The Rise and Fall of the Area Dental Officer

Reorganization of the NHS in 1974 sped up the process of professionalization of the leadership of the Community Dental Health Services. Since that event public dental officers have gained status through recognition of the need for specialists in community dental health. Nevertheless, by the beginning of 1982 no trainees had yet been appointed to begin the special training programme, thus far failing the efforts of those area dental officers who have striven since 1974 to raise the standards of their successors.     

Government regulation of gambling advertising: Replacing vice prevention with consumer protection

From 1895 to 1975, federal law forbade gambling advertising by use of the mail, interstate commerce, and the broadcast media. Congress exempted state lotteries in 1975 and charitable gambling (including casino games) in 1988. However, the Supreme Court requires a significant government interest, directly applied and narrowly tailored, in order to justify a commercial speech regulation. The exemptions for private charity casino games has arguably destroyed any constitutionally defensible government interest in restricting for-profit casinos. Casinos in new gambling jurisdictions (such as Iowa or Illinois) will probably push the hardest for an exemption for all legal gambling, as they have the most to gain from the freedom to advertise. Federal regulation of gambling advertising will fall to the Federal Trade Commission under prohibitions against unfair or deceptive trade practices. But as State regulations are not well developed even in states that permit casino gambling, there is a pressing need for new research to review state laws regulating gambling advertising and to propose a model statute.     

Bat ecology and public health surveillance for rabies in an urbanizing region of Colorado

We describe use of Fort Collins, Colorado, and nearby areas by bats in 2001–2005, and link patterns in bat ecology with concurrent public health surveillance for rabies. Our analyses are based on evaluation of summary statistics, and information-theoretic support for results of simple logistic regression. Based on captures in mist nets, the city bat fauna differed from that of the adjacent mountains, and was dominated by big brown bats (Eptesicus fuscus). Species, age, and sex composition of bats submitted for rabies testing locally and along the urbanizing Front Range Corridor were similar to those of the mist-net captures and reflected the annual cycle of reproduction and activity of big brown bats. Few submissions occurred November- March, when these bats hibernated elsewhere. In summer females roosted in buildings in colonies and dominated health samples; fledging of young corresponded to a summer peak in health submissions with no increase in rabies prevalence. Roosting ecology of big brown bats in buildings was similar to that reported for natural sites, including colony size, roost-switching behavior, fidelity to roosts in a small area, and attributes important for roost selection. Attrition in roosts occurred from structural modifications of buildings to exclude colonies by citizens, but without major effects on long-term bat reproduction or survival. Bats foraged in areas set aside for nature conservation. A pattern of lower diversity in urban bat communities with dominance by big brown bats may occur widely in the USA, and is consistent with national public health records for rabies surveillance.     

Population mixture models and clustering algorithms

The problem of clustering individuals is considered within the context of a mixture of distributions. A modification of the usual approach to population mixtures is employed. As usual, a parametric family of distributions is considered, a set of parameter values being associated with each population. In addition, with each observation is associated an identification parameter, Indicating from which population the observation arose. Theresulting likelihood function is interpreted in terms of the conditional probability density of a sample from a mixture of populations, given the identification parameter of each observation. Clustering algorithms are obtained by applying a method of iterated maximum likelihood to this like-lihood function.