Rundown State Research Articles

A Social Entrepreneurship Case Study of the “Pertubuhan Kebajikan Anak Yatim Islam Segamat” Orphanage in Malaysia

Most orphanages in Malaysia are run by means of charitable donations. However, the donations and contributions collected are usually not regular or one-off. This has led to orphanages being in a run-down state and ill-equipped. The care given to orphans is important as part and parcel of their human rights to be treated and given a fair chance of living with the rest of the human race. As such, this paper aims to investigate the role of social entrepreneurship in providing care for orphans. Particularly, the paper will focus on an orphanage – “Pertubuhan Kebajikan Anak Yatim Islam Segamat” (PKAYIS) which is located in the state of Johor. PKAYIS has provided shelter for 68 orphans and through charitable donations has been running successfully since 1983. The orphanage has been able to successfully bring up orphans who have succeeded academically and found successful careers in life. Based on the theoretical framework on social entrepreneurship and orphans, observation methods and interviews were carried out to supply relevant information and data for the study. This paper will provide some insights on how social entrepreneurship affects the society and would be beneficial for policy makers interested in adopting social entrepreneurship as a mean of care for orphans.

Ralph Ellison as Neighbor

Only slowly did Plainfield realize that it had a distinguished new resident. In a town of three hundred, word eventually got around. The first relevant gossip in the spring of 1967 reported that the Crews place had sold. Amazingly, someone had actually paid that exorbitant asking price of $35,000. Then rumor circulated that the purchaser was black, and later that he was a well-known author. I wondered aloud, Do you suppose we might have Ralph Ellison as a neighbor? And so it proved to be.The prospect excited me. I had admired Invisible Man since its appearance in 1952, when in graduate school my apartment mate George Bluestone had helped me understand its genius. I still possessed my battered paperback copy (a Signet Double Volume, 50 cents). As a young instructor at Amherst College, I had included the chapter on Dr. Bledsoe's college in a collection of readings on Booker T. Washington, a new sequence in the college's pioneering Problems in American Civilization course. What luck, I thought, to have this illustrious author as a fellow townsman.Perhaps because he recalled beginning to write Invisible Man during a vacation in rural Vermont, perhaps because his friend the poet Richard Wilbur was thriving in the neighboring town of Cummington, Ralph Ellison and his wife Fanny had chosen a place in this little-known Massachusetts hill town where the eastern edge of the Berkshire highlands joins the southern tip of the Green Mountains. At least one hundred fifty years old, the house was located on wooded acres out of sight of other houses, seemingly an ideal location to let a writer to escape the urban distractions of New York. Painted white, it stood out against the brilliant New England fall foliage, but would have disappeared into the winter snows were it not for the low-slung Cape Cod roof. Set well back from the road on land terraced up with a retaining wall of native stone, it could attract the admiration of anyone passing, but the notorious steepness of Lincoln Street meant that few drove or walked that way.After an economy that drew on light manufacturing by its water-powered mills and later relied on sheep-raising, the town had suffered from the rise of a national, and then an international, market. It was no help that it lay about as far from a railhead as any place in the state. The lack of jobs, the severity of the winters, and the rockiness of the soil had driven many inhabitants west or into the cities. Open fields that older residents could recall had long since returned to forest. Still, the pure air, spectacular fall foliage display, and quaint preservation of an earlier rural culture had for some time attracted a few summer residents.The Ellisons had purchased a property that, though once sold for unpaid taxes, had been fully restored by its previous owners. The contrast with our experience was striking. The abandoned farm that my partner Walter Richard and I had bought in 1950 offered a dilapidated house and neglected barn, but we found a gifted local carpenter who joined us in restoring them. Given its rundown state, the owner had not driven a hard bargain, warning us not to expect any luck growing a crop on the land. That was far from our intention. As college teachers, we were happy with the prospect of a place for weekend and summer breaks from our regular jobs.Though much of the charm of the town for us lay in its being virtually unheard of, we both liked the notion of a link to celebrity. Besides, having recently participated in civil rights protests, we welcomed any step toward racial integration. The latest town census recorded no resident in the Negro category, though the historical record showed Plainfield as the home of one black participant in Shays's Rebellion of 1787 and one member of the all-black Massachusetts 54th Regiment in the Civil War.Less than a year after their purchase, fire destroyed the Ellisons' Plainfield house. We had not yet met, but as soon as I heard the news, I wrote him, saying how proud the town was to have him here and expressing the hope that he would not abandon Plainfield. …

