Edward Jenner, who discovered that it is possible to vaccinate against Small Pox using material from Cow Pox, is rightly the man who started the science of immunology. However, over the passage of time many of the details surrounding his astounding discovery have been lost or forgotten. Also, the environment within which Jenner worked as a physician in the countryside, and the state of the art of medicine and society are difficult to appreciate today. It is important to recall that people were still being bled at the time, to relieve the presence of evil humors. Accordingly, this review details Jenner’s discovery and attempts to place it in historical context. Also, the vaccine that Jenner used, which decreased the prevalence of Small Pox worldwide in his own time, and later was used to eradicate Small Pox altogether, is discussed in light of recent data.

Parallel pattern-matching (PPM) provides true commutative implementation of functions defined by cases in functional languages, because no argument is given precedence over any other. However, the requirement for concurrency (in general) to support these semantics means that current implementations incur a significant performance penalty over simple, traditional left-to-right semantics. We describe a source-level program transformation scheme that analyses a PPM definition and is often able to generate an equivalent definition that can be executed without concurrency. Where sequential implementation is not possible, the scheme is sometimes able to generate an equivalent definition that reduces the number of concurrent threads required to execute a definition. This transformation scheme promises to deliver a major improvement in the performance of PPM implementations.

Abstract. The introduction of multi-parameter type classes in Haskell has been hindered because of problems associated to ambiguity, which occur due to the lack of type specialization during type inference. This paper proposes a minimalist, simple solution to this problem, which requires only a small change to the type inference algorithm and to what has been considered ambiguity in Haskell. It does not depend on the use of programmer specified functional dependencies between type class parameters nor any other extra mechanism, such as associated types. A type system and a type inference algorithm, sound and complete with respect to the type system, are presented. 1.

Teacher collegiality comes with the friendliest of epithets. This is the case despite the widely disseminated concerns of Andy Hargreaves (1994) about the pernicious effects of what he calls “contrived collegiality”, and the warnings of Milbury McLaughlin (1993) that more apparent collegiality does not automatically translate into more effective teaching practice. The driving logic of contemporary discussions of teacher culture, in general, still appears to be that teacher collegiality is an essential ingredient of any school that claims to be an “emotionally healthy workplace ” (Jarzabkowski, 2001: 4). It is, ipso facto, a good thing. In this paper, we cautiously attempt to write against the grain of this prevailing moral-ethical tale about teacher collegiality, at the same time working to undo the binary formulation of ‘positive ’ as distinct from ‘negative’collegiality, of the sort that Andy Hargreaves finds useful. Our thesis is that, for better and worse, risk consciousness is an organisational rationality that produces in individual teachers the desire not to be physically isolated from other teachers. Put another way, teachers want and need to be physically near to each other in order to minimize risk for themselves both individually and collectively.

Most of the work still to be done in science and the useful arts is precisely that which needs knowledge and cooperation of many scientists and disciplines. That is why it is necessary for scientists and technologists in different disciplines to meet and work together, even those in branches of knowledge which seem to have least relation and connection with one another. Antoine Lavoisier, 1793 Once science was the nearly exclusive province of the lone researcher. Now scientists from disparate fields glean grains of knowledge that when combined may address important societal problems and complex scientific questions. Individuals still must master their respective fields, but their contributions within teams assembled to transcend disciplines increasingly add to the whole to make it greater than the sum of the parts. Worldwide, scientific research has taken a new approach to discover and apply knowledge from many seemingly unrelated disciplines to create completely new research and problemsolving approaches. Intractable 21st-century global problems such as climate change, healthcare delivery, energy and water resources, food safety, defense, disease and natural disaster mitigation demand solutions fostered by teams that integrate their unique disciplinebased perspectives and findings to form broadly generalisable answers. Even when the problems are not global, melding the concepts, methods and models of traditional, discrete fields embedded in academic silos increases the practical depths and expands the effective boundaries of scientific discovery and the opportunities for innovation. One result is the emergence of completely new, inter- or transdisciplinary fields such as neuroendochrinology, chaos and complexity, genomics, combinatorial

A review of the stochastic background of gravitational waves in f(R) gravity with WMAP constrains

A review of the stochastic background of gravitational waves in f(R) gravity with WMAP constrains

Fludarabine phosphate for the treatment of low grade lymphoid malignancy

Summary There is strong evidence that breast cancer risk is influenced by environmental factors, and animal experiments and human ecological data suggest that increased dietary fat intake increases the incidence of the disease. Epidemiological evidence on the relationship of dietary fat to breast cancer from cohort and case control studies has however been inconsistent. To examine the available evidence we have carried out a meta-anaylsis to summarise quantitatively the large published literature on dietary fat in the aetiology of breast cancer. After assembling all of the published case control and cohort studies, we extracted the relative risk in each study that compared the highest to the lowest level of intake. We then calculated a summary relative risk for all studies. The summary relative risk for the 23 studies that examined fat as a nutrient was 1.12 (95 % CI 1.04-1.21). Cohort studies had a summary relative risk of 1.01 (95 % CI 0.90-1.13) and case control studies a relative risk of 1.21 (95 % CI 1.10-1.34). Summary estimates of risk for specific types of fat excluded unity for only saturated fat. For the 19 studies that examined food intake, the summary relative risks were 1.18 (95 % CI 1.06-1.32) for meat, 1.17 (95 % CI 1.04-1.31) for milk, and 1.17 (95 % CI 1.02-1.36) for cheese. Summary relative risks for total fat intake were examined for several potential modifying factors. Regression analysis showed that European studies were more likely than studies done in other countries to show an increased relative risk associated with dietary fat and breast cancer, after taking into account

Frequency of serum tumour marker monitoring in patients with non-seminomatous germ cell tumours