Tentative Considerations Research Articles

Chemometrics and Thermal Analytical Investigation of Ancient Human Bones Through the Estimation of Activation Energy Values of Main Degradation Processes

Background: The investigation of human bones unearthed from necropolises is a useful tool to enhance our knowledge about ancient cultures. In the present study, the possibility of using the activation energy (EA) values of thermogravimetric degradation processes coupled with exploratory analysis methods in order to investigate human remains, has been tested. Methods: Several human bones from four distinct necropolises have been analyzed by thermogravimetry and then thirteen different approaches have been used to estimate their activation energy of the degradation processes of carbonate and collagen. The entire set of data has been analyzed by Principal Component Analysis (PCA) in order to draw some preliminary considerations over the remains. Results: PCA analysis highlighted the possibility of recognizing grouping tendencies related to the funeral ritual bodies underwent and/or their age. Additionally, in the second part of the work, where the focus is on the activation energies of collagen and carbonates degradation processes estimated by the method which was considered the most reliable (i.e., the Arrhenius formula with the third order decay), some tentative considerations about a trend in cremation temperatures are drawn. Conclusion: The estimation of values from thermogravimetric signals combined with chemometrics is a useful tool for the investigation of bone samples, which allow obtaining additional info about trends and/or grouping tendencies in complex systems as human remains.

Room‐Temperature Micropillar Growth of Lithium–Titanate–Carbon Composite Structures by Self‐Biased Direct Current Magnetron Sputtering for Lithium Ion Microbatteries

AbstractHere, an unidentified type of micropillar growth is described at room temperature during conventional direct‐current magnetron sputtering (DC‐MS) deposition from a Li4Ti5O12+graphite sputter target under negative substrate bias and high operating pressure. These fabricated carbon–Li2O–TiO2 microstructures consisting of various Li4Ti5O12/Li2TiO3/Lix TiO2 crystalline phases are demonstrated as an anode material in Li‐ion microbatteries. The described micropillar fabrication method is a low‐cost, substrate independent, single‐step, room‐temperature vacuum process utilizing a mature industrial complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (CMOS)‐compatible technology. Furthermore, tentative consideration is given to the effects of selected deposition parameters and the growth process, as based on extensive physical and chemical characterization. Additional studies are, however, required to understand the exact processes and interactions that form the micropillars. If this facile method is further extended to other similar metal oxide–carbon systems, it could offer alternative low‐cost fabrication routes for microporous high‐surface area materials in electrochemistry and microelectronics.

Liability postponed: the failure to bring Annex VI of the Madrid Protocol into force

ABSTRACT The 1991 Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty (Madrid Protocol) and its first four annexes entered into force in 1998, with a fifth annex in 2002. Madrid Protocol Article 16 mandated elaboration of ‘rules and procedures relating to damage arising from activities taking place in the Antarctic Treaty area and covered by this Protocol’, in ‘one or more Annexes’ to the Protocol. These matters were explored for over a decade from 1992 in a Legal Experts Group and then in a Working Group where an annex was negotiated. At the 2005 Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting, Annex VI to the Protocol, Liability Arising from Environmental Emergencies, was adopted as legally binding Measure 1 (2005). That annex covers, in the view of some delegations, only part of the liability anticipated in Article 16. Accordingly, the ‘Stockholm Package’ included a commitment in Decision 1 (2005) to both annually review entry into force of the annex and to take a decision ‘not later than 5 years from the adoption of the Annex … on the establishment of a time-frame for the resumption of negotiations … to elaborate further rules and procedures as may be necessary’. Thirteen years after its adoption, Annex VI has still to enter into force, with just 16 of the 28 state approvals necessary for entry into force. The decision on further negotiations has been repeatedly postponed. This paper examines the focus and pathway from the negotiation of Annex VI to the present moment, considering the ‘Stockholm Package’ and broader context of liability discussions within the Antarctic Treaty System commencing over 30 years ago. It notes some areas where the present Annex requires further development or updating and offers some tentative considerations on whether and when Annex VI might finally enter into force.

