A Bayesian Dynamic Spatio-Temporal Interaction Model: An Application to Prostate Cancer Incidence

During the past three decades, prostate cancer incidence has changed substantially in the United States. A fully Bayesian hierarchical spatio-temporal interaction model is proposed to estimate prostate cancer incidence rates in the state of Iowa. We introduce random spatial effects to capture the local dependence among regions, random temporal effects to explain the nonlinearity of rates over time, and random spatio-temporal interactions. In addition, we introduce fixed age effects because most epidemiologic data are strongly related to age. We find that prostate cancer incidence in Iowa counties increased sharply over age while incidence rates increased initially, then decreased over time. We identify hot spots of high and low rates for age groups and time periods using disease mapping.     

Franz Joseph Gall came to Copenhagen,and for a brief moment the brain was the talk of the town

ABSTRACT

When the inventor of phrenology, Franz Joseph Gall, came to Denmark in the fall of 1805, he was met with great enthusiasm and fascination among the general public, as well as within the scientific community. His visit was an event that was covered by the newspapers unlike any other scientific lecture. However, as soon as Gall left, public interest in phrenology almost instantaneously vanished. Different theories have been put forth in the attempt to answer the question as to why phrenology never found a audience in Denmark. The Danish phrenologist Carl Otto explained it by referring to the poor quality of the Danish phrenological publications. Danish historians have argued that phrenology was too incompatible with the dominant scientific paradigm, Natürphilosophie. This article argues that the newspaper coverage of phrenology was more about sensational news stories than about science, and ultimately phrenology was a fad that wore off when the newspapers shifted their focus to other news.     

Paradigmatic versus Historical Thinking: The Case of Rabbinic Judaism

The idea of history, with its rigid distinction between past and present and its careful sifting of connections from the one to the other, came quite late onto the scene of intellectual life. Both Judaism and Christianity for most of their histories have read the Hebrew Scriptures from within an other-than-historical framework. They found in Scripture's words paradigms of an enduring present, by which all things must take their measure; they possessed no conception whatsoever of the pastness of the past. Rabbinic Judaism invented an entirely new way to think about times past and to keep all time—past, present, and future—within a single framework. For that purpose, a model was constructed, consisting of selected events held to form a pattern that imposes order and meaning on the chaos of what happens, whether past or present or future. Time measured in the paradigmatic manner is time formulated by a free-standing, (incidentally) atemporal model, not appealing to the course of sun and moon, nor concerned with the metaphor of human life and its cyclicality. Not only so, but the paradigm obliterates distinctions between past, present, and future, between here and now and then and there. The past participates in the present, the present recapitulates the past, and the future finds itself determined, predetermined really, within the same free-standing structure comprised by God's way of telling time.     

Trans migrations: Seeking refuge in “safe haven” Toronto

Trans and gender nonconforming (TGNC) people who make refugee claims in Canada negotiate a complex nexus of identity, belonging, and citizenship. Drawing on insights from TGNC refugees, immigration lawyers, and frontline workers, in this paper we examine the ways the state controls the trans body through the refugee claims process and in the process of integration into life in Canada, while also highlighting trans refugee methods of survival and resistance. What emerges is an understanding of the ways that refugees navigate the tension between gender, sexuality, and homecoming as both intimately felt and geopolitically managed. We convey TGNC refugee narratives to demonstrate how they both confirm and expand upon the existing literature on Canadian LGBTQ+ refugees. TGNC refugees' experiences at the Immigration and Refugee Board confirm insights from existing LGBTQ+ refugee studies. However, TGNC refugees' day-to-day lives differ significantly from LGB refugee lives as recounted in the literature. In TGNC refugees' attempts to access gender-affirming documentation, healthcare, housing, and income, they confront distinct systems of transgender exceptionalism, border imperialism, and racial and heteropatriarchal capitalism that limit their access to basic necessities and impact how they build home both conceptually and materially.     

Symbolic engravings on Byzantine sounding leads from the Carmel coast of Israel

Two Byzantine sounding leads recovered from a shipwreck off the Israeli coast were identified and dated by associated coins and artefacts to the 5th–6th centuries AD. The leads are similarly shaped. A cross and a sign like a capital'P' mark both. They may be from a set including an inshore and a deep-sea lead. A depiction of the stellar constellation Cassiopeia is seen on top of the lug of the small lead. Interpretation of the sign is supported by the navigational role of the constellation as well as by a classical tradition associating it with Jaffa and by its symbolic, anti-storm role.