Journal articles on the topic 'Sols – Analyse – Laos'

ASEAN formally came into being in 1967 and sole purpose of developing this association was to accelerate economic growth, cultural development and social progress. To achieve the vision, ASEAN member nations kept their focus on development and implementing science technology and innovation policy. For this study desktop research was conducted to analyze and compare current scenario of Science technology and innovation policy in Malaysia with Cambodia, Myanmar and Laos. Comparison was done on the basis of structure, framework, barriers and breakthrough in the field of STI policy. It was deduced that Malaysia is currently in its transition phase as compared to Cambodia, Myanmar and Laos, where formulation of an official STI policy documents are still in progress. Some recommendations are proposed so the gap between STI development and implementation is reduced.

AbstractIf one interprets China's sizable rise in Latin America as an unprecedented phenomenon, it follows that the concurrent story of declining U.S. influence in the region is an event hastily acknowledged at best and ignored at worst. In this article, we ask whether Chinese economic statecraft in Latin America is related to the declining U.S. hegemonic influence in the region and explore how. To do so we analyze foreign direct investments, bank loans, and international trade from 2003 to 2014, when China became a major player in the region. We use data from 21 Latin American countries, and find that an inversely proportional relationship exists between the investments made by Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs), bank loans, manufacturing exports, and the U.S. hegemonic influence exerted in the region. In other words, Beijing has filled the void left by a diminished U.S. presence in the latter's own backyard.

Environmental pollution is a global phenomenon which could results from both natural and anthropogenic activities which has resulted to several health and physiological problems in both plants and animals. Dump sites’ soils of and Borehole waters from Ojota, Ebutte-Meta, Igando and Bariga in Lagos state were analyzed for heavy metals using atomic absorption spectrophotometer. The data obtained were further subjected to contamination factor and pollution indices analyses. The results obtained showed lead (Pb) to be most concentrated in the soils and ranged from 0.22 ppm to 2.50 ppm, this was followed by the value recorded for zinc (Zn) which was between 0.0015 ppm to 0.020 ppm. The least observed metal in all the soil sample stations was nickel (Ni) which ranged from 0.001 ppm to 0.010 ppm. On the other hand, only water samples from Ojota and Ebutte-Meta were detectable with Pb concentration values of 0.38 ppm and 0.0028 ppm, Ni concentration values of 0.0052 ppm and 0.009 ppm, Zn concentration values of 0.0039 ppm and 0.0020 ppm respectively. On subjecting the concentration of the heavy metals to contamination factor (CF) revealed very slight contamination of the different soils from different areas. There was also very slight contamination of the waters from Ojota and Ebutte-Meta by metals, except for Igando and Bariga that were moderately and severely contaminated by the metals respectively. The Pollution Index (PI) showed that the soils and waters samples are unpolluted with the heavy metals.

Contamination of Lagos soils with persistent, bioaccumulative and toxic micropollutants (PBTs) may not only affect the non-target species residing in the soil, but also raises the concern of the possibility of the chemicals finding their way into the Lagoon and other water courses via soil run-off and leaching. In this study, soil samples were collected from three busy areas of Lagos (Apapa, Okobaba and Iddo) and analyzed for Polychlorinated Biphenyls (PCBs), Organochlorine pesticides (OCS), and Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons (PAHs). Gas Chromatography with Mass Selective Detector (GC/MSD) was used for the analyses. Iddo had the highest percentage organic carbon content of 39.39% with highest total PAHs of 2,706.93 ng/g. The highest total PCBs of 23.63 ng/g was found at Apapa 3 which was one of the three sampling points in Apapa. PCB 74 was the onlyPCB found in all the soil samples and ranged between 3.55 ng/g and 23.64 ng/g at Apapa 1 and Apapa 2 respectively. High concentrations of the following organic compounds were also obtained at the following locations- naphthalene (1,625.10 ng/g) at Iddo; dichlorodiphenyldichloroethylene (p,p'DDE ), (117.98 ng/g) at Okobaba, and PCB 74 (23.63 ng/g) at Apapa 1. The results obtained showed that the higher the municipal activity, the higher the percentage organic carbon content. Key words: Bioaccumulative and toxic micropollutants, Gas chromatography/Mass selective detector, Persistent organic carbon, Soil organic pollutants

ABSTRACT We monitored the BL Lac object S5 0716+714 in four optical wavebands with four telescopes on 11 nights from 2012 to 2017. The object was active during most of those nights. It was brightest on 2012 November 7 with 11.720 mag in the I band and reached the faintest state on 2016 January 22 with 15.770 mag in the R band corresponding to ∼15.230 mag in the I band. Intraday variations in all bands were found on 6 d, while in partial bands on 3 d. Strong bluer-when-brighter chromatism was observed on 8 nights. Correlation analyses revealed interband time delays from 4 to 40 min in the intraday variability on 5 nights. Both hard and soft lags were observed in this object, indicating complicated emission process in the jet. The analysis on the interband time delays indicated that the radiative cooling may dominate the optical time lags in S5 0716+714 occasionally, but cannot be invoked as the sole explanation.

Rapid urbanization can lead to significant environmental contamination with potentially toxic elements (PTEs). This is of concern because PTEs are accumulative, persistent, and can have detrimental effects on human health. Urban soil samples were obtained from parks, ornamental gardens, roadsides, railway terminals and locations close to industrial estates and dumpsites within the Lagos metropolis. Chromium, Cu, Fe, Mn, Ni, Pb and Zn concentrations were determined using inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry following sample digestion with aqua regia and application of the BCR sequential extraction procedure. A wide range of analyte concentrations was found—Cr, 19–1830 mg/kg; Cu, 8–11,700 mg/kg; Fe, 7460–166,000 mg/kg; Mn, 135–6100 mg/kg; Ni, 4–1050 mg/kg; Pb, 10–4340 mg/kg; and Zn, 61–5620 mg/kg—with high levels in areas close to industrial plants and dumpsites. The proportions of analytes released in the first three steps of the sequential extraction were Fe (16%) < Cr (30%) < Ni (46%) < Mn (63%) < Cu (78%) < Zn (80%) < Pb (84%), indicating that there is considerable scope for PTE (re)mobilization. Human health risk assessment indicated non-carcinogenic risk for children and carcinogenic risk for both children and adults. Further monitoring of PTE in the Lagos urban environment is therefore recommended.

The financial outcome of an enterprise is perceived to have some relationships with its operational environment. This study analysed the business environment as a correlate of financial performance of small and medium enterprises (SMEs), as to contribute to environment-enterprise policy mechanisms and regulatory framework, industry and management practices. Relevant definitional criteria and World Bank’s model were adopted to sample 228 SMEs from 456 via judgmental and convenience techniques. Multifactor business-environment questionnaire (MBEQ) was used to elicit responses from SMEs in a field survey. Enterprise type, activity, product line and financial performance were examined. Results showed dominance of sole proprietorship and services SMEs, multi-product lines, and highly positively correlated financial performance and business environment. Consequently, improved SME-friendly business environment was recommended.

Process-oriented models driven by highly resolved meteorological inputs and comprising a short internal time step are sometimes used to predict substance fluxes in air, soil and water over fairly long periods of time. To ascertain whether regression-based input–output analyses in such cases can provide adequate parametric models of the impact of daily and monthly fluctuations in inputs on annual outputs, we studied the SOIL/SOILN model of vertical transport of heat, water and nitrogen through arable soils. Annual leaching of nitrate from the root zone was regarded as the response variable, and regressors were selected from among the set of all linear combinations of daily or monthly values of five different meteorological inputs. We found that, although several of the underlying processes described by the SOIL/SOILN model are non-linear, both ordinary and partial least squares regression (OLS and PLS) identified the subsets of input variables with the strongest influence on the model output, and the dominating time lags between model inputs and outputs. Furthermore, highly resolved explanatory variables were a prerequisite for good performance of linear predictors of temporally aggregated outputs and, to discern the full dynamic behaviour of the model, it was necessary to analyse the response to artificially generated daily meteorological data representing a very large number of different weather conditions. PLS had one advantage over OLS: a smooth pattern in the regression coefficients facilitated physical interpretation of the derived impulse–response weights.

AbstractBackgroundThe number of people entering specialist drug treatment for cannabis problems has increased considerably in recent years. The reasons for this are unclear, but rising cannabis potency could be a contributing factor.MethodsCannabis potency data were obtained from an ongoing monitoring programme in the Netherlands. We analysed concentrations of δ-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) from the most popular variety of domestic herbal cannabis sold in each retail outlet (2000–2015). Mixed effects linear regression models examined time-dependent associations between THC and first-time cannabis admissions to specialist drug treatment. Candidate time lags were 0–10 years, based on normative European drug treatment data.ResultsTHC increased from a mean (95% CI) of 8.62 (7.97–9.27) to 20.38 (19.09–21.67) from 2000 to 2004 and then decreased to 15.31 (14.24–16.38) in 2015. First-time cannabis admissions (per 100 000 inhabitants) rose from 7.08 to 26.36 from 2000 to 2010, and then decreased to 19.82 in 2015. THC was positively associated with treatment entry at lags of 0–9 years, with the strongest association at 5 years, b = 0.370 (0.317–0.424), p < 0.0001. After adjusting for age, sex and non-cannabis drug treatment admissions, these positive associations were attenuated but remained statistically significant at lags of 5–7 years and were again strongest at 5 years, b = 0.082 (0.052–0.111), p < 0.0001.ConclusionsIn this 16-year observational study, we found positive time-dependent associations between changes in cannabis potency and first-time cannabis admissions to drug treatment. These associations are biologically plausible, but their strength after adjustment suggests that other factors are also important.

In many cities of third world countries, managing waste represents a beehive of activities that involve human scavengers searching for reusable or recyclable items that are either consumed or sold to generate funds for personal and family upkeep, since alternative decent employment are not available for them in the formal employment sector. Many of these waste pickers are young, work without the necessary health and safety apparatus, and expose themselves to injury and various health hazards. Therefore, this study investigated the working conditions and career aspirations of waste pickers in Lagos State, Nigeria. Using the questionnaire approach, structured, semi-structured, and open-ended questions were asked, and the Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS) was used to descriptively analyze the data collected and interpreted. The results showed that 87% of waste pickers in Lagos State have safety kits. In addition, the results showed flexibility in working hours and days since most waste pickers get to determine when and how they begin their work, i.e., 89% of the waste pickers spend 5 to 6 days a week in waste picking while 64% of them work between 10 and 14 h daily. Regarding earnings, the results showed that 68.3% of waste pickers earn between ₦2500 ($8.2) to ₦4900 ($16) daily. Finally, the results showed that despite access to safety kits, most waste pickers (54%) had experienced one form or another of hazard which has affected their career aspiration. Therefore, based on the study results we recommend that the Lagos State and the Nigerian federal government should develop a system that ensures strict compliance to established rules or guidelines that ensures the safety and health of waste pickers on the job.

Abstract Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) play an essential role in the sustainable development of countries. They help in employment generation, industrial production increase, and export, social enrichment as well as political stability. This study investigates the survival strategies and sustainability of SMEs using selected small businesses in the Oshodi-Isolo Local Government Area, Lagos State. It examines the type of growth strategies that SMEs adopt, ascertains what influences their survival strategies as well as the challenges that hinder their growth. Fifty (50) SMEs were randomly sampled. Their owners and managers were interviewed using questionnaires. Data collected were analysed using descriptive statistics and Pearson product–moment correlation coefficient statistics. Our findings reveal that there is a statistically significant relationship between survival strategies and SMEs’ sustainability. The major implication of the findings is that maintaining small but committed and motivated employees is critical in guaranteeing the survival of the SMEs in a volatile economy. The study recommends that there be a need for orientation and educational programmes to change the mindset of business owners to enable them to graduate from sole atomistic proprietor devoid of modern scientific business practice and effective succession to corporate status with an apparatus of modern business management practices and corporate vision. Finally, the study further suggests some imperatives for policy makers concerned with promoting small businesses’ growth and sustainability in the Oshodi-Isolo Local Government Area of Lagos State.

Background: Currently, consumers worldwide are exposed to and have more opportunities to choose from an extensive variety of foreign and domestic products. Objective: This study examined the purchase behaviours of consumers in Lagos State regarding locally manufactured and foreign medicines and other products sold in community pharmacies. Methods: A cross-sectional study among clients of community pharmacies in Lagos State was deployed. Data were collected using semi-structured questionnaires containing both open-ended and closed-ended questions, in electronic Google Forms®, and analysed using Microsoft Excel® Results: Majority of the consumers (60.1%) prefer to purchase foreign products stocked in a community pharmacy, 27.4% domestic products, while 12.1 -13.2% were neutral. More consumers prefer to purchase locally manufactured herbal products (local vs foreign) (56.9 vs 46.6%) and beverages (56.4 vs 55.9%). More consumers prefer to purchase foreign medicines (foreign vs local) (68.6 vs 58.2%), other medical products (50.4 vs 32.5%), toiletries (49.7 vs 46.7%), and cosmetics (55.4 vs 43.9%). In decreasing order of significance, cost, availability, and prescription, determined their preference for local products; while quality, prescription, and experience with the product determined their preference for foreign products. However, some consumers purchase local products due to patriotism (18.2%) and ethnocentrism (10.8%). Conclusion: Nigerian consumers prefer foreign medicines, cosmetics, and toiletries to locally manufactured ones as they believe that they are of superior quality, and they are willing to pay a higher price for them. There is need to properly regulate, strengthen, and support local industries to ensure manufacture of good quality products and boost the economy.

The bioavailability of phosphorus and other nutrients in feed for monogastrics is restricted by the presence of phytate. Exogenous supply of phytase produced by bacteria and other microbes can enhance the bioavailability of these nutrients and reduce phosphorus pollution. The objective of the study was to isolate bacteria with phytase-producing potentials from soil; which may be employed for the bioavailability of phosphorus and other nutrients in feed for monogastrics in Nigeria. Top soil samples were collected from two dumpsites in Lagos, Nigeria and bacteria were isolated and screened for potentials to produce phytase. The isolates with phytase potential were primarily identified by their cultural and biochemical characteristics and then confirmed using the 16S rRNA sequencing, after which their expressed phytases were quantified. A total of six isolates belonging to three species were identified as phytase producers. Sequence data analyses revealed these to be Bacillus subtilis (2), Bacillus amyloliquefaciens (3) and Enterobacter cloacae (1) with accession numbers MH879827 and MH879832; MH879828, MH879830 and MH879831; and MH879829 respectively. Phenotypic phytase activity was highest in E. cloacae ODS 29 (9.69 ± 0.04 U/ml) and least in B. subtilis ODS 10 (8.83 ± 0.02 U/ml). In conclusion, phytase-producing Bacillus and Enterobacter species were isolated and characterized from Nigerian soils. These bacteria species could be used in biotechnological applications. Keywords: Bacillus, Enterobacter, Monogastrics, Phylogenetic analysis, Phytase

It has been observed that real estate assets stay for a reasonably long period of time in the market before it was actually sold. This study therefore, examined the impacts of property features on time-on-market (TOM) of real estate assets in Lagos Metropolis, Nigeria. The study administered 65 questionnaires on estate firms actively involved in the sales of real estate assets in the study area. Information on property features and TOM of completed sales transactions were collected from 149 transactions. Data were collected and analysed using cross tabulation and regression analysis. The study revealed that there is a strong significant (0.05 level) relationship between TOM of real estate asset and title document, location condition and asset class while there is no significant relationship between TOM and repair condition, level of finishing, property description and property location. However, the result of regression analysis revealed that repair condition, asset class and title document are the only property features that have positive impacts on TOM. The study recommends that property developers should take notice of the identified property features that influence TOM of real estate assets which could improve the marketability of their assets and decrease the TOM of real estate asset..

