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In 2019 Cardinal George Pell, an important Vatican official and Australia’s most prominent Catholic cleric, was convicted of sexually abusing two choirboys in the sacristy of the Melbourne cathedral in the late 1990s. There was only one witness, the complainant. Pell spent more than 400 days in jail before he was exonerated in April 2020 after appealing to the High Court. Before, during and after the legal process most of the print and broadcast media were fiercely hostile to the Cardinal. This was due in part to Pell’s forthright personality and to his conservatism on moral issues. But he also represented the hierarchy of the Catholic Church in the midst of its crisis over sexual abuse. His public defenders were few. The clergy, by and large, refrained from commenting on the issue.

The papers in this special section focus on game design based on artificial intelligence (AI). As researchers working with games, we are often faced with terms that either lack a definition entirely or which are contested and debated as part of their very nature. Many papers have tried and failed to define what “fun” is, from where “creativity” originates, or what “difficulty” means, for example, and many more papers in the future will try and fail to do the same. Tangling with ineffable concepts, with moving targets and nebulous ideas is all part of the joy of doing artificial intelligence (AI) research in a complex, multifaceted domain like games.

Procedural generation is used to achieve a wide variety of game design goals, and has led to the creation of several game subgenres by injecting variance, surprise or unpredictability into otherwise static designs. Information games are a type of mystery game in which the player is tasked with gathering knowledge and developing an understanding of an event or system. Their reliance on player knowledge leaves them vulnerable to spoilers and hard to replay. In this paper we introduce the notion of a generative forensics game, a subgenre of information games that challenge the player to understand the output of a generative system, and present two examples.

Whether executive functioning deficits result in children experiencing learning difficulties is presently unclear. Yet evidence for these hypothesized causal relations has many implications for early intervention design and delivery. We used a multi-year panel design, multiple criterion and predictor variable measures, extensive statistical control for potential confounds including autoregressive prior histories of both reading and mathematics difficulties, and additional epidemiological methods to preliminarily examine these hypothesized relations. Results from multivariate logistic regression analyses of a nationally representative and longitudinal sample of 18,080 children (i.e., the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study – Kindergarten Cohort of 2011, or ECLS-K: 2011) indicated that working memory and, separately, cognitive flexibility deficits uniquely increased kindergarten children's risk of experiencing reading as well as mathematics difficulties in first grade. The risks associated with working memory deficits were particularly strong. Experimentally-evaluated, multi-component interventions designed to help young children with reading or mathematics difficulties may also need to remediate early deficits in executive function, particularly in working memory.

Casual creators are creativity support tools designed for non-experts to have fun with while they create, rather than for serious creative production. We discuss here how we adapted and enhanced an evolutionary art approach for casual creation. Employing a fun-first methodology for the app design, we improved image production speed and the quality of randomly generated images. We further employed machine vision techniques for image categorisation and clustering, and designed a user interface for fast, fun image generation, adhering to numerous principles arising from the study of casual creators. We describe the implementation and experimentation performed during the first stage of development, and evaluate the app in terms of efficiency, image quality, feedback quality and the potential for users to have fun. We conclude with a description of how the app, which is destined for public release, will also be used as a research platform and as part of an art installation.

This paper describes past preservation efforts with agricultural literature in the United States, as well as current projects, challenges, and trends. Starting in the early 1990s, preservation of U.S. historical agricultural publications experienced a period of coordinated scholarly evaluation and funding. In 1993 the combined efforts of the United States Agricultural Information Network and librarians at Cornell University's Albert R. Mann Library produced the National Preservation Program for Agricultural Literature. It was an ambitious effort to save the nation's historical print-agricultural literature from deterioration. This effort ranged from nationally significant scholarly works, such as the Core Historical Literature of Agriculture, to significant state and local literature. A multiphase project on state and local literature was funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Later, in the wake of the nation's financial crisis of 2008, NEH-sponsored funding ended and staffing levels in many libraries declined as the large-scale digitization of library collections was being undertaken by Microsoft and Google. With the advent of HathiTrust Digital Library and other collaborative efforts, the challenges and opportunities for preserving and accessing the nation's agricultural literature have evolved and changed dramatically. Today, new partnerships and initiatives around the country, such as the Center for Research Libraries–sponsored Project Ceres, are continuing and refocusing earlier efforts.

