The question of land in Zimbabwe has always been political and gendered. Whereas land reform was necessary in the context of highly unequal land ownership patterns and poverty, this paper shows that the Fast Track Land Reform Programme diminished opportunities or spaces for women to be empowered and shrunk the democratic spaces for genuine participation of women in the development process by de...

We present a procedure to perform and interpret pull-off force measurements during the jump-off-contact process between a liquid drop and rough surfaces using a conventional atomic force microscope. In this method, a micrometric liquid mercury drop is attached to an AFM tipless cantilever to measure the force required to pull this drop off a rough surface. We test the method with two surfaces: ...

the load transfer mechanisms of cable bolts differ from those for normal rebar bolts. the cable bolts used in mines are basically steel strands with different constructions depending on the number of wires or elements and the way they are laid. tendon bolts (rebar and cable) are normally evaluated for their strength and load transfer properties. the tendon strength can be evaluated by the tensi...

I feel somewhat relaxed and freer since I resigned from the position of Vice Minister of Finance for International Affairs about a month ago. At least now I don’t have to worry about what I say about the yen/US dollar rate for the wire people who used to follow me all over the world. I would like to remind you that what I say today does not necessarily reflect the official views of the Japanese...

Introduction Geriatric patients and their relative fragility with respect to younger patients represent a surgical dilemma for the general surgeon. This has led surgeons to adopt "tailored" techniques and strategies to treat them. The rapid increase of this aged population has given the clinician the chance to push forward the knowledge on this subset of patients and challenge previous concepts...

Understanding the microscopic dispersion and aggregation of nanoparticles at nanoscale media has become an important challenge during the last decades. Nanoscale modeling techniques are the important tools to tackle many of the complex problems faced by engineers and scientists. Making progress in the investigations at nanoscale whether experimentally or computationally has helped understand th...

In the current study, the effects of Casimir force and squeeze film damping on pull-in instability and dynamic behavior of electrostatically actuated nano and micro electromechanical systems are investigated separately. Linear elastic membrane theory is used to model the static and dynamic behavior of the system for strip, annular and disk geometries. Squeeze film damping is modeled using nonli...

Culture of entrepreneurs is also a sort of capital, which has a direct effect on development of enterprises in the process of economic operation of enterprises. Construction of cultural capital among entrepreneurs helps to enhance the overall competitive strength of Chinese enterprises in international society and helps to push forward development of the economic society. Due to historical reas...

This article deals with effects of thermal stresses on stability and frequency response of a fully clamped circular microplate, which acts as the diaphragm of a capacitive MEMS microphone. Static and dynamic pull-in phenomena limit the stable regions of a capacitive MEMS microphone. The results show that the non-dimensional static pull-in voltage of the studied case is about 5.23 (38.6 V). On t...