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Treatment of cancer-related symptoms represents a major challenge for physicians. The purpose of this pilot study was to determine whether a brief bedside visual art intervention (BVAI) facilitated by art educators improves mood, reduces pain and anxiety in patients with haematological malignancies. Thirty-one patients (21 women and 10 men) were invited to participate in a BVAI where the goal of the session was to teach art technique for ~30 min. Primary outcome measures included the change in visual analog scale, the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory and the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule scale, from baseline prior to and immediately post-BVAI. Total of 21 patients (19 women and two men) participated. A significant improvement in positive mood and pain scores (p = .003 and p = .017 respectively) as well as a decrease in negative mood and anxiety (p = .016 and p = .001 respectively) was observed. Patients perceived BVAI as overall positive (95%) and wished to participate in future art-based interventions (85%). This accessible experience, provided by artists within the community, may be considered as an adjunct to conventional treatments in patients with cancer-related mood symptoms and pain, and future studies with balanced gender participation may support the generalisability of these findings.

The Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) supports the creation of distributed systems that cross processor, language and paradigm boundaries. These systems can be large and complex entities that consume considerable resources in their creation and execution. Measurements of characteristics of software systems is an important area of study in general and of particular interest for distributed systems. The work presented in this paper describes a specific technique for instrumenting components in a distributed system. The technique constructs a wrapper around the component being measured. Interactions with the ORB and other components are monitored and summarized. Each wrapper mimics the interface of the component that it is wrapping so that the remaining objects in the system do not need modification. Two approaches to wrapping the component are presented and contrasted. The result is an efficient and modular technique that can quickly be applied to a component.

GUILD 1 has reported an audiometric analysis of children with reduced hearing acuity who were studied before and after medical treatment continuing over a period of several years. The complete population studied shows, among other things, an increase in hearing acuity at certain frequencies over the six years of the study for some groups of children, regardless of whether or not medical treatment was received. In analysis of the hearing data of the rural Illinois school system under consideration in the present series of studies, the threshold results for boys have been kept separate from those for girls. In the light of Guild's interesting findings, I have considered that an analysis of the present data to discover possible differences by sex in the improvement pattern might prove to be of significance. An effort has been made to break down the cases of the present survey in an attempt to add

The literature on hearing testing contains relatively few specific directions regarding the threshold finding procedure in pure frequency audiometry. Some "procedures" often quoted will be found on examination to contain little specific procedural information. It is the purpose of this paper to provide specific steps for obtaining the auditory threshold. All individuals working in the area of hearing testing would probably testify to the basic importance of a general philosophical or theoretical orientation regarding the nature of hearing and the nature of testing. In spite of the importance of such an orientation, the person who is actually conducting audiometric examinations as an important part of his diagnostic procedure will find a general philosophy an incomplete guide when he is faced with a specific client. In addition to the orientation, a step-by-step procedure is of vital concern. Such a procedure must be useful for the audiometrician in the daily conduct of

SOME general results of the analysis of hearing patterns in a rural Illinois school system have been previously described.1The present paper is a consideration of certain more exact aspects of the hearing of the same population. In brief review, the population under consideration in this analysis consisted of all the children in grades 5, 7 and 9 in two Illinois counties, DeWitt and Piatt. These children were tested during the month of March 1949. The total number of the school population, 6,062, was viewed as a rural population by the members of the health unit who were responsible for this analysis of the hearing acuity of this population. Children in the grades indicated were tested with a pure frequency sweep of 15 decibels intensity at seven frequencies (256 to 11,584). All children who failed to pass this sweep test were given an individual pure frequency audiometric test on

General This study is concerned with the effect of temporary closure of the Eustachian tube on hearing acuity scores obtained during pure-frequency audiometric measurement. The "common cold," nasal allergies, and tobacco smoking with inhaling presumably could produce some edema of the orifice of the Eustachian tube, resulting in partial closure, and thus have direct effects on the auditory threshold as measured by the pure-frequency audiometer. It is not unreasonable to expect hearing scores to be slightly less sensitive even when there is a slight closure of the Eustachian tube from some of the common forms of congestion mentioned above. Problem These considerations motivated us to conduct a simple preliminary study on the effects of the use of a nasal spray on hearing acuity scores, the spray presumably keeping patent or open the orifice of the Eustachian tube. In undertaking this study, we proposed to assess the hearing of the subjects