Archaeology of the McCormick Inlet Site, Melville Island, N.W.T.

Reports on a Dorset Eskimo site discovered by Henoch, qv. Architectural features of the dwelling and the artifacts collected are described. The large size of the stone tools (illus), and lack of some customary Dorset facts are unusual. The site is on the western periphery of the known range of Dorset culture, and further work may elucidate Dorset-Alaskan relationships

Diamond Jenness (1886-1969)

Canada's most distinguished anthropologist, Dr. Diamond Jenness, formerly Chief of the Division of Anthropology, National Museums of Canada, and Honorary Associate of the Arctic Institute of North America, died peacefully at his home in the Gatineau Hills near Ottawa on 29 November, 1969. He was one of that rapidly-vanishing, virtually extinct kind - the all round anthropologist, who, working seriously, turned out first-class publications in all four major branches of the discipline: ethnology, linguistics, archaeology, and physical anthropology. One must also add a fifth: applied anthropology, a fitting designation for the series of monographs on Eskimo administration in Alaska, Canada, and Greenland which he wrote after his retirement and which were published by the Arctic Institute of North America. ... [In response to an invitation to join Stefansson Arctic Expedition and study Eskimos for three years, Jenness found himself a member of the Southern Party with an assignment to study the Copper Eskimos around Coronation Gulf. These plans were interrupted due to the presence of sea ice.] On 30 September, Stefansson, with his secretary Burt McConnell, Jenness, two Eskimos, and the expedition's photographer G.H. Wilkins (later Sir Hubert Wilkins), left the Karluk near the mouth of the Colville River to hunt caribou and lay in a supply of fresh meat when it had become apparent that the ship, immobilized in the ice, could proceed no further. With two sleds, twelve dogs and food for twelve days the party set out for the mainland, but they never saw the Karluk again, for a week or so later the unfortunate vessel began her final drift westward. This was the inauspicious beginning of Jenness' arctic career. Few young anthropologists have faced such difficulties in beginning field-work in a new and unfamiliar area; yet none, surely, has emerged from the test with a more brilliant record of work accomplished. ... Jenness' first winter's field-work on the Arctic coast of Alaska led to [an] impressive list of publications ... conducted under conditions that many an ethnographer would have found intolerable. ... Scarcely a hint of these personal experiences of his first winter in the Arctic will be found in Jenness' anthropological writings. They were reserved for his retrospective volume Dawn in Arctic Alaska (1957) which he wrote while on a Gugenheim scholarship in 1954, some years after his retirement. ... Jenness' first year in the Arctic ended in July 1914 when the Expedition's schooners left Camden Bay and sailed eastward to Dolphin and Union Strait where he was to meet with another though very different, Eskimo people named by Stefansson the Copper Eskimos, most of whom, before Stefansson worked among them in 1910-1911, had never seen a white man. ... To obtain a faithful picture of the life of the Copper Eskimos Jenness chose an approach that in those days was not often employed by ethnologists. He entered into their life directly, as one of them. He attached himself to an Eskimo family and became the adopted son of Ikpukhuak, one of the foremost hunters and respected leaders of the Puivlik tribe of southwest Victoria Island, and his wife Higilak (Ice House), who was not only proficient in the ordinary and burdensome duties of an Eskimo wife but was also a shaman in her own right, a talent that saved Jenness from a local murder charge. Jenness lived with these people in their snow houses in winter and skin tents in summer, observing and recording the vastly different modes of life according to season. ... Jenness' researches extended far beyond Coronation Gulf and the arctic coast westward. ... Jenness always disclaimed being an archaeologist, yet he made two discoveries that are fundamental to an understanding of Eskimo prehistory - discovery of the Dorset culture in the eastern Arctic, and of the Old Bering Sea, earliest stage of the maritime pattern of Eskimo culture that later spread from northern Alaska to Canada and Greenland to form the principal basis for modern Eskimo culture. ... And so much more. In 1926, Jenness succeeded Edward Sapir as Chief Anthropologist of the National Museum of Canada. ... He developed the Antiquities Legislation that has been so important for the protection of archaeological resources in the Northwest Territories. ... Between 1962 and 1968 the Arctic Institute of North America published his admirable five volumes on Eskimo administration in Alaska, Canada, and Greenland. These monographs reflect his durable and compassionate concern for Canadian Indians and Eskimos and in them one can find much of the advice that he, for so many decades, provided the Canadian Government. ... [Jenness' accomplishments extend beyond the realm of anthropology and his reputation was both national and international. For his services in the field of anthropology, particularly in connection with the Indian and Eskimo population of Canada, he was appointed a Companion of the Order of Canada.

