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What explains the passage of Thailand's landmark universal healthcare (UHC) policy? In separate contributions, Selway and Harris emphasized the role of electoral rules and political parties, on one hand, and “professional movements” of developmentally minded state bureaucrats on the other. Which is correct? In this article, Selway and Harris respond to each other's work. While Selway agrees that the actions of the professional movement constitute an underappreciated necessary condition for universal healthcare in Thailand, he argues that Harris overstates the role of the movement in implementation. Harris defends his position and maintains that an institution-focused account is insufficient, arguing that the actions of Thailand's Rural Doctors’ Movement not only explain universal healthcare but also gave rise to the very electoral rule changes that Selway argues were so critical to facilitating universal coverage. Selway responds to these criticisms, and the two researchers jointly consider implications for causation, qualitative research, and policymaking theory.

How does the private sector structure the trajectory of a country's universal healthcare programme? Social scientists have long pointed to the importance of path dependence in shaping health reform. Yet, rarely have middle-income countries' experience with the private sector under Universal Health Coverage (UHC) been examined from comparative perspective. In this paper, we explore the changing landscape of the health sector in Brazil and Thailand before UHC reform and after. We find path-dependent processes at work that have pushed two countries that both adopted UHC reforms in divergent directions. In Brazil, a comparatively large and entrenched private sector that existed before reform has grown over time, and a sizable private health insurance industry has exerted powerful influence on health policy, weakening the public sector. In Thailand, constraints on private health insurance growth and sustained investment in public health infrastructure and governance have helped check the growth of private sector influence, although battles over health policy still remain contentious. The experiences of these countries offer lessons for policymakers seeking to achieve and maintain robust UHC programmes in other contexts.

Advances in pharmacokinetic understanding have popularised the safe and effective use of total intravenous anaesthesia delivered by continuous infusion. This article explores why the practical and outcome benefits have made total intravenous anaesthesia an increasingly accepted alternative to use of inhalational agents.

The Priority Risk Index is increasingly used as a methodology for quantifying jurisdictional risk for hazard mitigation planning purposes, and it can evolve to meet specific community needs. The index incorporates probability, impact, spatial extent, warning time, and duration when assessing each hazard, but it does not explicitly integrate a vulnerability and consequence analysis into its final scoring. To address this gap, a new index was developed—the Enhanced Priority Risk Index (EPRI). The new index adds a sixth category, vulnerability, calculated from a vulnerability and consequence analysis of the impacts on seven sectors identified in Standard 4.1.2 of the Emergency Management Accreditation Program (EMAP). To obtain a vulnerability score, impacts are ranked by sector from low (1) to very high (4), then a weighting factor is applied to each sector. The vulnerability score is added to the EPRI and provides risk levels based on the number of exploitable weaknesses and countermeasures identified within a specific jurisdiction. The vulnerability score and resulting EPRI are scalable and can be applied across jurisdictions, providing a transferable methodology that improves the hazard identification and risk assessment process and provides an approach for meeting EMAP accreditation standards.

Insecticide-treated nets (ITNs) are one of the most widespread and impactful malaria interventions in Africa, yet a spatially-resolved time series of ITN coverage has never been published. Using data from multiple sources, we generate high-resolution maps of ITN access, use, and nets-per-capita annually from 2000 to 2020 across the 40 highest-burden African countries. Our findings support several existing hypotheses: that use is high among those with access, that nets are discarded more quickly than official policy presumes, and that effectively distributing nets grows more difficult as coverage increases. The primary driving factors behind these findings are most likely strong cultural and social messaging around the importance of net use, low physical net durability, and a mixture of inherent commodity distribution challenges and less-than-optimal net allocation policies, respectively. These results can inform both policy decisions and downstream malaria analyses., Insecticide treated nets (ITNs) are an important part of malaria control in Africa and WHO targets aim for 80% coverage. This study estimates the spatio-temporal access and use of ITNs in Africa from 2000-2020, and shows that both metrics have improved over time but access remains below WHO targets.