Land surface temperature (LST) is a fundamental physical quantity in a range of different studies, for example in climatological analyses and surface–atmosphere heat flux assessments, especially in heterogeneous and complex surfaces such as vegetated canopies. To obtain accurate LST values, it is important to measure accurately the land surface emissivity (LSE) in the thermal infrared spectrum. In the past decades, different directional emissivity canopy models have been proposed. This paper evaluates six radiative transfer models (FR97, Mod3, Rmod3, 4SAIL, REN15, and CE-P models) through a comparison with in situ emissivity measurements performed using the temperature-emissivity separation (TES) method. The evaluation is done using a single set of rose plants over two different soils with very different spectral behavior. First, using an organic soil, the measurements were done for seven different observation angles, from 0° to 60° in steps of 10°, and for six different values of leaf area index (LAI). Taking into account all LAIs, the bias (and root mean square error, RMSE) obtained were 0.003 (±0.006), −0.004 (±0.005), −0.009 (±0.011), 0.005 (±0.007), 0.004 (±0.007), and 0.005 (±0.007) for FR97, Mod3, Rmod3, 4SAIL, REN 15, and CE-P models, respectively. Second, using an inorganic soil, the measurements were done for six different LAIs but for two different observation angles: 0° and 55°. The bias (and RMSE) obtained were 0.012 (±0.014), 0.004 (±0.007), −0.020 (±0.035), 0.016 (±0.017), 0.013 (±0.015), 0.013 (±0.015) and for FR97, Mod3, Rmod3, 4SAIL, REN15, and CE-P models, respectively. Overall, the Mod3 model appears as the best model in comparison to the TES emissivity reference measurements.

The main aim of this research was to assess the extent of the problems associated with inappropriate e-waste management and recycling practices. Electronic wastes (E-wastes) are generated from products that are designed for use with a maximum voltage of 1000 volts for alternating current and 1500 volts for direct current. These wastes contain hazardous materials such as lead, mercury, cadmium, brominated flame-retardants, valuable metals such as aluminium, nickel, copper, and certain precious metals such as gold, silver and platinum group metals (PGMs) which pose both human and environmental health threats. They have negative impacts on the health of workers and nearby residents; hence, residents of buildings located around and beside e-wastes dumpsites were randomly selected for this study. Well, run-off and borehole water samples as well as soil samples from different sites in Alaba international market, and Ikeja computer village in Lagos, Nigeria were analyzed for zinc, lead, iron, copper, nickel and chromium. Using additional information from questionnaires and interviews, impacts of e-waste dumps on the health of workers and residents near the study areas were investigated. The results were analysed using descriptive frequency count and tables which confirmed the presence of heavy metals in soils and water samples of the case study areas and hence appropriate recommendations were outlined to address the menace of e-waste disposal and as well as the need for improvement in e-waste management and recycling for economic opportunities and improved health standard within the Lagos Metropolis.

This study investigated the quantities of heavy metals including cadmium (Cd), chromium (Cr), copper (Cu), lead (Pb) and zinc (Zn)in soil samples and in the organs (leaf, stem and root) of Celosia argentea collected from a dumpsite (at Ojota) and a farmland (at Badagry) in Lagos, Nigeria. Additionally, the macroelement content of the soils and the effect of heavy metal soil contamination on C. argentea DNA stability was analysed. Heavy metals and NPK concentrations in the soil samples and organs of C. argentea were evaluated using standard techniques. The results of this study revealed that the microelement were more abundant in the soil collected from the dumpsite. Likewise, all the heavy metals (Cd,Cr,Cu,Pb and Zn) investigated in this study were detected in higher quantities in the dumpsite soil. Notably, the concentration of the metals was within the WHO/FAO limits in the soils collected from both sampling sites save Zn which was 660.260 mg/kg and 449.180mg/kg in the dumpsite and farmland respectively. The concentration of heavy metals in the C. argentea organs in this research were higher in samples collected from the dumpsite and Zn was the most accumulated on both the dumpsite and farmland. The highest amount (95.987 mg/kg) of Zn was by C. argentea root collected from the dumpsite while the least amount (15.380 mg/kg) was detected in C. argentea stem collected from the farmland. The DNA base pairs were not visibly fragmented in the samples C. argentea collected from the control and dumpsite sites. Although most of the heavy metals detected in C. argentea were in negligible quantities, the soils and the vegetable appear to be Zn-contaminated and unsafe for consumption. Keywords: Heavy Metal, DNA, vegetables, biomagnifications, Bioaccumulation, Dumpsites Farmlands

Abstract Objectives In 2012, a stratified random survey, using mystery shoppers, was conducted to investigate the availability and quality of antibiotics sold to patients in the private sector in five southern provinces of the Lao People’s Democratic Republic (Laos). Methods A total of 147 outlets were sampled in 10 districts. The active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) content measurements for 909 samples, including nine APIs (amoxicillin, ampicillin, ceftriaxone, ciprofloxacin, doxycycline, ofloxacin, sulfamethoxazole, tetracycline and trimethoprim), were determined using HPLC. Results All the analysed samples contained the stated API and we found no evidence for falsification. All except one sample had all the units tested with %API values between 75% and 125% of the content stated on the label. However, we identified the presence of substandard antibiotics: 19.6% (201/1025) of samples had their units outside the 90%–110% content of the label claim and 60.2% (617/1025) of the samples had units outside of the International Pharmacopoeia uniformity of content limit range. Amoxicillin had a high number of samples [67.1% (151)] with units above the limit range, followed by ciprofloxacin [58.8% (10)] and ofloxacin [57.4% (39)]. Ceftriaxone, trimethoprim and sulfamethoxazole had the highest number of samples with low API content: 57.1% (4), 51.6% (64) and 34.7% (43), respectively. Significant differences in %API were found between stated countries of manufacture and stated manufacturers. Conclusions With the global threat of antimicrobial resistance to patient outcomes, greater understanding of the role of poor-quality antibiotics is needed. Substandard antibiotics will have reduced therapeutic efficacy, impacting public health and control of bacterial infections.

In an increasingly urbanized world scientific research has shifted towards the understanding of cities as unique ecosystems. Urban land use change results in rapid and drastic changes in physical and biological properties, including that of biodiversity and community composition. Soil biodiversity research often lags behind the more charismatic groups such as vertebrates and plants. This paper attempts to fill this gap and provides an overview on urban isopod research. First, a brief overview on urban land use change is given, specifically on the major alterations on surface soils. Historical studies on urban isopods is summarized, followed by the status of current knowledge on diversity, distribution, and function of urban isopod species and communities. A review of more than 100 publications revealed that worldwide 50 cities and towns have some record of terrestrial isopod species, but only a few of those are city-scale explorations of urban fauna. A total of 110 isopod species has been recorded although the majority of them only once. The ten most frequently occurring isopods are widely distributed synanthropic species. Knowledge gaps and future research needs call for a better global dataset, long term monitoring of urban populations, multi-scale analyses of landscape properties as potential drivers of isopod diversity, and molecular studies to detect evolutionary changes.

ABSTRACT: This article analyses the effect of the closure of the Spanish coal-fired power stations on the price and quantity of energy sold in the daily electricity market. The comparative statics analysis is based on the hourly data of energy offer and demand bids published by the OMIE (Operator of the Iberian Energy Market) and made by the participants in the daily electricity market during the year 2018. Our analysis does not require any simulation of the market supply and demand curves, since they are obtained by aggregation using real data from the wholesale market. The main conclusion of our analysis is that, after the closure of the coal-fired stations, the hourly price of energy would increase 12,06% on average while the average amount of energy would decrease 2,57%. Keywords: Price of electricity; coal plants; ecological transition; supply and demand surpluses; renewable energy.

We examined the relationships between abundance of 16 species of waterbirds and the rainfall in eastern Australia, the rainfall west of this region, the annual Southern Oscillation index (SOI), the wetland area, and hunting in eastern Australia for the period 1983–92. Data were collected during aerial surveys of eastern Australia. For most explanatory variables, lags of up to five years before aerial surveys were also investigated during these analyses. The analyses covered all nine game species (plumed whistling-duck, Australian shelduck, Australian wood duck, pink-eared duck, grey teal, chestnut teal, Pacific black duck, Australasian shoveler, hardhead) and seven non-game species (Australian pelican, white-faced heron, yellow-billed spoonbill, freckled duck, black swan, black-winged stilt, red-necked avocet). Regression models were developed for all species apart from Australian pelicans. Rainfall and climate indices generally were most correlated with the species’ abundance. Bonferroni adjustments to significance levels meant that there were significant variables in regression models for seven of the 16 species. Abundance indices for plumed whistling-duck, chestnut teal, hardhead, black swan and black-winged stilt were related to the climate variables (rainfall, SOI) and wetland area, whereas abundance of pink-eared duck and red-necked avocets were negatively related. Abundance of chestnut teal was positively related to numbers of hunting licences sold. The results are equivocal about the role of hunting in determining waterfowl abundance, which is probably a reflection of few data points and numbers of variables included. In general, abundance indices of waterbirds appear to have decreased between 1983 and 1992, which may correspond to other factors not modelled

This study was designed to measure the microbiological and chemical characteristics of forest soils in a chronosequence of harvested Douglas-fir (Pseusotsuga menziesii (Mirb.) Franco) stands in different climatic settings. Mineral soil samples were collected along transects running from old-growth (OG) forests into harvested stands of ages 5, 15, and 40 years (5YS, 15YS, and 40YS, respectively) in the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest in the central Oregon Cascade Mountains. We took litter depth measurements and cores to test for the presence of mycorrhizal mats at each sampling location. Denitrification potential was significantly lower in OG than in 5YS, and litter depth, forest floor respiration rate, and concentration of ectomycorrhizal mats were significantly greater in OG than in 5YS. Values were intermediate in 15YS and similar to those measured in OG in 40YS. No significant stand-age differences occurred in soil organic matter, soil moisture, pH, mineralizable N, laboratory soil respiration rate, or extractable ammonium. Sample variability was generally lowest in OG forests and highest in 5YS, and no consistent autocorrelations were observed for any of the variables at lags of 5 m or greater. We found no second-level interactions between stand age and location in ANOVA analyses, suggesting that, within the limits of this study, climate did not influence soil response to disturbance and subsequent recovery; however, several soil properties were affected by site location and, therefore, climate.

This article analyses two important issues pertaining to Indian economy. One is the numerical target under rule-based fiscal correction mechanism being followed by Indian government and second is on infrastructural investment requirements. India lags behind many countries in the world including some of the developing ones both in terms of stock and quality of infrastructure. There exist huge investment requirements in order to foster the economic growth and efficiently utilise the available resources. In the recent years, there is a significant contribution from the private sector towards infrastructural investment. However, private participation is concentrated in few sectors which are commercially viable and hence in the remaining key areas, like rural infrastructure, government is the sole investor. In India, excess spending by the central government is restricted under Fiscal Responsibility and Budget Management Act, 2003 and for the state governments under state-specific Fiscal Responsibility Legislations. The Act limits the fiscal deficit (FD) to 3 per cent of GDP for central government and 3 per cent of GSDP for state governments. FD is capped due to its adverse impact on macroeconomy. However, the available literature shows mixed evidence. Most importantly, revenue deficit (RD) component covers major portion of FD and only a meagre amount is left for capital investments. This article debates whether 3 per cent cap on FD is advisable in all the circumstances and also analyses whether infrastructural investment gap can be filled with available fiscal-deficit amount. This article finds that there is an infrastructural investment gap of ‘5,165.20 billion in the 12th Plan period and concludes that it makes no harm even though FD crosses 3 per cent cap given that amount in entirety is spent on capital formation.

The current paper aims to analyze how certain Facebook settings, model of new Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), have turned into an infringement of some existing privacy Ethical principles. This totally changed and modern paradigm has its clearest expression in recent Web 2.0., and omnipotent Communication Technology, and implies the reconsideration of each Ethical Principles, especially those related to Intimacy and Image Protection. Our research explains not just how these areas are affected by technological changes but also the way these imperative ethical principles are violated because users ignorance and confidence. This carefree attitude and the increasing communicative relevance have given networking precedence over Intimacy protection. The result of this action has been denominated «Extimacy» according to the author Jacques Lacan, a concept which can be translated as public Intimacy through networking activities, namely, exposed Intimacy. The goal we aim to achieve is to illustrate the different ways our Privacy can be damaged by some Facebook measures (as Privacy Policies Change, collecting tendencies of consumption, the use of private data and revealing users confidence). Likewise these arguments will be endorsed by international researches focused on Facebook privacy violations, which we are going to expose to understand how citizens can carry out different actions to defend our Intimacy and Image Rights. El presente trabajo analiza cómo ciertas herramientas de Facebook, modelo de las nuevas tecnologías de la información, han derivado en la vulneración de algunos planteamientos éticos vigentes hasta el momento. Este paradigma comunicativo que encuentra su máxima expresión en las redes sociales y la tecnología 2.0, implica un replanteamiento de los principios de la ética informativa relativos a la salvaguarda de la intimidad, la protección de la vida privada y el resguardo de la propia imagen. Esta investigación estudia cómo estas áreas no solo se ven afectadas por los cambios tecnológicos y la propia naturaleza de la fuente informativa, sino por la confianza y desconocimiento de los usuarios, quienes dan primacía a la comunicación por encima de la intimidad. Este fenómeno denominado «extimidad» por Jacques Lacan, se traduce como la intimidad hecha pública a través de las nuevas redes de comunicación o intimidad expuesta. En nuestro análisis expondremos los resortes a través de los cuales se quebranta nuestra privacidad en Facebook, especialmente por medio de la captación de pautas de comportamiento, el empleo de datos derivados de los perfiles, los cambios en la política de privacidad y el reconocimiento facial, avalando su transgresión con documentación derivada de investigaciones realizadas por organismos internacionales. En resumen, analizar la vulneración de la intimidad en las redes sociales y entender qué medidas pueden implementarse para defender nuestros derechos son el objetivo de esta comunicación.

