George Wells Beadle [3] studied corn, fruit flies, and funguses in the US during the twentieth century. These studies helped Beadle earn the 1958 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine [4]. Beadle shared the prize with Edward Tatum for their discovery that genes [5] help regulate chemical processes in and between cells. This finding, initially termed the one gene-one enzyme hypothesis, helped sc...

By now it has become a truism that machine translation is no more (and no less) than a powerful tool for human translators. It is acknowledged that MT will not replace qualified translators but that it is indispensable in the face of the enormous quantities of texts that need to be translated. Furthermore, it is understood that MT systems cannot, and are not intended to, translate literary text...

Despite changes in technology that have improved both production and the final product, small local journals still have a low profile and struggle to obtain adequate copy, in terms of both quality and quantity. My experiences as editor of two small journals in Jamaica in the 1990s provided similar problems to those that are encountered by many editors today. Endeavour to persevere, but, if you ...

Little is known about past and present mortality in Vietnam, as the first official data on mortality have only recently become available from censuses taken in 1979 and 1989. Using these data, I estimate Vietnamese mortality during the intercensal period using two techniques that rely on age-specific growth rates from two successive age distributions. Intercensal emigration and differential com...

On 1 December 1989 Professor Michael W. Dols died in the United States after a long and difficult illness. With his passing, medical history lost one ofits foremost Arabist representatives. A native of Baltimore, Michael Dols received his BA in History from Trinity College (Hartford) in 1964 and an MA from the University of North Carolina in 1967. Drawn to the study ofthe Middle East at a time ...

This biographical sketch of R. Merle d’Aubigné corresponds to the historic text, The Classic: Functional Results of Hip Arthroplasty with Acrylic Prosthesis, available at DOI 10.1007/s11999-008-0572-1. Robert Merle d’Aubigné was born in 1900 in Neuilly, from a Huguenot family [9]. He had a classical education at the Lycée Pasteur [5] and at age 17 wanted to enlist in the tank corps, but with tw...

An anonymous, self administered health questionnaire survey of the habits and attitudes of servicemen in the 3 Services was conducted. The overall response rate was 75%. This paper reports the results of questions on smoking. The Army had the greatest percentage of smokers, smoked most heavily and had the worst attitude to smoking of the 3 Services. The RAF had the best results in these fields....

If we were to start from scratch today to design a quality-controlled archive and distribution system for scientific and technical information, it could take a very different form from what has evolved in the past decade from pre-existing print infrastructure. Ultimately, we might expect some form of global knowledge network for research communications. Over the next decade, there are many tech...