Radiocesium in Fish from the Savannah River and Steel Creek: Potential Food Chain Exposure to the Public

This study examined radiocesium (137Cs) levels in fish from the vicinity of the Department of Energy's Savannah River Site (SRS), a former nuclear weapons production facility in South Carolina. Fish from the Savannah River were sampled above (upstream), along, and below (downstream) the SRS, and from Steel Creek, a tributary that runs through the SRS. There was some off-site contamination of 137Cs in the Savannah River watershed due to low-level releases from past nuclear production on the SRS. The null hypotheses tested were that there would be no differences in 137Cs levels as a function of location along the river, and between species collected from the river and from Steel Creek on the SRS. For six of eight species of fish collected from the Savannah River, there were no differences in 137Cs levels in muscle from fish collected above, along, or below the SRS; exceptions were bowfin and shellcracker. Fish collected from Steel Creek had significantly higher levels (by about an order of magnitude) of 137Cs in muscle tissue than fish collected in the Savannah River. However, no fish from either Steel Creek or the Savannah River had 137Cs levels above the European Economic Community limit for fresh meat of 0.6 Bq/g. Lifetime cancer risk was calculated using the cancer slope factor of 3.2 x 10(-11)/pCi, and various fish consumption scenarios reflecting actual data from Savannah River fishermen. Using mean 137Cs concentrations and median fish consumption for 70 years for Black males-the group with the highest consumption-the excess lifetime risk associated with the eight species of fish in the Savannah River ranged from 9.0 x 10(-7) to 1.0 x 10(-5). The same calculation for fish from Steel Creek gave risk estimates from 1.4 to 8.0 x 10(-5). The 95% level for consumption by Blacks, however, was about 70 kg/year. Black fishermen consuming that amount of bass from Steel Creek would sustain a lifetime risk of 3.1 x 10(-4), whereas the same consumption of Savannah River bass would yield a risk estimate of 1.5 x 10(-5).     

Improving OpenURL Menus: User Testing of Revisions to SFX® Menus

Abstract

Twenty-one volunteers tested the usability of revisions to the Texas A&M University Libraries' SFX® OpenURL link resolver menus, including the addition of Ex Libris' new bXâ?¢ recommendation service and a plug-in which pulls additional information about the journal into the menu. The volunteers also evaluated the quality and desirability of the bX recommendations and discussed their preferences for help options and full-text format. Results of the usability testing are reported along with the resultant menu changes. This study will be of interest to librarians implementing or redesigning OpenURL menus as well as those interested in the user experience.     

Congruence and incongruence in the perception of ‘family’ among foster parents,birth parents and their adolescent (foster) children

Over recent decades, listening to children's voices and viewing children as competent actors has gathered momentum in research as well as in practice. Acknowledging children's perspectives requires sensitive listeners who are willing, deliberately and as realistically as possible, to reconstruct children's ways of seeing. In our study, based in Norway, we investigated the views of 22 adolescents in long‐term foster care and 15 of their birth parents and 21 of their foster parents. Using Q methodology, we explored congruence and incongruence in the perception of ‘family’ among foster parents, birth parents and their adolescent (foster) children. We found three family perspectives among the adolescents. Within two of these perspectives, there seem to be more congruent understandings of the children's perspectives among the parent groups. We discuss some main implications in light of these findings. In Norway, as in many other countries, the policy of child welfare is that children first and foremost should grow up with their birth family. When out‐of‐home placements are necessary, a basic principle is that children should remain in contact with their birth family.     

