Contemplative Practices: A Strategy to Improve Health and Reduce Disparities.

Health has many dimensions, and intolerance and lack of compassion may contribute to the poor health and disparities in our nation. Tolerance can convey an inherent paradox or dissonance that can be associated with stress. However, tolerance has a dimension of acceptance, an acknowledgement and acceptance of what "is" at the present moment, that can relieve tension associated with differing beliefs and practices. Compassionate consideration of others can be combined with acceptance to create harmony within and across individuals. In this article, we explore how contemplative practices can cultivate tolerance and compassion and contribute to improvements in individual and population health

Protective vaccination in the horse against _Streptococcus equi_ with recombinant antigens

_Streptococcus equi_ subspecies _equi_ (_S. equi_) is a clonal, equine host-adapted pathogen of global importance that causes a highly contagious suppurative lymphodendopathy of the head and neck, more commonly known as Strangles. The disease is highly prevalent, can be severe and spread easily by visibly infected animals or by carrier animals that show no clinical signs of disease. Antibiotic treatment is usually ineffective. However, the majority of horses develop immunity to re-infection, suggesting that vaccination should be a feasible way to prevent the infection. Live attenuated vaccine strains of _S. equi_ are available but adverse reactions have been reported and they suffer from a short duration of immunity. Thus, a safe and effective vaccine against _S. equi_ is highly desirable. In this report, Welsh mountain ponies vaccinated with a combination of seven recombinant _S. equi_ proteins, were significantly protected from experimental infection by _S. equi_, resembling the spontaneous disease. The protective antigens consisted of five surface localized proteins and two IgG endopeptidases. The results from a second vaccination trial indicate that the endopeptidases were important for good protection. The similarity of _S. equi_ to other pyogenic streptococci suggests that our findings have broader implications for the prevention of streptococcal infections

Perceptions of trends in Seychelles artisanal trap fisheries: comparing catch monitoring, underwater visual census and fishers' knowledge

Fisheries scientists and managers are increasingly engaging with fishers' knowledge (FK) to provide novel information and improve the legitimacy of fisheries governance. Disputes between the perceptions of fishers and scientists can generate conflicts for governance, but can also be a source of new perspectives or understandings. This paper compares artisanal trap fishers' reported current catch rates with landings data and underwater visual census (UVC). Fishers' reports of contemporary 'normal' catch per day tended to be higher than recent median landings records. However, fishers' reports of 'normal' catch per trap were not significantly different from the median CPUE calculated from landings data, and reports of 'good' and 'poor' catch rates were indicative of variability observed in landings data. FK, landings and UVC data all gave different perspectives of trends over a ten-year period. Fishers' perceptions indicated greater declines than statistical models fitted to landings data, while UVC evidence for trends varied between sites and according to the fish assemblage considered. Divergence in trend perceptions may have resulted from differences in the spatial, temporal or taxonomic focus of each dataset. Fishers may have experienced and understood behavioural changes and increased fishing power, which may have obscured declines from landings data. Various psychological factors affect memory and recall, and may have affected these memory-based estimates of trends, while different assumptions underlying the analysis of both interview data and conventional scientific data could also have led to qualitatively different trend perceptions. Differing perspectives from these three data sources illustrate both the potential for 'cognitive conflicts' between stakeholders who do not rely on the same data sources, as well as the importance of multiple information sources to understand dynamics of fisheries. Collaborative investigation of such divergence may facilitate learning and improve fisheries governance

Type III Einstein-Yang-Mills solutions

We construct two distinct classes of exact type III solutions of the D=4 Einstein-Yang-Mills system. The solutions are embeddings of the non-abelian plane waves in spacetimes in Kundt's class. Reduction of the solutions to type N leads to generalized $pp$ and Kundt waves. The geodesic equations are briefly discussed.Comment: revtex, 4 pages, minor changes, some factors and references corrected, footnote adde

The Contribution of Academic Scholarship to Management Development.

Purpose: This paper explores the impact of academic scholarship on the development and practice of experienced managers. Design / Methodology: Semi-structured interviews with experienced managers, modelled on the critical incident technique. ‘Intertextuality’ and framework analysis technique are used to examine whether the use of academic scholarship is a sub-conscious phenomenon. Findings: Experienced managers make little direct use of academic scholarship, using it only occasionally to provide retrospective confirmation of decisions or a technique they can apply. However, academic scholarship informs their practice in an indirect way, their understanding of the ‘gist’ of scholarship comprising one of many sources which they synthesise and evaluate as part of their development process. Practical implications: Managers and management development practitioners should focus upon developing skills of synthesising the ‘gist’ of academic scholarship with other sources of data, rather than upon the detailed remembering, understanding and application of specific scholarship, and upon finding / providing the time and space for that ‘gisting’ and synthesis to take place. Originality / Value: The paper addresses contemporary concerns about the appropriateness of the material delivered on management education programmes for management development. It is original in doing this from the perspective of experienced managers, and in using intertextual analysis to reveal not only the direct but also the indirect uses of they make of such scholarship. The finding of the importance of understanding the ‘gist’ rather than the detail of academic theory represents a key conceptual innovation

Evaluation of the effectiveness of marine reserves for transient spawning aggregations in data-limited situations

Many coral reef fish species form predictable, transient spawning aggregations. Many aggregations are overfished, making them a target for spatial management. Here, we develop a per-recruit model to evaluate the performance of no-take marine reserves protecting transient spawning aggregations. The model consists of only 14 demographic and exploitation-related parameters. We applied the model to a protogynous grouper and a gonochoristic rabbitfish from Seychelles and tested six scenarios regarding the extent of protected areas, the level of fish spawning-site fidelity, and fishing effort redistribution post reserve implementation. Spawning aggregation reserves improve spawning-stock biomass-per-recruit and reduce the sex ratio bias in protogynous populations for all scenarios examined. However, these benefits are often small and vary among the different scenarios and as a function of sexual ontogeny. In all scenarios, increases in yield-per-recruit do not occur or are negligible. The long-term yield increases due to spawning aggregation reserves may still occur, but only if spawning-stock biomass recovery results in a recruitment subsidy. Given these limited benefits, the value of no-take reserves must be weighed against those of other management options, such as fishing effort reduction and seasonal fishery closures. The latter is particularly appropriate when spawning and non-spawning areas overlap in space

Categories of matrices with only obvious Moore-Penrose inverses

AbstractLet R be an associative ring with 1 and with an involution a → ā, and let MR be the category of finite matrices over R with the involution (aij) → (aij)∗ = (āji). Then the following two statements are equivalent: (i) If A in MR has a Moore-Penrose inverse with respect to ∗, then A is permutationally equivalent to a matrix of the form B000 with B invertible. (ii) If 1 = ∑aā in R, then at most one of the a's is not zero