Valuing Water Quality As a Functionof Water Quality Measures

This paper incorporates a rich set of physical water quality attributes, as well as site and household characteristics, into a model of recreational lake usage in Iowa. Our analysis shows individuals are responsive to physical water quality measures. Willingness-to-pay estimates are reported based on improvements in these measures.

Hanging or Hieroglyphical Rock; Colossal Bust at Low Water Mark, Used as a Metre by the Aborigines

Scene three from the Panorama of the Monumental Grandeur of the Mississippi Valley painted by John J. Egan circa 1850. The original is owned by the Saint Louis Art Museum.https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/indian_head_rock/1085/thumbnail.jp

IgA Autoimmune Disorders: Development of a Passive Transfer Mouse Model

IgA is present in the skin in several dermatoses, including dermatitis herpetiformis, linear IgA bullous dermatosis, and Henoch-Schoenlein purpura. The neutrophilic infiltration in the area of the IgA deposition suggests that IgA is responsible for the associated inflammatory events. The mechanism for this process is unproven, but is likely to involve IgA-mediated neutrophil chemotaxis with inhibition of chemotaxis by dapsone. Elucidation of the mechanism of IgA-mediated inflammation will require an animal model. We have established a model for linear IgA bullous dermatosis as a prototype disease to be studied. IgA mouse monoclonal antibodies against a linear IgA bullous dermatosis antigen have been passively transferred to SCID mice with human skin grafts. This has produced neutrophil infiltration and basement membrane vesiculation in 4 of 12 mice tested. We conclude that an animal model for the pathogenesis of IgA dermatoses with IgA deposition and inflammation can be produced by passive transfer of mouse IgA antibodies against a linear IgA antigen

Edge enhancement improves disruptive camouflage by emphasising false edges and creating pictorial relief

Disruptive colouration is a visual camouflage composed of false edges and boundaries. Many disruptively camouflaged animals feature enhanced edges; light patches are surrounded by a lighter outline and/or a dark patches are surrounded by a darker outline. This camouflage is particularly common in amphibians, reptiles and lepidopterans. We explored the role that this pattern has in creating effective camouflage. In a visual search task utilising an ultra-large display area mimicking search tasks that might be found in nature, edge enhanced disruptive camouflage increases crypsis, even on substrates that do not provide an obvious visual match. Specifically, edge enhanced camouflage is effective on backgrounds both with and without shadows; i.e. this is not solely due to background matching of the dark edge enhancement element with the shadows. Furthermore, when the dark component of the edge enhancement is omitted the camouflage still provided better crypsis than control patterns without edge enhancement. This kind of edge enhancement improved camouflage on all background types. Lastly, we show that edge enhancement can create a perception of multiple surfaces. We conclude that edge enhancement increases the effectiveness of disruptive camouflage through mechanisms that may include the improved disruption of the object outline by implying pictorial relief

Hormone therapy and ovarian cancer: incidence and survival.

OBJECTIVE: We conducted a population-based case-control study to investigate the association between hormone therapy (HT) and ovarian cancer incidence, and followed all these cancer cases to determine the association of HT use with ovarian cancer mortality. METHODS: Seven hundred fifty-one incident cases of invasive epithelial ovarian cancer aged 40-79 years were diagnosed in Massachusetts and Wisconsin between 1993-1995 and 1998-2001 and matched to similarly aged controls (n = 5,808). Study subjects were interviewed by telephone, which ascertained information on HT use and specific preparation, estrogen alone (E-alone) or estrogen plus progestin (EP). Ovarian cancer cases were followed-up for mortality through December 2005. Multivariate logistic regression was used to estimate odds ratios and 95% confidence intervals (CI) for ovarian cancer incidence, and Cox proportional hazards modeling was used to estimate hazard ratios and corresponding confidence intervals for ovarian cancer mortality. RESULTS: Ever use of HT was significantly associated with an increased risk of ovarian cancer (odds ratio 1.57, 95% CI 1.31-1.87). The excess risk was confined to women who used E-alone preparations (OR 2.33, 95% CI 1.85-2.95). No significant associations were detected between pre-diagnosis HT use and ovarian cancer survival. CONCLUSIONS: Hormone therapy increases risk of ovarian cancer among E-alone users, but there is no substantial impact on survival after diagnosis

Asymptotics of 10j symbols

The Riemannian 10j symbols are spin networks that assign an amplitude to each 4-simplex in the Barrett-Crane model of Riemannian quantum gravity. This amplitude is a function of the areas of the 10 faces of the 4-simplex, and Barrett and Williams have shown that one contribution to its asymptotics comes from the Regge action for all non-degenerate 4-simplices with the specified face areas. However, we show numerically that the dominant contribution comes from degenerate 4-simplices. As a consequence, one can compute the asymptotics of the Riemannian 10j symbols by evaluating a `degenerate spin network', where the rotation group SO(4) is replaced by the Euclidean group of isometries of R^3. We conjecture formulas for the asymptotics of a large class of Riemannian and Lorentzian spin networks in terms of these degenerate spin networks, and check these formulas in some special cases. Among other things, this conjecture implies that the Lorentzian 10j symbols are asymptotic to 1/16 times the Riemannian ones.Comment: 25 pages LaTeX with 8 encapsulated Postscript figures. v2 has various clarifications and better page breaks. v3 is the final version, to appear in Classical and Quantum Gravity, and has a few minor corrections and additional reference