184,485 research outputs found
We are all in Guantanamo: State Terror and the Case of Mamdouh Habib
No full textMamdouh Habib was one of two Australians detained at the US prison camp in its naval facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Habib was kidnapped in October 2001 from a bus bound for Karachi, after intervening, as what might be described as a solicitous bystander, in the hauling off the bus in Pakistan of two young German national Muslim men whom he had befriended (Habib 2008: 84–7; Dateline 2005). He was taken, shackled and hooded, to Islamabad. He was tortured by the Pakistani security forces and interrogated by American agents, in communication with (and Habib claims in the presence of) Australian officials (Habib 2008: 100–8; Wilkinson 2005). He was then handed over to US forces and unlawfully ‘rendered’ by the US military in a ‘ghost flight’ to Egypt, where he was tortured while imprisoned and interrogated over six months, before transfer to Guantánamo in May 2002, via Bagram air base in Afghanistan. He was demonstrably tortured in US custody. In early 2005, details of his kidnapping, rendition and torture reached US courts – and thus the media – during a habeas corpus case, and the presumptively innocent Habib was repatriated to Australia in January 2005 without charge or trial. Australia’s security forces and government were evidently complicit in the unlawful mistreatment of Habib. He was certainly not ‘the worst of the worst’, nor had much, if any, security-sensitive intelligence. What rationale was there for his long-term detention and interrogation? What purpose underlay his abuse and humiliation (including sexual assault) in custody? This chapter argues that these forms of terrifying and well publicized crimes by the states involved serve to terrify and repress the wider communities from which the victims come, making an example of the victim-detainee for political purposes
Photo of Bedra and Habib Michael and their children.
No full textA photograph of Bedra and Habib Michael and their children. Standing L-R: Mary, Mickey, Habib, Dick. Seated L-R: Leo, Bedra with infant, Freddie
Lecaimmeria pakistanica K. Habib, R. Zulfiqar & Khalid 2022, sp. nov.
No full textLecaimmeria pakistanica K.Habib, R.Zulfiqar & Khalid sp. nov. MB844738 Fig. 2 Diagnosis Distinguished from all the known species of the genus by having large ascospores (20–32 × 10–16 μm), and relatively taller hymenium. All the other species of the genus have ascospore dimensions in the range of 14–22 × 5–14 μm. Also separated from other species of the genus by ITS nrDNA sequence data. Etymology The specific epithet ʻ pakistanica ʼ refers to country in which the new species was discovered. Material examined Holotype PAKISTAN • Azad Jammu and Kashmir, Muzaffarabad, Peer Chinasi; 34°23′ N, 73°32′ E; alt. 2924 m; on rocks; 9Aug. 2018; T. Saifullah and K. Habib leg.; PC-21; LAH [LAH-36674]; GenBank no.: MW508503. Paratype PAKISTAN • Azad Jammu and Kashmir, Muzaffarabad, Peer Chinasi; 34°23′ N, 73°32′ E; alt. 2700 m, on rocks; 22 Jul. 2019; T. Saifullah and K. Habib leg.; PC-22; LAH [LAH-36675]; GenBank no.: MW508504. Description Thallus crustose, areolate, up to 6 cm wide, in section 200–280 μm thick, upper surface yellow-brown to brown, no change when wet. Areoles separate, flat to weakly convex, irregular to angular, slightly pruinose near margin, glossy, adnate, without fissures, marginal areoles slightly larger, up to 1.5 mm across, up to 0.6 mm thick, rarely with whitish margins. Prothallus visible between areoles, blackish. Cortex two layered, ca 40–60 μm thick, paraplectenchymatous, cells 8–12 μm in diam., upper layer paler brown, 10–16 μm thick, lower layer hyaline, 30–40 μm thick, epinecral layer distinct, up to 20 μm high. Algal layer 80–120 μm thick, chlorococcoid, cells globose to subglobose, 10–20 μm in diam. Medulla: hyphae white, 15–30 μm thick, corresponding with areole, IKI+ blue. Apothecia crypto-lecanorine, frequent at center of