The organisation said its own studies suggested a hydro-electric scheme at Castlefields weir was financially viable.

BBC: Weir at Shrewsbury

The old quota system was bad, acknowledges Mozn Hassan, the director of Nazra for Feminist Studies, a Cairo-based organisation that researches women's rights and whose members include a number of Islamic feminists.

ECONOMIST: Women and the Arab awakening

Dr Johann Burger, a senior researcher at the Institute for Security Studies, which is a non-profit, independent organisation in South Africa, admits the country has "a serious crime problem" but emphasises the situation is improving.

BBC: Is South Africa ready for 2010?

In their research for Communities First, Money Second: Using Social Media to Build Emotional Capital in Your Organisation, Huy and Shipilov surveyed over 1, 000 executives, and conducted studies in 34 companies.

FORBES: How Social Media Can Boost Profits

One conclusion emerging from the research, says Irving Kirsch, a professor at Harvard Medical School who wrote the preface to the volume, is that the effect is strongest for those disorders that are predominantly mental and subjective, a conclusion backed by a meta-analysis of placebo studies that was carried out in 2010 by researchers at the Cochrane Collaboration, an organisation that reviews evidence for medical treatments.

ECONOMIST: Alternative medicine: Think yourself better | The