Religion in American Public Life (with transcript)

Sarah Gordon and Mark Silk look at how the U.S. has historically regulated religious institutions as well as accounted for an individual’s religious liberty

Religion in American Public Life (with transcript)

Sarah Gordon and Mark Silk look at how the U.S. has historically regulated religious institutions as well as accounted for an individual’s religious liberty

Evaluation of BacLite Rapid MRSA, a rapid culture based screening test for the detection of ciprofloxacin and methicillin resistant S. aureus (MRSA) from screening swabs

BACKGROUND: Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) is a major nosocomial pathogen worldwide. The need for accurate and rapid screening methods to detect MRSA carriers has been clearly established. The performance of a novel assay, BacLite Rapid MRSA (Acolyte Biomedica, UK) for the rapid detection (5 h) and identification of hospital associated ciprofloxacin resistant strains of MRSA directly from nasal swab specimens was compared to that obtained by culture on Mannitol salt agar containing Oxacillin (MSAO) after 48 h incubation. RESULTS: A total of 1382 nasal screening swabs were tested by multiple operators. The BacLite Rapid MRSA test detected 142 out of the 157 confirmed MRSA that were detected on MSAO giving a diagnostic sensitivity of 90.4, diagnostic specificity of 95.7% and a negative predictive value of 98.7%. Of the 15 false negatives obtained by the BacLite Rapid MRSA test, seven grew small amounts (< 10 colonies of MRSA) on the MSAO culture plate and five isolates were ciprofloxacin sensitive. However there were 13 confirmed BacLite MRSA positive samples, which were negative by the direct culture method, probably due to overgrowth on the MSAO plate. There were 53 false positive results obtained by the BacLite Rapid MRSA test at 5 h and 115 cases where MRSA colonies were tentatively identified on the MSAO plate when read at 48 h, and which subsequently proved not to be MRSA. CONCLUSION: The Baclite MRSA test is easy to use and provides a similar level of sensitivity to conventional culture for the detection of nasal carriage of MRSA with the advantage that the results are obtained much more rapidly

The Science Performance of JWST as Characterized in Commissioning

This paper characterizes the actual science performance of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), as determined from the six month commissioning period. We summarize the performance of the spacecraft, telescope, science instruments, and ground system, with an emphasis on differences from pre-launch expectations. Commissioning has made clear that JWST is fully capable of achieving the discoveries for which it was built. Moreover, almost across the board, the science performance of JWST is better than expected; in most cases, JWST will go deeper faster than expected. The telescope and instrument suite have demonstrated the sensitivity, stability, image quality, and spectral range that are necessary to transform our understanding of the cosmos through observations spanning from near-earth asteroids to the most distant galaxies.Comment: 5th version as accepted to PASP; 31 pages, 18 figures; https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1538-3873/acb29

The James Webb Space Telescope Mission

Twenty-six years ago a small committee report, building on earlier studies, expounded a compelling and poetic vision for the future of astronomy, calling for an infrared-optimized space telescope with an aperture of at least $4m$. With the support of their governments in the US, Europe, and Canada, 20,000 people realized that vision as the $6.5m$ James Webb Space Telescope. A generation of astronomers will celebrate their accomplishments for the life of the mission, potentially as long as 20 years, and beyond. This report and the scientific discoveries that follow are extended thank-you notes to the 20,000 team members. The telescope is working perfectly, with much better image quality than expected. In this and accompanying papers, we give a brief history, describe the observatory, outline its objectives and current observing program, and discuss the inventions and people who made it possible. We cite detailed reports on the design and the measured performance on orbit.Comment: Accepted by PASP for the special issue on The James Webb Space Telescope Overview, 29 pages, 4 figure

Review of \u3ci\u3eSomething in the Soil: Legacies and Reckonings in the New West\u3c/i\u3e By Patricia Nelson Limerick

Stories matter. That simple statement is at the heart of the now decades-old struggle between the Old and New Western histories. The stories people hear about their pasts contribute to the construction of both personal and collective identities. In other words, what we believe about who we are is, to a significant extent, determined by the stories we are told about where we came from. The dominant story of the past two centuries in American history has been the tale of the frontier-for most Americans, the winning of the West. It has become the creation myth of the United States. In Something in the Soil, Patricia Nelson Limerick continues her crusade, begun in The Legacy of Conquest (1987), to change this national mythology. Something in the Soil is a collection of essays, most of which (eleven of sixteen, by my count) have previously appeared elsewhere. Like all such collections, the book struggles to hold its various topics in one thematic grip. Limerick has divided the work into five parts with such titles as Forgetting and Remembering (part 1), Beleaguered Great White Men (part 2), and The Historian As Dreamer: Preaching to (and by) the Half-Converted (part 4). Each contains three or four separate essays loosely linked by brief prefatory remarks. The five sections together are preceded by an introduction in which Limerick explains her goal for the collection-to provide a more-grounded and down-to-earth version of the history of the American West. But, in all honesty, she wants to do much more than this. The overwhelming tone of the book is one of bemused frustration. Limerick doesn\u27t just want to offer a more realistic version of history; she wants to construct a new mythology, a new master narrative of the American West. And the fact that she has not, despite more than a decade of trying, managed to disabuse Americans of the old mythology of the frontier, in which the good guys and bad guys were well-defined and open to limited interpretation, haunts her, it seems. There is a Quixotic feel to this collection; the reader emerges from the final full-length essay, the well-known Dancing With Professors, wondering if Limerick hasn\u27t spent enough time tilting at her Turnerian windmills, enough time growing more frustrated as her large and varied audiences repeatedly exhibit their unwillingness to give up the old stories. Each and every essay in this collection is great reading. As anyone who has ever read her knows, Limerick tells fascinating stories. She is, as the dust cover blurb claims, \u27\u27irreverent, enlightening, and always witty. Without a doubt, she has done more than anyone else in the field of American Western history to change the way the tales are told, the mythologies constructed. Not everyone may be listening, but Limerick should find some solace in having inspired a new generation of scholars to continue the quest, to keep challenging those old stories that have mattered so much to so many for so long