Statins have revolutionised modern cardiovascular treatment by producing a striking reduction in coronary risk. In 2005, the Cholesterol Treatment Trialists’ (CTT) collaboration reported a meta-analysis of 14 random ised trials (including about 90 000 patients) of statin versus placebo that recorded a 20% relative risk reduc tion in major vascular events (comprising coronary death, nonfatal myo...

Allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT) is a potentially curative treatment option for patients with hematologic malignancies and nonmalignant disorders of hematopoiesis. Outcomes of allogeneic HSCT have improved steadily over the decades [1]. However, significant challenges remain. One of these challenges is the so-called Holy Grail of stem cell transplantation immunology: to...

It is perhaps illustrative of animal philosophy’s strong intent to establish itself firmly in serious academia that it has recently shown interest in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of becoming-animal, a concept which is so abstrusely theoretical and abstract that it appears to say very little on the animal as we know it.1 In her latest study When Species Meet (2007), Donna Haraway ...

In this paper, we introducte a family of univariate Birnbaum-Saunders distributions arising from the skew-normal-t  distribution. We obtain several properties of this distribution such as its moments, the maximum likelihood estimation procedure via an EM-algorithm and a method to evaluate standard errors using the EM-algorithm. Finally, we apply these methods to a real data set to demonstr...

Can we burn the signs and journey without maps? In other words, can we travel from representational theories, through Baudrillard's critique of representation, to forms of theory that are somehow nonrepresentational? In this paper I hijack and go beyond Baudrillard's concepts of the precession and orders of simulacra to illustrate two main things: first, how the history of geographical thought ...

This paper examines the cultural popularity of ‘ambient music’ playlists on digital streaming platforms as a paradigm technical fabrication atmospheres and modulation affect in some media environments contemporary capitalism. Ambient music names style non-intrusive, gentle background designed to assist listener relaxing or focussing work. At centre is argument that ambient demonstrates how inti...

Political culture represents a society`s widely held, traditional values and its fundamental practices; foreign policy decision makers tend to make policies that are compatible with their society`s political culture because they share, if not all, many of those values. Among the various factors influencing Iran`s foreign policy,  the role of political culture seems to be rather underestimated. ...