Innovations that changed mammalogy: the Cyclone trap

The quarter that changed the world

BACKGROUND The California Department of Public Health (CDPH), California Tobacco Control Program (CTCP) is one of the longest-running comprehensive tobacco control programmes in the USA, resulting from a 1988 ballot initiative that added a 25-cent tax on each pack of cigarettes and a proportional tax increase on other tobacco products. This programme used a social norm change approach to reduce...

Statistical modelling of tropical cyclone tracks: non-normal innovations

We present results from the sixth stage of a project to build a statistical hurricane model. Previous papers have described our modelling of the tracks, genesis, and lysis of hurricanes. In our track model we have so far employed a normal distribution for the residuals when computing innovations, even though we have demonstrated that their distribution is not normal. Here, we test to see if the...

The Virus That Changed My World

When I first read this little poem in The Lancet in January 2003 (Heikkinen and Jarvinen 2003), it elicited little more than a bemused chortle. There are few who would deny the paradox that for all the medical advances providing cures for multitudinous diseases afflicting the human condition, there remains a large hole in the understanding of and treatment for the common cold. We know that it i...

A memorandum that changed the world

In the summer of 1939 Otto Frisch, who was in Copenhagen, received an invitation from Mark Oliphant, a professor of physics at Birmingham, to come to Birmingham for the summer to see if some arrangements might be made for Frisch to emigrate to Birmingham. War came that fall and Frisch could not return safely to Denmark. He was given a lectureship that enabled him to stay. The previous Christmas...

“Not Everything That Is Faced Can Be Changed, but Nothing Can Be Changed Until It Is Faced”: A Response to Recent Commentaries