Law’s power to safeguard global health: a Lancet–O’Neill Institute, Georgetown University Commission on Global Health and the Law

The law-–global, national, and subnational–-plays a vital, yet often underappreciated, role in safeguarding and promoting the public’s health. In this article, we launch the Lancet-O’Neill Institute, Georgetown University Commission on Global Health and the Law. Commissioners from around the world will explore the critical opportunities and challenges of using law as a tool, while evaluating the evidence base for legal interventions. The Commission aims to define and systematically describe the current landscape of law that affects global health and safety. Commissioners were chosen from disciplines that range from health, policy, and law to economics and governance. The Commission aims to present a compelling argument as to why law should be viewed as a major determinant of health and safety and how the law can be used in a powerful and innovative way to address the global burdens of injury and disease. Above all, the Commission will pursue justice, finding innovative ways to narrow existing and unconscionable health inequalitie

Eskimos, Reindeer, and Land

The following report is based on an interdisciplinary research study undertaken to investigate the social, economic, and cultural aspects of reindeer herding in northwestern Alaska. The primary purpose of the research project was to gather data on the past and present reindeer herding practices of the region, but also to seek information on herding and land uses, the future potential of this essentially Native industry, and its impacts on the people and economy of the area.National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior, and carried out by staff of the University of Alaska, Fairbanks

Models of Metal Poor Stars with Gravitational Settling and Radiative Accelerations: I. Evolution and Abundance Anomalies

Evolutionary models have been calculated for Pop II stars of 0.5 to 1.0$M_\odot$ from the pre-main-sequence to the lower part of the giant branch. Rosseland opacities and radiative accelerations were calculated taking into account the concentration variations of 28 chemical species, including all species contributing to Rosseland opacities in the OPAL tables. The effects of radiative accelerations, thermal diffusion and gravitational settling are included. While models were calculated both for Z=0.00017 and 0.0017, we concentrate on models with Z=0.00017 in this paper. These are the first Pop II models calculated taking radiative acceleration into account. It is shown that, at least in a 0.8$M_\odot$ star, it is a better approximation not to let Fe diffuse than to calculate its gravitational settling without including the effects of $g_{rad}(Fe)$. In the absence of any turbulence outside of convection zones, the effects of atomic diffusion are large mainly for stars more massive than 0.7$M_\odot$. Overabundances are expected in some stars with \teff \ge 6000K. Most chemical species heavier than CNO are affected. At 12 Gyr, overabundance factors may reach 10 in some cases (e.g. for Al or Ni) while others are limited to 3 (e.g. for Fe). The calculated surface abundances are compared to recent observations of abundances in globular clusters as well as to observations of Li in halo stars. It is shown that, as in the case of Pop I stars, additional turbulence appears to be present.Comment: 40 pages, 17 color figures, to appear in The Astrophysical Journal, April 2002 (paper with original high resolution figures can be found at http://www.cerca.umontreal.ca/~richer/Fichiersps/popII_1.ps

Lithium in field Am and normal A-F-type stars

Preliminary abundances of lithium and a few other elements have been obtained for 31 field Am stars with good Hipparcos parallaxes, as well as for 36 normal A and F stars. Radial and projected rotational velocities were determined as well. We examine the Li abundance as a function of the stellar parameters: for normal stars, it is clearly bimodal for Teff < 7500 K, while Am-Fm stars are all somewhat Li-deficient in this range. The most Li-deficient stars - either Am or normal - tend to be at least slightly evolved, but the reverse is not true.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures, poster presented at the conference "Element stratification in stars, 40 years of atomic diffusion", eds. G. Alecian, O. Richard and S. Vauclair, EAS Publication Series, in pres

Asymptotic behavior of age-structured and delayed Lotka-Volterra models

In this work we investigate some asymptotic properties of an age-structured Lotka-Volterra model, where a specific choice of the functional parameters allows us to formulate it as a delayed problem, for which we prove the existence of a unique coexistence equilibrium and characterize the existence of a periodic solution. We also exhibit a Lyapunov functional that enables us to reduce the attractive set to either the nontrivial equilibrium or to a periodic solution. We then prove the asymptotic stability of the nontrivial equilibrium where, depending on the existence of the periodic trajectory, we make explicit the basin of attraction of the equilibrium. Finally, we prove that these results can be extended to the initial PDE problem.Comment: 29 page

ECONOMICS OF SWINE CROSSBREEDING SYSTEMS

Livestock Production/Industries,

Performance of Major Flare Watches from the Max Millennium Program (2001-2010)

The physical processes that trigger solar flares are not well understood and significant debate remains around processes governing particle acceleration, energy partition, and particle and energy transport. Observations at high resolution in energy, time, and space are required in multiple energy ranges over the whole course of many flares in order to build an understanding of these processes. Obtaining high-quality, co-temporal data from ground- and space- based instruments is crucial to achieving this goal and was the primary motivation for starting the Max Millennium program and Major Flare Watch (MFW) alerts, aimed at coordinating observations of all flares >X1 GOES X-ray classification (including those partially occulted by the limb). We present a review of the performance of MFWs from 1 February 2001 to 31 May 2010, inclusive, that finds: (1) 220 MFWs were issued in 3,407 days considered (6.5% duty cycle), with these occurring in 32 uninterrupted periods that typically last 2-8 days; (2) 56% of flares >X1 were caught, occurring in 19% of MFW days; (3) MFW periods ended at suitable times, but substantial gain could have been achieved in percentage of flares caught if periods had started 24 h earlier; (4) MFWs successfully forecast X-class flares with a true skill statistic (TSS) verification metric score of 0.500, that is comparable to a categorical flare/no-flare interpretation of the NOAA Space Weather Prediction Centre probabilistic forecasts (TSS = 0.488).Comment: 19 pages, 2 figures, accepted for publication in Solar Physic

Downscaling extremes: A comparison of extreme value distributions in point-source and gridded precipitation data

There is substantial empirical and climatological evidence that precipitation extremes have become more extreme during the twentieth century, and that this trend is likely to continue as global warming becomes more intense. However, understanding these issues is limited by a fundamental issue of spatial scaling: most evidence of past trends comes from rain gauge data, whereas trends into the future are produced by climate models, which rely on gridded aggregates. To study this further, we fit the Generalized Extreme Value (GEV) distribution to the right tail of the distribution of both rain gauge and gridded events. The results of this modeling exercise confirm that return values computed from rain gauge data are typically higher than those computed from gridded data; however, the size of the difference is somewhat surprising, with the rain gauge data exhibiting return values sometimes two or three times that of the gridded data. The main contribution of this paper is the development of a family of regression relationships between the two sets of return values that also take spatial variations into account. Based on these results, we now believe it is possible to project future changes in precipitation extremes at the point-location level based on results from climate models.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/09-AOAS287 the Annals of Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Requirement for the NF-kappa B family member Re1A in the development of secondary lymphoid organs

The transcription factor nuclear factor (NF)-kappaB has been suggested to be a key mediator of the development of lymph nodes and Peyer's patches. However, targeted deletion of NF-kappaB/ Rel family members has not yet corroborated such a function. Here we report that when mice lacking the RelA subunit of NF-kappaB are brought to term by breeding onto a tumor necrosis factor receptor (TNFR)1-deficient background, the trice that are born lack lymph nodes, foyer's patches, and an organized splenic microarchitecture, and have a profound defect in T cell-dependent antigen responses. Analyses of TNFR1/1RelA-deficient embryonic tissues and of radiation chimeras suggest that the dependence on RelA is manifest not in hematopoietic cells but rather in radioresistant stromal cells needed for the development of secondary lymphoid organs