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The article provides comprehensive guidance on the maintenance and storage of shell collections. It outlines detailed procedures for cleaning shells, including methods for removing encrustations and discoloration. It further discusses the application of protective coatings and offers insights into storage options, highlighting various container types and their advantages and disadvantages.

Simple Summary: Asbestos exposure is known as the main elicitor of pleural mesothelioma (PM) development. The pathology's rarity, wide range of growth patterns, and devastating prognosis have hindered a standardized treatment to date. This study intended to determine possible prognosticators contributing to adjusting the treatment allocation. This initiated the analysis of the readily available biomarkers (from blood withdrawal) and clinical characteristics of 98 consecutive patients regarding their impact on overall survival (OS) in a retrospective and multicentered manner. Surgery (pleurectomy/decortication (P/D)), multimodal therapy (chemotherapy and surgery), a high hemoglobin level, a low platelet count, and a low platelet–lymphocyte ratio (PLR) were identified as favorable prognosticators. In multivariate analysis, histology, P/D, low C-reactive protein (CRP), and platelet levels were independent prognostic variables for this cohort. These validating results support further application of (lung-sparing) interventions and accompanying research on prognostic and predictive biomarkers. Evoked from asbestos-induced inflammation, pleural mesothelioma represents a fatal diagnosis. Therapy ranges from nihilism to aggressive multimodality regimens. However, it is still unclear who ultimately benefits from which treatment. We aimed to re-challenge inflammatory-related biomarkers' prognostic value in times of modern immune-oncology and lung-sparing surgery. The biomarkers (leukocytes, hemoglobin, platelets, neutrophils, lymphocytes, monocytes, neutrophil–lymphocyte ratio (NLR), lymphocyte–monocyte ratio (LMR), platelet–lymphocyte ratio (PLR), C-reactive protein (CRP)) and clinical characteristics (age, sex, histology, therapy) of 98 PM patients were correlated to overall survival (OS). The median OS was 19.4 months. Significant OS advantages (Log-Rank) were observed in multimodal treatment vs. others (26.1 vs. 7.2 months, p < 0.001), surgery (pleurectomy/decortication) vs. no surgery (25.5 vs. 3.8 months, p < 0.001), a high hemoglobin level (cut-off 12 g/dL, 15 vs. 24.2 months, p = 0.021), a low platelet count (cut-off 280 G/L, 26.1 vs. 11.7 months, p < 0.001), and a low PLR (cut-off 194.5, 25.5 vs. 12.3 months, p = 0.023). Histology (epithelioid vs. non-epithelioid, p = 0.002), surgery (p = 0.004), CRP (cut-off 1 mg/dL, p = 0.039), and platelets (p = 0.025) were identified as independent prognostic variables for this cohort in multivariate analysis (Cox regression, covariates: age, sex, histology, stage, CRP, platelets). Our data verified the previously shown prognostic role of systemic inflammatory parameters in patients treated with lung-sparing surgery within multimodality therapy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces the special section on Religion, Spirituality, and Advertising. A person's belief in a religion or their spiritual identity can have a direct influence on the way they live and their attitudes and values. This can also impact an individual's perception toward an advertiser's message and images or advertising in general. While studies on the topic of religion and spirituality in the marketing literature are on the rise, there is still a substantive research gap on this topic, particularly on the theoretical and empirical developments pertaining to the influence of religion on various aspects of advertising topics. For this special section, the Call for Papers resulted in 37 submissions, which finally resulted in five articles that present a different focus on the topic and aim to encourage new discourse into the area of religion, spirituality, and advertising. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Environmentalists disagree with animal liberationists over how to repair the relationship between human beings and other species. While this often comes as a surprise to those not deeply involved in either movement (or those like me who identify with both movements), the fact is that the agenda and values of each group sometimes contradict those of the other. For the purposes of this paper we can summarize the basic, conflicting intuitions of environmentalists and animal liberationists as follows: Environmentalists often argue that human consumption of animals is natural, and what is natural is permissible, and therefore human consumption of animals is permissible (hereafter this will be referred to as "the naturalistic argument"). Animal liberationists often argue that pain and death are evil, and that it is incumbent upon humans to eliminate evil to the extent that they can; therefore, it is incumbent upon humans to eliminate the pain and death that accompany the consumption of animals.In arguing against the vegetarian plank of animal liberation, some environmentalists have tried to strengthen the naturalistic argument with an appeal to the example of indigenous cultures in general and Native American cultures in particular. In this paper I will examine and criticize this strategy. However, I am not concerned here with defending animal liberationism. Rather, I would like to show how these arguments reveal-unintentionally, I am sure-an unflattering view of Native Americans and are damaging to Indians of the past, present, and future. It is my contention that environmentalists who argue by appealing to American Indian cultures tend to (1) characterize Indians of the past as noncultured, (2) characterize Indians of the present as culturally contaminated or nonexistent, (3) “disappear” important concerns of contemporary Indians, and (4) trivialize American Indian cultures. This critique is not to be construed as a denial of the power of American Indian cultures as models of environmental consciousness. Nor does anything written here against this particular line of ar ment imply the falsehood of the environmentalists’ belief in the permissibility of animal consumption (the fact that an argument is unsound or dangerous does not mean that its conclusion is false).

The article reviews the West Coast Shell Show in San Diego, emphasizing its success with diverse exhibits, award-winning displays, and contributions to shell education and conservation efforts.

