The success of the Internet has launched McLuhan’s idea of the global village. Over the years, the Internet has become a real political medium which has inspired the emergence of the concept of e-democracy. Despite some successful applications, many limitations prevent its wide expansion. Some of these limitations can be solved with social software, in particular with the emerging Web 2.0 appli...

Information technology is currently taking center stage and transformed the whole world into a global village with a global economy, which is increasingly dependant on the creative management and distribution of information. The enormous advantages it has in easing the delivery of information around the world. The paper discusses the impact of information technology and role of libraries in the...

People have always been mobile. In the Middle Ages, masses moved because of pilgrimages. Today, these masses are called holiday travellers. People have never been more mobile than today. Because of increasing prosperity and the abolishment of many borders in Europe, "freedom" has become a new symbol. Freedom causes movement. We have yet to overcome the borders of the countries behind the former...

Eukaryotic gene expression is regulated both at the transcription and the mRNA degradation levels. The implementation of functional genomics methods that allow the simultaneous measurement of transcription (TR) and degradation (DR) rates for thousands of mRNAs is a huge improvement in this field. One of the best established methods for mRNA stability determination is genomic run-on (GRO). It al...

An Asynchronous Gated Ring Oscillator based Time to Digital Converter (A-GRO-TDC) is proposed. Gating functionality is added to a simple Ring Oscillator which drastically improves the system performance with asynchronous operation. Energy saving is possible due to scrambling and first order noise shaping. The proposed 9 bit A-GRO-TDC is implemented in Cadence using 0. 18μm digital CMOS Technolo...

In promoting a "New Policy Agenda," bilateral and multilateral donor agencies are keen to finance nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and grassroots organizations (GROs) on the grounds of their economic efficiency and contribution to "good governance." This paper reviews the impact of this trend on NGO/GRO programming, performance, legitimacy and accountability. It finds that much of the case ...

chemokines are classified in four distinct groups as cxc, cc, cx3c and c, depending on the presence or absence of a motif called elr (arg-leu-glu) before the first cysteine residue in their structure. cxc chemokines are also subdivided into elr + and elr - . increasing evidence has indicated the existence of a chemokine network in the liver which is involved in both physiological responses and,...

An 80MS/s analog-to-digital converter (ADC) based on single-slope conversion is presented which utilizes a recently developed gated ring oscillator (GRO) time-to-digital converter (TDC) to achieve an ENOB of 6.45 bits. To save power, the time-to-digital conversion is done in two steps, the first of which is based on coarse time quantization as measured by cycles of an oscillator and the second ...