Auspicious Circumstances Research Articles

Significance of Swarnaprashana in Boosting Immunity

Administration of gold in children is a unique practice mentioned in Ayurveda as “Swarnaprashana” by Acharya Kashyapa thousands of years back. He explained evidently the administration of Swarna (gold) in children for the benefits of improving Medha (intellect), Agni (digestion and metabolism), Bala (physical strength), Ayusha (longevity), Mangalkarka (Increase auspicious circumstances), Punyam (Virtue), Vrushya (Fertility) Grahabadhanashaka or Grahapaham (Protection from piritis & microorganisms) and act as a immuno-modulator. There are various formulations of gold along with herbal drugs explained by different Acharya for prolonged usage in children. The primary sources of Swarnaprashana in children are found in two classical Ayurvedic texts: Jatakarma Samskara (newborn care) and Lehana (supplementary feeding). The age and method of administration, benefits and dosage as per various classical textbooks of Ayurveda are discussed here along with the reports of related scientific studies. Ayurveda recommends only purified and processed form of gold for internal administration.

From Rise to Crisis: The Qatari Leadership

Qatar, a young and tiny Gulf State, realized a remarkable transformation through immense economic development in 1995-2013 period and emerged as an active and influential actor at international stage, receiving worldwide attention and scholarly interests. However, in the post “Arab-spring” context, the name of Qatar has turned out to be name of the regional crisis as a consequence of the emerging political clash between the GCC States. This paper analyzes Qatar’s distinctive policies in the period of Qatar’s rising (1995-2013) and in the ongoing period of the crisis within the framework of leadership conception. It is argued at this paper that the leadership factor has played the key role in transforming both the auspicious circumstances of the previous term and the challenging circumstances of the recent term into the great advantages to promote Qatar. Through this perspective, it’s aimed to define that why and how Qatar has differed from the other small Gulf States and how it affected Qatar’s emerging as a rising power and then as the main side of the regional conflict

A technoeconomic assessment of microalgal culture technology implementation for combined wastewater treatment and CO2 mitigation in the Arabian Gulf

A technoeconomic assessment (TEA) has been conducted of the feasibility of large-scale application of microalgal culture technology (MCT) to the combined mitigation of CO2 emissions from flue gases and nutrient discharges from wastewater in the Arabian Gulf. The assessment has incorporated the selection of the algal species and MCT technologies, the extent of nutrient removal, and the biomass/biofuel production rate. The cost benefit of the abatement of pollutants (in the form of CO2 and nutrient discharges) was included by assigning appropriate credits to these contributions. The overall economic viability was quantified as the break-even selling price (BESP) of the generated biocrude, taken to be the price at which the product must sell to cover the operating expenditure (OPEX). Based on available information and optimal operational conditions, the BESP was calculated as being $0.544 per kg biomass, equating to $0.9 L−1 for the extracted biocrude, the credited items contributing ˜14% of this figure. The BESP was found to be most sensitive to the algal growth rate μ, the BESP changing by ±24% in response to a ±20% change in μ. Whilst the terms of reference of the study are limited to OPEX contributors, the potential for sustainability associated with the innately reliably high levels of natural light in the Gulf region appear to provide auspicious circumstances for large-scale implementation of MCT. For emerging economies with a comparable climate but without a mineral oil-based economy a greater financial benefit from the proposed scheme would arise.

Dispositions, conditionals and auspicious circumstances

A number of authors have suggested that a conditional analysis of dispositions must take roughly the following form: Thing X is disposed to produce response R to stimulus S just in case, if X were exposed to S and surrounding circumstances were auspicious, then X would produce R. The great challenge is cashing out the relevant notion of ‘auspicious circumstances’. I give a general argument which entails that all existing conditional analyses fail, and that there is no satisfactory way to define ‘auspicious circumstances’ just in terms of S, R, and X. Instead, I argue that the auspicious circumstances C for the manifestation of a disposition constitute a third irreducible element of that disposition, and that to pick out (or to ‘individuate’) that disposition one must specify C along with S and R. This enables a new conditional analysis of dispositions that gives intuitively satisfying answers in cases that pose problems for other approaches.

