Evidence that indirect inhibition of saccade initiation improves saccade accuracy

Saccadic eye-movements to a visual target are less accurate if there are distracters close to its location (local distracters). The addition of more distracters, remote from the target location (remote distracters), invokes an involuntary increase in the response latency of the saccade and attenuates the effect of local distracters on accuracy. This may be due to the target and distracters directly competing (direct route) or to the remote distracters acting to impair the ability to disengage from fixation (indirect route). To distinguish between these we examined the development of saccade competition by recording saccade latency and accuracy responses made to a target and local distracter compared with those made with an addition of a remote distracter. The direct route would predict that the remote distracter impacts on the developing competition between target and local distracter, while the indirect route would predict no change as the accuracy benefit here derives from accessing the same competitive process but at a later stage. We found that the presence of the remote distracter did not change the pattern of accuracy improvement. This suggests that the remote distracter was acting along an indirect route that inhibits disengagement from fixation, slows saccade initiation, and enables more accurate saccades to be made

Institutionalizing health impact assessment in London as a public health tool for increasing synergy between policies in other areas

Objectives: To describe the background to the inclusion of health impact assessment (HIA) in the development process for the London mayoral strategies, the HIA processes developed, how these evolved, and the role of HIA in identifying synergies between and conflicting priorities of different strategies.Study design: Case series.Methods: Early HIAs had just a few weeks for the whole HIA process. A rapid appraisal approach was developed. Stages included: scoping, reviewing published evidence, a stakeholder workshop, drafting a report, review of the report by the London Health Commission, and submission of the final report to the Mayor. The process evolved as more assessments were conducted. More recently, an integrated impact assessment (IIA) method has been developed that fuses the key aspects of this HIA method with sustainability assessment, strategic environmental assessment and equalities assessment.Results: Whilst some of the early strategy drafts encompassed some elements of health, health was not a priority. Conducting HIAs was important both to ensure that the strategies reflected health concerns and to raise awareness about health and its determinants within the Greater London Authority (GLA). HIA recommendations were useful for identifying synergies and conflicts between strategies. HIA can be successfully integrated into other impact assessment processes.Conclusions: The HIAs ensured that health became more integral to the strategies and increased understanding of determinants of health and how the GLA impacts on health and health inequalities. Inclusion of HIA within IIA ensures that health and health inequalities impacts are considered robustly within statutory impact assessments. (C) 2010 The Royal Society for Public Health. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

The Systematic Unity of Value

This is the text of The Lindley Lecture for 1968, given by Jose Ferrater Mora (1903-1987), a South African philosopher

Does Migration Make You Happy?:A Longitudinal Study of Internal Migration and Subjective Well-Being

The authors acknowledge financial support from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) (RES-625-28-0001). This project is part of the ESRC Centre for Population Change (CPC). Financial support from the Marie Curie programme under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007-2013) / Career Integration Grant n. PCIG10-GA-2011-303728 (CIG Grant NBHCHOICE, Neighbourhood choice, neighbourhood sorting, and neighbourhood effects).The majority of quantitative studies on the consequences of internal migration focus almost exclusively on the labour-market outcomes and the material well-being of migrants. We investigate whether individuals who migrate within the UK become happier after the move than they were before, and whether the effect is permanent or transient. Using life-satisfaction responses from twelve waves of the British Household Panel Survey and employing a fixed-effects model, we derive a temporal pattern of migrants’ subjective well-being around the time of the migration event. Our findings make an original contribution by revealing that, on average, migration is preceded by a period when individuals experience a significant decline in happiness for a variety of reasons, including changes in personal living arrangements. Migration itself causes a boost in happiness, and brings people back to their initial levels. The research contributes, therefore, to advancing an understanding of migration in relation to set-point theory. Perhaps surprisingly, long-distance migrants are at least as happy as short-distance migrants despite the higher social and psychological costs involved. The findings of this paper add to the pressure to retheorize migration within a conceptual framework that accounts for social well-being from a life-course perspective.PostprintPeer reviewe

