Inkjet printed paper based frequency selective surfaces and skin mounted RFID tags: the interrelation between silver nanoparticle ink, paper substrate and low temperature sintering technique

Inkjet printing of functional frequency selective surfaces (FSS) and radio frequency identification (RFID) tags on commercial paper substrates using silver nanoparticle inks sintered using low temperature thermal, plasma and photonic techniques is reported. Printed and sintered FSS devices demonstrate performances which achieve wireless communication requirements having a forward transmission scattering parameter, S21, depth greater than ?20 dB at 13 GHz. Printed and plasma sintered RFID tags on transfer paper, which are capable of being mounted on skin, improved read distances compared to previously reported single layer transfer RFID tags fabricated by conventional thermal sintering

Poultry and Beef Meat as Potential Seedbeds for Antimicrobial Resistant Enterotoxigenic Bacillus Species: A Materializing Epidemiological and Potential Severe Health Hazard

Although Bacillus cereus is of particular concern in food safety and public health, the role of other Bacillus species was overlooked. Therefore, we investigated the presence of eight enterotoxigenic genes, a hemolytic gene and phenotypic antibiotic resistance profiles of Bacillusspecies in retail meat samples. From 255 samples, 124 Bacillus isolates were recovered, 27 belonged to B. cereusand 97 were non-B. cereus species. Interestingly, the non-B. cereus isolates carried the virulence genes and exhibited phenotypic virulence characteristics as the B. cereus. However, correlation matrix analysis revealed the B. cereus group positively correlates with the presence of the genes hblA, hblC, and plc, and the detection of hemolysis (p \u3c 0.05), while the other Bacillus sp. groups are negatively correlated. Tests for antimicrobial resistance against ten antibiotics revealed extensive drug and multi-drug resistant isolates. Statistical analyses didn’t support a correlation of antibiotic resistance to tested virulence factors suggesting independence of these phenotypic markers and virulence genes. Of special interest was the isolation of Paenibacillus alvei and Geobacillus stearothermophilus from the imported meat samples being the first recorded. The isolation of non-B. cereus species carrying enterotoxigenic genes in meat within Egypt, suggests their impact on food safety and public health and should therefore not be minimised, posing an area that requires further research

Effect of cystamine on sperm and antioxidant parameters of ram semen stored at 4 °C for 50 hours

Physical and chemical changes caused by oxidative stress in the spermatozoa membrane can reduce spermatozoa function and even lead to death. Cystamine (NH2-CH2-CH2-SH, β-mercaptoethylamine) is a natural substance that modulates the endocrine and metabolic status of animals. This substance has antioxidant and anti-apoptotic effects by inducing intracellular cysteine accumulation. Cystamine is used to treat many diseases despite its many side effects. Sheep semen is sensitive to the stressful condition of chilling storage, which restricts semen storage for artificial insemination in commercial herds. The effect of cystamine on spermatogenesis is not yet fully understood. The present study aimed to investigate the effect of cysteamine addition to the sheep sperm extender during cooling storage on semen quality parameters. Sperm samples were collected from six Edilbayevskaya rams (2 and 3 years old, 70-85 kg). The samples were diluted by extender and supplemented with different concentrations of cysteamine (0, 1, 2, 5, and 10 mM) and cooled to 4ºC for 50 h. Motility parameters, membrane integrity, viability, lipid peroxidation, and mitochondrial activity of cooled semen were evaluated at 0, 25, and 50 h of cooling storage. Although cysteamine failed to affect semen quality at start time (0 hrs), extender supplementation with cysteamine improved sperm total motility, progressive motility, and mitochondrial membrane potential during storage periods (P≤0.01). Moreover, using 1 and 2 mM cysteamine functionally and viably improved (P≤0.01) sperm membrane compared to other treatments. Antioxidant potential (AOP), lipid peroxidation (LPO), and total glutathione (tGSH) (except AOP at 50 h) were significantly different after semen storage at 4 °C. Therefore, levels of AOP and tGSH were significantly increased by using cysteamine. Cysteamine supplementation (1 and 2 mM cysteamine) leads to lower levels of LPO (p<0.01) at 0, 25, and 50 h. Therefore, finding and using the best concentrations of cysteamine in a cooling extender could be effective in saving sheep semen against damages of the cooling storage process

