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In the Dutch central government (following countries like New Zealand, Australia and the UK) a system of resource budgeting is being developed as a substitute for its present dual system of cash/commitment budgeting for core departments and accrual accounting for executive agencies. Advocates of this approach claim that resource budgeting will improve the allocation of government spending and increase efficiency in government production. A basic flaw of the reform proposals is the failure to acknowledge the hybridity of government activities and the need to accommodate these hybridities in the accounting system. We argue that the present dual system, with some minor revisions, will be superior to the proposed resource budgeting system.

Sets out to stress the need to adjust performance management to the deficiencies inherent in the output controls within The Netherlands defence forces.

By analysing the management control reforms of the recent past, the paper assesses the scope for a “decision revelation” within the Defence organisation. It develops a framework for disclosure of decentralised decision making focusing on the allocation of labour time within the fixed labour force. Recent developments in the Defence organisation units for officer education and training are used to illustrate the framework.

Management control systems fail because of weaknesses in the management accounting information underlying them. Management accounting information with respect to defence expense budgets does not grasp the relevant decentralised decision making to be controlled. This decision making is primarily concerned with the opportunity costs of the allocation of time within the labour force of the Dutch Department of Defence.

Variability of costs should be disclosed in terms of labour time information. Budgetary accounting restricted to the department's (fixed) expenses on military personnel will not reveal for which purposes defence money is actually spent.

Outlines a framework for decision revelation as a base for management contracting between central management and lower level organisation units.

Although first rank symptoms focus on positive symptoms of psychosis they are shared by a number of psychiatric conditions. The difficulty in differentiating bipolar disorder from schizophrenia with affective features has led to a third category of patients often loosely labeled as schizoaffective. Research in schizophrenia has attempted to render the presence or absence of negative symptoms and their relation to etiology and prognosis more explicit. A dichotomous population is a recurring theme in experimental paradigms. Thus, schizophrenia is defined as process or reactive, deficit or non-deficit and by the presence or absence of affective symptoms. Laboratory tests confirm the clinical impression showing conflicting responses to dexamethasone suppression and clearly defined differences in autonomic responsiveness, but their patho-physiological significance eludes mainstream theory. Added to this is the difficulty in agreeing to what exactly constitutes useful clinical features differentiating, for example, negative symptoms of a true deficit syndrome from features of depression. Two recent papers proposed that the general and specific cognitive features of schizophrenia and major depression result from a monoamine-cholinergic imbalance, the former due to a relative muscarinic receptor hypofunction and the latter, in contrast, to a muscarinic hypersensitivity exacerbated by monoamine depletion. Further development of these ideas will provide pharmacological principles for what is currently an incomplete and largely, descriptive nosology of psychosis. It will propose a dimensional view of affective and negative symptoms based on relative muscarinic integrity and is supported by several exciting intracellular signaling and gene expression studies. Bipolar disorder manifests both muscarinic and dopaminergic hypersensitivity. The greater the imbalance between these two receptor signaling systems, the more the clinical picture will resemble schizophrenia with bizarre, incongruent delusions and increasingly disorganized thought. The capacity for affective expression, by definition a non-deficit syndrome, will remain contingent on the degree of preservation of muscarinic signaling, which itself may be unstable and vary between trait and state examinations. At the extreme end of muscarinic impairment, a deficit schizophrenia subpopulation is proposed with a primary and fixed muscarinic receptor hypofunction.

The genomic profile of bipolar disorder and schizophrenia overlap and both have a common dopaminergic intracellular signaling which is hypersensitive to various stressors. It is proposed that the concomitant muscarinic receptor upregulation differentiates the syndromes, being marked in bipolar disorder and rather less so in schizophrenia. From a behavioral point of view non-deficit syndromes and bipolar disorder appear most proximate and could be reclassified as a spectrum of affective psychosis or schizoaffective disorders. Because of a profound malfunction of the muscarinic receptor, the deficit subgroup cannot express a comparable stress response. None -theless, a convergent principle of psychotic features across psychiatric disorders is a relative monoaminergic-muscarinic imbalance in signal transduction.

To develop electrode materials for supercapacitor with superior electrochemical performance and simple preparation process, the purpose of this study is to prepare flexible CC/NiS/a-NiS electrodes with self-supporting structure by loading hydrothermally synthesized a-NiS particles along with nano-NiS on carbon cloth by electroplating method.

The effects of current densities, temperatures and pH values on the loading amount and uniformity of the active substances during the plating process were investigated on the basis of optimization of surface morphology, crystalline structure and electrochemical evaluation as the cyclic voltammetry curves, constant current charge–discharge curves and AC impedance.

The a-NiS particles on CC/NiS/a-NiS were mostly covered by the plated nano-NiS, which behaved as a bulge and provided a larger specific surface area. The CC/NiS/a-NiS electrode prepared with the optimized parameter exhibited a specific capacitance of 115.13 F/g at a current density of 1 A/g and a Coulomb efficiency of 84% at 5 A/g, which is superior to that of CC/NiS electrode prepared by electroplating at a current density of 10 mA/cm², a temperature of 55°C and a pH of 4, demonstrating its fast charge response of the electrode and potential application in wearable electronics.

This study provides an integrated solution for the development of specifically structured NiS-based electrode for supercapacitor with simple process, low cost and high electrochemical charge/discharge performance, and the simple and easy-to-use method is also applicable to other electrochemically active composites.

The commercial stainless steels have been used extensively in the biomedicine application and their electrochemical behaviour in the simulated body fluid (SBF) are not uncovered obviously. In this research, the corrosion resistance of the commercial stainless steel of Fe–17Cr–xNi alloys (x = 4, 8, 10 and 14) has been studied. This study aims to evaluate the rate of corrosion and corrosion resistance of some Fe–Cr–Ni alloys in SBF at 37°C.

In this research, the corrosion resistance of the commercial stainless steel of Fe–17Cr–xNi alloys has been studied using open circuit potential, electrochemical impedance spectroscopy and potentiodynamic polarization in the SBF at 37°C and pH 7.4 for a week. Also, the surface morphology of the four alloys was investigated using scanning electron microscopy, elemental composition was obtained via energy dispersive spectroscopy and the crystal lattice structure of Fe–17Cr–xNi alloys was obtained using X-ray diffraction technique. The chemical structure of the protective oxide film has been examined by X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) and metals ions released into the solution have been detected after different immersion time using atomic absorption spectroscopy.

The results revealed that the increase of the Ni content leads to the formation of the stable protective film on the alloys such as the Fe–17Cr–10Ni and Fe–17Cr–14Ni alloys which possess solid solution properties. The Fe–17Cr–14Ni alloy displayed highest resistance of corrosion, notable resistance for localized corrosion and the low corrosion rate in SBF because of the formation of a homogenously protective oxide film on the surface. The XPS analysis showed that the elemental Fe, Cr and Ni react with the electrolyte medium and the passive film is mainly composed of Cr₂O₃ with some amounts of Fe(II) hydroxide at pH 7.4.

This work includes important investigation to use commercial stainless steel alloys for biomedical application.