RISK OF MUSCULOSCELETAL DISORDERS (MSDS) ON TRADITIONAL JEWELRY CREAMERS

The risk of Musculoskeletal Disorders (MSDs) can occur in a variety of occupations including in traditional jewelers. The complaint is caused by an awkward position during work activities. The study aims to identify complaints of Musculoskeletal Disorders (MSDs). This study used qualitative approach through in-depth interviews on 5 key informants and 2 key expert informants and ergonomic risk determination referring to the BRIEF method. The results showed that all informants experienced complaints of the upper neck, lower neck, right shoulder, back, right elbow, right upper arm, and right forearm. Measurements through the BRIEF sheet show that complaints on the left and right elbows, left and right shoulders, neck, and back include high category ergonomic hazards while complaints on the hands and wrists of the right include moderate category ergonomic hazards. High risk of Musculoskeletal Disorders (MSDs) is found at all stages of work (smelting, grinding, posturing, jewelry formation, and gilding). Therefore, workers are recommended to perform muscle relaxation for (8-12 seconds) every half hour.

‘Ek is Kain’: ’n Hermeneutiek van weerloosheid as ’n antwoord op die dekoloniale diskoers

‘I am Cain’: A hermeneutics of vulnerability in response to decolonial discourse. Given the theological justification of apartheid by past influential theologians such as Totius, a hermeneutics of vulnerability is presented in response to the experiences of those who suffered heavily under apartheid in an attempt to render accountable those who benefited from apartheid. The effect of acknowledging the negative influence apartheid had on the black Other, places the white Bible reader in the position of an implicated evildoer or a sinful human being. The author wants to put this awkward position on the table by looking at Cain’s position and whether there is any empowerment in his story. In the first part of the article, after the introduction, a brief account is given of certain aspects of Reformed hermeneutics with which the author, as reader, wants to map himself. In the second part, Cain’s role is linked to whiteness under apartheid and colonialism, and to the German adaptation of the Holocaust in World War II under the rule of the National Socialist Party in Nazi Germany. Finally, the reader pays attention to the figure of Cain in Genesis 4 under the heading ‘I am Cain!’ As part of a final word, I seek to connect his interpretation to Reformed hermeneutics.Contribution: With this, the author hope to draw attention to the role of whiteness (and masculinity) of the reader in the Bible reading process in a period where people within the Reformed religious tradition must reposition themselves in a post-apartheid and decolonial society. It makes the white male reader uncomfortable, but within a hermeneutics of vulnerability, it contributes positively to change.

Utility of a novel exoscope, ORBEYE, in gravity-assisted brain retraction surgery for midline lesions of the brain

Background: Midline brain lesions, such as falx meningioma, arteriovenous malformations, and cavernous malformations, are usually approached from the ipsilateral interhemispheric fissure. To this end, patients are positioned laterally with the ipsilateral side up. However, some studies have reported the usefulness of gravity-assisted brain retraction surgery, in which patients are placed laterally with the ipsilateral side down or up, enabling surgeons to approach the lesions through the ipsilateral side or through a contralateral interhemispheric fissure, respectively. This surgery requires less brain retraction. However, when using an operative microscope, performing this surgery requires the surgeon to operate in an awkward position. A recently developed high-definition (4K-HD) 3-D exoscope system, ORBEYE, can improve the surgeon’s posture while performing gravity-assisted brain retraction surgery. Methods: We report five cases with midline brain tumors managed by resectioning with gravity-assisted brain retraction surgery using ORBEYE. We also performed an ergonomic analysis of gravity-assisted brain retraction surgery with a craniotomy model and a neuronavigation system. Results: Gravity-assisted brain retraction surgery to the midline brain tumors was successfully performed for all five patients, using ORBEYE, without any postoperative neurological deficit. Conclusion: Gravity-assisted brain retraction surgery to the midline brain lesions using ORBEYE is feasible, and ORBEYE is ergonomically more favorable than a microscope. ORBEYE has the potential to generalize neurosurgical approaches considered difficult due to the surgeon’s awkward position, such as gravity-assisted brain retraction surgery.