The arrival of dozens of plants and animals from America after the Europeans’ encounter with this continent attracted attention from the most diverse fields of knowledge. Doctors and botanists, for example, devoted hundreds of pages to these exotic species. But the world of the arts was not alien to their arrival and throughout the Modern Age, paintings from all over Europe were populated with sunflowers, turkeys or macaws. A good example of this can be found in the collections of the Prado Museum, where American flora and fauna found a place not only in still-life painting, but also in works of an allegorical, mythological or religious nature, acquiring in each of them interesting connotations that we will analyse throughout this paper. La llegada de decenas de plantas y animales procedentes de América tras el encuentro de los europeos con este continente atrajo la atención desde los más diversos campos del saber. Médicos o botánicos, por ejemplo, dedicaron cientos de páginas a estas exóticas especies. Pero el mundo de las artes no fue en absoluto ajeno a su llegada y a lo largo de la edad moderna, cuadros de toda Europa fueron poblándose de girasoles, pavos o guacamayos. Un buen ejemplo de ello lo encontramos en las colecciones del Museo del Prado, donde la flora y la fauna americanas encontraron un hueco no solo en bodegones, sino también en obras de carácter alegórico, mitológico o religioso, adquiriendo en cada una de ellas interesantes connotaciones que analizaremos a lo largo de este artículo.

The arrival of dozens of plants and animals from America after the Europeans’ encounter with this continent attracted attention from the most diverse fields of knowledge. Doctors and botanists, for example, devoted hundreds of pages to these exotic species. But the world of the arts was not alien to their arrival and throughout the Modern Age, paintings from all over Europe were populated with sunflowers, turkeys or macaws. A good example of this can be found in the collections of the Prado Museum, where American flora and fauna found a place not only in still-life painting, but also in works of an allegorical, mythological or religious nature, acquiring in each of them interesting connotations that we will analyse throughout this paper. La llegada de decenas de plantas y animales procedentes de América tras el encuentro de los europeos con este continente atrajo la atención desde los más diversos campos del saber. Médicos o botánicos, por ejemplo, dedicaron cientos de páginas a estas exóticas especies. Pero el mundo de las artes no fue en absoluto ajeno a su llegada y a lo largo de la edad moderna, cuadros de toda Europa fueron poblándose de girasoles, pavos o guacamayos. Un buen ejemplo de ello lo encontramos en las colecciones del Museo del Prado, donde la flora y la fauna americanas encontraron un hueco no solo en bodegones, sino también en obras de carácter alegórico, mitológico o religioso, adquiriendo en cada una de ellas interesantes connotaciones que analizaremos a lo largo de este artículo.

Abstract. Increased anthropogenic inputs of nitrogen (N) to the biosphere during the last few decades have resulted in increased groundwater and surface water concentrations of N (primarily as nitrate), posing a global problem. Although measures have been implemented to reduce N inputs, they have not always led to decreasing riverine nitrate concentrations and loads. This limited response to the measures can either be caused by the accumulation of organic N in the soils (biogeochemical legacy) – or by long travel times (TTs) of inorganic N to the streams (hydrological legacy). Here, we compare atmospheric and agricultural N inputs with long-term observations (1970–2016) of riverine nitrate concentrations and loads in a central German mesoscale catchment with three nested subcatchments of increasing agricultural land use. Based on a data-driven approach, we assess jointly the N budget and the effective TTs of N through the soil and groundwater compartments. In combination with long-term trajectories of the C–Q relationships, we evaluate the potential for and the characteristics of an N legacy. We show that in the 40-year-long observation period, the catchment (270 km2) with 60 % agricultural area received an N input of 53 437 t, while it exported 6592 t, indicating an overall retention of 88 %. Removal of N by denitrification could not sufficiently explain this imbalance. Log-normal travel time distributions (TTDs) that link the N input history to the riverine export differed seasonally, with modes spanning 7–22 years and the mean TTs being systematically shorter during the high-flow season as compared to low-flow conditions. Systematic shifts in the C–Q relationships were noticed over time that could be attributed to strong changes in N inputs resulting from agricultural intensification before 1989, the break-down of East German agriculture after 1989 and the seasonal differences in TTs. A chemostatic export regime of nitrate was only found after several years of stabilized N inputs. The changes in C–Q relationships suggest a dominance of the hydrological N legacy over the biogeochemical N fixation in the soils, as we expected to observe a stronger and even increasing dampening of the riverine N concentrations after sustained high N inputs. Our analyses reveal an imbalance between N input and output, long time-lags and a lack of significant denitrification in the catchment. All these suggest that catchment management needs to address both a longer-term reduction of N inputs and shorter-term mitigation of today's high N loads. The latter may be covered by interventions triggering denitrification, such as hedgerows around agricultural fields, riparian buffers zones or constructed wetlands. Further joint analyses of N budgets and TTs covering a higher variety of catchments will provide a deeper insight into N trajectories and their controlling parameters.

Abstract This paper continues the effort that began in (Scheer, Tobias & Peter Szigetvari. 2005. Unified representations for stress and the syllable. Phonology 22(1). 37–75.) to present a compelling alternative to moraic accounts of stress systems, framed in the theory of Strict CV (Lowenstamm, Jean. 1996. CV as the only syllable type. In Jacques Durand & Bernard Laks (eds.), Current trends in phonology models and methods, 419–442. European Studies Research Institute, University of Salford.). We have chosen stress in Palestinian Arabic, a stronghold of moraic theory, to be the empirical basis of the paper. It is a complex system, involving syllable structure and stress assignment, quantity sensitivity and syllabically-determined stress shift. Moreover, its analysis requires the deployment of a great deal of the theoretical machinery that has been (independently) developed in moraic stress theory. These phenomena, although recurrent cross-linguistically, remained outside the scope of Scheer and Szigetvari’s work. The present paper provides an account of these patterns using the innovative grid-based notion of weight incorporation (Ulfsbjorninn, Shanti. 2014. A Field Theory of Stress: the role of empty nuclei in stress systems. SOAS – University of London, PhD Dissertation.). The analysis is also brought to bear on Cairene Arabic, which is shown to differ from Palestinian in a single parameter setting. Significant independent support is provided by the extension of the analysis to the phenomenon of vowel shortening (both metrical and final), whose distribution and motivation are shown to follow in a straightforward manner from the general account. The paper also improves on previous analyses of meter in Strict CV, as for the first time in Strict CV metrics, a computational component is explicitly formalized. We conclude with a comparison to a moraic analysis of the phenomena discussed, and argue on principled grounds that the Strict CV account is a worthy competitor to such an analysis. Like its predecessor from 2005, the present account recognizes only one unit relevant for meter: the nucleus. No appeal is made to moras, syllables, feet or extrametricality.

Hate speech has become a widespread phenomenon, however, it remains largely unclear why adolescents engage in it and which factors are associated with their motivations for perpetrating hate speech. To this end, we developed the multidimensional “Motivations for Hate Speech Perpetration Scale” (MHATE) and evaluated the psychometric properties. We also explored the associations between social norms and adolescents’ motivations for hate speech perpetration. The sample consisted of 346 adolescents from Switzerland (54.6% boys; Mage=14; SD=0.96) who reported engagement in hate speech as perpetrators. The analyses revealed good psychometric properties for the MHATE, including good internal consistency. The most frequently endorsed subscale was revenge, followed by ideology, group conformity, status enhancement, exhilaration, and power. The results also showed that descriptive norms and peer pressure were related to a wide range of different motivations for perpetrating hate speech. Injunctive norms, however, were only associated with power. In conclusion, findings indicate that hate speech fulfills various functions. We argue that knowing the specific motivations that underlie hate speech could help us derive individually tailored prevention strategies (e.g., anger management, promoting an inclusive classroom climate). Furthermore, we suggest that practitioners working in the field of hate speech prevention give special attention to social norms surrounding adolescents. El discurso de odio se ha convertido en un fenómeno generalizado. Sin embargo, todavía no está claro por qué los adolescentes se involucran en el discurso de odio y qué factores están asociados con las motivaciones para perpetrarlo. Con esta finalidad, desarrollamos una medida multidimensional, la «Escala de Motivaciones para Perpetrar Discurso de Odio» (MHATE), y evaluamos sus propiedades psicométricas. Asimismo, investigamos las asociaciones entre las normas sociales y las motivaciones para participar en el discurso de odio. La muestra estuvo compuesta por 346 adolescentes suizos (54,6% chicos; Medad=14; DT=0,96) que informaron haber perpetrado discurso de odio. Los análisis revelaron buenas propiedades psicométricas de MHATE, incluyendo adecuada consistencia interna. La subescala con mayor frecuencia fue venganza, seguida de las de ideología, conformidad con el grupo, mejora del estatus, regocijo y poder. Las normas descriptivas y la presión de iguales estuvieron relacionadas con varias motivaciones para perpetrar discurso de odio. Las normas prescriptivas, sin embargo, solo se asociaron con el poder. En conclusión, los hallazgos indican que el discurso de odio cumple varias funciones. Conocer las motivaciones específicas para el discurso de odio ayuda a derivar estrategias de intervención individualmente adaptadas (ej., manejo de la ira, promover un clima escolar inclusivo). Además, sugerimos que los profesionales que trabajan en la prevención del discurso de odio presten especial atención a las normas sociales que rodean a los adolescentes.

Abstract. During the African Monsoon Multidisciplinary Analyses (AMMA) airborne measurements of ozone, CO and nitrogen oxides by the French and German falcon aircraft took place near three cities in West Africa (Cotonou, Niamey and Ouagadougou). Significant ozone production (O3 increase of 40–50 ppbv) took place during two specific events: one near Cotonou on the coast of the Guinea Gulf, and the other near Niamey in the Sahel region. In both cases a high level of NOx (>3 ppbv) is related to the ozone production. The ozone production is mainly driven by the Lagos-Cotonou anthropogenic emissions in Cotonou. In Niamey the combined effect of advection of VOC emissions from the forest and stagnation over the city area and the poorly vegetated soils recently wetted by convected systems is needed to achieve a similar level of ozone precursors. In Ouagadougou no ozone plume is found because of the absence of a pause in the convective activity and of the larger vegetated area around the city which prevented ozone plume formation during the wet season. To discuss the ozone increase near Cotonou two different approaches have been implemented: a FLEXPART simulation to quantify the probability of transport from the SH compared to air mass stagnation over the emission area and a simulation of the BOLAM mesoscale model with two different tracers for the anthropogenic emission (RETRO inventory for 2000) and the biomass burning. The BOLAM model shows a good agreement with the meteorological observations of the aircraft and allows to identify the key influence of the anthropogenic emissions in the first 3 km while the biomass burning plume remains above this altitude. The day to day variability of the ozone and CO in Niamey and Ouagadougou is discussed using FLEXPART simulations of the air mass stagnation in the 12° N–14° N latitude band and northward advection of air masses from the vegetated areas influenced by the biogenic volatile organic compound (VOC) emissions. Both conditions need to be fulfilled to be able to detect ozone increase within the city plume. The first condition is necessary to obtain a significant increase of the NOx concentrations by combining the city emission and the soil emission. It also shows that, contrary to the Niamey conditions, the Ouagadougou air mass transport and its timing respective to the convective activity did not correspond to favourable conditions for O3 formation during the time period of the aircraft data. Finally to check the magnitude of the ozone production related to the observed CO and NOx observations, a 2-days stationary run of the CittyCAT Lagrangian model was conducted at Cotonou location. The initialisation of the chemical concentrations not measured is done by scaling to the NOx and CO concentrations observed in the polluted plume. The scaling factor is derived from the low altitude observations provided by the DF20 and the BAe-146 aircraft during the AMMA campaign. Under such conditions, the simulation show that 50 ppbv of ozone can be produced in a 2-days period.

O estudo da paisagem possibilita a compreensão das relações entre a dinâmica natural e social. A análise do contexto da ocupação das terras dorense, revela que o desenvolvimento social e econômico respaldado nas atividades agropastoris, está associado à supressão da cobertura florestal original. Este artigo objetiva analisar as transformações da paisagem do município de Nossa Senhora das Dores relacionadas com o processo de uso e ocupação das terras, entre 1985-2018, através da área da cobertura vegetal original. Dentre os procedimentos metodológicos adotados estão – pesquisa bibliográfica, documental e cartográfica, trabalhos de campo, processamento de imagens de satélite e fotografias aéreas, interpretação dos dados e elaboração de produtos cartográficos. Constatou-se, no recorte temporal analisado, através da interpretação de mapas da cobertura florestal original e de uso e cobertura do solo, que na atualidade, a paisagem encontra-se fortemente descaracterizada. Os setores antes colonizados pela vegetação foram submetidos à antropização e são ocupados, principalmente, com as atividades da agropecuária. Entre 1985 e 2018, foram suprimidas 29% das áreas com Floresta Natural; a Formação Campestre decresceu 31% e os Corpos d’água, representados pelos Lagos, Lagoas e Açude foram reduzidos em 45%. Entretanto, no mesmo período, a Agropecuária foi expandida em 2%, correspondendo a mais de 90% da área de estudo, cerca de 445 km², dos quais, 83% são ocupados com Pastagens. Seguindo a dinâmica demográfica do município e a concentração da população na cidade, a Infraestrutura Urbana foi ampliada cerca de 750% no período analisado.Palavras-chave: Paisagem. Uso e ocupação das terras. Antropização da cobertura florestal. Nossa Senhora das Dores. Landscape Transformations in Nossa Senhora das Dores-Sergipe:land use analysis between 1985 and 2018A B S T R A C TThe study of the landscape makes it possible to understand the relationships between natural and social dynamics. The analysis of the context of land occupation dorense reveals that the social and economic development supported by agropastoral activities is associated with the suppression of the original forest cover. This article aims to analyze the landscape changes in the municipality of Nossa Senhora das Dores related to the process of land use and occupation, between 1985-2018, through the area of the original vegetation cover. Among the methodological procedures adopted are - bibliographical, documentary and cartographic research, fieldwork, processing of satellite images and aerial photographs, data interpretation and elaboration of cartographic products. It was found, in the analyzed time frame, through the interpretation of maps of the original forest cover and of land use and cover, that at present, the landscape is strongly uncharacterized. The sectors previously colonized by vegetation were subjected to anthropization and are mainly occupied with agricultural activities. Between 1985 and 2018, 29% of the areas with Natural Forest were eliminated; the Campestre Formation decreased by 31% and the bodies of water, represented by the Lakes, Lagoas and Açude, were reduced by 45%. However, in the same period, Agropecuária was expanded by 2%, corresponding to more than 90% of the study area, about 445 km², of which 83% are occupied with Pastures. Following the demographic dynamics of the municipality and the concentration of the population in the city, Urban Infrastructure was expanded by about 750% in the analyzed period.Keywords: Landscape. Use and occupation of land. Anthropization of forest cover. Nossa Senhora das Dores

