Plenty New Under the Sun

Variation at the melanocortin 1 receptor (MC1R) is very common in most non-African world populations. A range of variants predispose to skin cancer, including melanoma. What remains unclear are the mechanisms linking gene variation with sun sensitivity or tumor risk. In particular, it remains unclear whether pigmentary effects of the MC1R can account for all of the increase in cancer risk

The Problem with Academic Medicine: Engineering Our Way into and out of the Mess

Medical schools have come to resemble schools of molecular biology, while medical research has become focused on molecules rather than patient

Children's subjective well-being : International comparative perspectives

We are enjoined by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child to take account of the views of children. One way this can be done is by asking children about their lives in sample surveys. This paper is a comparison of the results obtained to sample survey questions on subjective well-being of children at two contrasting levels of analysis - international macro (European Union 29) and national level micro (England). At both levels, children¿s well-being is accessed in terms of three subjective domains: (1) personal well-being, (2) relational well-being, and (3) well-being at school. At the micro level we also explore neighbourhood well-being. The results show that at the macro level personal well-being is associated with the material and housing circumstances but not family relationships or family structure. Well-being at school is not associated with any variable. Subjective health is only associated with family structure. At the micro level, although many of the demographic and socio-economic characteristics of children are found to be associated with their well-being in the four domains, these factors explain only a small amount of the variation in these well-being domains

Peter Maxwell Davies's 'Revelation and Fall': Influence study and analysis

This thesis is an analysis of Peter Maxwell Davies's Revelation and Fall, through the influences that affect the development of its musical language and adoption of the expressionist aesthetic. Each chapter concentrates upon one aspect of the work: (1) its deployment of precompositional processes of thematic transformation; (2) the superimposition of different levels of structural organization; (3) motivic working within thematic transformation and contrapuntal devices; (4) experiments with timbre and the manipulation of temporal flow; and (5) the dramatic and aesthetic influences that shape the presentation of the work. Throughout the thesis also runs a critique of certain trends in recent music analysis that seem to limit a full understanding of the analyzed work. I contend that restricting an analysis to the serial level of organization cannot prove the musical viability of the work. The other levels through which the work articulates its material must be identified by the analyst and given importance equal to this serial level. Through this thesis, I attempt to address Kevin Korsyn's complaint that some analyses (of music of all periods, not specifically Davies's) tend to view works as autonomous, synchronic entities, divorced from an artistic continuum of historical development, by focussing on the many connections with other music and ideas that inform the work's identity. Influence study is suggested as a method whereby the shortcomings of these analytical trends can be countered and the Conclusion of the thesis opposes the criticism of this method found not only in analytical studies, such as David Roberts's study of Davies's compositional techniques, discussed in Chapter One, but also a great number of commentaries on literary theory, particularly intertextuality

A Security Kernel Based on the Lambda-Calculus

Cooperation between independent agents depends upon establishing adegree of security. Each of the cooperating agents needs assurance that the cooperation will not endanger resources of value to that agent. In a computer system, a computational mechanism can assure safe cooperation among the system's users by mediating resource access according to desired security policy. Such a mechanism, which is called a security kernel, lies at the heart of many operating systems and programming environments.The report describes Scheme 48, a programming environment whose design is guided by established principles of operating system security. Scheme 48's security kernel is small, consisting of the call-by-value $lambda$-calculus with a few simple extensions to support abstract data types, object mutation, and access to hardware resources. Each agent (user or subsystem) has a separate evaluation environment that holds objects representing privileges granted to that agent. Because environments ultimately determine availability of object references, protection and sharing can be controlled largely by the way in which environments are constructed. I will describe experience with Scheme 48 that shows how it serves as a robust and flexible experimental platform. Two successful applications of Scheme 48 are the programming environment for the Cornell mobile robots, where Scheme 48 runs with no (other) operating system support; and a secure multi-user environment that runs on workstations

The Genetics of Sun Sensitivity in Humans

Humans vary >100-fold in their sensitivity to the harmful effects of ultraviolet radiation. The main determinants of sensitivity are melanin pigmentation and less-well-characterized differences in skin inflammation and repair processes. Pigmentation has a high heritability, but susceptibility to cancers of the skin, a key marker of sun sensitivity, is less heritable. Despite a large number of murine coat-color mutations, only one gene in humans, the melanocortin 1 receptor (MC1R), is known to account for substantial variation in skin and hair color and in skin cancer incidence. MC1R encodes a 317–amino acid G-coupled receptor that controls the relative amounts of the two major melanin classes, eumelanin and pheomelanin. Most persons with red hair are homozygous for alleles of the MC1R gene that show varying degrees of diminished function. More than 65 human MC1R alleles with nonsynonymous changes have been identified, and current evidence suggests that many of them vary in their physiological activity, such that a graded series of responses can be achieved on the basis of (i) dosage effects (of one or two alleles) and (ii) individual differences in the pharmacological profile in response to ligand. Thus, a single locus, identified within a Mendelian framework, can contribute significantly to human pigmentary variation

Benign mesenteric lipodystrophy presenting as low abdominal pain: a case report

INTRODUCTION: Benign mesenteric lipodystrophy is rare and often presents in a non-specific fashion. Imaging findings may mimic a range of malignant conditions, particularly malignant ovarian disease in women. CASE PRESENTATION: We present the case of a 61-year-old Caucasian woman who was referred to the gynaecology service at our institution and was thought to have ovarian malignancy, and required a laparotomy. However, histopathological analysis unexpectedly revealed benign mesenteric lipodystrophy. CONCLUSION: Benign mesenteric lipodystrophy may mimic a range of conditions, particularly malignancy