One of the great joys of being a scientist is the hunt for an elusive signal within the noise of data, opinions, biases, and other human foibles associated with the pursuit of knowledge. It is inevitable that this imperfect quest will result in many false starts along the way when looking “through a glass, darkly.” Our imperfect and incomplete knowledge of the world must look like an unpolished mirror, reflecting gibberish, at times. However, it also reflects an underlying signal that bears further scrutiny, in spite of our instinct to discard a flawed image of reality. The pursuit of the neural underpinnings of creative cognition is certainly that “dark glass” we peer into so intently, attempting to grasp, through our meager instruments, some hidden truth. Many thinkers and researchers have found that creativity and madness seem somehow to be intertwined, but the signal is weak, the image blurry, and the propensity toward romantic stereotypes is high. And yet, as scientists, we can only follow the data, trying to make sense of what it tells us. So, rather than entertain the premise outright let me take you on a bit of a journey .First: What if evolutionary processes selected for two types of reasoning? Cosmides and Tooby hypothesized a “dedicated intelligence” that “refers to the ability of a computational system to solve predefined, target set of problems.” These problems often involve well established rules—like your mundane life, and Raven's Matrices problems, and acquiring a language Pinker, . The othKanazawa  views indeductively derived from what had been previously known.” Moreover, this creative process possesses three necessary conditions: “a mechanism for introducing variation, a consistent selection process, and a mechanism for preserving and reproducing the selected variations.” Simonton, more recently, assessed and extended BVSR theory, a half-century after its inception, by addressing the shortfalls of Campbell's imprecise definition of what it means for a variation to be “blind:” creativity and discovery are not blind, rather ideas are blind to the extent that the utilities are initially unknown. In contrast, sighted ideas are guided by prior applicable ideas (a.k.a. acquired expertise)   as opposed to blind floundering. Campbell provides numerous examples of thinkers relying upon “chance combinations” of ideas that appear to coalesce into workable solutions, with Poincaré most famously describing five stages of creative thought (later trimmed to four) including preparation, incubation, illumination, and verification  highly correlated with nearly all measures of adaptive ability, including height, health, education, occupation, income, longevity—a staggering array of fitness indicators . The link between creative genius and psychoticism is not new, having been explored by Eysenck with regard to that rare bird “genius” Eysenck, . HoweverCan one be both “mad”  and creative? Certainly no evidence exists that creative genius (or even garden variety creativity) lurks, emerges, or is unleashed in the presence of overt psychosis . Might these examples of “madness” reside at the extreme ends of continua that produced more adaptive levels of flexibility and order (a.k.a. novelty vs. usefulness) Stein, ? CertainThe authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.


Benford’s Law describes the finding that the distribution of leading (or leftmost) digits of innumerable datasets follows a well-defined logarithmic trend, rather than an intuitive uniformity. In practice this means that the most common leading digit is 1, with an expected frequency of 30.1%, and the least common is 9, with an expected frequency of 4.6%. Currently, the most common application of Benford’s Law is in detecting number invention and tampering such as found in accounting-, tax-, and voter-fraud. We demonstrate that answers to end-of-chapter exercises in physics and chemistry textbooks conform to Benford’s Law. Subsequently, we investigate whether this fact can be used to gain advantage over random guessing in multiple-choice tests, and find that while testbank answers in introductory physics closely conform to Benford’s Law, the testbank is nonetheless secure against such a Benford’s attack for banal reasons. Therefore, the frequency of leading digits diminishes monotonically from 30.1% and 17.6% for the digits 1 and 2, to 5.1% and 4.6% for the digits 8 and 9, respectively. Benford called this finding a “law of anomalous numbers” [The expectation that the leading digits in the numbers one encounters in everyday life are uniformly distributed is a well-known “pitfall of elementary statistics” . As earlMust there be a well-defined distribution of leading digits for a given phenomenon or dataset? Intuitively, most people suspect that the most likely distribution of leading digits should be a uniform distribution, such that they are all equally likely. However, for a given physical phenomenon, any such stable distribution should be scale-invariant in a way that the choice of unit system or choice of base would maintain the existence of such a distribution. For example, if there is to be a well-defined distribution of leading digits for a tabulation of the mass of various insect species, it shouldn’t matter if the mass is measured in milligrams or in grains of rice. It has been shown that Benford’s Law gives the only scale invariant distribution of leading digits . FurtherDecades of research have led to some guidelines for predicting which datasets might follow Benford’s Law –10. Sucha posteriori diagnostics. In consideration of the general guidelines for datasets that are expected to conform to Benford’s Law, we identify the set of answers to end-of-chapter questions in introductory physics and chemistry textbooks as a possible Benford’s Law candidate. In fact, prior research has described the relative abundance of small-value numbers in grade school math textbooks that focus on arithmetic and multiplication, and has suggested a possible link to Benford’s Law [Because only certain datasets that correspond to real phenomena closely follow Benford’s Law, we trust that knowledge of this fact could be applied towards pro-active or predictive ends—as opposed to rd’s Law , 26. In Confirmation that quantitative answers to a wide range of “problems” in physics and chemistry follow Benford’s Law immediately suggests a practical (if somewhat nefarious) application: examination questions that are meant to assess knowledge of introductory physics and chemistry should be similar to those found in the practice sections of the textbooks. Thus, multiple-choice testbanks that are created to provide a valid examination tool might also follow similar leading-digit trends found in the textbook exercises. If this is true, then perhaps the implication that over 60% of the answers to numerical multiple-choice exam questions are anticipated to have a leading digit of 1, 2, or 3 can be utilized to gain an advantage by physics-ignorant but test-wise students. Traditionally, a physics-ignorant student can resort to complete guessing on a multiple-choice test, and thus each question has an expected baseline for guessing that is based on the number of options in the question. A student has a 33% chance of getting any given question right in a 3-option question, a 25% chance in a 4-option question, and a 20% chance in a 5-option question. Students might employ a slew of test-wise strategies to boost this baseline . One sucFinally, we discuss how the rounding off of numbers to a pedagogically-motivated reduced set of significant figures is expected to alter the distribution of leading digits away from Benford’s Law and demonstrate that a modified distribution based on this fact yields even better fits to testbank data in physics.rd edition, by Knight  is a highly popular introductory physics textbook with an approach that is based on recent physics education research findings.“Physics for Scientists and Engineers: A Strategic Approach”, 3th edition, by Young & Freedman  was a popular calculus-based introductory physics textbook a decade ago, with emphasis on physics education fundamentals.“Sears and Zemansky’s University Physics”, 10th edition, by Skoog, West, and Holler  was a favorite intermediate-level undergraduate chemistry textbook for one of us (ADS), and was selected in anticipation of useful quantitative chemistry end-of-chapter questions.