PurposeWe sought to identify factors predictive of or associated with receipt of speech/language services during early childhood. We did so by analyzing data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study–Birth Cohort (ECLS-B; Andreassen & Fletcher, 2005), a nationally representative data set maintained by the U.S. Department of Education. We addressed two research questions of particular importance to speech-language pathology practice and policy. First, do early vocabulary delays increase children's likelihood of receiving speech/language services? Second, are minority children systematically less likely to receive these services than otherwise similar White children?MethodMultivariate logistic regression analyses were performed for a population-based sample of 9,600 children and families participating in the ECLS-B.ResultsExpressive vocabulary delays by 24 months of age were strongly associated with and predictive of children's receipt of speech/language services at 24, 48, and 60 months of age (adjusted odds ratio range = 4.32–16.60). Black children were less likely to receive speech/language services than otherwise similar White children at 24, 48, and 60 months of age (adjusted odds ratio range = 0.42–0.55). Lower socioeconomic status children and those whose parental primary language was other than English were also less likely to receive services. Being born with very low birth weight also significantly increased children's receipt of services at 24, 48, and 60 months of age.ConclusionExpressive vocabulary delays at 24 months of age increase children’s risk for later speech/language services. Increased use of culturally and linguistically sensitive practices may help racial/ethnic minority children access needed services.

Games now inhabit a space where creativity is no longer centered around human authorship. The use of procedural content generation has been embraced by industry, academics and fans as a means for reducing labor cost, providing additional replayable content for players, investigating computational creativity in a complex and multifaceted domain and enabling new kinds of playable experiences. This incorporation of computational creative labor confuses authorship, labor politics and responsibility for rhetoric embedded in the procedures by complicating the way in which the computer is portrayed to users, researchers and other developers. We can apply feminist methodologies attentive to questions of difference and power in systemic structures in order to better understand each of these questions in turn. This article presents an analysis of the post-anthropocentric phenomenon of computer creativity within games, via a feminist analysis of procedural content generating algorithms, its role in game desi...

The geopolitical shape of the Middle East has varied greatly over time. This article is concerned with the period from Late Antiquity to the end of the eighteenth century, during which four basic configurations succeeded each other. Late Antiquity was marked by the coexistence of two large empires, one based in the western Middle East and the other in the eastern Middle East; the early Islamic period saw the dominance of a single empire the location of whose centre was unstable; the medieval period was characterised by the absence of large and lasting empires and a shifting plurality of smaller states; finally in the Ottoman period we see the renewed dominance of a single empire, now based in the western Middle East. Are these changes to be seen as random fluctuations, or can they be explained in terms of a small number of underlying factors? The point of this article is to argue that a focus on the potential imperial heartlands of the Middle East can help us to explain much—though not all—of the changing geopolitical configuration of the region.

There are a whole bunch of different things to worry about when you make a procedural generator. Will my generator ever make a mistake? Does it produce a lot of boring things? How much time does it need to generate something? Sometimes it can be so tricky to get your generator working that simply getting it to produce anything feels like a huge accomplishment. Worrying about what it’s producing, why it’s producing it or what others might think about it can get lost in the huge relief and satisfaction of finally seeing little dungeons, poems or stories coming out of your computer.

Mediums such as fine art and poetry are common subjects in computational creativity---but what about something closer to home? Can computers be as creative in programming as they are in poetry?

