Isaac Newton's Alchemical Symbols

Isaac Newton is an iconic figure in the history of science but he had a mysterious side that remained hidden and unknown until the 1930s---he wrote more than 125 manuscripts on alchemy, comprising over 2300 pages and a million words. Alchemy was equated with sorcery and charlatanism over many centuries, so the academic world was surprised to learn of Newton's consuming interest and tended to ignore it until very recently. Our project is creating a scholarly online edition of Newton's alchemical manuscripts. The goal is to provide accurate transcriptions of the originals in TEI/XML documents with Unicode encodings. Alchemists used large numbers of special symbols in their cryptic literature to stand for substances, principles, processes, and devices. Newton's use of those symbols presented us with many unexpected challenges. We'll discuss those challenges and describe our use of font editors and symbol generators and XSL to create and serve the symbols, our use of XTF to make them searchable, and our work with the Unicode Consortium to create a new block of code points devoted to these historical alchemical symbols

First-year experience of chemotherapy for advanced retinoblastoma in Tanzania: disease profile, outcomes, and challenges in 2008.

PURPOSE: To examine the profile of retinoblastoma in a national tertiary referral center in Tanzania and to report first-year outcomes of its treatment using chemotherapy. METHODS: All patients with retinoblastoma referred in 2008 were included. Disease was classified on clinical grounds as ocular, orbital, or metastatic. Those with ocular and orbital disease received chemotherapy. Remission was the main outcome measure and defined as absence of disease at the end of treatment. RESULTS: In 2008, 37 patients (20 males and 17 females) with retinoblastoma were referred to Ocean Road Cancer Institute. The mean delay from the first sign of disease to presentation at hospital was 10.4 ± 8.7 months. Disease was ocular in 32% (12 of 37), orbital in 57% (21 of 37), and metastatic in 11% (4 of 37). Of those with ocular disease, 67% (8 of 12) completed chemotherapy and all (8 of 8) achieved remission. In contrast, 48% (10 of 21) with orbital disease completed chemotherapy and only 50% (5 of 10) achieved remission. The difference in outcome between the groups was statistically significant (P = .001, Fisher exact test). CONCLUSION: The profile of retinoblastoma in Tanzania is skewed toward severe invasive disease. Despite the introduction of chemotherapy, further improvements in mortality and morbidity can only be achieved through emphasis on early detection

Video Games as Time Machines: Video Game Nostalgia and the Success of Retro Gaming

This article conceptually integrates research on the experience of nostalgia—defined as a predominantly positive, social, and past-oriented emotion—into the fold of video game research. We emphasize the role of nostalgia as an explanation for contemporary retro gaming trends, and suggest that nostalgia towards gaming events is a necessary area of research. To those ends, we broadly review existing literature on nostalgia before specifically focusing on media-induced nostalgia, and demonstrate how theoretical and empirical observations from this work can be applied to understand video game nostalgia. In particular, we argue that engaging in older gaming experiences indirectly (via memories) and even directly (via replaying or recreating experiences) elicits nostalgia, which in turn contributes to players’ self-optimization and enhanced well-being. Moreover, as gamers and the medium mature together, nostalgic experiences with the medium are likely to become increasingly prevalent. The broad aim of this article is to offer future directions for research on video game nostalgia and provide a research agenda for research in this area

The Joys of Cooking When You’re a Depressed and Anxious Student

En el presente artículo se pretende mostrar cómo las transformaciones del psiquismo humano, a partir del carácter cultural de las producciones y prácticas del hombre, permiten retomar el tema de la subjetividad como nivel cualitativo distintivo de la especie humana. La subjetividad, entendida en la perspectiva aquí defendida, es un proceso inherente al funcionamiento cultural del hombre y al mundo social generado por sus producciones culturales. Estas consideraciones pretenden responder a la exclusión de la subjetividad por el post-estructuralismo y el neo-pragmatismo, apoyada en la idea de que se trababa de una noción que cargaba con las limitaciones del pensamiento moderno. Frente a esta postura, se argumenta que ninguna de estas corrientes de pensamiento tuvo una conciencia teórica sobre la subjetividad, un concepto que, de hecho, va en dirección opuesta a los principios fundamentales que sustentaron la modernidad tardía, apoyada en la idea de ciencia objetiva y en una representación racional del hombre

Maternal depressive symptoms and young people's higher education participation and choice of university: Evidence from a longitudinal cohort study

Background: Participation in higher education has significant and long-lasting consequences for people's socioeconomic trajectories. Maternal depression is linked to poorer educational achievement for children in school, but its impact on university attendance is unclear. // Methods: In an English longitudinal cohort study (N = 8952), we explore whether young people whose mothers experienced elevated depressive symptoms are less likely to attend university, and the role of potential mediators in the young person: educational achievement in school, depressive symptoms, and locus of control. We also examine whether maternal depressive symptoms influence young people's choice of university, and non-attendees' reasons for not participating in higher education. // Results: Young people whose mothers experienced more recurrent depressive symptoms were less likely to attend university (OR = 0.88, CI = 0.82,0.94, p < 0.001) per occasion of elevated maternal depressive symptoms) after adjusting for confounders. Mediation analysis indicated this was largely explained by educational achievement in school (e.g., 82.7 % mediated by age 16 achievement) and locus of control at 16. There was mixed evidence for an impact on choice of university. For participants who did not study at university, maternal depressive symptoms were linked to stating as a reason having had other priorities to do with family or children (OR: 1.17, CI = 1.02,1.35). // Limitations: Lack of data on the other parent's depression, loss to follow-up, possibly selective non-response. // Conclusions: Young people whose mothers experience elevated depressive symptoms on multiple occasions are less likely to participate in higher education; educational achievement in secondary school, but not the young people's own depressive symptoms, substantially mediated the effect

Citizen participation in news

The process of producing news has changed significantly due to the advent of the Web, which has enabled the increasing involvement of citizens in news production. This trend has been given many names, including participatory journalism, produsage, and crowd-sourced journalism, but these terms are ambiguous and have been applied inconsistently, making comparison of news systems difficult. In particular, it is problematic to distinguish the levels of citizen involvement, and therefore the extent to which news production has genuinely been opened up. In this paper we perform an analysis of 32 online news systems, comparing them in terms of how much power they give to citizens at each stage of the news production process. Our analysis reveals a diverse landscape of news systems and shows that they defy simplistic categorisation, but it also provides the means to compare different approaches in a systematic and meaningful way. We combine this with four case studies of individual stories to explore the ways that news stories can move and evolve across this landscape. Our conclusions are that online news systems are complex and interdependent, and that most do not involve citizens to the extent that the terms used to describe them imply

Running Head: Video Game Nostalgia and Retro Gaming

This article conceptually integrates research on the experience of nostalgia—defined as a predominantly positive, social, and past-oriented emotion—into the fold of video game research. We emphasize the role of nostalgia as an explanation for contemporary retro gaming trends, and suggest that nostalgia towards gaming events is a necessary area of research. To those ends, we broadly review existing literature on nostalgia before specifically focusing on media-induced nostalgia, and demonstrate how theoretical and empirical observations from this work can be applied to understand video game nostalgia. In particular, we argue that engaging in older gaming experiences indirectly (via memories) and even directly (via replaying or recreating experiences) elicits nostalgia, which in turn contributes to players' self-optimization and enhanced well-being. Moreover, as gamers and the medium mature together, nostalgic experiences with the medium are likely to become increasingly prevalent. The broad aim of this article is to offer future directions for research on video game nostalgia and provide a research agenda for research in this area