An In-Depth Look at Recent Influenza Seasons and Vaccine Effectiveness

This paper aims to present an in-depth exploration of immunology, the influenza virus, vaccination, and vaccination’s effectiveness with respect to influenza. It also delves into the possible causes behind the large increase in early childhood deaths during the 2003-2004 influenza season, which was a turning point in terms of influenza incident reporting. Finally, data analysis on the relationship between childhood flu vaccine coverage and childhood outpatient ILI (influenza-like illness) visits by region is presented as a measurement of vaccine effectiveness and identifier of trends. Although this relationship was not statistically significant (alpha=0.05) regionally, this simply points to alternate factors that exist among the relationship between vaccine coverage and outpatient visits in children. The same comparison made over time with national statistics did prove statistically significant (p=0.02), however, other variables are hypothesized to be present in this relationship as well

What the Right Hand Gives: Prohibitive Interpretations of the State Constitutional Right to Bail

Most state constitutions include a right-to-bail provision, commonly phrased, “All persons shall be bailable by sufficient sureties except for [certain offenses] when the proof of guilt is evident or the presumption great.” This Note examines conflicting interpretations of the effect this provision has on the cases excluded from its guarantee—specifically, certain offenses when the proof is evident or presumption great. Some courts read this provision to be silent regarding the excepted cases, allowing the legislature and judiciary to decide whether to permit bail. Others reason that the plain language of this right to bail is prohibitive with respect to the excepted cases even if the court concludes that the accused does not pose a risk of flight or danger. This Note concludes that the grammatical structure and history of this provision support the former, permissive interpretation. It further warns against reducing the standard for denial of bail to the strength of the proof of guilt alone, arguing that the bail decision should reflect the purposes of bail—to ensure the accused’s presence at trial and safety of the community—lest the practice venture into the dangerous territory of preconviction punishment

Autumn Adventures

Postcard from Ariana Lipkind, during the Linfield College Semester Abroad Program at the Austro-American Institute of Education in Vienna, Austri

Person to Person in Austria

While still in the midst of their study abroad experiences, students at Linfield College write reflective essays. Their essays address issues of cultural similarity and difference, compare lifestyles, mores, norms, and habits between their host countries and home, and examine changes in perceptions about their host countries and the United States. In this essay, Ariana Lipkind describes her observations during her study abroad program at Austro-American Institute of Education in Vienna, Austria

Theory of Mind and its Relation to Psychopathy

Psychopathy is a personality dysfunction wherein an individual is unemotional and has a deficit in empathy (Dolan & Fullam, 2004). Theory of mind is the ability to perceive other’s thoughts, beliefs, emotions, etc. (Vonk, Hill, Mercer & Noser, 2015). This is similar to empathy, and as such is likely to have a relationship with psychopathy, although no such research has been undertaken to date. In this study, I correlated measures of psychopathy with theory of mind, sampling from Butler’s undergraduate population. Due to my combined major in Psychology and Criminology, I then researched and discuss the similarities theory of mind has with the sociological term, role taking, which is the process of viewing oneself from another perspective (Crawford & Novak, 2014). Rather than being an aptitude that varies per person, as is theory of mind, role taking is seen as an innate ability and rather is looked at in terms of the propensity in which one engages in it. While there were no significant relationships between theory of mind and psychopathy detected, the results suggested that a study with more statistical power may be able to find such a relationship. If a relationship does not exist between theory of mind and psychopathy, this can be explained by role taking theory

Pharmaceuticals entering Lake Champlain and their combination effects on developing Zebrafish Embryos

