[Review of] Roy Harvey Pearce. Savagism and Civilization: A Study of the Indian and the American Mind. Rev. ed. of The Savages of America

This classic volume on the image of the Indian in the American mind first appeared in 1953. Although both limited and incomplete, Pearce\u27s work compelled a virtual revolution in literary and historical approaches to analysis of public view concerning the role of Indians in the American past

An update on domineering on rectangular boards

Domineering is a combinatorial game played on a subset of a rectangular grid between two players. Each board position can be put into one of four outcome classes based on who the winner will be if both players play optimally. In this note, we review previous work, establish the outcome classes for several dimensions of rectangular board, and restrict the outcome class in several more.Comment: 9 pages. References fixe

Homotopically trivializing the circle in the framed little disks

This paper confirms the following suggestion of Kontsevich. In the appropriate derived sense, an action of the framed little disks operad and a trivialization of the circle action is the same information as an action of the Deligne-Mumford-Knudsen operad. This improves an earlier result of the author and Bruno Vallette.Comment: 36 pages. This version accepted for publication by the Journal of Topolog

The blue one takes a battering why do young adults with asthma overuse bronchodilator inhalers? A qualitative study

Objective: Overuse of short-acting bronchodilators is internationally recognised as a marker of poor asthma control, high healthcare use and increased risk of asthma death. Young adults with asthma commonly overuse short-acting bronchodilators. We sought to determine the reasons for overuse of bronchodilator inhalers in a sample of young adults with asthma. Design: Qualitative study using a purposive extreme case sample. Setting: A large urban UK general practice. Participants: Twenty-one adults with moderate asthma, aged 20-32 years. Twelve were high users of short-acting bronchodilators, nine were low users. Results: Asthma had a major impact on respondents' lives, disrupting their childhood, family life and career opportunities. High users of short-acting bronchodilators had adapted poorly to having asthma and expressed anger at the restrictions they experienced. Overuse made sense to them: shortacting bronchodilators were a rapid, effective, cheap 'quick-fix' for asthma symptoms. High users had poorer control of asthma and held explanatory models of asthma which emphasised short-term relief via bronchodilation over prevention. Both high and low users held strong views about having to pay for asthma medication, with costs cited as a reason for not purchasing anti-inflammatory inhalers. Conclusions: Young adults who were high users of short-acting bronchodilators had adapted poorly to having asthma and had poor asthma control. They gave coherent reasons for overuse. Strategies that might address high bronchodilator use in young adults include improving education to help young people accept and adapt to their illness, reducing stigmatisation and providing free asthma medication to encourage the use of anti-inflammatory inhalers

Faint counts as a function of morphological type in a hierarchical merger model

The unprecedented resolution of the refurbished Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) on the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) has led to major advances in our understanding of galaxy formation. The high image quality in the Medium Deep Survey and Hubble Deep Field has made it possible, for the first time, to classify faint distant galaxies according to morphological type. These observations have revealed a large population of galaxies classed as irregulars or which show signs of recent merger activity. Their abundance rises steeply with apparent magnitude, providing a likely explanation for the large number of blue galaxies seen at faint magnitudes. We demonstrate that such a population arises naturally in a model in which structure forms hierarchically and which is dynamically dominated by cold dark matter. The number counts of irregular, spiral and elliptical galaxies as a function of magnitude seen in the HST data are well reproduced in this model.We present detailed predictions for the outcome of spectroscopic follow-up observations of the HST surveys. By measuring the redshift distributions of faint galaxies of different morphological types, these programmes will provide a test of the hierarchical galaxy formation paradigm and might distinguish between models with different cosmological parameters.Comment: 5 pages, 3 postscript figures included. To be published as a Letter in Monthly Notices of the RAS. Postscript version available at http://star-www.dur.ac.uk/~cmb/counts.htm

A criterion for existence of right-induced model structures

Suppose that $F: \mathcal{N} \to \mathcal{M}$ is a functor whose target is a Quillen model category. We give a succinct sufficient condition for the existence of the right-induced model category structure on $\mathcal{N}$ in the case when $F$ admits both adjoints. We give several examples, including change-of-rings, operad-like structures, and anti-involutive structures on infinity categories. For the last of these, we explore anti-involutive structures for several different models of $(\infty, 1)$-categories, and show that known Quillen equivalences between base model categories lift to equivalences

Cones in homotopy probability theory

This note defines cones in homotopy probability theory and demonstrates that a cone over a space is a reasonable replacement for the space. The homotopy Gaussian distribution in one variable is revisited as a cone on the ordinary Gaussian.Comment: 8 pages. Missing reference adde