Physiological ecology of the ciliated protozoon Loxodes

Loxodes faces special problems in living close to the oxic-anoxic boundary. In tightly-stratified ponds like Priest Pot its optimum environment may be quite narrow and it can be displaced by the slightest turbulence. Loxodes cannot sense an O sub(2) gradient directly but its ability to perceive gravity allows it to make relatively long vertical migrations. It is also sensitive to light and oxygen and it uses these environmental cues to modulate the parameters of its random motility: in the dark, it aggregates at a low O sub(2) tension and in bright light it aggregates in anoxic water. The oxic-anoxic boundary is also a zone where O sub(2) may be a scarce and transient resource, but Loxodes) can switch to nitrate respiration and exploit the pool of nitrate that often exists close to the base of the oxycline

The Undisclosed Principal Doctrine: Rationalisations, Justifications and Origins

The undisclosed principal doctrine is anomalous in the common law. The doctrine enables a principal to sue and be sued on a contract made by his or her agent with a third party who did not know the principal existed. In so holding, the doctrine appears to fly in the face of fundamental contract law principles. Commentators have provided a range of explanations for the doctrine's existence despite its apparent anomalous nature. This article critically analyses four explanations for the doctrine: the principal impliedly intends to contract with the third party; the principal provides the consideration to support the contract; the doctrine is a primitive form of assignment; and an "intervention thesis" that justifies the doctrine by coupling the consideration justification with the nature of the principal-agent relationship. All four of these theories are found not to withstand analysis. This article then considers a theory that the doctrine evolved out of the foreign principal doctrine in the mid-19th century due to changing customs and practices in international trade. While this theory is found wanting evidentially, this article agrees that the doctrine's origins almost certainly lie in mercantile custom, incorporated into the common law via the law merchant, most likely in the 17th to 18th centuries, from which point it ossified into a standard agency doctrine of general application. The article concludes by suggesting that the doctrine ought simply to be recognised as anomalous and exceptional to the standard rules of contract formation, rather than unconvincingly rationalised or justified on grounds that only act to further reduce its doctrinal coherence

Haemophilia: a sketch of our present knowledge of the disease, with results in eight cases of the effect of normal serum on the blood coagulation time

1. The transmission of the disease in all the cases is according to the usual rule - through the female line.2. The Prolific tendency of the disease is well marked in all the family pedigree charts.3. There is an absence of symptoms in early infancy.4. No prodromel symptoms were ever complained of.5. The frequent nocturnal onset of symptoms is well seen in these cases.6. The joint symptoms are shown to occur at an earlier age than is generally stated - five years instead of twelve to fourteen years - they are very rapidly recovered from. In the foregoing cases the knee joints were most frequently ffected, and next the elbow joints. X ray photographs may be useful in diagnosis.Facts noted about the Blood:7. Blood Counts were done on fully 40 occasions. The Red. Counts and Haemoglobin showed nothing special to note. The White Counts, however, in no case shoved a leucopaenìa, es stated by Wright , but were found to be all normal or slightly raised.8. The differential Counts (300 cells being counted in each film) likewise show no departure from the normal, and no evidence was seen, in either the blood of the patients themselves, or that of their. non-haemophilic relatives, of a polymorphonuclear leucopaenia, stated by Wright to be a constant feature of the disease.9. The Blood Pressure was normal.10. The Viscosity of the Blood in the majority of the cases was below normal, and in only one case was it above normal; as held to be the usual rule by Neil.11. The local applications to bleeding surfaces are shown to be of little use. Local applitions of normal horse serum are equally disappointing12. The Coagulation of haemophilic blood shows no material difference from that of normal blood, except that it takes place in a relatively much longer time. Experiments shored that each successive specimen of blood taken from the same puncture wound increased in rate of coagulation, till it became instantaneous, and this delay is supposed to be due more to a qualitative than to a quantitative change in the blood.13. The series of blood coagulation estimations, (of which about 500 were done) taken at each sitting, were found to vary considerably in time, and to a greater extent than could be accounted for by experimental error. Those taken from the control and from the "non-bleeder" relations of the patients were not found to vary to an appreciable extent.14. In so- called "Spontaneous Haemophilia", normal serum has been found to give excellent results, but in true hereditary haemophilia, it never brought about a sudden fall in coagulation time. In the severe cases, it had some slight effect, but in the milder cases appeared to be inert. an the whole, therefore, normal serum, as a therapeutic agent in haemophilia, was found to be disappointing, and its action on the blood coagulation uncertain, slight and transient

