Three papers in the Journal this month examine the impact on service use of particular service developments and patient/illness characteristics. Williams et al (pp. 480–485) compared patterns of service use, including hospital admission rates, before and after the introduction of a triage admission system in one large innercity mental health organisation. Overall, little difference was found be...

Several papers in the BJPsych this month address issues arising from the overlap or comorbidity between mental and physical ill health. In a UK sample of individuals with affective disorders, Forty et al (pp. 465–472) found significantly increased rates of several medical illnesses among those with bipolar and unipolar disorder compared with controls. Among those with affective disorder, migrai...

Two papers in the Journal this month examine patterns of prescribing practice. With established clinical guidelines for the management of individuals with treatment-resistant schizophrenia in mind, Howes et al (pp. 481–485) reviewed prescribing practices prior to commencement of clozapine for a sample of patients managed within one mental health service. The authors found evidence of a signific...

A 20-hour VLBI observation with the NRAO VLBA and GBT in the NOAO Boötes field reaches an rms noise of 9 microJy per beam at 1.4 GHz. Three sources were detected at 10-milliarcsecond resolution within the GBT primary beam of FWHM 8.6, including the 20milliJy calibrator and two sub-milliJy sources. By tapering the visibility data, portions of the VLBA primary beam of FWHM 29 were imaged at poore...

Software often goes through a variety of extensions during its lifetime: adding new fields or new variants to a data structure, retroactively creating new type abstractions, and adding new operations on a data structure. As characterized by the extensibility problem, it should be possible to apply any combination of these types of extensions in any order. Mainstream object-oriented languages, h...