RACE DISCOURSE IN WUTHERING HEIGHTS

This article explores how Emily Brontë, in Wuthering Heights, uses the discourse of race and slavery, or emancipation from slavery, to further a political project of freeing the underprivileged, Heathcliff, the excluded, demonised, and homeless slave, from the grip of the rich. He tries all the time to reconstruct his own position and the social ranks as a whole, to identify his own social position within a class hierarchy. Heathcliff begins his life at the very bottom of this hierarchy but he concludes it with a great shift, situating himself at the top of it. It reveals how an outsider, a faceless, homeless, placeless, and accursed slave of a goblin is excluded as someone who has no social or biological place in the existing social structure, and which makes him determined to carve his own place as equal, and renders himself free in a world of exploitation and inequality. This study explains that Wuthering Heights is among the nineteenth-century novels that contributed to a shift of cultural authority in Britain from the upper to the middle class, even to lower-middle-class. It focuses on how Catherine's authoritative white and middle-class subject is defeated by the lower-class Heathcliff. Heathcliff becomes a capitalist himself, an expropriator, thereby turning the ruling class's weapons of property accumulation and acquisitive marriage against them, by turning them into a yeoman class, as represented, for example, by Hareton. Indeed Heathcliff has succeeded in his attempts, all the time, to break down a cultural myth, the superiority of the white, and build from it a whole new construct of new relationships which he sees more racially fair and fit

DIALOGUE AND CONSTRUCTION OF WOMAN IN JOHN FOWLES’S A MAGGOT

This article explores how John Fowles, in his last published novel A Maggot (1985), has depicted the figure of woman in a strong dialogical position, as a matriarch leading the entire dialogical narrative of the novel. For Fowles, the woman has metamorphosed from being a fallen and problematic woman into a successful and sacred historical mother of Ann Lee, the founder of the Shakers. Indeed through the dialogical confrontations of the Shaker woman, Rebecca Lee, with her multi-faceted challenges of the lawyer Henry Ayscough, the patriarch, who has constantly constructed her as a fallen woman, Fowles deployed a very problematic construction for women, thereby challenging all the traditional discourses of female forbidden behaviour and quizzing the decidedly patriarchal perception of women within the seventeenth-century English culture (the novel is a late twentieth-century text about the seventeenth century) in terms of sexuality, education, and the corruption of law system, and also to reconstruct the Shakers’ weird idea of redemption. This article focuses on the question of how Fowles sees the woman; how she should be perceived: the fallen figure and the female sexuality is a masculine construct within a patriarchal society, whereas in reality and for the Shakers, she is an immutable sacred matriarch. For Fowles, this “divine matriarch” is Rebecca Lee (aliases Fanny, Louise), the former Quaker woman forced by circumstances into prostitution. She was the poor woman hired by Mr. Bartholomew to accompany him on his journey, and she was the only living witness of the mysterious events in the cave, and the one who went on to become the fictional mother of the historical Ann Lee, the founder of the Shakers. Indeed A Maggot attempts to resolve such ambiguities and paradoxes of the role of woman within the cultural and ideological limitations of her society

The Development of Class Consciousness in Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!

