A Proposal to Finance Long-Term Care Services through Medicare with an Income Tax Surcharge

Proposes expanding Medicare to cover comprehensive long-term care services, including home care and custodial nursing home care, and financing this expansion of benefits with a surcharge on federal income taxes

Weak imposition of Signorini boundary conditions on the boundary element method

We derive and analyse a boundary element formulation for boundary conditions involving inequalities. In particular, we focus on Signorini contact conditions. The Calder\'on projector is used for the system matrix and boundary conditions are weakly imposed using a particular variational boundary operator designed using techniques from augmented Lagrangian methods. We present a complete numerical a priori error analysis and present some numerical examples to illustrate the theory

Hypercalcaemia and in vitro osteolysis associated with xenografts of squamous carcinomas of the tongue.

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Managing at the Speed of Light: Improving Mission-Support Performance

The House and Senate Energy and Water Development Appropriations Subcommittees requested this study to help DOE's three major mission-support organizations improve their operations to better meet the current and future needs of the department. The passage of the Recovery Act only increased the importance of having DOE's mission-support offices working in the most effective, efficient, and timely manner as possible. While following rules and regulations is essential, the foremost task of the mission-support offices is to support the department's mission, i.e., the programs that DOE is implementing, whether in Washington D.C. or in the field. As a result, the Panel offered specific recommendations to strengthen the mission-focus and improve the management of each of the following support functions based on five "management mandates":- Strategic Vision- Leadership- Mission and Customer Service Orientation- Tactical Implementation- Agility/AdaptabilityKey FindingsThe Panel made several recommendations in each of the functional areas examined and some overarching recommendations for the corporate management of the mission-support offices that they believed would result in significant improvements to DOE's mission-support operations. The Panel believed that adopting these recommendations will not only make DOE a better functioning organization, but that most of them are essential if DOE is to put its very large allocation of Recovery Act funding to its intended uses as quickly as possible

Further observations on mechanisms of bone destruction by squamous carcinomas of the head and neck: the role of host stroma.

Mechanisms of bone invasion by squamous carcinomas of the head and neck have been investigated using fresh tumours and established tumour cell lines in an in vitro bone resorption assay with 45Ca-labelled mouse calvaria. Fresh tumours regularly resorb bone in vitro. Activity is consistently reduced by indomethacin. The tumours release E2 prostaglandins (PGE2) in amounts sufficient to account for approximately 50% of the bone resorption observed. Small amounts of non-prostaglandin (indomethacin-resistant) osteolytic factors are also produced. Control non-neoplastic tissues show a variable capacity to resorb bone in vitro; PGE2 levels in these tissues may be related to their content of inflammatory cells. Tumour cell lines also resorb bone in vitro but, for most lines, activity is not significantly blocked by indomethacin and PGE2 levels are generally insufficient to account for the osteolysis observed. Non-prostaglandin bone resorbing factors thus predominate. It is concluded that most squamous cancers of the head and neck are osteolytic in vitro and release a mixture of prostaglandin and non-prostaglandin factors which stimulate osteoclastic bone resorption. These factors are derived from both neoplastic and stromal elements, and are "tumour-associated" rather than "tumour-specific". In vitro bone resorption and prostaglandin release does not correlate with pathological features of the tumour or with post-operative survival

The impact of water pH on association preferences in fish

Acidification of lakes and rivers, as a consequence of anthropogenic interference, can cause fundamental changes to biological and ecological processes. One of the main consequences of a reduction in water pH for aquatic organisms is the disruption of their chemosensory abilities, as the detection of chemical cues underpins a wide range of decision-making processes; for example, a reduction to low pH has been shown to interfere with predator avoidance and the detection of foraging cues. Moreover, aquatic organisms are known to make widespread use of chemical information to inform their social behaviour, although we have a comparably poor understanding of how this is impacted by water acidification, especially their shoaling behaviour. Using a standard behavioural assay, we therefore investigated the impact of low water pH on the social interactions mediated by diet-derived chemical cues in three-spined sticklebacks (Gasterosteus aculeatus), by quantifying social behaviour in water that varied either experimentally or naturally in pH. In both cases we predicted that association patterns would be disrupted by low pH conditions, as reduced pH has shown to interfere with the perception of chemical cues in other non-social contexts. Consistent with this prediction, our results demonstrate that an acute, short-term reduction in water pH caused a breakdown in the diet-mediated social interaction patterns seen in more alkaline water, although, interestingly, the pattern of associations for fish tested in naturally acidic water was both more complex and in a direction that was precisely contrary to our predictions. Overall the findings provide insights into the potential effects of an acute reduction in water pH on fish communication and social interaction patterns, which may have implication for various individual, group, population and community-level processes

Unpredictable movement as an anti-predator strategy

Prey animals have evolved a wide variety of behaviours to combat the threat of predation, and these have been generally well studied. However, one of the most common and taxonomically widespread antipredator behaviours of all has, remarkably, received almost no experimental attention: so-called ‘protean’ behaviour. This is behaviour which is sufficiently unpredictable to prevent a predator anticipating in detail the future position or actions of its prey. In this study, we used human ‘predators’ participating in 3D virtual reality simulations to test how protean (i.e. unpredictable) variation in prey movement affects participants’ ability to visually target them as they move (a key determinant of successful predation). We found that targeting accuracy was significantly predicted by prey movement path complexity, although, surprisingly, there was little evidence that high levels of unpredictability in the underlying movement rules equated directly to decreased predator performance. Instead, the specific movement rules differed in how they impacted on targeting accuracy, with the efficacy of protean variation in one element depending on the values of the remaining elements. These findings provide important insights into the understudied phenomenon of protean antipredator behaviour, which are directly applicable to predator-prey dynamics within a broad range of taxa

Deconstructive discourse analysis: extending the methodological conversation

Discourse analysis is increasingly becoming a methodology of preference amongst qualitative researchers. There is a danger, however, of it being viewed as a bounded and uncontested domain of research practice. As discourse analysis is inextricably linked with theoretical issues, it is a dynamic practice that is constantly in a process of revision. In this paper I reflect on some of the conceptualisations undergirding the notion of discourse – conceptualisations that have important implications in terms of how the practice of discourse analysis proceeds. I highlight some of the dualisms that may plague discourse analysis, and offer some solutions to these. Finally, I outline the deconstructive discourse analysis that I utilised in my doctoral work. The purpose of the latter is not to provide a recipe of methodology, but to illustrate how elements of various theorists’ work (in this case Foucault, Derrida and Parker) may be profitably drawn together to perform specific discourse analytic work.Rhodes Universit