Ruin and Allegory in Benjamin

To think about allegory in Walter Benjamin is to identify as a fundamentally historical problem matter’s awkward position between compelling idea and unwieldy thing. This chapter locates Benjamin’s first major project, his 1925 study of German drama of the seventeenth century in Origins of the German Trauerspiel, in the context of the nineteenth-century culture of art that shaped that extraordinary work. In a historical displacement, itself typical of the nineteenth-century formulations shaping his thought, Benjamin’s reflections on the creative work of a post-reformation German culture become the occasion to address the sources of emergent forms of meaning-making built on fragments of unassimilable material from the past. The crisis of legitimacy and cultural power manifested most brutally in the Thirty Years’ War revitalizes practices that had come to the fore in another period of unresolved crisis, the transition from classical antiquity to the Christian era. As a creative and interpretative mode depending on the ongoing preservation of forms that took their original meaning from an earlier dispensation now lost, allegory becomes the characteristic manifestation of the culture of an era of profound and ongoing political and religious uncertainty.

'Mercenary' arrests derail Belarus-Russia ties again

Significance In recent months, Lukashenka has repeatedly argued that Moscow is working to unseat him at the August 9 polls. A trade and debt deal last month made progress on important energy issues, and with that progress appeared to ease bilateral tensions: political and economic relations are intertwined. Now the mistrust is back: as Lukashenka denounces "liars", Moscow is angrily denying the suggestion it would destabilise a neighbour. Impacts Ukraine will seek the extradition of some of the 33 arrested Russians, putting Minsk in an awkward position. Lukashenka is proposing a post-election referendum on the constitution, presumably to strengthen his position. Belarus will keep asking Russia to cut the cost of natural gas as well as oil.

Religious Experience, Pragmatic Encroachment, and Justified Belief in God

The secondary literature on religious epistemology has focused extensively on whether religious experience can provide evidence for God’s existence. In this article, I suppose that religious experience can do this, but I consider whether it can provide adequate evidence for justified belief in God. I argue that it can. This requires a couple of moves. First, I consider the threshold problem for evidentialism and explain pragmatic encroachment (PE) as a solution to it. Second, I argue that religious experience can justify belief in God if one adopts PE, but this poses a dilemma for the defender of the veridicality of religious experience. If PE is true, then whether S has a justified belief in God on the basis of religious experience depends on how high the stakes are for having an experience with God. This requires one to determine whether the stakes are high or low for experiencing God, which puts the experient of God in an awkward position. If the stakes are not high, then justified belief in God on the basis of religious experience will be easier to come by, but this requires conceding that experiencing God is not that important. If the stakes are high, then the experient can maintain the importance of experience with God but must concede that justified belief in God on the basis of experience with God is less likely to happen, perhaps impossible.

Design of a Novel Locking Ratcheting Mechanism for a Body-Powered Underactuated Hand

As affordable and efficient three-dimensional (3D) printers became widely available, researchers are focusing on developing prosthetic hands that are reasonably priced and effective at the same time. By allowing anyone with a 3D printer to build a body-powered prosthetic hand, many people could build their own prosthetic hand. However, one of the major problems with the current designs is the users must bend and hold their wrist in an awkward position to grasp an object. The primary goal of this work is to present the design process and analysis of a body-powered underactuated prosthetic hand with a novel ratcheting mechanism that locks the finger automatically at a desired position. To estimate how a compliant finger behaves on the actual system with the ratcheting mechanism, the preshaping analysis and the preshaping experiment were conducted. From the experiment, the presence of elastic hysteresis was observed. Additionally, the contact force analysis was performed to see the effects of joint angles and applied tension force. To test how well the hand can grasp, a cup with various weights was lifted and various objects with different shapes were grasped to prove how well the compliant finger can adapt to the shape of the objects. Based on the experiment, the hand had a higher success rate of grasping objects that are lightweight (less than 500 g) and cylindrical or circular shaped.