Background Substantial progress has been made in reducing the burden of malaria in Africa since 2000, but those gains could be jeopardised if the COVID-19 pandemic affects the availability of key malaria control interventions. The aim of this study was to evaluate plausible effects on malaria incidence and mortality under different levels of disruption to malaria control. Methods Using an established set of spatiotemporal Bayesian geostatistical models, we generated geospatial estimates across malaria-endemic African countries of the clinical case incidence and mortality of malaria, incorporating an updated database of parasite rate surveys, insecticide-treated net (ITN) coverage, and effective treatment rates. We established a baseline estimate for the anticipated malaria burden in Africa in the absence of COVID-19-related disruptions, and repeated the analysis for nine hypothetical scenarios in which effective treatment with an antimalarial drug and distribution of ITNs (both through routine channels and mass campaigns) were reduced to varying extents. Findings We estimated 215·2 (95% uncertainty interval 143·7–311·6) million cases and 386·4 (307·8–497·8) thousand deaths across malaria-endemic African countries in 2020 in our baseline scenario of undisrupted intervention coverage. With greater reductions in access to effective antimalarial drug treatment, our model predicted increasing numbers of cases and deaths: 224·1 (148·7–326·8) million cases and 487·9 (385·3–634·6) thousand deaths with a 25% reduction in antimalarial drug coverage; 233·1 (153·7–342·5) million cases and 597·4 (468·0–784·4) thousand deaths with a 50% reduction; and 242·3 (158·7–358·8) million cases and 715·2 (556·4–947·9) thousand deaths with a 75% reduction. Halting planned 2020 ITN mass distribution campaigns and reducing routine ITN distributions by 25%–75% also increased malaria burden to a total of 230·5 (151·6–343·3) million cases and 411·7 (322·8–545·5) thousand deaths with a 25% reduction; 232·8 (152·3–345·9) million cases and 415·5 (324·3–549·4) thousand deaths with a 50% reduction; and 234·0 (152·9–348·4) million cases and 417·6 (325·5–553·1) thousand deaths with a 75% reduction. When ITN coverage and antimalarial drug coverage were synchronously reduced, malaria burden increased to 240·5 (156·5–358·2) million cases and 520·9 (404·1–691·9) thousand deaths with a 25% reduction; 251·0 (162·2–377·0) million cases and 640·2 (492·0–856·7) thousand deaths with a 50% reduction; and 261·6 (167·7–396·8) million cases and 768·6 (586·1–1038·7) thousand deaths with a 75% reduction. Interpretation Under pessimistic scenarios, COVID-19-related disruption to malaria control in Africa could almost double malaria mortality in 2020, and potentially lead to even greater increases in subsequent years. To avoid a reversal of two decades of progress against malaria, averting this public health disaster must remain an integrated priority alongside the response to COVID-19. Funding Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; Channel 7 Telethon Trust, Western Australia.

This article explores the complex relationship between fame, glory, and death through the case of Corneille’s tragedy Horace (1640). Horace eagerly welcomes the chance to fight — and probably die — in a brutal combat against his brothers-in-law, believing that he is being offered a unique opportunity to show his valour and fortitude to his contemporaries and to secure his glorious posthumous ‘immortality’. Yet, having emerged triumphant, Horace proves to be strangely ill at ease with a life of fame. He recognizes that public acclaim is precarious, and that he may never again be offered the chance to match his moment of glory. Horace fears a post-heroic life of compromise; as he later explains, he would rather have died straight after the combat so as to preserve his glory forever in a single act. Glory, he learns, involves a complex interaction between the hero, his dazzled and expectant public, and a wilful fate that may never again allow him the opportunity to prove his heroism. By outliving his single ...

Although the title hero never sets foot onstage during the play, Corneille’s tragedy La Mort de Pompee (1643) offers one of the author’s most extensive and gruesome engagements with the corporeality of death. Having been led into a trap set by the cowardly Egyptian king Ptolomee, the Roman military hero Pompee is cruelly assassinated early in the play; his dead body is then decapitated, and then dumped into the sea, while his head is triumphantly presented to his horrified military rival Cesar. Although, as I demonstrate, a vocabulary of vileness recurs throughout the play in words such as ‘vil’, ‘bas’, and ‘abject’, it is not — as we might expect — Pompee’s mutilated corpse that is depicted in such terms. Paradoxically, the body itself retains a certain moral (if not physical) integrity; both Pompee’s head and trunk serve as touchstones for the nobility or villainy of those who encounter them. For the nobler characters, Pompee’s corpse evokes the grandeur of his heroic past. Conversely, the stain of vile...

