Review: Academic Life: Hospitality, Ethics, and Spirituality

A book review of Academic Life: Hospitality, Ethics, and Spirituality by John B. Bennett

Review: The Administrative Portfolio by Peter Seldin and Mary Lou Higgerson

A book review of The Administrative Portfolio by Peter Seldin and Mary Lou Higgerson

“All’s Well that Ends Welles”: Orson Welles and the “Voodoo” Macbeth

The Federal Theatre Project, which was established in 1935 to put unemployed Americans back to work after the Great Depression, and later employed over 10,000 people at its peak, financed one particularly original adaptation of Shakespeare: the “voodoo” Macbeth directed by Orson Welles in 1936. Debuting in Harlem with an all-black cast, the play’s setting resembled a Haiti-like island instead of ancient Scotland, and Welles also supplemented the witches with voodoo priestesses, sensing that the practice of voodoo was more relevant, if not more realistic, for a contemporary audience than early modern witchcraft. My essay will consider how the terms “national origins” and “originality” intersect in three distinct ways vis-a-vis this play: The Harlem locale for the premier, the Caribbean setting for the tragedy, and the federal funding for the production

Time series analysis of age related cataract hospitalizations and phacoemulsification

BACKGROUND: Cataract surgery remains a commonly performed elective surgical procedure in the aging and the elderly. The purpose of this study was to utilize time series methodology to determine the temporal and seasonal variations and the strength of the seasonality in age-related (senile) cataract hospitalizations and phacoemulsification surgeries. METHODS: A retrospective, cross-sectional time series analysis was used to assess the presence and strength of seasonal and temporal patterns of age-related cataract hospitalizations and phacoemulsification surgeries from April 1, 1991 to March 31, 2002. Hospital admission rates for senile cataract (n = 70,281) and phacoemulsification (n = 556,431) were examined to determine monthly rates of hospitalization per 100,000 population. Time series methodology was then applied to the monthly aggregates. RESULTS: During the study period, age-related cataract hospitalizations in Ontario have declined from approximately 40 per 100,000 to only one per 100,000. Meanwhile, the use of phacoemulsification procedures has risen dramatically. The study found evidence of biannual peaks in both procedures during the spring and autumn months, and summer and winter troughs. Statistical analysis revealed significant overall seasonal patterns for both age-related cataract hospitalizations and phacoemulsifications (p < 0.01). CONCLUSION: This study illustrates the decline in age-related cataract hospitalizations in Ontario resulting from the shift to outpatient phacoemulsification surgery, and demonstrates the presence of biannual peaks (a characteristic indicative of seasonality), in hospitalization and phacoemulsification during the spring and autumn throughout the study period

Evaluating Simulations as Preparation for Health Crises like CoVID-19: Insights on Incorporating Simulation Exercises for Effective Response.

Today's health emergencies are increasingly complex due to factors such as globalization, urbanization and increased connectivity where people, goods and potential vectors of disease are constantly on the move. These factors amplify the threats to our health from infectious hazards, natural disasters, armed conflicts and other emergencies wherever they may occur. The current CoVID-19 pandemic has provided a clear demonstration of the fact that our ability to detect and predict the initial emergence of a novel human pathogen (for example, the spill-over of a virus from its animal reservoir to a human host), and our capacity to forecast the spread and transmission the pathogen in human society remains limited. Improving ways in which we prepare will enable a more rapid and effective response and enable proactive preparations (including exercising) to respond to any novel emerging infectious disease outbreaks. This study aims to explore the current state of pandemic preparedness exercising and provides an assessment of a number of case study exercises for health hazards against the key components of the WHO's Exercises for Pandemic Prepared Plans (EPPP) framework in order to gauge their usefulness in preparation for pandemics. The paper also examines past crises involving large-scale epidemics and pandemics and whether simulations took place to test health security capacities either in advance of the crisis based on risk assessments, strategy and plans or after the crisis in order to be better prepared should a similar scenario arise in the future. Exercises for animal and human diseases have been included to provide a "one health" perspective [1,2]. This article then goes on to examine approaches to simulation exercises relevant to prepare for health crisis involving a novel emergent pathogen like CoVID-19. This article demonstrates that while simulations are useful as part of a preparedness strategy, the key is to ensure that lessons from these simulations are learned and the associated changes made as soon as possible following any simulation in order to ensure that simulations are effective in bringing about changes in practice that will improve pandemic preparedness. Furthermore, Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies could also be applied in preparing communities for outbreak detection, surveillance and containment, and be a useful tool for providing immersive environments for simulation exercises for pandemic preparedness and associated interventions which may be particularly useful at the strategic level. This article contributes to the limited literature in pandemic preparedness simulation exercising to deal with novel health crises, like CoVID-19. The analysis has also identified potential areas for further research or work on pandemic preparedness exercising

AD51B in Familial Breast Cancer

Common variation on 14q24.1, close to RAD51B, has been associated with breast cancer: rs999737 and rs2588809 with the risk of female breast cancer and rs1314913 with the risk of male breast cancer. The aim of this study was to investigate the role of RAD51B variants in breast cancer predisposition, particularly in the context of familial breast cancer in Finland. We sequenced the coding region of RAD51B in 168 Finnish breast cancer patients from the Helsinki region for identification of possible recurrent founder mutations. In addition, we studied the known rs999737, rs2588809, and rs1314913 SNPs and RAD51B haplotypes in 44,791 breast cancer cases and 43,583 controls from 40 studies participating in the Breast Cancer Association Consortium (BCAC) that were genotyped on a custom chip (iCOGS). We identified one putatively pathogenic missense mutation c.541C&gt;T among the Finnish cancer patients and subsequently genotyped the mutation in additional breast cancer cases (n = 5259) and population controls (n = 3586) from Finland and Belarus. No significant association with breast cancer risk was seen in the meta-analysis of the Finnish datasets or in the large BCAC dataset. The association with previously identified risk variants rs999737, rs2588809, and rs1314913 was replicated among all breast cancer cases and also among familial cases in the BCAC dataset. The most significant association was observed for the haplotype carrying the risk-alleles of all the three SNPs both among all cases (odds ratio (OR): 1.15, 95% confidence interval (CI): 1.11–1.19, P = 8.88 x 10−16) and among familial cases (OR: 1.24, 95% CI: 1.16–1.32, P = 6.19 x 10−11), compared to the haplotype with the respective protective alleles. Our results suggest that loss-of-function mutations in RAD51B are rare, but common variation at the RAD51B region is significantly associated with familial breast cancer risk