O estudo da paisagem possibilita a compreensão das relações entre a dinâmica natural e social. A análise do contexto da ocupação das terras dorense, revela que o desenvolvimento social e econômico respaldado nas atividades agropastoris, está associado à supressão da cobertura florestal original. Este artigo objetiva analisar as transformações da paisagem do município de Nossa Senhora das Dores relacionadas com o processo de uso e ocupação das terras, entre 1985-2018, através da área da cobertura vegetal original. Dentre os procedimentos metodológicos adotados estão – pesquisa bibliográfica, documental e cartográfica, trabalhos de campo, processamento de imagens de satélite e fotografias aéreas, interpretação dos dados e elaboração de produtos cartográficos. Constatou-se, no recorte temporal analisado, através da interpretação de mapas da cobertura florestal original e de uso e cobertura do solo, que na atualidade, a paisagem encontra-se fortemente descaracterizada. Os setores antes colonizados pela vegetação foram submetidos à antropização e são ocupados, principalmente, com as atividades da agropecuária. Entre 1985 e 2018, foram suprimidas 29% das áreas com Floresta Natural; a Formação Campestre decresceu 31% e os Corpos d’água, representados pelos Lagos, Lagoas e Açude foram reduzidos em 45%. Entretanto, no mesmo período, a Agropecuária foi expandida em 2%, correspondendo a mais de 90% da área de estudo, cerca de 445 km², dos quais, 83% são ocupados com Pastagens. Seguindo a dinâmica demográfica do município e a concentração da população na cidade, a Infraestrutura Urbana foi ampliada cerca de 750% no período analisado.Palavras-chave: Paisagem. Uso e ocupação das terras. Antropização da cobertura florestal. Nossa Senhora das Dores. Landscape Transformations in Nossa Senhora das Dores-Sergipe:land use analysis between 1985 and 2018A B S T R A C TThe study of the landscape makes it possible to understand the relationships between natural and social dynamics. The analysis of the context of land occupation dorense reveals that the social and economic development supported by agropastoral activities is associated with the suppression of the original forest cover. This article aims to analyze the landscape changes in the municipality of Nossa Senhora das Dores related to the process of land use and occupation, between 1985-2018, through the area of the original vegetation cover. Among the methodological procedures adopted are - bibliographical, documentary and cartographic research, fieldwork, processing of satellite images and aerial photographs, data interpretation and elaboration of cartographic products. It was found, in the analyzed time frame, through the interpretation of maps of the original forest cover and of land use and cover, that at present, the landscape is strongly uncharacterized. The sectors previously colonized by vegetation were subjected to anthropization and are mainly occupied with agricultural activities. Between 1985 and 2018, 29% of the areas with Natural Forest were eliminated; the Campestre Formation decreased by 31% and the bodies of water, represented by the Lakes, Lagoas and Açude, were reduced by 45%. However, in the same period, Agropecuária was expanded by 2%, corresponding to more than 90% of the study area, about 445 km², of which 83% are occupied with Pastures. Following the demographic dynamics of the municipality and the concentration of the population in the city, Urban Infrastructure was expanded by about 750% in the analyzed period.Keywords: Landscape. Use and occupation of land. Anthropization of forest cover. Nossa Senhora das Dores.

Dans le milieu aride et semi-aride tunisien, les aménagements de conservation des eaux et du sol jouent un rôle important dans la collecte et le stockage sur les versants des eaux de ruissellement. Cependant l'impact de ces aménagements sur les écoulements reste mal connu. Pour évaluer l'impact de banquettes à rétention totale à l'échelle d'un bassin versant situé au centre de la Tunisie, en zone semi-aride, nous nous proposons dans cet article d'utiliser le modèle géomorphologique H2U, fonction de transfert basée sur la répartition des chemins de l'eau à la surface du bassin. Pour la reconstitution des crues, ce modèle a été couplé à une fonction de production qui définit la pluie nette (lame ruisselée) à partir de la hauteur précipitée sur le bassin versant. Entre juillet 96 et juillet 97, le bassin versant d'El Gouazine (18,1 km2) a été aménagé en banquettes à rétention totale. La longueur moyenne de ces banquettes est d'environ 100 m pour une hauteur moyenne de 1,50 m. L'écartement moyen entre les banquettes est de 25 m. La superficie aménagée sur le bassin versant est de 783 hectares, soit 43 % de sa superficie. Cet aménagement a intéressé principalement les terres de culture et une partie des parcours dégradés transformés à cette occasion en terres de culture. Dès lors, sur ce bassin, les eaux de ruissellement sont interceptées par ces levées de terre et elles n'atteignent l'oued principal qu'après avoir rempli les fossés créés en amont des banquettes. Avant l'aménagement en banquettes, le coefficient de ruissellement global du bassin versant était de l'ordre de 7 à 8 % pour les hauteurs de pluie inférieures à 20 mm et compris entre 20 et 30% pour les hauteurs de pluie supérieures à 20 mm. Les pluies d'automne (septembre - octobre) présentaient les coefficients de ruissellement les plus forts car elles sont caractérisées par des intensités très élevées et les sols ne sont pas encore couverts par les végétations naturelles et cultivées. Ils présentent alors des croûtes de battance qui limitent l'infiltration des eaux de ruissellement. Le calage du modèle H2U (fonctions de transfert et de production associée) sur 12 crues avant aménagement a fourni une pluie d'imbibition initiale de 10 mm, une intensité limite pour l'apparition de ruissellement de 3,6 mm.h-1, un coefficient de ruissellement efficace de 42 % et un temps moyen de parcours de l'ordre de 40 minutes. Le modèle a été par la suite validé pour la crue du 20 septembre 1995. Les critères d'ajustement sont bons pour le calage et pour la validation. Le critère de Nash appliqué aux débits ruisselés est de 0,62 à 0,96 pour le calage et de 0,96 pour la validation. Après l'aménagement, les pluies enregistrées n'ont engendré qu'un faible ruissellement : un coefficient de ruissellement compris entre 1 à 3% pour les pluies de 30 à 50 mm, un coefficient de ruissellement de 9% pour une pluie de 80 mm (24 septembre 1998). L'utilisation du modèle H2U nous a permis d'évaluer l'impact des banquettes en comparant directement les crues observées avec aménagement et les crues reconstituées par le modèle sans aménagement. Ainsi la pluie du 24 septembre 1998, de fréquence décennale, a-t-elle engendré un ruissellement 4 fois plus faible avec l'aménagement en banquettes, un débit maximum 8 fois plus faible et un temps de réponse 4 fois plus fort. Malgré son extension limitée à 43 % de la surface du bassin d'El Gouazine, l'aménagement anti-érosif en banquettes joue donc un rôle très important sur la rétention des eaux de ruissellement, au point de limiter considérablement, de 50 à 80 %, les apports dans la retenue du petit barrage collinaire. Il convient donc de trouver, pour chaque bassin versant de la dorsale tunisienne, une solution optimale à l'aménagement des terres cultivées sur les versants tout en conservant des apports suffisants aux lacs collinaires pour subvenir aux besoins en eau des cultures irriguées. Pour caler le modèle H2U et sa fonction de production sur des bassins versants aménagés, une meilleure analyse du fonctionnement hydrologique d'un système de banquettes en cascade semble donc nécessaire.

Abstract Background Sickle cell anemia (HbSS) is characterized by chronic hemolysis, i.e. a shortened red blood cell (RBC) lifespan. Hemolysis varies greatly in degree among patients and is thought to be the proximate cause of some of the complications of HbSS. To date, clinical studies exploring the pathological role of hemolysis in SCD have used surrogates (e.g., reticulocyte count, LDH, AST) rather than direct measures. Surrogate markers are inadequate to study causation, but current gold standard methods for calculating RBC lifespan in humans are labor-intensive and involve radioactivity or ex vivo cell labeling. Glycine is a precursor for both the globin and heme components of hemoglobin (Hb), so stable isotope-labeled glycine (15N-glycine) can be used to measure RBC survival. Following ingestion of 15N-glycine, labeled Hb is synthesized within RBC precursors that are subsequently released as an age cohort into the circulation where the label can be measured over time. This differs from population labels, e.g. chromium or biotin, that label RBCs of all ages in the circulation. The measurement is safe (no infusion of manipulated RBC products or radioactivity), not labor-intensive (no ex vivo manipulation of RBCs) and appears to be practical for use in clinical studies. Objective To measure RBC survival using 15N-glycine in patients with HbSS and demonstrate its practicality for use in multi-institutional clinical studies. Methods We enrolled individuals with HbSS in steady-state without hepatobiliary disease who had not been transfused in the preceding 3 months. After obtaining informed consent and duplicate baseline blood samples, participants ingested 15N-glycine and had serial phlebotomies over 16 weeks for blood counts, clinical chemistries, and storage of aliquots of frozen whole blood. Heme was extracted from frozen whole blood and analyzed using combustion isotope ratio mass spectroscopy at a commercial laboratory to give a precise ratio of 15N/14N, which is directly related to the number of cells remaining from the age cohort of RBCs that were produced in the presence of 15N-glycine. We defined the starting point for all RBC survival calculations as the time at which the percent ratio excess of 15N to 14N (%RE) reached 50% of the maximum value, and we defined the endpoint as the time at which the rate of change of %RE had decreased to 0.5% per day. To produce normalized RBC survival curves, the absolute %RE was corrected for any residual component evident at the endpoint by assuming a linear increase in the residual from the starting point to the endpoint. The normalized RBC survival curve was fit using a 5-order polynomial expression. Median survival, mean survival and mean RBC age were computed (Lindsell 2008). Results Six participants with HbSS were studied. Mean age was 22.3 years (range 16-31); 4 of 6 were female; and 5 of 6 were prescribed a stable dose of hydroxyurea. All participants completed the 16-week protocol. None had a transfusion during the study, but one was hospitalized for a painful event. Curves for %RE (Figure, panel A) and normalized RBC survival (Figure, panel B) were generated. A representative individual with normal (AA) Hb type is shown (Figure, panel A) illustrating the more rapid rise and decline in %RE in HbSS, as expected physiologically. Median RBC survival was 21.6 days (S.D. 5.5; range 12.0- 28.3). Mean RBC survival was 26.6 days (S.D. 4.2; range 14.1- 36.0). Mean RBC age was 19.9 days (S.D. 5.1; range 11.4- 26.6). Reticulocyte count was significantly correlated with median RBC survival (Spearman rho = -0.943, P=0.005), mean RBC survival (rho = -0.943, P=0.005), and mean RBC age (rho = -0.886, P=0.019). Hb concentration, percent Hb F, LDH, AST, and total bilirubin were not significantly correlated with RBC survival in this small sample of 6 persons. Samples after 80 days added no useful information, so the number of phlebotomies can be decreased for future analyses. Conclusions This 15N-glycine stable isotope cohort label can measure RBC survival and quantify hemolysis safely and easily in patients with HbSS. This method is practical for use in multi-institutional clinical studies because whole blood can be frozen and stored for later shipment to central labs for processing and analysis. The causal role of hemolysis in the development of complications of HbSS can be studied without sole reliance on surrogate markers. Lindsell CJ et al. Am J Hematol. 83(6):454-7, 2008. Disclosures: No relevant conflicts of interest to declare.

