Botanical Latin: History, Grammar, Syntax, Terminology and Vocabulary. William T. Stearn. London and Edinburgh: Thomas Nelson and Sons, Ltd., 1966. xiv, 566pp.($14.75)

Excerpt: As W. T. Stearn reminds us in the preface to this attractive and welcome work, the realm of literature which a knowledge of botanical Latin opens to botanists is a strange barbarous place for classicists; invited into it as an interpreter, a good classical scholar may well feel like Alice meeting Humpty Dumpty through the looking-glass. The same perplexity is experienced by the entomologist; those of us educated in the Latin of Cicero and Pliny are ill equipped to name new species or even to translate Latin descriptions, as biological Latin developed long ago into a stylized form not easily conquered without a specific aid

Seven Illustrations from Maurice Sand\u27s Le Monde des Papillons (1867)

Excerpt: The tailpieces and rear cover illustration in this issue are six vignettes and the frontispiece from a popular nineteenth-century French work for beginning amateur lepidopterists, Maurice Sand\u27s Le monde des papillons (Paris, 1867). The frontispieces (our rear cover) depicts a melange of collecting equipment, including a ring net for aerial collecting, a folding sweeping net, an entomological satchel, various forceps, a pupa-digging spud, a collecting tin for larvae, a lantern, a collecting box into which adult specimens were pinned, and several items which have disappeared from our modern list of paraphernalia

Anglo-American corporate governance and the employment relationship: a case to answer

The corporate governance environment in the UK and US is generally thought to be hostile to the emergence of cooperative employment relations of the kind exemplified by labour-management partnerships. We discuss case study evidence from the UK which suggests that, contrary to this widespread perception, enduring and proactive partnerships may develop, in conditions where management can convince shareholders of the long-term gains from this approach, and where other regulatory factors operate to extend the time-horizon for financial returns. We conclude that there is more scope than is commonly allowed for measures which could reconcile liquidity in capital markets with cooperation in labour relations

Colloquia Entomologica II: A Remarkable Sale of Victorian Entomological Jewelry

Excerpt: The insect brooch was a popular genre of Victorian jewelry, and the late Dr. Moser Lyon Stadiem of New Orleans owned one of the finest private collections of Victorian jewelry in the United States. Dr. Stadiem\u27s rarities, valued at over a million dollars, were obtained by the Famous-Barr Company of St. Louis five years after his death in 1964. 294 lots of the collection were sold at auction by Parke-Bernet Galleries, New York City, on 6 October 1969, and among these were some of the finest known examples of the great age of entomological jewelry

Plant Nutrient and Economic Value of Animal Manures

Animal manures have economic value as plant nutrient sources and as amendments for soils whose physical properties can be improved by adding organic matter. Their value as fertilizer per metric ton applied is generally inverse to their water and carbon contents. Plant nutrient concentrations in animal manures are highly variable, thereby introducing uncertainty into meeting plant nutrient needs for crop production. Where manure has been applied for several years, however, little or no additional fertilizer phosphorus (P) and potassium (K) are needed for crop production. Animal manures were ranked in decreasing order as to replacement fertilizer value (dollars) as follows: broiler litter; hen litter; hen droppings; beef feedlot, swine and dairy solid manures; poultry slurry; and other classes of livestock manure slurries. Storage conditions and degree of dilution mainly determine the fertilizer value of liquid manure. Liquid manures have little potential economic value as fertilizer outside the farm where produced. Relative efficiencies of manure nitrogen (N) as compared to commercial fertilizer N range from less than 30% to greater than 100%. Manure N applications that are immediately incorporated have produced yields equal to those produced by fertilizer N for many different crops. The representative plant nutrient contents selected from the literature suggest that replacement fertilizer value can exceed waste management costs, thus changing manure from a waste to a resource

Study of radiation hazards to man on extended near earth missions

Radiation hazards to man on extended near earth mission

The CMS Simulation Software

In this paper we present the features and the expected performance of the re-designed CMS simulation software, as well as the experience from the migration process. Today, the CMS simulation suite is based on the two principal components - Geant4 detector simulation toolkit and the new CMS offline Framework and Event Data Model. The simulation chain includes event generation, detector simulation, and digitization steps. With Geant4, we employ the full set of electromagnetic and hadronic physics processes and detailed particle tracking in the 4 Tesla magnetic field. The Framework provides "action on demand" mechanisms, to allow users to load dynamically the desired modules and to configure and tune the final application at the run time. The simulation suite is used to model the complete central CMS detector (over 1 million of geometrical volumes) and the forward systems, such as Castor calorimeter and Zero Degree Calorimeter, the Totem telescopes, Roman Pots, and the Luminosity Monitor. The designs also previews the use of the electromagnetic and hadronic showers parametrization, instead of full modelling of high energy particles passage through a complex hierarchy of volumes and materials, allowing significant gain in speed while tuning the simulation to test beam and collider data. Physics simulation has been extensively validated by comparison with test beam data and previous simulation results. The redesigned and upgraded simulation software was exercised for performance and robustness tests. It went into Production in July 2006, running in the US and EU grids, and has since delivered about 60 millions of events

The accomplishment of nonserious talk in severe speech disability: An examination of recipient uptake and delayed other-initiated repair

This paper investigates the production of, and responses to, nonserious talk by a person with a severe speech disorder in everyday conversation. Using the methods of Conversation Analysis (CA) a distinction between appreciability on the one hand and intelligibility and understandability on the other is examined through sequences featuring recipient laughter followed by delayed other-initiation of repair. Additional features of understandability are explored whereby a humour source turn is shown to be both appreciated and intelligible but not fully understood. The analysis reveals ways in which affiliation through humour is accomplished and maintained within an environment of significant intelligibility problems. The evidence presented in this paper indicates that nonserious talk is achievable through interaction despite the challenges of a severe speech disability

Modelling the Galactic Magnetic Field on the Plane in 2D

We present a method for parametric modelling of the physical components of the Galaxy's magnetised interstellar medium, simulating the observables, and mapping out the likelihood space using a Markov Chain Monte-Carlo analysis. We then demonstrate it using total and polarised synchrotron emission data as well as rotation measures of extragalactic sources. With these three datasets, we define and study three components of the magnetic field: the large-scale coherent field, the small-scale isotropic random field, and the ordered field. In this first paper, we use only data along the Galactic plane and test a simple 2D logarithmic spiral model for the magnetic field that includes a compression and a shearing of the random component giving rise to an ordered component. We demonstrate with simulations that the method can indeed constrain multiple parameters yielding measures of, for example, the ratios of the magnetic field components. Though subject to uncertainties in thermal and cosmic ray electron densities and depending on our particular model parametrisation, our preliminary analysis shows that the coherent component is a small fraction of the total magnetic field and that an ordered component comparable in strength to the isotropic random component is required to explain the polarisation fraction of synchrotron emission. We outline further work to extend this type of analysis to study the magnetic spiral arm structure, the details of the turbulence as well as the 3D structure of the magnetic field.Comment: 18 pages, 11 figures, updated to published MNRAS versio

Nonexponential decay of an unstable quantum system: Small-QQ-value s-wave decay

We study the decay process of an unstable quantum system, especially the deviation from the exponential decay law. We show that the exponential period no longer exists in the case of the s-wave decay with small $Q$ value, where the $Q$ value is the difference between the energy of the initially prepared state and the minimum energy of the continuous eigenstates in the system. We also derive the quantitative condition that this kind of decay process takes place and discuss what kind of system is suitable to observe the decay.Comment: 17 pages, 6 figure