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Cardiac involvement in AL amyloidosis portends a poor prognosis. 2D-speckle tracking echocardiography (2D-STE) strain can identify subclinical cardiac involvement. This study performed multilayer and multiplanar 2D-STE myocardial strain analysis.We compared 75 AL amyloidosis patients to 49 hypertensive patients and 49 healthy controls. Longitudinal strain was obtained from epicardial, mid-myocardial and endocardial layers; segmental strain was measured from mid-myocardial basal, mid and apical segments.Global longitudinal strain was reduced in epicardial (-14.3 ± -4.0% vs. -17.4 ± 2.2% vs. -17.5 ± -2.0%,Strain demonstrated myocardial involvement in all layers in AL amyloidosis, with reduced basal segmental longitudinal strain a likely marker of early disease.

The little-studied presidency of Benjamin Harrison offers valuable insights into the surprising role that political ideas can play in government. Harrison was a highly qualified president who demon...

This study explores the significant variation in test methods used to quantify microplastic release from the domestic laundry of textile fabrics. A wide review of the existing methods is made, with...

Ten years on the offsite construction (OSC) industry continues to be held high as a panacea to the inefficiencies, labour shortages and environmental impact of the construction of our built environ...

When the President Calls provides a fascinating set of interviews with dozens of top economic advisors to American presidents over the past fifty years. Its author, Simon Bowmaker, is something of ...

Prior research has shown that cognitive behavioural therapy, relaxation, mindfulness, exercise and positive psychology interventions, when conducted as single interventions, have a useful effect on depression and also increasing well-being. The purpose of this study was to conduct a pilot programme to determine the efficacy of a multi-modal approach to enhancing well-being. Five teachers engaged in the four-week pilot programme called CALMERSS. The findings provide evidence for the effectiveness of the CALMERSS programme in enhancing well-being in participants, through significant reductions in psychological strain, physical and personal strain, and improving self-care. Four of the five participants who would officially have been classified as depressed at the commencement of the programme were no longer depressed at the end of the programme.

Conflicts between indigenous people and mining companies have occurred in many countries and over many years, with the pressure for mining companies to improve their performance leading to a growth of corporate social responsibility concepts. Energy Resources of Australia and the Gundjeihmi Aboriginal Corporation (representing the Mirarr people) sought to resolve a number of long-standing issues relating to surface water management and monitoring associated with the Ranger Uranium Mine. This article summarises the process adopted and discusses the main factors that underpinned the success of the project.

Foreign exchange trading is performed in opaque and decentralized markets. The two-tier market structure consisting of a customer segment and an interdealer segment to which only market makers have access gives rise to the possibility of price discrimination. We develop a theoretical pricing model that accounts for market-power considerations and analyze a database of the trades of a foreign exchange market maker. We find that the market maker generally exerts low bargaining power vis-a-vis customers. The dealer earns lower average spreads on trades with financial customers than commercial customers, even though the former are perceived to convey exchange-rate-relevant information.

In the current and foreseeable harsh UK higher education environment, aspiring to best- practice financial management will be key to ensuring the prosperity – and indeed the survival – of any university. In this article I argue that good university financial management should provide stability to the institution, allow for investment as well as renewal and the exploitation of opportunity, be transparent enough to facilitate accountability and good governance, and ensure that the institution allocates resources efficiently in the context of its strategic plan. I explore in detail the issues relating to this fundamental definition of good financial management, including the role of financial management in inducing stability, short-term solvency and reserves, managing financial risk, capital expenditure and long-range planning, developing a diversified funding base, embedding good financial management in university culture, the relationship between financial planning and strategic planning, and financial acc...

The ability of nations to innovate technologically plays an important causal role in both security studies and international political economy. Explanations for national differences in technological capabilities, however, have had little place in international relations theory. This gap is partly the result of assumptions made by scholars that the rate and direction of technological change are determined by a state's domestic institutions and policies. This article will bring together recent findings about the political economy of technological innovation in order to show that much of this conventional wisdom is incorrect. Instead, it will be shown that, due to the distributive nature of technological change, different combinations of domestic tensions and external security concerns motivate elites to pursue or eschew a technologically competitive economy. Institutions are not causal, they are merely instrumental. Recent findings in the economic development literature therefore have important implications...

