Untold Millions Research Articles

Chronicles of medical history in Africa

Professor and Head of Surgery (1948 – 1958), Beatrice M. Joly was the Foundation Dean of the Faculty of Medicine, University College, Ibadan (1948 – 1949). She was born on 14 Dec, 1902; a time when female education was considered unimportant. Beatrice made up her mind very early on what she wanted out of life. She studied Medicine and excelled. She obtained the M.B.B.S. degree in 1930 carting away the best prizes. She went on to pursue a successful postgraduate medical training in Obstetrics and Gynecology, and later in Surgery. She worked briefly as a general physician in 1933 before traveling to India where she became a lecturer and rose to the position of professor seven years after getting her M.B.B.S. degree. In 1947, she came to Nigeria as the first professor appointed to the new University of Ibadan and subsequently contributed immensely to the development of Nigeria’s first University. She was the first Head of department of Surgery and laid the groundwork for subsequent growth of the Department. Beatrice Joly laid the framework for the Department of Surgery which eventually became the 2 nd most productive Department in the first 3 decades of the College of Medicine, Ibadan (by publications, 2 nd to the Department of Medicine). The Department today is undeniably an asset not only to Nigeria but to Africa. She died on 27 th August, 1999. She would always be remembered as a unique woman, a brilliant scholar, an excellent surgeon, and a visionary leader; a pioneer whose contributions have continued to produce excellent specialists who have touched the lives of untold millions all over the continent.

Who was Shakespeare? [Geek Life

Wikipedia, today the seventh most popular site on the Web, is the go-to source for untold millions of users around the world. Yet, despite widely publicized worries that the selfedited and self-policed encyclopedia might subvert authority, the opposite concern has also emerged. Does Wikipedia, in other words, provide a viewpoint that's overly mainstream, giving short shrift to controversial, minority, or heretical ideas? "All great truths," George Bernard Shaw famously wrote, "begin as blasphemies."

Taxonomy shifts up a gear: New publishing tools to accelerate biodiversity research

Biodiversity is under severe threat. It is estimated that there are untold millions of species on the planet and we have, in the past 250 years and recently with a decreasing number of specialists, described only about 2 million of them.Th ough this happens with an agonizing low description rate of an estimated number of 20,000 new species per year (Polaszek et al. 2005), digital and genomic resources now are allowing discovery of new and identifi cation of existing species at a never before seen pace. Th e principles of Open Access greatly facilitate dissemination of information through the Web where it is freely accessed, shared and updated in a form that is accessible to indexing and data mining engines using Web 2.0 technologies. Web 2.0 turns the taxonomic information into a global resource well beyond the taxonomic community. A signifi cant bottleneck in naming species is the requirement by the current Codes of biological nomenclature ruling that new names and their associated descriptions must be published on paper, which can be slow, costly and render the new information diffi cult to fi nd. In order to make progress in documenting the diversity of life, we must remove the publishing impediment in order to move taxonomy “from a cottage industry into a production line” (Lane et al. 2008), and to make best use of new technologies warranting the fastest and widest distribution of these new results. In this special edition of ZooKeys we present a practical demonstration of such a process. Th e issue opens with a forum paper from Penev et al. (doi: 10.3897/zookeys.50.538) that presents the landscape of semantic tagging and text enhancements in taxonomy. It describes how the content of the manuscript is enriched by semantic tagging and marking up of four exemplar papers submitted to the publisher in three diff erent ways: (i) written in Microsoft Word and submitted as non-tagged manuscript (Stoev et al., doi: 10.3897/zookeys.50.504); (ii) generated from Scratchpads (Blagoderov et al., doi: 10.3897/zookeys.50.506 and Brake and Tschirnhaus, doi: 10.3897/ zookeys.50.505); (iii) generated from an author’s database (Taekul et al., doi: 10.3897/ zookeys.50.485). Th e latter two were submitted as XML-tagged manuscript. Th ese examples demonstrate the suitability of the workfl ow to a range of possibilities that should encompass most current taxonomic eff orts. To implement the aforementioned routes for XML mark up in prospective taxonomic publishing, a special software tool ZooKeys 50: i-iv (2010)

Nicotine and Behavioral Sensitization

Use of tobacco products contributes to hundreds of thousands of premature deaths and untold millions of dollars in health care costs in this country each year. Nicotine is the principal neuroactive component in tobacco, but, despite ongoing research efforts, the cellular basis of its effects on behavior remains unclear. Efforts to resolve this conundrum have focused on the mesoaccumbens dopamine system, which contributes to the rewarding effects of many addictive drugs, including nicotine. The goal of this review is to outline recent advances and highlight some of the important unanswered questions regarding nicotine's effects on neuronal excitability and synaptic plasticity within the brain reward pathways.

