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Background: Small mammals are important reservoirs for pathogens in military conflicts and peacekeeping operations all over the world. This study investigates the rodent communities in three military bases in Northern Afghanistan. Small mammals were collected in this conflict zone as part of Army pest control measures from 2009 to 2012 and identified phenotypically as well as by molecular biological methods. Results: The analysis of the collected small mammals showed that their communities are heavily dominated by the house mouse Mus musculus and to a lesser extent Cricetulus migratorius and Meriones libycus. The origin of M. musculus specimens was analyzed by DNA sequencing of the mitochondrial cytochrome b gene and D-loop sequences. All animals tested belonged to the Mus musculus musculus subspecies indigenous to Afghanistan. The results were supported by detection of two nucleotide exchanges in the DNA polymerase gene of Mus musculus Rhadinovirus 1 (MmusRHV1), a herpesvirus, which is specific for all gene sequences from Afghan house mice, but absent in the MmusRHV1 sequences of German and British house mice. Studies of astrovirus RNA polymerase gene sequences did not yield sufficient resolution power for a similarly conclusive result. Conclusions: House mouse populations in military camps in Northern Afghanistan are indigenous and have not been imported from Europe. Nucleotide sequence polymorphisms in MmusRHV1 DNA polymerase gene might be used as an additional phylogeographic marker for house mice.

Examensarbete i (socialt arbete) 15 högskolepoäng. Malmö universitet: Fakulteten för hälsa och samhälle, institutionen för socialt arbete, 2018.Opgaven tager afsæt i en undren over en tilsyneladende forskel i menneskeretlig diskurs i Danmark og Sverige. Menneskerettigheder er en central del af socialrådgiver(socionom)professionens selvforståelse og etiske grundlag i begge lande, hvorfor det er interessant at søge efter eventuelle forskelle i (social)juridisk diskurs i de to lande, der evt. kan medvirke til at give et billede af årsager til de forskelige perspektiver i de to lande. Opgaven indeholder herefter en kort beskrivelse af politiske perspektiver på menneskerettigheder i de to lande.Metodisk anvendes diskursanalysen, konkret ved en tekstanalyse af danske og svenske juridiske tekster om dels det (social)retlige forvaltningsskøn (värdering) i afgørelsessager (förvaltningsbelsut), og dels tekster om betydningen af menneskerettighedsbetragtninger i kredsen af lovlige kriterier ved afgørelser.Samlet skal det bidrage for det første at beskrive hvilke positioner, der overordnet eksisterer i henholdsvis dansk og svensk juridisk litteratur om det juridiske skøn og specifikt i forhold til socialret. For det andet beskrive hvilke positioner, der eksisterer i henholdsvis dansk og svensk juridisk litteratur om indvandrede retskilder som menneskerettigheder som relevante i forhold til de lovlige kriterier ved skønsudøvelse (på det sociale område) i de to lande. Og for det tredje diskutere om diskursen i den danske og svenske juridiske litteratur om skøn og menneskerettigheder eventuelt kan give bidrag til at forstå forskelle i politiske opfattelser af menneskerettigheder i politisk diskurs i Danmark og Sverige.Nøgleord/nyckelordAfgørelser/förvaltningsbeslut, diskursanalyse/diskursanalys, menneskerettigheder/ mänskliga rättigheter, skøn/skön (värdering), socialjura/ socialjuridik Degree project in social work, 15/30 högskolepoäng. Malmö University: Faculty of Health and Society, Department of social work, Year 2018.The point of departure for the paper is a interest in an apparently different discourse over human rights in Denmark and Sweden. Human rights is seen as a vital part of the self-understanding and ethical platform of the social work profession in both countries, wherefore it is interesting to look for possible differences in the (social)legal discourse in the two countries, that possibly may contribute to give a picture of the various perspectives in the two countries. The paper also contains a short description of political perspectives on human righs in the two countries.Methodically a discourse analysis is used, by making textanalysis of Danish and Swedish legal texts on partly the (social)legal administrative, discretionary decisions, and partly on texts relating to the importance of human rights considerations in finding the legal criteria for administrative discretionary based decisions. Combined the chapters contribute to describing the positions, that generally exist in Danish and Swedish legal litterature on discretion in decisionmaking and specifically in terms of Social Law. Secondly to describe the positions that exist in Danish and Swedish litterature on the relevance of International Law such as Human Rights Law as sources of law in terms of the legal criteria for decision making (in the field of Social Law). And thirdly discuss whether the discourse in the Danish and Swedish legal litterature on discretionary decisions and human rights may give a contribution to an understanding of the political perceptions of human rigths in the political discussion in Denmark and SwedenKey words: Administrative decisions, discourse analysis, human rights, discretionary decisions, social law

