Library As Place: Being Human in a Digital World

Despite the increasingly digital nature of information retrieval, both users and computers continue to occupy physical space, and the library – as place – offers an essential location for inspiration. In an age when one might assume that the digital negates the physical, a finite place can root the individual within space regarding both composition and information retrieval. In this seeking for the essentially human element of the physical book within space, we may also discover a need for the library as place

Event-related potentials and monoamines in autistic children on a clinical trial of fenfluramine

Introduction: As autistic persons have problems with selecting and encoding meaningful stimuli and multi-centre studies (Ritvo et al., 1983, 1986) had reported mild behavioural improvements following treatment with fenfluramine, event-related potential (ERP) stages of information processing were studied in childhood autism as part of a double blind crossover study of the efficacy of dl fenfluramine. . Methods: Acceptable recordings were derived from midline and 4 lateral sites on the scalp of 7 from 14 young persons with autism who understood the task (6 male, 1 female 5.8-17.7 years-of-age). A three-tone oddball paradigm was presented in a passive and active-task form (72% at 1 kHz, 14% at 0.5 kHz and 14% at 2.0 kHz) under placebo and drug conditions (where each condition lasted 5 months). Eleven patients provided blood and urine samples for monoamine analyses in both conditions. Results: a) With fenfluramine treatment blood serotonin decreased and urinary catecholamine levels fell (25-45%, but dopamine utilization (HVA/DA) increased 2-4-fold. b) Under fenfluramine autistic subjects responded non-significantly faster, with fewer errors of omission and improved /decreased beta criterion (signal detection). [IQ measures increased 7.5 points.] c) N1 amplitudes (Fz) decreased and latencies increased in the fenfluramine condition. Early negativity (especially on the right) correlated inversely with HVA/DA actvivity. Subtraction of the ERPs in nontarget from target conditions showed that the Negative difference (Nd) increased during fenfluramine treatment. d) P3 amplitudes (especially after the deviants) increased with fenfluramine treatment. But in the difference waveform (active-minus-passive condition) the P3 amplitude was halved. The distribution of the P3 component moved rostrally with treatment. Conclusions: N1 and P3 components of the ERP were responsive to fenfluramine treament. Treatment appears to have mildly improved early stimulus processing at stages represented by the early negative components, but to have mildly impaired processing at the P3-stage. The N1 / Nd - related improvement seems to be related to increased dopamine activity (cf. neuroleptic-like properties of racemate fenfluramine)

Comparison of Two Self-organization and Hierarchical Routing Protocols for Ad Hoc Networks

International audienceIn this article, we compare two self-organization and hierarchical routing protocols for ad hoc networks. These two protocols apply the reverse approach from the classical one, since they use a reactive routing protocol inside the clusters and a proactive routing protocol between the clusters. We compare them regarding the cluster organization they provide and the routing that is then performed over it. This study gives an idea of the impact of the use of recursiveness and of the partition of the DHT on self-organization and hierarchical routing in ad hoc networks

Literacy and Cultural Assimilation in Rural China: A Report from the Interior

The American Library Association has long been concerned with the promotion of literacy, particularly as it pertains to the equity and global universality of access to information. When libraries focus on the accessibility of information, literacy is understandably an initial step in the process. This essay focuses on challenges to literacy in rural China, and how technology may be improving access to information for many of the inland population

Building the Financial Facade: Jacques-Denis Antoine\u27s Hotel De La Monnaie, The Parisian Mint, 1765-1775

Building the Financial Facade: Jacques-Denis Antoine\u27s Hotel de la Monnaie, The Parisian Mint, 1765-1775, a thesis prepared by Amanda Catherine Roth Clark in partial fulfillment of the requitements for the Master of Arts degree in the Department of Art History

An Appeal for the Physical Book

Librarians are confronting a shift in media that is changing the structure and the collections of libraries as well as the meaning of librarianship itself. The heart of this essay suggests that the physical book maybe considered an enduring communication vessel. If the goal of the library is to offer access to the cultural record, then physical books as a social record embodying “bookness” hold a place within the library institution as a material expression of the intimate and enduring relationship between human and book

Green functions for generalized point interactions in 1D: A scattering approach

Recently, general point interactions in one dimension has been used to model a large number of different phenomena in quantum mechanics. Such potentials, however, requires some sort of regularization to lead to meaningful results. The usual ways to do so rely on technicalities which may hide important physical aspects of the problem. In this work we present a new method to calculate the exact Green functions for general point interactions in 1D. Our approach differs from previous ones because it is based only on physical quantities, namely, the scattering coefficients, $R$ and $T$, to construct $G$. Renormalization or particular mathematical prescriptions are not invoked. The simple formulation of the method makes it easy to extend to more general contexts, such as for lattices of $N$ general point interactions; on a line; on a half-line; under periodic boundary conditions; and confined in a box.Comment: Revtex, 9 pages, 3 EPS figures. To be published in PR

Near-Earth asteroid sample return missions

The rate of discovery of new NEAs and the success of D-S 1 and NEAR-Shoemaker, suggest that sample return from NEAs is now technically feasible. Here we present a summary of a recent workshop on the topic