Gaussian scale-space is considered to be a modern bottom-up tool in computer vision. The Amer-ican and European vision community, however, is unaware of the fact that Gaussian scale-space has already been axiomatically derived in 1959 in a Japanese paper by Taizo Iijima. This result formed the starting point of an entire world of linear scale-space research in Japan ranging from various axiomat...

The energy spectra of ultra-high energy cosmic rays reported by the AGASA, Fly’s Eye, Haverah Park, HiRes, and Yakutsk experiments are all shown to be in agreement with each other for energies below 1020 eV (after small adjustments, within the known uncertainties, of the absolute energy scales). The data from HiRes, Fly’s Eye, and Yakutsk are consistent with the expected flux suppression above ...

Meningococcal disease is a worldwide life-threatening infection associated in many cases with debilitating long-term sequelae, both within the military and civilian populations. Military recruits are at a higher risk of acquiring this infection due to numerous factors, such as young recruits in the age group 18-25 years, high carriage rates of meningococci, communal and crowed living quarters a...

It says in the report by Wang et al. that a negative group velocity u = −c/310 is obtained and that a pulse advancement shift 62-ns is measured. The authors claim that the negative group velocity is associated with superluminal light propagation and that the pulse advancement is not at odds with causality or special relativity. However, it is shown here that their conclusions above are not true...

Memory training for older adults often produces gains that are limited to the particular memory tasks encountered during training. We suggest that memory training programs may be misguided by an implicit "generalist" assumption-memory training on a couple of memory tasks will have a positive benefit on memory ability in general. One approach to increase memory-training benefits is to target tra...

Wild poliovirus type 3 (WPV3) has not been seen anywhere since the last case of WPV3-associated paralysis in Nigeria in November 2012. At the time of writing, the most recent case of wild poliovirus type 1 (WPV1) in Nigeria occurred in July 2014, and WPV1 has not been seen in Africa since a case in Somalia in August 2014. No cases associated with circulating vaccine-derived type 2 poliovirus (c...

New chair, new members and many more possibilities Among many other things, the last European Respiratory Society (ERS) International Congress in Munich brought changes to the ERS Junior Members Committee (JMC). The 3-year term of JMC representatives has seen Indre Butiene, who initiated the Committee 3 years ago, finish her tenure as chair, with Anders Bjerg, respiratory epidemiologist from Go...

This paper examines the contributions Management Accounting Research (MAR) has (and has not) made to social and critical analyses of management accounting in the twenty-five years since its launch. It commences with a personalised account of the first named author’s experiences of behavioural, social and critical accounting in the twenty-five years before MAR appeared. This covers events in the...

Most electrophysiologists generally do not speak highly of leak currents. In reality, these conductances represent a crucial functional mechanism by which neurons control resting membrane potentials. A new study in Cell by Lu et al. has surprisingly confirmed the identity of the long-sought voltage-insensitive sodium leak conductance to be encoded by the third branch of the voltage-gated sodium...

Exacerbations of COPD are the largest single cause of hospital admission with respiratory disease, and are frequently associated with impaired gas exchange and mortality rates of up to 14%. 1 Acute hypercapnic respiratory failure leads to admissions to intensive care units with a mortality rate of 59% at one year. 2 Noninvasive ventilation (NIV) is a well established and validated therapy for a...