Full Throttle: Reforming Canada's Aviation Policy

Federal government policies are a major cause of high costs throughout the aviation supply chain, often leading Canadians to waste time and money by seeking lower fares at nearby US airports, or not travel at all. High fuel taxes and onerous foreign ownership and airline-specific policies are harming the competitiveness of airlines. Meanwhile, airports have been transformed from the rundown state they were in when operated by the federal government to become world leaders in customer service and quality. However, Canada’s airports are now handicapped by federal government policies that result in otherwise higher costs for travelers. If Canadians are to have the most economically efficient aviation system possible – crucial for such a geographically vast country – the federal government should enact a comprehensive set of policy reforms across the aviation sector. The federal and provincial governments should reduce, or eliminate, remaining aviation fuel taxes. The federal government should also gradually loosen foreign ownership restrictions on Canadian airlines, eliminate both company-specific burdens and protection for Air Canada, and attempt to renegotiate open skies agreements with the United States and the European Union to open the right to operate on domestic routes to all international airlines. Twenty years ago, Canada was a global leader in moving airports from government to private operation. While the federal government still owns the major airports proper, it signed operating leases with not-for-profit airport authorities. These airport authorities make long-term commitments that the looming end of leases may soon jeopardize, necessitating Ottawa to take action soon. The federal government should sell its remaining interest in the leases at airports it owns either to the not-for-profit airport authorities that currently operate them or to for-profit corporations. Such sales could make investors, airlines, travelers, and taxpayers all better off.Rather than regulating privately owned airports, government policy should focus on increasing competition in the sector. For example, if the City of Toronto approves the extension of the runway at the Billy Bishop Toronto City Island Airport and allows jets of all types that meet noise requirements to operate there, that would benefit travelers by enhancing competition locally and beyond.Ottawa should treat airports and airlines like regular businesses, remove sector-specific taxes and ownership and operation regulations, and let our Canadian aviation companies compete on the world stage.

The history of deinstitutionalization and reinstitutionalization

Until the mid-1950s asylum care was the routine approach to managing mental illness in the UK, especially those patients with the more prolonged forms of psychosis such as schizophrenia. It is uncertain why there was a move to community-based treatments, but this probably derived from a change in social philosophy, new and effective forms of psychopharmacology and the rundown state of the asylum buildings. Bed numbers gradually declined, a process enhanced by some model closure projects (e.g. Friern Barnet in North London), substantial closures of the asylums taking place from the 1980s onwards. Inquiries into hospital scandals, and research supporting the effectiveness of community care further encouraged these developments, along with changes in the Mental Health Act. However, despite the more recent development in the 1990s of specialist community teams (e.g. home treatment), the demand for beds has substantially increased over the last 10 years, leading to particular developments in the private sector, especially of ‘forensic’ resources. This resort to reinstitutionalization, on a Europe-wide basis, reflects a culture of risk management, an overriding concern for public safety, and the burdens and pressures upon services trying to manage ‘revolving-door’ psychotic patients. Despite the stable settlement of many ex-asylum patients, the ‘new long-stay’ have generated a sense of service neglect fuelled by regular homicide inquiries. A return to reinstitutionalization seems likely.

