IN ITS SHORT CAREER, Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel1 has enjoyed remarkable success for a book not much concerned with diets, cats, or how to get rich quick. It has appeared on best-seller lists and as a selection for several book clubs, won a Pulitzer Prize, and accompanied President Clinton on his 1999 vacation on Martha's Vineyard. Not bad for an amateur historian. But what clinches ...

The Pyramid system associates importance ratings with individual sentences in evaluated summaries. Given that many summarization systems compose their output from source document sentences with limited or no editing, it is often possible to propagate Pyramid ratings back to the source document and tag source sentences with one measure of their suitability to a generic summary. In the case of Py...

New approaches are required to analyse very large land-use transportation systems in which millions of people make millions of trips each day. New computer technology has enabled packages that model very large transportation systems. Some of these models are reviewed and it is concluded that the TRANSIMS system developed at Los Alamos National Laboratory has the best combination of desirable ch...

A national survey was sent to all appropriate Veterans Health Administration (VA) medical facilities asking about the ability to test for Staphylococcus aureus with reduced susceptibility to vancomycin (SARV) (MICs >4 microg/mL). For those with this ability, a request was made for the number of patients having SARV isolated during a 1-year period. Nineteen patients from eight sites across the c...

OBJECTIVES To identify the status of compliance and enforcement of New Zealand's Fencing of Swimming Pools Act (FOSP Act), 10 years after its introduction, and to identify methods for improving both compliance with the act and the process of enforcement. METHODS A postal questionnaire was sent to all 74 authorities in New Zealand in which they were asked questions about their enforcement of t...

OBJECTIVE To obtain a national consensus view of suggested criteria for good quality care in induced abortion to serve as a basis for standards for audit to assess current clinical practice. DESIGN Postal, questionnaire survey assessing consensus agreement with criteria identified from a literature review and refined by an invited panel of four gynaecologists and the gynaecology audit project...

This study is the first in a program to develop a battery of Performance Evaluation Tests for Environmental Research (PETER). Nineteen volunteer subjects were tested daily for 3 weeks on a complex task requiring the operator to keep simultaneous track of several things with changing states. Average daily performances are reported as well as reliabilities of three main types: 1) internal consist...

Objectives. There are no published studies on the Barbados Emergency Ambulance Service and no assessment of the calls that end in nontransported individuals. We describe reasons for the nontransport of potential clients. Methods. We used the Emergency Medical Dispatch (Medical Priority Dispatch System) instrument, augmented with five local call types, to collect information on types of calls. T...

Discussion of Marxism in the Western world since the nineteen-sixties has been dominated by a reaction against Hegelian ideas. This agenda has been shared equally by the analytical Marxism which has predominated in the English speaking world and by the structuralist Marxism which has been the major influence in the continental tradition. The main purpose of my own work has been to reassess thes...

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the influence of different degrees of opposition on ball velocity in the jump throw in elite, amateur and adolescent team handball players. Thus, one hundred and nineteen elite, amateur and under 18 team handball players performed jump throws under three different conditions: 1) without opposition, 2) with the opposition of the goalkeeper and ...