Response to Martin-Moreno et al. (2014) Surgical mask or no mask for health workers not a defensible position for Ebola

Surgical mask vs N95 respirator for preventing influenza among health care workers: a randomized trial.

CONTEXT Data about the effectiveness of the surgical mask compared with the N95 respirator for protecting health care workers against influenza are sparse. Given the likelihood that N95 respirators will be in short supply during a pandemic and not available in many countries, knowing the effectiveness of the surgical mask is of public health importance. OBJECTIVE To compare the surgical mask ...

On the reclassification of box turtles (Terrapene): A response to Martin et al. (2014).

Species delimitation is a central issue in all fields of biology, and it is closely tied to the species concept employed. Thousands of pages have been filled with debates about competing species concepts; for instance, Coyne & Orr (2004) counted no less than 25 distinct species concepts. Among these are several phylogenetic species concepts. The paper by Martin et al. (2013) on box turtles is o...

Unconscious semantic categorization and mask interactions: An elaborate response to Kunde et al. (2005)

In their original report [Kunde, W., Kiesel, A., & Hoffmann, J. (2003). Conscious control over the content of unconscious cognition. Cognition, 88, 223–242] maintain that “unconscious stimuli [do not] owe their impact [.] to automatic semantic categorization” (p.223), and instead propose the action-trigger theory of unconscious priming. In a reply to our paper [Kunde, W., Kiesel, A., & Hoffmann...

Large-scale catastrophic disturbance regimes can mask climate change impacts on vegetation - a reply to Pederson et al. (2014).

The Pederson et al. (2014) letter deals ostensibly with their opinion that we (Nowacki & Abrams, 2014) failed to consider the lessening of drought after the 1930s as a major driver of post-European forest dynamics in the eastern U.S. We are befuddled by this because our paper includes long-term precipitation data for four study regions and we report a slight increase (2–8% change) from 1895 to ...

Public Participation: Methods Matter; A Response to Boaz et al.