To safely integrate the emerging Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) technology into the national airspace system and a variety of application fields, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is in charge of publishing rules to regulate and oversee UAS activities in the U.S. However, incompliance with rules undermines the effectiveness of such regulations. This study focuses on investigating the status of UAS regulatory compliance in the U.S. from the perspectives of UAS ownership registration and maximum flight altitude limitation, analyzing the socio-demographic factors of UAS users and their relationship with regulatory compliance. A U.S. national representative survey was performed for data collection. Descriptive statistics illustrate the overall status of UAS regulatory compliance and the demographic characteristics of the adult UAS users. Canonical correlation analysis was adopted to explore the pattern between variables of regulatory compliance and socio-demographic factors. Logistic regression was used to identify influencing socio-demographic factors for compliance behavior of UAS users on two specific rules. Results present 1) the demographic features of the adult UAS users in the U.S., 2) the overall status of UAS regulatory compliance in terms of ownership registration and maximum flight altitude limitation, and 3) the relationship between UAS regulatory compliance and influencing socio-demographic factors. Findings of this study provide aviation regulation authorities and UAS law enforcement important insights into UAS regulatory compliance to further develop more effective policies and strategies to safely and sustainably regulate UAS activities.

Explanations for the expansion of the welfare state have frequently centered on the importance of left-wing political parties and labor unions. Scholars have even pointed to the rare but growing significance of social democracy in the industrializing world. Yet, in the field of healthcare, labor unions frequently oppose sweeping universalistic reforms that threaten to erode members’ existing benefits, and those most in need of healthcare in rural areas and the informal sector are often the least organized politically. In the absence of mass demands, who then is responsible for universal healthcare programs in the industrializing world, and by what means do they successfully advocate for far-reaching reforms? This article explores the role that “professional movements” played in expanding access to healthcare in an industrializing nation that was engaged in processes of democratization. Mass movements are typically composed of lay people; by contrast, professional movements are made up of elites from esteemed professions who command knowledge, networks, and access to state resources that set them apart from ordinary citizens. The account illustrates how and why professional movements are able to play such a powerful role in health policymaking in the industrializing world, points to the need for more research on professional movements in other cases and policy domains, and discusses their relevance to social change in the industrializing world.

Generally speaking, deaths in tragedy involve murder or suicide. This article brings together a handful of disparate cases, from within Corneille’s dramatic work, of deaths that do not fit into this typical tragic schema. Such deaths held something of a fascination for Corneille throughout his career: between his comedy L’Illusion comique (1635) and his swansong tragedy Surena (1674), four of his female characters die of a broken heart, and one man is struck down by a lethal haemorrhage. Although these ‘(un)natural deaths’ clearly compromise vraisemblance , the very backbone of seventeenth-century dramaturgy, Corneille is also keen to harness their potential benefits as a source of dramatic, ethical, or emotional effect. This article traces the various techniques that Corneille adopts in order to integrate such causally problematic deaths into his plays. As I argue, although Corneille never settles for a single strategy (sometimes refusing to re-use even techniques he deems successful), he increasingly tends to draw on his rhetorical skills to ‘prepare’ these potentially awkward deaths on a thematic or poetic level. This becomes most poignantly clear at the end of his final tragedy Surena , which reworks elements of his earlier ‘(un)natural deaths’ to unexpectedly elegiac effect.

Set against existing explanations for Thailand’s landmark universal coverage policy, this chapter traces the historical rise of a movement of progressive physicians in Thailand (the Rural Doctors’ Movement). After establishing their origins, it explores the critical role they played in institutionalizing universal healthcare over powerful opposition forces. In the absence of the strategic actions of this professional movement, the evidence presented here suggests that there is little reason to believe that Thailand’s universal coverage policy would ever have become a major issue in the 2001 election, much less a policy that would have been implemented and gone on to receive international acclaim. It points to the knowledge, social networks, and privileged positions in the state that allowed the movement to have an outsized role in the policy process following democratic transition in 1992.