Hamsters were exposed to sodium arsenite (173 mg As/L) in drinking water for 6 days. Equal amounts of proteins from urinary bladder or liver extracts of control and arsenic-treated hamsters were labeled with Cy3 and Cy5 dyes, respectively. After differential in gel electrophoresis and analysis by the DeCyder software, several protein spots were found to be down-regulated and several were up regulated. Our experiments indicated that in the bladder tissues of hamsters exposed to arsenite, transgelin was down-regulated and GST-pi was up-regulated. The loss of transgelin expression has been reported to be an important early event in tumor progression and a diagnostic marker for cancer development [29-32]. Down-regulation of transgelin expression may be associated with the carcinogenicity of inorganic arsenic in the urinary bladder. In the liver of arsenite-treated hamsters, ornithine aminotransferase was up-regulated, and senescence marker protein 30 and fatty acid binding protein were down-regulated. The volume ratio changes of these proteins in the bladder and liver of hamsters exposed to arsenite were significantly different than that of control hamsters. Introduction Chronic exposure to inorganic arsenic can cause cancer of the skin, lungs, urinary bladder, kidneys, and liver [1-6]. The molecular mechanisms of the carcinogenicity and toxicity of inorganic arsenic are not well understood [7-9). Humans chronically exposed to inorganic arsenic excrete MMA(V), DMA(V) and the more toxic +3 oxidation state arsenic biotransformants MMA(III) and DMA (III) in their urine [10, 11], which are carcinogen [12]· After injection of mice with sodium arsenate, the highest concentrations of the very toxic MMA(III) and DMA(III) were in the kidneys and urinary bladder tissue, respectively, as shown by experiments of Chowdhury et al [13]. Many mechanisms of arsenic toxicity and carcinogenicity have been suggested [1, 7, 14] including chromosome abnormalities [15], oxidative stress [16, 17], altered growth factors [18], cell proliferation [19], altered DNA repair [20], altered DNA methylation patterns [21], inhibition of several key enzymes [22], gene amplification [23] etc. Some of these mechanisms result in alterations in protein expression. Methods for analyzing multiple proteins have advanced greatly in the last several years. In particularly, mass spectrometry (MS) and tandem MS (MS/MS) are used to analyze peptides following protein isolation using two-dimensional (2-D) gel electrophoresis and proteolytic digestion [24]. In the present study, Differential In Gel Electrophoresis (DIGE) coupled with Mass Spectrometry (MS) has been used to study some of the proteomic changes in the urinary bladder and liver of hamsters exposed to sodium arsenite in their drinking water. Our results indicated that transgelin was down-regulated and GST-pi was up-regulated in the bladder tissues. In the liver tissues ornithine aminotransferase was up-regulated, and senescence marker protein 30, and fatty acid binding protein were down-regulated. Materials and Methods Chemicals Tris, Urea, IPG strips, IPG buffer, CHAPS, Dry Strip Cover Fluid, Bind Silane, lodoacetamide, Cy3 and Cy5 were from GE Healthcare (formally known as Amersham Biosciences, Uppsala, Sweden). Thiourea, glycerol, SDS, DTT, and APS were from Sigma-Aldrich (St. Louis, MO, USA). Glycine was from USB (Cleveland, OH, USA). Acrylamide Bis 40% was from Bio-Rad (Hercules, CA, USA). All other chemicals and biochemicals used were of analytical grade. All solutions were made with Milli-Q water. Animals Male hamsters (Golden Syrian), 4 weeks of age, were purchased from Harlan Sprague Dawley, USA. Upon arrival, hamsters were acclimated in the University of Arizona animal care facility for at least 1 week and maintained in an environmentally controlled animal facility operating on a 12-h dark/12-h light cycle and at 22-24°C. They were provided with Teklad (Indianapolis, IN) 4% Mouse/Rat Diet # 7001 and water, ad libitum, throughout the acclimation and experimentation periods. Sample preparation and labelling Hamsters were exposed to sodium arsenite (173 mg) in drinking water for 6 days and the control hamsters were given tap water. On the 6th day hamsters were decapitated rapidly by guillotine. Urinary bladder tissues and liver were removed, blotted on tissue papers (Kimtech Science, Precision Wipes), and weighed. Hamster urinary bladder or liver tissues were homogenized in lysis buffer (30mMTris, 2M thiourea, 7M urea, and 4% w/w CHAPS adjusted to pH 8.5 with dilute HCI), at 4°C using a glass homogenizer and a Teflon coated steel pestle; transferred to a 5 ml acid-washed polypropylene tube, placed on ice and sonicated 3 times for 15 seconds. The sonicate was centrifuged at 12,000 rpm for 10 minutes at 4°C. Small aliquots of the supernatants were stored at -80°C until use (generally within one week). Protein concentration was determined by the method of Bradford [25] using bovine serum albumin as a standard. Fifty micrograms of lysate protein was labeled with 400 pmol of Cy3 Dye (for control homogenate sample) and Cy5 Dye (for arsenic-treated urinary bladder or liver homogenate sample). The samples containing proteins and dyes were incubated for 30 min on ice in the dark. To stop the labeling reaction, 1uL of 10 mM lysine was added followed by incubation for 10 min on ice in the dark. To each of the appropriate dye-labeled protein samples, an additional 200 ug of urinary bladderor liver unlabeled protein from control hamster sample or arsenic-treated hamster sample was added to the appropriate sample. Differentially labeled samples were combined into a single Microfuge tube (total protein 500 ug); protein was mixed with an equal volume of 2x sample buffer [2M thiourea, 7M urea, pH 3-10 pharmalyte for isoelectric focusing 2% (v/v), DTT 2% (w/v), CHAPS 4% (w/v)]; and was incubated on ice in the dark for 10 min. The combined samples containing 500 ug of total protein were mixed with rehydration buffer [CHAPS 4% (w/v), 8M urea, 13mM DTT, IPG buffer (3-10) 1% (v/v) and trace amount of bromophenol blue]. The 450 ul sample containing rehydration buffer was slowly pipetted into the slot of the ImmobilinedryStripReswelling Tray and any large bubbles were removed. The IPG strip (linear pH 3-10, 24 cm) was placed (gel side down) into the slot, covered with drystrip cover fluid (Fig. 1), and the lid of the Reswelling Tray was closed. The ImmobillineDryStrip was allowed to rehydrate at room temperature for 24 hours. First dimension Isoelectric focusing (IEF) The labeled sample was loaded using the cup loading method on universal strip holder. IEF was then carried out on EttanIPGphor II using multistep protocol (6 hr @ 500 V, 6 hr @ 1000 V, 8 hr @ 8000 V). The focused IPG strip was equilibrated in two steps (reduction and alkylation) by equilibrating the strip for 10 min first in 10 ml of 50mM Tris (pH 8.8), 6M urea, 30% (v/v) glycerol, 2% (w/v) SDS, and 0.5% (w/v) DTT, followed by another 10 min in 10 ml of 50mM Tris (pH 8.8), 6M urea, 30% (v/v) glycerol, 2% (w/v) SDS, and 4.5% (w/v) iodoacetamide to prepare it for the second dimension electrophoresis. Second dimension SDS-PAGE The equilibrated IPG strip was used for protein separation by 2D-gel electrophoresis (DIGE). The strip was sealed at the top of the acrylamide gel for the second dimension (vertical) (12.5% polyacrylamide gel, 20x25 cm x 1.5 mm) with 0.5% (w/v) agarose in SDS running buffer [25 mMTris, 192 mM Glycine, and 0.1% (w/v) SDS]. Electrophoresis was performed in an Ettan DALT six electrophoresis unit (Amersham Biosciences) at 1.5 watts per gel, until the tracking dye reached the anodic end of the gel. Image analysis and post-staining The gel then was imaged directly between glass plates on the Typhoon 9410 variable mode imager (Sunnyvale, CA, USA) using optimal excitation/emission wavelength for each DIGE fluor: Cy3 (532/580 nm) and Cy5 (633/670 nm). The DIGE images were previewed and checked with Image Quant software (GE Healthcare) where all the two separate gel images could be viewed as a single gel image. DeCyde v.5.02 was used to analyze the DIGE images as described in the Ettan DIGE User Manual (GE Healthcare). The appropriate up-/down regulated spots were filtered based on an average volume ratio of ± over 1.2 fold. After image acquisition, the gel was fixed overnight in a solution containing 40% ethanol and 10% acetic acid. The fixed gel was stained with SyproRuby (BioRad) according to the manufacturer protocol (Bio-Rad Labs., 2000 Alfred Nobel Drive, Hercules, CA 94547). Identification of proteins by MS Protein spot picking and digestion Sypro Ruby stained gels were imaged using an Investigator ProPic and HT Analyzer software, both from Genomic Solutions (Ann Arbor, MI). Protein spots of interest that matched those imaged using the DIGE Cy3/Cy5 labels were picked robotically, digested using trypsin as described previously [24] and saved for mass spectrometry identification. Liquid chromatography (LC)- MS/MS analysis LC-MS/MS analyses were carried out using a 3D quadrupole ion trap massspectrometer (ThermoFinnigan LCQ DECA XP PLUS; ThermoFinnigan, San Jose, CA) equipped with a Michrom Paradigm MS4 HPLC (MichromBiosources, Auburn, CA) and a nanospray source, or with a linear quadrupole ion trap mass spectrometer (ThermoFinnigan LTQ), also equipped with a Michrom MS4 HPLC and a nanospray source. Peptides were eluted from a 15 cm pulled tip capillary column (100 um I.D. x 360 um O.D.; 3-5 um tip opening) packed with 7 cm Vydac C18 (Vydac, Hesperia, CA) material (5 µm, 300 Å pore size), using a gradient of 0-65% solvent B (98% methanol/2% water/0.5% formic acid/0.01% triflouroacetic acid) over a 60 min period at a flow rate of 350 nL/min. The ESI positive mode spray voltage was set at 1.6 kV, and the capillary temperature was set at 200°C. Dependent data scanning was performed by the Xcalibur v 1.3 software on the LCQ DECA XP+ or v 1.4 on the LTQ [27], with a default charge of 2, an isolation width of 1.5 amu, an activation amplitude of 35%, activation time of 50 msec, and a minimal signal of 10,000 ion counts (100 ion counts on the LTQ). Global dependent data settings were as follows: reject mass width of 1.5 amu, dynamic exclusion enabled, exclusion mass width of 1.5 amu, repeat count of 1, repeat duration of a min, and exclusion duration of 5 min. Scan event series were included one full scan with mass range of 350-2000 Da, followed by 3 dependent MS/MS scans of the most intense ion. Database searching Tandem MS spectra of peptides were analyzed with Turbo SEQUEST, version 3.1 (ThermoFinnigan), a program that allows the correlation of experimental tandem MS data with theoretical spectra generated from known protein sequences. All spectra were searched against the latest version of the non redundant protein database from the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI 2006; at that time, the database contained 3,783,042 entries). Statistical analysis The means and standard error were calculated. The Student's t-test was used to analyze the significance of the difference between the control and arsenite exposed hamsters. P values less than 0.05 were considered significant. The reproducibility was confirmed in separate experiments. Results Analysis of proteins expression After DIGE (Fig. 1), the gel was scanned by a Typhoon Scanner and the relative amount of protein from sample 1 (treated hamster) as compared to sample 2 (control hamster) was determined (Figs. 2, 3). A green spot indicates that the amount of protein from sodium arsenite-treated hamster sample was less than that of the control sample. A red spot indicates that the amount of protein from the sodium arsenite-treated hamster sample was greater than that of the control sample. A yellow spot indicates sodium arsenite-treated hamster and control hamster each had the same amount of that protein. Several protein spots were up-regulated (red) or down-regulated (green) in the urinary bladder samples of hamsters exposed to sodium arsenite (173 mg As/L) for 6 days as compared with the urinary bladder of controls (Fig. 2). In the case of liver, several protein spots were also over-expressed (red) or under-expressed (green) for hamsters exposed to sodium arsenite (173 mg As/L) in drinking water for 6 days (Fig. 3). The urinary bladder samples were collected from the first and second experiments in which hamsters were exposed to sodium arsenite (173 mg As/L) in drinking water for 6 days and the controls were given tap water. The urinary bladder samples from the 1st and 2nd experiments were run 5 times in DIGE gels on different days. The protein expression is shown in Figure 2 and Table 1. The liver samples from the 1st and 2nd experiments were also run 3 times in DIGE gels on different days. The proteins expression were shown in Figure 3 and Table 2. The volume ratio changed of the protein spots in the urinary bladder and liver of hamsters exposed to arsenite were significantly differences than that of the control hamsters (Table 1 and 2). Protein spots identified by LC-MS/MS Bladder The spots of interest were removed from the gel, digested, and their identities were determined by LC-MS/MS (Fig. 2 and Table 1). The spots 1, 2, & 3 from the gel were analyzed and were repeated for the confirmation of the results (experiments; 173 mg As/L). The proteins for the spots 1, 2, and 3 were identified as transgelin, transgelin, and glutathione S-transferase Pi, respectively (Fig. 2). Liver We also identified some of the proteins in the liver samples of hamsters exposed to sodium arsenite (173 mg As/L) in drinking water for 6 days (Fig. 3). The spots 4, 5, & 6 from the gels were analyzed and were repeated for the confirmation of the results. The proteins for the spots 4, 5, and 6 were identified as ornithine aminotransferase, senescence marker protein 30, and fatty acid binding protein, respectively (Fig. 3) Discussion The identification and functional assignment of proteins is helpful for understanding the molecular events involved in disease. Weexposed hamsters to sodium arsenite in drinking water. Controls were given tap water. DIGE coupled with LC-MS/MS was then used to study the proteomic change in arsenite-exposed hamsters. After electrophoresis DeCyder software indicated that several protein spots were down-regulated (green) and several were up-regulated (red). Our overall results as to changes and functions of the proteins we have studied are summarized in Table 3. Bladder In the case of the urinary bladder tissue of hamsters exposed to sodium arsenite (173 mg As/L) in drinking water for 6 days, transgelin was down-regulated and GST-pi was up-regulated. This is the first evidence that transgelin is down-regulated in the bladders of animals exposed to sodium arsenite. Transgelin, which is identical to SM22 or WS3-10, is an actin cross linking/gelling protein found in fibroblasts and smooth muscle [28, 29]. It has been suggested that the loss of transgelin expression may be an important early event in tumor progression and a diagnostic marker for cancer development [30-33]. It may function as a tumor suppressor via inhibition of ARA54 (co-regulator of androgen receptor)-enhanced AR (androgen receptor) function. Loss of transgelin and its suppressor function in prostate cancer might contribute to the progression of prostate cancer [30]. Down-regulation of transgelin occurs in the urinary bladders of rats having bladder outlet obstruction [32]. Ras-dependent and Ras-independent mechanisms can cause the down regulation of transgelin in human breast and colon carcinoma cell lines and patient-derived tumorsamples [33]. Transgelin plays a role in contractility, possibly by affecting the actin content of filaments [34]. In our experiments loss of transgelin expression may be associated or preliminary to bladder cancer due to arsenic exposure. Arsenite is a carcinogen [1]. In our experiments, LC-MS/MS analysis showed that two spots (1 and 2) represent transgelin (Fig. 2 and Table 1). In human colonic neoplasms there is a loss of transgelin expression and the appearance of transgelin isoforms (31). GST-pi protein was up-regulated in the bladders of the hamsters exposed to sodium arsenite. GSTs are a large family of multifunctional enzymes involved in the phase II detoxification of foreign compounds [35]. The most abundant GSTS are the classes alpha, mu, and pi classes [36]. They participate in protection against oxidative stress [37]. GST-omega has arsenic reductase activity [38]. Over-expression of GST-pi has been found in colon cancer tissues [39]. Strong expression of GST-pi also has been found in gastric cancer [40], malignant melanoma [41], lung cancer [42], breast cancer [43] and a range of other human tumors [44]. GST-pi has been up-regulated in transitional cell carcinoma of human urinary bladder [45]. Up-regulation of glutathione – related genes and enzyme activities has been found in cultured human cells by sub lethal concentration of inorganic arsenic [46]. There is evidence that arsenic induces DNA damage via the production of ROS (reactive oxygen species) [47]. GST-pi may be over-expressed in the urinary bladder to protect cells against arsenic-induced oxidative stress. Liver In the livers of hamsters exposed to sodium arsenite, ornithine amino transferase was over-expressed, senescence marker protein 30 was under-expressed, and fatty acid binding protein was under-expressed. Ornithine amino transferase has been found in the mitochondria of many different mammalian tissues, especially liver, kidney, and small intestine [48]. Ornithine amino transferase knockdown inhuman cervical carcinoma and osteosarcoma cells by RNA interference blocks cell division and causes cell death [49]. It has been suggested that ornithine amino transferase has a role in regulating mitotic cell division and it is required for proper spindle assembly in human cancer cells [49]. Senescence marker protein-30 (SMP30) is a unique enzyme that hydrolyzes diisopropylphosphorofluoridate. SMP30, which is expressed mostly in the liver, protects cells against various injuries by stimulating membrane calcium-pump activity [50]. SMP30 acts to protect cells from apoptosis [51]. In addition it protects the liver from toxic agents [52]. The livers of SMP30 knockout mice accumulate phosphatidylethanolamine, cardiolipin, phosphatidyl-choline, phosphatidylserine, and sphingomyelin [53]. Liver fatty acid binding protein (L-FABP) also was down- regulated. Decreased liver fatty acid-binding capacity and altered liver lipid distribution hasbeen reported in mice lacking the L-FABP gene [54]. High levels of saturated, branched-chain fatty acids are deleterious to cells and animals, resulting in lipid accumulation and cytotoxicity. The expression of fatty acid binding proteins (including L-FABP) protected cells against branched-chain saturated fatty acid toxicity [55]. Limitations: we preferred to study the pronounced spots seen in DIGE gels. Other spots were visible but not as pronounced. Because of limited funds, we did not identify these others protein spots. In conclusion, urinary bladders of hamsters exposed to sodium arsenite had a decrease in the expression of transgelin and an increase in the expression of GST-pi protein. Under-expression of transgelin has been found in various cancer systems and may be associated with arsenic carcinogenicity [30-33). Inorganic arsenic exposure has resulted in bladder cancer as has been reported in the past [1]. Over-expression of GST-pi may protect cells against oxidative stress caused by arsenite. In the liver OAT was up regulated and SMP-30 and FABP were down regulated. These proteomic results may be of help to investigators studying arsenic carcinogenicity. The Superfund Basic Research Program NIEHS Grant Number ES 04940 from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences supported this work. Additional support for the mass spectrometry analyses was provided by grants from NIWHS ES06694, NCI CA023074 and the BIOS Institute of the University of Arizona. Acknowledgement The Author wants to dedicate this paper to the memory of his former supervisor Dr. H. VaskenAposhian who passed away in September 6, 2019. He was an emeritus professor of the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology at the University of Arizona. 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This study seeks to investigate the microbial profile of frozen fish and meat. Forty samples consisting of Scomber scombrus (Titus), Clupea harengus (Shawa) and frozen meat (Chicken, Turkey) were purchased from different retail outlets in Ayobo-Ipaja markets for microbiological analysis. The samples were analysed for the total viable count using standard microbiological procedures. The mean bacterial and fungal counts for Scomber scombrus, Chicken, Clupea harengus and Turkey are 254.70±83.81 CFU/G and 5.50±4.45 CFU/G; 210.10±55.03 CFU/G and 6.80±3.39 CFU/G; 298.20±67.35 CFU/G and 6.10±3.87 CFU/G; 221.30±80.33 CFU/G and 4.30±2.00 CFU/G respectively. Clupea harengus has the highest bacterial count while Scomber scombrus has the lowest bacterial count. Chicken has the highest fungal count while Turkey had the lowest fungal count. The microbial isolates from the frozen food samples include species of S. aureus, E. coli, Salmonella, Micrococcus, Aspergillus, and Penicillium. Escherichia coli were susceptible to all the antibiotics while Salmonella sp., Staphylococcus aureus, and Micrococcus were resistance to Augmentin, Gentamycin, Tarivid, and susceptible to Sparfloxacin and Chloramphenicol. Although freezing retard pathogens multiplication, post-harvest contaminants can multiply during thawing to a level that can have a major impact on the quality of the final consumer product. It is advised that frozen foods must be properly cooked before consumption and effective hazard analysis and critical control point implemented.