thallus, 1–4 per areole, immersed, sometimes not completely surrounded by the areole. Disc contiguous to separate, flat to concave, reddish brown, rounded at first becoming irregular, sometimes surrounded by a white rim, up to 0.8 mm diam., thinly to rarely pruinose, margin pruinose. Proper exciple thin, poorly differentiated, reduced, hyaline, 10–25 μm thick. Hymenium hyaline, 130–160 μm tall including the epihymenium, which is pale brown to brown, 10– 15 μm thick, epinecral layer 3–7 μm thick; paraphyses apically branched, anastomosing, 1–2 μm wide, apically slight swollen, apices 2.5–3.5 μm wide. Hypothecium 60–100 μm tall, light grayish brown, containing algal cell in the lower part. Asci Porpidia - type, clavate, 80–130 × 25–45 μm, amyloid wall 4–6 μm thick, 8-spored; ascospores hyaline, ellipsoid to broadly ellipsoid, mature with germ tube, 20–32 × 10–16 μm. Spot tests cortex and medulla K-, C-, KC-; medulla IKI+ blue; TLC none detected. Ecology Growing on sun-exposed rocks in a dense forest at an altitude of 2900 m. Topography is mountainous in Himalayan region. Dominant tree species are Pinus roxburghii Sarg., Pinus wallichiana A.B.Jacks., Cedrus deodara (Roxb.) G.Don, Picea smithiana (Wall.) Boiss, Abies pindrow Royle. Maximum and minimum temperature of 32°C and -8°C, respectively. Annual rainfall varying between 1000–1500 mm.Published as part of Habib, Kamran, Zulfiqar, Rizwana & Khalid, Abdul Nasir, 2022, Lecaimmeria pakistanica, a new lichen from Azad Jammu and Kashmir, Pakistan, pp. 94-101 in European Journal of Taxonomy 834 on pages 96-99, DOI: 10.5852/ejt.2022.834.1901, http://zenodo.org/record/701051
Liver resection with bipolar radiofrequency device: Habib™ 4X
No full textAbstractBackground. Intraoperative blood loss has been shown to be an important factor correlating with morbidity and mortality in liver surgery. In spite of the technological advances in hepatic parenchymal transection devices, bleeding remains the single most important complication of liver surgery. The role of radiofrequency (RF) in liver surgery has been expanded from tumour ablation to major hepatic resections in the last decade. Habib™ 4X, a new bipolar RF device designed specifically for liver resection is described here. Methods. Habib™ 4X is a bipolar, handheld, disposable RF device and consists of two pairs of opposing electrodes which is introduced perpendicularly into the liver, along the intended transection line. It produces controlled RF energy between the electrodes and the heat produced seals even major biliary and blood vessels and enables resection of the liver parenchyma with a scalpel without blood loss or biliary leak. Results. Three hundred and eleven patients underwent 384 liver resections from January 2002 to October 2007 with this device. There were 109 major resections and none of the patients had vascular inflow occlusion (Pringle's manoeuvre). Mean intraoperative blood loss was 305ml (range 0–4300) ml, with less than 5% (n=18) rate of transfusion. Conclusion. Habib™ 4X is an additional device for hepatobiliary surgeons to perform liver resections with minimal blood loss and low morbidity and mortality rates
White noise quantum time shifts
No full textIn the present paper we extend the notion of quantum time shift, and the
related results obtained in \cite{[abo06]}, from representations of current algebras
of the Heisenberg Lie algebra to representations of current algebras
of the Oscillator Lie algebra.\
This produces quantum extensions of a class of classical L'evy processes much
wider than the usual Brownian motion. In particular this class processes includes
the Meixner processes and, by an approximation procedure, we construct
quantum extensions of all classical L'evy processes with a L'evy measure
with finite variance.
Finally we compute the explicit form of the action, on the Weyl operators of the
initial space, of the generators of the quantum Markov processes canonically
associated to the above class of L'evy processes.