“Fundamentals of Analytical Chemistry”, 7Henceforth these three books will be referred to as Knight, Young & Freedman, and Skoog, respectively. The data was obtained by recording the leading digit (i.e. the leftmost nonzero digit) from every end-of-chapter answer. Data collection was implemented manually by parsing through the texts, but with a protocol designed to eliminate subjective selection. Nonetheless, because of the general constraints of anticipated Benford data sets, such as avoiding unphysical numbers and numbers that are too narrowly confined in domain, we rejected all unitless values, values reported as percentages, and those with units of degrees. Furthermore, because the number zero is meaningless from a significant digit standpoint, all answers of exactly zero were rejected. Obviously, non-numeric end-of-chapter answers such as pictures, graphs, equations, and textual answers were ignored. In all, approximately 10%–15% of entries in the introductory physics texts were rejected and 30%–35% were ignored as non-numeric. In Skoog—the analytical chemistry text—as many as 25% of the numeric answers were rejected, largely due to being unitless or percentages. Other than these limitations, all other data was recorded. For testbank data, we recorded leading digits of the multiple-choice numerical items supplied with Knight. When parsing this testbank we looked at both the keyed options and at the distractors, recording the leading digit of each separately. In recording testbank entries, the same protocol was followed as described for textbook data; however, the number of rejected entries in the testbank was only 7%. In sum, this data is presented in To select an appropriate representative sample of physics and chemistry exercises, three books were chosen based on ready availability on our bookshelf and on current popularity in undergraduate physics education:approached, and any dataset—no matter how good—will ultimately deviate from the ideal distribution. In many cases, where the invocation of Benford’s Law is meant simply to highlight the disproportionate abundance of low-value leading digits over high-value leading digits, the suggestion of Benford’s Law can be confirmed by visual inspection of a digit frequency histogram. Such a histogram is presented in χ2 test for goodness of fit. However, leading expertise in Benford’s Law analysis finds that the χ2 test is widely misused and misinterpreted [χ2 test has been described as suffering from an “excess power” problem, wherein larger data sets require increasingly better fits to pass the χ2 threshold for conformity [χ2 test that the smaller dataset passes [The data presented in erpreted . The χ2nformity . Thus, lt passes .χ2 test, other simple tests have been championed, as a means of judging dataset conformity to Benford’s Law. For example, Nigrini has proposed using a mean absolute deviation (MAD) measure [K is the number of leading digit bins , AP is the actual proportion observed, and EP is the expected proportion according to Benford’s Law. The MAD test does not have an analytically-derived critical value. Instead, Nigrini has established empirically-based criteria for conformity to Benford’s Law. [As a way to avoid problems with the  measure , and Kos measure . MAD is d’s Law.  The suggLikewise, SSD too is an empirically-based whole-test measure that simply takes the sum of the squares of the deviation of each digit’s frequency from the ideal Benford’s Law frequency. Specifically, this is given bynforming .The three textbooks varied in the number of available entries for analysis, but overall contained a sufficient number of entries and domain of data to warrant a Benford’s Law analysis. Skoog provided the smallest data set with a total of 294 entries in 32 chapters, with several chapters having no usable entries. In total, however, the numerical entries in this book spanned 60 orders of magnitude. Knight and Young both provided large data sets, with 1644 and 2155 entries in 42 and 39 chapters, respectively. Numerical answers to physics questions in these books spanned over 170 orders of magnitude. As seen from lowest-leading-digit, i, among a group of N distractors can be given byN choose k”). These probabilities are presented in The first-digit frequency distribution for the companion multiple-choice testbank to Knight is presented in on average a lower first digit than the keyed response. These considerations would strongly moderate the advantage of a Benford’s Law-based attack on a set of multiple-choice questions, but would not entirely negate this strategy. This is demonstrated by considering the probability of finding the correct answer by choosing the lowest leading digit among a group of N uniformly-distributed-first-digit-distractors and a Benford’s-distributed correct answer, with random guessing in cases where the lowest leading digit is not unique, as given byFrom We attacked the Knight testbank by selecting the option with the lowest leading digit or guessing among items with identical lowest leading digits, and compared these selections to the keyed response. The majority of questions were of the 4-option type. Our attack yielded a score of 24.6%; i.e. no better than chance. The explanation for the failure in this strategy lies in the first-digit distribution of the distractors. As shown in de novo random numbers are uniformly distributed in leading-digit, processed random numbers are not, and multiplications of arrays of random number are known to generate near-ideal Benford sets [As we have shown, typical physics and chemistry questions, as a group, follow Benford’s Law for leading digits, as do both the keyed responses and the distractors of a large introductory physics testbank. Uniformly-distributed random numbers, however, do not follow Benford’s Law, but rather have uniformly-distributed leading digits. Thus, one definite conclusion we can draw from our analysis of the testbank is that for this set of multiple-choice questions the distractors are clearly not random numbers. A more interesting question is whether the fact that the distractors follow the same pattern of leading digits as do the keyed-responses—which emerge from well-defined and deterministic procedures—means that they too are a result of a similar creation process? That is, are the distractors necessarily created as answers to alternate questions? Not necessarily. While ord sets . Furtherord sets , 6. FinaThe question of why a large but seemingly random subset of all possible quantitative physics questions should follow Benford’s Law with such precision is warranted. There may not be a clear-cut answer to this question, but the truth probably lies in the aforementioned theorem that random sampling from a wide mixture of first-digit distribution sets converges to a Benford distribution. As a group, end-of-chapter questions  span many topics and involve numerous different parameters, each of which may have a different first-digit distribution within the domain of physically relevant phenomena. As examples, the sets of likely “kinetic energies for vehicles on earth” and realistic “currents induced in copper rings by Lenz’s Law” may be sufficiently limited in domain as to individually refrain from a Benford distribution, but random sampling of values across such distributions will yield a Benford set. This is likely the reason that such a good Benford distribution is found in our samples. As further evidence of this argument, we see that combining the data from the three textbooks, the testbank answers, and the testbank distractors yields an aggregate data set that better conforms to Benford’s Law than any of the individual data sets. Included in NSD is the number of significant digits to which a value is rounded, and NSD = ∞ represents the traditional case of no rounding:Thus far we have determined that answers to physics questions conform to Benford’s Law. However, these numerical quantities, as found in the textbooks and in the testbank, are often reported to an artificially reduced number of significant digits. The link between rounding and Benford’s Law was identified at inception,  and has For numbers rounded to three or more significant digits the distribution of the leading digit is nearly identical to Benford’s Law. However, in the case of values rounded to two significant digits, there is a small but significant modification of the first few digits. If numbers are rounded to only one significant digit, the distribution of this leading digit varies drastically from Benford’s Law to the point where the occurrence of the digit 2 becomes more probable than the digit 1. We recorded the leftmost significant digit of the answers to every end-of-chapter question in two popular introductory physics textbooks, an intermediate analytical chemistry textbook, and a large introductory physics multiple-choice testbank, and find that all conform to Benford’s Law. The fact that the answers to multiple-choice testbank questions follow this trend suggested a means by which the testbank could be attacked by a subject-ignorant but test-wise student. We find that among a set of distractors (wrong answers), each having uniformly distributed leading digits, the Benford distribution of the keyed response could be used to pass a 3-option test. Nonetheless, when using this information to “guess” the correct answers in a real testbank we find that the distractors themselves conform to Benford’s Law, thereby securing the testbank from such an attack. The fact that the distractors are Benford distributed does not, however, assure that they were engineered intelligently, but simply suggests that they do not comprise uniformly-distributed random values. Thus, we expect any such testbank to be equally secure against a Benford’s Law based attack. We observed that physics textbooks and testbank items are often reported rounded to two significant digits, and we have shown how this fact may have impacted its distribution of leading digits, modifying it slightly from Benford’s law and primarily yielding a relative dearth of leading 1s. We expect that for many readers our demonstration of Benford’s Law in end-of-chapter textbook answers will prove counter-intuitive, just as math educators were surprised that grade school texts were biased toward small addition and multiplication facts , 26: mosS1 DatasetWorksheet “Data” includes raw data and summary counts/proportions collected from the five principle sources described in the article. Worksheet “Stat Analysis” provides an example of the data analysis preformed on one of the data sources from “Data”.(XLS)Click here for additional data file.


