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Some prior research has found that religiosity and spirituality can be related to health. However, the relationships are inconsistent, measures of religiosity and spirituality are often problematic and conflated with the health outcomes they are supposed to predict, and very little research on this topic specifies which aspects of health supposedly benefit from religiosity and spirituality. Using two sets of survey data (Sample 1N = 347; Sample 2N = 404), we examined whether religiosity and spirituality had direct or indirect effects on physical, mental, and/or social health. We found that spirituality, when conceptualized as belief and experience of the supernatural, had no direct or indirect effect on physical, mental, or social health. Religiosity had a small but significant direct effect on social health in one sample but not the other. We consider our findings in relation to religious privileging in the United States and how proreligious biases can lead to health inequalities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Editor's Note: This paper was found in galley proof form from the journal Mind in the C.I. Lewis Archives in the Special Collections Department of the Stanford University Libraries, call number M174, Box 18, Folder 1. There are two copies of the proofs in this folder, one includes Lewis's corrections. The version that appears here incorporates all of Lewis's corrections. Where these corrections are substantive, the original wording is give in a footnote. The paper was withdrawn from publication by Lewis early in 1935. The proofs were found with Lewis's other papers in his house in Menlo Park after his death in 1964. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Although an increased incidence of mantle cell lymphoma (MCL) has been reported, age-specific incidence patterns have not been described. Further analyses could inform investigation into the etiology of this disease. We conducted an epidemiologic study using the 13 Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) registries to evaluate MCL incidence from 1992 through 2009. We calculated the proportional changes in the incidence of MCL for subpopulations defined by age, race/ethnicity and gender over time and the racial/ethnic and gender disparities. We observed a 130.9% increase in MCL incidence from 1992-1994 to 2005-2009. The increase was strongest for males (199.0%) and for whites (153.0%). The incidence increased 161%, 200%, 398% and 429% from 1992-1994 to 2005-2009 in white men ages 50-59, 60-69, 70-79 and 80+, respectively, whereas the increase in white females was 86%, 82%, 50% and 193% in the corresponding age groups. We observed a male-to-female incidence rate ratio (IRR) of 2.65 and a white-to-black IRR of 2.21. Our analysis confirmed significant increases in MCL, and illustrated that the incidence is increasing more rapidly in elderly persons, particularly in white males. We also identified novel age-specific temporal trends by race/ethnicity and sex. In addition, we found that the gender and white-to-black disparities have grown over time. Our findings may impact MCL etiologic investigation and treatment research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The microbial-enhanced oil recovery method relies on microorganisms and their metabolic products to mobilize residual oil. It is environmentally friendly and easy to operate. In the past ten years, the microbial-enhanced oil recovery method has attracted a great deal of attention in both research and field applications. Previous reviews focused on microbial-enhanced oil recovery mechanisms, namely IFT reduction, selective plugging, gas production, biodegradation, and wettability alteration. This article summarizes the well-documented field cases in the past ten years. The objectives are to investigate the microbial-enhanced oil recovery mechanisms and application criteria based on field data. A total of ten field cases are reviewed, including cases in Malaysia, USA, Argentina, and China. It was concluded that most of the successful MEOR treatments were conducted for formations with a low temperature (below 55 ° C), low water salinity (less than 100,000 ppm), high water cut (above 75%), and low production rate. Reservoir permeability does not seem to determine the success of microbial-enhanced oil recovery. The current success rate for the microbial-enhanced oil recovery method stands at about 80%. With a better understanding of microbial-enhanced oil recovery mechanisms and field experiences, the microbial-enhanced oil recovery method is expected to prosper and the success rate will improve. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the affect of health insurance on children in the United States. Four topics are addressed. First, estimates of the number of children with no insurance or discontinuous coverage are presented. Second, consequences of being uninsured or having gaps in health insurance are considered. Third, a summary of barriers to increasing the extent and continuity of children's health insurance is outlined. Fourth, implications for policy and research are briefl y discussed. It has been well established that heath care in the United States is not the main determinant of health status of the population (McGinnis and Foege, 1993). As a nation, we spend by far more than any other country, yet our population has worse health status as measured by numerous indicators among the 30 developed countries comprising the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (Schroeder, 2007). This is due, in part, to determinants of health status that are not addressed by the health care system such as genetic predispositions and, more importantly, lifestyle choices (e.g., diet, physical activity, tobacco, alcohol and drug use, sexual practices, among others), and environmental and social factors (e.g., poverty, employment, housing, socially disintegrated communities, etc.). The ways in which the U.S. health care system is structured and the kinds of health care services that are emphasized (e.g., tertiary care versus primary and secondary prevention), further limit the extent to which health care contributes to health promotion and disease prevention. Nevertheless, availability and accessibility to consistent and high quality health care does influence the health status of the U.S. population, particularly for those at increased risk of various health problems and those with