Editorial: Beyond diagnosis - taking a ‘global’ view of research and practice

Editorial: Beyond diagnosis - taking a ‘global’ view of research and practice

Democratic Elitism and Western Political Thought

AbstractMany political thinkers have viewed democratic elitism as closing a democratic road they believe is or should be open-ended. Their view of democratic possibilities reflects the auspicious circumstances of Western societies during the past several centuries and especially since World War II. However, it involves a conflation of liberal and democratic values. I examine why and how this has occurred, and I argue that liberal and democratic values must be more clearly separated in today's dangerous world. In step with Schumpeter, democracy must be regarded as a method or instrumental value that in some but by no means all circumstances promotes the ultimate liberal value of actively individualistic free people.

An Experiment with Regulated Competition and Individual Mandates for Universal Health Care: The New Dutch Health Insurance System

The 2006 Enthoven-inspired Dutch health insurance reform, based on regulated competition with a mandate for individuals to purchase insurance, will interest U.S. policy makers who seek universal coverage. This ongoing experiment includes guaranteed issue, price competition for a standardized basic benefits package, community rating, sliding-scale income-based subsidies for patients, and risk equalization for insurers. Our assessment of the first two years is based on Dutch Central Bank statistics, national opinion polls, consumer surveys, and qualitative interviews with policy makers. The first lesson for the United States is that the new Dutch health insurance model may not control costs. To date, consumer premiums are increasing, and insurance companies report large losses on the basic policies. Second, regulated competition is unlikely to make voters/citizens happy; public satisfaction is not high, and perceived quality is down. Third, consumers may not behave as economic models predict, remaining responsive to price incentives. Finally, policy makers should not underestimate the opposition from health care providers who define their profession as more than simply a job. If regulated competition with individual mandates performs poorly in auspicious circumstances such as the Netherlands, how will this model fare in the United States, where access, quality, and cost challenges are even greater? Might the assumptions of economic theory not apply in the health sector?

Agreements, Allusions, and Constructive Misunderstandings

Agreements, Allusions, and Constructive Misunderstandings

Making Contact: Petitions and the English Republic

W Shakespeare turned the assassination of Julius Caesar on the dictator’s rejection of petitions, he gave dramatic force to a political commonplace. The encounter of supplicant and superior imparted a dynamic element to early modern visions of order, and although the rhetoric of rule changed markedly across the decades, the responsiveness and care expected of magistrates did not. In extreme cases, rulers who stumbled over petitions might face consequences. Only with difficulty did Charles I recover from his first grudging answer to the Petition of Right in 1628, and a generation later the army justified its expulsion of the Rump in 1653 by citing the latter’s failure to respond to the Council of Officers’ petition the previous August. In more auspicious circumstances a petition could even reshape regimes, and the role of the Humble Petition and Advice in remodeling the Protectorate needs no comment. That was of course the work of parliament men, who chose to proceed by petition; but not long before, civilian petitioners from outside parliament had first redirected the Protector’s course toward constitutional reform. On Christmas Day, 1656, Oliver Cromwell carried with him into the council chamber a petition from divers “wellaffected” London godly and drew on it as he wrote his letter questioning Parlia-

Megagauss sensors.

Magnetic fields change the way that electrons move through solids. The nature of these changes reveals information about the electronic structure of a material and, in auspicious circumstances, can be harnessed for applications. The silver chalcogenides, Ag2Se and Ag2Te, are non-magnetic materials, but their electrical resistance can be made very sensitive to magnetic field by adding small amounts--just 1 part in 10,000--of excess silver. Here we show that the resistance of Ag2Se displays a large, nearly linear increase with applied magnetic field without saturation to the highest fields available, 600,000 gauss, more than a million times the Earth's magnetic field. These characteristics of large (thousands of per cent) and near-linear response over a large field range make the silver chalcogenides attractive as magnetic-field sensors, especially in physically tiny megagauss (10(6) G) pulsed magnets where large fields have been produced but accurate calibration has proved elusive. High-field studies at low temperatures reveal both oscillations in the magnetoresistance and a universal scaling form that point to a quantum origin for this material's unprecedented behaviour.