Over the past fifteen years, the city of Kisumu in western Kenya has emerged as anepicentre of ‘global health’ interventions, organized by non-governmental andtransnational groups. These interventions involve concrete, practical engagements with thecity's populations, but also imaginations and desires, as they intersect with residents’expectations of development. This article follows the hopes, aspirations and trajectoriesof people who attach themselves as volunteers to these interventions, or who hope to do sothrough a process they describe as ‘tarmacking’. In exploring how volunteers orientthemselves to ideas of ‘empowerment’ that are promoted by NGOs and also have influenceoutside institutional settings, it examines the relations between the landscapes ofintervention, the spatial-temporal horizons, and the geographies of responsibilityemergent in the city. Through its association with ‘moving ahead’ and with development,empowerment implies movement towards some kind of future. While there is a widely sharedsense among volunteers that they are going somewhere, just where that might be is notclearly articulated. Rather than attempt to pinpoint this destination, this articlefollows their trajectories in an attempt to grasp why and how it remains obscure. I first met Maryon through one of the numerous ‘youth groups’ that have sprouted up in thecity of Kisumu in western Kenya during the last decade. With funds secured from a larger‘youth intervention project’ backed by an international NGO, the group had rented two smallrooms in a market street within one of Kisumu's semi-formal settlements and had taken onMaryon as a ‘volunteer’. Wearing heels and a smart trouser suit, her hair elaborately styled,she was sitting at a desk in the office, filling out forms to be taken to the project'sheadquarters, a large NGO on the other side of the city. She told me that she had finishedsecondary school three years previously and, after some time living in her parents' rural homeand waiting in vain for an opportunity to pursue further education or to get a job, moved toKisumu to stay with her older sister. The youth group she joined was (at that time) one of themore successful in the city. She was sent on a training week in ‘peer education’ aboutHIV/AIDS, for which she received a valued certificate. Her task was to ‘mobilize’ youngpeople, to walk around streets and markets and talk to them about HIV. For this, she received3,000 shillings (about £30) per month. The project did not last long as it ran into fundingdifficulties, so Maryon found a post as a volunteer ‘youth counsellor’ at another NGO runninghealth education projects in a roadside market outside Kisumu. After this move I lost contactwith her and when we met again some months later, she was back in Kisumu, staying with hersister, and ‘tarmacking’, as she put it, looking for work. Unsatisfied with rural life andfinding that her volunteering there was not leading to new opportunities, she had returned tothe city and, with help from a friend of her sister, began selling second-hand clothes. Shehad followed her friends to a new youth group, hoping, like them, to become part of a workshopor some further training programme. She had made a CV and was sending out applications forpositions as ‘health educator’ or ‘community mobilizer’ for various public health and researchprojects. Although she had not managed to convert her volunteering or the new knowledge shehad gained into employment, Maryon was upbeat about her future. ‘I've been empowered,’ shetold me, ‘I am developing myself … I am moving ahead.’Maryon belongs to a class of aspiring young people who come from families that have enjoyedsocial and geographical mobility over the past two generations. Their fathers (and sometimestheir mothers) were government civil servants – teachers, nurses, railway officers andbureaucrats – until retirement or retrenchment. They thus come from families that were membersof rural elites and the urban salariat (termed the ‘working’ classes by East Africans) Cooper. Many grThe HIV/AIDS epidemic exacerbated and intensified their experience of socio-economic decline.Maryon's generation has lived through the epidemic and their lives have been intimatelyaffected by it. Many lost parents and siblings to AIDS and, as families lost theirbreadwinners, their own education was disrupted. Yet in the last decade or so HIV/AIDS hasalso set in motion a new dynamic and new opportunities, as the emergence of Kisumu in the late1990s as the epicentre of the regional AIDS epidemic attracted international attention andresources and drew in external funds and institutions. A plethora of organizations conductingresearch on HIV and other diseases operate in the city and its hinterlands, alongsidegovernment and non-governmental groups running projects directed at HIV and ‘global health’Garrett .1 In 2going somewhere. It connects the mundane work they do tosome kind of future. Yet what kind of future that is, and the direction of their movement,remain unclear. Moreover, if one lacks professional qualifications and the right contacts,gaining access to that future through global health projects and NGO work is not easy.In the face of earlier disappointments, then, Kisumu appears to Maryon to be a place ofopportunity; a space in which, if she avoids slipping through the cracks, she can makesomething of herself, economically and socially. Through getting ‘exposed’, as she put it, tothe city's spaces of intervention, she hopes that she too can place herself in their forward,progressive trajectory. This hope is for economic and social mobility; for a recognized placeand position. Yet it is not only about class and self-making. Having grown up in the era ofsilence and denial about AIDS, many young people like Maryon want to be part of what they seeas an opening up of Kisumu and life in it to global languages of human rights and genderequality, to science and ‘positive living’; some want to make Kenya ‘a better place’, otherstalk of ‘helping the community’. The rhetoric of empowerment draws volunteers like Maryon intoHIV interventions in the city and gives them a sense of being able to act, of being part of aforward movement, of One way to gain some exposure, if not entry, to this world is to orientate oneself to theknowledge associated with global health projects. In a city focused on the production andcirculation of knowledge about health and disease,The saturation of the city by narratives of empowerment speaks of the narrowing ofdevelopment horizons towards individual responsibility and self-reliance Green . Throughbeingon the move and it implies a capacity to ‘move ahead’ and asense of purposiveness. The Kiswahili word for development, maendelelo,literally means ‘moving ahead’, as does the Dholuo dhinyime.somewhere.Both ‘empowerment’ and ‘exposure’ are English terms that have no translation intovernaculars – underlining, perhaps, their association with the global. However, they areintimately associated with the broader concept of ‘development’, which has a longer historyin Kenya. Development is conceived of as having both a spatial and a temporal orientation;it implies a movement ahead, towards some kind of better future, which relies on spatialconnection, exchanges and contacts with elsewhere. Development is also about All this suggests that ‘empowerment’ should not be dismissed as the empty or self-deludingrhetoric of neo-liberal development. Instead, the way in which it connects lives, identitiesand subjectivities to spaces of intervention and global connection should be approachedethnographically. Powerful institutions such as NGOs and government in Kisumu, backed up byinternational donors, pursue a particular vision of development based upon the empoweredindividual. Yet in western Kenya development is also intertwined with other histories andtrajectories, with continuities as well as departures, which speak to Doreen Massey's  argumentasebedo empowered’ (‘I have been empowered’). In Kisumu, one hears‘empowerment’ in the speech of popular Pentecostal preachers who exhort people to developtheir sense of self-worth and