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We have yet to fully walk the path of the Calls to Action put forth by the Truth & Reconciliation Commission of Canada within our health care system. In this piece, we offer a suggestion of enhanced and increased curiosity and empathy in our practice as health care providers, particularly in regard to Call 22. This encouragement is exemplified through sharing learning we received around an Indigenous way of knowing and traditional health practice: waspison , known in English as, 'moss bag'. Waspison is a sacred prenatal and postnatal practice used since time immemorial and carrying through to today, across Canada and the USA. It is a novel teaching example not previously discussed in medical literature. Our intention is to stoke greater interest in practicing deep caring for our patients in ways that are culturally humble, safe, and as competent as possible. That is, learning more about our patients through curiosity and empathy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Zoomify Image is a mature product for easily publishing large, high-resolution images on the Web. End users view these images with existing Web-browser software as quickly as they do normal, downsampled images. A Flash-based Zoomifyer client asynchronously streams image data to the Web browser as needed, resulting in response times approaching those of desktop applications using minimal bandwidth. The author, a librarian at Cornell University and the principal architect of a small, open-source company, worked closely with Zoomify to produce a cross-platform, open-source implementation of that company's image-processing software and discusses how to easily deploy the product into a widely used Web-publishing environment. Limitations are also discussed as are areas of improvement and alternatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: With the aim of gaining insight into the notoriously difficult problem of energy and vorticity cascades in high dimensional incompressible flows, we take a simpler and very well understood low dimensional analog and approach it from a new perspective, using the Fourier transform. Specifically, we study, numerically and analytically, how kinetic energy moves from one scale to another in solutions of the hyperbolic or inviscid Burgers equation in one spatial dimension (1D). We restrict our attention to initial conditions which go to zero as . The main result we report here is a Fourier analytic way of describing the cascade process. We find that the cascade proceeds by rapid growth of a crossover scale below which there is asymptotic power law decay of the magnitude of the Fourier transform. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Although flightless alcids from the Miocene and Pliocene of the eastern Pacific Ocean have been known for over 100 years, there is no detailed evaluation of diversity and systematic placement of these taxa. This is the first combined analysis of morphological and molecular data to include all extant alcids, the recently extinct Great Auk Pinguinus impennis, the mancalline auks, and a large outgroup sampling of 29 additional non-alcid charadriiforms. Based on the systematic placement of Mancallinae outside of crown clade Alcidae, the clade name Pan-Alcidae is proposed to include all known alcids. An extensive review of the Mancallinae fossil record resulted in taxonomic revision of the clade, and identification of three new species. In addition to positing the first hypothesis of inter-relationships between Mancallinae species, phylogenetic results support placement of Mancallinae as the sister taxon to all other Alcidae, indicating that flightlessness evolved at least twice in the alcid lineage. Convergent osteological characteristics of Mancallinae, the flightless Great Auk, and Spheniscidae are summarized, and implications of Mancallinae diversity, radiation, and extinction in the context of paleoclimatic changes are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

1. Upland heaths in the UK are of significant conservation importance. Large areas are managed through prescribed burning to improve habitat and grazing for red grouse Lagopus lagopus scoticus, deer Cervus elaphus and sheep Ovis aries. Previous research has identified trends in vegetation development following burning, but has not linked this to variation in fire behaviour and severity. 2. We burned 15 experimental fires on an area of Calluna vulgaris-dominated moorland, and recorded pre- and post-fire vegetation structure and composition, fire behaviour characteristics, and several ‘proxy measures’ of fire severity. 3. We distinguished measures of fire severity, describing the immediate physical effects of burning, from the long-term ecosystem responses of substrate development and Calluna regeneration. Proxy measures of fire severity did not relate strongly to fire behaviour or ecosystem response. 4. Post-fire regeneration was strongly linked to stand age and post-fire substrate type. Fire behaviour and severity had little effect, though fire-induced ground-surface heating may promote Calluna seedling establishment. Vegetative regeneration of Calluna was extremely poor in older stands, as was seedling establishment in areas where the post-fire substrate was dominated by live or dead pleurocarpous moss mats. 5. Synthesis and applications. Significant nonlinearities exist in fire severity on heathlands, with step changes related to the depth and moisture content of moss/litter layers and peat. Younger stands, less than c. 30 cm tall, should be the focus of management if the objective is to maximize Calluna regeneration. Burning older and uneven-aged stands is discouraged except for the purposes of fire hazard management. Managers should develop landscape-level burn plans to target burning effectively and create diverse fire regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article highlights the important consequences brought about by the inevitable rise in the number of people contracting the HIV virus and ultimately, developing AIDS for work organizations. These will range from coping with chronically ill employees to dealing with discrimination against those with, or suspected of, carrying the virus and allaying the fears of other workers and customers/clients. There has been a growing tendency for work organizations to formulate AIDS policies designed to deal with the contingencies which the disease may introduce into the workplace. Such policy documents might seem a relatively unpromising source of data for sociological inquiry. It is generally recognized that formal policies may bear little relation to actual organizational activity and may mask all manner of informal practices. Indeed, designed as they are for public consumption, it is likely that such policies will have been carefully sanitized, further distancing them from real life. What is important, however, is the status of these policy documents as data and their place in the wider research process. What can be gained from policy research are insights into the construction and prioritization of issues, the erection of meaningful bases from and through which power may be activated, they point to relationships, tensions and paradoxes which may not be dealt with explicitly in the policy but reflected implicitly in its form and structure.

