Nordson Corporation is an American multinational corporation that designs and manufactures dispensing equipment for consumer and industrial adhesives, sealants and coatings. The company also manufactures equipment used in the testing and inspection of electronic components, technology-based systems for curing and surface treatment processes as well as medical devices and component technologies. The company is headquartered in Westlake, Ohio, and has direct operations and sales-support offices in approximately 30 countries.
Women play crucial roles in the emergence of societies worldwide, but due to customary barriers and traditional practices are neglected, leading to objectification and relegation to substitution for men, feeding, family care, domestic income generation responsibilities, with limited authority over natural resource management. The study analysed the level of involvement of rural women in natural resources management in the Basimukuma grouping. Data were collected from a sample of 246 participants from 7 villages, through questionnaires and focus group discussions. 68% of the surveyed were women with a primary education basis (39%), working daily as farmers (61.3%), aged 40.1±6.8. Factors such as duality of laws and customary practices, illiteracy, prejudices, stereotypes, lack of knowledge of legal instruments, and women’s natural inferiority complex, the sociological and cultural environment are barriers to rural women's participation and empowerment. The results show that women are active in agricultural fieldwork, spending (4.1 ± 1 .3) hours compared to men (1.4±0.5), for specific fields of operation in irrigation, tree cutting, and land clearing operations. Household income allocation decision is made by men (75.6%) while extraction of natural resources activities are women-led, spending an average of 2.8±0.3 hours compared to men (0.6±0.1). 84% of respondents recognise the under-representation of women in the decision-making process in natural resource management. In surveyed villages, there is a critically low proportion of women in the village council deciding on the exploitation of natural resources. Except for CBOs in ANANDA and MKELA, where 98% of members are women, the majority of decision-makers, agents and members are men in other villages. Actions should be taken to address the illiteracy burden, advocate for women's empowerment, quota insertion, and promote entitlement for women to full control resources they are tributary to. The study engaged with village councils, leaders, CBOs, women, and men, through focus groups and surveys to gather involvement insights from different perspectives.
Traditionally, X-ray technology has been widely used for inspecting optically hidden joints and other features within PCB assemblies and advanced microelectronics components and systems. With ever growing trends of size reduction and higher complexity, the inspection challenges are growing and driving the development and improvement of the X-ray inspection systems. There are two main flavors of X-ray inspection equipment: inline (AXI), and standalone (MXI) systems. Both types of systems offer 2D and 3D inspection techniques. 2D is usually much faster than 3D, but the 3D techniques deliver further inspection capabilities via virtual cross-sectioning techniques. The MXI systems can also be found in the failure analysis labs and offer further analytical capabilities in the form of porosity measurements, solder reflow simulators, and others. Due to their higher resolution and flexibility, in many cases the MXI systems are used to verify the AXI results and fine tune the AXI algorithms. The MXI systems also feature some automation capabilities, but these are less developed and slower compared to the AXIs. There is ever growing demand for the AXI and MXI systems to communicate with each other and with other machines in the SMT line in accordance with the Industry 4.0 smart manufacturing process. This paper provides an overview of some of the latest technical developments in the X-ray inspection technology for the electronics industry.
In May 2019, the Wellcome Centre for Anti-Infectives Research (WCAIR) at the University of Dundee, UK, held an international conference with the aim of discussing some key questions around discovering new medicines for infectious diseases and a particular focus on diseases affecting Low and Middle Income Countries. There is an urgent need for new drugs to treat most infectious diseases. We were keen to see if there were lessons that we could learn across different disease areas and between the preclinical and clinical phases with the aim of exploring how we can improve and speed up the drug discovery, translational, and clinical development processes. We started with an introductory session on the current situation and then worked backward from clinical development to combination therapy, pharmacokinetic/pharmacodynamic (PK/PD) studies, drug discovery pathways, and new starting points and targets. This Viewpoint aims to capture some of the learnings.
1University of Georgia, 1109 Experiment St., Griffin, GA 30223, USA 2The Acheson Group, 13983 Ridge Loop Road, Bigfork, MT 59911, USA 3Children’s Mercy Hospital, Kansas City, 2401 Gillham Road, Kansas City, MO 64108, USA 4North Dakota Dept. of Health, 600 East Boulevard Ave., Bismarck, ND 58505, USA 5U.S. Food and Drug Administration, 10903 New Hampshire Ave., Silver Spring, MD 20993, USA 6Texas A&M University, 402 Raymond Stotzer Pkwy., College Station, TX 77845, USA 7Randall Singer, University of Minnesota, 300A Veterinary Science, 1971 Commonwealth Ave., St. Paul, MN 55108, USA 8International Food Information Council (IFIC) Foundation, 1100 Connecticut Ave. NW, Suite 430, Washington, D.C. 20036, USA Enhancing Practitioner Knowledge about Antibiotic Resistance: Connecting Human and Animal Health