Michael J Cook,1 Basant K Puri2 1Independent researcher, Dorset, UK; 2Department of Medicine, Hammersmith Hospital, Imperial College London, London, UK Abstract: The clinical diagnosis of Lyme borreliosis can be supported by various test methodologies; test kits are available from many manufacturers. Literature searches were carried out to identify studies that reported characteristics of the test kits. Of 50 searched studies, 18 were included where the tests were commercially available and samples were proven to be positive using serology testing, evidence of an erythema migrans rash, and/or culture. Additional requirements were a test specificity of ≥85% and publication in the last 20 years. The weighted mean sensitivity for all tests and for all samples was 59.5%. Individual study means varied from 30.6% to 86.2%. Sensitivity for each test technology varied from 62.4% for Western blot kits, and 62.3% for enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay tests, to 53.9% for synthetic C6 peptide ELISA tests and 53.7% when the two-tier methodology was used. Test sensitivity increased as dissemination of the pathogen affected different organs; however, the absence of data on the time from infection to serological testing and the lack of standard definitions for “early” and “late” disease prevented analysis of test sensitivity versus time of infection. The lack of standardization of the definitions of disease stage and the possibility of retrospective selection bias prevented clear evaluation of test sensitivity by “stage”. The sensitivity for samples classified as acute disease was 35.4%, with a corresponding sensitivity of 64.5% for samples from patients defined as convalescent. Regression analysis demonstrated an improvement of 4% in test sensitivity over the 20-year study period. The studies did not provide data to indicate the sensitivity of tests used in a clinical setting since the effect of recent use of antibiotics or steroids or other factors affecting antibody response was not factored in. The tests were developed for only specific Borrelia species; sensitivities for other species could not be calculated. Keywords: test sensitivity, 2 tier test, two-tier test, ELISA test, Western Blot, test specificity

Therapies that suppress RIPK1 kinase activity are emerging as promising therapeutic agents for the treatment of multiple inflammatory disorders. The ability to directly measure drug binding of a RIPK1 inhibitor to its target is critical for providing insight into pharmacokinetics, pharmacodynamics, safety and clinical efficacy, especially for a first‐in‐class small‐molecule inhibitor where the mechanism has yet to be explored. Here, we report a novel method for measuring drug binding to RIPK1 protein in cells and tissues. This TEAR1 (Target Engagement Assessment for RIPK 1) assay is a pair of immunoassays developed on the principle of competition, whereby a first molecule (ie, drug) prevents the binding of a second molecule (ie, antibody) to the target protein. Using the TEAR1 assay, we have validated the direct binding of specific RIPK1 inhibitors in cells, blood and tissues following treatment with benzoxazepinone (BOAz) RIPK1 inhibitors. The TEAR1 assay is a valuable tool for facilitating the clinical development of the lead RIPK1 clinical candidate compound, GSK2982772, as a first‐in‐class RIPK1 inhibitor for the treatment of inflammatory disease.

The notion that software could be independently and use- fully creative is becoming more commonplace in scientific, cultural, busi- ness and public circles. It is not fanciful to imagine creative software embedded in society in the short to medium term, acting as collabora- tors and autonomous creative agents for much societal benefit. Techno- logically, there is still some way to go to enable Artificial Intelligence methods to create artefacts and ideas of value, and to get software to do so in interesting and engaging ways. There are also a number of socio- logical hurdles to overcome in getting society to accept software as being truly creative, and we concentrate on those here. We discuss the various communities that can be considered stakeholders in the perception of computers being creative or not. In particular, we look in detail at three sets of stakeholders, namely the general public, Computational Creativ- ity researchers and fellow creatives. We put forward various philosophical points which we argue will shape the way in which society accepts cre- ative software. We make various claims along the way about how people perceive software as being creative or not, which we believe should be addressed with scientific experimentation, and we call on the Computa- tional Creativity research community to do just that.

Outlines an institutional framework for identifying and rewarding excellence in teaching, drawing on an initiative developed at the University of Lincolnshire and Humberside. Describes the strategies adopted by the excellence in teaching working group, the outcomes of the project, and identifies how these have been implemented in the university’s promotions policy. Case study offers a framework for practitioners involved in raising the quality and profile of teaching in higher education through a recognition of the achievement of excellence.

In The Hollow Man (1935), John Dickson Carr’s larger than life detective Dr. Gideon Fell rails against the pursuit of realism in detective fiction: A few people who do not like the slightly lurid insist on treating their preferences as rules. They use, as a stamp of condemnation, the word ‘improbable’. And thereby they gull the unwary into their own belief that ‘improbable’ simply means ‘bad’. Now, it seems reasonable to point out that the word improbable is the very last which should ever be used to curse detective fiction in any case. A great part of our liking for detective fiction is based on a liking for improbability.2

