Personal recollections of poets, philosophers and statesmen : being 1,001 anecdotes of life in New England, and of the great and eccentric characters celebrated in her history fifty years ago : also giving numerous anecdotes concerning the private life and secret history of many personages illustrious in American public life during the first half of the present century : and an account of men and things I saw in Europe /

Includes index.

Ten nights in a bar-room and what I saw there /

Mode of access: Internet.

The great war as I saw it,

Mode of access: Internet.

Saw filing and management of saws; a practical treatise on filing, gumming, swaging, hammering, and brazing band saws, etc.

Includes index.

Zero-dimensional noise:the best mask you never saw

The transmission of weak signals through the visual system is limited by internal noise. Its level can be estimated by adding external noise, which increases the variance within the detecting mechanism, causing masking. But experiments with white noise fail to meet three predictions: (a) noise has too small an influence on the slope of the psychometric function, (b) masking occurs even when the noise sample is identical in each two-alternative forced-choice (2AFC) interval, and (c) double-pass consistency is too low. We show that much of the energy of 2D white noise masks extends well beyond the pass-band of plausible detecting mechanisms and that this suppresses signal activity. These problems are avoided by restricting the external noise energy to the target mechanisms by introducing a pedestal with a mean contrast of 0% and independent contrast jitter in each 2AFC interval (termed zero-dimensional [0D] noise). We compared the jitter condition to masking from 2D white noise in double-pass masking and (novel) contrast matching experiments. Zero-dimensional noise produced the strongest masking, greatest double-pass consistency, and no suppression of perceived contrast, consistent with a noisy ideal observer. Deviations from this behavior for 2D white noise were explained by cross-channel suppression with no need to appeal to induced internal noise or uncertainty. We conclude that (a) results from previous experiments using white pixel noise should be re-evaluated and (b) 0D noise provides a cleaner method for investigating internal variability than pixel noise. Ironically then, the best external noise stimulus does not look noisy.

Interfacing low-energy SAW nebulization with liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry for the analysis of biological samples

Soft ionization methods for the introduction of labile biomolecules into a mass spectrometer are of fundamental importance to biomolecular analysis. Previously, electrospray ionization (ESI) and matrix assisted laser desorption-ionization (MALDI) have been the main ionization methods used. Surface acoustic wave nebulization (SAWN) is a new technique that has been demonstrated to deposit less energy into ions upon ion formation and transfer for detection than other methods for sample introduction into a mass spectrometer (MS). Here we report the optimization and use of SAWN as a nebulization technique for the introduction of samples from a low flow of liquid, and the interfacing of SAWN with liquid chromatographic separation (LC) for the analysis of a protein digest. This demonstrates that SAWN can be a viable, low-energy alternative to ESI for the LC-MS analysis of proteomic samples.

See-saw relationship of the Holocene East Asian-Australian summer monsoon

D.E. and N.M. acknowledge support by the Leibniz Association (WGL) under Grant No. SAW-2013-IZW-2. F.H.M.’s research is funded through an Australian Postgraduate Award. I.O. is financially supported from TUBITAK under 2214/A program and by Ege University under the Research Project number 2015FEN028. This study received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 691037. The publication of this article was funded by the Open Access Fund of the Leibniz Association. K.H.W. thank Rhawn F. Denniston for his wider involvement in the northwest Australian monsoon project and the Kimberley Foundation Australia for financial support for this project and Paul Wyrwoll for helpful comments. We are also grateful to Yanjun Cai for providing the Lake Qinghai record.

"When I saw walking I just kind of took it as wheeling": interpretations of mobility-related items in generic, preference-based health state instruments in the context of spinal cord injury

Background : In health economic analyses, health states are typically valued using instruments with few items per dimension. Due to the generic (and often reductionist) nature of such instruments, certain groups of respondents may experience challenges in describing their health state. This study is concerned with generic, preference-based health state instruments that provide information for decisions about the allocation of resources in health care. Unlike physical measurement instruments, preference-based health state instruments provide health state values that are dependent on how respondents interpret the items. This study investigates how individuals with spinal cord injury (SCI) interpret mobility-related items contained within six preference-based health state instruments.

Methods : Secondary analysis of focus group transcripts originally collected in Vancouver, Canada, explored individuals’ perceptions and interpretations of mobility-related items contained within the 15D, Assessment of Quality of Life 8-dimension (AQoL-8D), EQ-5D-5L, Health Utilities Index (HUI), Quality of Well-Being Scale Self-Administered (QWB-SA), and the 36-item Short Form health survey version 2 (SF-36v2). Ritchie and Spencer’s ‘Framework Approach’ was used to perform thematic analysis that focused on participants’ comments concerning the mobility-related items only.

Results : Fifteen individuals participated in three focus groups (five per focus group). Four themes emerged: wording of mobility (e.g., ‘getting around’ vs ‘walking’), reference to aids and appliances, lack of suitable response options, and reframing of items (e.g., replacing ‘walking’ with ‘wheeling’). These themes reflected item features that respondents perceived as relevant in enabling them to describe their mobility, and response strategies that respondents could use when faced with inaccessible items.

Conclusion : Investigating perceptions to mobility-related items within the context of SCI highlights substantial variation in item interpretation across six preference-based health state instruments. Studying respondents’ interpretations of items can help to understand discrepancies in the health state descriptions and values obtained from different instruments. This line of research warrants closer attention in the health economics and quality of life literature.