Extra Argument Research Articles

Smoking habits and carboxyhaemoglobin. A cross-sectional study of an urban population of middle-aged men.

In this cross-sectional population study we report on the distribution of carboxyhaemoglobin concentrations in the morning, before smoking, in an urban population of 1037 men born in 1931. The median concentration was the same in non-smokers as in ex-smokers: 0.5%. It increased with increasing daily tobacco consumption. But when carboxyhaemoglobin concentrations are measured in reasonably well-standardised circumstances there are large variations between individuals, even in those who smoke equal amounts of tobacco a day. This makes it difficult to predict the concentration in the individual smoker when only his daily tobacco consumption is known. Measurements of carboxyhaemoglobin concentration should be a valuable complement to smoking history to identify the smoker at high risk of cardiovascular disease, to provide an extra argument to make the patient give up the habit, and to reinforce the efforts of those who try to do so.

Heat treatment of silicon and the nature of thermally induced donors

Silicon, heat treated to temperatures above 1000 °C followed by a rapid quench, shows a donor activity due to the so called thermally induced donors (TID’s). In this paper it is shown that for samples treated in this way the TID effect and the behavior of the resistivity as a function of time after quenching is exactly the same as for similar samples which have been deliberately doped with iron. Hall measurements reveal the same donor levels at Ev+0.40 eV in both cases indicating that unintentional Fe contamination may have taken place in the former samples during high-temperature treatment. An extra argument in favor of the opinion that TID’s do not originate from an intrinsic effect but are due to unwanted doping is given by the fact that the entire TID effect can be eliminated by treating the samples in a H2 flow containing a few percent HCl and 100 ppm O2. This mixture, which has no etching capacity, has a strong gettering effect for Fe because of the high volatility of the iron chlorides in the gas phase. Samples heated in this gas mixture and quenched rapidly remain completely free of TID’s and show no other donor activity within the accuracy of the measurements.

Adverbs and events

There are two basic approaches to the analysis of adverbial constructions in formalized representations of English. One is to follow Richard Montague1 and treat them as sentential operators of the same syntactical category as not.2 The other is to follow Donald Davidson3 and represent them in the predicate calculus with the aid of an extra argument place in the verb to be modified. Montague’s approach requires an intensional language and so there seems no hope of fitting his analysis into Davidson’s programme. It is, however, possible to incorporate Davidson’s analysis into an intensional language. In this paper I indicate why this may be desirable and then shew how it can be done in a way which satisfies the rather strict conditions imposed in [12] on the relation between ordinary English and the representing formal language.

Les spores du frasnien du bas-boulonnais (France)

The Bas Boulonnais, which appears to have formed an epicontinental 3latform during the Middle and Upper Devonian, presents a priviledged region for palynology. In this warm and not too deep shelf area, bordering a delta, the speed of sedimentation must have been very high, judging from the thickness of the sections; the Frasnian succession alone being already about 250 m thick. The study of this stage was carried out with the aid of about a hundred samples that had been collected in the field. About fifty different species of spores have been described. Ancyrospora is the most common genus but also the one which has the least stratigraphic value. (This genus can be compared with the spores of Selaginella spinosa L.) The genus Retusotriletes characterises, by its abundance, the extreme base of the Frasnian. The richest assemblage occurs at the top of the Middle Frasnian and is found to be identical at several places over a distance of about 10 km. The Shales of Hydrorequent differ from the previous formations by its content of the species of the genus Stenozotriletes, which pprovide an extra argument for including this formation in the Upper Frasnian. An attempt to give an idea of the abundant growth of the flora has been made. Alongside the spores, the species of Tasmanites, which are found in great quantities, make it possible to distinguish distinct stratigraphic units.