agency. For those who learn the language of empowerment, then,the HIV city seems to offer a space of anticipation and mobility and a trajectory throughwhich one might ‘move ahead’. But this trajectory intersects with other histories ofself-fashioning and class formation as well as with religious  values and orientations. It is through these intersections, perhaps, thatempowerment gains deeper meaning and traction in people's lives.Connected to these currents of class and religious identities, references to ‘empowerment’are not necessarily tied to recent institutional settings; they seep outside them and speakto something beyond them. They can be drawn upon to negotiate intimate relationships as wellas public performances. They are used not only by people like Maryon who speak English withease; women with little formal education pepper their vernacular with‘This article uses the prism of ‘empowerment’ to explore the relationships of individualslike Maryon to the work of development – or, as they put it, to ‘moving ahead’. In thisapproach, I describe both spatial-temporal frames of transformation and the layeredgeographies of responsibility Massey  thatareI explore these issues through following the trajectories of some volunteers who attachthemselves to NGOS, youth groups, HIV clinics and other projects in Kisumu. Taking up JaneGuyer's challenge to explore the temporality of lived economies Guyer , I try tVolunteers are key figures in official discourses of ‘empowerment’ and their work pervadespublic health intervention and research in the city, as well as development more generally.It is volunteers who do much of the street-level public health work of ‘mobilizing’communities, reaching individuals, and providing links between ‘community’ and clinic orproject. Volunteers persuade people to come to the clinics or to get an HIV test; theyprovide counselling; they ‘trace’ people back to their residence and try to keep track ofthem. In smaller NGOs, they do much of the accounting and auditing work, filling inpatients’ forms and updating clinic records. NGOs running projects on orphan care, incomegeneration or home-based care also rely on volunteers, and so do the numerouscommunity-based organizations (CBOs) in Kisumu. Volunteers include people of different ages,social positioning and aspirations. They include middle-aged people with some education whohave lost the formal employment upon which they previously relied, widows who have beenforced from their rural homes, young aspirational people like Maryon, as well as people whovolunteer out of their HIV-positive identity, the ‘poor and positive’ Boesten . While vBoth the Kenyan government and international donors have promoted the use of volunteers inHIV interventions since the late 1990s, leading to an expansion of opportunities forvolunteers to train in and carry out health-related work. This has created a perception thatvolunteering opens up opportunities for employment in the emerging AIDS economy in Kisumu.While the use of volunteers – part of the trend towards ‘community-based development’ – iswidespread beyond health projects .These figures emphasize that volunteers are a large but shifting and poorly definedpopulation. While their work is conducted in the formalized space of public health anddevelopment interventions, they themselves occupy the ambiguous ground of informal work.Many are taken on through personal contacts and they approach the staff of clinics, projectsand NGOs as patrons whose access to training and other opportunities may help them on theirway. If successful, particularly in setting up their own CBOs, they may become patronsthemselves. Most have no work contract, and while they expect some degree of remuneration,there is no standard to this and many are exploited. Some volunteers receive almost nothing,others receive 3,000 Kenyan shillings a month (about £30), while others are given ‘lunchmoney’ of 100 shillings for a day's work. Dependent as they are on external funding cycles,projects are time-limited. Many volunteers experience large fluctuations in remuneration, asproject funds dry up; some have to wait months for any material benefit and, worn down bywaiting, become disillusioned.Still, many volunteers spend months, even years, volunteering on and off, and since fewmanage to convert it into an independent livelihood and still fewer into a career, theirvolunteering must be motivated by more than economic gain. This sense of something beyond alivelihood is captured by Maryon's comment (echoing a common sentiment), ‘I am developingmyself.’ Below I consider how ‘exposure’, ‘moving ahead’ and ‘developing oneself’ figure inother volunteers’ trajectories and consider how their visions of development and asuccessful life may arise from multiple  sources.It is early morning, October 2010, in one of Kisumu's fast-growing ‘informal’ settlements.I arrive at Pamela's rented room just after her children  have left for school. Pamela is hanging up thecurtain dividing her sleeping area from the sitting area of her single rented room, thewalls of which are covered with HIV-treatment and education posters and the framedcertificates of her attendance at HIV-related workshops. A bucket on the floor collects thedrops of water leaking from the roof. She is gloomily contemplating the move she will soonhave to make: finding school fees and looking after sick relatives have prevented her frompaying her monthly rent (of Ksh800 or £8 a month) for several months, and her landlord wantsto kick her out. Gesturing for me to sit on one of the soft chairs, Pamela unwraps somesheets of paper from a plastic bag. These are the ‘follow-up’ forms she is given by theprovincial hospital at the start of each week, with the names and locations of tuberculosispatients whom she must visit and observe taking their medicine. I mean to accompany hertoday, and we set off for the provincial hospital, where Pamela has to deliver her forms andpick up new ones. Together we step carefully over the stream of muddy water and the piles ofplastic rubbish that lie embedded in the soil between the rows of hastily constructedhouses. Navigating puddles and bicycles, we make our way to the entrance of the hospital,located off one of the city's main road arteries. The dusty pavement is crowded withbillboards and hung with banners advertising the upcoming visit of a Pentecostal preacherfrom Nairobi. A short walk away, an imposingly large cathedral is under construction for oneof the many Pentecostal congregations. Under a billboard advertising airtime, Pamela buystwenty shillings (£0.2) of phone credit. A young man in jeans, T-shirt and bandanarecognizes her as a community health worker and approaches politely, asking for advice. Hesays he should have an HIV test; he is worried, but does not know what to do. She tells himshe will take him to the hospital's HIV clinic, and the three of us bend our way through thelarge hole in the wire fence of the compound, the short-cut that saves us walking around tothe front gate.jua kali) sector, she manages, but only just, to get by.Pamela is a widow who shared the fate of many others in her situation when her husband'sfamily forced her to leave his land, blaming her for his death Prince . Accompaet al. Pamela's work with AIDS projects and clinics is not easy. It is difficult to keep track ofpeople who ‘move around’. Some patients stop taking their medication, and, afraid of thedisapproval of clinic staff, present themselves as new patients at another clinic. Theyoften disappear from clinic records and cannot be traced, as rental agreements are ofteninformal and people are easily evicted from their rooms. Many do not wish to be identifiedas HIV-positive, and a visit from someone like Pamela, associated with an NGO or clinic,raises suspicions among neighbours. Having been through similar experiences herself, Pamelais sympathetic. She knows that most young women and mothers, dependent on their malepartners for material support, take a great risk if they ‘disclose’ their HIV status, and somay not welcome her visit. Some are suspicious of the motivations for such visits, andaccuse