Bayesian analysis of quasi-life tables

Quasi-life tables, in which the data arise from many concurrent, independent, discrete-time renewal processes, were defined by Baxter (1994, Biometrika 81:567–577), who outlined some methods for estimation. The processes are not observed individually; only the total numbers of renewals at each time point are observed. Crowder and Stephens (2003, Lifetime Data Anal 9:345–355) implemented a formal estimating-equation approach that invokes large-sample theory. However, these asymptotic methods fail to yield sensible estimates for smaller samples. In this paper, we implement a Bayesian analysis based on MCMC computation that works equally well for large and small sample sizes. We give three simulated examples, studying the Bayesian results, the impact of changing prior specification, and empirical properties of the Bayesian estimators of the lifetime distribution parameters. We also study the Baxter (1994, Biometrika 81:567–577) data, and uncover structure that has not been commented upon previously.     

‘I can see it in the nightclub’: dance,capoeira and male bodies

This paper reports an ethnographic study of how Brazilians teaching capoeira in the UK use dance as a discursive and embodied pedagogic strategy both to change men's bodies and also to gauge the success of their instructional work. The theoretical framework is drawn from Herzfeld's neglected study of the poetics of manhood in Crete which is revisited in the light of his subsequent analysis of the embodiment of ethnographic practice. Ethnographic research is used to show how British men learning capoeira are enculturated into a different, Brazilian, embodiment in which dance is masculine, and dancing is one way to display a social self‐regard. Discourse about performance helps to define the appropriateness of the social self‐regard that the capoeira students acquire and display.     

Negotiating a moral identity in the context of later life care

Strategies to maintain independence for older people have received considerable attention as a social policy solution to the financial and social impact of the ageing population. Critical scholars in gerontology have also highlighted the negative consequences of promoting independence in this way. Understandings of independence have profound implications for caring relationships as people age. To investigate the ways that older people talk about caring we interviewed 48 people aged 55-70years. A discourse analysis of these data showed that a dominant discourse of 'independence' was drawn upon to value self-sufficiency and construct dependence on others as burdensome. This construction of care provides a comfortable position for those who can afford to purchase professional care; however, those without resources are unable to accept unpaid help without also accepting a position of dependency. An alternative discourse of 'being there' constructs having others to provide personal care as a virtue and obligations to provide such care as based on family duty and affection. This discourse emphasises connections between people and a moral obligation to care which also creates difficulties for those with fewer material resources. The position for a dependent older subject in these two discourses may seem incompatible but can be reconciled by reframing independence as autonomy. Autonomy for those requiring care alongside a wider recognition of caring as the responsibility of all members of the community rather than with individual family members would support a flexible approach to later life care arrangements.     

Goodness‐of‐fit tests for the hyperbolic distribution

The authors give tests of fit for the hyperbolic distribution, based on the Cramér‐von Mises statistic W². They consider the general case with four parameters unknown, and some specific cases where one or two parameters are fixed. They give two examples using stock price data.     

USING LINEAR PREDICTORS TO IMPUTE ALLELE FREQUENCIES FROM SUMMARY OR POOLED GENOTYPE DATA

Recently-developed genotype imputation methods are a powerful tool for detecting untyped genetic variants that affect disease susceptibility in genetic association studies. However, existing imputation methods require individual-level genotype data, whereas in practice it is often the case that only summary data are available. For example this may occur because, for reasons of privacy or politics, only summary data are made available to the research community at large; or because only summary data are collected, as in DNA pooling experiments. In this article, we introduce a new statistical method that can accurately infer the frequencies of untyped genetic variants in these settings, and indeed substantially improve frequency estimates at typed variants in pooling experiments where observations are noisy. Our approach, which predicts each allele frequency using a linear combination of observed frequencies, is statistically straight-forward, and related to a long history of the use of linear methods for estimating missing values (e.g. Kriging). The main statistical novelty is our approach to regularizing the covariance matrix estimates, and the resulting linear predictors, which is based on methods from population genetics. We find that, besides being both fast and flexible - allowing new problems to be tackled that cannot be handled by existing imputation approaches purpose-built for the genetic context - these linear methods are also very accurate. Indeed, imputation accuracy using this approach is similar to that obtained by state-of-the art imputation methods that use individual-level data, but at a fraction of the computational cost.