In Search of Trust and Legitimacy: The political Trajectory of Hong Kong as Part of China

In the 1980s and 1990s, the impending return of Hong Kong to China by 1997 had triggered a major confidence crisis in Hong Kong. A new logic of governance would have to be created to substitute the then colonial logic which emphasized administrative efficiency and the rule of convenience, a logic that the local population had implicitly accepted out of political acquiescence. However, the path towards a new Hong Kong as a special administrative region (SAR) had not been accompanied by the proper decolonization and democratization of the governance system. Old wine was put into new bottle. The political order as enshrined in Hong Kong’s Basic Law had largely been a continuation (and at most a re-institutionalization) of the ancient regime. Since 1997, the Hong Kong SAR has been suffering from one legitimacy crisis after another. The infallibility of the administrative state, long held responsible for Hong Kong’s success story in the final decades of British colonial rule, has by now been largely eroded. In 2002, government by bureaucrats was replaced by government by politically-appointed ministers, in the hope of enhancing executive accountability and improving policy performance and governance effectiveness. Yet, that failed to deliver results. This article traces the development of the post-colonial administrative state in Hong Kong from 1997 to the present

Cost Evaluation in Design for End-of-Life of Automotive Components

The European Union implemented the End-of-Life Vehicle directive to deal with an estimated 6 million end-of-life vehicles each year. Existing literature describe the processes to deal with the waste at end-of-life of different products but there is a lack of information on the costing of these options. These costs remain a concern to automotive manufacturers. This paper therefore reports the end-of-life costs of vehicle components and also demonstrates how these costs can be predicted at the design stage. The proposed approach should help to decide whether the automotive parts are viable for remanufacture, refurbishment, recycling, or disposal from an economic perspective. Two different automotive parts have been selected as case studies to validate the approach. Assumptions were made during the development of the technique and based on the results, the proposed approach could potentially provide vehicle manufacturers a method of estimating the cost of end-of-life recovery processes of vehicle components

Chromosomal periodicity and positional networks of genes in Escherichia coli

Escherichia coli periodic gene distribution is identified for a periodic interval of 33 kb.Two positional networks of genes are discovered by studying gene periodic distribution: one is driven by metabolic genes and the other by genes involved in cellular processing and signaling.A functional core of Escherichia coli genes drives gene periodic distribution.A few chromosomal regions that preserve gene transcription profiles across environmental changes are identified.This single genome analysis approach can be taken as a footprint for a large-scale bacterial and archaeal periodic distribution analysis

Controlled-Release of Tegretol-XR for Treatment of Epileptic Seizures

Fifty million people around the world are currently affected by epilepsy. Fortunately, the disease responds to treatment 70% of the time, but many of the medications prescribed require multiple dosages per day. To ensure patient compliance, prevent adverse consequences due to missed dosing, and to enhance medicative convenience for the patient, Tegretol has engineered as extended-release pill, Tegretol-XR, which delivers carbamazepine at a nearly constant rate for a twelve hour time period. The design of these tablets involves a drug infused matrix surrounded by an insoluble shell, with a small orifice to allow drug release. When water diffuses through the orifice, the interior pill matrix saturates, and carbamazepine begins to elute out of the orifice until depletion, a process that is designed to take twelve hours. Using COMSOL, a Tegretol-XR tablet was modeled as a 2D rectangular, axisymmetrical slab. Researched diffusivity constants were found to precisely model the water and drug flow into and out of the pills. The diffusion of the drug is coupled with the concentration of water, and as the water infuses into the pill, the diffusivity of the drug is altered, ultimately leading to a sustained release of carbamazepine over the allotted twelve hours. Results from our model indicate that drug release closely follows ideal release kinetics and keeps an ample amount of drug in the bloodstream at all times. It was found that altering the orifice size by 5% resulted in changes of up to 16% in final average drug concentration, implicating that this is the most sensitive variable analyzed. Variables like water diffusivity were much less influential to the final solution. Our model of Tegretol-XR gives epileptic patients the option of taking only two pills a day, and thus, significantly lowers the risk of a missed dose

Age-related diffusion patterns in intervertebral disc degeneration

Poster Presentation - Give the Dog a Bone: no. 818postprintThe Joint Annual Meeting of ISMRM-ESMRMB 2010, Stockholm, Sweden, 1-7 May 2010

Quantitative evaluation of diffusion tensor imaging at 3T in the human lumbar intervertebral disc degeneration

Poster presentations: ST4postprintThe 2010 World Forum for Spine Research (WFSR 2010): The Intervertebral Disc, Montreal, Canada, 5-8 July 2010

Complete small bowel obstruction caused by metastasis from primary nasopharyngeal carcinoma

We here report the first case in the literature on a surgical emergency of complete small bowel obstruction caused by metastasis from nasopharyngeal carcinoma nine months after the primary tumor was treated with concurrent chemoradiation. The patient achieved prolonged survival with prompt surgical treatment followed by systemic chemotherapy

Direct health care costs of treating seasonal affective disorder: a comparison of light therapy and fluoxetine.

Objective. To compare the direct mental health care costs between individuals with Seasonal Affective Disorder randomized to either fluoxetine or light therapy. Methods. Data from the CANSAD study was used. CANSAD was an 8-week multicentre double-blind study that randomized participants to receive either light therapy plus placebo capsules or placebo light therapy plus fluoxetine. Participants were aged 18-65 who met criteria for major depressive episodes with a seasonal (winter) pattern. Mental health care service use was collected for each subject for 4 weeks prior to the start of treatment and for 4 weeks prior to the end of treatment. All direct mental health care services costs were analysed, including inpatient and outpatient services, investigations, and medications. Results. The difference in mental health costs was significantly higher after treatment for the light therapy group compared to the medication group-a difference of $111.25 (z = -3.77, P = 0.000). However, when the amortized cost of the light box was taken into the account, the groups were switched with the fluoxetine group incurring greater direct care costs-a difference of$75.41 (z = -2.635, P = 0.008). Conclusion. The results suggest that individuals treated with medication had significantly less mental health care cost after-treatment compared to those treated with light therapy