This paper intends to produce a compendium of geotechnical properties of major problem soils of Nigeria which have critical influence on the design, performance, lifespan, construction cost and maintenance of civil engineering structures. Apart from the well researched lateritic soils of Nigeria, the black cotton soils (BCS) of north-eastern Nigeria, clay shale of north-western Nigeria, organic clay prominent in Lagos and soft sedimentary deposits of the Niger-Delta areas of Nigeria are also considered. Significant geotechnical properties of major problem soils in Nigeria were discovered to be scattered in different publications, magazines, journals, conference proceedings, research papers etc. Consequently, it is the aim of this paper to collate, correlate, analyze and digitize these important geotechnical properties on digital map of Nigeria. A Geographic Information System (GIS) mapping software called ArcGIS will be used to generate isopleths in form of contours for these soil properties on map of Nigeria.

Abstract Poultry waste as enhancement for crop development has become a norm for nutrients’ source but their pollution potentials is a source for concern. Thus, this study aimed at assessing proximate compositions and heavy metal accumulation in organs of Amaranthus spinosus and Talinum fruticosum handpicked from three poultry faecal sites in Badagry, Lagos State. Leaves and roots of A. spinosus and T. fruticosum as well as soil samples were collected from Yafin, Agric and Badagry dumpsites in Badagry Local Government and these were subjected to proximate and heavy metal analyses using standard analytical procedures. Data obtained were analyzed using mean-standard deviation. Proximate analyses of A. spinosus and T. fruticosum from three faecal sites contained appreciable Moisture, protein, carbohydrate, fiber, ash, and fat contents. Also, heavy metal analyses of the vegetables from the three faecal sites ranged as follows: Cd: 0.01-0.05mg/100g in leaves; 0.04-0.12mg/100g in roots, Co: 0.04-0.05 in leaves; 0.04-0.12mg/100g in roots, Cr: 0.58-0.84mg/100g in leaves; 0.91-1.01mg/100g in roots, Cu: 0.27-70.51mg/100g in leaves; 0.50-58.55mg/100g in roots for A. spinosus; Cd: 0.04-0.07mg/100g in leaves; 0.06-0.12mg/100g in roots, Co: 0.02-0.06mg/100g in leaves; 0.08-0.34mg/100g in roots, Cr: 0.05-0.12mg/100g in leaves; 0.04-0.23mg/100g in roots, Cu: 61.55-121.81mg/100g in leaves; 48.45-147.45mg/100g in roots for T. fruticosum and Cd: 3.53-9.05mg/100g, Co: 0.14-0.69mg/100g, Cr:0.14-4.22mg/100g: and Cu: 2.59-8.11mg/100g in soils for all three dumpsites sampled. However, all metals analysed were below WHO limits for vegetable and soils except cobalt, copper and chromium. Thus, locals should be advised against consumption of vegetables from dumpsites since toxic substances often accumulates in the environment and maybe hazardous to man’s health.

É notório que a vida nos grandes centros urbanos brasileiros tem seu foco voltado aos carros e não às pessoas, haja vista que o investimento governamental é focado na infraestrutura veicular, como vias, viadutos, pontes e grandes estacionamentos, em detrimento daquela direcionada às pessoas, como calçadas, ciclovias e espaços de convívio. Cabe destacar que estes últimos são impulsionadores dos comércios, uma vez que quanto menor a velocidade dos deslocamentos, maior a possibilidade de interação. Ademais, cabe pontuar que há distinções entre os comércios tradicionais e aqueles planejados, como os existentes em cidades idealizadas sob os preceitos modernistas, sendo considerados como subcentros urbanos (Kneib, 2008). É sob este viés que o objetivo deste trabalho é verificar se os comércios locais do plano piloto de brasília são atrativos às pessoas, tendo em conta os preceitos de Jacobs (2000) e Gehl (2010). Para isso, foram realizados levantamentos em 8 comércios locais do plano piloto de Brasília com localização e características específicas – 4 em cada asa e um em cada segmento de quadra (100/200/300/400) – a fim de obter dados que levam em consideração parâmetros em relação a sua diversidade de usos do solo, número de portas por fachada de suas edificações e quantidade de usuários que nela transitam a pé. Vale ressaltar que se realizou uma estratificação dos usos em quatro tipos: comércios curto versus longo tempo de permanência; e serviço curto versus longo tempo de permanência, de modo a se adequar melhor com a visão da vida urbana, haja vista que estar de passagem é diferente de permanecer nos espaços. Com isso, foi possível considerar que as diversas situações morfológicas espaciais dos comércios locais do plano piloto de brasília alteram, de fato, a conduta das pessoas que ali caminham, apresentando dados que são condizentes com as afirmações de vida urbana de Gehl (2010) e Jacobs (2000). Verificou-se que na asa norte houve uma maior presença de pedestres que na asa sul, uma vez que a morfologia edilícia apresenta características que atrai os pedestres, pois há portas ativas em todos os lados dos blocos, ampliando a quantidade de portas, diferentemente, do que ocorre na asa sul que há somente dois lados, frente e fundo, e neste último, há muitos casos de portas inativas, tornando o desempenho dos espaços menos convidativos do ponto de vista do pedestre. Ademais, cabe pontuar que nos comércios da asa norte houve maior diversidade de usos, principalmente a alimentícia, ao contrário dos da asa sul, o que aumenta os trajetos a pé, haja vista a maior possibilidade de encontros. Diante disso, pode-se concluir que os preceitos de ambos os autores são ratificados também para o caso dos comércios locais de Brasília, considerados subcentros urbanos de grande expressividade aos residentes do plano piloto

Abstract Background Viruses are the most abundant biological entities on the planet and drive biogeochemical cycling on a global scale. Our understanding of biogeography of soil viruses and their ecological functions lags significantly behind that of Bacteria and Fungi. Here, a viromic approach was used to investigate the distribution and ecological functions of viruses from 19 soils across China. Results Soil viral community were clustered more significantly by geographical location than type of soil (agricultural and natural). Three clusters of viral communities were identified from North, Southeast and Southwest regions; these clusters differentiated using taxonomic composition and were mainly driven by geographic location and climate factors. A total of 972 viral populations (vOTUs) were detected spanning 23 viral families from the 19 viromes. Phylogenetic analyses of the phoH gene showed a remarkable diversity and the distribution of viral phoH genes was more dependent on the environment. Notably, five proteins involved in phosphorus (P) metabolism-related nucleotide synthesis functions, including dUTPase, MazG, PhoH, Thymidylate synthase complementing protein (Thy1), and Ribonucleoside reductase (RNR), were mainly identified in agricultural soils. Conclusions The present work revealed that soil viral communities were distributed across China according to geographical location and climate factors. In addition, P metabolism genes encoded by these viruses probably drive the synthesis of nucleotides for their own genomes inside bacterial hosts, thereby affecting P cycling in the soil ecosystems.

Abstract Objectives In 2012, a stratified random survey, using mystery shoppers, was conducted to investigate the availability and quality of antibiotics sold to patients in the private sector in five southern provinces of the Lao People’s Democratic Republic (Laos). Methods A total of 147 outlets were sampled in 10 districts. The active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) content measurements for 909 samples, including nine APIs (amoxicillin, ampicillin, ceftriaxone, ciprofloxacin, doxycycline, ofloxacin, sulfamethoxazole, tetracycline and trimethoprim), were determined using HPLC. Results All the analysed samples contained the stated API and we found no evidence for falsification. All except one sample had all the units tested with %API values between 75% and 125% of the content stated on the label. However, we identified the presence of substandard antibiotics: 19.6% (201/1025) of samples had their units outside the 90%–110% content of the label claim and 18.3% (188/1025) of the samples had units outside the International Pharmacopoeia/United States Pharmacopoeia assay (percentage of label claim) specifications. Trimethoprim had a high number of samples [51.6% (64)] with units below the limit range, followed by ceftriaxone [42.9% (3)] and sulfamethoxazole [34.7% (43)]. Doxycycline, ofloxacin and ciprofloxacin had the highest number of samples with high API content: 43.7% (38), 14.7% (10) and 11.8% (2), respectively. Significant differences in %API were found between stated countries of manufacture and stated manufacturers. Conclusions With the global threat of antimicrobial resistance on patient outcomes, greater understanding of the role of poor-quality antibiotics is needed. Substandard antibiotics will have reduced therapeutic efficacy, impacting public health and control of bacterial infections.

Geophysical and physiochemical investigations were carried out along Lagos-Badagry Expressway, Southwest, Nigeria on three locations dominated by highway runoff, with a view to monitoring the effect of highway runoff on nearby groundwater. The locations were: Iyana Isashi, Iyana Era and Agbara. An overview of the subsurface resistivity distribution was achieved employing Vertical Electrical Sounding (VES) using Schlumberger array and Two-dimensional (2D) resistivity imaging (Wenner array). The ABEM Terrameter SAS 1000 was used for both VES and 2D resistivity surveys and the data were analysed using IPI2win and RES2DINV, respectively. The VES results showed up to four geoelectric layers consisting of sand, clayey sand, clay and sandy soils. The resistivity at Agbara was found varying from 3.52 Ωm - 11 Ωm. This low resistivity value showed a high level of infiltration of highway runoff into the subsurface, thereby causing contamination of the groundwater. Iyana Isashi and Iyana Era have a relatively moderate resistivity values ranging from 103 Ωm to 178 Ωm. Physiochemical analysis of groundwater samples collected at the study locations revealed high electrical conductivity, total dissolved solids and pH values. The results of the borehole sample taken at 32 m away from the profile point at Agbara produced higher values of electrical conductivity and total dissolved solids than those of other locations, hence validating the electrical resistivity surveys, indicating that the groundwater sample from the survey point at Agbara is contaminated.

Globalization has made agricultural commodities more accessible, available, and affordable. But their global movement increases the potential for invasion by pathogens and necessitates development and implementation of sensitive, rapid, and scalable surveillance methods. Here, we used 35 strains, isolated by multiple diagnostic laboratories, as a case study for using whole genome sequence data in a plant disease diagnostic setting. Twenty-seven of the strains were isolated in 2022 and identified as Xanthomonas hortorum pv. pelargonii. Eighteen of these strains originated from material sold by a plant breeding company that had notified clients following a release of infected geranium cuttings. Analyses of whole genome sequences revealed epidemiological links among the 27 strains from different growers that confirmed a common source of the outbreak and uncovered likely secondary spread events within facilities that housed plants originating from different plant breeding companies. Whole genome sequencing data were also analyzed to reveal how preparatory and analytical methods can impact conclusions on outbreaks of clonal pathogenic strains. Results demonstrate the potential power of using whole genome sequencing among a network of diagnostic labs and highlight how sharing such data can help shorten response times to mitigate outbreaks more expediently and precisely than standard methods.

Introduction The inadequacy of pipe borne water supplies in urban centers is a growing problem. In recent years, packaged waters became major sources of drinking water in the households and at work. Aim This study aimed at evaluates the physical and chemical quality of packaged water sold in some part of Lagos Metropolis. Compare the quality with that of tap water; and check compliance with respect to national and international regulatory standards. Materials and Methods Thirty tap water and fifty seven packaged water samples of different types were selected by random sampling and analysed for trace metals using atomic absorption spectrometry; Total hardness was measured titrimetically; pH, electrical conductivity and anions were measured using meters. Results and Conclusion The results showed that the concentrations of trace metals and anions in both tap and packaged waters were below the drinking water threshold values stipulated by national and international agencies, with the exception of the nitrate (NO3-), where 11 % and 20 % respectively of the bottled and sachet water samples investigated exceeded the USEPA standard of 10 mg L-1. This finding may result from the geological formations through which the ground water flows and substances dissolving from either natural sources or from household plumbing systems. This study concludes that the systematic monitoring by drinking water authorities of water quality is essential and the enforcement agencies in the state (NAFDAC and the Ministry of Health) need to get the producers of 'packaged water' to comply with the national drinking water guidelines.

ABSTRACT Fungi underpin almost all terrestrial ecosystem functions, yet our understanding of their community ecology lags far behind that of other organisms. Here, red paddy soils in subtropical China were collected across a soil depth profile, comprising 0-to-10-cm- (0-10cm-), 10-20cm-, and 20-40cm-deep layers. Using Illumina MiSeq amplicon sequencing of the internal transcribed spacer (ITS) region, distance-decay relationships (DDRs), and ecological models, fungal assemblages and their spatial patterns were investigated from each soil depth. We observed significant spatial variation in fungal communities and found that environmental heterogeneity decreased with soil depth, while spatial variation in fungal communities showed the opposite trend. DDRs occurred only in 0-10cm- and 10-20cm-deep soil layers, not in the 20-40cm layer. Our analyses revealed that the fungal community assembly in the 0-10cm layer was primarily governed by environmental filtering and a high dispersal rate, while in the deeper layer (20-40cm), it was primarily governed by dispersal limitation with minimal environmental filtering. Both environmental filtering and dispersal limitation controlled fungal community assembly in the 10-20cm layer, with dispersal limitation playing the major role. Results demonstrate the decreasing importance of environmental filtering and an increase in the importance of dispersal limitation in structuring fungal communities from shallower to deeper soils. Effectively, “everything is everywhere, but the environment selects,” although only in shallower soils that are easily accessible to dispersive fungal propagules. This work highlights that perceived drivers of fungal community assembly are dependent on sampling depth, suggesting that caution is required when interpreting diversity patterns from samples that integrate across depths. IMPORTANCE In this work, Illumina MiSeq amplicon sequencing of the ITS region was used to investigate the spatial variation and assembly mechanisms of fungal communities from different soil layers across paddy fields in subtropical China, and the results demonstrate the decreasing importance of environmental filtering and an increase in the importance of dispersal limitation in structuring fungal communities from shallower to deeper soils. Therefore, the results of this study highlight that perceived drivers of fungal community assembly are dependent on sampling depth and suggest that caution is required when interpreting diversity patterns from samples that integrate across depths. This is the first study focusing on assemblages of fungal communities in different soil layers on a relatively large scale, and we thus believe that this study is of great importance to researchers and readers in microbial ecology, especially in microbial biogeography, because the results can provide sampling guidance in future studies of microbial biogeography.