This chapter explores the historical rise of a movement of radical physicians in Brazil (the sanitaristas). After examining their struggle to expand access to healthcare and advance health equity under military dictatorship, it traces the state-based strategy that they used to institutionalize universal healthcare in the most improbable of moments following democratic transition in 1985. Specifically, it shows how they put the policy on the political agenda by embedding principles and mandates in the Brazilian constitution; by crafting legislation in the Ministry of Health; by developing an innovative implementation strategy; and creating accountability mechanisms aimed at involving citizens and ensuring that the program would live up to its promise.

While Chapter 2 explored the historic contributions of the Rural Doctors’ Movement to universal healthcare in Thailand, this chapter explores the critical role played by the Drug Study Group and activist professionals in the Ministry of Public Health in expanding access to AIDS medication in Thailand. In a political context that increasingly placed importance on citizens’ rights, the chapter shows how this professional movement drew on its legal knowledge to empower AIDS NGOs who used the courts to challenge pharmaceutical companies; to promote the government’s use of generic drugs; to build state (and civil society) capacity to address concerns related to the drugs’ cost; and to resist pressures from the United States and powerful drug companies.

Sociologists have rarely imagined elites as capable of delivering for society the promise of a better future. More frequently, labor unions and left-wing parties, or grassroots social movements, have been looked to as champions of social progress. This chapter explores the broader theoretical contributions of the book and situates the key concepts of “professional movements” and “heightened political competition” in the literature. First, whereas scholarship has emphasized the way in which democratization empowers the masses, this book turns conventional wisdom on its head by suggesting that democratization empowers elites. Second, it calls attention to the role that newly empowered (and public-minded) professionals play in expanding access to healthcare and medicine on behalf of the poor and those in need. Third, it highlights the importance of differences in the character of political competition in the wake of democratic transition in conditioning the possibilities for well-organized professional movements to institute such changes.

‘Post-national’ scholars have taken the extension of social rights to migrants that are normally accorded to citizens as evidence of the growing importance of norms of ‘universal personhood’ and the declining importance of the nation-state. However, the distinct approach taken by the state toward another understudied category of non-citizen – stateless people – complicates these theories by demonstrating that the state makes decisions about groups on different bases than theory would suggest. These findings suggest the need to pay more attention to how the state treats other categories of ‘semi-citizens’. This article examines the differential effects of universal healthcare reforms in Thailand on citizens, migrants, and stateless people and explores their ramifications on theories of citizenship and social rights. While the state has expanded its healthcare obligations toward people living within its borders, it has taken a variegated approach toward different groups. Citizens have been extended ‘differe...

This chapter characterises some types of eddic scholarship as ‘traditions’ or ‘streams (of tradition)’. It is in no way a full history of scholarship on eddic poetry; but, because traditions everywhere in cultures represent similar phenomena flowing through history, the traditions of eddic scholarship treated here can, it is hoped, suggest the lineaments of such a history. And despite academia's emphasis on originality, tradition is a force in scholarship no less than in literature or culture in general. Possibly scholars are more aware of it even than poets – who famously suffer ‘the burden of the past’ – precisely because consciousness of our traditions is or should be an integral and conscious part of our practice. The vagueness of this vocabulary – rather than, for example, ‘schools’ or ‘foci’ – has the advantage that it obviously seeks to adumbrate rather than to offer sharp differences, and in this way reflects the borderlessness of actual thought. This chapter's contribution is itself part of a tradition – albeit a humble one – of surveys of scholarship, and some of the best of its antecedents (for example, Fidjestol, cited just below) succeeded in giving their material a historical feeling by allowing underlying binaries to exert structural force. Fully appreciative of that heritage, I nevertheless seek to avoid such structure here. No survey can absorb all its predecessors, so it is still worthwhile reading surveys of various ages and emphases, even the oldest. At present, the single work best representing the development of eddic scholarship is an unfinished posthumous book, The Dating of Eddic Poetry from 1999, written by the Norwegian scholar Bjarne Fidjestol and saved for us after his premature death by his colleague Odd Einar Haugen. Although Fidjestol's specific interest is dating, the problem of how to place these poems in time, his reading was so comprehensive and his analyses so fine that the book gives the best available picture of the development of studies in eddic poetry generally, even if only through the prism of dating. Anyone interested in a more comprehensive historical view of scholarship on eddic poetry would be advised to go next after this chapter to Fidjestol's book.