TOX 21: New Dimensions of Toxicity Testing

On the ground floor of the National Institutes of Health Chemical Genomics Center (NCGC) in Rockville, Maryland, a $10-million automated laboratory spends all day and night screening chemicals at speeds no team of human researchers could ever match. In a week, depending on the nature of the assay, it can yield up to 2.2 million molecular data points derived from thousands of chemicals tested at 15 concentrations each.

REVIEWS

To the Editors: I am grateful for Maartje Abbenhuis's kind comments about my account of the massacres of Belgian civilians in her review of Rehearsals: The German Army in Belgium, August 1914 (AHR, June 2008, 930–931). (I am a little puzzled, however, by her congratulating my research assistants and translators. I had no research assistants and do not mention any in my acknowledgments. I do thank two individuals for “translating some documents in Dutch,” but there were only three such documents. I slogged through a few more, but 99.9 percent of my sources were in French, English, or German, and all the translations are my own.) Unfortunately, Abbenhuis's analysis of the explanation I offer is woefully misleading. I nowhere write about a German “national character.” I don't believe for a moment that there is such a thing. I certainly do not say or suggest that Germans are “innately barbaric.” The first example Abbenhuis offers of my “highly flawed” analysis is revealing: to the unoriginal observation in the Prologue that “the invasion of Belgium precipitated a long chain of events that resulted in the murders of untold millions of civilians,” she arbitrarily adds in brackets “[during the Holocaust].” It is perfectly clear from the sentence itself and from the paragraph in which it appears that I'm referring to civilian deaths during World War I and all the twentieth-century wars that can be linked to it. There is no mention of the Holocaust in the Prologue.

The Canadian Response to the USA Patriot Act

The border between Canada and the US is often hailed as the longest undefended border in the world. This is true for the physical border, dotted with sporadic land crossings, and even more so for the digital border, where thousands of strands of fiber span the frontier without any regulation or formality. Since the attacks of September 11, 2001, US authorities have spent untold millions of dollars guarding their frontiers to regulate what gets into the country. On the other side of the border, many Canadian jurisdictions have turned their thoughts to regulating what information flows southward, into the US. This isn't out of concern about terrorism but rather about the US response to terrorism.

Research and Development of Laser-Beam Automatic Grade-Control System on High-Speed Subsurface Drainage Equipment

Subsurface drainage methods and materials technologies were modernized more through innovative research and development between 1960 and 1975 than during the previous 100 years. Original research conducted by ASABE Member agricultural engineers who were employed by the USDA Agricultural Research Service (ARS) and worked cooperatively with other ARS scientists and technicians plus scientists at The Ohio State University developed the prototype materials and equipment to test the new drainage technology. High-speed installation of plastic subsurface drains with plow-type equipment was made possible and practical in the late 1960s with the adoption of coilable corrugated-wall polyethylene plastic tubing. However, manual control of depth and grade by the operator of the drain plow at speeds of 35 to 50 m/min was not sufficiently accurate or practical. A laser-beam automatic grade-control system was designed and developed to meet the specific requirements of high-speed plow-type draintube installation equipment. The first use of the laser in agriculture was reported to be in the installation of plastic drain tubing with plow and/or trencher equipment. Through cooperative field trial demonstration projects with university extension specialists and industry representatives, the new technology was transferred to industry for final development and marketing. A laser-plane system, rather than the laser-line prototype tested, was developed by the industry cooperators to project a beacon of laser light (a laser plane) over an entire field. Laser-plane technology subsequently applied in precision land grading for surface irrigation vastly improved irrigation efficiency and saved untold millions of acre-feet of irrigation water worldwide. From this agricultural engineering beginning, laser technology expanded rapidly into many engineering agricultural and non-agricultural fields, including surveying, land leveling and grading, construction (highways and buildings), and military tasks. The laser-beam and laser-plane systems are considered the engineering standard method today for alignment and guidance applications.

