The commercial businesses of Queensland Rail (QR) were separated from the Government’s public transport business on 1 July 2010. QR National Limited will be sold via an Initial Public Offering (IPO) – sometimes referred to as a public float planned for the final quarter of 2010, subject to market conditions. On becoming a publicly listed company it is expected that there is great scope for increase in market share. In order to realise the opportunities available to a public company, the following undertakings are necessary: - Business and logistics improvements. - Compliance requirements. - Capital Investment. This report looks at the process to develop a program of work that will deliver on these undertakings. It describes how nominated projects were classified, scoped, prioritised and selected using a filtering process and how sub programs were packaged for delivery. Finally the report outlines a framework for execution. This framework includes an approach to governance, risk management, control of time, cost, scope and benefits realisation. Due to the limited knowledge of the inner workings of QR National, assumptions have been made based on information available in the public domain.

This article is concerned with soil-sustainability problems of agriculture in developing countries, in particular with soil erosion. The aim of our study is to develop a comprehensive model that explains the adoption of sustainable agricultural practices with respect to soil conservation. Our approach includes the following special features: (A) The model is comprehensive in that it includes a large number of institutional, personal–social, economic, and physical explanatory variables. (B) Particular attention is paid to the influence of marketing systems on the adoption of sustainable agricultural practices, which to our knowledge has been neglected in past research. (C) The concept of adopting sustainable agricultural practices (ASAP) is differentiated into a limited number of basic components of soil conservation.(D) The model is estimated by Principal Component Regression, which enhances efficient estimation of the impact of many explanatory variables on ASAP. Our model is applied to Cabuyal hillside farming in Colombia. The application demonstrates the usefulness of the proposed model. ASAP is differentiated into three basic components: soil-disturbance control, soil-protection practices, and run-off control. It appears that soil-disturbance control is particularly influenced by farmers’ characteristics, such as education and managerial variables. The second component, soil-protection practices, appears to be strongly influenced not only by farmers’ managerial variables but also by their relationship with their environment, in particular marketing institutions. The third soil-conservation component, run-off control, is influenced by the physical characteristics of the plot and by the available farm labor. Our empirical results demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed model in designing agricultural policies, because it can determine which variables are more likely to influence the adoption of a specific type of soil conservation.

The immense literature on discrimination treats outcomes as relative: One group suffers compared to another. But does a difference arise because agents discriminate against others—are exophobic—or because they favor their own kind—are endophilic? This difference matters, as the relative importance of the types of discrimination and their inter-relation affect market outcomes. Using a field experiment in which graders at one university were randomly assigned students’ exams that did or did not contain the students’ names, on average we find favoritism but no discrimination by nationality, and neither favoritism nor discrimination by gender, findings that are robust to a wide variety of potential concerns. We observe heterogeneity in both discrimination and favoritism by nationality and by gender in the distributions of graders’ preferences. We show that a changing correlation between endophilia and exophobia can generate perverse changes in observed market discrimination.

Managing and arbitrating behaviours, processes and components in multilayered cognitive architectures when a huge amount of environmental variables are changing continuously with increasing complexity, ensue in a very comprehensive task. The presented framework proposes an hybrid cognitive architecture that relies on subsumption theory and includes some important extensions. These extensions can be condensed in inclusion of learning capabilities through bio-inspired reinforcement machine learning systems, an evolutionary mechanism based on gene expression programming to self-configure the behaviour arbitration between layers, a co-evolutionary mechanism to evolve behaviour repertories in a parallel fashion and finally, an aggregation mechanism to combine the learning algorithms outputs to improve the learning quality and increase the robustness and fault tolerance ability of the cognitive agent. The proposed architecture was proved in an animat environment using a multi-agent platform where several learning capabilities and emergent properties for self-configuring internal agent’s architecture arise.

