Captain Smith\u27s Vlgrie

Harry B. Partridge, in Ad Memoriam Demetrii (August 1986), introduced a newly-discovered word ending in -gry. I was very interested in this announcement, since I Have been working on a little treatise of such words; ulgry increased my list to nineteen examples

A Collacon on Collacon

Mellen and I were exploring the depths of logology one day, when she suddenly stopped short, and uttered a single word, collacon. \u27Collacon?\u27 My dear Mellen --- ? That, she replied, is your challenge

Onomasticon III

In his November 1978 article, Logopoeia, Philip M. Cohen defines his title word as a coined word meaning \u27word-coinging.\u27 This definition does not do an established word justice. Logopoeia was defined by Ezar Pound -- who may have coined it -- in ABC of Reading (1934); and while logopoeia is literally making of words, Pound gives the word a much richer definition. The accepted meaning of this and most (all?) other -poeia words (from the Greek poiein, to make) are in the following onomasticon. Perhaps this should have been subtitled Much Ado About \u27Making\u27

Onomasticon IV

\u27Wright\u27 is a word whose earliest recorded use was, according to the OED, circa 695 A.D. The word is now considered archaic or dialectic, but in its 1300-year history \u27wright\u27 has spawned many attributed and combined words and surnames, the subject of this listing. All words are from Webster\u27s Second, the OED, or S. Baring-Gould\u27s Family Names and Their Story. Words which double as surnames are indicated by an asterisk and are either recorded in Baring-Gould or known to the author; if a reader knows someone whose surname is in this list, but not noted as such, please send it in as a correction. I have provided definitions (in parentheses) for words listed without definition

Onomasticon II

Little did I envision the difficulties encountered in building a list of -cide words. In general, such words are a combined form, signifying \u27killer\u27 or \u27killing\u27 (from the Latin caedere, to cut or kill). There are, however, three groups of exceptions: (1) development from other, similar roots; (2) neologisms, many of which are nonsensical; and (3) accidents of etymology

Onomasticon I

One of my favorite pastimes is gathering together words that share an interesting suffix -- or perhaps share a similar spelling, regardless of etymology

Microgravity Investigation of Cement Solidification

Concrete is the most widely used man-made material in the world, second only to water. The large-scale production of cements contributes to approximately 5% anthropogenic CO2 emission. Microgravity research can lead to more durable and hence more cost-effective material

Developing a Method for Reporting Patient Harm Due to Antimicrobial Shortages

INTRODUCTION: The number of drug shortages in the United States has increased in recent years. While some literature exists on factors that contribute to antimicrobial shortages, the need remains to accurately gage the level of patient harm incurred as a result of realized antimicrobial shortages. Furthermore, current methods of reporting adverse drug events are known to under-report instances of patient harm. We sought to develop an ongoing and accurate method of reporting patient harm due to antimicrobial shortages, which was convenient, anonymous, and allowed clinicians to estimate the causality due to a shortage. METHODS: We distributed a public SurveyMonkey(®) (SurveyMonkey, Palo Alto, CA, USA) link to gather information regarding institution (for de-duplicating purposes), patient age, sex, antimicrobial product on shortage, type of infection requiring treatment or prophylaxis, adverse event, and patient outcome. RESULTS: To date complete data were reported on four patients being treated for infections that included Stenotrophomonas maltophilia bacteremia, Pneumocystis jirovecii pneumonia, neonatal sepsis of unknown etiology, and cytomegalovirus colitis. Antimicrobials that were unavailable to patients included sulfamethoxazole–trimethoprim, gentamicin, and foscarnet. Two adverse events (a delay in treatment and an inability to treat with other antimicrobials due to resistance) were attributed with probable causality due to a shortage, while the remaining adverse events (death and an inability to tolerate high oral doses) were attributed to have unlikely and possible causalities due to a shortage, respectively. CONCLUSION: These methods encourage reports of antimicrobial shortage harms. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s40121-014-0040-z) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users

Insights into a dinoflagellate genome through expressed sequence tag analysis

BACKGROUND: Dinoflagellates are important marine primary producers and grazers and cause toxic "red tides". These taxa are characterized by many unique features such as immense genomes, the absence of nucleosomes, and photosynthetic organelles (plastids) that have been gained and lost multiple times. We generated EST sequences from non-normalized and normalized cDNA libraries from a culture of the toxic species Alexandrium tamarense to elucidate dinoflagellate evolution. Previous analyses of these data have clarified plastid origin and here we study the gene content, annotate the ESTs, and analyze the genes that are putatively involved in DNA packaging. RESULTS: Approximately 20% of the 6,723 unique (11,171 total 3'-reads) ESTs data could be annotated using Blast searches against GenBank. Several putative dinoflagellate-specific mRNAs were identified, including one novel plastid protein. Dinoflagellate genes, similar to other eukaryotes, have a high GC-content that is reflected in the amino acid codon usage. Highly represented transcripts include histone-like (HLP) and luciferin binding proteins and several genes occur in families that encode nearly identical proteins. We also identified rare transcripts encoding a predicted protein highly similar to histone H2A.X. We speculate this histone may be retained for its role in DNA double-strand break repair. CONCLUSION: This is the most extensive collection to date of ESTs from a toxic dinoflagellate. These data will be instrumental to future research to understand the unique and complex cell biology of these organisms and for potentially identifying the genes involved in toxin production

Group descent algorithms for nonconvex penalized linear and logistic regression models with grouped predictors

Penalized regression is an attractive framework for variable selection problems. Often, variables possess a grouping structure, and the relevant selection problem is that of selecting groups, not individual variables. The group lasso has been proposed as a way of extending the ideas of the lasso to the problem of group selection. Nonconvex penalties such as SCAD and MCP have been proposed and shown to have several advantages over the lasso; these penalties may also be extended to the group selection problem, giving rise to group SCAD and group MCP methods. Here, we describe algorithms for fitting these models stably and efficiently. In addition, we present simulation results and real data examples comparing and contrasting the statistical properties of these methods