Herman D. Stein

Herman Stein, President of the International Association of Schools of Social Work from 1968 - 1976, has for more than sixty years excelled as an educator, scholar, internationalist, university administrator, and leader in a variety of professional associations. From almost the beginning of his career, the world has been the stage on which he has played those many roles, all of them with an abundance of talent. In fact, while he was in the graduate program of what is now the Columbia University School of Social Work, he had to decide whether to become a social worker or an actor. As an undergraduate he became involved in student theatrical productions, where he teamed up with the famous comedian, Danny Kaye, who became a life-long companion and friend. At the end of Steins first year in the social work program, he was invited to join an off-Broadway variety show that helped to launch Kaye on his meteoric rise on both stage and screen. "If I´d joined," Stein has said, "the theater probably was going to be where I would make my career as a character actor." Fortunately for social work and social work education, he chose instead to continue his studies at the School of Social Work, from which he received his master's degree in 1941 and the doctoral degree in 1958. While the world has been his stage, education has been at the heart of his manifold activities. Following a period of direct service practice as a caseworker in a well-known private agency in New York City, he was recruited by the Columbia School of Social Work in 1945 as a faculty member. With an interruption for a significant overseas assignment from 1947 to 1950, he continued at Columbia for another fourteen years, rising through all professorial ranks to Professor and Director of the School's Research Center.

The Almost Person: Myth, Narrative and The Doctor

Paul Ricœur describes selfhood as the product of a communal narrative. Communal narratives structured as symbolic myths provide a narrative identity and an ethic of selfhood. The psychologist Jerome Bruner, for instance, places the source of such a narrative identity in the family, where ‘canonical stories’ are formed. ‘Home’ becomes a mode of discourse, a way of recognizing ourselves in the narratives given to us by others. This paper will draw on these concepts of narrative identity in order to investigate the problems to selfhood which face the character of The Doctor in the BBC series Doctor Who. I will identify The Doctor as a character who acts within a self-constructed narrative vacuum, reading the character by contrasting two types of personal myth-making, one ‘real’, as in a lived narrative, and one ‘counterfeit’; a conjured myth to replace and obscure the lived self. The paper will pay particular attention to the twenty-first century reincarnations of Doctor Who. I will argue that the writing of Russell T. Davis and later Steven Moffat in particular directly address this tension of myth and selfhood, as The Doctor struggles between his self-imposed role as a modern Prometheus and the insistent haunting and return of his own story. In these incarnations, his companions become mirrors to The Doctor, bringing with them their own narrative and ethical identities. In turn, it is through his companions that The Doctor is able to build his own lived narrative of sorts, which challenges his self-created ‘mythology’. In contrast to the weeping angels, whose horrific agency manifests only when not apprehended, the Doctor’s story continues to become more real the more he is ‘perceived’, both by the human race and by the viewer.

The DESCARTES-Nantes survey of kidney transplant recipients displaying clinical operational tolerance identifies 35 new tolerant patients and 34 almost tolerant patients.

BACKGROUND Kidney recipients maintaining a prolonged allograft survival in the absence of immunosuppressive drugs and without evidence of rejection are supposed to be exceptional. The ERA-EDTA-DESCARTES working group together with Nantes University launched a European-wide survey to identify new patients, describe them and estimate their frequency for the first time. METHODS Seventeen coordinators distributed a questionnaire in 256 transplant centres and 28 countries in order to report as many 'operationally tolerant' patients (TOL; defined as having a serum creatinine <1.7 mg/dL and proteinuria <1 g/day or g/g creatinine despite at least 1 year without any immunosuppressive drug) and 'almost tolerant' patients (minimally immunosuppressed patients (MIS) receiving low-dose steroids) as possible. We reported their number and the total number of kidney transplants performed at each centre to calculate their frequency. RESULTS One hundred and forty-seven questionnaires were returned and we identified 66 TOL (61 with complete data) and 34 MIS patients. Of the 61 TOL patients, 26 were previously described by the Nantes group and 35 new patients are presented here. Most of them were noncompliant patients. At data collection, 31/35 patients were alive and 22/31 still TOL. For the remaining 9/31, 2 were restarted on immunosuppressive drugs and 7 had rising creatinine of whom 3 resumed dialysis. Considering all patients, 10-year death-censored graft survival post-immunosuppression weaning reached 85% in TOL patients and 100% in MIS patients. With 218 913 kidney recipients surveyed, cumulative incidences of operational tolerance and almost tolerance were estimated at 3 and 1.5 per 10 000 kidney recipients, respectively. CONCLUSIONS In kidney transplantation, operational tolerance and almost tolerance are infrequent findings associated with excellent long-term death-censored graft survival.