Sociology, Primitivism and Museums: The Museology of George Henri Rivière, Follower of Marcel Mauss

The Musée de l'Homme closed its ethnological collections to the public during April 2003, after years of failing to receive appropriate finances, which brought about the run-down state of its premises, a lack of qualified staff and a distressing intellectual and moral atmosphere (Heritage-Augé 1991). With its library in the process of dispersion and its galleries emptied and silent, it is difficult to understand the fascination that the museum has had on vast sections of the population and the convergence of artistic, philosophical and political expectations of its creators in the 1930s (see Karsenti 1997). This article explores the influence of the Durkheimian school of sociology in the shaping of the so-called 'myth of primitivism' (Rubin 1984; Hiller 1991). It also addresses the meaning and significance given to objects and to collections in the avant-garde circles close to the Musée de l'Homme and notably amongst the immediate friends and collaborators of the French museologist, Georges Henri Rivi´re. It was an ideology that could be characterized as an object-based and philosophically inspired anthropology shaped by the unique convergence of multiple and often conflicting politico- and socio-cultural streams existing in the France of the Third Republic. This article also focuses on the epistemological con-sequences of a museology of 'presence' in the context of a growing heterogeneous society and of an aesthetic of collage 'that valued the fragmented, curious collections, unexpected juxtapositions, that works to provoke the manifestation of extraordinary realities drawn from the domains of the erotic, the exotic and the unconscious' (Clifford 1994:118).

State-dependent modification of ATP-sensitive K+ channels by phosphatidylinositol 4,5-bisphosphate.

With inside-out patch recordings in ventricular myocytes from the hearts of guinea pigs, we studied ATP-sensitive K+ (K(ATP)) channels activated by phosphatidylinositol 4,5-bisphosphate (PIP2) with respect to sensitivity to ATP when in either a rundown state (RS) or a non-rundown state (NRS). Rundown of K(ATP) channels was induced by exposure either to ATP-free solution or to ATP-free solution containing 19 microM Ca2+. Exposure of membrane patches to 10 microM PIP2 reactivated channels with both types of rundown. The reactivation by PIP2 did not require ATP in the bath. The IC50 of channels recovered from RS and before the rundown was 37.1 and 31.1 microM, respectively. PIP2 irreversibly increased the mean current when the channel was in the NRS. This was associated with a shift of IC50 to 250.6 microM after PIP2 exposure. PIP2 activates NRS K(ATP) channels by decreasing their sensitivity to ATP, whereas PIP2 reactivates RS-K(ATP) channels independently of ATP without changing ATP sensitivity.

Too Little, Too Late: An Analysis of Hitler's Failure in August 1942 to Damage Soviet Oil Production

EVEN before Operation Barbarossa petered out in December 1941, Germany's oil reserves were severely depleted. Adolf Hitler worried that his armed forces would soon grind to a halt for want of petroleum products. During the last months of 1941 and the first of 1942, economic considerations played as much of a role in the formulation of a new strategy as did the run-down state of the eastern armies and air fleets. Hitler feared heavy Soviet bombing attacks on Rumanian oilfields, his main source of oil, and knew that the Reich's reserves were almost exhausted. Consequently, he considered the protection of the Rumanian oilfields and the acquisition of new sources of oil crucial if he were to wage a prolonged war against the growing list of nations he opposed.1 He therefore formulated Fall Blau (Case Blue), a major campaign for summer 1942. This aimed first, through preliminary offensives in the Crimea, to protect Rumanian oil centres from Soviet air attacks, and second, through a powerful thrust to the Don River and then into the Caucasus, to deliver that oil-rich region into German hands. The capture of

Inhibition by cyclothiazide of neuronal nicotinic responses in bovine chromaffin cells