It was one of those rare moments of affirmation. The instant I read Michael Dirda’s description of The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901–2) as ‘the first “grown-up” book I ever read — and it changed my life’, it reawakened distant memories of my own.2 This remarkable story bade me enter a world of adventure beyond even my own childish fantasies, the world of the detective which, despite the many directions that books have taken me since, I have never entirely abandoned. For someone growing up in a working-class town in the post-war decades, this Dartmoor seemed a far-off magical land full of mystery, terror and intrigue, entirely alien to the greyness of urban life. Here was a place, a primeval landscape, inhabited by spectral hounds, desperate convicts, ancient legends, cunning murderers, and Corinthian heroes taken straight from the Gothic canon — a kind of reincarnated Wuthering Heights. No amount of subsequent scholarly know-how can ever make up for the thrill of that first reading, which will stay with me always.

The scene that greets Watson on his return to Baker Street at the start of ‘The Naval Treaty’ (1893) captures the essence of the emerging detective story in the fin de siecle: Holmes was seated at his side-table clad in his dressing-gown and working hard over a chemical investigation. A large curved retort was boiling furiously in the bluish flame of a Bunsen burner, and the distilled drops were condensing into a two-litre measure...He dipped into this bottle or that, drawing out a few drops of each with his glass pipette, and finally brought a test-tube containing a solution over to the table. In his right hand he had a slip of litmus-paper. ‘You come at a crisis, Watson,’ said he. ‘If this paper remains blue, all is well. If it turns red, it means a man’s life.’ He dipped it into the test-tube, and it flushed at once into a dull dirty crimson. ‘Hum! I thought as much!’ he cried.1

It is now the stuff of legend in the world of detective fiction. In A Study in Scarlet (1887), a man lies dead at No. 3, Lauriston Gardens, Brixton, and above the body on the wall, written in blood, is the word ‘Rache’. After his accustomed examination of the scene, Holmes makes the following pronouncement: There has been murder done, and the murderer was a man. He was more than six feet high, was in the prime of life, had small feet for his height, wore coarse, square toed boots and smoked a Trichinopoly cigar. He came here with his victim in a four-wheeled cab, which was drawn by a horse with three old shoes and one new one on his off fore-leg. In all probability the murderer had a florid face, and the finger-nails of his right hand were remarkably long.1

Agatha Christie’s 1930 book The Mysterious Mr. Quin is one of her best kept secrets; it is perhaps the least well known of her early texts and certainly one which has received scant critical attention. This is a pity, because while Christie’s writing has frequently been portrayed as possessing excellent plotting but set within a flat, matter-of-fact style, The Mysterious Mr. Quin, on the other hand, contains some of her finest prose and acute observation of the art of detection and its relationship with human nature. In ‘The Man from the Sea’, for instance, Mr. Satterthwaite, the book’s principal protagonist, reflects as he tries to get to the bottom of the mystery surrounding the lonely Signora. He presses her on her unhappy marriage: He felt himself groping — groping — in the dark recesses of her mind where she was trying to hide her secret from him. ‘The boy — it’s got to do with him. You wouldn’t mind about anything else.’ He heard the faint gasp she gave and he knew he had probed correctly. A cruel business but necessary. It was her will against his. She had got a dominant, ruthless will, but he, too, had a will hidden beneath his meek manner. And he had behind him the heaven-sent assurance of a man who is doing his proper job. He felt a passing contemptuous pity for men whose business it was to track down such crudities as crime. This detective business of the mind, this assembling of clues, this delving for the truth, this wild joy as one drew nearer the goal...Her very passion to keep the truth from him helped him. He felt her stiffen defiantly as he drew nearer and nearer.2

Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black (1983) is one of the most celebrated ghost stories of modern times. Adapted for television in 1989, it continues to attract interest and is now the subject of a recent major film. One of the main reasons for the story’s impact is its overwhelmingly tragic, yet compelling, central theme, the death of children and the appalling consequences which flow from it. It is a subject that is at once profoundly and universally affecting, not just because of the tragedy of a life unfulfilled, but because the death of children is the death of the future. It stops the tide of life in its tracks and conjures up the nightmare world of P. D. James’s novel, The Children of Men, where no children are born to an infertile population. From a literary perspective, the story has one of the iconic spectres of contemporary fiction, the figure of the woman in black herself, doomed to pass on her own grief to all who witness her melancholy presence.

