 3.5% K) and platelet function during pregnancy and lactation. In the first experiment, 12 ewes were assigned to four diets which contained either deficient or adequate Mg supplemented with adequate (diet 1 and 2) or high K (diet 3 and 4). In the second experiment eight ewes from the first experiment and eight ewe lambs born to ewes from the first experiment were fed either deficient (diet 1) or adequate Mg (diet 2) to investigate the effect of previous Mg status, either in utero or as an adult ewes, on later performance. Plasma Mg was higher (P\u3c.05) in ewes fed diet 2 than in those fed diet 1. Supplementing diets with high K (diet 3 and 4) increased (P\u3c.05) plasma K in ewes over those fed adequate K (diet 1 and 2) and lowered (P\u3c.05) plasma Mg in ewes fed Mg-adequate (diet 4) but not Mg-deficient diets (diet 3). Ewes fed adequate Mg plus adequate K (diet 2) had lower (P\u3c.05) systolic and diastolic blood pressure than those fed deficient Mg plus adequate K (diet 1). When K was high systolic, diastolic and mean arterial pressures were lower (P\u3c.05) in ewes fed a deficient Mg diet (diet 3) than in those fed the adequate Mg diet (diet 4). In vitro platelet delay time was longer and % aggregation velocity was higher (P\u3c.05) in ewes during the preliminary than the gestation periods. In vitro platelet reactivity measurements were not affected by Mg or K treatments in ewes after parturition or during lactation. Thromboxane B21α concentration was not affected. Previous Mg deficiency lowered (P\u3c.05) plasma K and increased (P\u3c.01) packed cell volume but had no effect on plasma Mg and Calcium (Ca). There was no effect of previous Mg deficiency in ewes on blood pressures or heart rate. In the second experiment feeding adequate Mg diets resulted in similar effects which were observed in the first experiment. Plasma K and blood glucose in ewes fed experimental diets were lower {P\u3c.01) during the second than in the first experiment and the ewes developed abnormal health problems before parturtion in the second experiment. The problem was recognized as copper (Cu) toxicity due to high Cu content of corn gluten meal and possibly low molybdenum (Mo) in the diets

Teaching Subtitling at Jordanian Universities: An Untapped Territory

The impact of globalization and the advent of satellite channels and digital technology have played an instrumental role in changing the audiovisual translation scene in Jordan. During the last two decades, the subtitling industry has flourished at an exponential rate as manifested in the number of institutions engaged in this form of translation, the quantity of multimodal texts commissioned for translation and the widening remit of translation activities conducted under the rubric of subtitling. The marked development in the subtitling industry, however, has not received adequate support from the academic institutions in the country. Departments that award undergraduate degrees in translation rarely teach courses in subtitling, and research conducted on the pedagogy of this kind of translation is almost nonexistent. This paper argues that courses in subtitling should be incorporated in the translation studies curricula offered at Jordanian universities not because these courses are an embellishment but because the benefits accrued from teaching this mode of translation are multifaceted. The paper highlights these benefits and examines whether the feedback from students exposed to subtitling activities reflects the importance of integrating this mode of audiovisual translation in BA translation programs offered at Jordanian universities

Utilization of heat precipitated whey protein

The purpose of this study was to coagulate whey protein by heat denaturation, recover it, and use it in food products. Fresh liquid whey at pH 4.5 was heated at 90°C for 20 minutes. Heated whey was cooled to room temperature (about 25°C) and centrifuged 15 minutes at 750xg. About 42 percent of the protein was recovered. The mean particle diameter of the sedimented material was 29.5μ. Electrophoresis indicated that blood serum albumin and 3-lactoglobulin were essentially precipitated while some a-lactalbumin remained in suspension. The sediment was collected and used as a basic matrix in sandwich spread and as a partial replacement of NFDM in ice cream. The products showed desirable quality when examined by sensory panels. Up to 30 per-cent of the NFDM in ice cream could be replaced