The goals of Universal Health Coverage (UHC) are to ensure that all people can access quality health services, to safeguard all people from public health risks, and to protect all people from impoverishment due to illness, whether from out-of-pocket payments for health care or loss of income when a household member falls sick. Countries as diverse as Brazil, France, Japan, Thailand, and Turkey that have achieved UHC are showing how these programs can serve as vital mechanisms for improving the health and welfare of their citizens, and lay the foundation for economic growth and competitiveness grounded in the principles of equity and sustainability. Ensuring universal access to affordable, quality health services will be an important contribution to ending extreme poverty by 2030 and boosting shared prosperity in low income and middle-income countries (LMICs), where most of the world’s poor live.

The goals of Universal Health Coverage (UHC) are to ensure that all people can access quality health services, to safeguard all people from public health risks, and to protect all people from impoverishment due to illness, whether from out-of-pocket payments for health care or loss of income when a household member falls sick. Countries as diverse as Brazil, France, Japan, Thailand, and Turkey that have achieved UHC are showing how these programs can serve as vital mechanisms for improving the health and welfare of their citizens, and lay the foundation for economic growth and competitiveness grounded in the principles of equity and sustainability. Ensuring universal access to affordable, quality health services will be an important contribution to ending extreme poverty by 2030 and boosting shared prosperity in low income and middle-income countries (LMICs), where most of the world’s poor live.

‘Capacity building’ has become a ubiquitous term in the international peacebuilding community. While the need for capacity building in post-conflict contexts is widely accepted, discussions rarely venture into what it is in practical and operational terms, and how it ought to be done. This article 1 examines a major capacity building project in East Timor, focusing on capacity building as it occurs day to day and on the ground. Following a brief overview of the concept of capacity building, it identifies a number of key challenges that arise in initiatives in which internationals work directly with local actors to build their capacity. It then offers a set of concrete proposals, targeted at capacity builders and their managing institutions, for improved practice.

L'Ecole des femmes offers one of Moliere's most sustained and yet most ambiguous explorations of laughter. Problematically, the play constructs its protagonist Arnolphe's principal comic flaw as his unsympathetic laughter at others' marital misfortunes, at least as much as his cruel treatment of his intended bride. Arnolphe explicitly sets himself up as a spectator of others; this implicitly metatheatrical reworking of a traditional plot can, as this article demonstrates, pose complex questions of response for the actual spectators. After all, the audience is encouraged to laugh at a play which explicitly presents laughter as something essentially negative and (according to Arnolphe's friend Chrysalde in the first scene) which invariably invites punishment in the form of further laughter. As the play progresses, Arnolphe moves from laughing spectator to failed actor on the social stage — two roles starkly and comically juxtaposed when he is confronted by his unwitting rival with the collapse of h...

This article addresses the ways in which laughter, comedy and entertainment are thematized within the comedies and tragicomedies of the early seventeenth-century dramatist Jean de Rotrou. In particular, it demonstrates how Rotrou frequently portrays laughter as being implicated within complex networks of literal and symbolic exchange – networks that mirror, to some extent at least, the wider transactions that underpin the theatre as an institution. For professional or semi-professional entertainers such as the parasite Ergazile in Les Captifs and the jester Fabrice in La Bague de l’oubli, comedy is a commodity that can be traded for financial (or other) profit. Despite these characters’ best efforts, however, comedy stubbornly refuses to obey straightforward models of exchange, and indeed Rotrou’s entertainer figures are repeatedly shown to fail in their professional capacities (their very failure to make others laugh itself providing a further, ironic source of comic entertainment for Rotrou’s literal au...