This paper empirically investigates the Evans and Lyons’ [2002. Understanding order flow. International Journal of Finance and Economics 11: 3–23] model of the foreign exchange market from a dealer's perspective. We provide evidence of the suggested information aggregation process using a rich database on a German bank's end-user order flow from 2002 to 2003. Although customer order flow is unambiguously the vehicle incorporating non-public information into exchange rates over time, our empirical analysis does not support the idea that customer order flow is a high-powered source of information easily exploitable for short-run speculation.

The offsite construction sector is now established as a significant contributor to the delivery of UK construction industry output. The exact value of this contribution is questionable and has been subject to substantial debate in recent literature. Existing offsite construction sector valuation methodologies have been based upon market research questionnaires and estimates of turnover and manufacturing output. Considerable attention has been given to the definition of the terms used to describe the various constituent technologies and manufacturing processes. However there has been limited reference to its size, sector classification, employment statistics and value added to the UK gross domestic output. A method is presented for the determination of the UK offsite construction sector gross output and value added. Historical data for the period 1998 to 2008 with growth forecasts up to 2013 are offered. A breakdown of the sector, examining the common standard industrial activity classification codes (SIC)...

This essay engages the political philosophy of Giorgio Agamben and the literary criticism of Abdul R. JanMohammed in critically exploring the contours of the present arrangement of democratic politics in the United States. Giorgio Agamben's exception theory of sovereignty and bare life are deployed in order to grasp the political meaning of surprisingly unprecedented and exceptional recent court rulings in the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal, who has been on Pennsylvania's death row since 1982. Abu-Jamal's experience of exceptional rulings also requires a critical elaboration of the racialized nature of American democracy. Thus, Agamben's theory finds a critical complement with the work of literary theorist Abdul R. JanMohammed, particularly JanMohammed's formulations of "social death" and the "dialectics of death" for "death-bound-subjects." The theories of Agamben and JanMohammed make clear the nature of Abu-Jamal's political struggle and the state of democratic politics that so often transforms the exc...

How useful are podcasts in the political science classroom? Some educators argue that podcasts will revolutionize education; others are less convinced. However, to date, the evidence on podcasts has been slim. This article reports the results of a year-long trial using podcasts to aid in teaching political science to undergraduates at a research university. This trial does not test hypotheses but constitutes an exploratory probe that tells us more about how students and educators use, and react to, podcast lectures. The results suggest that podcasts are not likely a revolutionary teaching technology but can nonetheless have useful roles in the college classroom. Students liked the control, but few took advantage of the podcasts' portability, and most preferred to listen to them while reading lecture notes. No evidence was found for a relationship between student performance and their opinion of, or technique for using, the podcasts. For the professor, podcast lectures appeared to create time both in and o...

We introduce and summarize the results of 18 empirical studies that make up this special issue on long-run purchasing power parity (PPP) and real exchange rates. The motivation for the special issue was to bring together a set of studies as diverse as possible in terms of countries, real exchange rates and methodology, as a means of testing the robustness of long-run PPP. Overall, the results of the various studies provide robust support for long-run PPP.

There is an abundance of evidence supporting a cross-sectional association between poor housing and poor health, but relatively few studies have examined the relationship between housing and health over time. Using contemporary longitudinal data from seven yearly waves (1996–2002) of the British Household Panel Survey, summary statistics and multivariate first-differences regression models, this study provides robust evidence of a dynamic relationship between housing conditions and health. Worsening housing conditions, measured in three domains, are independently associated with deterioration in health, especially the number of reported health problems in women. These findings add to the longitudinal evidence of the effect of housing conditions. It is concluded that improvements in housing conditions produce health benefits and the findings are important for proposed housing interventions to maximise health benefits and prioritise areas of housing investment.

As amperages have increased on existing plants and environmental and energy constraints have tightened on both new and existing ones, smelter control has become the biggest leverage point for not only cost reduction and product quality improvement, but also for environmental compliance. The license to operate smelters now is becoming increasingly dependent on the reputation of companies for close control of their operations. This licence is even more important for companies building new smelters. The present article addresses some of the issues smelter practitioners, designers, and engineers face on a daily basis concerning the drivers of smelter process variation and the levers to reduce it. A step change in the understanding and thinking about control is required first at a managerial level, and this change is discussed. Better education concerning process control is essential for engineers and scientists so that more rigorous analysis of plant control defects and failures can occur on a broad front. Th...

Desalination plan and recycle/reuse options have the capability of delivering a solution to the Sydney's water supply problem. The Australian Competition Tribunal has hence permitted Services Sydney Pty Ltd. to mine sewage water to produce recycled water, which would help in solving the water problem to some extent.

