something wrong with the current system. Everyone has one or more nightmare stories about certain papers. Once, a paper of ours that after many months’ worth of hard work and two rounds of revision eventually got the explicit approval of all three referees was eventually rejected on the astonishing grounds that the editor did not find it sexy enough (sic). Since then, I anxiously search for the...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE The advent of controlled clinical trials revolutionized clinical medicine over the course of the 20th century. The objective of this study was to quantitatively characterize developments in clinical trial methodology over time in the field of acute ischemic stroke. METHODS All controlled trials targeting acute ischemic stroke with a final report in English were identifi...

After China opened her doors to the world again, I seized the opportunity to organize the University of Minnesota Art and Craft Tour of China, in 1982. When we were in Hangzhou, I visited the China Academy of Fine Arts (Formerly the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts) to negotiate with the leaders of the Academy to establish the very first exchange program in the arts with the University of Minnesot...

Bonds are traded in over-the-counter markets, where opacity and fragmentation imply large transaction costs for retail investors. Is there something special about bonds, in contrast to stocks, precluding transparent limit-order markets? Historical experience suggests this is not the case. Before WWII, there was an active market in corporate and municipal bonds on the NYSE. Activity dropped dram...

[1] We used a simulated data set of hydro-climatological variables to examine for 20th century trends in soil moisture, runoff, and drought characteristics over the conterminous United States (U.S.). An increasing trend is apparent in both model soil moisture and runoff over much of the U.S., with a few decreasing trends in parts of the Southwest. The trend patterns were qualitatively similar t...

The early years of the 20th century were notable for improvements in general sanitation, dairying practices and milk handling. Most infants were breast-fed, often with some formula feeding as well. Availability of the home icebox permitted safe storage of milk and infant formula, and by the 1920s, feeding of orange juice and cod liver oil greatly decreased the incidence of scurvy and rickets. U...

Scholars of Chinese literature note that China’s tumultuous literary history in the 20th century centered around the uncomfortable tensions between tradition and modernity. In this corpus study, we develop and automatically extract three features to show that the classical character of Chinese poetry decreased across the century. We also find that Taiwan poets constitute a surprising exception ...

From the beginning of this century, following the publication of his dissertation, Thorndike made many significant contributions to psychology, some related to animal and human learning and others to various areas of educational psychology. This paper concentrates on the former and mentions some of the latter, in the context of personal and professional aspects of his life.

Modern research has found strong links between family structure and children’s outcomes. One of the robust findings is that stepchildren and adopted children have worse adult outcomes compared to biological children. However, we know very little about how non-biological children fared historically. In this study, by linking adopted children across U.S. federal censuses in the first half of the ...

It is quite fitting for a symposium reviewing progress in infant nutrition in the 20th century to start with a review of infant mortality rates during that time period. Indeed, it has been a truism in public health that, within limits, the infant mortality rate of any community, large or small, reflected its general state of health better than any other single indicator. Although no longer vali...