1. The desensitizing acetylcholine (ACh) response of bovine chromaffin cells maintained in culture was examined using rapid agonist applications (of 2 s duration) which imposed nominal drug concentrations within 50 ms. This study was aimed, firstly, at identifying which of the alpha 3, alpha 4 and alpha 7 subunits known to be present in these cells is predominant in the ACh-evoked response and secondly, on the effects on these neuronal nicotinic ACh receptors (AChR) of cyclothiazide (CT), an agent acting as a modulator of a gating desensitization site on other ligand-gated channels. 2. Locally applied 100 microM ACh evoked peak currents (IACh) of -1.5 +/- 0.1 nA (n = 83) at a holding potential of -60 mV. The ACh dose-response curve yielded an estimated EC50 of 60 microM. This current was not sustained but desensitized during the application period; it displayed strong inward rectification, but desensitized equally whether the evoked current was inward or outward going. The latter observation excludes alpha 4 as a major contributor to the recorded current. Because the response was almost insensitive to a 1 microM alpha-bungarotoxin pretreatment (IACh = -1.2 +/- 0.1 nA; n = 6), and because 1, 1-dimethyl-4-phenylpiperazinium (DMPP) works as a potent agonist (peak current = -1.9 nA, n = 2 for 100 microM DMPP), the alpha 7 subunit is also a minor contributor to the response. Taken together, these observations suggest a dominant alpha 3 type of response. 3. Triple exponential fits were used to describe the characteristics of the ACh-evoked currents; one component to fit the rising phase, with 2 components to describe the decay phase. The decay times were 100 ms and 4 s for the fast and slow components respectively. The rate of the slow decay component increased systematically with recording time, approximately doubling from its initial value within 20-40 min. Furthermore there was a gradual rundown of the response, seen first as a loss of the late component of the current, measured at 2 s, with the peak current amplitude decreasing later in the recording.4. CT, when coapplied with ACh, produced a dose-dependent inhibition of the ACh-evoked peak current. The effect showed little voltage-dependency with 100 microM CT producing 46 +/- 5% (s.d.; n = 3)and 47 +/- 8% (s.d.; n = 7) inhibition at -100 and -60 mV respectively. At + 60 mV, inhibition was estimated to be 26 +/- 7% (s.d.; n = 3).5. After pre-exposure of the cells to CT by bath application, 10 and 30 microM CT produced poorly reversible 20 +/- 9% (n = 7) and 42 +/- 5% (n = 4) inhibitions of the peak current respectively. There were no discernible effects on the fitted decay constants at any CT concentration tested, although an increased inhibitory effect of CT was observed at higher concentrations (100 microM) on the amplitude of the late component measured at 2 s.6. Similar effects were observed in conditions chosen to isolate the alpha 3 type of receptor: namely when using DMPP as an agonist, or after a-bungarotoxin pretreatment.7. The 2,3-benzodiazepine, GYKI 53655, is known to antagonize the action of CT on AMPA receptors.Coapplication of 50 microM GYKI 53655 with ACh (100 microM) produced a 29 +/- 4% inhibition of the peak ACh-evoked current and 44 +/- 6% inhibition of its amplitude at 2 s (n = 4). This response was fully reversible. Brief applications of both CT (100 microM) and GYKI 53655 (50 microM) with ACh via the microperfusion system produced a fully reversible inhibition that was not significantly different from the values obtained with either CT or GYKI 53655 alone, with 37 +/- 6% inhibition of peak and 61 +/- 9%inhibition of the amplitude at 2 s (n = 3).8. The results obtained suggest that the CT effect is to impede recovery from a slow desensitization,with a more pronounced effect with longer CT applications. Globally, CT favours the 'rundown state' of the neuronal nicotinic AChR.