This study provides a critical review of the research literature on long-run Purchasing Power Parity and the stability of real exchange rates.

The Australian landscape is characterised by floods and droughts, so that the form, flow patterns and structure of our rivers reflect the full range of discharge patterns from perennial to intermittent, through to ephemeral. However, legislative descriptions of ‘river’ are derived from a Eurocentric perspective. In New South Wales, the definition of a river is provided in the Rivers and Foreshores Improvement Act (1948) and the partially implemented Water Management Act (2000). The Rivers and Foreshores Improvement Act implies that a bona fide river should have perennial and intermittent flow. This is quite atypical of many lower order river systems in New South Wales which are normally ephemeral. Herein lies the issue. Development on or adjacent to a river is subject to specific restrictions. As a consequence, numerous disputes regarding the nature and definition of a ‘watercourse’ have arisen in both the Australian High Court and the NSW Land and Environment Court. This paper considers the util...

A generally accepted view among researchers and policy makers is that large capital flows to Latin America starting from the second half of the 1980s through the 1990s may have caused speculative bubbles in the asset markets of recipient economies. This article tests for asset price bubbles in the stock markets of six Latin American countries using data for the last 10 years or so. It employs recently developed robust estimation techniques which are specifically designed to exploit the skewness and leptokurtosis that bubbles may engender in the data. It finds massive deviations from normality in both stock prices and dividends series and the test results provide strong evidence for the existence of stock price bubbles in each of the markets examined.

This article provides capital flow forecasts to 32 developing countries using an unobserved components model and maximum likelihood Kalman filtering estimation. Permanent and temporary components of capital flows of bond, equity and syndicated loans are separated out to the countries concerned. Based on these models, and using monthly data up to December 2000, forecasts of various capital flows are presented for the period January 2001 to December 2003. The results of the time series based forecasts are then compared to those obtained using a fundamentals-based approach.

We provide an introduction and overview to the 12 applied financial studies making up this special issue on the Global Financial Crisis (GFC). The studies cover a wide range of international and regional experience and employ a variety of applied techniques.

We provide an introduction and overview to the 15 applied studies making up this special theme on sport. The studies cover a wide range of international and regional experience and employ a variety of applied techniques.

We provide an introduction and overview to the nine applied studies making up this special theme on transport. The studies cover a wide range of national and regional experience and employ a variety of applied techniques.

We provide an introduction and overview to the 10 applied studies making up this themed issue on employment. The studies cover a wide range of national and regional experience and employ a variety of applied techniques.

We introduce and summarize the results of 10 empirical studies that make up this special theme on monetary policy, covering a wide range of countries and issues.

We introduce and summarize the results of 12 empirical studies that make up this special theme on economic growth, covering a wide range of countries and issues.

We provide an introduction and overview to the 13 applied studies making up this special theme on money and inflation. The studies cover a wide range of national and regional experience in the relationship between inflation and money and employ a variety of applied techniques.

We introduce and summarize the results of 10 empirical studies that make up this special issue on fiscal policy, covering a wide range of developed and developing countries.

We introduce and summarize the results of 12 empirical studies that make up this special issue on health economics, covering a wide range of countries and issues.

We introduce and summarize the results of nine empirical studies that make up this special issue on agricultural economics. The research includes studies applied to the US, Bangladesh, Northern Ireland, Germany, Poland, Taiwan, Tunisia and Italy.

This paper provides new evidence on unemployment durations for individuals in Great Britain using a three state Markov framework in a competing risk setting and a nationally representative data set. The analysis is based on the premise that an individual's movements between labour market states can be represented by a Markov process. The modelling procedure combines the dynamic properties of the search approach to unemployment while using the labour supply decision at each moment in time in response to the expected wage to include participation decisions. Using this framework, we are able to determine the effect of individual characteristics, including the expected wage, on labour market behaviour. The model is estimated separately for men and women, and for young and mature workers, to investigate whether labour market behaviour differs for these groups. The validity of the Markov assumptions are tested using different model specifications, and changes in the model over calendar time are also presented.

In this paper we study two-dimensional flexible interaction-site molecules composed of n tangent hard discs. In particular, we obtain exact results for the n-site probability function for isolated tangent-hard-disc chains and rings with n⩽6. All configurational properties of the chain and ring n -mers can be determined from this probability function. We present analytical and ‘exact’ numerical results for the mean-square site–site separations, mean-square radii of gyration, average shape and two-site intramolecular distribution functions.