Accessing Patient Records in Virtual Healthcare Organisations

The ARTEMIS project is developing a semantic web service based P2P interoperability infrastructure for healthcare information systems that will allow healthcare providers to securely share patient records within virtual healthcare organisations. Authorisation decisions to access patient records across organisation boundaries can be very dynamic and must occur within a strict legislative framework. In ARTEMIS we are developing a dynamic authorisation mechanism called PBAC that provides a means of contextual and process oriented access control to enforce healthcare business processes. PBAC demonstrates how healthcare providers can dynamically share patient records for care pathways across organisation boundaries

Origin and stability of the dipolar response in a family of tetragonal tungsten bronze relaxors

A new family of relaxor dielectrics with the tetragonal tungsten bronze structure (nominal composition Ba6M3+Nb9O30, M3+ = Ga, Sc or In) were studied using dielectric spectroscopy to probe the dynamic dipole response and correlate this with the crystal structure as determined from powder neutron diffraction. Independent analyses of real and imaginary parts of the complex dielectric function were used to determine characteristic temperature parameters, TVF, and TUDR, respectively. In each composition both these temperatures correlated with the temperature of maximum crystallographic strain, Tc/a determined from diffraction data. The overall behaviour is consistent with dipole freezing and the data indicate that the dipole stability increases with increasing M3+ cation size as a result of increased tetragonality of the unit cell. Crystallographic data suggests that these materials are uniaxial relaxors with the dipole moment predominantly restricted to the B1 cation site in the structure. Possible origins of the relaxor behaviour are discussed.Comment: Main article 32 pages, 8 figures; Supplementary data 24 pages, 4 figure

Performance of Geant4 in simulating semiconductor particle detector response in the energy range below 1 MeV

Geant4 simulations play a crucial role in the analysis and interpretation of experiments providing low energy precision tests of the Standard Model. This paper focuses on the accuracy of the description of the electron processes in the energy range between 100 and 1000 keV. The effect of the different simulation parameters and multiple scattering models on the backscattering coefficients is investigated. Simulations of the response of HPGe and passivated implanted planar Si detectors to \beta{} particles are compared to experimental results. An overall good agreement is found between Geant4 simulations and experimental data

Immorality and Irrationality

Does immorality necessarily involve irrationality? The question is often taken to be among the deepest in moral philosophy. But apparently deep questions sometimes admit of deflationary answers. In this case we can make way for a deflationary answer by appealing to dualism about rationality, according to which there are two fundamentally distinct notions of rationality: structural rationality and substantive rationality. I have defended dualism elsewhere. Here, I’ll argue that it allows us to embrace a sensible – I will not say boring – moderate view about the relationship between immorality and irrationality: roughly, that immorality involves substantive irrationality, but not structural irrationality. I defend this moderate view, and argue that many of the arguments for less moderate views turn either on missing the distinction between substantive and structural rationality, or on misconstruing it

Chert formation at IODP Site U1521 as a proxy for variations in marine geochemistry at the onset of the Miocene Climate Optimum

The goal of International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP) Expedition 374 in the Ross Sea, Antarctica was to collect marine sediment drill cores that would demonstrate the changes in the Antarctic Ice Sheets mass balance during times of Earth history when global temperatures and atmospheric CO2 were higher than today. Intervals such as the Miocene Climatic Optimum (MCO; ~17-14.5 million years ago) provide insights into what a future world could look like (Shevenell et al., 2004; Levy et al., 2016). Ice-proximal records from the near-Antarctic coast, such as those collected during IODP Exp 374, may hold critical information to understanding far-reaching impacts of the Antarctic Ice Sheets on global environmental changes. Depositional reconstructions of past glacial and open marine conditions in the region provide environmental constraints used to model changes in the Antarctic Ice Sheets. In my study, I will explore the presence of glacial deposits (till delta features), which prograde onto stratified glaciomarine sediment in several locations in the region during the Early to Middle Miocene (17.6-16.9 million years ago), immediately preceding the MCO. The samples presented here were collected from IODP Exp 374 Site U1521, from a depth of 287.21 to 344.92 meters below the sea floor (mbsf) and made up of a dark grey, massive to stratified diatom-bearing and clast-poor sandy diamictite as well as grey chert nodules interbedded with dark grey, silica cemented, faintly irregularly laminated mudstones (McKay et al., 2019). This study supports the basic shipboard lithological data, but there is distinct variability in the silica-carbonate content of the chert and upper diamictite layers. These data provide additional evidence for a significant change in depositional environment as a result of fluctuations in the in the Ross Ice Shelf that predate the MCO.B.S. (Bachelor of Science