This article reads William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! (1936) as a constant negotiation between Thomas Stupen's "design" and the class of the planters, with which he tries to compete. Sutpen's childhood in the Appalachian Mountains, where class and racial differences are largely absent, renders his descent with his family into the plains in Tidewater as a kind of a Fall associated with knowledge. Sutpen observes the importance of land in the plains and the racial differences on the basis of colour and the differences between white people and white people. Even though Sutpen's humiliation comes from a black butler who does not allow him to enter the mansion of the planter Bettibone from the front door, it is with the planter that Sutpen plans to combat. Sutpen's "design" which will shape his life starts as a reading of the planters' class and as a recipe for becoming one of them, or even defeating them. Sutpen expresses this design as follows: “So to combat them you have got to have what they have that made them do what the man did. You got to have land and niggers and a fine house to combat them with” (A,A!. 229). Sutpen succeeds in having land and slaves, but it is the more subtle aspects of class which he misses that undermine his design and even bring his life to a tragic end. Keywords: key words, Absalom; Class consciousness; Desig

Development of an objective method for the assessment of nylon sutures knot security

A perfect wound healing requires sutures having many handling characteristics such as good knot security and flexibility. Knot security characteristics are influenced by a variety of physical and mechanical parameters including the friction coefficient, bending rigidity and compressibility of the suture. Knot security and other handling characteristics are evaluated only by surgeons during the implantation. There are no standard tests to evaluate these qualities. We present in this paper an objective method to assess knot security of nylon sutures. This method is based on a fuzzy-logic model which correlates suture physical parameters and the knot security.Keywords: Nylon braided sutures, handling characteristic, knot security, physical parameters, fuzzy-logic mode

Finding p-adic zeroes of the Kubota-Leopoldt zeta-function numerically

We first establish why the p-adic zeta function has a Dirichlet series expansion. We then compute an improved expansion, which allows us to express it as a power-series modulo pⁿ. Using this expansion, we compute all the zeros of L₋p(s, χωʲ) for those quadratic characters χ of conductor < 200

Competency Assessment of Public Employee in Kuwaiti Civil Service Law.

The system of competency assessment has a special importance in public employment because it is one of the tools that are used to assess the capability of the employees and their ability to satisfy their public duties, as well as their roles to achieve the goals of the administrative department in managing the public facility and attaining the public interest. The system of competency assessment seeks to achieve many objectives, the most important of which are: the advancement of the service that the public facility is providing, the improvement of the programs and methods of appointing employees and their training; the detection of the administration\u27s errors and problems; and the improvement of the competency of employees. This study will include the legal organization of the competency assessment in Kuwaiti civil service law, by identifying the public employees who are subject to this system and those who are making it. In addition, this study will shed the light on the assessment process, factors, and hierarchy. The time of assessment, steps, publicity, and effects will be covered in this study. Finally, the complaint about the competency assessment and the judicial appeal will be subject to discussion in the stud

The Acquisition of Negation in Najdi Arabic

This investigation follows the development of negation of a Najdi speaking child. Previous negation studies have treated negation as one unit (NEG) regardless of its form in the adult language (no and not). This investigation provides a syntactic account of negation in Najdi in light of previous Arabic studies (Benmamoun 2000). It is argued in this study that verbal and non-verbal negation is captured by the same syntactic analysis. Both the affirmative and negative sentences of an adult and a child were evaluated and negation markers in verbal (la and ma) and non-verbal (muhub) sentences were examined. The data is analyzed by examining six contexts of negation: discourse, imperative, existential, declarative interrogative and non-verbal predicate negation. Qualitative and quantitative methods were applied to assess the development of negation in Najdi. The results of the study have significant implications for the Continuity Hypothesis (Pinker 1984). The Continuity Hypothesis proposes that children and adults share the same types of grammatical elements and rules. Results of the study show that the subject made clear distinctions between verbal and non-verbal negation markers. The data also show that Najdi children demonstrate the linguistic ability to correctly produce negation in six different contexts. The results of the study support a discontinuous approach to language acquisition for the non-verbal (muhub) negation sentences. At the same, the results support continuity in the discourse and imperative contexts (la). Only partial support for continuity is shown for ma production in declarative, existential and interrogative contexts. In addition, this research took into consideration whether the input frequency has an effect on the child's productions. This study shows that input is not the driving factor for the early production of negative markers as usage based studies suggest (Cameron-Faulkner, Lieven, & Theakston 2007)