Electrochemical capacitors and lithium-ion batteries have seen little change in their electrolyte chemistry since their commercialization, which has limited improvements in device performance. ...Combining superior physical and chemical properties and a high dielectric-fluidity factor, the use of electrolytes based on solvent systems that exclusively use components that are typically gaseous under standard conditions show a wide potential window of stability and excellent performance over an extended temperature range. Electrochemical capacitors using difluoromethane show outstanding performance from -78° to +65°C, with an increased operation voltage. The use of fluoromethane shows a high coulombic efficiency of ~97% for cycling lithium metal anodes, together with good cyclability of a 4-volt lithium cobalt oxide cathode and operation as low as -60°C, with excellent capacity retention.
Electrochemical capacitors and lithium-ion batteries have seen little change in their electrolyte chemistry since their commercialization, which has limited improvements in device performance. ...Combining superior physical and chemical properties and a high dielectric-fluidity factor, the use of electrolytes based on solvent systems that exclusively use components that are typically gaseous under standard conditions show a wide potential window of stability and excellent performance over an extended temperature range. Electrochemical capacitors using difluoromethane show outstanding performance from –78° to +65°C, with an increased operation voltage. The use of fluoromethane shows a high coulombic efficiency of ~97% for cycling lithium metal anodes, together with good cyclability of a 4-volt lithium cobalt oxide cathode and operation as low as –60°C, with excellent capacity retention.
A thin-film electrochemical sensor electrode capable of electrolytic conductivity, cyclic voltammetry, and temperature measurements of electrolyte solutions has been fabricated and characterized. The ...electrode fabrication and calibration is detailed, showing accuracies of
±
6 % for electrolytic conductivity measurements over the range of 0.1–100 mS·cm
-
1
and temperature measurement within
±
2
∘
C from
-
60 to 95
∘
C. The electrode’s capabilities are verified with standard Li-ion battery and electrochemical double-layer capacitor electrolytes, to which the measured data match well with literature values. Lastly, demonstration of the electrode’s capabilities is shown with determination of cyclic voltammetry curves and electrolytic conductivity over a range of temperatures for other electrolyte solutions. Integration of these three measurement tools into a single, low-cost, high accuracy, rapid measurement electrode can greatly simplify quantitative characterization of novel electrolytes developed in the electrochemical energy storage field.
Abstract Little is known about the epidemiology of HCV in Suriname, a former Dutch colony in South America. To study the prevalence, determinants and genetic diversity of HCV, a one-month survey was ...conducted at the only Emergency Department in the capital Paramaribo. Participants (≥18 years) completed an interviewer-led standardized HCV risk-factor questionnaire, were tested for HCV-antibodies, and if positive also for HCV RNA. The overall HCV prevalence was 1.0% (22/2128 participants; 95%CI 0.7–1.5). Male sex (OR=4.11; 95%CI 1.30–13.01), older age (OR=1.06 per year increase; 95%CI 1.04–1.09), Javanese ethnicity (OR=7.84; 95%CI 3.25–18.89) and cosmetic tattooing (OR=31.7; 95%CI 3.25–323.87) were independently associated with HCV-infection. Phylogenetic analysis revealed six distinct HCV subtypes, all HCV-genotype 2 (HCV-2): subtype 2f (also circulating in Indonesia) plus five yet unassigned HCV-2 subtypes exclusively linked to Suriname.