From Reunification to Economic Integration: Productivity and the Labor Market in Eastern Germany

IT IS DIFFICULT TO FIND A MORE dramatic episode of economic dislocation in peacetime during the twentieth century than that associated with the reunification of Germany. It is a sad irony of history that the plucky East Germans who toppled the dictatorship of the proletariat in the bloodless revolution of 1989 were rewarded with an economic bloodletting on such a vast scale. From 1989 to 1992, GDP in the former German Democratic Republic declined by roughly 30 percent, value added in industry by more than 60 percent, and employment by 35 percent. During the same period, unemployment rose from officially zero to more than 15 percent. That figure, moreover, is based on registered unemployment only; joblessness rose to 33 percent if hidden unemployment (early retirement, involuntary part-time work, makework, training schemes for the unemployed, and so on) is included. Ten years after East Germany came in from the cold, the success of the transition from socialism cannot easily be summarized. By 2000, GDP per capita in the eastern states (Lander) of the reunited Germany including Berlin had risen to 65.3 percent of that in the western states (if Berlin is excluded, the figure is 60.6 percent). That is an impressive accomplishment by the yardstick of economists' more pessimistic forecasts a decade ago. Thanks to generous transfers from the west, consumption per capita has converged even more. Miriam Beblo, Irwin Collier, and Thomas Knaus report that 81 percent of easterners have seen their incomes rise during the transition. (1) However, convergence in productivity has slowed sharply, implying the need for continuing transfers, and the labor market has yet to recover from the initial shock. Even the unemployment rate cannot easily be summarized, since, again, it depends on whether people in makework and training programs are included. The eastern unemployment rate based on registered unemployed was 18.8 percent in 2000, more than twice the rate in the west; it was 27 percent in 1997 if hidden unemployment is included. Measures based on survey data, taking search and availability into account, show that the unemployment rate averaged 13 percent from 1994 to 1999. The employed share of the eastern working-age population (those aged eighteen to sixty-five) declined from 83 percent in 1990 to 65.2 percent in 1999, compared with a steady 73 percent in the west over the same period. German reunification is paradigmatic of the economic integration of any two neighboring regions at different levels of economic development. The mixed success of the transition shows the difficulty of development even under the most auspicious circumstances. The former East Germany was immediately able to import sound institutions, including political, legal, monetary, banking, and industrial relations systems, from its more developed partner. At a minimum, these have enabled eastern Germany to avoid the anarchic equilibrium in which Russia finds itself today. Furthermore, eastern Germany has benefited from the largesse, labor market, and expertise of a rich neighbor sharing a culture and language. Its experience serves as a crucible for understanding the ramifications of other, larger-scale regional integration projects. The milestone achievement of German monetary, economic, and social union now stands as a benchmark (and perhaps as a foil) not only for the economic integration of the rest of central and eastern Europe with the European Union, but also for the immediate consequences of European Monetary Union. Although the eastern German transition has attracted the continuous attention of economists, the issues have changed. The one-for-one conversion of East German ostmarks for deutsche marks, the privatization and restructuring of state enterprises, and the striking initial jump in real wages are no longer matters of policy debate, although they may have left their mark on the economy. We take the position that the ultimate measure of the economic success of German reunification is no longer the introduction of a market economy, but rather the attainment of an efficient production pattern made possible by the union of the two regions. …

