Experience shows that larg e scale distance education efforts found many ways to fail. Reasons for failure of these p rograms include lack of student acceptance, which re s u l t s in low enrollment, higher costs, and more faculty time than expected. Many programs have discounted tuition in order to attract students. For students, the lack of enthusiasm could be a result of the missing social s...

From Marco Polo to Richard Nixon, narratives of the encounter between Chinese and Westerners have been defining texts of European cultures and their descendants. Successive but sporadic reports from travellers, missionaries, diplomats, traders and others have provided a model of an alternative way of arranging people, of organizing their lives, of thinking about the state of being human; one th...

A 66-year-old man who had end-stage renal disease and was undergoing maintenance hemodialysis presented with facial edema together with a strip of blisters and crust over the right side of his reddened forehead. Initially, the symptoms seemed indicative of herpes zoster ophthalmicus. However, his left periorbital area was more swollen than the infected right periorbital area (Figure 1A). The in...

will have noticed a number of cosmetic changes made to the journal since it received its last major facelift at the beginning of 1999. Most of these changes have been designed to make the journal a more attractive “read”. But the real changes go more than skin deep. The Editorial Board has been implementing structural changes to the way that the journal is produced and disseminated, with the ai...

We introduce Generalised Object Normal Form (GONF), a syntax formalism that enables language designers to de ne concrete syntax in a form that also naturally de nes the data structure of the abstract syntax tree. More precisely, GONF's grammatical productions specify simultaneously and without annotations (1) concrete syntax (a language and its parser) and (2) the collection of languageindepend...

melanogaster show a preference for nutritive sugars (which can be metabolized) over non-nutritive sugars (which offer no nutritive benefit) independently of taste; however, the mechanisms that mediate this preference are unknown. In a recent study, Suh and colleagues show that, in D. melanogaster, neurons expressing Diuretic hormone 44 (Dh44; a homologue of mammalian corticotropin-releasing hor...

Traditionally, developments in the labon-a-chip community have been technology-pushed, mainly guided by analytical chemists, micro-machinists and material scientists, rather than demand-pulled. Applications such as LabChip from Caliper (Fig. 1) and i-STAT from Abbott Point of Care (Fig. 2) can now be found on the market, solving practical problems for users. However, the field is still lacking ...

There have been several interesting results in the literature on dividing up goods between self-interested parties such that the allocation is envy-free (Brams Taylor 1996). An allocation is deemed envy-free when every party (agent) believes that its share is not less than anyone else’s share. These procedures, however, are not efficient (in the sense of pareto optimality) general. Envy-free pr...