This article investigates the contexts, or "listening niches", in which people hear popular music. The study spanned a century of popular music, divided into 10 decades, with participants born between 1940 and 1999. It asks about whether they know and like the music in each decade, and their emotional reactions. It also asks whether the music is associated with personal memories and, if so, wit...

The article by Homedes and Ugalde in this week’s issue of PLoS Medicine is an important addition to the global discussion about Mexico’s 2003 health reform, the Seguro Popular (SP) [1]. While this reform has been controversial in Mexico [2], it has been highly praised in international circles. The Lancet ran a special series on the reform in 2006, and former U.S. President Bill Clinton lauded S...

Because my expertise is in early American history, I will concentrate on Larry Kramer’s portrait of pre-Revolutionary popular constitutionalism, which acts as a baseline against which to measure nineteenth-century developments. Before examining pre-Revolutionary constitutionalism, however, I want to note two features of Kramer’s style of historical argument that make the book a particularly sop...

IT is difficult to imagine a case more deserving of detailed historical analysis than that of John Roberton (1776-1840), a surgeon who practised as a specialist in the treatment of venereal disease in two European capitals' yet is linked to a subject, medical police, which, on close examination, occupied a fraction of his known professional life. Despite his widely published popular works on ve...

Although the question of equal rights for members of the female sex was raised during the founding of the New England colonies (as, for example, when Anne Hutchinson challenged the Puritan theocracy of Boston), such equality has yet to be fully reached in America in fact (or in law) in 1977. The 1970s witnessed a growing agitation for “women’s rights” and, with the enactment of Title IX of the ...

This little booklet, though planned to help the American family with a retarded child living at home, would be of use and encouragement to any mother confronted with the same problem. It is simple and practical and the advice given is sound common-sense.

The fundamental premise of tagging systems is that regular users can successfully organize large collections for browsing and other tasks through the use of uncontrolled vocabularies. Until now, that premise has remained relatively unexamined. In this work, using library data as a guide, we look at whether tags do a good job of organizing large sets of objects. We find that tags are predominant...

OBJECTIVE In the context of aiming to achieve universal health coverage in Mexico, this study compares access to prescribed medicines (ATPM) between Seguro Popular (SP) and non-SP affiliated outpatient health service users. MATERIALS AND METHODS ATPM by 6,123 users of outpatient services was analyzed using the National Health and Nutrition Survey 2012. Adjusted bi-probit models were performed...

Studies have shown that some musical pieces may preferentially activate reward centers in the brain. Less is known, however, about the structural aspects of music that are associated with this activation. Based on the music cognition literature, we propose two hypotheses for why some musical pieces are preferred over others. The first, the Absolute-Surprise Hypothesis, states that unexpected ev...