If the opinion surveys are right, Michelle Bachelet would become the first woman to be elected president in a major Latin American country. Her gold-rimmed glasses and frumpy two-piece suits may ...give her the air of a school headmistress, but Bachelet is in the vanguard of a generation of self-confident women who are staking their claims in the traditionally macho world of Latin American politics. Since 1991, 11 countries have enacted laws requiring political parties to nominate a minimum percentage of female candidates for legislative office, and in some instances the number of women lawmakers doubled between 1997 and 1999. A 12th nation, Colombia, passed a law in 2000 requiring that women occupy at least 30 percent of appointed decision-making posts in the executive branch. This year's key midterm congressional elections in Argentina will be dominated by the showdown for Senate seats between the nation's current First Lady, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, and her immediate predecessor, Hilda (Chiche) Duhalde, in populous Buenos Aires province. "In the past 10 years there has been a tremendous increase in the number of women in positions of power, not just running for office but serving in ministries and as elected legislators," says Mala Htun, a political scientist at the New School for Social Research in New York who has written extensively about the subject. "It's opening up opportunities to women who are quite prepared and competent." Perhaps no one personifies the new breed of female politicians in Latin America better than Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner--or just Cristina, as she is universally known. Growing up in the Argentine city of La Plata, Cristina was inspired by the example of Eva Peron, the fiery wife of Juan Domingo Peron who championed the demands of the country's blue-collar workers and became a national icon when she died of leukemia at the age of 33. During her years as a university student, Cristina joined the Peronist Party's youth movement amid the wanton political violence that engulfed Argentina in the early 1970s and culminated in a military coup in 1976. The junta's brutal repression of left-wing Peronist activists like Cristina and her new husband, Nestor Kirchner, led the young couple to retreat to his native province of Santa Cruz in southern Patagonia. With the restoration of democracy in 1983, Kirchner and Cristina, both of whom were successful attorneys in their early 30s, began plotting their political careers. Unlike that of her idol Eva Peron, Cristina's own rise to the pinnacle of Argentine politics was never primarily a function of her husband's star power. She became a national figure in 1995 when she was elected to the Argentine Senate, at a time when Nestor was a relatively obscure provincial governor and several years before he decided to run for president. With-in months Cristina had become a familiar figure on the country's top-rated political talk shows, denouncing illegal arms sales and the corruption that flourished under the government of President Carlos Menem, who also headed the Peronist Party at the time. Her outspoken criticisms eventually earned Cristina an expulsion from the Pe-ronist Senate caucus, a punishment that she attributes partly to her gender (sidebar). And after Nestor scored a surprise victory in the 2003 presidential election, she made a point of remaining in her assigned seat in the Senate cham-ber on the day he donned the azure-and-white sash inside the National Congress rather than join him on the podium. "My political career did not begin on that day," she told NEWSWEEK. "Before Kirchner became president, I had been a legislator, an activist, a politician."
It also weighs down the country with a never fully resolved trauma. President Nestor Kirchner, who was an active member of the radical Peronist Youth movement in the 1970s, is the first product of ...that generation to reach the presidency in Argentina. And it's clear that providing succor for the victims of the Dirty War is one of his priorities. He's focused much of his energies on social- justice and human-rights issues since taking office 15 months ago. Among his first acts as president was the repeal of a decree blocking the extradition of current and former members of the armed forces who are wanted by European prosecutors on charges of gross human-rights abuses. In August of last year Kirchner strong-armed the Argentine congress into annulling two controversial laws, enacted by a democratically elected government in the late 1980s, which ended all pending human-rights trials involving military personnel. To date, approximately 100 retired and active-duty military officers and enlisted men have been jailed under Kirchner for alleged human-rights violations. In Kirchner's view, these moves are aimed at healing the old wounds of the Dirty War. But some right-wing critics and political opponents argue they're having the opposite effect, exposing again the country's thoroughly polarized culture. In their view, the 54- year-old Kirchner's emphasis on justice smacks of setentismo--a political buzzword meaning "seventyism," as in the 1970s. For Kirchner's political foes, it's an irrational, idealistic and unduly biased fascination with the political and often armed struggles of that decade. They say a relentless rehash of the country's blood- stained past is simply not conducive to the building of consensus and the healing of still festering wounds. "The country cannot allow itself the luxury of really delving into human rights," insists Patricia Bullrich, a former cabinet minister in the center-right government of President Fernando de la Rua. She, like Kirchner, was a Peronist firebrand in her student days. "It is too busy working out how it will survive economically. The Kirchner government is recreating a society that was split into two sides, when it should be above that." The right-wing opposition does not limit itself to carping about a supposed witch hunt for Dirty War-era killers. Some leading foes of Kirchner have accused the president of cozying up too closely to Venezuela's populist President Hugo Chavez, needlessly picking fights with the International Monetary Fund and favoring a larger role for the state in the Argentine economy. They lay much of the blame on several former Montonero guerrillas who hold prominent government positions under Kirchner, who himself apparently never had any links to armed groups. Among the better known Montonero alumni are Kirchner's influential deputy chief of staff Carlos Kunkel, Foreign Minister Rafael Bielsa and deputy foreign minister Jorge Taiana.
The recently proposed Uniswap v3 replaces the fungible liquidity provider token (LP token) into non-fungible ones, making the design for liquidity mining more difficult. In this paper, we propose a ...flexible liquidity mining scheme that realizes the overall liquidity distribution through the fine control of local rewards. From the liquidity provider's point of view, the liquidity provision strategy forms a multiplayer zero-sum game. We analyze the Nash Equilibrium and the corresponding strategy, approximately, deploying the liquidity proportional to the reward distribution, in some special cases and use it to guide the general situations. Based on the strategic response above, such a scheme allows the mining rewards provider to optimize the distribution of liquidity for the purpose such as low slippage and price stabilization.