Amir Arsalan Afkhami. « Compromised Constitutions: the Iranian Experience with the 1918 Influenza Epidemic ». Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 77 (2003), pp. 367 - 393.

This clearly written and cogent study considers the effect of the 1918 “Spanish” flu on Iran. This pandemic sent untold millions to their deaths around the world, but struck particularly hard in Iran, a country already devastated by war, famine, and disease. The author estimates that of the country’s circa eleven million inhabitants, anywhere between one and nearly two-and-a-half million people perished, which means that, at anywhere between 8 and 21.7 percent of the entire population, the co...

Conventional wisdom vs reality in stroke prevention

The economist Galbraith distinguishes the divergence between “reality” and “approved belief.”1 Belief seems sensible and will later masquerade as “conventional wisdom.” Entrepreneurs cultivate their own version of approved belief and reap rewards disregarding the impact on company or shareholder. Similarity exists between “common-sense” business practices and time-honored medical therapeutics. “Experience” recommended tonsillectomy. Clinical trials in Pittsburgh schools introduced “reality,” sparing tonsillectomy to millions. “Conventional wisdom” directed weeks of bed rest after myocardial infarction (MI). The practice stopped when trials counted reduced deaths with early ambulation. In stroke prevention, randomized trials, unavailable to commerce, have introduced reality or rejection for successive innovative strategies. Vascular risks were identified and many management strategies perfected. Collectively they are front-line therapy for all stroke-threatened patients. Anticoagulants exemplify the uncertainties in medical practice based on unproven hypotheses. Indications for warfarin and heparin lay in the shadows for half a century. Untold millions received them. Reality emerged from belated clinical trials: patients with chronic nonvalvular atrial fibrillation are obligatory recipients of warfarin; patients with noncardiogenic ischemic stroke do not benefit. Conventional wisdom was dealt a body-blow. Platelet inhibitors fared better. In the 1960s they were discovered to alter platelet function. Scientists studying the antiplatelet activity of aspirin and sulfinpyrazone insisted upon randomized trials before “approved belief” could emerge.2 The claim that a pain drug could prevent thrombotic disease was viewed skeptically. Larger trials included patients with cerebral and coronary artery symptoms. Reality was achieved: aspirin emerged as the front-line platelet inhibitor for preventing ischemic stroke and MI. The era of platelet inhibition was established. Other platelet inhibitors were approved following randomized trials commercially conducted with data guarded by industry. Their analyses and data management illustrate the need to interpret cautiously the reports of trials even though randomized. The combination of dipyridamole (DP) 225 mg + …

The call heard 'round the world: Voice over Internet Protocol and the quest for convergence

From the Publisher: The Internet still has many great applications left up its sleeve. Chief among them is the seamless integration of voice transmission with text, audio, video, and graphics — all delivered simultaneously through the high bandwidth of the Internet. As Chief Operating Officer of Net2Phone, author David Greenblatt guided the firm to a 40% share of this snowballing market, known interchangeably as VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) or IP telephony. With sister company Adir Technologies, Greenblatt is leveraging his knowledge and vision in collaborations with powerhouse companies like Cisco, Yahoo, AOL, RealNetworks, and Microsoft. The evolution of Net2Phone and Adir forms the framework for a revealing look at the immediate and long-range future of communication and information delivery. The Call Heard 'Round the World describes the evolution-in-progress of VoIP technology, from its current applications (it powers each of the untold millions of instant messages sent over AOL, MSN, and Yahoo) to the impact it will have on business models and investment strategy in a broad range of industries. In addition to the author's own experiences and perspectives, the book features observations from respected analysts, investment professionals, business leaders and industry experts. Author Biography: David Greenblatt (Lawrence, NY) is former Chief Operating Officer of Net2Phone, the pioneering force behind VoIP technology. He is currently CEO and President of ADIR Technologies, which licenses and sells Net2Phone's VoIP management software.