Papua New Guinea in 1992: Challenges for the State

The June 1992 elections, the fourth since the independence of Papua New Guinea (PNG) in 1975, led to a smooth change of government, yet the state itself was under challenge. Most obviously, the secessionist crisis on Bougainville Island continued, but also the reach of the state was declining in the Highlands and some coastal provinces. Armed criminals (raskols) had a relatively free rein in many rural areas, provincial towns, and the capital, Port Moresby. Observers argued that glaring social inequalities and corruption in high places provided a rationalization for raskol activity. Minor riots erupted during the elections. The police, sometimes with help from the Defence Force (PNGDF), sought to reestablish public order using paramilitary means and were several times accused of brutality, especially around the resource projects that are expected to fund a revenue boom in the next few years. The state's political legitimacy among PNG's 13.9 million people has long derived from its capacity to provide security, namely to maintain peace and to deliver basic health and educational services, improved economic conditions, and the prospect of employment for a rapidly growing population. However, the urban infrastructure is failing, and with low real per capita incomes, poor educational and health levels, limited social services, and insufficient employment, PNG ranks only 116th on the U.N. Development Program's Human Development Index. Macroeconomic growth in 1992 was good because minerals exports have grown dramatically in the last two years, but the government's capacity to meet public expectations has declined for a variety of reasons-falling prices for agricultural commodities that support three quarters of the people, pressure on rundown state infrastructure from a rapidly growing population, and the painful restructuring cutbacks initiated after the shutdown of the Bougain-

International Economic Arbitration in Germany: A New Era

AT a press conference held in Bonn on January 21, 1992, which was featured in the major German newspapers and on German television, the Chairman of the German Federation of Industry and Trade, together with some German arbitration specialists, announced the foundation of the German Arbitration Institution (‘ Deutsche Institution fur Schiedsgerichtsbarkeit, e.V .’, ‘ DIS ’) on January 1, 1992, Some months earlier, on October 31, 1991, the Working Group on the Reform of the German Law of Civil Procedure had held its inaugural session at the Federal Ministry of Justice in Bonn to commence work on the reform of German arbitration law. These dates mark the beginning of a new era of international arbitration in Germany. The development deserves attention for various reasons. German unification has made Germany the gateway to Eastern Europe. The political and economic changes in this part of the world, and the need to build up run-down state economies, will lead to a substantial increase in commercial and financial activities. The state of judicial emergence of the court systems in Eastern Europe makes arbitration the only viable alternative for an effective dispute resolution process for these cross-border transactions. This is true, not only for the traditional commercial contract, but also for financial agreements, even though banks and other lending institutions have traditionally refrained from accepting arbitration agreements in their contracts. Also, the coming EC Single European Market, and the expected substantial rise in cross-border trade and resulting commercial disputes, account for Germany's increasing significance on the international arbitration scene.1 International practitioners and academicians alike have long since deplored the striking contrast between Germany's strong position in world trade and the small number of international arbitrations taking place in Germany every year. Professor Sandrock has aptly described this phenomenon: > Though it is an elephant …

THE DEVELOPMENT AND PRODUCTION OF TARA HILLS HIGH COUNTRY RESEARCH STATION

When purchased in 1946 Tara Hills was in a rundown state and typical of large areas of inland Otago depleted by overgrazing. Since then development by oversowing, topdressing, fencing, irrigation, together with rabbit control have given large increases in production. The stock units have increased from 1240 in 1946 to 11,066 in 1966 and wool production has increased from 1.3 kg/ha to 13.4 kg/ha. Since 1975 the gross income per hectare has risen from $21/ha to peak at $131/ha in 1984. These levels of production provide a sharp contrast to the much lower production of the average South Island high country run. Keywords: wool, income.

Influence of Spring-Back on the Characteristics of the Spiral Spring

In this paper, the method of manufacturing the spiral spring is examined to develop a theory for this type of spring giving a closer agreement with practical tests than does the conventional theory. The theory makes use of Gardiner's (1***)† equation for spring-back to develop the equation of the free spiral of the spring and then considers that, in operation, the process of winding up or running down can be considered as the difference between winding up from the free spiral to the run-down state and winding up from the free spiral to the wound-up state. In the conventional theory for this type of spring, the active length is considered to be constant and equal to the strip length and the moment versus the rotation of the arbor plot (torque characteristic) is apparently always linear. In the theory presented below, the variation in active length is taken into account and non-linearities in the torque characteristic become evident. The theory assumes that the forming of the spring takes place under the action of pure bending without anticlastic curvature and the strip is assumed to behave as an ideal elastic-perfectly plastic material.