Potential Terrorist Uses of Highway-Borne Hazardous Materials, MTI Report 09-03

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has requested that the Mineta Transportation Institutes National Transportation Security Center of Excellence (MTI NTSCOE) provide any research it has or insights it can provide on the security risks created by the highway transportation of hazardous materials. This request was submitted to MTI/NSTC as a National Transportation Security Center of Excellence. In response, MTI/NTSC reviewed and revised research performed in 2007 and 2008 and assembled a small team of terrorism and emergency-response experts, led by Center Director Brian Michael Jenkins, to report on the risks of terrorists using highway shipments of flammable liquids (e.g., gasoline tankers) to cause casualties anywhere, and ways to reduce those risks. This report has been provided to DHS. The teams first focus was on surface transportation targets, including highway infrastructure, and also public transportation stations. As a full understanding of these materials, and their use against various targets became revealed, the team shifted with urgency to the far more plentiful targets outside of surface transportation where people gather and can be killed or injured. However, the team is concerned to return to the top of the use of these materials against public transit stations and recommends it as a separate subject for urgent research

Health transition research in the control of morbidity and mortality from acute respiratory infection.

The essence of health transition research is its multidisciplinary character and openness to broad theory. Theories of health transition provide the context in which classic epidemiological studies can, most effectively, contribute to population health improvement. Acute respiratory infections are a leading cause of morbidity in all countries, and a major cause of premature death in countries where mortality is high. The international ARI control program in childhood sponsored by the World Health Organization is built on conventional biomedical foundations. Health systems in Australia and Pakistan continue to be driven by this conventional model which has contributed to changes in mortality but probably not exclusively. A health transition approach forces us to step back, and place the gains of the biomedical model in a social and historical perspective. Using that perspective to move public health policy forward in the modern nation state requires adventurous lateral thinking. We review here the problem of acute respiratory infections in Australian and Pakistani children. In Australia, we focus on the large differences in respiratory infection severity and outcomes between Aboriginal children and Caucasians. We also draw attention to our current ignorance on what differentiates children who are prone to respiratory infections from those who are not. In Pakistan, we highlight the problem of refocusing a health care system that is already seriously underfunded for the biomedical task. A major challenge for social scientists is to become involved more directly in the medical care system and devise health care interventions that can address social inequities, and can provide a better integration between social and biomedical views of the world

Authors' reply : on "Narrow Scope of Vitamin C Review" and "Misleading Information on the Properties of Vitamin C"

Non peer reviewe

Mechanics\u27 Liens

In 1977 and 1978 the Florida Legislature made extensive amendments to the Mechanics\u27 Lien Law. The statute, however, remains intricate and elusive for builder, lawyer and lienor alike. The authors review the amendments and case law of the past two years and offer suggestions on how to avoid the many pitfalls of the statute. In addition, the article contains a section devoted to the equitable lien

Vitamin C for preventing and treating the common cold

Non peer reviewe

Predictability of repeating earthquakes near Parkfield, California

We analyse sequences of repeating microearthquakes that were identified by applying waveform coherency methods to data from the Parkfield High-Resolution Seismic Network. Because by definition all events in a sequence have similar magnitudes and locations, the temporal behaviour of these sequences is naturally isolated, which, coupled with the high occurrence rates of small events, makes these data ideal for studying interevent time distributions. To characterize the temporal predictability of these sequences, we perform retrospective forecast experiments using hundreds of earthquakes. We apply three variants of a simple algorithm that produces sequence-specific, time-varying hazard functions, and we find that the sequences are predictable. We discuss limitations of these data and, more generally, challenges in identifying repeating events, and we outline the potential implications of our results for understanding the occurrence of large earthquake

Cylindrical gravitational waves in expanding universes: Models for waves from compact sources

New boundary conditions are imposed on the familiar cylindrical gravitational wave vacuum spacetimes. The new spacetime family represents cylindrical waves in a flat expanding (Kasner) universe. Space sections are flat and nonconical where the waves have not reached and wave amplitudes fall off more rapidly than they do in Einstein-Rosen solutions, permitting a more regular null inifinity.Comment: Minor corrections to references. A note added in proo

EDP engagement : software package evaluation and selection; Management advisory services practice aids. Technical consulting practice aid, 04

https://egrove.olemiss.edu/aicpa_guides/1092/thumbnail.jp

Loss of strumpellin in the melanocytic lineage impairs the WASH Complex but does not affect coat colour

The five-subunit WASH complex generates actin networks that participate in endocytic trafficking, migration and invasion in various cell types. Loss of one of the two subunits WASH or strumpellin in mice is lethal, but little is known about their role in mammals in vivo. We explored the role of strumpellin, which has previously been linked to hereditary spastic paraplegia, in the mouse melanocytic lineage. Strumpellin knockout in melanocytes revealed abnormal endocytic vesicle morphology but no impairment of migration in vitro or in vivo and no change in coat colour. Unexpectedly, WASH and filamentous actin could still localize to vesicles in the absence of strumpellin, although the shape and size of vesicles was altered. Blue native PAGE revealed the presence of two distinct WASH complexes, even in strumpellin knockout cells, revealing that the WASH complex can assemble and localize to endocytic compartments in cells in the absence of strumpellin