Purpose: Endothelial dysfunction and inflammation are conditions which fuel atherosclerosis and ischaemic heart disease. We have previously reported reduced cardiovascular (CV) mortality following supplementation with selenium and coenzyme Q10 to 443 elderly individuals with low selenium status (mean 67 μg/L) for 4 years. Here, we wanted to evaluate a possible association between the supplementation and the plasma concentrations of the von Willebrand factor (vWf), and the plasminogen activator inhibitor-1 (PAI-1), as they, besides other functions, are also strongly associated with endothelial function. Methods: In this sub-study, 308 individuals (active substance: 157, placebo: 151) were included. Blood samples were drawn after 6 and 36 months and vWf and PAI-1 were determined in plasma by ELISA. Changes in concentrations of the biomarkers were evaluated by the use of T tests, repeated measures of variance, and ANCOVA analyses. Results: The active treatment group presented a lower level of vWf after 36 months compared with the placebo group (1.08 U/mL vs. 5.10 U/mL; p = 0.0007). The results were validated through the repeated measures of variance evaluation. The PAI-1 levels showed an equally significant decrease in the active group (26.2 ng/mL vs. 49.2 ng/mL; p = 0.0002) and were also validated through repeated measures of variance evaluation. Conclusion: In this sub-study on elderly receiving selenium and coenzyme Q10, or placebo we found significantly lower levels of vWf and PAI-1 in the active treatment group as compared to the placebo group. We interpret this as a better endothelial function because of the intervention, which accords with a previous finding of reduced CV mortality. Keywords: Coenzyme Q10; Elderly; Intervention; PAI-1; Selenium; Von willebrand factor.

As the world sits on the cusp of a new age, a new Pacific century is dawning. The growth of the East Asian model of capitalism seems irreversible, driven by East Asian free trade. But can there be an East Asian Free Trade Area, leading eventually to a Pacfic FTA? Accepted version

It has been asserted that family language policy, or FLP, is the single most important factor affecting minority language maintenance, and moreover that this factor is resistant to outside influence. While there is little data available on language use within minority communities in Singapore, there is reason to believe that other significant factors besides FLP have affected language maintenance in the case of these languages. This study focuses on one of Singapore’s smallest ethnic minority groups, namely the Singaporean Punjabi community, and attempts to address the aforementioned premise through an exploration of the current state of the Punjabi language here, as well as factors affecting this. Through analysis of a combination of qualitative and quantitative data, several key factors affecting language maintenance in this community were identified in addition to FLP. The most prominent factors affecting language maintenance were found to be religious affiliations, language in education policies, and proximity to other speakers. Factors such as intermarriage and language attitudes also played a role, influencing families’ language choices and practices. The research presented suggests that FLP is neither immutable, nor the single most important factor affecting language maintenance where this particular community is concerned. Bachelor of Arts in Linguistics and Multilingual Studies

A very and natural way of introducing a logic is by using a sequent calculus, or Gentzen system. These systems are determined by specifying a set of axioms and a set of rules. Axioms are then starting points from which we can derive new consequences by using the rules. Hilbert systems consist also on a set of axioms and a set of rules that are used to deduce consequences. The main difference is that, whereas the axioms in Hilbert systems are formulas, and the rules allow to deduce certain formulas from other sets of formulas, in the case of Gentzen systems the axioms are sequents and the rules indicate which sequents can be inferred from other sets of sequents. By a sequent we understand a pair hG, Si, where G and S are finite sequences of formulas. We denote the sequent hG, Si by G . S.1 The sequent G . S intends to formalize – at least in its origin – the concept “the conjunction of all the formulas of G implies the disjunction of all the formulas of S.” The notion of a sequent calculus was invented by G. Gentzen in order to give axiomatizations for Classical and Intuitionistic Propositional Logics. And the rules he gave in both cases can be grouped in different categories: because of its character, the Cut rule deserves a special category for itself; then we have the rules of introduction and elimination of each one of the connectives, both on the left and on the right – of the symbol . –; and finally a set of rules that do not involve any particular connective. These rules are necessary in Classical and Intuitionistic logics because in these logics 1Traditional notations for sequents are G ) S and G ` S, but since both the symbols ) and ` have many other meanings, we prefer to denote sequents by using the less overloaded symbol ., which can also be found in literature with this use. the order in which we are given the premises, or if we have them repeated, is irrelevant, and we do not loose consequences if we extend the set of hypotheses. But there are other logics that do not satisfy all these rules: for instance, relevance logics and linear logic. At first, these logics were studied separately, and different theories were developed for their investigation. But later on, researches arrived to the conclusion that all of them share a common feature, which became more apparent after the work of W. Blok and D. Pigozzi. It was discovered that (pointed) residuated lattices – or FL algebras – are the algebraic counterpart of substructural logics. In the XIX century, Boole noticed a close connection between “the laws of thought,” as he put it, and algebra. After him, other mathematicians put together all the pieces and described a sort of algebras, named Boole algebras after him, and shed light on the connection anticipated by Boole: Boole algebras are the “natural” semantics for Classical Propositional Logic. More connections were discovered between other logics and other sorts of algebras: for instance, Heyting algebras are the “natural” semantics for Intuitionistic Propositional Logic, and MV algebras for Łukasievicz Multivalued Logic. But it was not until 1989, when Blok and Pigozzi published their book Algebraizable Logics, that for the first time the connections between these logics and classes of algebras were finally described with absolute