her of ‘eating’ the resources to which they believe she has access. At the same time,they may value being connected to her: she can introduce them to staff at the clinics andshe can point people towards particular NGOs or research projects that may offer materialhelp or some form of healthcare. Her reputation as a good community health worker depends onbeing able to negotiate such delicate circumstances . While NGO and clinic staff appreciate her skills at navigatingterrain unfamiliar to them – the informal settlements and the mobile lives of those who livein them – there are many like her and, without qualifications, it is difficult to gainlasting recognition. It is in this context that we can understand the value of the numerouscertificates that cover the walls of Pamela's room, which attest to her participation invarious seminars and workshops. These do not provide her with formal qualifications but theydisplay her exposure to particular spaces – such as the HIV clinics, which, surrounded byprestigious vehicles with NGO logos, embody local, national and global connections,knowledge and skills. They underline her status as a person who is ‘in the know’. Thepossibilities and limitations of this identity were underlined by the ironic comment made bya member of her HIV-positive support group: ‘We are HIV graduates.’ Volunteering has alsogiven Pamela a sense of connection to something beyond her neighbourhood, and indeed, beyondKisumu. She once showed me a black bag marked with the logo of an NGO and containing as yetuntouched commodities, including soap and a towel. ‘Look at this!’ she joked, ‘I havegraduated! I'm at college. And people think I'm studying in America!’Francis is one of the most prominent informal figures who navigate between Kisumu's HIVprojects, NGOs, government initiatives and ‘community’ groups. A tall man in his forties,usually dressed casually in a pressed shirt and jeans, with a rucksack over his shoulder anda mobile phone headset, he has been openly HIV-positive since 2000 and is passionate about‘fighting AIDS in Kenya’. His parents hail from the Rift Valley, but he grew up in Kisumuand speaks fluent Dholuo, Kiswahili and English as well as Kisii, his mother tongue. Francisis a founding member of the first ‘patient support group’ in Kisumu and is on the organizingcommittee of Kisumu's global AIDS day celebrations. He takes seriously the turn to communitydevelopment and is passionate about his self-created role as a community spokesperson,acting as a mediator between ‘the community’, government and NGO networks.Francis has no official position and is not attached to any particular NGO, but uses hiscontacts to access computers and office space at an NGO office, where, through email andFacebook, he keeps in touch with the many expatriates he meets and with web-basedHIV-positive groups. He is forever going to training sessions, enrolling himself in variouscourses, and gaining certificates and diplomas in a wide array of subjects such ascounselling, management and community health. He makes an income partly from the allowanceshe gets from acting as a representative at workshops and meetings, and from some piecemealwork for NGOs and research projects. His stable income, however, comes from the property hisfather built in one of Kisumu's informal settlements, a two-storey apartment block, where heand his wife live with their four children and a shifting population of relatives andfriends, whom they support. His wife operates a small shop and they rent out the firstfloor.Francis grew up in Kisumu. His father worked as a radiologist in the provincial hospitalwhile his mother had her own small business. He spent his childhood in one of the solidmiddle-class houses built by the Soviets for hospital employees in the 1970s , attended a respected Kisumu high school, and went tocollege. Unable to convert his education into any job, he went through a period ofdepression, and, as he recalls, began drinking too much while his family suffered. It wasthrough getting sick, finding out and eventually accepting his HIV status, and setting upthe patient support group that he pulled himself up. Since then he has built upon andenlarged his network of contacts both within and beyond Kisumu, successfully operatingoutside formal structures, making connections and seizing opportunities to assert his ownrole in health projects and ‘community-based development’.et al. The stories of Pamela and Francis demonstrate that being able to narrate one's life andoutlook in terms of a conversion to knowing HIV and responsible living is a vital waythrough which people attach themselves to global health projects and resources and insertthemselves into networks of people and organizations, thereby making a living and even, asthey see it (or present it), a new life  for 30 shillings (£0.25) and sit in the courtyard on a shadybench. I suggested having a drink together there but Jomo wanted to meet at United, a shinymall café in one of the new and expensive shopping plazas, which was the hang-out ofprofessionals and, it would seem, the upwardly mobile. A coke at the café there, served byuniformed waiters, costs 150 shillings .I found Jomo chatting, as was usual, with a knot of acquaintances – he seemed to knoweveryone in Kisumu. He introduced a middle-aged man to me as the director of counselling atone of Kisumu's colleges: ‘He is the one who helped me so much in life.’ Jomo lookedsomewhat worried and clearly wanted to talk. ‘Did I tell you the position I have is avolunteer position?’ he began, when we were alone at a table. ‘Even those youth groupmembers don't know I am a volunteer’ – and he explained that, if they knew, he would losehis authority. Like Jomo, many of the volunteers had secondary school certificates, but‘some have college diplomas, some even have degrees, so many are more learned than I am,even though I know more, I am more experienced’. ‘Why do they volunteer then?’ I asked. ‘Toget a reference, to get experience, and some have managed to find jobs, so that encouragesothers.’ ‘But what about you?’ ‘I am just getting frustrated,’ he replied. ‘I'm justtarmacking.’Jomo had lost both his parents while still a child. His uncle (FB), who worked as atechnician in the state-owned water company, took him and his younger sisters in andsupported him through the first two years of a good government secondary school in Kisumu.But he had his own children's fees to pay, and for the next two years of school Jomo wasshuffled from relative to relative. With some support from an NGO, he managed to finishschool but ‘could not get further’. Finally, in 2006, through his aunt's acquaintance withthe director of counselling, he managed to get sponsored by an NGO for a three-week trainingcourse – and certificate – in ‘HIV/AIDS counselling’. After further periods of tarmacking,including joining the NGO's youth group, he was taken on as ‘director of youth services’. Hereceived a monthly allowance of 3,000 shillings (£30), and was hopeful that this wouldtranslate into a paid position. Unfortunately this period coincided with a decline in theNGO's fortunes – as staff at the head office were accused of misappropriating resources.International donors pulled out, funds were cut and projects slashed, and the period alsosaw the gradual drift of the youth group volunteers to more successful NGOs.At the time of our drink at United, Jomo was again sending off his CV to the manyorganizations working in Kisumu and was hoping to get sponsorship for a part-time course inone of the Kisumu's colleges. He was anxious about his own and his siblings’ futures. Hisyoungest sister had dropped out of school for lack of fees, and then become pregnant. Shewas staying with their aunt and helping with the housework. In this situation and without ajob, Jomo felt unable to move on with his life; he was still sharing a room with a friendand he had a girlfriend but was not planning, as yet, on marriage. He did eventually getsponsorship from an NGO to go on a training course in ‘community development’, and the lasttime we met he was heading off to Nairobi to take it up.Jomo's story