Judicial Review and the Arab World

Judicial Review and the Arab World Nathan J. Brown (bio) In recent years, the global spread of democracy has been accompanied by a far less noticed, but even more pervasive political change: the acceptance of judicial review and the establishment of specialized constitutional courts. Judicial review has become nearly ubiquitous in emerging democracies and is increasingly viewed as a prerequisite of healthy democratic development. The democratic acceptance of judicial review has been both imperceptible and widespread, but this should not obscure an underlying puzzle. How did the least democratic branch of government—the judiciary—come to be seen as the necessary guardian of democratic values? Historically, democrats had regarded judicial review with some suspicion. Examining how and why this perception has changed helps us understand the necessity for judicial review as well as its limitations. Not only is the democratic acceptance of judicial review a historical and ideological puzzle, it also poses an immensely important practical challenge for emerging democracies. How can judicial review operate effectively in societies where democratic institutions and practices are still embryonic? In establishing constitutional courts as one of the first steps in the construction of a new democratic system, countries in transition have typically copied institutions that have functioned well in established democracies. But such models might be inappropriate for transitional countries where constitutional courts are asked to function in far less auspicious circumstances. A more useful, if unusual, parallel may be drawn with the Arab world, where constitutional courts have a history of operating in nondemocratic settings. Understanding the operation [End Page 85] and limits of constitutional courts in the Arab world sheds unexpected light on the development of judicial review in transitional countries. Judicial review developed initially as a by-product of constitu-tionalism. Under a constitutional system, public authorities, even those elected by the people, must operate within the limits defined by constitutional law. While constitutionalism is now widely viewed as intimately related to democracy, this has not always been the case. Constraining democratic governments by law was once seen as denying the majority its wishes. In the past, many a constitutionalist regarded popular majorities with suspicion, fearful that they might violate fundamental rights and principles for ephemeral or self-interested reasons. Many a democrat, on the other hand, regarded constitutionalism as an attempt to contain the popular will with dry legalism and outdated documents. Democratic suspicion of constitutionalism once extended to judicial review, as the latter was often seen as a way of allowing judges, rather than the people’s elected representatives, to interpret constitutional texts. It should not be at all surprising, therefore, that judicial review initially emerged in the United States, the first country to attempt to contain democratic practices within constitutional limits. American constitutionalism sought to allow democracy to operate while curbing its excesses; judicial review came to be seen as a vital corrective to unlimited democracy. Yet even as other countries followed the American example of adopting a written constitution, most rejected judicial review. European democracies, in particular, tended to take a hostile view of judicial review because it threatened to restrict the authority of popularly elected legislatures. If a constitution emanated from the sovereign will of a people, then the people’s representatives, sitting in parliament, were assumed to be the best interpreters of that will. In France, constitutional supervision originally emerged as a function of the legislature and not of the judiciary, as prerevolutionary judicial activism had led most French democrats to view the judiciary as a potential bastion of privilege and reaction. In other European countries, such as Sweden and Norway, the parliament played a major, often preponderant, role in constitutional supervision. In most democracies, judicial review came to be seen as a limitation on the sovereignty of the people. Communist states later adopted the same view. Democratic suspicions of judicial review were well-founded, for it had indeed often been instituted in order to restrict popular majorities, as represented in parliaments. Instead of emerging as a result of judicial initiative or customary practice, judicial review was advocated in Sweden in response to universal male suffrage and parliamentary supremacy. 1 In France, the Council of State, an advisory and judicial body, asserted the right...

The Contact Hypothesis Revisited: Black-White Interaction and Positive Racial Attitudes

The Contact Hypothesis Revisited: Black-White Interaction and Positive Racial Attitudes

On the deadly parallel: A review with reminiscence

Pyongyang was immediately responsible for the fighting that began on June 25, 1950. It held the balance of military power and that enabled it to make the vital choices. Syngman Rhee's Capital Division may have attacked in some force on the Ongjin Peninsula and the suspicious circumstances uncovered by I. F. Stone in his The Hidden History of the Korean War may be the reality, but whether reacting to provocations (good leaderships do not) or taking advantage of what it thought to be auspicious circumstances, north Korea made the miscalculated decision to go for the entire peninsula.