Enabling validated exascale nuclear science

The field of fusion energy is about to enter the ITER era, for the first time we will have access to a device capable of producing 500 MW of fusion power, with plasmas lasting more than 300 seconds and with core temperatures in excess of 100-200 Million K. Engineering simulation for fusion, sits in an awkward position, a mixture of commercial and licensed tools are used, often with email driven transfer of data. In order to address the engineering simulation challenges of the future, the community must address simulation in a much more tightly coupled ecosystem, with a set of tools that can scale to take advantage of current petascale and upcoming exascale systems to address the design challenges of the ITER era.

Urban Popular Movements in Latin America

In Latin America, urban popular movements emerged in the late 1940s as thousands of low-income migrants and city residents banded together to claim land, build self-help housing, and forge neighborhood organizations that fomented community participation and mobilized to demand land titles and city services. These neighborhoods were characterized by informal housing; inadequate provision of electricity, water, sanitation, transportation, and social services; and informal employment and underemployment. During the authoritarianism of the 1960s and 1970s, some urban popular movements resisted military dictatorship while others forged clientelist ties. Democratic and authoritarian leaders alike were forced to deal with the steady influx of rural migrants to cities, and regimes of all types often came to view informal neighborhoods founded by urban popular movements as an acceptable solution to some of the challenges of urbanization. In the 1980s and 1990s, neoliberal privatization of public utilities and cuts to social safety nets harmed urban popular movements, but national and local democratization expanded some avenues of participation, and the regional trend of urban popular movements expanded in numbers and extended its geographic reach. In the 2000s, socialist “Pink Tide” governments delivered benefits to low-income sectors, and many popular sectors supported these leftist regimes. Material gains proved modest, however, and state-movement alliances were rocky, leaving urban popular movements in the awkward position of being dissatisfied with national leadership, yet preferring the Pink Tide incumbents to most alternatives. And in the 2010s, a new “right turn” emerged, as conservative leaders replaced many Pink Tide presidents, threatening to reintroduce the repressive over-policing of popular sectors. Throughout these periods, the core conceptual identity of some urban popular movements shifted from the poblador (the “founder” seeking to meet his or her family’s needs) to the vecino (the “neighbor” collaborating with other movement participants through collective efforts), to the ciudadano (the empowered “citizen” who recognizes his or her needs as rights to be secured through political engagement).

Constraining political extremism and legal revolution

Recently, extremist ‘populist’ parties have succeeded in obtaining large enough democratic electoral mandates both to legally make substantive changes to the law and constitution and to legally eliminate avenues to challenge their control over the government. Extremists place committed liberal democrats in an awkward position as they work to legally revolutionize their constitutions and turn them into ‘illiberal democracies’. This article analyses political responses to this problem. It argues that the twin phenomena of legal revolution and illiberal democracy reveal a latent tension between the constitutional commitments to democracy and liberalism, that is, the equal chance to have one’s political goals enacted into law and individual basic rights. Political extremists make the latent tension real when they use the procedures of democratic legal change to abrogate constitutional commitments to liberalism, among other things. Although the two commitments normally coexist side by side, exceptional times raise an existential dilemma for liberal democracies: is it constitutional to democratically amend liberalism out of the constitution? After analysing the moral legitimacy of both the democratic and liberal arguments, this article concludes that liberal constitutionalism is constitutive of genuine democracy. In other words, it is unconstitutional to abrogate basic liberal commitments and it is legitimate to adopt constitutional mechanisms to guarantee liberalism – even if it means constraining democracy to do so. This article then situates ‘constrained democracy’ within the liberal current as a way to conceive of and respond to this pressing problem. It concludes by discussing four constitutional mechanisms – inspired by the German Grundgesetz – to guarantee liberalism: unambiguous lexically prior commitment to liberalism, limits on negative majorities, the eternity clause and party bans. It concludes that constrained democracy is an important constitutional guarantee of liberal democracy and that the four mechanisms, among others, are essential to enact constrained democracy.