gives some insight into the contradictions of volunteering. Having lost hisparents, his education became dependent on rather strained family relations, and, as for somany others, his secondary school certificate proved almost useless. In Kisumu today the fewopportunities to ‘move ahead’ and achieve a successful life are bottlenecked around the NGOeconomy. People attach themselves as volunteers to a project or NGO in the hope of eithermaking a livelihood, like Pamela, or of finding a professional identity and an office job.But they seem rarely to realize these hopes. Instead, these attachments offer much lessconcrete opportunities: the exposure to new networks, contacts and exchanges, partlycomposed of local patronage and partly of contacts with globalized spaces, knowledge andskills. The empowerment that people seek appears to reside more in the process of attachingoneself to these spaces, and making use of what one finds there, than in an end result thatrarely materializes. The significance of this spatial positioning is demonstrated in thestory told by Elias, an age-mate and friend of Jomo. According to Elias, it was the chancehe got to sell sodas from a mobile stand located outside an NGO that ‘opened’ a newtrajectory, giving him contacts with a network of people and projects, and exposure to aninstitutional environment. Over a period of five years, through stops and starts, movesforward but also sideways  he managed eventually toconvert this exposure into volunteering, workshops and further training days. His luckybreak came when he managed to get one year of paid employment with the NGO as an HIVcounsellor.jua kali sector. Like juakali workers, volunteers must work under the hot sun as they traverse the city tofind people to ‘mobilize’ or to ‘trace’ clients. Like work in the informal economy, there isno security. The fragility of funds, projects and organizations lends a strong sense oftransience to Kisumu's global health interventions. Projects can be closed down and jobslost in the space of a few months, pushing people who had been employed back into tarmackingor into the informal economy of petty trading, selling sodas, or peddling bicycle taxis. Inthe five years he spent attached to the NGO, Elias signed up as a clinical trial subject,went to training days, and gained several certificates, but he often found himself back athis soda stand. Another lucky break, a volunteer position for a health project funded by aGerman organization, came to an abrupt standstill when the donor pulled out. While drivingwith Elias and other volunteers out of town one day to ‘mobilize’ at a rural school, hisboss received a phone call on her mobile, telling her to turn the vehicle round and returnto headquarters. By the end of the month the project no longer existed; there were noresources and no payment for the volunteers.Mostly, however, volunteers’ trajectories present less a road to success than a struggleback and forth, aptly captured in the idiom of ‘tarmacking’. The reality is thatvolunteering is more like work in the In the face of this insecurity, would-be volunteers attempt to build up their ‘portfolio’with stacks of certificates, attesting to attendance and skills gained at training days,workshops and coveted courses run by NGOs or colleges. But these attempts are themselvesbeset with frustrations. Elias tried a computer course until the college running itdisappeared overnight, along with his money and certificate. He next tried a course in‘community health’, but could not keep up with the fees when the project he was volunteeringfor was slashed. And even certificates quickly become outdated and obsolete, as globalhealth interventions circulate new knowledge and require new forms of expertise.The constant slippage between the cracks requires a degree of dissimulation, of ‘keeping upappearances’ . Yet this insistence onempowerment continued in casual conversations, on the street, in people's homes, andthroughout longer acquaintances and friendships with some of the volunteers. Hope persistedin spite of frustrations.(breaks down)E: I took a gospel song and … and … ah R: You took a?E: A … a … gospel song and ah … sat down and … prayed … and prayed.Elias's use of gospel songs to express his intense emotions suggests thatreligious sensibilities and subjectivities may inform both a sense of self and idioms ofagency among my informants. Empowerment discourses have a striking resonance with themessages of the popular Pentecostal churches in Kenya. These exhort people to ‘feel yourworth’ as a means of overcoming the anxieties of poverty, the loss of loved ones and theprecariousness of life. ‘You are valuable!’ preachers tell their congregations. At theRedeemed Gospel Church in Kisumu, sermons last for hours, preachers, pouring with sweat andemotion, bellow into their loudspeakers: ‘Even if you face poverty, even if you facefrustrations, even if you have no job and no money, if your business is not doing well, evenif your child has died, if you have no children, if you have been frustrated with youreducation, if your husband does not love you, if people are saying you are useless in yourhouse, even if the devil has messed up your life … you can change this! You can open yourheart! You will prosper. You are a great man, you are a great woman!’ Another sermoncontinued, ‘If you are still sitting here, you have got through what others could not getthrough. You are sitting here. You have survived! You are victorious!’ These messagesproject a sense of strength rooted in the self, and of hopeful agency: ‘You can do it!’While this is clearly connected to a prosperity gospel – ‘You will have a child, you willhave a big business, you will become a multi-millionaire!’ – what strikes me here is thefocus on the strength of the self, orientated to ‘God's love’ and membership of a church,and ‘manifesting God's will’, as the anchor to a successful life.Furthermore, there was a strong sense of personal and emotional investment into theseprecarious trajectories. People drew upon ‘NGO speak’ but they invested it with intenseemotions, hopes and aspirations. When Elias received his long-awaited certificate incounselling, based on a part-time course he paid for himself, he told me: ‘I never put itdown. I walked with it for almost like … four days, I just admired it and, ah, I could feelproud of myself because … because I had secured one thing that had taken me a long time.’And in narrating the experience of finally getting his job (the one-year position as HIVcounsellor) he became choked with emotion.Amplified through loudspeakers beyond the confines of the church itself, these messagescarry across the city. In Kisumu alone, there are numerous Pentecostal congregations, fromlarge globalized churches broadcasting in Kiswahili and English and appealing to the‘working’ classes and those aspiring to them  to small offshoots set up by individual preachers speaking vernaculars.Services are filled with emotion, from joy and praise, dancing and singing to tears,physical exhaustion, speaking in tongues and possession. Not confined to official buildings,Pentecostal churches fill the city's public spaces, blasting sermons, prayers and music fromloudspeakers erected under temporary sun-shades. Across the city, banners advertisepreachers and conventions, mass prayers and meetings. Most of the volunteers I intervieweddescribed themselves as ‘strong Christians’; many were ‘Born-Again’, whose conversationswere interspersed with praises to ‘Jesus our Redeemer’. Emails addressed to me with friendlygreetings and enquiries about my family are headed with ‘Jesus Saves’, ‘My Redeemer Lives’,and ‘The Lord Is My Strength’. Gospel music is an important part of Christian life and, likeElias, many of my informants found in its messages a way of channelling their own emotions,of cultivating a relationship with God, and, in doing so, orienting themselves to a futurethat may be uncertain but is guided by the divine. As observed elsewhere, the born-againsubject is embedded in relations with a ‘different temporal orientation’, in which thefuture is much more important than the past van