Literature review on children and young people demonstrating technology-assisted harmful sexual behavior

Abstract The review examines existing literature around the concept of technology-assisted harmful sexual behavior (TA-HSB) as demonstrated by children and young people. This is when a child or young person demonstrates sexual behavior online or through the use of technology that may be harmful to themselves or others, have a significant detrimental impact on their daily functioning, or leave them vulnerable for criminal prosecution. The review was motivated by the increase of children and young people referred to a sexual abuse service, due to their demonstration of TA-HSB. This review aimed to explore theories relating to TA-HSB and to develop awareness on identified treatment needs of these behaviors, so that professionals may better understand and support children and young people demonstrating them. Furthermore, it discusses assessment, intervention and risk management approaches as currently identified within best-practice, to support towards prevention of future criminalization and further victimization. The review initially aimed to include current literature based on children and young people (aged 5 to 21 years old) demonstrating TA-HSB; however due to the limited availability of this, the search parameters were expanded with tentative consideration on the implications of this when working with children and young people.

Managing Sovereign Debt Restructurings in the Euro Zone. A Note on Old and Current Debates

European economic governance is again under the spotlight. Several reform proposals have been put forward in recent years, including new arrangements for the management and resolution of sovereign debt crises. This note purports to: (a) critically review earlier debates on the reform of the international financial architecture, identifying those elements that could be still relevant for Europe today; (b) discuss recent proposals to establish a restructuring scheme in the euro area, drawing some tentative considerations on possible ways forward.

Judging and Conciliation – Differentiations and Complementarities

Diverse forms of conflict resolution were established throughout the course of history: state and non-state, judicial and extra judicial, consensual, authoritarian, contradictory forms, etc. This contribution ties in with a German tradition of discussions which broaches the issue of the alternatives of conflict resolution under the phrase “Richten oder Schlichten (Judging or conciliation). The paper sketches the life path of this discussion and develops some tentative considerations on how semantic confrontations of “Richten” and “Schlichten” can be made palatable in order to develop research questions and analytical patterns from a historical as well as a current-day perspective.

자동차 산업분야의 효과적인 제조협업 구현을 위한 디지털 엔지니어링 적용 방법론에 대한 연구

Very special and tentative considerations including emotional aspects are required to apply any new mechanism and methodologies for manufacturing fields due to several reasons. This study reviews the characteristics of manufacturing collaborations through specific cases applied digital engineering to enhance the collaboration performance in manufacturing domains. Two cases of collaboration related with automotive manufacturing process are analyzed to extract meaningful insights for better collaboration model suggestions. The first case deals the robot simulation to find out advance errors in jig and fixture design during the various welding process of body-in-whites. The effective communication protocol to share their idea and agreed schedules are essential for this collaboration. More severe requirement of collaboration between R&D and manufacturing departments are studied in the second case for e-coating process. The invisible barriers among different departments are lowered by the process application of Computer Aided Engineering which can make sure their own interesting effectively. Those technical and managerial suggestions can be used when the information system and standard process are sought to implement and update not only when innovation projects are executed.

Can we still be Reformed? A reflection on the Reformed tradition and South Africa’s modernity

This article reflects on the potential of the Reformed tradition in the context ofmodernity in South Africa. This is of course a courageous venture: the meaning of theconcepts “Reformed” and “modernity” are intensely debated and in some quarterseven their usefulness is questioned. This is exactly why the argument presented inthis article will not be much more than a tentative consideration. It will be donein three parts. The first part will examine challenges to being Reformed in SouthAfrica. The second part investigates South Africa’s modernity as a central challengein more detail. The article concludes with a consideration of three impulses from theReformed tradition that may prove helpful in the context of South Africa’s modernity.