precision. According to their definitions, these classes of algebras are the equivalent algebraic sematics of the corresponding logics. That is, these classes of algebras are the algebraic counterparts of the corresponding logics. Their ideas paved the way to a new branch of mathematics called Abstract Algebraic Logic, which investigates the connections between logics and classes of algebras, and the so-called bridge theorems: that is, theorems that establish bridges between some property of one realm (logic or algebra) with another property of the other realm. The core of the connection between substructural logics and residuated lattices is that in all these logics, some theorem of the following form could always be proven. Thus, we could think that the metalogical symbol ’,’ is acting as a real connective. More precisely, we could introduce a new connective , called fusion, and impose the following rule. Given an algebraic model with a lattice reduct, it is usually the case that the meet and join operations serve as the interpretations of the conjunction and disjunction connectives. What should be then the interpretation of the fusion? Usually, the elements of the lattice are thought as different degrees of truth, and “a . b is provable” is interpreted as “for every assignment, the degree of truth of a is less than that of b.” Under this natural interpretation, the condition (1) becomes: That is, the fusion is interpreted as a residuated operation on the lattice. Being the algebraic semantics of substructural logics and containing many interesting subvarieties such as Heyting algebras, MV algebras, and lattice-ordered groups, to name a few, the variety of residuated lattices is of utmost importance to the studies of Logic and Algebra, hence our interest. In this dissertation we carry out some investigations on different problems concerning residuated lattices. In what follows we give a brief description of the contents and organization of this dissertation. Every chapter – except for the first one, which is devoted to setting the preliminaries – starts with an introduction in which the reader will find a lengthier explanation of the subject of the chapter, the way the material is organized, and references. We start by compiling in Chapter 1 all the essential well-known results about residuated lattices that we will need in the subsequent chapters. We present here the definitions of those concepts that are not specific to some particular chapter, but general. We define the variety of residuated lattices, and some of its more significant subvarieties. We also introduce nuclei, and nucleus retracts. As it is widely known, the lattice of normal convex subalgebras of a residuated lattice is isomorphic to its congruence lattice, and hence its importance. But it turns out that also the lattice of convex (not necessarily normal) subalgebras is of great significance, specially in the case of e-cyclic residuated lattices. Many of its properties depend on the fact that it is a pseudo-complemented lattice. Actually, it is a Heyting algebra. For instance, polars are special sets usually defined in terms of a certain notion of orthogonality; in the case of e-cyclic residuated lattices, polars are the pseudo-complements of the convex subalgebras. We end the chapter by briefly explaining the notions of semilinearity and projectability for residuated lattices. In the 1960’s, P. F. Conrad and other authors set in motion a general program for the investigation of lattice-ordered groups, aimed at elucidating some order-theoretic properties of these algebras by inquiring into the structure of their lattices of convex `-subgroups. This approach can be naturally extended to residuated lattices and their convex subalgebras. We devote Chapters 2 and 3 to two different problems that can be framed within Conrad’s program for residuated lattices. More specifically, in Chapter 2 we revisit the Galatos-Tsinakis categorical equivalence between integral GMV algebras and negative cones of `-groups with a nucleus, showing that it restricts to an equivalence of the full subcategories whose objects are the projectable members of these classes. Afterwards, we introduce the notion of Gödel GMV algebras, which are expansions of projectable integral GMV algebras by a binary term that realizes a positive Gödel implication in every such algebra. We see that Gödel GMV algebras and projectable integral GMV algebras are essentially the same thing. Analogously, Gödel negative cones are those Gödel GMV algebras whose residuated lattice reducts are negative cones of `-groups. Thus, we turn projectable integral GMV algebras and negative cones of projectable `-groups into varieties by including this implication in their signature. We prove that there is an adjunction between the categories whose objects are the members of these varieties and whose morphisms are required to preserve implications. We devote Chapter 3 to the study of certain kinds of completions of semilinear residuated lattices. We can find in the literature different notions of completions for residuated lattices, like for example Dedekind-McNeil completions, regular completions, complete ideal completions, . . . Very often it happens that for a certain algebra in a variety of residuated lattices, those completions exists but do not belong to the same variety. That is, varieties are not closed, in general, under the operations of taking these kinds of completions. But there are other notions of completions that might have better properties in this regard. Conrad and other authors proved the existence of lateral completions, projectable completions, and orthocompletions for representable `-groups, and moreover, that the varieties of representable `-groups are closed under these completions. Our goal in this chapter is to prove the existence of lateral completions, (strongly) projectable completions, and orthocompletions for semilinear e-cyclic residuated lattices, as they are a natural generalization of representable `-groups. We introduce all these concepts