Macurdablastus, a Middle Ordovician blastoid from the southern Appalachians

10 p., 3 fig.http://paleo.ku.edu/contributions.htm

Biostratigraphy and paleoecology of the Floyd Shale, Upper Mississippian, northwest Georgia

The Floyd Shale is a thick sequence of shale and siltstone containing minor units of sandstone and limestone that crops out in Georgia in the Valley and Ridge physiographic province. The formation represents the prodelta and embayment shale facies of high constructive deltas that were developed in the area during Late Mississippian time. Important facies associated with the Floyd Shale are the Hartselle delta front sandstone and the Tuscumbia, Monteagle, and Bangor shelf and carbonate bank limestones. Paleontologic evidence suggests that the Floyd ranges in age from Middle Meramecan through Middle Chesteran, but the lowermost Floyd may possibly be Early Meramecan. Floyd deltas, fed from source areas to the south and east, prograded northwestward during the Middle and Late Meramecan over the Tuscumbia Limestone shelf. Delta abandonment during the Late Meramecan resulted in marine reworking of terrigenous facies and transgression by carbonate sediments of the Monteagle Limestone. In the Early and Middle Chesteran, deltas prograded to the north and west over the Monteagle Limestone shelf. Final delta destructive phases occurred in the Middle Chesteran culminating with the Bangor Limestone transgressive sequence. During the period of Floyd deposition, communities of benthic marine organisms became established in sedimentary environments where favorable conditions prevailed. Five communities identified from the Floyd Shale may be distinguished on the basis of numerically dominant organisms; distribution can be related to sedimentary facies. Community 1 is dominated by linguloid brachiopods that probably inhabited areas of moderate to high sedimentation such as prodelta environments. Community 2 is dominated by mollusks and spiriferid and productid brachiopods and may have lived in shallow embayments established along strike from delta lobes. Community 3 includes assemblages dominated by fenestellid bryozoans that probably lived in shallow embayments similar to Community 2. Community 4 is dominated by pelmatozoan echinoderms, spiriferid brachiopods, and bryozoans and probably lived on the open shelf. Community 5 is characterized by dominant rugose or tabulate corals and pelmatozoan echinoderms that may have thrived on carbonate banks. Previous studies of marine benthic communities by such authors as Bretsky and Anderson have suggested a rigid onshore to offshore shelf sequence to explain the distribution of communities. Lack of work on a larger scale has resulted in a gap in the "offshore" community of the Mississippian in Bretsky's (1969) chart. Community distributions proposed by these previous workers are an oversimplification that ignores the control of local sedimentary processes on the distribution of marine organisms. The distribution of communities in the Floyd Shale explained in terms of depositional framework suggests that communities vary both perpendicular and parallel to the paleoshoreline depending upon sedimentary environment.Geological Science

Stratigraphy of the Dubuque Formation (Upper Ordovician) in Iowa

The Dubuque Formation of Upper Ordovician age crops out in the Upper Mississippi Valley. It comprises interbedded carbonate and argillaceous rocks that are approximately 35 feet thick in Iowa and Illinois, but thicken to a maximum of approximately 45 feet in southern Minnesota. Three proposed informal subdivisions: Frankville, Luana, and Littleport beds, are differentiated on the basis of bed surface topography ranging upward from nearly planar beds in the Frankville to prominently undulose surfaces in the Littleport beds. The Frankville beds represent a transition from the massive dolomite of the underlying Stewartville Member of the Wise Lake Formation to the overlying interbedded carbonate rocks and shale of the upper Dubuque. The base of the Dubuque Formation in Iowa and Minnesota is placed at a prominent, approximately 8 inch thick, carbonate bed at the base of the Frankville beds. This \u27\u27marker bed\u27\u27 provides a more precise datum for lithostratigraphic correlation than the lowest prominent shale parting employed by previous workers to identify the base of the Dubuque

Depression in Zimbabwe: a community approach to prevention and treatment

A position paper on primary health care for the management of mental health in Zimbabwe.This paper reports on a process whereby research findings, generated by a collaborative project between primary health care workers and a University team, were utilized by a community to formulate local plans for the prevention and management of depression. Action-oriented research, with a high level of community participation, follows on directly from the Declaration of Alma-Ata1 and has been called Health Systems Research (HSR). The principle of HSR is that it should be useful and have a direct focus on solving practical and relevant problems.2 Priorities should be generated by health workers and by the community rather than purely by academics and as much as possible of the research should be carried out by those already working at ground level. Results should lead to implementable recommendations and the research is not complete until those recommendations are underway

An alternative to the SAS2H/ORIGEN-S sequence to account for water-density effects in BWR systems

A scheme to generate one-group problem-dependent cross-section libraries for point-depletion calculations with the ORIGEN-S code was developed as an alternative to the SAS2H sequence of the SCALE code system. The methodology, named Automatic Rapid Processing (ARP), generates libraries by interpolating in SAS2H precomputed cross section libraries. The method has been used to generate ORIGEN-S cross section libraries on a personal computer resulting in a great reduction of computer time without a sacrifice of accuracy over that required by corresponding SAS2H calculations. The ARP scheme generates ORIGEN-S libraries by interpolating in burnup and enrichment for PWR assemblies. The intent of this work is to describe a procedure which extends the application of the ARP methodology to BWR assemblies by including the axial water-density effects in the generation of the ORIGEN-S cross-section libraries. The axial liquid- to-steam change of state in BWR systems leads to a variation in the water density and significant cross-section changes as a function of the water density. To account for the axial water-density changes in a SAS2H calculation, the water density is entered explicitly in the generation of the one-group ORIGEN-S cross-section libraries generated from the SCALE 27-group library. In its original version, ARP does not account for the effects of water-density variation in ORIGEN-S cross-section library generation, and, therefore, its application is restricted to systems for which the impact of this parameter is negligible. To update the ARP methodology to account for the water-density effect, a detailed study of the cross-section change with this parameter was performed with an 8 x 8 (General Electric) BWR assembly

