OBJECTIVES We investigated the secular trend in white blood cell (WBC) count and the relationship between WBC count and mortality between 1958 and 2002. BACKGROUND The WBC count is a clinical marker of inflammation and a strong predictor of mortality. Limited data exist on the WBC count secular trend and the relationship between WBC and mortality. METHODS One thousand eighty-three women and...

BACKGROUND Evidence from a number of countries in Europe and North America point towards the secular declining trend in menarcheal age with considerable spatial variations over the past two centuries. Similar trends were reported in several developing countries from Asia, Africa and Latin America. However, data corroborating any secular trend in the menarcheal age of the Indian population remai...

The Nigerian social, public, political and religious landscapes have changed significantly over time with the emergence proliferation of Pentecostal megachurches. majority these churches are structured characterized a peculiar missional focus, ritual, ecclesiastical distinctiveness. Many megachurches been criticized for their economic motivations, exploitation commercialization Christian faith....

We assessed how much of the observed decline in the prevalence of trachoma in a district of Western Nepal was due to an antibiotic treatment program and how much to an underlying secular trend outside of the program. Although antibiotic treatments clearly have an effect at 6 months, we were unable to show that this effect persisted at 12 months; in fact, long-term gains may be due to a secular ...

Contemporary conflicts about secularity in ‘the West’ tend to focus on public space. Although collective Christian heritage means that space is rarely exclusively neutral, continue arise over the relationship between and religious symbolism, especially those symbols which derive from minorities. This contribution critically considers designation of as either sacred or secular political imaginar...

Galactic evolution is in transition from an early universe dominated by hierarchical clustering to a future dominated by secular processes. These result from interactions involving collective phenomena such as bars, oval disks, spiral structure, and triaxial dark halos. A detailed review is in Kormendy & Kennicutt (2004). This paper provides a summary illustrated in part with different galaxies...

In Why Tolerate Religion?, Brian Leiter argues against the special legal status of religion, claiming that religion should not be the only ground for exemptions to the law and that this form of protection should be, in principle, available for the claims of secular conscience as well. However, in the last chapter of his book, he objects to a universal regime of exemptions for both religious and...

We tested the hypothesis that more frequent exposure to multiword phrases results in deeper entrenchment of their representations, by examining the performance of subjects of different religiosity in the recognition of briefly presented liturgical and secular phrases drawn from several frequency classes. Three of the sources were prayer texts that religious Jews are required to recite on a dail...

This study examines the intergenerational transmission of family religion as measured by parent's and adolescent's beliefs and practices in Buddhism, and its relation to delinquent behaviors among early adolescents in Thailand. The data set is from the Thai Family Matters Project 2007, a representative sample of 420 pairs of parents and teens in Bangkok. A structural equation model is employed ...

[1] We investigate the relationship between solar irradiance and cosmogenic isotope variations by simulating with a flux transport model the effect of solar activity on the Sun’s total and open magnetic flux. As the total amount of magnetic flux deposited in successive cycles increases, the polar fields build up, producing a secular increase in the open flux that controls the interplanetary mag...