Under the care of its founder, John Miles Foley, the Center for Studies in Oral Tradition, together with its journal Oral Tradition, has become the preeminent institution in its field in America; and as the field itself widens, the Center’s importance in the study of the humanities can only grow. The annual Lord and Parry Lecture Series is one aspect of that widening outreach, and I feel very honored to be able to follow distinguished and provocative humanists in the series and to follow, though more distantly, Lord and Parry themselves. The topic agreed on for my contribution was the slippery subject of myth, my current preoccupation, not only because of some detailed research projects in hand, but more urgently as a new undergraduate seminar on the general topic looms on my immediate horizon. There’s nothing like that kind of undergraduate teaching to force one to return to basic ideas. Bless them, undergraduates won’t let a body hide behind philology! I realize that myth fits only problematically into the format of the Lord and Parry lectures and into the mandate of the journal Oral Tradition; in fact as far as my skimming eye could discover, no article in Oral Tradition’s eighteen luminous years has confessed in its title to a principle concern with myth—admittedly this impression was not the product of meticulous research.

The representation of sexual material in any period is potentially a contentious issue and this article discusses how sexual taboos can influence representation even in medical writings. Written at a liminal period before the advent of both 'modern' scientific attitudes and the fabled prudery of the 'Grand Siecle', Duval's treatise reveals a stance towards language and representation that is both playful and problematic. In a legal trial, Duval saved a young woman named Marie le Marcis who had been sentenced to death for 'sodomy' with another woman. By manually stimulating her, Duval was able to prove that she actually possessed an internal penis, and could thus not be accused of 'unnatural' acts. Although Duval feels compelled to justify both this action and his general interest in sexual matter against anticipated reproaches of indecency, he also acknowledges the reader's libidinal interest in reading about sex. By comparing the treatise with legal, pornographic and theoretical attitudes towards representing sexual matter, I explore how Duval's text is caught between portraying his own text as 'transparent' and acknowledging that, if such a language is possible, then ethical strictures and taboos placed on the empirical body must also condition the representation of this body within discourse.

The eighteenth century was the last period in France in which tragedy could be said to exist as a genre in any meaningful sense. In various respects, the spirit of the Enlightenment was fundamentally untragic; the period's increasing optimism in reason, progress, bourgeois values, natural religion, and later republicanism, sat increasingly uneasily alongside the traditional demands of tragedy. But while the spirit of ‘the tragic’ dwindled, tragedy as a genre proved surprisingly robust, with average audience numbers being some 50 per cent higher than for comedy. If, because of the overall expense required, the theatre has to reflect popular tastes and beliefs more than any other medium, then eighteenth-century tragedy can be seen as a gauge of the progression of Enlightenment ideas and ideals. Yet, as dramatists, theoreticians, and politicians alike increasingly recognised, tragedy can not only reflect public tastes, beliefs, and morality, but also play an active role in shaping them. The eighteenth century was a period of both experimentation and conservatism. Setting the benchmark for eighteenth-century tragedy even as their popularity fluctuated, Racine and Corneille were a source of both pride and anxiety for France's new generations of tragedians. While few dramatic conventions went unchallenged, the broad formal framework of tragedy remained relatively constant; indeed, in certain formal and stylistic respects, a typical tragedy from the final decades of the eighteenth century differs relatively little from one from Racine's time.

With recent advancements in GPS receiver technology, it will now be possible to acquire and track weak GPS signals at geostationary orbit. As INR (Image Navigation and Registration) requirements become tighter for the next generation weather satellites, due in part to increased spatial resolution, orbit knowledge will play a significant role in the pointing error budget. This paper presents a multi-sensor and multi-spectral approach to image navigation for the next generation geostationary weather satellite programs. The sensors include GPS and imaging radiometers.

In this video, we demonstrate how to use the neuron microfluidic device without plasma bonding. In some cases it may be desirable to reversibly bond devices to the Corning No. 1 cover glass. This could be due, perhaps, to a plasma cleaner not being available. In other instances, it may be desirable to remove the device from the glass after the culturing of neurons for certain types of microscopy or for immunostaining, though it is not necessary to remove the device for immunostaining since the neurons can be stained in the device. Some researchers, however, still prefer to remove the device. In this case, reversible bonding of the device to the cover glass makes that possible. There are some disadvantages to non-plasma bonding of the devices in that not as tight of a seal is formed. In some cases axons may grow under the grooves rather than through them. Also, because the glass and PDMS are hydrophobic, liquids do not readily enter the device making it necessary at times to force media and other reagents into the device. Liquids will enter the device via capillary action, but it takes significantly longer as compared to devices that have been plasma bonded. The plasma cleaner creates temporary hydrophilic charges on the glass and device that facilitate the flow of liquids through the device after bonding within seconds. For non-plasma bound devices, liquid flow through the devices takes several minutes. It is also important to note that the devices to be used with non-plasma bonding need to be sterilized first, whereas plasma treated devices do not need to be sterilized prior to use because the plasma cleaner will sterilize them.

