I review the reason for considering the prime purpose of the program of measurements of the fundamental parameters of cosmology to be the tests of cosmological models. I comment on the philosophy by which we are approaching this goal, offer an assessment of where we stand, and present some thoughts on where the tests may be headed.

The accompanying editorial, headed " A victory in the battle against hunger " , said the news was " a cause for major congratulation " to the scientists involved, and for the decision to place their findings openly on the internet. Now here are some readers' responses: " I will never eat the crap. Are you out of your mind? " , " Sounds like 'cure for cancer has been found'. Big corps would not ...

In Part II of this volume, " Generating New Data, " we take an in-depth look at methods and processes in creating data and corpora for sociolinguistic analysis. The chapters and vignettes in this section address the various ideological frameworks and applied methods for creating and dealing with new sociolinguistic data, and readers will note the predominant theme of creating data that speaks b...

A major problem associated with the chemosensitivity testing of fresh human tumour cells using the MTT assay is the contamination of nonmalignant cells in the tumour tissues. Highly purified fresh human gastric cancer cells could be obtained from 43 solid tumours and eight malignant ascites for the MTT assay. The success rate of the MTT assay was 87.9% (51 of the 58 cases), and the purity of tu...

A crystal of painite discovered in 1979 in a parcel of rough gem spinel from Burma represents the third known crystal of the species. This crystal is similar to the type crystal in most respects. Chemical analyses of both the new crystal and the type crystal confirmed the essential constituents reported by Moore and Araki (1976) and showed in addition the presence of trace amounts of Fe, Cr, V,...

Fostered by Web 2.0, ubiquitous computing, and corresponding technological advancements, social media have become massively popular during the last decade. The term social media refers to a wide spectrum of digital interaction and information exchange platforms. YouTube). Regardless of the particularities of each one, these social media services share the common goal of enabling the general pub...