Alcohol misuse can harm people other than the drinker, and can have negative consequences for society as a whole. It is commonly believed to play a role in decreased worker productivity, increased unintentional injuries, aggression and violence against others, and child and spouse abuse. Research findings support the idea that drinking is involved in or associated with many of these social harm...

One of the major goals of most early concept learners was to find hypotheses that were perfectly consistent with the training data. It was believed that this goal would indirectly achieve a high degree of predictive accuracy on a set of test data. Later research has partially disproved this belief. However, the issue of consistency has not yet been resolved completely. We examine the issue of c...

Nesiritide is the recombinant form of human B-type (brain) natriuretic peptide (BNP), and its amino acid sequence is identical to that of endogenous human BNP. Administration of nesiritide results in venous and arterial vasodilation, as well as enhanced diuresis. Given the many limitations of therapies previously available for the treatment of acute decompensated heart failure, the anticipation...

Traditionally, computer communication networks have been optimized with respect to throughput, robustness and absolute delay, with little or no concern for the variation in delay (jitter) induced by the network. It is now desirable that high speed networks support a greater range of telecommunication services by providing a multi-service environment. If the transmission of jitter-sensitive tra ...

A common argument against prostitution states that selling sex is harmful because it involves selling something deeply personal and emotional. More and more of us, however, believe that sexual encounters need not be deeply personal and emotional in order to be acceptable--we believe in the acceptability of casual sex. In this paper I argue that if casual sex is acceptable, then we have few or n...

The idea for this note arose during the “Web Information Retrieval and Linear Algebra Algorithms” held at Schloss Dagstuhl in February 2007. Many brilliant people working on either side (numerical analysis and web search) had a chance to meet and talk for one week about mathematical and practical aspects of linear methods for ranking, and in particular (not surprisingly) PageRank and HITS. Ther...

The spread of the cover sheet is a divisive phenomenon. Their appearance is geographically bound and their content situated in the local political and financial context. In this article we discuss the arguments for and against the coversheet in its guise as a fixture on institutional repository preprints, exploring the issue through statistical information gathered from survey material and from...

OBJECTIVE This study formed part of the South African National HIV, Incidence, Behaviour and Communication (SABSSM) 2008 survey, which included questions assessing the extent of alcohol use and problem drinking among South Africans. METHOD A multistage random population sample of 15 828 persons aged 15 or older (56.3% women) was included in the survey. Alcohol use was assessed using the Alcoh...