Emergent Management Morality: Explaining Corporate Corruption

As the twentieth century closed out and a new one dawned, a great wave of corporate scandals swept across the United States. They brought financial ruin and bankruptcy to leading firms, led to widespread employee layoffs, decimated workers’ pensions, wiped out untold millions of dollars of shareholders’ investments, shook investors’ confidence, and greatly elevated public mistrust of business in general. To p -level executives were charged with fraudulent reporting of company revenues and profits; engaging in insider trading; looting company treasuries for personal gain; lying to employees, board members, and regulators about their company’s financial condition; colluding with public auditing firms to inflate revenues and conceal costs; illegally fixing prices by restricting energy supplies; ordering employees to destroy potentially incriminating company documents; establishing internal conflict-ofinterest partnerships; creating offshore operations centers as tax-escape havens; receiving outsized salaries, bonuses, stock awards, and stock options as their company’s financial fortunes degenerated; misusing company airlines for family benefit; borrowing and not repaying company funds to build private mansions; buying art for personal use through company channels to avoid paying taxes; and numerous other illegal and questionable actions. As the scandals spread, various explanations were offered. President George W. Bush favored the bad-apple idea, saying that “the vast majority of businesspeople are living by the rules [but] a few bad actors can tarnish our entire free enterprise system” (Bush, 2002). Others cited

What was natural in the coastal oceans?

Humans transformed Western Atlantic coastal marine ecosystems before modern ecological investigations began. Paleoecological, archeological, and historical reconstructions demonstrate incredible losses of large vertebrates and oysters from the entire Atlantic coast. Untold millions of large fishes, sharks, sea turtles, and manatees were removed from the Caribbean in the 17th to 19th centuries. Recent collapses of reef corals and seagrasses are due ultimately to losses of these large consumers as much as to more recent changes in climate, eutrophication, or outbreaks of disease. Overfishing in the 19th century reduced vast beds of oysters in Chesapeake Bay and other estuaries to a few percent of pristine abundances and promoted eutrophication. Mechanized harvesting of bottom fishes like cod set off a series of trophic cascades that eliminated kelp forests and then brought them back again as fishers fished their way down food webs to small invertebrates. Lastly, but most pervasively, mechanized harvesting of the entire continental shelf decimated large, long-lived fishes and destroyed three-dimensional habitats built up by sessile corals, bryozoans, and sponges. The universal pattern of losses demonstrates that no coastal ecosystem is pristine and few wild fisheries are sustainable along the entire Western Atlantic coast. Reconstructions of ecosystems lost only a century or two ago demonstrate attainable goals of establishing large and effective marine reserves if society is willing to pay the costs. Historical reconstructions provide a new scientific framework for manipulative experiments at the ecosystem scale to explore the feasibility and benefits of protection of our living coastal resources.

The Rendezvous of Axon with Dendrite

The brain is a network of untold millions of nerve cells. Little is known of how these make contacts and transmit signals. Neuroscientists have been studying the basics

The clients for agrometeorological information

This paper deals with the clients that may use agrometeorological information. The sections treat the possible identities of the clients, the nature of the information products that they may request, the products that an agrometeorological unit can provide, the manner of delivery of the product, and the evaluation of the value of the product to the client. A fair amount of agrometeorological knowledge is, or can relatively easily be made available, but far from all is used. If agrometeorological information is communicated to the right client and applied, agrometeorology can help find ‘windows of opportunity’ to practise sustainable, high quality agriculture more profitably, with less risks, less cost, and less environmental pollution and damage. Such an application requires a concerted and interdisciplinary approach, whether by the public service or by a commercial firm, to offer the agrometeorological product to the client. The reward may be great, because clients may persist for a very long time and useful products may have an incalculably fruitful outcome. Such is proven by the agrometeorological information for the control of potato blight ( Phytophthora infestans), now supplied to potato farmers all over the world: a single agrometeorological information product, steadily perfected, and persistently used for more than a lifetime of man, having positively affected untold millions of lives.

