Book Reviews

Systemic Practice and Action Research -     

Preface:Recent Developments in Semantic Web

<正>The World Wide Web (WWW) has revolutionized many aspects of society in the past two decades.Emerging applications of the World Wide Web have not only fostered industrial     

The dating of shallow faults in the Earth's crust.

Direct dating of ductile shear zones and calculation of uplift/exhumation rates can be done using various radiometric dating techniques. But radiometric dating of shallow crustal faulting, which occurs in the crust's brittle regime, has remained difficult because the low temperatures typical of shallow crusted faults prevent the complete syntectonic mineral recrystallization that occurs in deeper faults. Both old (detrital) and newly grown (authigenic) fine-grained phyllosilicates are thus preserved in shallow fault zones and therefore their radiometric ages reflect a mixture of both mineral populations. Also, the loss of 39Ar during neutron irradiation in dating of clay minerals can produce erroneously old ages. Here we present a method of characterizing the clay populations in fault gouge, using X-ray modelling, combined with sample encapsulation, and show how it can be used to date near-surface fault activity reliably. We examine fault gouge from the Lewis thrust of the southern Canadian Rockies, which we determine to be approximately 52 Myr old. This result requires the western North America stress regime to have changed from contraction to extension in only a few million years during the Eocene. We also estimate the uplift/exhumation age and sedimentary source of these rocks to be approximately 172 Myr.     

Experiments with interactional expertise

‘Interactional expertise’ is developed through linguistic interaction without full scale practical immersion in a culture. Interactional expertise is the medium of communication in peer review in science, in review committees, and in interdisciplinary projects. It is also the medium of specialist journalists and of interpretative methods in the social sciences. We describe imitation game experiments designed to make concrete the idea of interactional expertise. The experiments show that the linguistic performance of those well socialized in the language of a specialist group is indistinguishable from those with full blown practical socialization but distinguishable from those who are not well socialized. The imitation game can also be used to indicate whether an individual can enter an esoteric domain and master the interactional expertise, a skill required by interpretative sociologists of science, anthropologists, ethnographers, and the like.     

Methionine enkephalin as a possible neuromodulator of regional cerebral blood flow

In swine, cerebral blood flow was documented by a left ventricular injection of radiolabeled 15-micron spheres. Utilizing this procedure, the effect of the putative neurotransmitter methionine-enkephalin on regional cerebral blood flow was systemically evaluated. Our results revealed that a peripheral infusion of methionine enkephalin into miniature swine significantly increased cerebral blood flow in the basal ganglia, cerebellum, pons, inferior parietal cortex and frontal cortex. Non-significant increases were observed in the hippocampus, occipital cortex and medulla oblongata while no effect on blood flow was observed in the pituitary gland. Significance of these results in the potential role of methionine enkephalin as a modulator of blood flow to the brain.