Human-derived pharmaceuticals have been identified entering surface waters in the United States through wastewater effluent. While there is ample literature about what each compound alone does to aquatic life, little is known about the effects aquatic life may experience from the exposure to many different pharmaceuticals present in the environment. More specifically, are the combination of pharmaceuticals in the environment more detrimental to aquatic life than each pharmaceutical alone? Zebrafish embryos were used to model what aquatic life in Lake Champlain may experience. Vatovec et al (2016) determined that there are 51 environmentally-relevant human derived pharmaceuticals entering Lake Champlain through wastewater effluent. Out of the 51, acetaminophen, carbamazepine, and diphenhydramine were studied. Embryos were exposed to each pharmaceutical for three days at various concentrations and observed for any developmental defects. The sub-lethal concentration of each pharmaceutical was determined and then this specific concentration was used in subsequent combination experiments. Results indicated that the exposure to all three pharmaceuticals were more detrimental to embryonic development than each pharmaceutical alone. However, when pharmaceuticals were combined in groups of two, one of the groups was more detrimental to embryos than the combination of all three pharmaceuticals. Although concentrations used in this experiment were much higher than that found in the environment, the implications of this study are still important. It is necessary to determine and demonstrate at what concentration pharmaceuticals are detrimental to aquatic life so that environmental concentrations never reach the concentrations used in the current experiment. The outcome of this research stands as a warning as to what may occur if nothing is done about pharmaceuticals entering water sources. Future studies should determine combination effects of pharmaceuticals at environmental concentrations

Proper efficiency and duality for a new class of nonconvex multitime multiobjective variational problems

In this paper, a new class of generalized of nonconvex multitime multiobjective variational problems is considered. We prove the sufficient optimality conditions for efficiency and proper efficiency in the considered multitime multiobjective variational problems with univex functionals. Further, for such vector variational problems, various duality results in the sense of Mond-Weir and in the sense of Wolfe are established under univexity. The results established in the paper extend and generalize results existing in the literature for such vector variational problems

How to Upscale The Kinetics of Complex Microsystems

The rate constants of chemical reactions are typically inferred from slopes and intersection points of observed concentration curves. In small systems that operate far below the thermodynamic limit, these concentration profiles become stochastic and such an inference is less straightforward. By using elements of queuing theory, we introduce a procedure for inferring (time dependent) kinetic parameters from microscopic observations that are given by molecular simulations of many simultaneously reacting species. We demonstrate that with this procedure it is possible to assimilate the results of molecular simulations in such a way that the latter become descriptive on the macroscopic scale. As an example, we upscale the kinetics of a molecular dynamics system that forms a complex molecular network. Incidentally, we report that the kinetic parameters of this system feature a peculiar time and temperature dependences, whereas the probability of a network strand to close a cycle follows a universal distribution

VOICE PROBLEMS IN TRANSLATIONS OF ROMANIAN AND ENGLISH ECONOMIC TEXTS

The difficulties brought about by the passive constructions have been an issue to debate for many linguists and scientist. Translations become ever more important in an increasingly global marketplace, and they are sometimes taken too lightly, when in fact it is a serious business that should be approached sensibly in order to avoid poor results. Translation is a specialised branch of translation, which requires specific skills and also methodology, theme as well as terminology competences. Without being exhaustive the aim of our paper is to focus on the types of the passive constructions specific to the scientific discourse, the economic one, in particular. It also tackles the translation difficulties that may come along when dealing with scientific papers and rendering texts from Romanian into English. Passive constructions are frequently used both in English and Romanian. However, active forms are more common in literary writing or where the focus is on the people who make things happen. In contrast, passives are mainly specific to texts where the focus is on events and processes, in things that happen. The most common problem in writing economic texts is overusing the passive voice. Specialists recommend or even require the passive voice in scientific, technical writing; motivating that by using the passive voice in scientific writing it achieves an objective tone whereas, sometimes it only obscure the text. The scientific discourse and the economic one in particular, basically mean presenting ideas, descriptions, definitions, classifications, instructions, etc. The speech is brief, the technical person, and the scientist managing to say things which in ordinary language would require a vast amount of talk. Therefore, speakers or writers use the passive constructions in the scientific discourse for the following reasons: a) when there is no use of identifying the agent of the action, being unimportant or obvious from the context; b) to avoid repetition of the subject; c) to put emphasis on the action or the process; d) to convey objectivity; e) to avoid a long active subject.translation, passive voice, Romanian language, English language, difficulties

TEACHING ENGLISH IN SEVERAL CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPEAN COUNTRIES

The Central and Eastern European countries find themselves at present, following a period of transition in all domains, education included. One of the greatest challenges is providing sufficient foreign language education so as to meet the growing demand especially after along period of time when foreign languages were seriously and damagingly neglected. This paper is an attempt to briefly present the way English language is taught in several Central and Eastern European Countries as well as to underline the importance of this educational process and maybe to offer some applicable solutions to teaching English in Romaniaeducation, English, methodology