In a chapter of miscellaneous traditions (nawādir) near the end of the “book of prayer” (kitāb al-salāt) of his celebrated collection of Imāmī Shī‘ite traditions, Kulaynī (d. 329/941) has the following tradition:2 ‘Alī b. Muhammad rafa‘ahu qāla: qīla li-Abī ‘Abdi ’llāh ‘alayhi ’l-salām: lima sāra ’l-rajul yanharifu fī ’l-salāt ilā ’l-yasār? fa-qāla: li-anna lil-Ka‘ba sittat hudūd, arba‘a minha ‘an 3 yasarika, wa-’thnan minha ‘ala yaminika, fa-min ajl dhalika waqa ‘a ’l-tahrif4 ilā ’l-yasār. ‘Alī b. Muhammad,6 without a (full) chain of transmission,7 said: Abū ‘Abdallāh [Ja‘far al-Sādiq (d. 148/765)] was asked: “How does it come about that a man inclines to the left in prayer?” He answered: “Because the Ka‘ba has six boundaries, four of them on your left, and two of them on your right; it is on account of this that the inclination is to the left.”

Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy — originally published as three separate novels, City of Glass (1985), Ghosts (1986) and The Locked Room (1986) — are works where the ultimate nightmares for detective fiction come true. These are stories where unexplained absences and strange disappearances are the norm and where the generic conventions dissolve into an endless pursuit of an unspecified mystery. In the post-Second World War period, since the appearance of Borges’s three detective stories, two distinct forms of the ratiocinative detective story emerged. The conventional detective tale with its formulaic narrative of enclosure now found itself running parallel with a new form, the metaphysical detective story.1 Successive novels by writers such as Nabokov, Robbe-Grillet, Durrenmatt and Pynchon, amongst others, have all augmented this growing body of work.2

Edward D. Hoch, a critic and prolific writer of locked room mysteries, claimed in 1981 that ‘the locked room story has a long and noble history, going back to Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”’.2 In the period after the First World War the genre began to see a return to the notion in Poe’s detective fiction that theme was a direct consequence of the nature of the detective narrative structure. As Chapter 1 demonstrated, Poe’s theme of ratiocination in ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ complemented the closed nature of the story’s construction by appearing as a frame for the narrative. In this respect the locked room mysteries written by John Dickson Carr between 1930 and the outbreak of the Second World War are of particular relevance.3 Although Carr continued to write until his death in 1977, it is his novels of the 1930s, written in the genre’s Golden Age, a period of increasing conventions for the genre, which exhibit some of the most notable examples of the locked room mystery anywhere.

I have, during the course of this study, argued that the concept of enclosure should be recognized as having a profound effect on detective fiction. Much of the reason for this is directly attributable to the locked room mystery, and in particular to ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’; its dual status as the first modern detective story and a locked room mystery has meant that it occupies a seminal position in the canon. In this story, as I have already demonstrated, enclosure was consonant with the architecture of the locked room, the nature of the new narrative structure and the way in which the theme of ratiocination formed a frame around the narrative. Crucially, the theme of logical reasoning interacts with the narrative to fulfil the detective story’s desire for closure.

One of the more remarkable facts about detective fiction, a genre which has now assumed epic proportions, is its foundation of just three short stories, an experiment to be abandoned by its creator almost as quickly as it appeared. For Edgar Allan Poe, the publication of ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ in 1841, followed by ‘The Mystery of Marie Roget’ (1842–3) and ‘The Purloined Letter’ (1844), was to represent the extent of his output in this field. Although he always seemed diffident about his foray into detective fiction, being ‘conscious of the inherent gimmickry’ of the tales, he nevertheless realized that he was in uncharted literary territory.3 In a letter to a friend, he wrote, ‘these tales of ratiocination owe most of their popularity to being something in a new key’.4 This ‘new key’ was characterized by the representation of crime as an intellectual puzzle, invoking the practice of scientism in clue solving and heralding the detective as a major literary figure. So complete was Poe’s innovation that the narrative structure he composed for these tales was to become a blueprint for all subsequent detective stories. Thus the locked room of ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, as a prototype for detective fiction with its accent on enclosures, death and references to sequestered lives, not only became a paradigm for the way in which the genre would function structurally, but carried with it an idea central to Poe’s Gothic texts.

