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When we discuss leadership, we often discuss leadership in terms of leadership for the abled bodies; we ordinarily forget or talk less about people being disabled. In this paper, the authors discuss leadership and the disability issues. In essence, they examine the notion of how and in what ways can leaders do for persons with disabilities and for the leaders with disabilities to enable them to develop.

Suddenly many of my friends are getting married. Many of them have been in committed same-sex relationships for years. However, the spate of activities--judicial and political that have made same-sex [...]

We present three image-guided navigation systems developed for needle-based interventional radiology procedures, using the open source image-guided surgery toolkit (IGSTK). The clinical procedures we address are vertebroplasty, RF ablation of large lung tumors, and lung biopsy. In vertebroplasty, our system replaces the use of fluoroscopy, reducing radiation exposure to patient and physician. We evaluate this system using a custom phantom and compare the results obtained by a medical student, an interventional radiology fellow, and an attending physician. In RF ablation of large lung tumors, our system provides an automated interventional plan that minimizes damage to healthy tissue and avoids critical structures, in addition to accurate guidance of multiple electrode insertions. We evaluate the system's performance using an animal model. Finally, in the lung biopsy procedure, our system replaces the use of computed tomographic (CT) fluoroscopy, reducing radiation exposure to patient and physician, while at the same time enabling oblique trajectories which are considered challenging under CT fluoroscopy. This system is currently being used in an ongoing clinical trial at Georgetown University Hospital and was used in three cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Electronic (e) government is now deployed by many governments around the world in order to achieve the promise brought by the advancement of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). The implementation of many e-government projects, however, seems to have failed to achieve its full potential due to the complex nature of e-government. It is now realized that ICT diffusion is much more than just technological adoption and adaptation. There are many soft issues particularly one that deals with the human side of technological implementation. This paper examines the core factor of leadership, which according to the findings of this paper, is of paramount importance to the successful implementation of e-government. The implementation process of e-government in Brunei is first discussed and then analysed from the leadership's perspectives. Case studies on the experiences of implementing e-government projects in all the ministries in Brunei were conducted. Interviews with key players from each ministry were also conducted. This paper shows that poor identification of a champion in e-government resulted in inertia in initiating the e-government, silos (compartmentalization) among the government agencies, duplication of projects, poor change management strategy, lack of incentives to take risk, and the emergence of rank and file rather than top-down innovation approach. Several key learning points on leadership have been proposed in this paper with regards to all the identified leadership issues in implementing e-government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In high-pressure die casting processes, proper control of die temperature is essential for producing superior quality components and yielding high production rates. However, die temperature distribution depends on various die design and process variables for which accurate models are normally very difficult to obtain. In this paper, a new intelligent control scheme is proposed for die thermal management. In this scheme, extra cooling waterlines controlled by a pump and solenoid valves are attached to the established cooling channels. A fuzzy PID controller is designed to minimize the temperature differences between channels. The experimental results obtained from a laboratory die casting process simulator indicate that the developed control system is capable of adjusting the desirable supply of cooling water into multiple cooling lines. Hence, the local temperature distribution of the die insert may become more homogeneous. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]