Semiclassical charged black holes with a quantized massive scalar field

Semiclassical perturbations to the Reissner-Nordstrom metric caused by the presence of a quantized massive scalar field with arbitrary curvature coupling are found to first order in \epsilon = \hbar/M^2. The DeWitt-Schwinger approximation is used to determine the vacuum stress-energy tensor of the massive scalar field. When the semiclassical perturbation are taken into account, we find extreme black holes will have a charge-to-mass ratio that exceeds unity, as measured at infinity. The effects of the perturbations on the black hole temperature (surface gravity) are studied in detail, with particular emphasis on near extreme ``bare'' states that might become precisely zero temperature ``dressed'' semiclassical black hole states. We find that for minimally or conformally coupled scalar fields there are no zero temperature solutions among the perturbed black holes.Comment: 19 pages; 1 figure; ReVTe

Do semiclassical zero temperature black holes exist?

The semiclassical Einstein equations are solved to first order in $\epsilon = \hbar/M^2$ for the case of a Reissner-Nordstr\"{o}m black hole perturbed by the vacuum stress-energy of quantized free fields. Massless and massive fields of spin 0, 1/2, and 1 are considered. We show that in all physically realistic cases, macroscopic zero temperature black hole solutions do not exist. Any static zero temperature semiclassical black hole solutions must then be microscopic and isolated in the space of solutions; they do not join smoothly onto the classical extreme Reissner-Nordst\"{o}m solution as $\epsilon \to 0$.Comment: 5 pages, no figures, minor changes and corrections, to appear in Physical Review Letter

Efficient in vitro RNA interference and immunofluorescence-based phenotype analysis in a human parasitic nematode, Brugia malayi

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>RNA interference (RNAi) is an efficient reverse genetics technique for investigating gene function in eukaryotes. The method has been widely used in model organisms, such as the free-living nematode <it>Caenorhabditis elegans</it>, where it has been deployed in genome-wide high throughput screens to identify genes involved in many cellular and developmental processes. However, RNAi techniques have not translated efficiently to animal parasitic nematodes that afflict humans, livestock and companion animals across the globe, creating a dependency on data tentatively inferred from <it>C. elegans</it>.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We report improved and effective <it>in vitro </it>RNAi procedures we have developed using heterogeneous short interfering RNA (hsiRNA) mixtures that when coupled with optimized immunostaining techniques yield detailed analysis of cytological defects in the human parasitic nematode, <it>Brugia malayi</it>. The cellular disorganization observed in <it>B. malayi </it>embryos following RNAi targeting the genes encoding γ-tubulin, and the polarity determinant protein, PAR-1, faithfully phenocopy the known defects associated with gene silencing of their <it>C. elegans </it>orthologs. Targeting the <it>B. malayi </it>cell junction protein, AJM-1 gave a similar but more severe phenotype than that observed in <it>C. elegans</it>. Cellular phenotypes induced by our <it>in vitro </it>RNAi procedure can be observed by immunofluorescence in as little as one week.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>We observed cytological defects following RNAi targeting all seven <it>B. malayi </it>transcripts tested and the phenotypes mirror those documented for orthologous genes in the model organism <it>C. elegans</it>. This highlights the reliability, effectiveness and specificity of our RNAi and immunostaining procedures. We anticipate that these techniques will be widely applicable to other important animal parasitic nematodes, which have hitherto been mostly refractory to such genetic analysis.</p

Can Disease Management Target Patients Most Likely to Generate High Costs? The Impact of Comorbidity

CONTEXT: Disease management programs are increasingly used to manage costs of patients with chronic disease. OBJECTIVE: We sought to examine the clinical characteristics and measure the health care expenditures of patients most likely to be targeted by disease management programs. DESIGN: Retrospective analysis of prospectively obtained data. SETTING: A general medicine practice with both faculty and residents at an urban academic medical center. PARTICIPANTS: Five thousand eight hundred sixty-one patients enrolled in the practice for at least 1 year. MAIN OUTCOMES: Annual cost of diseases targeted by disease management. MEASUREMENTS: Patients’ clinical and demographic information were collected from a computer system used to manage patients. Data included diagnostic information, medications, and resource usage over 1 year. We looked at 10 common diseases targeted by disease management programs. RESULTS: Unadjusted annual median costs for chronic diseases ranged between $1,100 and$1,500. Congestive heart failure ($1,500), stroke ($1,500), diabetes ($1,500), and cancer ($1,400) were the most expensive. As comorbidity increased, annual adjusted costs increased exponentially. Those with comorbidity scores of 2 or more accounted for 26% of the population but 50% of the overall costs. CONCLUSIONS: Costs for individual chronic conditions vary within a relatively narrow range. However, the costs for patients with multiple coexisting medical conditions increase rapidly. Reducing health care costs will require focusing on patients with multiple comorbid diseases, not just single diseases. The overwhelming impact of comorbidity on costs raises significant concerns about the potential ability of disease management programs to limit the costs of care