On the evening of Saturday, 9 July 1864, Thomas Briggs, the chief clerk of Robarts Bank in the City, boarded the 9.50 train from Fenchurch Street to Hackney. Briggs was returning home from a weekly excursion to visit a family member in Peckham, a routine journey he had made countless times, but on this particular occasion it was destined to become infamous in the annals of crime. When passengers at Hackney boarded the first class compartment formerly occupied by Briggs, they found it covered in blood, with a bag and stick belonging to Briggs and a singular hat, not Briggs’s, lying between the seats. The alarm was raised. The battered body of Briggs, still alive, was found on the line between Hackney Wick and Bow; it has never been established whether he fell or was thrown from the train during the attack. Whatever the truth of these events, he died of his injuries later that evening.1 The crime prompted the largest manhunt thus far in English legal history; eventually, with the help of forensic examination of the hat, a German emigre, an ex-gunsmith turned tailor by the name of Franz Muller, was arrested in America where he had fled after the murder. Muller was tried, convicted and eventually hanged outside Newgate on 14 November 1864. With public executions being banned in 1868, this was one of the last such spectacles.

It is an iconic moment. Mary the housemaid enters the library and draws back the curtains to reveal the body of a blonde stretched out on the carpet. The Bantrys, hapless owners of Gossington Hall in Agatha Christie’s The Body in the Library (1942), have no idea who she is or how she got there. So begins one of the quintessential texts of the Golden Age, so redolent of its genre that it has acquired a metonymical relationship with the classic detective story. In her Author’s Foreword to The Body in the Library, Agatha Christie even describes the body in the library as a cliche of detective fiction. In Christie’s version the private library would represent a conventional element of social privilege, while the body of an ordinary girl placed within it would be a highly improbable and sensational incursion. It is precisely this dislocation which W. H. Auden had in mind in his essay, ‘The Guilty Vicarage’: ‘The corpse must shock not only because it is a corpse but also because, even for a corpse, it is shockingly out of place, as when a dog makes a mess on a drawing room carpet.’3 As this unlikely juxtaposition presents the combination of murder and libraries as a violation of the sense of peace and reverential erudition, it is little wonder that the discovery in Gossington Hall brings with it a sense of personal outrage, not for the fact of the murder itself, but for its location. As Colonel Bantry demands, ‘You mean to tell me, that there’s dead body in my library — my library?’4

When Jorge Luis Borges wrote the first of three detective stories in 1941, ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’, he did so as part of a wider initiative to mark the centenary of the publication of ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’. This year also saw the inaugural edition of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine2 promoting excellence in the short story, and Howard Haycraft’s Murder for Pleasure: The Life and Times of the Detective Story, a landmark volume in the critique of the genre.3 Borges completed his doubling of Poe’s original project by adding ‘Death and the Compass’ in 1942 and ‘Ibn-Hakam al-Bokhari, Murdered in His Labyrinth’ in 1949. In the spirit of the anniversary Borges returns the detective story to its origins. In this respect, Maurice Bennett has argued that: The relationship between Poe and Borges, however, transcends mere similarities in metaphysical and artistic interests. Critics have noted in passing that Borges is the single most prominent perpetuator of literary forms pioneered by Poe. The detective story and the short tale that turns narrative action into philosophical speculation rank among the most notable exercises of both writers. Poe is also the author to whom Borges returns most often in praise, criticism, and explicit imitation.4

Ellery Queen, in his survey of early detective fiction, was moved to describe Chesterton’s The Innocence of Father Brown (1911), his first collection of such stories, as the ‘miracle book’.2 There is just the faintest tinge of irony in this statement; this first set of clerical mysteries do indeed contain some of the most celebrated stories in the canon, but they are also perfect examples of how Chesterton sought to articulate, in fictional form, the desirable qualities of the Catholic faith: a faith which would ultimately become his own.

The litigation crisis in this country is a subject of great importance to the chief executive officers of public uccounting firms. 1 will first address the problem's magnitude and its source and then speculate on the developments we might expect in the future. Like all forecasts, mine will certainly be wrung. I hope that my degree of error on the pessimistic side will be considerable.