Untold millions: secret truths about marketing to gay and lesbian consumers

Contents Foreword * Acknowledgments * Chapter 1. You Can Bank on It * Recognize What Is Changing * Coming Out with the Code * A Melting Pot of Coded Messaging * Reading the Future Between the Lines * Seeing Is Believing * Real People and (ital)The Real World * Moving Ahead * Chapter 2. Visibility: The New Politics of Profit * Strong Medicine for Corporate America * Refocusing the Images * Putting First Things First * Gay Is Good--Big Is Not * Communicating Sensitivity * Understanding the Influence of the Gay Male Aesthetic * Changing Times for the Gay and Lesbian Consumer, Employee, and Investor * Communicating Legitimacy in an Age of Grief * Chapter 3. Will the Real Gay Consumers Please Stand Up? * Elevating the Discussion and the Science * Staying Mindful of Statistical Games * How We Got Where We Are * Identifying the Consumers That Matter * The Population Estimates on Gay and Lesbian Americans * The Overall Picture * Chapter 4. Understanding Pride and Pragmatism: A Marketer's View of Modern Gay and Lesbian Culture * Economics and the Sexual Identity Crisis * Adaption and Change * Context Matters * A General Gay and Lesbian American Profile * Attitudinal Profile of Gay and Lesbian Americans * The Psychology of Disenfranchisement * Business and Marketing Implications * Chapter 5. Brand Loyalty, Management, and the Creative Process: Promoting Products and Services to Gay and Lesbian Consumers * The Equality Principles on Sexual Orientation * Take Action Be Decisive * Fifty Great Ways to Build Stronger Customer Relations with Gay and Lesbian Consumers * Corporate Nightmares: The Truth About Boycotts and Backlash * Common Sense Public Relations * Gay and Lesbian Consumer Demand: Key Areas of Growth * General Strategy * HIV and the Gay Marketing Moment * Chapter 6. Key Cities and Emerging Opportunities for Business * Investing in Taste * Healthy Living * Entertaining the Masses * What to Wear * Gay and Lesbian Travel * Fund-Raising * Gay and Lesbian Book, Magazine, and Newspaper Publishing * Media, Advertising, and Direct Marketing * Changes Yet to Come * Chapter 7. The Future of the Gay and Lesbian Marketplace: Considerations at the Door of the Twenty-First Century * Times Are A-Changing * Appendix A: Independent Information Sources for Gay- and Lesbian-Oriented Advertisers and Marketers * Appendix B: A Note on Yankelovich MONITOR's Sensitivity Techniques * Notes * Bibliography * Index

The Medium Vanishes?

The Medium Vanishes?

Foreign Business and Consumer Rights: A Survey of Consumer Protection Law in China

FOREIGN BUSINESS AND CONSUMER RIGHTS: A SURVEY OF CONSUMER PROTECTION LAW IN CHINA Mark Williams* INTRODUCTION The accepted wisdom of the economic titans of the west is that China is a land of opportunity. 1 Untold millions of consum- ers are apparently eagerly waiting for the benefits of Western consumer-oriented capitalism. The oft-repeated nostrum appears to be that any self-respecting multi-national cannot afford to ig- nore the huge market 2 and the profit bonanza that surely will be the prize of the bold entrepreneur who commits early to the Chi- nese market. Does this view represent reality or do those who have committed huge sums to unprofitable joint venture enter- prises need to perpetuate such a myth to reassure anxious share- holders? The answer is yet to be determined. However, the imminent entry of China into the World Trade Organization (WTO) will inevitably lead to increased opening of the domestic market to imports and goods and services produced locally by foreign enterprises and so the potential opportunities for foreign firms' interaction with the Chinese market will un- doubtedly increase. The reduction of tariffs, most favored nation status and national treatment of foreign goods as promised by the trade agreements already signed with the United States of * Assistant Professor of Law, Hong Kong Polytechnic University 1. A recent survey of the CEO's/CFO's of 1000 global companies found that China was the second most favoured recipient of foreign direct investment after the United States of America. The reasons for this confidence in the Chinese market place resulted from three factors - size of the potential market and a growing mid- dle class , entry by China into the World Trade Organization and normalization of China's policy behaviour . See A. T. Kearney, Inc., FDI Confidence Index (Feb., 2001), at http://www.atkearney.com. 2. China has a population of over 1.2 billion people. See 2000 CHINA STAT. Y.B. (China Statistics Press, Beijing).

Globalization: The outer and the inner dimensions

Globalization is an open‐ended process that can bring prosperity and well‐being to untold millions, or can issue in further rich‐poor polarization, the reduction of social and cultural diversity, and further harm to the environment. If globalization's promise is to be fulfilled and its dangers averted, conscious orientation is needed on the part of contemporary peoples and leaders. This means attention to the inner, human dimension of the globalization process, in addition to its outer, socioeconomic and political dimension. Fundamental transformations are needed in the inner dimension: in the way people and societies perceive the globalization process, and their role and responsibility in steering it toward sustainable and humanly beneficial pathways.

Britannia's Children: Reading Colonialism through Children's Books and Magazines

The untold millions princes and paupers the unknown continent the goodfellows the sleeping giant the yellow peril the inter-war years.