‘Ghosts in the Head and Ghost Towns in the Field: Ethnography and the Experience of Presence and Absence’

This article is about an anthropologist coming to terms with the field and fieldwork. In 1995, I left – was evacuated from – my fieldsite as a volcanic eruption started just as my period of fieldwork drew to a close. These eruptions dramatically and instantaneously altered life on the island of Montserrat, a British colony in the Caribbean. While Montserrat the land, and Montserratians the people, migrated and moved on with their lives, Montserrat and Montserratians were preserved in my mind and in my anthropological writings as from “back home.” Revisiting Montserrat several years into the volcano crisis, I drove through the villages and roads leading to the former capital of the island, where I had worked from. My route to this modern-day Pompeii threw up a stark contrast between absence and presence, the imagined past and the experienced present. This is understood, in part, by examining the literary work of two other travelers through Montserrat, Henry Coleridge and Pete McCarthy, both of whom have a very different experience of the place and the people.

Differential physico-chemical tolerances of amphipod species revealed by field transplantations

Physico-chemical regimes of river systems are major determinants of the distributions and relative abundances of macroinvertebrate taxa. Other factors, however, such as biotic interactions, may co-vary with changes in physico-chemistry and concomitant changes in community composition. Thus, direct cause and effect relationships may not always be established from field surveys. Equally, however, laboratory studies may suffer from lack of realism in extrapolation to the field. Here, we use balanced field transplantation experiments to elucidate the role of physico-chemical regime in determining the generally mutually exclusive distributions of two amphipod taxa, Gammarus (two species) and Crangonyx pseudogracilis. Within two river systems in Ireland, the former species dominate stretches of well oxygenated, high-quality water, whereas the latter dominates stretches of poorly oxygenated, low-quality water. G. pulex and G. duebeni celticus did not survive in bioassay tubes in areas dominated by C. pseudogracilis, which itself survived in tubes in such areas. However, both C. pseudogracilis and Gammarus spp. survived equally well in tubes in areas dominated by Gammarus spp. Physicochemical regime thus limits the movement of Gammarus spp. into C. pseudogracilis areas, but some other factor excludes C. pseudogracilis from Gammarus spp. areas. Since previous laboratory experiments showed high predation rates of Gammarus spp. on C. pseudogracilis, we propose that predation by the former causes exclusion of the latter. Hence, presumed effects of physico-chemical regime on macroinvertebrate presence/abundance may often require experimental field testing and appreciation of alternative explanations.

Stratification and Monitoring of Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis Patients by Synovial Proteome Analysis

Juvenile idiopathic arthritis (JIA) comprises a poorly understood group of chronic, childhood onset, autoimmune diseases with variable clinical outcomes. We investigated whether profiling of the synovial fluid (SF) proteome by a fluorescent dye based, two-dimensional gel (DIGE) approach could distinguish patients in whom inflammation extends to affect a large number of joints, early in the disease process. SF samples from 22 JIA patients were analyzed: 10 with oligoarticular arthritis, 5 extended oligoarticular and 7 polyarticular disease. SF samples were labeled with Cy dyes and separated by two-dimensional electrophoresis. Multivariate analyses were used to isolate a panel of proteins which distinguish patient subgroups. Proteins were identified using MALDI-TOF mass spectrometry with expression further verified by Western immunoblotting and immunohistochemistry. Hierarchical clustering based on the expression levels of a set of 40 proteins segregated the extended oligoarticular from the oligoarticular patients (p <0.05). Expression patterns of the isolated protein panel have also been observed over time, as disease spreads to multiple joints. The data indicates that synovial fluid proteome profiles could be used to stratify patients based on risk of disease extension. These protein profiles may also assist in monitoring therapeutic responses over time and help predict joint damage. © 2009 American Chemical Society.

Impact of PSA testing and prostatic biopsy on cancer incidence and mortality: comparative study between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland

Objectives: To investigate the impact of different PSA testing policies and health-care systems on prostate cancer incidence and mortality in two countries with similar populations, the Republic of Ireland (RoI) and Northern Ireland (NI).

Methods: Population-level data on PSA tests, prostate biopsies and prostate cancer cases 1993–2005 and prostate cancer deaths 1979–2006 were compiled. Annual percentage change (APC) was estimated by joinpoint regression.

Results: Prostate cancer rates were similar in both areas in 1994 but increased rapidly in RoI compared to NI. The PSA testing rate increased sharply in RoI (APC = +23.3%), and to a lesser degree in NI (APC = +9.7%) to reach 412 and 177 tests per 1,000 men in 2004, respectively. Prostatic biopsy rates rose in both countries, but were twofold higher in RoI. Cancer incidence rates rose significantly, mirroring biopsy trends, in both countries reaching 440 per 100,000 men in RoI in 2004 compared to 294 in NI. Median age at diagnosis was lower in RoI (71 years) compared to NI (73 years) (p < 0.01) and decreased significantly over time in both countries. Mortality rates declined from 1995 in both countries (APC = -1.5% in RoI, -1.3% in NI) at a time when PSA testing was not widespread.

Conclusions: Prostatic biopsy rates, rather than PSA testing per se, were the main driver of prostate cancer incidence. Because mortality decreases started before screening became widespread in RoI, and mortality remained low in NI, PSA testing is unlikely to be the explanation for declining mortality.

Passive Intermodulation Generation on Printed Lines: Near-Field Probing and Observations

The phenomenological mechanisms of passive intermodulation (PIM) in printed lines have been explored by mapping intermodulation products generated by the two-tone traveling waves in microstrip lines. Near-field probing based upon a commercial PIM analyzer has been employed for identification of the PIM sources in printed lines. The results of extensive near-field probing provide the direct experimental evidences of cumulative growth of the intermodulation products in the matched uniform microstrip lines and reveal the fundamental role of the nonlinear scattering by the lumped nonlinear inclusions in the intermodulation production. The distributed nature of the PIM generation in microstrip lines has been conclusively demonstrated and comprehensively described in terms of the four-wave mixing process that proved to be fully consistent with the results of experimental observations of third-order PIM products on the matched and mismatched microstrip lines. © 2006 IEEE.