Understanding Language Death in Czech-Moravian Texas

Based on several decades of personal interaction with Texas speakers of Czech, the author's article attempts to correlate social change with some specific stages of language obsolescence and language death. Many instances of language change in that community, as well as cultural and social change, may be explained by the linguistic model known as the wave theory. One hundred and fifty years passed between the introduction of Czech and the death of that language in Texas. From the mid-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century, the Czech-Moravians represented a closed community in which individuals defined their identity primarily by the Czech language, ethnicity, and culture. In the final five decades of the twentieth century, as the social template representing Texas speakers of Czech disintegrated, spoken Czech ceased to function as a living language, and much of the ancestral culture connected with the language was lost. Today some among the elderly, described as semi-speakers, terminal speakers, or "rememberers" of language, retain a limited knowledge, but the ancestral language now has only a symbolic function

BAT - The Bayesian Analysis Toolkit

We describe the development of a new toolkit for data analysis. The analysis package is based on Bayes' Theorem, and is realized with the use of Markov Chain Monte Carlo. This gives access to the full posterior probability distribution. Parameter estimation, limit setting and uncertainty propagation are implemented in a straightforward manner. A goodness-of-fit criterion is presented which is intuitive and of great practical use.Comment: 31 pages, 10 figure

Lech kocha Głupią Ludmiłę : Polacy i stereotypy słowiańskości a "Malowany ptak" Jerzego Kosińskiego

"Zróżnicowane reakcje spowodował zarówno sam Jerzy Kosiński, jak i jego najbardziej znana powieść – "Malowany ptak". Z perspektywy często artykułowanego w Stanach Zjednoczonych punktu widzenia, Kosiński jest ofiarą Holocaustu, która podczas drugiej wojny światowej doświadczyła osobistej tragedii pociągającej za sobą utratę domu rodzinnego i bliskich. Dlatego też "Malowany ptak" i sam Kosiński (na mocy swych doświadczeń, jako świadek Holocaustu) oferują całej ludzkości lekcję moralności. Z innego punktu widzenia, "Malowany ptak" (odczytany w świetle biografii autora) zawiera sugestię kłamliwego i zwodniczego odczytania historii. Artykuł ten podąża tropem tej drugiej perspektywy [...]"

Volume-based referral for cardiovascular procedures in the United States: a cross-sectional regression analysis

BACKGROUND: We sought to estimate the numbers of patients affected and deaths avoided by adopting the Leapfrog Group's recommended hospital procedure volume minimums for coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) surgery and percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI). In addition to hospital risk-adjusted mortality standards, the Leapfrog Group recommends annual hospital procedure minimums of 450 for CABG and 400 for PCI to reduce procedure-associated mortality. METHODS: We conducted a retrospective analysis of a national hospital discharge database to evaluate in-hospital mortality among patients who underwent PCI (n = 2,500,796) or CABG (n = 1,496,937) between 1998 and 2001. We calculated the number of patients treated at low volume hospitals and simulated the number of deaths potentially averted by moving all patients to high volume hospitals under best-case conditions (i.e., assuming the full volume-associated reduction in mortality and the capacity to move all patients to high volume hospitals with no related harms). RESULTS: Multivariate adjusted odds of in-hospital mortality were higher for patients treated in low volume hospitals compared with high volume hospitals for CABG (OR 1.16, 95% CI 1.10–1.24) and PCI (OR 1.12, 95% CI 1.05–1.20). A policy of hospital volume minimums would have required moving 143,687 patients for CABG and 87,661 patients for PCI from low volume to high volume hospitals annually and prevented an estimated 619 CABG deaths and 109 PCI deaths. Thus, preventing a single death would have required moving 232 CABG patients or 805 PCI patients from low volume to high volume hospitals. CONCLUSION: Recommended hospital CABG and PCI volume minimums would prevent 728 deaths annually in the United States, fewer than previously estimated. It is unclear whether a policy requiring the movement of large numbers of patients to avoid relatively few deaths is feasible or effective