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Assuming that partisan fairness and responsiveness are important aspects of redistricting, it is important to measure them. Many measures of partisan bias are satisfactory for states that are balanced with roughly equal proportions of voters for the two major parties. It has been less clear which metrics measure fairness robustly when the proportion of the vote is unbalanced by as little as 60% to 40%. We have addressed this by analyzing past election results for four states with Democratic preferences (CA, IL, MA, and MD), three states with Republican preferences (SC, TN, and TX) and comparing those to results for four nearly balanced states (CO, NC, OH, and PA). We used many past statewide elections in each state to build statistically precise seats for votes and rank for votes graphs to which many measures of partisan bias were applied. In addition to providing values of responsiveness, we find that five of the measures of bias provide mutually consistent values in all states, thereby providing a core of usable measures for unbalanced states. Although all five measures focus on different aspects of partisan bias, normalization of the values across the eleven states provides a suitable way to compare them, and we propose that their average provides a superior measure which we call composite bias. Regarding other measures, we find that the most seemingly plausible symmetry measure fails for unbalanced states. We also consider deviations from the proportionality ideal, but using it is difficult because the political geography of a state can entangle responsiveness with total partisan bias. We do not attempt to separate intentional partisan bias from the implicit bias that results from the interaction of the map drawing rules of a state and its political geography, on the grounds that redistricting should attempt to minimize total partisan bias whatever its provenance., Comment: 55 pages and 27 figures

Neurology and psychiatry are a pair of Siamese twins who cannot be separated. Though an acknowledged symbiotic interdependence exists, accommodation is difficult and complicated at best; at worst, there is a stony silence between the partners. This paper will attempt to touch on some historical reasons for this state of affairs and to review what progress is being made toward rationalizing and sweetening the symbiosis.

A protocol is presented for the full medico-psychosocial evaluation of patients with chronic benign pain, Complete history taking is often difficult with these patients. However, this can be accomplished with a combined approach by an anaesthetist and a psychiatrist following a structured interview pattern which respects the patient’s attitude towards psychological factors. The specific format of this interview is described.

The proverb “all that glitters is not gold” is one of the traditional gentle injunctions used by parents and educators to urge their young charges to look beyond first impressions in evaluating the world around them. In an attempt to communicate some understanding of the complexities involved in the formation of pain as a symptom, one could perhaps begin with a gentle reminder to all of us raised on the Western medical model that “all that hurts is not somatic”. This has a double meaning, which is intended. On the one hand it refers to the long historical record (Merskey and Spear, 1967), expressed in literature, etymology, religion and philosophy of “pain”, “hurt”, and related words being used as much to refer to emotional events as to physical ones. A second meaning is that pain in the clinical situation does not always have an identifiable somatic basis or so-called “peripheral input”. Particularly in the case of patients with chronic pain, keeping these two basic concepts in mind will contribute greatly to their understanding and to more effective clinical management.