Constitutionalising Secondary Rules in Global Environmental Regimes: Non-Compliance Procedures and the Enforcement of Multilateral Environmental Agreements

Due to its remarkable success, the model of the Montreal Protocol’s non-compliance procedure (NCP) has been adopted in other environmental regimes, whose primary norms differ considerably. Hence, this article distinguishes different types of global environmental regimes and assesses the performance of NCPs therein as endogenous enforcement mechanisms. In fact, the reciprocal nature of the main conventional obligations in some more recent environmental regimes seems to hamper the effectiveness of compliance procedures. On this basis, the article puts forward some tentative considerations from a constitutional perspective. Drawing from the experience gained under environmental regimes in the region of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE), it explores the feasibility of transplanting some aspects of the model of the Aarhus Convention NCP into the more complex global context. Further, it reflects upon the potential of enhancing synergies between NCPs and national and international judiciaries as a step towards the consolidation of international public law in this area.

Critical Media Studies and the North American Media Literacy Movement

While many of us have been professionally ensconced in North American colleges and universities, dutifully building and institutionalizing critical film, media, and cultural studies programs over the course of the 1990s, a similar if far more decentralized and loosely coordinated project has been under construction outside the walls of Academe. Serious critical discourse concerning the possible psychological, social, political, and cultural ramifications of the pervasive and ever-expanding mass media has been circulating through primary and secondary school classrooms, community meeting halls, church basements, and public libraries. Informed by a mix of theoretical stances and methodological approaches that must serve a wide and sometimes disparate range of cultural assumptions, ideological positions, and political intentions, these discussions have come to promote both the idea and the practice of some form of media literacy as the necessary response to, if not the inoculation against, the lived experience of media-saturated lives. And at least some of those who are engaged with the creation and dissemination of this media literacy are part of the larger media literacy campaign. This essay is neither a descriptive history nor a critical analysis of the media literacy movement. The bibliography below includes some places to which the reader might turn for such accounts. This essay instead is a tentative consideration of the potential for alignment between the work of this popular movement and the academic/critical media studies project. By way of thinking through a few of my own encounters with the media literacy movement, I want to suggest that it is not best understood as an activist or a popular spin-off of the critical media studies project, as one might at first assume. Instead, many of this movement's central theoretical concerns and operative assumptions echo and provide a contemporary forum for the primarily psychologically and biologically informed threads of mass communication theory and research that so dominated U.S. academic understanding of media, society, and culture in the mid-twentieth century. This scholarship has continued to shape a large portion of traditional mass communication theory since. Thus, the media literacy movement renews and updates the popular concerns over the relationship between mass media and the changing sociocultural norms of 1950s and 1960s America, the so-called mass culture debates. My initial response to discovering the media literacy movement a few years ago as a card-carrying and tenure-tracking member of the critical media studies project was a mixture of surprise, arrogance, and suspicion. Of course, the surprise may have simply been a result of spending a good part of the 1990s teaching a 4-4 course load at a bargain-basement, publicly funded liberal arts college tucked away in the Rocky Mountains of southwestern Colorado. We sometimes came down to the lands below in search of mates, a two-day-old New York Times, and replacement

State-changes in the brain viewed as linear steady-states and non-linear transitions between steady-states.

Preceding papers concern a linear theory of electrocortical waves and their regulation by brain-stem neurones, in conditions of steady-state. The present paper reconsiders the theory, and generalizes beyond the effects of the fibre systems so far studied. Relaxation and unification of the assumptions upon which the initial model was based is undertaken. It is shown that the generalised model may render state changes within the brain accessible to systematic description, using the EEG as dependent variable. It is proposed that a multitude of stable states are possible within the brain, each characterised by a set of damping parameters for separate linear resonant modes. Within each stable state, the set of sums of resonant modes characterises a sub-space of the total state-space. Transition between stable regions can occur with either perturbation by external signals, or by internal controls. Tentative consideration is given to the role of plastic changes leading to adaptive learning as an attribute of a system of this type.

Evidence for another cell-adhesion molecule in Dictyostelium discoideum.