Dijk , 2003.Recent work on African cities highlights the transient, shifting and uncertain nature ofurban life today  from the factories exporting to European markets. In recent years, however, Kisumuhas developed many of the attributes of globalized enclaves  (Geissler and Prince Ferguson  – pocketFerguson , as poveIt is within these criss-crossing currents of unequal economies, in which economicinsecurity and deprivation coexist with bounded enclaves of global funds, connections andlifestyles, that I have described the hopes, aspirations and trajectories of Maryon andother volunteers and ‘tarmackers’ in Kisumu. In doing so, I attend less to the emergence ofa new middle class than to those who cannot quite enter it; to the cracks and gaps thatappear within and around it and to the wider transformation of life and opportunities beyondformal employment in global health and non-governmental organizations.Volunteers occupy an ambiguous middle ground here, between those who are actors in adevelopment and global health nexus, and those who are acted upon; between formal employmentand informal means of ‘getting by’; and between the disappointed trajectories of previousgenerations and the hopeful lives to which volunteers aspire. Like many residents of thecity, their place is insecure, and they move often, tarmacking in and out of the city, fromone rented room to another, and from one project to another. Projects come and go as donorspull out, colleges disappear, and hopes fade of even the insecure employment enjoyed brieflyby Elias. The promise of economic and social mobility through empowerment and of inclusionin the NGO world seems ever out of reach (Swidler and Watkins harambee or ‘pulling together’. The failure of suchcalls for togetherness to translate into development (Howard Smith For an earlier generation in Kenya, lay participation and voluntary labour in developmentprojects meant being part of the progressive trajectory of the new nation, captured inKenyatta's call for Nevertheless, many of the city's residents regard these interventions as taking the city,and themselves, into a forward-moving trajectory. Projects of global health offer focalpoints of transformation through which people seek exposure to new ways of speaking, seeingand doing – to new forms of agency and trajectories of self-development. In drawingglobalized resources, knowledge, expertise and lifestyles as well as new discourses ofgender, health, science and human rights into the city, they materialize hopes fordevelopment. Development might be reduced to the individual, and individual trajectories to‘tarmacking’, but people like Maryon or Elias also feel that they are part of a broadermovement forward. They share a sense of being part of an ‘enlightened’ generation; andcontrast their lives and attitudes with the ignorance, suffering and fear of the parentalgeneration, whose silence about AIDS marked their childhoods.For people like Maryon, then, volunteering seems to open up a field of opportunity in whichto fashion a particular subjectivity around an ‘empowered’ self. Their sense of empowermentspeaks of a form of self-making that is spatial as well as temporal, where placing oneselfwithin particular spaces becomes a means of orientation and of future growth. Making use ofspatial connections and temporal orientations, they place the self at the centre of theseefforts (see Diouf We may be sceptical of the Pentecostal call for an ‘enhanced agency’. Yet unlike the‘crisis’ of the post-colonial subject that Mbembe and Roitman describe, what emerges out ofthese experiences is a sense of the strength and capacity of the self and its hopefulorientation towards a future Moore , 2011. IFor the volunteers and tarmackers I have followed here, ‘empowerment’, then, is not onlyabout the self and its development. They feel part of a movement forward. The movement isnot clearly defined, perhaps because it is about the opening up of plural trajectoriesrather than a single narrative of destination. What is clear is that the pouring in ofresources and activities into the ‘millennium city’ gives them a sense of being on themap – of being recognized and part of something. Their sense of moving forward arises fromtheir ‘exposure’ to global connections and currents of exchange, and the possibilities theseopen up. While emerging global health regimes inscribe cartographies of economic, political,cultural and symbolic power onto cities like Kisumu, in engaging with these, people likeMaryon, Francis, Pamela, Jomo and Elias bring their own interests to bear, inscribing theirown trajectories into the city and, perhaps, opening up future pathways.


EHP, investigators review nearly two dozen of alternatives assessment frameworks to identify what’s working and what needs improvement in this rapidly advancing field.With the rise in green chemistry and growing concern over worker and consumer protection, businesses and regulatory agencies are increasingly looking to identify alternative chemicals for use in products and manufacturing processes. Alternatives assessment involves comparing the advantages and disadvantages of potential substitutes for toxic chemicals,As governments around the world begin to require alternatives assessments for chemicals of high concern,The group’s analysis showed that all the assessment frameworks incorporated hazards, costs, and performance. However, they lacked consistency in ranking and scoring the hazards created by different chemicals, as well as in the end points they addressed and the methods and criteria used to reach conclusions.Some of the difficulty in comparing these frameworks is that they are designed to accommodate the specific needs of the parties using them. For instance, a small business will use quite a different framework than a large corporation or governmental agency, because the latter have the resources to do a much more in-depth assessment. “There is need for flexibility in the approach to using these alternatives assessment frameworks given differences in context—regulatory versus nonregulatory, government versus business, differences in business positions along the supply chain, etc.,” Jacobs explains.Selecting an alternative isn’t always straightforward. Businesses need to factor in the cost of replacements as well as how a new chemical will fit into existing manufacturing processes, says Paul DeLeo, associate vice president for environmental safety at the American Cleaning Institute, which represents manufacturers of consumer cleaning products. “We’re doing alternatives assessment every day—it’s part of product design,” DeLeo says. But it’s a complicated process with a lot of moving parts. “We need to distill the process down into more manageable segments,” he says.Suitable alternatives don’t have to be risk-free, just lower-risk, and the risk needs to be manageable with appropriate protections. “There are always trade-offs to make, such as determining whether it’s better to use a little of a chemical that’s more dangerous or a lot of one that’s more moderate,” says Igor Linkov, a risk and decision scientist for the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center. Linkov was not involved with the review.n-propyl bromide). In the late 1990s 1-BP was marketed as an alternative for banned solvents such as 1,1,1-trichloroethane. Some companies also began to substitute 1-BP for other commonly used solvents. But in the years that followed, a number of published case reports described neurotoxic effects in workers exposed to 1-BP,,,At the same time, says coauthor Joel Tickner, an environmental health scientist at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, “we need to make sure that we don’t jump out of the frying pan and into the fire.” As one example of this, the authors point to 1-bromopropane (1-BP, also called Given the emphasis on green chemistry, the field of alternatives assessment likely will only continue to pick up momentum, Linkov says. But the results of the new analysis indicate that ongoing interdisciplinary research will be required to take alternatives assessments to their highest potential.