Emergence of acquired HIV-1 drug resistance has almost been stopped in Switzerland - a 15 year prospective cohort analysis

BACKGROUND  Drug resistance is a major barrier to successful antiretroviral treatment (ART). Therefore, it is important to monitor time trends at a population level. METHODS  We included 11,084 ART-experienced patients from the Swiss HIV Cohort Study (SHCS) between 1999 and 2013. The SHCS is highly representative and includes 72% of patients receiving ART in Switzerland. Drug resistance was defined as the presence of at least one major mutation in a genotypic resistance test. To estimate the prevalence of drug resistance, data for patients with no resistance test was imputed based on patient's risk of harboring drug resistant viruses. RESULTS  The emergence of new drug resistance mutations declined dramatically from 401 to 23 patients between 1999 and 2013. The upper estimated prevalence limit of drug resistance among ART-experienced patients decreased from 57.0% in 1999 to 37.1% in 2013. The prevalence of three-class resistance decreased from 9.0% to 4.4% and was always <0.4% for patients who initiated ART after 2006. Most patients actively participating in the SHCS in 2013 with drug resistant viruses initiated ART before 1999 (59.8%). Nevertheless, in 2013, 94.5% of patients who initiated ART before 1999 had good remaining treatment options based on Stanford algorithm. CONCLUSION  HIV-1 drug resistance among ART-experienced patients in Switzerland is a well-controlled relic from the pre-combination ART era. Emergence of drug resistance can be virtually stopped with new potent therapies and close monitoring.

EMBT haciendo (casi) nada en Mercaders = EMBT doing (almost) nothing in Mercaders

Cualquier indagación sobre proyectos representativos en la historia contemporánea de la vivienda, nos lleva inevitablemente a darnos cuenta como predomina en gran parte de ellos una actitud que tiene que ver con producir indiscriminadamente nuevos productos arquitectónicos. EMBT construyen su propia casa en la calle Mercaders de Barcelona, e inciden en entender la arquitectura no como la creación de nuevos productos sino como una capa más dentro de un sustrato ya informado(materia no prima), una característica puramente postproductiva. Como ellos apuntan su nueva capa de información se ‘instala’, añade sólo información precisa de su tiempo, pero no intenta volver hacia atrás ni rehabilitar o restaurar el edificio existente. Esta comunicación persigue poner de manifiesto la existencia velada de esta otra actitud dentro del campo de la vivienda, una actitud no opuesta y si complementaria, que opera desde una voluntad de no ser, de hacer con (casi) nada. ABSTRACT: Any inquiry about representative projects in the contemporary history of housing, lead us to inevitably understand how in lots of them dominates an attitude related to the indiscriminate production of new architectural products. EMBT build their own house on Mercaders street of Barcelona, and promote the understanding of architecture not as the creation of new products but as a new layer within a substrate already full of information (not a raw material), a feature purely postproductive. As they point, the new information layer is ‘installed’, adds only precise information of its time, but does not try to get back or restore the existing building. This paper aims to demonstrate the veiled existence of this different attitude within the housing field, an attitude not opposed but complementary, that works from a desire of not to do, a desire to do with (almost) nothing.

Almost rejectionless sampling from Nakagami-m distributions (m ≥ 1)

The Nakagami-m distribution is widely used for the simulation of fading channels in wireless communications. A novel, simple and extremely efficient acceptance-rejection algorithm is introduced for the generation of independent Nakagami-m random variables. The proposed method uses another Nakagami density with a half-integer value of the fading parameter, mp ¼ n/2 ≤ m, as proposal function, from which samples can be drawn exactly and easily. This novel rejection technique is able to work with arbitrary values of m ≥ 1, average path energy, V, and provides a higher acceptance rate than all currently available methods. RESUMEN. Método extremadamente eficiente para generar variables aleatorias de Nakagami (utilizadas para modelar el desvanecimiento en canales de comunicaciones móviles) basado en "rejection sampling".

Influence of a liquid on the natural frequencies of almost circular plates

In this work, the influence of the surrounding fluid on the dynamic characteristics of almost circular plates is investigated. First the natural frequencies and normal modes for the plates in vacuum are calculated by a perturbation procedure. The method is applied for the case of elliptical plates with a low value of eccentricity. The results are compared with other available methods for this type of plates with good agreement. Next, the effect of the fluid is considered. The normal modes of the plate in vacuum are used as a base to express the vibration mode of the coupled plate-fluid system. By applying the Hankel transformation the nondimensional added virtual mass 2 increment (NAVMI) are calculated for elliptical plates. Results of the NAVMI factors and the effect of the fluid on the natural frequencies are given and it is shown that when the eccentricity of the plate is reduced to zero (circular plate) the known results of the natural frequencies for circular plates surrounded by liquid are recovered.

