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Objectives: To understand the views of qualified medical practitioners regarding "reasonable adjustments" and the quality of the care and treatment provided to adults with intellectual disabilities when admitted to acute hospitals as inpatients. Methods: Semi-structured interviews took place with 14 medical practitioners, seven from each of two acute hospitals, with a thematic analysis of the resulting data. Results: All 14 medical practitioners reported problems in the diagnosis and treatment of patients with intellectual disabilities. Most participants attributed these difficulties to communication problems and/or behaviours that, in the context of a hospital ward, were non-conforming. However, a minority reported that, because they were likely to have multiple comorbid health conditions, patients with intellectual disabilities were more complex. In addition, half of all these respondents reported making little use of "reasonable adjustments" introduced to improve the quality of the care received by this group of patients. Conclusions: Medical practitioners should make better use of the "reasonable adjustments" introduced in the UK to address inequities in care and treatment received by patients with intellectual disabilities. However, training should also focus on the biomedical complexities often presented by these men and women.

The developing discourse which moves assessment away from a measurement model towards one of learner empowerment and the development of assessment for lifelong learning sets the context for this paper. Within this framework, we explore how the demands made on practitioners may influence current reported assessment practices. The reasons given by practitioners for implementing innovations in assessment illuminate the ways in which academics are attempting to meet these demands. Using data from a recent UK Higher Education Academy (HEA) funded literature review, we examined six different types of innovation in assessment. These were presentations and other non-written assessments; portfolios and other non conventional writing assignments; assessment of groups and collaboration; involving students in assessment; use of new technology in assessment and the how and when of guidance and feedback. Our aim was to identify the drivers to each. Evidence from this project (INNOVAS) (Hounsell et al., 2007), suggests that drivers to innovation can be broadly classified as two basic types: those which are related to the student experience (termed "internal") and those which are clearly "external". This paper explores the interface between these drivers and current higher education assessment practice as reported in recent literature.

Abstract Background Aptamers are nucleic acids selected for their ability to bind to molecules of interest and may provide the basis for a whole new class of medicines. If the aptamer is simply a dsDNA molecule with a ssDNA overhang (a "sticky" end) then the segment of ssDNA that complements that overhang provides a known binding target with binding strength adjustable according to length of overhang. Results Two bifunctional aptamers are examined using a nanopore detector. They are chosen to provide sensitive, highly modulated, blockade signals with their captured ends, while their un-captured regions are designed to have binding moieties for complementary ssDNA targets. The bifunctional aptamers are duplex DNA on their channel-captured portion, and single-stranded DNA on their portion with binding ability. For short ssDNA, the binding is merely to the complementary strand of DNA, which is what is studied here – for 5-base and 6-base overhangs. Conclusion A preliminary statistical analysis using hidden Markov models (HMMs) indicates a clear change in the blockade pattern upon binding by the single captured aptamer. This is also consistent with the hypothesis that significant conformational changes occur during the annealing binding event. In further work the objective is to simply extend this ssDNA portion to be a well-studied ~80 base ssDNA aptamer, joined to the same bifunctional aptamer molecular platform.

Abstract Background Rare genomic changes (RGCs) that are thought to comprise derived shared characters of individual clades are becoming an increasingly important class of markers in genome-wide phylogenetic studies. Recently, we proposed a new type of RGCs designated RGC_CAMs (after Conserved Amino acids-Multiple substitutions) that were inferred using genome-wide identification of amino acid replacements that were: i) located in unambiguously aligned regions of orthologous genes, ii) shared by two or more taxa in positions that contain a different, conserved amino acid in a much broader range of taxa, and iii) require two or three nucleotide substitutions. When applied to animal phylogeny, the RGC_CAM approach supported the coelomate clade that unites deuterostomes with arthropods as opposed to the ecdysozoan (molting animals) clade. However, a non-negligible level of homoplasy was detected. Results We provide a direct estimate of the level of homoplasy caused by parallel changes and reversals among the RGC_CAMs using 462 alignments of orthologous genes from 19 eukaryotic species. It is shown that the impact of parallel changes and reversals on the results of phylogenetic inference using RGC_CAMs cannot explain the observed support for the Coelomata clade. In contrast, the evidence in support of the Ecdysozoa clade, in large part, can be attributed to parallel changes. It is demonstrated that parallel changes are significantly more common in internal branches of different subtrees that are separated from the respective common ancestor by relatively short times than in terminal branches separated by longer time intervals. A similar but much weaker trend was detected for reversals. The observed evolutionary trend of parallel changes is explained in terms of the covarion model of molecular evolution. As the overlap between the covarion sets in orthologous genes from different lineages decreases with time after divergence, the likelihood of parallel changes decreases as well. Conclusion The level of homoplasy observed here appears to be low enough to justify the utility of RGC_CAMs and other types of RGCs for resolution of hard problems in phylogeny. Parallel changes, one of the major classes of events leading to homoplasy, occur much more often in relatively recently diverged lineages than in those separated from their last common ancestor by longer time intervals of time. This pattern seems to provide the molecular-evolutionary underpinning of Vavilov's law of homologous series and is readily interpreted within the framework of the covarion model of molecular evolution. Reviewers This article was reviewed by Alex Kondrashov, Nicolas Galtier, and Maximilian Telford and Robert Lanfear (nominated by Laurence Hurst).

Stephanie W. Jamison and Joel P. Brereton, translators THE RIGVEDA The earliest religious poetry of India Three volumes 1,728pp. Oxford University Press. 257.50 [pounds sterling] (US $399). 978 0 19 [...]

The meaning and translations of the Rigveda, a collection of poems in early Sanskrit, are analyzed. Article discusses its history, authorship, and old and modern translations and interpretations of the work.

Sir,--It was good of Christopher Minkowski, not himself a Rigvedic scholar, to take on the task of responding (Letters, February 19) to my highly critical review of the recent translation [...]