along the chapter, and prove first that every semilinear e-cyclic residuated lattice can be densely embedded into another residuated lattice which is latterly complete and strongly projectable. We obtain this lattice as a direct limit of a certain family of algebras obtained from the original lattice by taking quotients and products, so the direct limit stays in the same variety where the original algebra lives. Finally, we prove that for semilinear GMV algebras, we can find minimal dense extensions satisfying all the required properties. In Chapter 4 we study the failure of the Amalgamation Property on several varieties of residuated lattices. The Amalgamation Property is of particular interest in the study of residuated lattices due to its relation with various syntactic interpolation properties of substructural logics. There are no examples to date of non-commutative varieties of residuated lattices that satisfy the Amalgamation Property. The variety of semilinear Abstract 5 residuated lattices is a natural candidate for enjoying this property, since most varieties that have a manageable representation theory and satisfy the Amalgamation Property are semilinear. However, we prove that this is not the case, and in the process we establish that the same happens for the variety of semilinear cancellative residuated lattices, that is, it also lacks the Amalgamation Property. In addition, we prove that the variety whose members have a distributive lattice reduct and satisfy the identity x(y ^ z)w xyw ^ xzw also fails the Amalgamation Property. In Chapter 5 we show how some well-known results of the theory of automata, in particular those related to regular languages, can be viewed within a wider framework. In order to do so, we introduce the concept of module over a residuated lattice, and show that modules over a fixed residuated lattice – that is, partially ordered sets acted upon by a residuated lattice – provide a suitable algebraic framework for extending the concept of a recognizable language as defined by Kleene. More specifically, we introduce the notion of a recognizable element of a residuated lattice by a finite module and provide a characterization of such an element in the spirit of Myhill’s characterization of recognizable languages. Further, we investigate the structure of the set of recognizagle elements of a residuated lattice, and also provide sufficient conditions for a recognizable element to be recognized by a Boolean module. We summarize in Chapter 6 the main results of this dissertation and propose some of the problems that still remain open. We end this dissertation with an appendix on directoids. These structures were introduced independently three times, and their aim is to study directed ordered sets from an algebraic perspective. The structures that we have studied in this dissertations have an underlying order, but moreover they have a lattice reduct. That is not always the case for directed ordered sets. Hence the importance of the study of directoids. We prove some properties of directoids and their expansions by additional and complemented directoids. Among other results, we provide a shorter proof of the direct decomposition theorem for bounded involute directoids. We present a description of central elements of complemented directoids. And finally we show that the variety of directoids, as well as its expansions mentioned above, all have the strong amalgamation property.

The Baseline Indicators (BLIs) assessment has been conducted by the Development Partners and the Government of Pakistan as a precursor to carrying forward the Government's efforts to upgrade the Country Procurement Systems (CPS) to international standards and to help it assess the level and type of technical assistance required for achieving this objective. The assessment, being the first phase of a comprehensive procurement performance assessment, covered the four pillars as well as all the indicators and sub-indicators in each pillar based on a review of the existing regulatory framework and the institutional and operational arrangements and as provided for in the Organization for Economic Development (OECD) Development Advisory Committee (DAC) guidelines. While the views expressed in the report were the subject of discussions at the stakeholders' workshop, they do not necessarily represent the views of the Government of Pakistan. The result indicates that compared to the standard required for a transparent, efficient and effective procurement system, the existing system in Pakistan needs to be improved substantially. The highest achieved rating is for pillar one, the legislative and regulatory framework, which is an amalgam of specific legislation and sub-legislation impacting the procurement activity of the government and the older legislative instruments affecting the overall operations of the public and/or the private sectors. The Public Procurement Regulatory Authority (PPRA) is the apex body of the institutional framework (pillar two) governing the public procurement arena. The Pakistan Engineering Council (PEC) was involved as a member of the Kazi committee to prepare a standard bidding document and standard General Conditions of Contract (GCC) for all engineering contracts. Improvements in improving the procurement market and operations (pillar three) can only happen when substantial progress has been achieved in reforming pillars one and two of the procurement framework. Integrity and efficiency in the public procurement system (pillar four) is the ultimate goal of all procurement systems and is not easily achieved. This, therefore, requires changes not only within the specific procurement related legislation, but also across a raft of other legislation to ensure an overall enabling environment. Coupled to this is the need to motivate decision makers and civil society to actively participate in ensuring the implementation of the revised legislation. This will require several years, but the effort could be started at an early stage of the reform process.