By the time these words appear in print, I understand that we shall have taken one more step, whatever that is, towards joining the European Community whatever that is. (We have trouble enough defining what we mean by a community even within Britain; I can't imagine it's going to be any easier, in European terms, even to perceive the community, let alone define it.) Anyway, before very long, pe...

BACKGROUND For many years, the detection of clusters has been of great public health interest. Several detection methods have been developed, the most famous of which is the circular scan method. The present study, which was conducted in the context of a rare disease distributed over a large territory (7675 cases registered over 17 years and located in 1895 units), aimed to evaluate the perform...

I have recently been renewing my acquaintance with Rudyard Kipling Rudyard Kipling the poet, that is, as distinct from Rudyard Kipling the short-story writer and part-time novelist. R.K. the poet is very much out of favour at present, and has been these twenty years. I suppose this disfavour springs from his identification with the spirit of Empire, with the Raj, with the Great White Sahib, wit...

A personal view of the social services.

One of the most notable phenomena of the last two years has been the sudden growth of what might be called the 'ecological movement'. I think myself that 'ecology' is a bad word to use in this context; I take the word to mean the systematic and dispassionate analysis of interrelationships between various kinds of life-forms and their physical environment?and the movement is not yet very systema...

A better understanding of the scan-to-scan signal intensity variation can lead to more sophisticated algorithms for database searching and de novo peptide sequencing using single scan mass spectra. In this study, we systematically studied the variation in relative intensity of m/z values in the single scan product ion mass spectra (MS2) derived from five representative precursor ions (MS1) coll...

The local authority Social Services Departments are going to get a bad press during the next year or two This seems quite certain, because of the attitudes and activities of certain Members of Parliament. There appears to be quite a vogue nowadays for Members to open debates, ask questions and make speeches not so much for their impact on the floor of the House as for the amount of press covera...

RATIONALE Lupus panniculitis (LP) is a unique variant of cutaneous lupus erythematosus. Clinical manifestations are typically mild and include erythema, nodules, and small ulcers. In certain cases, diagnosing LP may be challenging. Skin overlying the typical subcutaneous inflammation may appear normal, and bacterial superinfections of the skin sometimes mask the underlying LP. It has been sugge...

Introduction: 3D gradient echo (GRE) sequence is commonly used for T1-weighted MR imaging of liver. Conventional 3D GRE sequences utilize either one of centric-linear, radial or linear ordering of k-space with a fat suppression technique and partial scan technique along a slice direction. We introduce a enhanced 3D-GRE sequence, which adopted a linear ordering with half scan along both slice an...