The micropolitics of quality

This paper discusses how the audit culture has impacted on UK academics in terms of professional identities, priorities and social relations. Micropolitics, performativity, psychic economy and the changing political economy of higher education are some of the theoretical tools used to offer some explanatory power for the range of engagements with quality assurance. Questions are raised about the polysemic discourse of quality and how it has been subjected to multiple interpretations. For example, there are those members of the academy who see it as a major form of modernisation and student empowerment, while others see it as a form of symbolic violence. Specific attention is paid to peer review, impact studies, gendered power relations, productivity measures and whether quality intersects with equality in the academy. The paper concludes with calls to consider what the gestalt is of higher education

A Diagnostic Aid For Detecting Multiple Mental Disorders In Primary Care: The Symptom Driven Diagnostic System For Primary Care (sdds-pc*).

A high rate of undiagnosed mental disorders in primary care has been well documented for nearly three decades. (Shepherd et al 1966; Regier et al 1978,1993; Goldberg et al 1980; Van Hermert et al 1993; Olfson and Klerman, 1992; Barrett et al 1988). Failure to recognize mental illness has been shown to lead to undertreatment, greater impairment, and a longer duration of illness (Ormel et al 1991). The few efforts to change the diagnostic practice of primary care physicians, either through providing information from a patient screen completed prior to the physician visit or through physician education, have provided equivocal results. (Higgins 1994; Rand et al 1988; Goldberg 1980). The effects of improved physician recognition on decreasing patients’ health care use have also been equivocal, probably because there are many steps between recognition and patient outcome. These steps include accurate diagnosis, proper treatment, patient compliance, and timely follow-up with adjustment in treatment, as needed. Efforts to improve detection of mental disorders have concentrated on developing patient screens, which usually includea list ofpsychiatric symptoms independent of specific diagnoses, (Goldberg et al 1980; Borgquist et al 1993; Von Korff et al 1987) or which screen for one diagnosis; depression or alcoholism (Selzer 1971; Babor et al 1992). The former approach is limited because symptoms are not directly related to a treatable disorder, the latter, because patients may have more than one treatable psychiatric disorder (Kessler et al 1994). Moreover, screens are not widely used in primary care (Nelson and Berwick, 1989). Because most primary care visits are 15 minutes long or less, there is a need to develop rapid assessment methods that can be incorporated into routine care (Barrett 1991; Mitchell et al 1988; Anderson and Mattsson 1989)

The consequences of malaria infection in pregnant women and their infants

Preliminary results are presented from this study which indicate that 84.8 of pregnant women present at first antenatal visit with anemia (Hb 11g/dl) an 8.7 of their infants (n = 230) have a hemoglobin at birth below 14g/dl. There is an association between pregnancy anemia and malaria. A case control study in pregnant women and an infant cohort study to 18 months of age, are employed to study the cause and effects of anemia and malaria on women and their infants health

Development And Validation Of The Sdds-pc Screen For Multiple Mental Disorders In Primary Care

Objective: To develop, validate, and cross-validate a patient-completeds creen for multiplemental disorders in primary care. Design: Comparison of a patient self-report screen with an independent diagnostic assessment by mental health professionals using the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-III-R diagnoses as criterion standard. Setting: Three Rhode Island family practices and a South Carolina family medicine residency. Subjects: In the initial validation study, 937 patients in Rhode Island were screened; 388 were interviewed. In the cross-validation study, 775 patients were screened in Rhode Island and South Carolina, and 257 were interviewed. Screen Items: Sixty-two questions pertaining to nine mental disorders and suicidal ideation. Results: A 16-item screen remained after analys is of item and scale performance. Sensitivity, specificity, and positive predictive value, respectively, were calculated for the following scales: alcohol abuse or dependence (62%, 98%, and 54%), generalized anxiety disorder (90%, 54%, and 5%), major depression (90%, 77%, and 40%), obsessive-compulsive disorder (65%, 73%, and 5%), panic disorder (78%, 80%, and 21%), and suicidal ideation (43%, 91%, and 51%). Replicationin a new sampleshowed attenuated but acceptable operating characteristics for cross-validation. Conclusions: The Symptom-Driven Diagnostic System for Primary Care screen assesses multiple mental disorders that are common to primary care. It serves as a sensitive, valid, and patient-friendly first step in a new approach to recognizing and managing mental disorders in primary care. Finally, it aids the primary care clinician in selecting an appropriate diagnostic interview module for the disease for which the patient screened positive

The Three Rs: The Way Forward

This is the report of the eleventh of a series of workshops organised by the European Centre for the Validation of Alternative Methods (ECVAM), which was established in 1991 by the European Commission. ECVAM\u27s main goal, as defined in 1993 by its Scientific Advisory Committee, is to promote the scientific and regulatory acceptance of alternative methods which are of importance to the biosciences and which reduce, refine or replace the use of laboratory animals. One of the first priorities set by ECVAM was the implementation of procedures which would enable it to become well-informed about the state-of-the-art of non-animal test development and validation. and the potential for the possible incorporation of replacement alternative tests into regulatory procedures. It was decided that this would be best achieved by the organisation of ECVAM workshops on specific topics, at which small groups of invited experts would review the current status of various types of in vitro tests and their potential uses, and make recommendations about the best ways forward