Exact semi-analytical expressions are obtained for the zero density site-site distribution function and the second virial coefficient for homonuclear square-well diatomics. The diatomic molecules considered here are composed of two fused square-well spheres with hard core diameter σ, well diameter λσ, and dimer bond length L, such that 0

The issue of long-run purchasing power parity for the US dollar–UK sterling exchange rate during the 1920s float is re-examined, and it is concluded that a form of long-run purchasing-power parity did in fact hold for dollar-sterling during this period. The new results are also employed to gauge the degree of overvaluation of sterling relative to the imposed pre-war parity of $4.86 on its return to gold in 1925 and for 12 months afterwards.

An empirical analysis of long-run purchasing power parity (PPP) as a theory of international commodity arbitrage between UK and US prices and the sterling/US dollar exchange rate for the period 1975–1980 is presented. Econometric techniques concerning the cointegration of economic time series are applied to a sample of 35 manufactured commodities which in 1977 constituted approximately a quarter of the net output of all manufacturing industry in Great Britain. Our results are extremely unfavourable to the PPP hypothesis as a stable long-run proportionality between exchange rates and disaggregated prices.

Navicula quadripunctata Hustedt, which has sometimes been synonymized with Neidium alpinum Hustedt, is distinct and recognized here as Neidium alpinum var. quadripunctatum (Hustedt) Hamilton, comb. nav. This taxon is distinguished from the nominate variety by its robust size, elliptical-linear shape, and narrowly rounded apices (length: 12–33 μm width: 3–7 μm; striae 30–38 in 10 μ). From SEM observations, it is evident that the bifurcate appearance of the terminal raphe fissures corresponds to a siliceous flap that covers the polar raphe endings, which are simple and straight. N. alpinum var. quadripunctatum is acidobiontic, commonly found in lakes and streams of pH 4.5–5.9. In North America, this diatom has been found in Ontario (Canada) and Alaska, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New York, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin (U.S.A.).

This paper presents some empirical evidence that real exchange rate series contain a unit root in their time series respresentation, which cancels out on first differencing, using the augmented Dic...

(1990). Some efficient tests of international real interest rate parity. Applied Economics: Vol. 22, No. 8, pp. 1083-1092.

Dithionite is often used to deoxygenate aqueous solutions because it reacts readily with oxygen. However, milder reducing agents, that do not ordinarily react readily with oxygen, may do so in the presence of an appropriate redox catalyst. We show that dithiothreitol reacts rapidly with oxygen in concentrated hemoglobin solutions to produce a mixture of deoxy-, met- and sulf-hemoglobin. The reaction in neutral phosphate buffer is not significantly affected by superoxide dismutase, benzoate or EDTA. However, addition of catalase or horseradish peroxidase decreases the proportions of met- and sulf-hemoglobin produced. We conclude that both hemoglobin and horse radish peroxidase accept dithiothreitol as the reducing substrate in heme catalyzed reactions with their respective oxidizing substrates (dioxygen and hydrogen peroxide). As a result, deoxy-hemoglobin suitable for physical studies can be prepared with a combination of a stoichiometric excess of dithiothreitol and a catalytic amount of horse radish peroxidase.

We provide an introduction and overview to the 10 applied economics studies making up this special-themed issue on The Applied Economics of Industry. The studies cover a wide range of topics, and employ a variety of applied techniques.

We provide an introduction and overview to the eleven applied economics studies making up this special themed issue on The applied economics of trade. The studies cover a wide range of topics, and employ a variety of applied techniques across a range of countries.

We provide an introduction and overview to the seven applied financial studies making up this special theme on labour. The studies cover a wide range of topics, and employ a variety of applied techniques across a range of countries.

This special issue of Applied Financial Economics is dedicated to the memory and the achievements of Professor Sir Clive Granger, economics Nobel laureate and one of the great econometricians and applied economists of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. As editor of the Applied Economics journals I am proud that Sir Clive had such a long and distinguished association with the journals; indeed he was one of the early editors of Applied Economics and was for many years on the editorial board of both Applied Economics and Applied Financial Economics. Sir Clive also published a number of his own papers in the journals, the first in 1971 (in Applied Economics) and the last in 2001 (in Applied Financial Economics).

Mulder's derivation of the excluded volume between a pair of identical biaxial spheroplatelets is extended to the case of non-identical particles. This result will be useful in the application of scaled particle theory to the monodisperse spheroplatelet fluid or in the study of a bidisperse spherocylinder—‘square’ spheroplatelet fluid mixture or a generally polydisperse spheroplatelet fluid.