Foot pain

Foot complaints are very common in general practice and their incidence increases with age. Three out of four people complain of foot pain during the course of a lifetime, while approximately 20% of people aged 65 years or older complain of non-traumatic foot problems.peer-reviewe

The Colonial Dynamic: The Xhosa Cattle Killing and the American Indian Ghost Dance

In 1856, a fourteen year old girl named Nongqawuse (non-see) had a vision on the banks of the Gxarha River in southern Africa. Entranced, she saw dearly departed ancestors, their cattle hiding in the rushes, and she heard other cattle underground waiting to come forth. She was told that if her people would but kill all their cattle, their ancestors would arise from the dead, the cattle lowing in the subterranean passages would come forth, and all the whites would be swept into the sea. Nongqawuse’s prophecy provoked the colonially embittered Xhosa (cōe-săh) people to rise up and kill their cattle. As the movement drew to a close, around 400,000 cattle had been slaughtered and an estimated 80,000 Xhosa died of starvation. Those that remained were reduced to working as laborers throughout the Cape Colony after being pushed off some 600,000 acres of their ancestral lands

Cinematic

Is cinematicity a virtue in film? Is lack of cinematicity a defect? Berys Gaut thinks so. He claims that cinematicity is a pro tanto virtue in film. I disagree. I argue that the term “cinematic” principally refers to some cluster of characteristics found in films featuring the following: expansive scenery, extreme depth of field, high camera positioning, and elaborate tracking shots. We often use the word as a term of praise. And we are likely right to do so. We are right if we mean that the film does well what movies often do well. We are wrong if we mean that the film is good for doing what is merely distinctive of film. This issue has important implications for understanding the role of the medium in artistic evaluation. I argue that we should reject Gaut’s claim because it entails an implausibly strong medium specificity thesi

Guest Post: John Rambo fights the Civil War

Today we offer another of our “Guest Post Wednesday” extras, with some meditations on Rambo from Aaron Urbanski. Yeah, we’re not kidding... Rambo. Aaron is a graduate of the GMU American History Masters program and alumnus Ranger of the NPS. [excerpt

13% of Online Adults Use Twitter

Presents survey findings about trends in Americans' use of Twitter by gender, age, race/ethnicity, income, education, and community type, including high rates of use among African Americans and Latinos/Hispanics and growth among the 25-44 age group

A Gibbs sampler on the nn-simplex

We determine the mixing time of a simple Gibbs sampler on the unit simplex, confirming a conjecture of Aldous. The upper bound is based on a two-step coupling, where the first step is a simple contraction argument and the second step is a non-Markovian coupling. We also present a MCMC-based perfect sampling algorithm based on our proof which can be applied with Gibbs samplers that are harder to analyze.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/12-AAP916 the Annals of Applied Probability (http://www.imstat.org/aap/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org