Abstract Introduction Life cycle costing is an important management tool that takes into account the implications of planning, acquiring, operating, maintaining, and disposing of an asset during its complete life cycle. A major hindrance to the procurement of expensive equipment in developing countries is the lack of a reliable framework combining and integrating all the equipment life cycle aspects into procurement process. Methods The study was conducted from the data collected from the bids that were received for procurement of two robotic track-based central laboratories which were installed at All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), New Delhi. The procurement was done as per the guidelines laid down under General Finance Rules (GFR) 2017 following the two bid systems: technical bid and price/commercial bid. Results A complete financial analysis of the robotic laboratory was done that involved gathering of all the pertinent financial information into one place and then using that data to analyze the feasibility of the bid. The life cycle costs of both the labs were calculated by assuming the life of equipment as 10 years and by factoring in cost of equipment including 5-year warranty, comprehensive maintenance from years 6 to 10, indicative cost of all reagents for 10 years, and indicative cost of all other consumables for 10 years. Conclusion Results showed that the cost of equipment alone should not be the sole predictor of making purchase decisions of equipment. Further research may additionally explore differences between processes being followed in government versus private organizations, as well as national guidelines and subnational practices.

AbstractA clinically relevant inhibitor for Heptosyltransferase I (HepI) has been sought after for many years because of its critical role in the biosynthesis of lipopolysaccharides on bacterial cell surfaces. While many labs have discovered or designed novel small molecule inhibitors, these compounds lacked the bioavailability and potency necessary for therapeutic use. Extensive characterization of the HepI protein has provided valuable insight into the dynamic motions necessary for catalysis that could be targeted for inhibition. Structural inspection of Kdo2-lipid A suggested aminoglycoside antibiotics as potential inhibitors for HepI. Multiple aminoglycosides have been experimentally validated to be first-in-class nanomolar inhibitors of HepI, with the best inhibitor demonstrating a Ki of 600 ± 90 nM. Detailed kinetic analyses were performed to determine the mechanism of inhibition while circular dichroism spectroscopy, intrinsic tryptophan fluorescence, docking, and molecular dynamics simulations were used to corroborate kinetic experimental findings. While aminoglycosides have long been described as potent antibiotics targeting bacterial ribosomes’ protein synthesis leading to disruption of the stability of bacterial cell membranes, more recently researchers have shown that they only modestly impact protein production. Our research suggests an alternative and novel mechanism of action of aminoglycosides in the inhibition of HepI, which directly leads to modification of LPS production in vivo. This finding could change our understanding of how aminoglycoside antibiotics function, with interruption of LPS biosynthesis being an additional and important mechanism of aminoglycoside action. Further research to discern the microbiological impact of aminoglycosides on cells is warranted, as inhibition of the ribosome may not be the sole and primary mechanism of action. The inhibition of HepI by aminoglycosides may dramatically alter strategies to modify the structure of aminoglycosides to improve the efficacy in fighting bacterial infections.

Internal water storage within trees can be a critical reservoir that helps trees overcome both short- and long-duration environmental stresses. We monitored changes in internal tree water storage in a ponderosa pine on daily and seasonal scales using moisture probes, a dendrometer, and time-lapse electrical resistivity imaging (ERI). These data were used to investigate how patterns of in-tree water storage are affected by changes in sapflow rates, soil moisture, and meteorologic factors such as vapor pressure deficit. Measurements of xylem fluid electrical conductivity were constant in the early growing season while inverted sapwood electrical conductivity steadily increased, suggesting that increases in sapwood electrical conductivity did not result from an increase in xylem fluid electrical conductivity. Seasonal increases in stem electrical conductivity corresponded with seasonal increases in trunk diameter, suggesting that increased electrical conductivity may result from new growth. On the daily scale, changes in inverted sapwood electrical conductivity correspond to changes in sapwood moisture. Wavelet analyses indicated that lag times between inverted electrical conductivity and sapflow increased after storm events, suggesting that as soils wetted, reliance on internal water storage decreased, as did the time required to refill daily deficits in internal water storage. We found short time lags between sapflow and inverted electrical conductivity with dry conditions, when ponderosa pine are known to reduce stomatal conductance to avoid xylem cavitation. A decrease in diel amplitudes of inverted sapwood electrical conductivity during dry periods suggest that the ponderosa pine relied on internal water storage to supplement transpiration demands, but as drought conditions progressed, tree water storage contributions to transpiration decreased. Time-lapse ERI- and wavelet-analysis results highlight the important role internal tree water storage plays in supporting transpiration throughout a day and during periods of declining subsurface moisture.

Rashes pose a unique challenge to general internists. Here we present a case of a 51-year-old female with end-stage renal disease (ESRD) on peritoneal dialysis who presented to a General Internal Medicine clinic with a vesiculobullous rash on palms and soles 6 months after using icodextrin dialysate, a widely used osmotic agent in peritoneal dialysis. The investigations were positive for an elevated eosinophil count, elevated IgE level and a skin biopsy consistent with an allergic reaction. Her symptoms and labs normalized after stopping icodextrin. There are some reports of allergic reactions to icodextrin which usually occur within a month of initiation of the agent and are self-limiting. Here we hope to report a case of a reaction that occurred 6 months after using icodextrin. Resume Les éruptions cutanées posent un défi particulier aux internistes généraux. Nous rapportons ici le cas d’une femme de 51 ans atteinte d’insuffisance rénale terminale (IRT), sous dialyse péritonéale, qui se présente à une clinique de médecine interne générale avec une éruption cutanée vésiculo-bulleuse sur les paumes et la plante des pieds. Depuis six mois, la patiente utilise un dialysat d’icodextrine, un agent osmotique largement utilisé en dialyse péritonéale. Les analyses ont révélé une numération élevée des éosinophiles, un taux élevé d’IgE et une biopsie cutanée a indiqué la présence d’une réaction allergique. Les symptômes et les résultats d’analyses se sont normalisés après l’arrêt de l’icodextrine. Des réactions d’allergie à l’icodextrine ont déjà été rapportées, mais celles-ci surgissent habituellement dans le mois suivant le début de l’usage de l’agent et se résorbent d’elles-mêmes. Nous désirons signaler un cas de réaction survenue six mois après le début de l’utilisation de l’icodextrine.

