The recreational use of Salvia divinorum has received increased attention by media outlets and policy-makers in recent years. The vast absence of research to guide the dissemination of information has prompted this research note describing the use of this substance in a large public institution of higher education. The prevalence of Salvia divinorum is described in this context and a descriptio...

This discussion paper is a preliminary version designed to generate ideas and constructive comment. The contents of the paper are presented to the reader in good faith, and neither the author, the ISMA Centre, nor the University, will be held responsible for any losses, financial or otherwise, resulting from actions taken on the basis of its content. Any persons reading the paper are deemed to ...

An ethnobotanical study was carried out in the Saïda region among herbalists to evaluate the use of Salvia argentea (L.), a plant species native from North Africa belonging to the Lamiaceae family. Forty-two herbalists were interviewed individually, aged between 30 and 70 years, all males, 52.38% of them having received a secondary education level and having performing their duties for more tha...

In the course of our investigations of new sources of higher plant lipids, seed fatty acid compositions and the tocochromanol contents of Salvia bracteata, S. euphratica var. euphratica, S. aucherii var. canascens, S. cryptantha, S. staminea, S. limbata, S. virgata, S. hypargeia, S. halophylla, S. syriaca and S. cilicica were investigated using GLC and HPLC systems. Some of the species are ende...

Sage (Salvia) species is known as the Functional Novel Natural Medicine, Salvia Extract are considered important for drug development, because they are reported to have Pharmacological activity in the Asia, Middle East especially China and India. For a long time Salvia has been used in traditional medicine for the relief of pain, protecting the body against oxidative stress, free radical damage...

In recent years, Salvia divinorum has become a major focus by state legislatures throughout the United States looking to prohibit the sale of the psychoactive plant. After researching testing procedures presented in the literature and those employed by crime laboratories throughout the country, it was decided that thin layer chromatography (TLC) and gas chromatography ⁄mass spectrometry (GC ⁄MS...

This paper presents a novel approach to the problem of hedge detection, which involves the identification of so-called hedge cues for labeling sentences as certain or uncertain. This is the classification problem for Task 1 of the CoNLL-2010 Shared Task, which focuses on hedging in biomedical literature. We here propose to view hedge detection as a simple disambiguation problem, restricted to w...

In this paper, we examine the risk characteristics and capital adequacy of hedge funds using Value-at-Risk (based on Extreme Value Theory) as the criterion for measuring risk and estimating capital requirements. Using extensive data on nearly thirteen hundred live and dead hedge funds, we find that the vast majority of funds are adequately capitalized. In addition, a large fraction of hedge fun...

This paper presents a system which adopts a standard sequence labeling technique for hedge detection and scope finding. For the first task, hedge detection, we formulate it as a hedge labeling problem, while for the second task, we use a two-step labeling strategy, one for hedge cue labeling and the other for scope finding. In particular, various kinds of syntactic features are systemically exp...

This paper examines how hedge funds manage their market risk according to changes in aggregate liquidity conditions. Using a large sample of equity-oriented hedge funds during the period of 1994–2008, we find strong evidence that hedge-fund managers possess the ability to time market liquidity at both the style category level and the individual fund level. They increase (decrease) their portfol...