Abundance of blue whales off Chile from the 1997/98 SOWER survey

The 1997/98 SOWER survey in Chile searched the region from 18°30′S to 38°S. Although the primary intention of the surveys was to maximize blue whale encounters, survey coverage was sufficient to estimate abundance using line transect methods. The baseline abundance estimate, excluding transit legs, was 452 (CV = 0.56, 95% CI: 160–1300). This abundance estimate is negatively biased because inshore regions including Chiloé Island and the Gulf of Corcovado, where blue whales are now known to aggregate, were outside the survey area. If it is conservatively assumed that the baseline estimate applied to the entire population, then the population was at a minimum of 7–23% of pre-exploitation levels in 1997

Metastable phases and "metastable" phase diagrams

The work discusses specifics of phase transitions for metastable states of substances. The objects of condensed media physics are primarily equilibrium states of substances with metastable phases viewed as an exception, while the overwhelming majority of organic substances investigated in chemistry are metastable. It turns out that at normal pressure many of simple molecular compounds based on light elements (these include: most hydrocarbons; nitrogen oxides, hydrates, and carbides; carbon oxide (CO); alcohols, glycerin etc) are metastable substances too, i.e. they do not match the Gibbs' free energy minimum for a given chemical composition. At moderate temperatures and pressures, the phase transitions for given metastable phases throughout the entire experimentally accessible time range are reversible with the equilibrium thermodynamics laws obeyed. At sufficiently high pressures (1-10 GPa), most of molecular phases irreversibly transform to more energy efficient polymerized phases, both stable and metastable. These transformations are not consistent with the equality of the Gibbs' free energies between the phases before and after the transition, i.e. they are not phase transitions in "classical" meaning. The resulting polymeric phases at normal pressure can exist at temperatures above the melting one for the initial metastable molecular phase. Striking examples of such polymers are polyethylene and a polymerized modification of CO. Many of energy-intermediate polymeric phases can apparently be synthesized by the "classical" chemistry techniques at normal pressure.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure

Perspectives of research on detritus: Do factors controlling the availability of detritus to macroconsumers depend on its source?

Various factors have been suggested as regulating the availability of detritus to detritivores, e.g., particle-size and microbial dynamics, nutritional composition of detritus per se, and chemical inhibitors/ enhancers. These factors might vary in importance depending on detritus source: fecal pellets, vascular plants, or seaweed-derived detritus. We review the literature to evaluate the above factors and suggest that future research on detritus should consider regulatory mechanisms which depend on detritus type

Priming in the Microbial Landscape: Periphytic Algal Stimulation of Litter-Associated Microbial Decomposers

Microbial communities associated with submerged detritus in aquatic ecosystems often comprise a diverse mixture of autotrophic and heterotrophic microbes, including algae, bacteria, protozoa, and fungi. Recent studies have documented increased rates of plant litter mass loss when periphytic algae are present. We conducted laboratory and field experiments to assess potential metabolic interactions between natural autotrophic and heterotrophic microbial communities inhabiting submerged decaying plant litter of Typha angustifolia and Schoenoplectus acutus. In the field, submerged plant litter was either exposed to natural sunlight or placed under experimental canopies that manipulated light availability and growth of periphytic algae. Litter was collected and returned to the laboratory, where algal photosynthesis was manipulated (light/dark incubation), while rates of bacterial and fungal growth and productivity were simultaneously quantified. Bacteria and fungi were rapidly stimulated by exposure to light, thus establishing the potential for algal priming of microbial heterotrophic decay activities. Experimental incubations of decaying litter with 14C‐ and 13C‐bicarbonate established that inorganic C fixed by algal photosynthesis was rapidly transferred to and assimilated by heterotrophic microbial decomposers. Periphytic algal stimulation of microbial heterotrophs, especially fungal decomposers, is an important and largely unrecognized interaction within the detrital microbial landscape, which may transform our current conceptual understanding of microbial secondary production and organic matter decomposition in aquatic ecosystems