The emergence of the Meixner classes in connection with the renormalized
second order white noise, is now well known. The fact that they also emerge from
first order noise in a simple and canonical way, comes somehow as a surprise
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
No full textWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Photo of men from the extended family of Habib and Bedra Michael.
No full textA photograph of the extended family of Habib and Bedra Michael. Standing L-R: Leo Michael (Sheffi), Fred Michael (Ferdoun), Gus Duffy (family friend), Chris Andrews (nephew). Seated L-R: Mickey Michael (Mikhail), Albert Michael (Habib, the father), Father Joe Michael, O.M.I. (nephew) Albert Andrews (nephew), Frankie Cromwell (nephew)
Experimental study of spot weld parameters in resistance spot welding process
No full textResistance spot welding is a comparatively clean and ef?cient weld-ing process that is widely used in sheet metal joining. This process involves electrical, thermal and mechanical interactions. Resistance spot welding primarily takes place by localized melting at the inter-face of the sheets followed by its quick solidi?cation under sequential control of water cooled electrode pressure and ?ow of required electric current for certain duration. In this experimental work the tensile tests and the spot weld diameter were studied. The objectives of this analysis is to understand the physics of the process and to show the influence of the electrical current, weld time and the type material in resistance spot welding process
Optimising social welfare in practical cooperative settings
No full textThe coalition structure generation (CSG) problem is a fundamental topic in multi-agent systems and cooperative game theory. It treats scenarios in which cooperative agents strive to maximise the sum of their utilities known as the social welfare. Existing research addressing the CSG problem has focused on settings where an agent’s participation is restricted to one coalition, while little research has been done on overlapping coalition formation games (OCF-Gs). OCF-Gs, introduced by Chalkiadakis et al. (2010), allow agents to join multiple coalitions. More specifically, Chalkiadakis et al. (2010) defined threshold task games (TTGs), to represent overlapping coalitions of agents in a taskbased environment. In essence, every agent is endowed with a certain amount of a resource and is allowed to contribute to multiple tasks represented as coalitions. However, the TTG model makes the simplifying assumption that the environment consists of only one type of resource. As the first contribution in this thesis, we introduce MR-TTGs (multiple-resource threshold task games), an extension of TTGs that models environments with multiple resources. Furthermore, for our second contribution, we solve the CSG problem for MR-TTGs. To this end, we present two reductions of the CSG problem on MR-TTGs to two different variants of the knapsack problem. We then propose two anytime branch and bound algorithm for solving these reductions. Moreover, work on CSG studies a very general setting where coalition structures of all sizes are feasible. However, in certain scenarios, it is desirable to specify the size (cardinality) of a coalition structure depending on the availability of some resource. The number of rooms or vehicles available, for example, influences the number of coalitions in a coalition structure. For our third contribution, we propose an algorithm to address the problem of cardinality constrained CSG. The running time of the algorithm is small for large coalition structure sizes. Moreover, the approximation ratio was less than 1.006 for all instances. Furthermore, most of the literature on CSG focused on settings where the coalition values are given. However, in many settings, obtaining the optimal coalition values require iv complex computations. As a result, in order to utilise existing CSG algorithm, one needs to calculate the values of all coalitions beforehand. We ran a couple of problems of 25 agents in this setting and it took 3 days to solve each problem using CPLEX. To circumvent expensive calculations, for our fourth contribution, we utilise interval cooperative games to substitute coalition values with approximate ones. More specifically, we prove that the resulting coalition structure is within β 2 of the optimal, where β is the approximation ratio of the values used in the interval model. Additionally, empirical evaluation of our proposed approach output solutions that are within β of the optimal
"Closing the R&D Gap, Evaluating the Sources of R&D Spending"
No full textBoth spending and tax policies have been implemented in the United States with the goal of stimulating private sector research and development (R&D). Karier questions whether current R&D policy, especially the research and experimentation tax credit, can contribute to closing the gap between nondefense expenditures on R&D in the United States and such expenditures in other countries, such as Japan and Germany. He also explores possible changes to our current R&D policy to make it more effective.
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