GRO J1008−57: an (almost) predictable transient X-ray binary

A study of archival RXTE, Swift, and Suzaku pointed observations of the transient high-mass X-ray binary GRO J1008−57 is presented. A new orbital ephemeris based on pulse arrival-timing shows the times of maximum luminosities during outbursts of GRO J1008−57 to be close to periastron at orbital phase − 0.03. This makes the source one of a few for which outburst dates can be predicted with very high precision. Spectra of the source in 2005, 2007, and 2011 can be well described by a simple power law with high-energy cutoff and an additional black body at lower energies. The photon index of the power law and the black-body flux only depend on the 15–50 keV source flux. No apparent hysteresis effects are seen. These correlations allow us to predict the evolution of the pulsar’s X-ray spectral shape over all outbursts as a function of just one parameter, the source’s flux. If modified by an additional soft component, this prediction even holds during GRO J1008−57’s 2012 type II outburst.

Corpus Use and Learning to Translate, almost 20 years on

It is almost 20 years since a series of conferences known as CULT (Corpus Use and Learning to Translate) started. The first and second took place in Bertinoro, Italy, back in 1997 and 2000, respectively. The third was held in 2004 in Barcelona, and the fourth in 2015 in Alicante. Each was organized by a few enthusiastic lecturers and scholars who also happened to be corpus lovers. Guy Aston, Silvia Bernardini, Dominic Stewart and Federico Zanettin, from the Universitá di Bologna; Allison Beeby, Patricia Rodríguez-Inés and Pilar Sánchez-Gijón, from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona; and Daniel Gallego-Hernández, from the Universidad de Alicante, organized CULT conferences in the belief that spreading the word about the usefulness of corpora for teaching and professional translation purposes would have positive results.

Mutual recognition in goods and services: an economic perspective. Bruges European Economic Policy (BEEP) Briefing 2/2002

Mutual recognition is a remarkable innovation facilitating economic intercourse across borders. In the EU's internal goods market it has been helpful in tackling or avoiding the remaining obstacles, namely, regulatory barriers between Member States. However, there is a curious paradox. Despite the almost universal acclaim of the great merits of mutual recognition the principle has, in and by itself, contributed only modestly to the actual realisation of free movement in the single market. It is also surprising that economists have not or hardly underpinned their widespread appreciation for the principle by providing rigorous analysis which could substantiate the case for mutual recognition for policy makers. Business in Europe has shown a sense of disenc hantment with the principle because of the many costs and uncertainties in its application in actual practice. The purpose of the present paper is to provide the economic and strategic arguments for employing mutual recognition much more systematically in the single market for goods and services. The strategic and the "welfare" gains are analysed and adetailed exposition of the fairly high information , transaction and compliance costs is provided. The information costs derive from the fact that mutual recognition remains a distant abstraction for day-to-day business life. Understandably, verifying the "equivalence" of objectives of health and safety between Member States is perceived as difficult and uncertain. This sentiment is exacerbated by the complications of interpreting the equivalence of "effects". In actual practice, these abstractions are expected to override clear and specific national product or services rules, which local inspectors or traders may find problematic without guidance. The paper enumerates several other costs including, inter alia, the absence of sectoral rule books and the next-to-prohibitive costs of monitoring of the application of the principle. The basic problems in applying mutual recognition in the entire array of services are inspected, showing why the principle can only be used in a limited number of services markets and even there it may contribute only modestly to genuine free movement and competitive exposure. A special section is devoted to a range of practical illustrations of the difficulties business experiences when relying on mutual recognition. Finally, the corollary of mutual recognition - regulatory competition - is discussed in terms of a cost/benefits analysis compared to what is often said to be the alternative , that is "harmonisation" , in EU parlance the "new approach" to approximation. The conclusion is that the manifold benefits of mutual recognition for Europe are too great to allow the present ambiguities to continue. The Union needs much more pro-active approaches to reduce the costs of mutual recognition as well as permanent monitoring structures for its application to services (analogous to those already successfully functioning in goods markets). Above all, what is required is a "mutual recognition culture" so that the EU can better enjoy the fruits of its own regulatory ingenuity.

Vučić’s plebiscite almost slipped on arithmetics. EPC Commentary, 29 April 2016

As largely anticipated, the incumbent Prime Minister of Serbia, Aleksandar Vučić, secured another four years in power at the snap elections that took place on 24 April. However, the results suggest that Vučić has overplayed his hand with this personal plebiscite: simple arithmetics unmasked his exaggerated hope to wipe out the opposition and consolidate political dominance. This might bode well for political pluralism but voters’ preferences and the affixed party options caution against taking Serbia’s commitment to European integration for granted.

Morse's manual of art : a self teacher in all branches of deocrative art, embracing almost every variety of painting and drawing, on china, glass, velvet, canvas, paper and wood : the secret of all glass transparencies, sketching from nature, pastel and crayon drawing, etc. : illustrated /

Mode of access: Internet.

Memoirs of the Rev. Ammi Rogers ... persecuted in the state of Connecticut, on account of religion and politics, for almost twenty years; and finally falsely accused and imprisoned in Norwich jail, for two years on the charge of crimes said to have been committed in the town of Griswold ... Also a concise view of the authority , doctrine, and worship, in the Protestant Episcopal church, and a very valuable index to the Holy Bible.

Mode of access: Internet.