In this video, we demonstrate the technique of soft lithography with polydimethyl siloxane (PDMS) which we use to fabricate a microfluidic device for culturing neurons. Previously, a silicon wafer was patterned with the design for the neuron microfluidic device using SU-8 and photolithography to create a master mold, or what we simply refer to as a "master". Next, we pour the silicon polymer PDMS on top of the master which is then cured by heating the PDMS to 80°C for 1 hour. The PDMS forms a negative mold of the device. The PDMS is then carefully cut and lifted away from the master. Holes are punched where the reservoirs will be and the excess PDMS trimmed away from the device. Nitrogen is used to blow away any excess debris from the device. At this point the devices are now ready for use and can either bonded to corning No. 1 cover glass with a plasma sterilizer/cleaner or can be reversibly bound to the cover glass by simply placing the device on top of the cover glass. The reversible bonding of the device to glass is covered in a separate video and requires first that the device be sterilized either with 70% ethanol or by autoclaving. Plasma treating sterilizes the devices so no further treatment is necessary. It is, however, important, when plasma-treating the devices, to add liquid to the devices within 10 minutes of the plasma treatment while the surfaces are still hydrophilic. Waiting longer than 10 minutes to add liquid to the device makes it difficult for the liquid to enter the device. The neuron devices are typically plasma-bound to cover glass and 0.5 mg/ml poly-L-lysine (PLL) in pH 8.5 borate buffer is immediately added to the device. After a minimum of 3 hours incubating with PLL, the devices are washed with dH2O water a minimum of 3 times with at least 15 minutes between each wash. Next, the water is removed and fresh media is added to the device. At this point the device is ready for use. It is important to remember at this point to never remove all the media from the device. Always leave media in the main channel.

In the study of dementia, diagnostic criteria as well as differential diagnosis remain issues to be resolved, hindering both effective research and developing effective treatments. Further, there has been a need to combine brain metabolism studies with specific forms of cognitive analysis. Dementia is characterized by chronic and substantial decline in two or more areas of cognitive function. The cognitive deficits should include a memory impairment and at least one other cognitive disturbance, such as aphasia, agnosia or a disturbance in executive functioning. The impairments must be severe enough to cause occupational and /or social impairment and must represent a significant decline from previous functioning (American Psychiatric Association, 1994).

The nature of verse and its consequences for the mixed form, Kristin Hanson and Paul Kiparsky the prosimetrum in the classical tradition, Jan Ziolkowski "Aucassin et Nicolette" and the mixed forms in medieval French, Ardis Butterfield prosimetrum in insular Celtic literature, Proinsias MacCana the prosimetrum of Icelandic saga and some relatives, Joseph Harris hybrid forms in German Romanticism, Judith Ryan the "Cante Fable" in occidental folk narrative, W. F. H. Nicolaisen the African challenge, Lee Haring the "Orientalization" of prosimetrum - prosimetrum in biblical and ancient Near Eastern literature, Steven Weitzman prosimetrical genres in classical Arabic literature, Wolfhart Heinrichs prosimetrum in 19th- and 20th-century Arabic literature, Dwight Reynolds mixed prose and verse in medieval Persian literature, Julie Scott Meisami the mixture of verse and prose in Turkic oral epic poetry, Karl Reichl from verse epic to prosimetrum in recent Mongolian oral literature, Walter Heissig the prosimetric form in the Chinese literary tradition, Victor H. Mair Sarama and the Panis - origins of prosimetric exchange in Archaic India, Michael Witzel combinations of poetry and prose in classical Japanese narrative, Helen Craig McCullough.