We raised a rabbit antiserum that completely blocked cell-cell adhesion of aggregating Dictyostelium discoideum cells in an in vitro assay. All adhesion-blocking activity of this antiserum was adsorbed with a D. discoideum fraction containing molecules having molecular weights as high as about 10(6), even after the material had been extensively digested with Pronase. The properties of this fraction indicate that the antigenic determinants in this macromolecule are saccharide residues. Antigen-rich material is found on vegetative cells but accumulates on or around differentiating D. discoideum cells as they aggregate. The cell surface of an aggregating cell contains about 5 X 10(5) antigenic sites. Antigen is also abundant in the medium of D. discoideum cells starved in suspension, which proved the most convenient starting material for its purification. Like several other macromolecules already discovered in D. discoideum by using this immunological approach, the material identified here may play a direct or indirect role in cell-cell adhesion and merits tentative consideration as a cell-adhesion molecule.

The sanitation syndrome: Bubonic plague and urban native policy in the Cape colony, 1900-1909.

Infectious disease and concepts of public health, operating as societal metaphors, seem to have exercised a powerful influence on the origins and development of urban segregation in South Africa. Between 1900 and 1904 bubonic plague, threatening major centres, occasioned the mass removal of African urban populations to hastily established locations at the instigation of medical authorities and other government officials under the emergency provisions of the public health laws. Inchoate urban policy, under tentative consideration since the 1890s as economic development and social change began to stimulate black urban migration, was precipitated by this episode into specific legislation and permanent administration. Cape Town and Port Elizabeth were the two foci of this development in the Cape Colony, where the government locations at Ndabeni and New Brighton exemplify the process. These moves and the effort to consolidate them were to a large degree frustrated by practical administrative, legal, economic and human factors which have characterized the anomalies and contradictions of urban location policy ever since. A black ‘middle class’ resisted the loss of property rights and clung to aspirations of economic and social mobility or legal independence. Especially at Port Elizabeth, where independent peri-urban settlements proliferated, white officials and politicians laboured in an administrative and legal quagmire. White employers and black migrants proved only marginally amenable to location concepts modelled on the principles of quarantine. But ‘the sanitation syndrome’, equating black urban settlement, labour and living conditions with threats to public health and security, became fixed in the official mind, buttressed a desire to achieve positive social controls, and confirmed or rationalized white race prejudice with a popular imagery of medical menace. These issues of urban social order would be repeated again in connexion with such dire events as the 1918 influenza epidemic as the foundations of Union-wide policy and law were laid during and after World War I.

Management of the asymptomatic carrier of the hepatitis-associated (Australia) antigen. Tentative considerations of the clinical and public-health aspects.

Special Article from The New England Journal of Medicine — Management of the Asymptomatic Carrier of the Hepatitis-Associated (Australia) Antigen — Tentative Considerations of the Clinical and Public-Health Aspects

Vertical growth and decay of convective cloud cells and associated precipitation rates at different levels

Study, using radar, has been made of history of growth and decay, in the vertical of convective rain cells around Delhi, and of associated variations in liquid water concentration of rate of precipitation release at different heights as judged from echo intensity measurements. Data relating to three such situations, typifying respectively rain from (a) warm, (b) moderately cold and (c) very tall and highly supercooled (as in a severe thunderstorm) convective cloud are presented in the paper. One common feature noticed, namely, that the rise of fall in precipitation rate at each level, follows closely a similar trend in variation of height of radar cloud top, needs to be given detailed consideration on the basis of suitable model of distribution of vertical currents within such a cell. Some tentative considerations have been given to this aspect of the problem.

Suggestions as to Metric in a Non-Conservative Mechanics

The purpose of this note is to give tentative consideration to the dependence of space-time metric on the distribution of energy and momentum, in the case of a mechanics which abandons the principle of the conservation of energy. The question is a difficult one, and its final correct answer might necessitate some new conceptual apparatus. In the present note, however, we shall merely try to show the consequences of a direct and somewhat plausible method of attack, which can be made with familiar tools.

Influenza: Is It a Hazard to Be Healthy? Certain Tentative Considerations

Influenza: Is It a Hazard to Be Healthy? Certain Tentative Considerations