By looking at specific motivations for social media use as general action or inaction goals, this research provides a cognitive account of their effects on perceptions of paid advertising on smartphones. Results across two studies show that specific motivations with an overarching action goal (i.e. seeking information, seeking excitement, and seeking emotional support) relate positively to perceptions of advertising entertainment, while those with an overarching inaction goal (i.e. seeking relaxation) relate negatively to perceptions of advertising entertainment. In addition, the motivation to seek information from social media relates positively to perceptions of advertising informativeness. Perceptions of both advertising informativeness and advertising entertainment relate negatively to perceptions of advertising intrusiveness, leading to indirect effects of specific motivations on intrusiveness. Direct effects of specific motivations on intrusiveness are minimal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mou, Zhao, and McNamara (2007) proposed the "intrinsic model of human spatial memory," which posits that a viewer's memory of an array of objects will exhibit a preferred direction that is aligned with an intrinsic axis of the array. They defined intrinsic axes as salient axes created in part by the physical (geometric) properties of the array. To date, these geometric characteristics have received little research attention. We begin such an endeavor by evaluating the role of symmetry and orthogonality (i.e., number of right angles in an array of objects) in spatial memory. Participants viewed a layout of objects from a single (Experiment 1) viewpoint or 2 (Experiment 2) viewpoints and then judged relative directions within the layout from memory. Orthogonality and symmetry were associated with decreased reliance on egocentric reference systems but were qualified by a generally greater reliance on egocentric reference frames than is common in the literature. Indeed, for only 1 array--a highly orthogonal and symmetric one--did participants consistently respond nonegocentrically. We suggest that overuse of this array in the literature has led to an overestimation of the importance of allocentricity in spatial memory.

We examined whether view combination mechanisms shown to underlie object and scene recognition can integrate visual information across views that have little or no three-dimensional information at either the object or scene level. In three experiments, people learned four "views" of a two dimensional visual array derived from a three-dimensional scene. In Experiments 1 and 2, the stimuli were arrays of colored rectangles that preserved the relative sizes, distances, and angles among objects in the original scene, as well as the original occlusion relations. Participants recognized a novel central view "more efficiently" than any of the Trained views, which in turn were recognized more efficiently than equidistant novel views. Experiment 2 eliminated presentation frequency as an explanation for this effect. Experiment 3 used colored dots that preserved only identity and relative location information, which resulted in a weaker effect, though still one that was inconsistent with both part-based and normalization accounts of recognition. We argue that, for recognition processes to function so effectively with such minimalist stimuli, view combination must be a very general and fundamental mechanism, potentially enabling both visual recognition and categorization.

A substantial amount of research has demonstrated the importance of reference frames in organizing memory of object locations in both small and large environments. However, to date, little research has examined how the object locations represented in one reference frame are specified relative to object locations represented in another. In a series of 4 experiments, we demonstrate that multiple "microreference frames" can be established in memory for sets of objects that are spatially and semantically distinct, and that the spatial relations between these microreference frames are specified in memory by means of a more global, "macroreference frame". Additionally, these experiments demonstrate that an established macroreference frame can influence which of several microreference frames will be coded in memory, but that a previously established microreference frame had no appreciable influence on the subsequent formation of a macroreference frame. These results are interpreted as indicating that the same cognitive mechanisms underlie interobject coding across multiple environmental scales. The implications for reference frame theories and theories positing hierarchical memory organization are discussed. (Contains 8 figures.)

In Australia, advertising is a $13 billion industry that needs a supply of suitably skilled employees. Over the years, advertising education has developed from vocational-based courses to degree courses across the country. This study uses diffusion theory and various secondary sources and interviews to observe the development of advertising education in Australia from its early past to its current-day tertiary offerings, to discussing the issues that are arising in the near future. Six critical issues are identified, along with observations about the challenges and opportunities within Australian advertising education. By looking back to the future, it is hoped that this historical review provides lessons for other countries of similar educational structure or background, or even other marketing communication disciplines on a similar evolutionary path. (Contains 5 tables.)

The tendency to underestimate egocentric distances in immersive virtual environments (VEs) is not well understood. However, previous research (A. R. Richardson & D. Waller, 2007) has demonstrated that a brief period of interaction with the VE prior to making distance judgments can effectively eliminate subsequent underestimation. Here the authors examine the mechanism underlying the effect of VE interaction and the conditions that may give rise to it. In Experiment 1, after interacting with an immersive VE, participants tended to overestimate distances in the physical world, indicating that the interaction involved a recalibration of the perceptual-motor system. Experiment 2 demonstrates that visual information is not necessary (and that body-based information is necessary) during the interaction period for it to have a positive effect on subsequent distance estimation accuracy. Experiment 3 illustrates that the interaction task does not need to be goal directed in order to be effective. (Contains 3 figures.)

Several lines of research have suggested the importance of egocentric reference systems for determining how the spatial properties of one's environment are mentally organized. Yet relatively little is known about the bases for egocentric reference systems in human spatial memory. In three experiments, we examine the relative importance of observer-based reference directions in human memory by controlling the orientation of head and body during acquisition. Experiment 1 suggests that spatial memory is organized by a head-aligned reference direction; however, Experiment 2 shows that a body-aligned reference direction can be more influential than a head-aligned direction when the axis defined by the relative positions of the observer and the learned environment (the "self-to-array" axis) is properly controlled. A third experiment shows that the self-to-array axis is distinct from--and can dominate--retina, head, and body-based egocentric reference systems.

The interdisciplinary survey inherits from more traditional survey courses the weaknesses embodied in the survey textbook. The standard textbook presentation gives students the impression that each figure's music, art, or literature is the product of the "spirit of the age." Well-chosen biographies temper that presentation by drawing attention to actual acquaintances and collaborations. In addition, biographies help overcome aliteracy, encourage critical thinking, and, perhaps surprisingly, show the traditional textbook in its best light: as a resource to be consulted rather than literature to be pored over.