"England Hath Seene Her Best Dayes, and Now Evill Dayes are Befalling Us." Nostalgia in Puritan Culture

To examine Puritan nostalgia in the context of the Great Migration (1630s-40s), this paper analyzes the spiritual autobiography of the English tailor John Dane, in which he recollects his memories of leaving his family and wandering through Hertfordshire, as well as his return home and subsequent move to New England. By investigating how Dane employs nostalgia to make sense of and emotionally cope with his separation from home, his conversion experience, and his decision to leave for New England, this paper argues that nostalgia was decisive in how early modern Puritans understood, experienced, and practiced their daily lives

Breast screening: What can the interval cancer review teach us? Are we perhaps being a bit too hard on ourselves?

Purpose The aim of this study was to determine the features that make interval cancers apparent on the preceding screening mammogram and determine whether changes in the ways of performing the interval cancer review will affect the true interval cancer rate. Materials and methods This study was approved by the clinical governance committee. Mammograms of women diagnosed with an interval cancer were included in the study if they had been allocated to either the “suspicious signs” group or “subtle signs” group, during the historic interval cancer review. Three radiologists, individually and blinded to the site of interval cancer, reviewed the mammograms and documented the presence, site, characteristics and classification of any abnormality. Findings were compared with the appearances of the abnormality at the site of subsequent cancer development by a different breast radiologist. The chi-squared test was used in the analysis of the results, seeking associations between recall concordance and cancer mammographic or histological characteristics. Results 111/590 interval cancers fulfilled the study inclusion criteria. In 17% of the cases none of the readers identified the relevant abnormality on the screening mammogram. 1/3 readers identified the relevant lesion in 22% of the cases, 2/3 readers in 28% of cases and all 3 readers in 33% of cases. The commonest unanimously recalled abnormality was microcalcification and the most challenging mammographic abnormality to detect was asymmetric density. We did not find any statistically significant association between recall concordance and time to interval cancer, position of lesion in the breast, breast density or cancer grade. Conclusion Even the simple step of performing an independent blinded review of interval cancers reduces the rate of interval cancers classified as missed by up to 39%

The database of the PREDICTS (Projecting Responses of Ecological Diversity In Changing Terrestrial Systems) project

The PREDICTS project—Projecting Responses of Ecological Diversity In Changing Terrestrial Systems (www.predicts.org.uk)—has collated from published studies a large, reasonably representative database of comparable samples of biodiversity from multiple sites that differ in the nature or intensity of human impacts relating to land use. We have used this evidence base to develop global and regional statistical models of how local biodiversity responds to these measures. We describe and make freely available this 2016 release of the database, containing more than 3.2 million records sampled at over 26,000 locations and representing over 47,000 species. We outline how the database can help in answering a range of questions in ecology and conservation biology. To our knowledge, this is the largest and most geographically and taxonomically representative database of spatial comparisons of biodiversity that has been collated to date; it will be useful to researchers and international efforts wishing to model and understand the global status of biodiversity