Predicate agreement in Russian By G. G. Corbett. (review)

240 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 57, NUMBER 1 (1981) Virtually the entire illustrative material comprises short passages extracted from the latest crop of 'Moldavian' fiction, without benefit of translation into Russian or any other world language . Even so, the topics broached might, under more auspicious circumstances, have made the book attractive to theorists and generalists among foreign linguistic scholars, who will now feel frustrated—and this is the fourth paradox. Part I deals with the view of morphological category adopted by G (5-22); Part II, subdivided into 6 chapters, with 'Stylistic variation ' (23-146); and Part III, with non-stylistic variation, emphasizing the verb (147-76). An appendix takes up once more the issue ofgrammatical categories (177-211). Throughout, one discovers a good deal of information on homonymy , ergativity, fusion, clitics, and other problems much discussed in the West. The single most perplexing feature of this book is the absence of any index—of key concepts adopted or newly introduced, linguistic forms cited, languages referred to, or authorities invoked. One can, e.g., anticipate a certain concern , on the part of a professed Balkanologist, with Albanian and Modern Greek; but who could have guessed that the book contains excursuses on (or collateral references to) Basque, Finno-Ugric, the Caucasian language family, Japanese, and even—albeit sparingly—one indigenous New World language (Aztec)? Only two guides to the reader are appended to the book. First is a list of abbreviations (212-18), practically all in Cyrillic script—so that one must look under ?' to find Hjelmslev, who exerted a profound, if not always acknowledged, influence on G. Second is a list of sources (218-22)—overwhelmingly an inventory of 'Moldavian' fiction and poetry published in KiSinëv throughout the seventies; the only works credited to Rumanian research and publication centers such as Bucharest and Ia§i are three books on Macedo-Rumanian, plus a recent critical edition of Dosoftei's verse rendition of the Psalter (a.d. 1673). Samples of American linguistics have, I suspect, been widely consulted ; but only Bloomfield's Language (in a heavily edited Russian translation), plus two short articles by younger scholars, one of them channeled through a British journal, are explicitly cited. [YAKOV MALKiEL, Berkeley.] Predicate agreement in Russian. By G. G. Corbett. (Birmingham Slavonic monographs, 7.) Birmingham: Department of Russian Language & Literature, University of Birmingham , 1979. Pp. xii, 111. £2.80. There is no denying that a TG approach to grammatical problems of Contemporary Standard Russian has on occasion furnished new insights into the mechanisms at work; but this short monograph, dealing with various problems of predicate agreement—and particularly some of its substandard puzzles (cf. Krepkij (aj vredno 'Strong tea is harmful', Mne konfety nevazno 'Candy is not important to me')—does not actually add much to our better understanding of what is going on 'under the surface' of Russian morphology and syntax. Though Corbett is familiar with much—not all—of the pertinent work, both as regards data and theory, by his own admission he does not succeed in doing more than identifying a few sub-areas in need of further, in-depth investigation (cf. his 'Conclusion' on p. 103). [Henrik Birnbaum, UCLA.] Sociolinguistic problems in Czechoslovakia , Hungary, Romania and Yugoslavia . Ed. by William R. Schmalstieg and Thomas F. Magner . (Folia Slavica, 1:3.) Columbus , OH: Slavica, 1978. Pp. 176. These papers represent the proceedings of a conference on Sociolinguistics in Eastern Europe , held at the Pennsylvania State University in October of 1976. A brief introduction by the editors points to some specific sociolinguistic problems in a part of Eastern Europe, with their specific tensions and sensitivities, and summarizes the various papers of the volume. By and large, the contributions are uneven in both quality and scope. The first piece, by William Bright, represents his keynote address. It is concerned with some basic epistemological issues in linguistics, as viewed against their social setting ('Things people know about language that ain't so'), drawing parallels with comparable language situations elsewhere in the world (India, Norway, the U.S.) M. FryScák discusses 'The two official languages of Czechoslovakia', retracing the relatively recent and difficult road of Slovak toward achieving status on a par with Czech...

