"Second Opinions in Internal Medicine" is a short book aimed at junior doctors, general practice trainees and their trainers. It adopts a case study approach to frequent, yet taxing problems that face general practitioners and hospital Consultants. The format adopted is that of GP assessment and management, followed by a referral letter, and then Consultant assessment and reply, finishing with ...

The vast range of heterotrophic plate count (HPC)-detected bacteria are not considered to be frank or opportunistic pathogens, as discussed elsewhere in this book (chapters 4–7) and in previous reviews (Nichols et al. The purpose of this chapter, however, is to highlight important methodological issues when considering " traditional " and emerging procedures for detecting bacterial pathogens in...

Let me begin by expressing my sincere gratitude to the Japanese Association of Mathematical Sciences for inviting me to present this lecture and for giving me the JAMS International Prize for 2003 . I am deeply honored. This lecture is not a survey, but simply a discussion of some topics that I find interesting. For the most recent surveys of this subject area in which I have participated see [...

The title ‘What works in tackling health inequalities?’ is actually too narrow to do justice to the wealth of information that can be found in this book. A more accurate description would have been: ‘What do we know about the scale of the problem of health inequalities, about pathways giving rise to these inequalities and about policy interventions to address those pathways?’ But admittedly, th...

In the previous article in this series I started by giving a description of the files in the ‘base’ LATEX distribution. In part 2, I shall cover the ‘tools’ and ‘graphics’ distributions. These are distributed in the tools and graphics subdirectories of the CTAN directory macros/latex/ packages. Although these files are not part of the minimal base distribution they should normally be included i...

In this paper, we show that the problem of computing the complex roots of unity is not as simple as it seems at rst. In particular, the formulas given in a standard programmer's reference book Knuth, Seminumerical Algorithms, 1981] are shown to be numerically unstable, giving unacceptably large error for moderate sized sequences. We give alternative formulas, which we show to be superior both b...

Machine Translation Past, Present, Future (Ellis Horwood Limited, Chichester, England, 1986, 382 pp., $52.95) by William John Hutchins is a good book. It is organized around projects as “a history and assessment of efforts to mechanise processes of translating” (p.18). It is complete, discussing basically every project in the world since machine translation’s first glimmerings 40 years ago Proj...

Research at the interface of psychology, neuroscience, molecular biology, and genetics, focusing on the amygdala, has begun to reveal a rule book for emotional reactions. Variations in intrinsic and extrinsic factors tweak the sensitivity of the amygdala, giving rise to differences in behavior between individuals. At their most extreme, these variations may generate psychological disorders, and...