1. Guy Debord in the Land of the Long WeekendIt’s the weekend – leisure time. It’s the interlude when, Guy Debord contends, the proletarian is briefly free of the “total contempt so clearly built into every aspect of the organization and management of production” in commodity capitalism; when workers are temporarily “treated like grown-ups, with a great show of solicitude and politeness, in their new role as consumers.” But this patronising show turns out to be another form of subjection to the diktats of “political economy”: “the totality of human existence falls under the regime of the ‘perfected denial of man’.” (30). As Debord suggests, even the creation of leisure time and space is predicated upon a form of contempt: the “perfected denial” of who we, as living people, really are in the eyes of those who presume the power to legislate our working practices and private identities.This Saturday The Weekend Australian runs an opinion piece by Christopher Pearson, defending ABC Radio National’s Stephen Crittenden, whose program The Religion Report has been axed. “Some of Crittenden’s finest half-hours have been devoted to Islam in Australia in the wake of September 11,” Pearson writes. “Again and again he’s confronted a left-of-centre audience that expected multi-cultural pieties with disturbing assertions.” Along the way in this admirable Crusade, Pearson notes that Crittenden has exposed “the Left’s recent tendency to ally itself with Islam.” According to Pearson, Crittenden has also thankfully given oxygen to claims by James Cook University’s Mervyn Bendle, the “fairly conservative academic whose work sometimes appears in [these] pages,” that “the discipline of critical terrorism studies has been captured by neo-Marxists of a postmodern bent” (30). Both of these points are well beyond misunderstanding or untested proposition. If Pearson means them sincerely he should be embarrassed and sacked. But of course he does not and will not be. These are deliberate lies, the confabulations of an eminent right-wing culture warrior whose job is to vilify minorities and intellectuals (Bendle escapes censure as an academic because he occasionally scribbles for the Murdoch press). It should be observed, too, how the patent absurdity of Pearson’s remarks reveals the extent to which he holds the intelligence of his readers in contempt. And he is not original in peddling these toxic wares.In their insightful—often hilarious—study of Australian opinion writers, The War on Democracy, Niall Lucy and Steve Mickler identify the left-academic-Islam nexus as the brain-child of former Treasurer-cum-memoirist Peter Costello. The germinal moment was “a speech to the Australian American Leadership Dialogue forum at the Art Gallery of NSW in 2005” concerning anti-Americanism in Australian schools. Lucy and Mickler argue that “it was only a matter of time” before a conservative politician or journalist took the plunge to link the left and terrorism, and Costello plunged brilliantly. He drew a mental map of the Great Chain of Being: left-wing academics taught teacher trainees to be anti-American; teacher trainees became teachers and taught kids to be anti-American; anti-Americanism morphs into anti-Westernism; anti-Westernism veers into terrorism (38). This is contempt for the reasoning capacity of the Australian people and, further still, contempt for any observable reality. Not for nothing was Costello generally perceived by the public as a politician whose very physiognomy radiated smugness and contempt.Recycling Costello, Christopher Pearson’s article subtly interpellates the reader as an ordinary, common-sense individual who instinctively feels what’s right and has no need to think too much—thinking too much is the prerogative of “neo-Marxists” and postmodernists. Ultimately, Pearson’s article is about channelling outrage: directing the down-to-earth passions of the Australian people against stock-in-trade culture-war hate figures. And in Pearson’s paranoid world, words like “neo-Marxist” and “postmodern” are devoid of historical or intellectual meaning. They are, as Lucy and Mickler’s War on Democracy repeatedly demonstrate, mere ciphers packed with the baggage of contempt for independent critical thought itself.Contempt is everywhere this weekend. The Weekend Australian’s colour magazine runs a feature story on Malcolm Turnbull: one of those familiar profiles designed to reveal the everyday human touch of the political classes. In this puff-piece, Jennifer Hewett finds Turnbull has “a restless passion for participating in public life” (20); that beneath “the aggressive political rhetoric […] behind the journalist turned lawyer turned banker turned politician turned would-be prime minister is a man who really enjoys that human interaction, however brief, with the many, many ordinary people he encounters” (16). Given all this energetic turning, it’s a wonder that Turnbull has time for human interactions at all. The distinction here of Turnbull and “many, many ordinary people” – the anonymous masses – surely runs counter to Hewett’s brief to personalise and quotidianise him. Likewise, those two key words, “however brief”, have an unfortunate, unintended effect. Presumably meant to conjure a picture of Turnbull’s hectic schedules and serial turnings, the words also convey the image of a patrician who begrudgingly knows one of the costs of a political career is that common flesh must be pressed—but as gingerly as possible.Hewett proceeds to disclose that Turnbull is “no conservative cultural warrior”, “onfounds stereotypes” and “hates labels” (like any baby-boomer rebel) and “has always read widely on political philosophy—his favourite is Edmund Burke”. He sees the “role of the state above all as enabling people to do their best” but knows that “the main game is the economy” and is “content to play mainstream gesture politics” (19). I am genuinely puzzled by this and imagine that my intelligence is being held in contempt once again. That the man of substance is given to populist gesturing is problematic enough; but that the Burke fan believes the state is about personal empowerment is just too much. Maybe Turnbull is a fan of Burke’s complex writings on the sublime and the beautiful—but no, Hewett avers, Turnbull is engaged by Burke’s “political philosophy”. So what is it in Burke that Turnbull finds to favour?Turnbull’s invocation of Edmund Burke is empty, gestural and contradictory. The comfortable notion that the state helps people to realise their potential is contravened by Burke’s view that the state functions so “the inclinations of men should frequently be thwarted, their will controlled, and their passions brought into subjection… by a power out of themselves” (151). Nor does Burke believe that anyone of humble origins could or should rise to the top of the social heap: “The occupation of an hair-dresser, or of a working tallow-chandler, cannot be a matter of honour to any person… the state suffers oppression, if such as they, either individually or collectively, are permitted to rule” (138).If Turnbull’s main game as a would-be statesman is the economy, Burke profoundly disagrees: “the state ought not to be considered as nothing better than a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee, callico or tobacco, or some other such low concern… It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection”—a sublime entity, not an economic manager (194). Burke understands, long before Antonio Gramsci or Louis Althusser, that individuals or social fractions must be made admirably “obedient” to the state “by consent or force” (195). Burke has a verdict on mainstream gesture politics too: “When men of rank sacrifice all ideas of dignity to an ambition without a distinct object, and work with low instruments and for low ends, the whole composition [of the state] becomes low and base” (136).Is Malcolm Turnbull so contemptuous of the public that he assumes nobody will notice the gross discrepancies between his own ideals and what Burke stands for? His invocation of Burke is, indeed, “mainstream gesture politics”: on one level, “Burke” signifies nothing more than Turnbull’s performance of himself as a deep thinker. In this process, the real Edmund Burke is historically erased; reduced to the status of stage-prop in the theatrical production of Turnbull’s mass-mediated identity. “Edmund Burke” is re-invented as a term in an aesthetic repertoire.This transmutation of knowledge and history into mere cipher is the staple trick of culture-war discourse. Jennifer Hewett casts Turnbull as “no conservative culture warrior”, but he certainly shows a facility with culture-war rhetoric. And as much as Turnbull “confounds stereotypes” his verbal gesture to Edmund Burke entrenches a stereotype: at another level, the incantation “Edmund Burke” is implicitly meant to connect Turnbull with conservative tradition—in the exact way that John Howard regularly self-nominated as a “Burkean conservative”.This appeal to tradition effectively places “the people” in a power relation. Tradition has a sublimity that is bigger than us; it precedes us and will outlast us. Consequently, for a politician to claim that tradition has fashioned him, that he is welded to it or perhaps even owns it as part of his heritage, is to glibly imply an authority greater than that of “the many, many ordinary people”—Burke’s hair-dressers and tallow-chandlers—whose company he so briefly enjoys.In The Ideology of the Aesthetic, Terry Eagleton assesses one of Burke’s important legacies, placing him beside another eighteenth-century thinker so loved by the right—Adam Smith. Ideology of the Aesthetic is premised on the view that “Aesthetics is born as a discourse of the body”; that the aesthetic gives form to the “primitive materialism” of human passions and organises “the whole of our sensate life together… a society’s somatic, sensational life” (13). Reading Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, Eagleton discerns that society appears as “an immense machine, whose regular and harmonious movements produce a thousand agreeable effects”, like “any production of human art”. In Smith’s work, the “whole of social life is aestheticized” and people inhabit “a social order so spontaneously cohesive that its members no longer need to think about it.” In Burke, Eagleton discovers that the aesthetics of “manners” can be understood in terms of Gramscian hegemony: “in the aesthetics of social conduct, or ‘culture’ as it would later be called, the law is always with us, as the very unconscious structure of our life”, and as a result conformity to a dominant ideological order is deeply felt as pleasurable and beautiful (37, 42). When this conservative aesthetic enters the realm of politics, Eagleton contends, the “right turn, from Burke” onwards follows a dark trajectory: “forget about theoretical analysis… view society as a self-grounding organism, all of whose parts miraculously interpenetrate without conflict and require no rational justification. Think with the blood and the body. Remember that tradition is always wiser and richer than one’s own poor, pitiable ego. It is this line of descent, in one of its tributaries, which will lead to the Third Reich” (368–9).2. Jean Baudrillard, the Nazis and Public MemoryIn 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, the Third Reich’s Condor Legion of the Luftwaffe was on loan to Franco’s forces. On 26 April that year, the Condor Legion bombed the market-town of Guernica: the first deliberate attempt to obliterate an entire town from the air and the first experiment in what became known as “terror bombing”—the targeting of civilians. A legacy of this violence was Pablo Picasso’s monumental canvas Guernica – the best-known anti-war painting in art history.When US Secretary of State Colin Powell addressed the United Nations on 5 February 2003 to make the case for war on Iraq, he stopped to face the press in the UN building’s lobby. The doorstop was globally televised, packaged as a moment of incredible significance: history in the making. It was also theatre: a moment in which history was staged as “event” and the real traces of history were carefully erased. Millions of viewers world-wide were undoubtedly unaware that the blue backdrop before which Powell stood was specifically designed to cover the full-scale tapestry copy of Picasso’s Guernica. This one-act, agitprop drama was a splendid example of politics as aesthetic action: a “performance” of history in the making which required the loss of actual historical memory enshrined in Guernica. Powell’s performance took its cues from the culture wars, which require the ceaseless erasure of history and public memory—on this occasion enacted on a breathtaking global, rather than national, scale.Inside the UN chamber, Powell’s performance was equally staged-crafted. As he brandished vials of ersatz anthrax, the power-point behind him (the theatrical set) showed artists’ impressions of imaginary mobile chemical weapons laboratories. Powell was playing lead role in a kind of populist, hyperreal production. It was Jean Baudrillard’s postmodernism, no less, as the media space in which Powell acted out the drama was not a secondary representation of reality but a reality of its own; the overheads of mobile weapons labs were simulacra, “models of a real without origins or reality”, pictures referring to nothing but themselves (2). In short, Powell’s performance was anchored in a “semiurgic” aesthetic; and it was a dreadful real-life enactment of Walter Benjamin’s maxim that “All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war” (241).For Benjamin, “Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate.” Fascism gave “these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves.” In turn, this required “the introduction of aesthetics into politics”, the objective of which was “the production of ritual values” (241). Under Adolf Hitler’s Reich, people were able to express themselves but only via the rehearsal of officially produced ritual values: by their participation in the disquisition on what Germany meant and what it meant to be German, by the aesthetic regulation of their passions. As Frederic Spotts’ fine study Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics reveals, this passionate disquisition permeated public and private life, through the artfully constructed total field of national narratives, myths, symbols and iconographies. And the ritualistic reiteration of national values in Nazi Germany hinged on two things: contempt and memory loss.By April 1945, as Berlin fell, Hitler’s contempt for the German people was at its apogee. Hitler ordered a scorched earth operation: the destruction of everything from factories to farms to food stores. The Russians would get nothing, the German people would perish. Albert Speer refused to implement the plan and remembered that “Until then… Germany and Hitler had been synonymous in my mind. But now I saw two entities opposed… A passionate love of one’s country… a leader who seemed to hate his people” (Sereny 472). But Hitler’s contempt for the German people was betrayed in the blusterous pages of Mein Kampf years earlier: “The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous” (165). On the back of this belief, Hitler launched what today would be called a culture war, with its Jewish folk devils, loathsome Marxist intellectuals, incitement of popular passions, invented traditions, historical erasures and constant iteration of values.When Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer fled Fascism, landing in the United States, their view of capitalist democracy borrowed from Benjamin and anticipated both Baudrillard and Guy Debord. In their well-know essay on “The Culture Industry”, in Dialectic of Enlightenment, they applied Benjamin’s insight on mass self-expression and the maintenance of property relations and ritual values to American popular culture: “All are free to dance and enjoy themselves”, but the freedom to choose how to do so “proves to be the freedom to choose what is always the same”, manufactured by monopoly capital (161–162). Anticipating Baudrillard, they found a society in which “only the copy appears: in the movie theatre, the photograph; on the radio, the recording” (143). And anticipating Debord’s “perfected denial of man” they found a society where work and leisure were structured by the repetition-compulsion principles of capitalism: where people became consumers who appeared “s statistics on research organization charts” (123). “Culture” came to do people’s thinking for them: “Pleasure always means not to think about anything, to forget suffering even where it is shown” (144).In this mass-mediated environment, a culture of repetitions, simulacra, billboards and flickering screens, Adorno and Horkheimer concluded that language lost its historical anchorages: “Innumerable people use words and expressions which they have either ceased to understand or employ only because they trigger off conditioned reflexes” in precisely the same way that the illusory “free” expression of passions in Germany operated, where words were “debased by the Fascist pseudo-folk community” (166).I know that the turf of the culture wars, the US and Australia, are not Fascist states; and I know that “the first one to mention the Nazis loses the argument”. I know, too, that there are obvious shortcomings in Adorno and Horkheimer’s reactions to popular culture and these have been widely criticised. However, I would suggest that there is a great deal of value still in Frankfurt School analyses of what we might call the “authoritarian popular” which can be applied to the conservative prosecution of populist culture wars today. Think, for example, how the concept of a “pseudo folk community” might well describe the earthy, common-sense public constructed and interpellated by right-wing culture warriors: America’s Joe Six-Pack, John Howard’s battlers or Kevin Rudd’s working families.In fact, Adorno and Horkheimer’s observations on language go to the heart of a contemporary culture war strategy. Words lose their history, becoming ciphers and “triggers” in a politicised lexicon. Later, Roland Barthes would write that this is a form of myth-making: “myth is constituted by the loss of the historical quality of things.” Barthes reasoned further that “Bourgeois ideology continuously transforms the products of history into essential types”, generating a “cultural logic” and an ideological re-ordering of the world (142). Types such as “neo-Marxist”, “postmodernist” and “Burkean conservative”.Surely, Benjamin’s assessment that Fascism gives “the people” the occasion to express itself, but only through “values”, describes the right’s pernicious incitement of the mythic “dispossessed mainstream” to reclaim its voice: to shout down the noisy minorities—the gays, greenies, blacks, feminists, multiculturalists and neo-Marxist postmodernists—who’ve apparently been running the show. Even more telling, Benjamin’s insight that the incitement to self-expression is connected to the maintenance of property relations, to economic power, is crucial to understanding the contemptuous conduct of culture wars.3. Jesus Dunked in Urine from Kansas to CronullaAmerican commentator Thomas Frank bases his study What’s the Matter with Kansas? on this very point. Subtitled How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, Frank’s book is a striking analysis of the indexation of Chicago School free-market reform and the mobilisation of “explosive social issues—summoning public outrage over everything from busing to un-Christian art—which it then marries to pro-business policies”; but it is the “economic achievements” of free-market capitalism, “not the forgettable skirmishes of the never-ending culture wars” that are conservatism’s “greatest monuments.” Nevertheless, the culture wars are necessary as Chicago School economic thinking consigns American communities to the rust belt. The promise of “free-market miracles” fails ordinary Americans, Frank reasons, leaving them in “backlash” mode: angry, bewildered and broke. And in this context, culture wars are a convenient form of anger management: “Because some artist decides to shock the hicks by dunking Jesus in urine, the entire planet must remake itself along the lines preferred” by nationalist, populist moralism and free-market fundamentalism (5).When John Howard received the neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute’s Irving Kristol Award, on 6 March 2008, he gave a speech in Washington titled “Sharing Our Common Values”. The nub of the speech was Howard’s revelation that he understood the index of neo-liberal economics and culture wars precisely as Thomas Frank does. Howard told the AEI audience that under his prime ministership Australia had “pursued reform and further modernisation of our economy” and that this inevitably meant “dislocation for communities”. This “reform-dislocation” package needed the palliative of a culture war, with his government preaching the “consistency and reassurance” of “our nation’s traditional values… pride in her history”; his government “became assertive about the intrinsic worth of our national identity. In the process we ended the seemingly endless seminar about that identity which had been in progress for some years.” Howard’s boast that his government ended the “seminar” on national identity insinuates an important point. “Seminar” is a culture-war cipher for intellection, just as “pride” is code for passion; so Howard’s self-proclaimed achievement, in Terry Eagleton’s terms, was to valorise “the blood and the body” over “theoretical analysis”. This speaks stratospheric contempt: ordinary people have their identity fashioned for them; they need not think about it, only feel it deeply and passionately according to “ritual values”. Undoubtedly this paved the way to Cronulla.The rubric of Howard’s speech—“Sharing Our Common Values”—was both a homage to international neo-conservatism and a reminder that culture wars are a trans-national phenomenon. In his address, Howard said that in all his “years in politics” he had not heard a “more evocative political slogan” than Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America”—the rhetorical catch-cry for moral re-awakening that launched the culture wars. According to Lawrence Grossberg, America’s culture wars were predicated on the perception that the nation was afflicted by “a crisis of our lack of passion, of not caring enough about the values we hold… a crisis of nihilism which, while not restructuring our ideological beliefs, has undermined our ability to organise effective action on their behalf”; and this “New Right” alarmism “operates in the conjuncture of economics and popular culture” and “a popular struggle by which culture can lead politics” in the passionate pursuit of ritual values (31–2). When popular culture leads politics in this way we are in the zone of the image, myth and Adorno and Horkheimer’s “trigger words” that have lost their history. In this context, McKenzie Wark observes that “radical writers influenced by Marx will see the idea of culture as compensation for a fragmented and alienated life as a con. Guy Debord, perhaps the last of the great revolutionary thinkers of Europe, will call it “the spectacle”’ (20). Adorno and Horkheimer might well have called it “the authoritarian popular”. As Jonathan Charteris-Black’s work capably demonstrates, all politicians have their own idiolect: their personally coded language, preferred narratives and myths; their own vision of who “the people” might or should be that is conjured in their words. But the language of the culture wars is different. It is not a personal idiolect. It is a shared vocabulary, a networked vernacular, a pervasive trans-national aesthetic that pivots on the fact that words like “neo-Marxist”, “postmodern” and “Edmund Burke” have no historical or intellectual context or content: they exist as the ciphers of “values”. And the fact that culture warriors continually mouth them is a supreme act of contempt: it robs the public of its memory. And that’s why, as Lucy and Mickler’s War on Democracy so wittily argues, if there are any postmodernists left they’ll be on the right.Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer and, later, Debord and Grossberg understood how the political activation of the popular constitutes a hegemonic project. The result is nothing short of persuading “the people” to collaborate in its own oppression. The activation of the popular is perfectly geared to an age where the main stage of political life is the mainstream media; an age in which, Charteris-Black notes, political classes assume the general antipathy of publics to social change and act on the principle that the most effective political messages are sold to “the people” by an appeal “to familiar experiences”—market populism (10). In her substantial study The Persuaders, Sally Young cites an Australian Labor Party survey, conducted by pollster Rod Cameron in the late 1970s, in which the party’s message machine was finely tuned to this populist position. The survey also dripped with contempt for ordinary people: their “Interest in political philosophy… is very low… They are essentially the products (and supporters) of mass market commercialism”. Young observes that this view of “the people” was the foundation of a new order of political advertising and the conduct of politics on the mass-media stage. Cameron’s profile of “ordinary people” went on to assert that they are fatally attracted to “a moderate leader who is strong… but can understand and represent their value system” (47): a prescription for populist discourse which begs the question of whether the values a politician or party represent via the media are ever really those of “the people”. More likely, people are hegemonised into a value system which they take to be theirs. Writing of the media side of the equation, David Salter raises the point that when media “moguls thunder about ‘the public interest’ what they really mean is ‘what we think the public is interested in”, which is quite another matter… Why this self-serving deception is still so sheepishly accepted by the same public it is so often used to violate remains a mystery” (40).Sally Young’s Persuaders retails a story that she sees as “symbolic” of the new world of mass-mediated political life. The story concerns Mark Latham and his “revolutionary” journeys to regional Australia to meet the people. “When a political leader who holds a public meeting is dubbed a ‘revolutionary’”, Young rightly observes, “something has gone seriously wrong”. She notes how Latham’s “use of old-fashioned ‘meet-and-greet’campaigning methods was seen as a breath of fresh air because it was unlike the type of packaged, stage-managed and media-dependent politics that have become the norm in Australia.” Except that it wasn’t. “A media pack of thirty journalists trailed Latham in a bus”, meaning, that he was not meeting the people at all (6–7). He was traducing the people as participants in a media spectacle, as his “meet and greet” was designed to fill the image-banks of print and electronic media. Even meeting the people becomes a media pseudo-event in which the people impersonate the people for the camera’s benefit; a spectacle as artfully deceitful as Colin Powell’s UN performance on Iraq.If the success of this kind of “self-serving deception” is a mystery to David Salter, it would not be so to the Frankfurt School. For them, an understanding of the processes of mass-mediated politics sits somewhere near the core of their analysis of the culture industries in the “democratic” world. I think the Frankfurt school should be restored to a more important role in the project of cultural studies. Apart from an aversion to jazz and other supposedly “elitist” heresies, thinkers like Adorno, Benjamin, Horkheimer and their progeny Debord have a functional claim to provide the theory for us to expose the machinations of the politics of contempt and its aesthetic ruses.ReferencesAdorno, Theodor and Max Horkheimer. "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception." Dialectic of Enlightenment. London: Verso, 1979. 120–167.Barthes Roland. “Myth Today.” Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. St Albans: Paladin, 1972. 109–58.Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations. New York: Semiotext(e), 1983.Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zorn. New York: Schocken Books, 1969. 217–251.Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France. Ed. Conor Cruise O’Brien. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969.Charteris-Black, Jonathan. Politicians and Rhetoric: The Persuasive Power of Metaphor. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone Books, 1994.Eagleton, Terry. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990.Frank, Thomas. What’s the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2004.Grossberg, Lawrence. “It’s a Sin: Politics, Post-Modernity and the Popular.” It’s a Sin: Essays on Postmodern Politics & Culture. Eds. Tony Fry, Ann Curthoys and Paul Patton. Sydney: Power Publications, 1988. 6–71.Hewett, Jennifer. “The Opportunist.” The Weekend Australian Magazine. 25–26 October 2008. 16–22.Hitler, Adolf. Mein Kampf. Trans. Ralph Manheim. 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