special health care needs (Hoffman and Paradise, 2008) , both of which disproportionately affect poor and minority youth. Indeed, universal health insurance coverage for theelderly may explain, at least in part, why one measure of health status for which the U.S. ranks higher thanmany nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development is life expectancy among those over 65 years of age (Schroeder, 2007). This paper considers the affect of health insurance on children in the United States. Four topics are addressed. First, estimates of the number of children with no insurance or discontinuous coverage are presented. Second, consequences of being uninsured or having gaps in health insurance are considered. Third, a summary of barriers to increasing the extent and continuity of children's health insurance is outlined. Fourth, implications for policy and research are briefl y discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By studying Bartonella prevalence in rodent communities from 23 geographic sites in the western United States and one site in northern Mexico, the present study focused on the effects of rodent community diversity (measured by richness and Shannon index) and composition on prevalence of Bartonella infections. The analysis showed negative correlations of Bartonella prevalence with rodent richness and Shannon index. Further, Bartonella prevalence varied among rodent genera/species. Three models were applied to explain the observations. (1) Within-species/genus transmission: Bartonella strains usually are host-specific and adding non-host species would decrease Bartonella prevalence in its principal host through reduction of host contact (encounter reduction); (2) Frequency-dependence: Adding hosts would decrease the proportion of all infected individuals in the community, resulting in a reduction in the number of contacts between susceptible and infected individuals that usually leads to transmission (transmission reduction); and (3) Dominant species effect: Dominant species, if not susceptible to Bartonellae, can constrain the abundance of susceptible hosts (susceptible host regulation). These mechanisms work in concert; and the level of Bartonella prevalence is an outcome of regulation of all of these mechanisms on the entire system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: Despite school food service directors' (FSDs) important role in the school food environment, little research has been conducted to assess their perceptions of barriers to and strategies for improving the nutritional status of the nation's school children. The aim of this study was to examine FSDs' perceptions about the school food environment at the elementary, junior high, and high school levels. Design: A cross sectional survey of the school FSDs in the United States was conducted. The sampling frame was a total of 5,146 FSDs included in a list maintained by the School Nutrition Association. From this list, a random sample of 508 FSDs were selected. The self report questionnaire was conducted via mail and included the following three sections: (1) social and demographic characteristics of FSDs, (2) perceived barriers to improving healthy food choices in the school food environment, and (3) perceived strategies for improving healthy food choices in the school food environment. The overall response rate was 58.5% (n - 297), of which data was analyzed for the 259 respondents responsible for directing food services at the elementary, junior high school, and high school levels. Results: Of the 15 barriers presented, lack of nutrition education for parents (80%) and pressure to serve foods that children enjoy versus healthy foods (75%) had the greatest proportion of FSDs agreeing that they were probably or definitely barriers to improving the school food environment. Of the 16 presented, the strategies upon which there was the greatest agreement that would likely have a positive or very positive effect on the school food environment were encouraging taste testing of healthy dishes (95%) and increasing the availability of fresh fruit (87%). In general, FSDs' perceptions about barriers to and strategies for improving the school food environment were similar across the three school levels. Future policy initiatives may benefit from seeking the input of FSDs. FSDs can offer unique perspectives on where the attention should be focused in order to create healthier school environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Essentially all marine mining along the East and Gulf coasts of the U.S. is for sand used in beach nourishment projects. The current minimal commercial production of sand and aggregate may increase as conventional, on-shore sources become exhausted or are lost to competing land use. Studies published in the late 1990s document a history of nearly 900 individual episodes of beach nourishment having a total cost in excess of $2 × 109 with several hundred million cubic meters of sand placed along over 645 km (400 mi) of shoreline. As exemplified by studies in Florida, prospecting for sand for use in beach nourishment can begin before site specific needs are identified. A full prospecting starts with assimilation of pertinent literature, local knowledge, and an understanding of the geologic and geomorphic settings in which suitable deposits of sand or aggregate occur. High-resolution seismic profiling follows to outline the three dimensional extent of the sand bodies. Finally, vibratory cores are collected to verify the interpretation of the seismic data and to provide samples for geotechnical, especially granulometric, analyses. The actual method of production often is determined by the local availability of different dredge types. Because the mining of marine sands disturbs meaningful areas of the sea floor, environmental concerns must be considered. While it generally is assumed that dredged areas will be left barren, it is possible to assess the likely rate of recolonization. The disruption of bottom habitat also can affect feeding and spawning areas for fishes and other organisms. Alteration in local currents and wave transformation processes need to be modeled and their consequences assessed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The shuttle radar topography mission (SRTM), was flow on the space shuttle Endeavour in February 2000, with the objective of acquiring a digital elevation model of all land between 60° north latitude and 56° south latitude, using interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) techniques. The SRTM data are distributed at horizontal resolution of 1 arc-second (∼30 m) for areas within the USA and at 3 arc-second (∼90 m) resolution for the rest of the world. A resolution of 90 m can be considered suitable for the small or medium-scale analysis, but it is too coarse for more detailed purposes. One alternative is to interpolate the SRTM data at a finer resolution; it will not increase the level of detail of the original digital elevation model (DEM), but it will lead to a surface where there is the coherence of angular properties (i.e. slope, aspect) between neighbouring pixels, which is an important characteristic when dealing with terrain analysis. This work intents to show how the proper adjustment of variogram and kriging parameters, namely the nugget effect and the maximum distance within which values are used in interpolation, can be set to achieve quality results on resampling SRTM data from 3” to 1”. We present for a test area in western USA, which includes different adjustment schemes (changes in nugget effect value and in the interpolation radius) and comparisons with the original 1” model of the area, with the national elevation dataset (NED) DEMs, and with other interpolation methods (splines and inverse distance weighted (IDW)). The basic concepts for using kriging to resample terrain data are: (i) working only with the immediate neighbourhood of the predicted point, due to the high spatial correlation of the topographic surface and omnidirectional behaviour of variogram in short distances; (ii) adding a very small random variation to the coordinates of the points prior to interpolation, to avoid punctual artifacts generated by predicted points with the same location than original data points and; (iii) using a small value of nugget effect, to avoid smoothing that can obliterate terrain features. Drainages derived from the surfaces interpolated by kriging and by splines have a good agreement with streams derived from the 1” NED, with correct identification of watersheds, even though a few differences occur in the positions of some rivers in flat areas. Although the 1” surfaces resampled by kriging and splines are very similar, we consider the results produced by kriging as superior, since the spline-interpolated surface still presented some noise and linear artifacts, which were removed by kriging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Genetic toxicity data from various sources were integrated into a rigorously designed database using the ToxML schema. The public database sources include the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) submission data from approved new drug applications, food contact notifications, generally recognized as safe food ingredients, and chemicals from the NTP and CCRIS databases. The data from public sources were then combined with data from private industry according to ToxML criteria. The resulting "integrated" database, enriched in pharmaceuticals, was used for data mining analysis. Structural features describing the database were used to differentiate the chemical spaces of drugs/candidates, food ingredients, and industrial chemicals. In general, structures for drugs/candidates and food ingredients are associated with lower frequencies of mutagenicity and clastogenicity, whereas industrial chemicals as a group contain a much higher proportion of positives. Structural features were selected to analyze endpoint outcomes of the genetic toxicity studies. Although most of the well-known genotoxic carcinogenic alerts were identified, some discrepancies from the classic Ashby-Tennant alerts were observed. Using these influential features as the independent variables, the results of four types of genotoxicity studies were correlated. High Pearson correlations were found between the results of Salmonella mutagenicity and mouse lymphoma assay testing as well as those from in vitro chromosome aberration studies. This paper demonstrates the usefulness of representing a chemical by its structural features and the use of these features to profile a battery of tests rather than relying on a single toxicity test of a given chemical. This paper presents data mining/profiling methods applied in a weight-of-evidence approach to assess potential for genetic toxicity, and to guide the development of intelligent testing strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study extends the microstructure literature by examining the offering prices in the United States Initial Public Offering (IPO) market for the presence of clusters. It is found that the use of whole prices is more frequent in the IPO market than in secondary stock markets. Offering prices in the IPO market exhibit a dominant clustering at whole fives and tens (5s and 0s) that cannot be adequately explained by existing hypotheses. Unlike other studies on IPO underpricing, this study examines the impact of offering price clusters on the degree of underpricing. It is documented that whole-priced IPOs are underpriced more relative to fractional-priced IPOs. It is found that the negotiations hypothesis and the implicit collusion hypothesis are not adequate explanations and leave this puzzle to be resolved by future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To Business-to-Consumer (B2C) companies, finding convenient and secure payment methods is crucial. While the most popular payment method in the United States is the credit card, the common methods in Japan are cash on delivery, transfer of payment into bank accounts, and postal money order. The paper presents such issues as why credit card payments have not become the mainstream payment method in Japan, the current situation of other payment methods, and the future mobile trend. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