Abstract: Autophagy is a highly regulated catabolic process that involves sequestration and lysosomal degradation of cytosolic components such as damaged organelles and misfolded proteins. While autophagy can be considered to be a general cellular housekeeping process, it has become clear that it may also play cell type-dependent functional roles. In this study, we analyzed the functional importance of autophagy in human hematopoietic stem/progenitor cells (HSPCs), and how this is regulated during differentiation. Western blot-based analysis of LC3-II and p62 levels, as well as flow cytometry-based autophagic vesicle quantification, demonstrated that umbilical cord blood-derived CD34(+) /CD38(-) immature hematopoietic progenitors show a higher autophagic flux than CD34(+) /CD38(+) progenitors and more differentiated myeloid and erythroid cells. This high autophagic flux was critical for maintaining stem and progenitor function since knockdown of autophagy genes ATG5 or ATG7 resulted in reduced HSPC frequencies in vitro as well as in vivo. The reduction in HSPCs was not due to impaired differentiation, but at least in part due to reduced cell cycle progression and increased apoptosis. This is accompanied by increased expression of p53, proapoptotic genes BAX and PUMA, and the cell cycle inhibitor p21, as well as increased levels of cleaved caspase-3 and reactive oxygen species. Taken together, our data demonstrate that autophagy is an important regulatory mechanism for human HSCs and their progeny, reducing cellular stress and promoting survival. Resumen: La autofagia es un proceso lisosomal catabólico altamente regulado que implica el secuestro y degradación de componentes citosólicos: tales como proteínas mal plegadas y orgánelos deteriorados. Mientras que la autofagia puede ser considerada como un proceso general de limpieza celular, también juega un papel funcional dependiendo del tipo de célula. En el presente estudio, hemos analizado la importancia de la autofagia en las células madre hematopoyéticas y sus progenitores y cómo dicho proceso está regulado durante la diferenciación. El análisis de los niveles de LC3-II y p62, así como la cuantificación de la autofagia mediante citometría de flujo demostraron que los progenitores hematopoyéticos inmaduros CD34 (+) / CD38 (-) tienen un flujo de autofagia mayor que las células eritroides y mieloides. Este alto flujo de autofagia es crucial para las células madre y los progenitores hematopoyéticos inmaduros CD34 (+) / CD38 (-) ya que la disminución en los niveles de ATG7 y ATG5 resulta en una reducción de dichas células tanto in vitro como in vivo. Lo anterior es consecuencia de la inhibición parcial del ciclo celular y de un aumento en apoptosis. Adicionalmente, observamos un incremento en la expresión de p53, los genes pro-apoptosis BAX y PUMA, el inhibidor de ciclo celular p21, los niveles de caspasa-3 clivada y las especies reactivas del oxígeno. En conclusión, nuestros datos demuestran que la autofagia es un mecanismo de regulación importante para las células madre hematopoyéticas y sus progenitores reduciendo los niveles de estrés y promoviendo su supervivencia.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that through the maintenance systems theory an audit methodology can be developed so it can be linked to a decision making process methodology to fully support the actions and initiatives proposed for improvement. Design/methodology/approach - The methodology is delimited by the concept of maintenance systems, from where a maintenance audit is developed to allow an integration of the Decision Making Grid (DMG) concept in order to add a basis of decision making and help in the prioritization process. Findings – This paper discuss an approach to the maintenance audits integrating well-established concepts of maintenance engineering and a decision making technique, which leads to an audit result-decision matrix that can show to the organization the wrong paths and shortcomings that are required to be solved in order to progress and close the gap to reach their desired performance. Originality/Value – Although there is a wide range of techniques developed to assess and audit, most of them imply a large and elaborated method not only for the questions (which are inevitable when assessing) but also to understand the findings and elaborate recommendations. The paper explores the integration of a defined maintenance system, its boundaries and its interactions, while mapping those concepts within a decision matrix.

We argue that a healthy urban forest contributes immensely to the sustainability of cities. The argument is based on a comprehensive array of values elicited from Canadians in several cities. To begin, we define the urban forest as inclusive of all the trees in the city and thus representing the predominant contributor to a city’s green infrastructure. Then we enumerate and explain the broad diversity of ways in which urban people value trees in the city. We, thus, show the myriad pathways by which trees contribute positively to any city’s social, economic, and ecological sustainability. Following a short summary of the ways in which trees may detract from people’s quality of life, we present promising management directions for urban-forest improvement, as we understand the situation in Canada. We conclude that all cities can enhance their sustainability by improving the urban forest.

Background: Female physicians face extra challenges in their career development and tend to choose salary or other forms of alternative payment plans (APP). Fee-for-service (FFS) and APP may affect the well-being of female and male physicians differently. Three measures of well-being are: levels of career satisfaction, professional equity, and daily distress. The objectives are to identify differences in the levels of career satisfaction, fulfillment-recognition equity, and daily distress of physicians by gender and payment method, and to assess interactions between these two factors. Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted in 2011 with physicians practicing in the Saskatoon Health Region, Saskatchewan, Canada. Resident physicians were excluded from the study. Eligible physicians completed a survey, assessing levels of daily distress, fulfillment-recognition equity, and career satisfaction as dependent variables. A multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA), using the Wilks’ Lambda criterion, was conducted to study differences among the dependent variables by remuneration method and gender. Multiple comparisons were performed as post-hoc tests. Results: Nearly half (382) of the 794 eligible physicians completed the questionnaire; 37.2% were female. Half were remunerated by FFS, a quarter by APP, and the remainder by blended forms. Career satisfaction and fulfillment-recognition equity were positively correlated to each other and daily distress was negatively correlated with both. According to the MANOVA results, the dependent variables were affected by gender but not by payment method, and there was no evidence of an interaction effect between payment method and gender. Women reported lower levels of career satisfaction (p=0.01) and fulfillment-recognition equity (p=0.01), and higher levels of daily distress (p=0.03).

Research topics related to the production of nanocomposites are the most important directions of development of new semiconductor engineering, ensuring high nanocomposites obtaining useful properties in the scope of biophysical characteristics, biomedical and piezoelectric applications. We present two case studies as Hydroxyapatite are in medical applications and aluminum nitride as acoustic wave sensor. Hydroxyapatite, is the main inorganic structure of the tooth enamel and bone and is a biomaterial that.

Biomimetic surface modification with peptides that have specific cell-binding moieties is a promising approach to improve endothelialization of metal-based stents. In this study, we functionalized CoCr surfaces with RGDS, REDV, YIGSR peptides and their combinations to promote endothelial cells (ECs) adhesion and proliferation. An extensive characterization of the functionalized surfaces was performed by XPS analysis, surface charge and quartz crystal microbalance with dissipation monitoring (QCM-D), which demonstrated the successful immobilization of the peptides to the surface. Cell studies demonstrated that the covalent functionalization of CoCr surfaces with an equimolar combination of RGDS and YIGSR represents the most powerful strategy to enhance the early stages of ECs adhesion and proliferation, indicating a positive synergistic effect between the two peptide motifs. Although these peptide sequences slightly increased smooth muscle cells (SMCs) adhesion, these values were ten times lower than those observed for ECs. The combination of RGDS with the REDV sequence did not show synergistic effects in promoting the adhesion or proliferation of ECs. The strategy presented in this study holds great potential to overcome clinical limitations of current metal stents by enhancing their capacity to support surface endothelialization.