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Ozone holds a certain fascination in atmospheric science. It is ubiquitous in the atmosphere, central to tropospheric oxidation chemistry, yet harmful to human and ecosystem health as well as being an important greenhouse gas. It is not emitted into the atmosphere but is a byproduct of the very oxidation chemistry it largely initiates. Much effort is focused on the reduction of surface levels of ozone owing to its health and vegetation impacts, but recent efforts to achieve reductions in exposure at a country scale have proved difficult to achieve owing to increases in background ozone at the zonal hemispheric scale. There is also a growing realisation that the role of ozone as a short-lived climate pollutant could be important in integrated air quality climate change mitigation. This review examines current understanding of the processes regulating tropospheric ozone at global to local scales from both measurements and models. It takes the view that knowledge across the scales is important for dealing with air quality and climate change in a synergistic manner. The review shows that there remain a number of clear challenges for ozone such as explaining surface trends, incorporating new chemical understanding, ozone–climate coupling, and a better assessment of impacts. There is a clear and present need to treat ozone across the range of scales, a transboundary issue, but with an emphasis on the hemispheric scales. New observational opportunities are offered both by satellites and small sensors that bridge the scales.

Abstract Disclosure: J. Tsoutsouki: None. N. Ertl: None. E.G. Mills: None. M.B. Wall: None. L. Thurston: None. L. Yang: None. S. Suladze: None. T. Hunjan: None. M. Phylactou: None. B. Patel: None. J. Howard: None. A. Abbara: None. D. Golmeier: None. A.N. Comninos: None. W.S. Dhillo: None. Background: Distressing low sexual desire, termed Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder (HSDD), affects 10% of women and 8% of men. The established ‘top-down’ neurofunctional model of HSDD in women suggests that in response to erotic cues, excessive activation of higher-level cognitive brain regions (involved in introspection/self-monitoring) suppresses lower-level sexual brain centres, thereby impeding normal sexual function. By contrast, the neurodysfunction in men with HSDD remains to be fully characterised and crucially unlike in women, there are currently no licensed therapies. Herein, we report the first direct comparison of the neural bases of HSDD in women and men. Methods: 32 premenopausal women with HSDD [mean age±SD (y) 29.2±6.7] and 32 men with HSDD [age 37.9±8.6] underwent a task-based functional MRI (fMRI) measuring sexual brain activity during erotic versus control (exercise) videos. Participants completed psychometric questionnaires before and after the fMRI scan, providing functional relevance for the brain activity changes. Results: Women displayed significantly greater activation in higher-level cortical regions (e.g. inferior frontal gyrus, superior frontal gyrus) and lower-level limbic brain regions (e.g. amygdala, striatum, thalamus) in response to erotic videos, compared to the men. Lower activation in lower-limbic sexual regions in women correlated with more severe HSDD, which along with a hyperactivation in the inferior-frontal gyrus relative to the men, supports the ‘top-down’ mechanism underlying HSDD in women. By contrast, men exhibited lower activation in both higher-cortical and lower-limbic regions, but greater activation than the women in the visual cortex in response to erotic videos. Hence, a heightened sensitivity to visual erotic cues in men might not be effectively relayed to the limbic system. In women only, hypothalamic hyperactivation in response to erotic videos correlated with ‘increased heartbeat’ (r=0.5, P=0.001), and ‘tingling all over’ (r=0.6, P<0.001), while higher striatal activation correlated with feeling more ‘stimulated’ (r=0.4, P=0.001) and ‘genital tingling’ (r=0.6, P<0.001) on the psychometric questionnaires. Crucially, these findings were specific to erotic stimuli as no differences were identified in the control comparison (exercise>baseline contrast). Discussion: This is the first study to directly compare the neural bases of distressing low sexual desire in women and men. While supporting the ‘top-down’ mechanism of HSDD in women, it suggests a different neurodysfunctional process in men with HSDD, highlighting a potential functional disconnection between sensory/attention and sexual centres. Our findings have key clinical implications as they identify a sexual dimorphism in the neural bases of low sexual desire relevant to the escalating development of therapeutics for patients with HSDD. Presentation: 6/3/2024

The use of mediation in the resolution of disputes is not new to American society. It is new, however, in the realm of special education as a strategy for problem solving before a disagreement between parents and a school district escalates to the point of necessitating a due process hearing. As a result of the IDEA Amendments of 1997, mediations are now required to be offered as interventions in every state. Missouri, ahead of the regulation, began offering mediations in the fall of 1996. It is the purpose of this article to discuss the successes and challenges associated with mediations as they have occurred because of their brief history in Missouri, with a pointed examination of four specific cases.

The perspective of administrative institution-building is applied to the phenomenon of institutional innovation in the English-speaking Caribbean states. Under the colonial system, popular participation & administrative innovation were avoided in favor of routine behavior within centralized institutions. 'Commissions of Enquiry' were appointed to deal with social questions, gathering information & also preventing change. In the postcolonial period, states have concentrated on formal & symbolic aspects of institutional development, which can be expected to be ineffective as a problem-solving strategy unless large numbers of people are resocialized to a new ideology hostile to certain present conditions. A private sector isolated from economic planning, reliance on special advisors, & the organization of public services through nondepartmental agencies serve to prevent participation & innovation. W. H. Stoddard.

3 hypotheses are tested: (1) For development to take place in Jamaica, there is a need for a recruitment policy which would bring into the arena of public administration people who are extremely competent in their area of specialization &, had at the same time, strong ideological commitments to change. (2) It is important in the drive towards development to recruit bureaucrats who are creative & willing to push politicians into taking control of the economy. (3) Change is directly related to the relationships between the bureaucrat & the politician. Simple random sampling was used to select 100 R's from the top 4 levels of the Civil Service. A satisfying 85% response rate was obtained. Questionnaires were administered to the R's over a 1 month period, (90% of the questions asked were open-ended), responses were coded, & the computer was utilized for producing cross-tabulations, estimating significance & strength of relationships. X2 tests consistently yielded significance at the 5% level. While very competent personnel had been recruited, the outlook for retaining them & increasing their productivity is gloomy. Bureaucrats see themselves in the old colonial mold of mere functionaries rather than as an integral part of the policy creation process. Tied to this are the conclusions that: Jamaican bureaucrats lack real commitment & ideological strength; lack a sense of urgency & are distant from real world problems; are unwilling, & in many cases, incapable of pushing politicians into taking control of the economy. To the extent that the hypotheses relate to the potential for change & development in Jamaica, the general conclusion is that without radical & nonreformist decentralization of the bureaucracy, fascism is a real possibility as the state seeks to suppress the grass-root demands that are at present incapable of being met. Modified AA.

This conference, organised by the African Centre for Training and Research in Administration for Development (C.A.F.R.A.D.), was attended by more than 40 participants from government departments, institutes of public administration, and écoles nationales d'administration of 14 francophone and 10 anglophone African countries; in addition, a number of observers were present. An international dimension was given by the presence of 14 consultants from a wide variety of countries, including France, the United Kingdom, India, Nigeria, the U.S.A., the Philippines, and Jamaica; the U.N. was also represented, by the head of its division of public administration.