Developmental susceptibility to four forms of the horizontal-vertical (HV) illusion was examined in subjects ranging in age from 3 to 20 years. For each form of the HV illusion, one standard and six comparison stimuli were developed, with subjects first inspecting the standard and then selecting the matching comparator. The magnitude of the illusion, estimated from the difference between the size of the standard and that of the selected comparator, was found to be similar to values reported previously and determined through the use of a wide range of stimuli, procedures, and subject groups. Susceptibility to the HV illusion was greatest for the youngest subjects. It decreased for older subjects in accordance with the development of spatial coordinates, as suggested by Piaget.

At some time towards the middle of the twelfth/eighteenth century, the young Najdī scholar Muḥammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhāb (1115–1206/1703f–92) experienced something like a conversion. From that point on, his understanding of monotheism seems to have been such that he considered most of the professed Muslims of his day to be polytheists who should be fought till they accepted Islam. The first Wahhābī state (1158–1233/1745f–1818) was the product of the fusion of this radical vision with the political fortunes of the Āl Sa'ūd, until then the petty chiefs of the Najdī oasis of Dir'iyya.

The namesake taboo was not restricted to the names of caliphs, as we learn from an anecdote about the litterateur Abu Zayd al-Balkhi. In short, the namesake taboo protects the dignity of those who wield political power by forbidding the mention by name in their presence of any persons who share their names. There are doubtless other attestations of the namesake taboo to be found in the sources. But they are hard to locate, even with electronic search facilities, and the attestations are at least enough to establish the existence of this exotic phenomenon. The very presence of the namesake taboo in a Muslim context goes against the grain. This at least makes it intriguing, which perhaps does something to mitigate the shame of presenting an aniconic tuḥfa to Oleg Grabar. Keywords: Abu Zayd al-Balkhi; caliphs; Muslim; namesake taboo; Oleg Grabar; political power

Purpose: The role of motion contrast and motion capture in the ‘Ouchi’ effect was investigated in a simplified stimulus. Methods: Sinewave gratings were rapidly oscillated vertically within two concentric stationary ‘apertures’, an innerdisc surrounded by an annulus. Results: A strong illusion of relative motion between the disc and annulus is observed in the horizontal direction for 8 and 12 cycles/deg given small orientation differences between the two gratings. Conclusion: These parameters coincide with those of the ‘Ouchi’ effect, suggesting a sharing of the same causal mechanism.

Aims This study explored the Magnet accreditation process in the first health care organization outside the USA to attempt to gain the award, Rochdale NHS Trust United Kingdom. The development was supported by the American Nurses Credentialing Center as a pilot project and the research conducted as a case study in organizational response to the requirements of a new accreditation system. Method Information was collected via 23 face-to-face and three telephone interviews carried out with 11 senior figures at Rochdale during the 2-year period of the Magnet project, from field notes of meetings attended by the researchers and from analysis of documents associated with the project. Results The work of applying for Magnet accreditation built upon a previous 2–3 year programme of shared governance and clinical leadership throughout the Trust which senior staff felt had been an essential foundation for the Magnet project. The process enabled staff to assemble evidence which held up a mirror to their practice and contributed to other quality-related initiatives. The experience at Rochdale suggests that Magnet enables care areas to identify and celebrate examples of good practice and for lessons to be learned and shared within the organization. Although the Magnet concept is primarily nursing oriented, medical and allied health professionals were able to contribute and benefit. The application was successful and Rochdale was awarded Magnet status in April 2002. Conclusions The Magnet project at Rochdale was essentially a process of collecting evidence to formally recognize previous leadership initiatives and their effects within the organization. The emergent approach to implementing the Magnet project was one which attempted to integrate and utilize existing systems and resources. The project provides evidence that Magnet can be transferred to non-US health care systems. The principal issues associated with this transfer were the costs incurred, the interpretation of terminology and the engagement of medical and allied health professionals.

A variety of biomedical technologies are being developed that can be used for purposes other than treating disease. Such "enhancement technologies" can be used to improve our appearance and regulate our emotions, with the goal of feeling "better than well." While these technologies can help people adapt to their rapidly changing lifestyles, their use raises important ethical issues.