Purpose: To evaluate relative and absolute relationships between preterm birth (PTB) and neighborhood education over time. Methods: Live births in Québec, Canada, were obtained for 1990–1995, 1996–2000, and 2001–2006. Mean maternal education and proportion of females with no high school diploma were expressed as continuous cumulative rank scores for 10,923 neighborhoods. We estimated the relative hazard of PTB (<37 gestational weeks) for neighborhood education in each period by using Cox proportional hazards regression, accounting for individual education, age, marital status, birthplace, language, parity, infant sex, rurality, neighborhood income, and area clustering. Adjusted absolute differences in the prevalence of PTB between the most and least educated neighborhoods were calculated. Results: PTB prevalence (6.1% overall) was greater in less-educated neighborhoods. Although PTB proportions increased over time in all neighborhoods, the increase was proportionately greater for less-educated areas. Hazards of PTB for neighborhood education were proportional over gestation. Depending on the indicator of neighborhood education and period, adjusted hazards of PTB were 10%-37% greater for the least relative to most educated neighborhoods, and prevalence percentage differences ranged from 0.6% to 1.9%. Associations persisted over time. Conclusions: Relative and absolute neighborhood educational inequalities in PTB, independent of individual education, were present and persistent over time. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

When the viridin wortmannin (Wm) is modified by reaction with certain nucleophiles at the C20 position, the compounds obtained exhibit an improved antiproliferative activity even though a covalent reaction between C20 and a lysine in the active site of PI3 kinase is essential to Wm’s ability to inhibit this enzyme. Here we show that this improved potency results from an intramolecular attack by the C6 hydroxyl group that slowly converts these inactive prodrugs to the active species Wm over the 48 h duration of the antiproliferative assay. Our results provide a guide for selecting Wm-like compounds to maximize kinase inhibition with the variety of protocols used to assess the role of PI3 kinase in biological systems, or for achieving optimal therapeutic effects in vivo .In addition, the slow self-activation of WmC20 derivatives provides a mechanism that can be exploited to obtain kinase inhibitors endowed with physical and pharmacokinetic properties far different from man-made kinase inhibitors because they do not bind to kinase active sites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Silole-containing polymers consisting of a dithienosilole homopolymer backbone (12) or an alternating dithienosilole and 4,7-bis(2-thienyl)-2,1,3-benzothiadiazole copolymer backbone (13) were synthesized. The presence of planar dithienosilole tricyclic units along these -conjugated polymer backbones lowered the band gap and led to strong absorption in the visible region of the solar spectrum. The introduction of electron-withdrawing benzothiadiazole moieties along the dithienosilole backbone further reduced the optical band gap and increased the interchain interaction. Bulk-heterojunction organic solar cells using 1:1 w/w polymer 12or 13:PCBM (methanofullerene 6,6-phenyl C61-butyric acid methyl ester) blends as the photoactive layers were prepared. Photovoltaic cells with copolymer 13as the electron donor and PCBM as the electron acceptor exhibited an increased energy conversion efficiency by a factor of 3 up to 0.18% under an AM 1.5 simulated solar light at 100 mW/cm2after thermal annealing at 140 °C. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two key issues thrown up by the 1999 introduction of the National Minimum Wage (NMW) in the United Kingdom are its likely impact on employers' training practices in low paying sectors of the economy and the implications for skills. Based on a study of the hospitality industry, this article assesses the limited significance of the differential, 'subminimum' NMW rates as devices for promoting skills development and considers the absence of any direct impact on training practices of the statutory floor of wages in general. The weaknesses of a policy framework dominated by a supply-side ethos in which the importance of incentives for employers to provide training and employment opportunities is prioritised, rather than one in which an opportunity is taken to use the NMW as part of a wider strategy to generate greater demand for skills in low-paying industries are attested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Red grouse Lagopus lagopus scoticus populations exhibit unstable dynamics that are often characterised by regular periodic fluctuations in abundance. Time-series’ of grouse harvesting records collected from 287 management units (moors) across Scotland, England and Wales were analysed to investigate the broad scale patterns of synchrony in these fluctuations. Estimation of the spatial autocorrelation of grouse population dynamics across moors indicates relatively high levels of synchrony between populations on adjacent moors, but that this synchrony declines sharply with increasing inter-moor distance. At distances of greater than 100 km, grouse population time-series exhibit only weakly positive cross-correlation coefficients. Twenty-eight geographical, environmental and other candidate variables were examined to construct a general linear model to explain variation in local synchrony. Grouse moor productivity (average size of shooting bag), distance from the Atlantic coast moving in a north-easterly direction, April and June temperatures, and June rainfall significantly increased the explanatory power of this model. An understanding of the processes underlying synchrony in red grouse population dynamics is a prerequisite to anticipating the effects of large-scale environmental change on regional patterns of grouse distribution and abundance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ryan French and colleagues discuss their Hinode/EIS outreach work and the resulting resources available for A-level classes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]