Nationalizing the gas industry is a minority view in Bolivia. But it does reflect growing disenchantment across Latin America with the privatization of energy resources. In the headlong rush to ...embrace free-market models of economic growth during the 1990s, governments from Venezuela to Argentina opened up their energy sectors to foreign investment. It made sense at the time because many state- owned oil, gas and electric-power companies lacked the capital to expand operations and keep pace with rising demand. But partly because of political pressures and regulatory disputes, privatization hasn't achieved the desired outcome. Argentina, for example, is facing gas shortages as the Southern Hemisphere's winter approaches. To mitigate the problem, the country has reduced exports to Chile and Uruguay, threatening those countries with shortages of their own. "There is a feeling that the shift toward a market- oriented model hasn't delivered the goods to the population," says Jed Bailey, Latin America research director for the consulting firm Cambridge Energy Research Associates. For better or worse, the prevailing trend is toward greater state intervention. Brazil's President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has halted further privatization of that country's hybrid energy sector. While three quarters of all electricity distribution in Brazil is handled by privately owned utilities, the government still owns 80 percent of power-generation capacity. Lula also wants to curb the authority of independent regulatory agencies and give his Energy minister the final say over which companies can operate in Brazil. Foreign energy executives are frustrated. "Before, government was the lawmaker and regulator," says Mickey Peters, a group vice president for the U.S. company Duke Energy, which has invested $1.7 billion in Brazil and other South American countries. "Now it's also a competitor and a planner in the business." By playing the statist card, Lula is ignoring the lessons of one of his country's own major success stories. In the early 1990s Brasilia largely cut its ties to Petrobras, the state-owned oil monopoly, giving the company free rein to operate like a private concern. Petrobras has taken advantage of its autonomy, venturing outside Brazil and doing deals with both state and private companies. Today it produces 85 percent of the oil that Brazil consumes--a startling turn-around from the 1970s, when the country imported 85 percent of its oil. Petrobras is one of the firms that landed a multiple service contract to drill for natural gas in Mexico. "Petrobras is growing very fast in terms of oil and gas production, and these days it's looked at as the Latin American oil company," says David Shields, a Mexico City-based expert on Latin American energy issues, who recently published a book on Pemex.
Community-based participatory research (CBPR) strives for equitable collaboration among community and academic partners throughout the research process. To build the capacity of academia to function ...as effective research partners with communities, the North Carolina Translational and Clinical Sciences Institute (NC TraCS), home of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH)'s Clinical and Translational Sciences Award (CTSA), developed a community engagement consulting model. This new model harnesses the expertise of community partners with CBPR experience and compensates them equitably to provide technical assistance to community-academic research partnerships.
This paper describes approaches to valuing community expertise, the importance of equitable compensation for community partners, the impact on the community partners, opportunities for institutional change, and the constraints faced in model implementation.
Community Experts (CEs) are independent contractor consultants. CEs were interviewed to evaluate their satisfaction with their engagement and compensation for their work.
(1) CEs have knowledge, power, and credibility to push for systems change. (2) Changes were needed within the university to facilitate successful consultation to community-academic partnerships. (3) Sustaining the CE role requires staff support, continued compensation, increased opportunities for engagement, and careful consideration of position demands. (4) The role provides benefits beyond financial compensation. (5) Opportunities to gather deepened relationships within the partnership and built collective knowledge that strengthened the project.
Leveraging CE expertise and compensating them for their role benefits both university and community. Creating a place for community expertise within academia is an important step toward equitably including the community in research.
Dramatic as it was, the cop killings were not an isolated incident. Vigilantism has taken root in Latin America over the past decade, lending credence to the notion that the region is in the throes ...of a democratic crisis. From Venezuela and Guatemala to Bolivia and Peru, angry crowds are increasingly taking the law into their own hands, meting out physical punishment for crimes real and imagined. Vigilantes often "lynch" common criminals who, in their view, have escaped justice. More recently they've started attacking public officials suspected of malfeasance. Last May a mob in the Peruvian town of Ilave beat their mayor after accusing him of embezzlement, then dragged him into a public square and left him to die. "Lynching has grown totally out of control," says Mark Ungar, an expert on Latin American police reform at the Woodrow Wilson International School for Scholars in Washington. "It's spreading in the sense that vigilantes are going after criminals, officials, even governments--and once it starts it's hard to stop." Analysts say that many cases of vigilantism are desperate attempts by disenfranchised groups to assert a nascent political will. In one case, closely documented by University of Washington sociologist Angelina Godoy Snodgrass, thousands of people gathered on a farm in rural Guatemala in October 2001 to witness the hanging and burning of three men suspected of stealing some fertilizer and candy. In a recent article, Snodgrass notes ominously that the process was "clearly premeditated... community security committees had been constituted to handle crime." If vigilantism is left unchecked, say experts, the problem could develop into something even more sinister--swaths of Latin American territory where mobs and mafia types rule. Snodgrass believes the trend is part of the "dark side of democracy."
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