Tacitus and the Governor's Lady: A Note on Annals iii. 33–4

Until the last years of the Republic, Roman governors might officially see their wives present in their provinces only in the form of honorific statues. The chaos of civil war was to bring to a number of senatorial husbands, as they mounted their campaigns in the eastern provinces, the solace of their wives' companionship in the flesh. First in time amongst these refugee wives was Caecilia Metella, who was present with Sulla at Athens in 86 B.c. Later, and in less auspicious circumstances, Cornelia was to travel to Lesbos and then to Egypt to be with the doomed Pompeius in 49–48 B.c. Occasionally, such loyal wives joined their husbands over die latter's objections. They might, it seems, be expected to remain in Italy in order to avoid danger or even proscription, and not least to defend the family interests so far as this was possible.

Organizing House Officers

Working with an acutely ill patient late at night on the back wards of a city hospital, with no nursing care, minimal laboratory support, and pathological conditions that should have been noticed months before were there adequate screening clinics, the young intern or resident feels far removed from the process of medical education. Even under the relatively more auspicious circumstances under which most house officers pass their period of post-graduate training, there is the sense of being removed from the structured and formalistically didactic medical school situation. Its demands, its rewards, its circumstances, and its style combine to make house officership an experience relatively more involved and less pristine than its undergraduate predecessor. There is no debate that house officership is an educational experience, but unlike medical school, it is also a service experience and a commitment of work to patient and community alike. It is heartening that the Council

The Ubiquity of the Administrative Role in Counterinsurgency

One of the most disquieting commentaries on South Vietnamand on American involvement in South Vietnam-is William A. Nighswonger's Rural Pacification in Vietnam.' This analysis by an articulate and sympathetic participant-observer of legitimate government revolutionary counterinsurgency warfare lists a series of programs which failed. Yet it is not the failures that are overly disturbing. Nor is it the specific inadequacies of projects in his Quang Nam Province case study or of nationwide projects that lead to a generally pessimistic evaluation of the fortunes for revolutionary development in South Vietnam. Specific inadequacies can be found to a degree in any project analogous to those pursued in the Vietnamese setting; comparisons with Malaya and the Philippines, while admittedly overexaggerated, are analogous enough to prove the point.2 But such inadequacies are problems of detail, whether of great detail or small. Problems of this sort should be susceptible to solution if they are accompanied by an expanded commitment of resources, both human and material, and by minimal administrative adaptations permitting increased flexibility and coordination of effort, and by some requisite minimal amount of luck. And luck in counterinsurgency, typically, is opportunity seized upon in an expeditious and opportunistic manner. What is disquieting about Nighswonger's list of social, economic, political, military and administrative project failures is that there was nothing intrinsic in the concepts underlying their initiation which automatically precluded their success. Certainly most of them had and continue to have enormous potential for attaining counterinsurgency objectives. It is even possible that almost any one of the failures could be taken off the shelf, given a small amount of procedural dusting, and tried again successfully under more auspicious circumstances. This latter thesis rests upon the assumption that the concepts and types of projects applied thus far in revolutionary development in South Vietnam actually have been relatively adequate to the task. (This point is made most advisedly.) It assumes further that circumstances have remained inauspicious for success because the government and administration of South

Reaction of the World's Press to the Overthrow of Nkrumah

Although he rose to power under auspicious circumstances, the President of Ghana proved to be “his own worst enemy.” Press support at the end came mainly from Communist countries, the U.A.R. and the Congo.

Life and Death of a Mental Hospital.

This book is the history of a private hospital that lived out its brief life in the decade of the 1950's. It was born under auspicious circumstances. The staff was mostly trained at the Menninger Foundation, and all regarded themselves as genuinely psychoanalytically oriented. There was every expectation that the success of the Menninger Foundation in the midwest was going to be transferred to the west coast. The new hospital, which was given the fictitious name of Crest by the authors, seemed to be the answer to many unmet needs in the psychiatric community. No other hospital in the area stressed milieu therapy with a psychoanalytic orientation. The milieu therapy was a "total push" program with the staff's attitudes for each patient determined by individual prescription. Despite the note of high hope on which the hospital started, its history is a series of disillusionments and defeats. The authors explain the