The Franks Flying Suit in Canadian Aviation Medicine History, 1939–1945

It is not widely appreciated that Canadians were active during the war in the field of aviation medicine. Aviation medicine research in Canada during the Second World War involved a significant commitment of personnel and resources. However, there has been little historical investigation of this and that which has occurred is misleading. In 1947 C.B. Stewart argued that Canadian research was boosted by an early start and achieved unsurpassed results; the most prominent of which was the work of Wilbur Franks. In the years since 1947, Stewart\u27s conclusions have never been challenged. In fact, historians have ultimately judged the entire Canadian research effort equal to Great Britain’s and even equal to the United States’. Unfortunately, this well-established consensus is not completely accurate. The problem is that Canadian historians have consistently described Canadian work without reference or comparison to foreign research. Perhaps the most interesting and illustrative example is that of the Franks Flying Suit

Refining queries on a treebank with XSLT filters. Approaching the universal quantifier

This paper discusses the use of XSLT stylesheets as a filtering mechanism for refining the results of user queries on treebanks. The discussion is within the context of the TIGER treebank, the associated search engine and query language, but the general ideas can apply to any search engine for XML-encoded treebanks. It will be shown that important classes of linguistic phenomena can be accessed by applying relatively simple XSLT templates to the output of a query, effectively simulating the universal quantifier for a subset of the query language

The Elderly and Health Care Rationing

[Excerpt] “The allocation of health care resources involves a societal determination of what resources should be devoted to a particular program. The allocation process is typically performed on a ―macro‖ level, with allocation decisions often affecting only statistical lives. In contrast to the identifiable lives often affected by health care rationing, statistical lives affected by allocation decisions are much more readily sacrificed. A common means of deciding health care allocation is through political processes. Government decisions pertaining to health care spending and regulation typically involve allocation determinations. For example, the Medicare and Medicaid programs allocate resources for numerous purposes. Hospitals, too, regularly make allocation decisions in determining the quantity and type of resources to have available. Their actions, in turn, impact directly upon physicians who subsequently also become health care allocators.

Infection in prosthetic material

Surgical site infection (SSI) occurs when a wound created as part of a surgical procedure becomes infected. SSI is one of the most common healthcare-associated infections and occurs in approximately 5% of patients undergoing a surgical procedure. SSI may lead to patients suffering considerable morbidity or mortality and have significant cost implications. The aetiology involves the interplay of host, environmental and pathogen factors all of which should be addressed in seeking to reduce the risk of developing an infection. The presence of prosthetic material reduces the number of bacteria necessary for an infection to develop and can give rise to treatment and diagnostic difficulties. The responsible organisms are most commonly Staphylococcus aureus and S. epidermidis. Diagnosis is frequently problematic and antibiotic treatment alone is often ineffective due to biofilm formation necessitating removal of prosthesis in many cases. Prevention of infection is by far the most important aspect of prosthetic implant surgery. Patient optimization is equally important as the cutting edge research into biological prostheses in reducing the incidence of prosthetic infection in future practice

Strength in Shear of the Thin Curved Sheets of Alclad

This note is on an investigation made to obtain information on the strength of thin curved sheets of Alclad in shear. Designers may utilize this material as a strength member as well as for a covering for the wings and fuselages. A reduction may then be made in the size of the internal strength members. These experiments were undertaken with the object of securing the maximum value from the metal in this respect. The point at which buckling occurs is of primary importance. The buckling shear of a curved thin plate was determined mathematically and also experimentally. The following formula was obtained mathematically: s=K E t/r in which s is the unit shear, K is a constant, E is the modulus of elasticity, t is the thickness of the material, and r is the radius of curvature. The value of K as determined by the experiments was found to be .075. This formula applies only when s is within the elastic limit of the material. The breaking point of the material was obtained in most of the tests as a matter of information and the results are included in this report. The effect of the supporting ribs was determined by varying the number used

Labor Economics

The authors hypothesize that most labor economists sooner or later had to incorporate at least the appearance of institutional concerns in their papers to avoid indigestion whenever lunching with colleagues outside the field of economics They add: If the new interests of modern labor economics are in fact driven by the imperatives of science, then the institutionalist and the neoclassical approaches may well synthesize

Nuclear weak interaction rates in primordial nucleosynthesis

We calculate the weak interaction rates of selected light nuclei during the epoch of Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN), and we assess the impact of these rates on nuclear abundance flow histories and on final light element abundance yields. We consider electron and electron antineutrino captures on 3He and 7Be, and the reverse processes of positron capture and electron neutrino capture on 3H and 7Li. We also compute the rates of positron and electron neutrino capture on 6He. We calculate beta and positron decay transitions where appropriate. As expected, the final standard BBN abundance yields are little affected by addition of these weak processes, though there can be slight alterations of nuclear flow histories. However, non-standard BBN scenarios, e.g., those involving out of equilibrium particle decay with energetic final state neutrinos, may be affected by these processes.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figure