There is a general agreement that Intellectual Property Rights are important for promoting research and in particular practical plant breeding. Providing an effective IPR system by countries increases the access to foreign-bred varieties for their citizens. The design of such a national IPR system for plant varieties requires a careful balancing of exclusive rights and exemptions taking into account the current (informal) seed systems for the particular crops and their intended development. The interest in Intellectual Property Rights for the protection of germplasm in the seed industry is growing with the increasing investment from the biotechnology as the value of the new traits will eventually be captured by outstanding varieties, which are bred by a combination of new technology and conventional breeding. The UPOV based Plant Variety Protection laws offer the most simple and adequate protection for breeders by combining a good scope of protection with a full freedom to operate. The Plant Patent in the USA, only accessible for asexually reproduced crops, except species with edible tubers, is of very little importance for the seed industry. The utility patent, also only in the USA available for conventional bred varieties, offers a very wide scope of protection at the choice of the applicant. This restricts the research freedom to the extent that allows only the study of the variety for making a phenotypic description. This very strong form of protection can be obtained without the “inventions” being tested against the prior art. As obtaining and defending utility patents is very expensive, it is only worthwhile for financial good yielding crops like corn and soybean. Furthermore, most of the patent claims have first to be tested in court before their validity will be known. Other forms of protection like trademarks, trade secrets and Material Transfer Agreements play a supplementary role, dependent of the crop and the circumstances. The agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) and the increasing use of IPRs have triggered some reluctance at the side of developing countries to implement western based IPR models like UPOV. Although UPOV is a well-balanced system for the protection of plant varieties, a solution must be found for the problem of the seed flow in the so-called informal seed systems. The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and the International Treaty (IT) of the FAO, influence the development of IPRs on plant varieties, by requiring restrictions on IPRs and contributions to a fund for the maintenance of the agricultural genetic diversity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Randomized trials have shown that results of radiotherapy in patients with cervical cancer can be improved by combining the treatment with either cisplatin based chemotherapy, or hyperthermia. The studies on both the combination of radiotherapy with chemotherapy, and the combination on radiotherapy with hyperthermia, leave several important questions unanswered. At present, no definite conclusions can be drawn with regard to which combination results in the best therapeutic ratio. Therefore, on both ethical and scientific grounds, the next logical step would be to compare the two types of combined treatment to each other, and each combination with a treatment including all three modalities, in a randomized fashion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the issue of team viability and professional franchise relocation, a problem common to all major sports leagues in North America. Specifically, using the National Hockey League in the 1990s as the analytical vehicle, the proposition that the viability of Canadian Small Market Franchises (SMF) is in doubt because of a combination of inadequate revenue (due to the quality of their locations) and escalating salary cost, is examined. Using game by game data for the 1989/90 season, revenue, costs and profits by team were estimated and it was concluded that Canadian SMF are indeed an endangered species. Several alternatives which might rectify the problem are considered (revenue sharing, salary caps, public subsidy), but none are as attractive or as realistic as relocating south to US cities. The behaviour of SMF in the 1990s is consistent with this prognosis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on empirical studies of the role of key individuals in the processes of ten successful innovations in the US construction industry, this paper makes three principal arguments. First, effective leadership is essential for technological innovation - in particular in construction. Second, technological competence is an utmost prerequisite for effective leadership for construction innovation - regardless of the size of the firm. In other words, an entrepreneurial role as a technical champion in a small firm does not change even as the firm grows. Lastly, the role of technical champion can be delegated only with slack resources and adequate power. This paper also highlights conclusions and practical applications to increase technological innovation in design and construction firms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The union threat effect is the propensity of non-union employers to resist union organization by raising wages. This study introduces an empirical model of the non-union employer's optimal wage in the presence of threat effects. Estimates of an equation of a firm's unionization probability provide key variables. Unlike previous models, this specification derives directly from a theoretical model, separates threat effects from the influence of other union-non-union spillovers and efficiency wages and includes many factors affecting the probability of unionization. Wage equation estimates reveal that the predicted threat of unionization did not significantly raise non-union wages in the United States in 1980.
This study models the optimum wage strategy for a non-union employer in an environment of threat effects. Optimal wage rates are shown to depend on the union wage rate, the probability that the firm will be organized by a union and the ability of the firm to buy off the threat by raising wages. The last two factors are predicted from estimates of a model of the probability of firm unionism. Since the threat effect variables are specifically modelled in the wage equation, the threat effect can be isolated from other effects avoiding the ambiguous results of earlier studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents the text of the speech given by C. H. Woolbert at the second annual convention of the National Association in New York on December 2, 1916.

The authors reflect on the role of educators, particularly the medical education teachers in the U.S. They discuss that educators should liken their role to that of the surrogate parents, investing time and emotion, and allowing the students to make small mistakes to learn from. The authors also believe that medical educators should honestly assess the chances of their students for postgraduate examinations, to allow them to be mature and ready to sit for examinations.