May 22, 2006 issue Imagine tears, lots of tears. Imagine a trail of tears trickling across upstate New York. Judie Comerford and her husband, Michael, are in their minivan on a highway somewhere between Potsdam and their home in Buffalo. They've just bid farewell to their oldest child, Meghan, who's starting college. "I cried, and then I cried some more, and then I cried again," Judie recalls. ...

To evaluate the effects of season, sex and age on serum concentrations of thyroid hormones, cholesterol and triglyceride, and their correlations together in dromedarian camels, these parameters were measured in 180 clinically healthy dromedary camels. No significant difference was detected for the measured serum parameters between the two sexes and among the different age groups of camels and n...

The main goal of the paper is to generalize the Duistermaat-Guillemin trace formula to the case of transversally elliptic operators on a compact foliated manifold. First, let us recall briefly the setting of the classical formula. Let P be a positive self-adjoint elliptic pseudodifferential operator of order one on a closed manifold M (for example, P = √ ∆, where ∆ is the Laplace-Beltrami opera...

Adaptive learning capacity is a critical component of community resilience that describes the ability of a community to effectively gauge its vulnerability to the external environment and to make appropriate changes to its coping strategies. Traditionally, the relationship between government and community learning was framed within a deterministic paradigm. Learning outcomes were understood to ...

Humor is a ubiquitous experience that facilitates coping, social coordination, and well-being. We examine how humorous responses to a tragedy change over time by measuring reactions to jokes about Hurricane Sandy. Inconsistent with the belief that the passage of time monotonically increases humor, but consistent with the benign violation theory of humor, a longitudinal study reveals that humoro...

This paper presents a system for classifying disaster-related tweets. The focus is on Twitter data generated before, during, and after Hurricane Sandy, which impacted New York in the fall of 2012. We propose an annotation schema for identifying relevant tweets as well as the more fine-grained categories they represent, and develop feature-rich classifiers for relevance and fine-grained categori...

Funerals have long been of interest to social scientists. Previous sociological work has examined the relationship between individuality, belief and tradition within funeral services, founded on assumption that public rituals psycho-social benefit for organisers attendees. With introduction direct cremation UK, impact COVID-19 pandemic service attendance in 2020 2021, critique this is now neede...