The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, this paper maps a concise three-phase trajectory of Jung’s changing views on dreams and interpretation. The paper posits that Jung’s last essay, “Symbols and the Interpretation of Dreams” (1961), epitomizes his final stand, although such a stand is also reflected in a less explicit and less emphatic way during the latter period of the second phase. The paper also briefly addresses where Jung and Jungians have been enigmatic or negligent. For example, it has not been explicated fully why compensation as slight modifications and compensation as parallels to waking life situations are rare in Jung’s cases In addition, contemporary cognitive and neuroscientific approaches to the study of dreams, as represented by Harry Hunt, William Domhoff, and Allan Hobson, among others, are presented in connection with Jung. The juxtaposition of Jungian, cognitive, and neuroscientific approaches showcases how cognitive and scientific findings challenge, enrich, and in some ways confirm Jung’s dream theory and praxis.Post-Jungians tend to identify Jung’s dream theory with the concept of compensation; they tend to believe that Jung’s radically open stand constitutes his dream theory in its entirety. However, Jung’s theory regarding dreams was a product of an evolving process throughout his whole intellectual and professional life. Unfortunately, the theory has not been understood in such a developmental light. Based on a historical and textual study of all dream articles found throughout  The Collected Works of C.G. Jung (CW hereafter). I performed a comprehensive search of all essays explicitly citing the word “dream” in the title . The General Index to CW provides a long classified index On the Significance of Number Dreams (1910) Morton Prince, “Mechanism and Interpretation of Dreams”: A Critical Review (1911) Vol. 4: The Analysis of Dreams (1909)On the Nature of Dreams (1945/1948)Vol. 8: General Aspects of Dream Psychology (1916/1948)Vol. 12: Individual Dream Symbolism in Relation to Alchemy (1936)Vol. 16: The Practical Use of Dream-Analysis (1934)Sigmund Freud: On Dreams (1901)The Dream of Poliphilo (1946)Foreword to Fierz-David: Vol. 18: Symbols and the Interpretation of Dreams (1961)My study of Jung on dreams extracted all the articles that are in dex  he adept is freed when long-term meditative practice renders the experience of waking reality as ephemeral as a dream”  costs” Hobson ,31 takesJung’s dream theory emphasizes transparency and creativity, in contrast to Freud’s emphasis on obscurity and psychopathology” .hology” Pragmatic and experimental, they refused to accept any hypothesis that was not scientifically justified. Meanwhile, phenomena that could not be so explained were not denied existential status, ex cathedra. Thus, the apparent religiosity of James and Jung can obscure their fundamental scientific rigor. as having an open, fluid, and relative status. Such a status accounts for creativity in a two-mind therapeutic dynamic that is constantly changing intra-psychically and interpersonally, and involves subject-and-object levels of interpretation. Second, it is more congenial to see Jung as a pragmatist  rather than as a scientist; Jung kept claiming to be scientific at times and “ruefully” acknowledged deviating far from scientific norms [Hobson claims that the most significant conclusion of his new dream theory is that it can predict that brain activation of a given chemical and regional type will always produce hallusinosis, hyperassociativity, hyperemotionality, false beliefs, and other cognitive errors. This is as far as scientific prediction can now go with dreams, but it is far enough to put the formal psychological analysis of dreams out of the reach of content analysis.In his theory of dream formation, Hobson goes to great lengths to prove with experimental data  that dreams are chemically mediated and enhanced within the brain. For example, he states, “We can safely conclude that REM sleep dreaming is mediated by acetylcholine when noradrenaline and serotonin are at very low levels” .levels” .levels” .lained” .the brain regions supporting these functions are more active” ionism” agency” Hobson’s activation–synthesis theory of dream formation has been challenged by Mark Solms  since 19because the main findings on dream content are at odds with them” ..because The full landscape of Jung’s dream theory trajectory should contain three periods, despite the fact that there is some overlap of time between the phases. To single out one phase at the cost of the others is to provide only a partial picture. The developmental delineation of this paper features a solid contextual and textual exegesis that uses primary sources . Hypotheses have been presented as to why unconscious compensation, as a parallel and/or satisfaction with slight modification, is so rare. References to the possible influences from Eastern thought, as well as from phenomenology and pragmatism, are also briefly mentioned. Cognitive and neuroscientific theories of dream formation both challenge and confirm the aspects of Jungian theory that concern dreams and interpretation. Our understanding on dreaming requires greater integrative applications. Cognitive and neuroscientific approaches can and should be combined fruitfully with the Jungian approach.


For all the attributes considered, the influences of DISTANCE and DIRECTION are strong. On the other hand, the influences of Int.V, SHOPS, CARS, ELEVATION, and WIDTH are different for each attribute. People with defined destinations tend to choose streets that “have more shops, and are wider and lower”. In contrast, people with undefined destinations tend to choose streets of high Int.V. The choice of males is affected by Int.V, SHOPS, WIDTH (positive) and CARS (negative). Females prefer streets that have many shops, and couples tend to choose downhill streets. The behavior of individual persons is affected by all variables. The behavior of people visiting in groups is affected by SHOP and WIDTH (positive).In this study, we propose two models for predicting people’s activity. The first model is the pedestrian distribution prediction (or postdiction) model by multiple regression analysis using space syntax indices of urban fabric and people distribution data obtained from a field survey. The second model is a street choice model for visitors using multinomial logit model. We performed a questionnaire survey on the field to investigate the strolling routes of 46 visitors and obtained a total of 1211 street choices in their routes. We proposed a utility function, sum of weighted space syntax indices, and other indices, and estimated the parameters for weights on the basis of maximum likelihood. These models consider both street networks, distance from destination, direction of the street choice and other spatial compositions . The first model explains the characteristics of the street where many people tend to walk or stay. The second model explains the mechanism underlying the street choice of visitors and clarifies the differences in the weights of street choice parameters among the various attributes, such as gender, existence of destinations, number of people,  In recent years, the importance of realizing the cities in which people can live without dependence on cars has been recognized. Therefore, there have been concerns about the need to create user-friendly cities that are equipped with specialized infrastructure. To create such cities, it is necessary that streets in cities are designed to be not only effective pathways for movement but also as attractive spaces that are ideal for a stroll because pedestrians enhance the liveliness of a city. Accordingly, to enable successful urban planning, we need to examine the characteristics of streets on which a large number of people stroll. We propose two models for predicting pedestrian activity. First model is a pedestrian distribution model. This model shows the characteristics of streets where many people stroll. Second model is a street choice model. This model shows the characteristics of street which people tend to choose when they stroll. This model explains pedestrian activity quantitatively. Street choice may be different by people’s personal character; therefore we examine the second model by the attribute of the stroller such as genders, ages, and so on. In the future, combining these models, it would be possible to estimate the distribution of pedestrians by the estimation of strolling route based on the composition of peoples’ age, gender, or occupation.There are many former related researches about the route choice and strolling behavior in commercial district or shopping center. Gil, Lemilij, Rose, and Penn  clarifieFurthermore, Golledge ,5 investPrevious studies in this regard considered two aspects. Some studies focused on spatial connections such as street networks, while the others focused on spatial compositions such as the number of shops and visual elements. However, we assumed that pedestrians perceived both space connections and compositions while strolling. Therefore, this paper suggests two models that consider both space connections and compositions. We used seven variables in these models. Space connections included the following variables: (1) integration value obtained from the space syntax and (2) the shortest distance to a destination (or a station). Space compositions included the following: (3) number of pedestrians, (4) cars, (5) shops, (6) width of streets, and (7) altitude. In order to obtain the number of pedestrians and cars, we performed a field survey. One is a pedestrian distribution model that explains the relationship between pedestrian distribution and spaces. Using this model, we aim to gain deeper insights on the distribution characteristics of visitors on the basis of the spatial connection and composition. This model was developed using multiple regression analysis. The other model is a street choice model that explains the influence of elements when people choose a route. This was developed using logit model based on routes obtained from a questionnaire survey. Logit model is a popular model in transportation science, which has been used for the prediction of mode choice ”, “number of cars on each segment per 1 m (CARS)”, “number of shops facing each segment per 1 m (SHOPS)”, “elevation of each node (ELEVATION)”, “integration value (Int.V)”, “distance from a specific place (DISTANCE)”, “width of each street (WIDTH)”, and “direction of street choice (DIRECTION)” .In the distribution model, DISTANCE implies “the distance of each segment from the Jiyugaoka Station”. In the street choice model, it means “the distance from the destination”. If the respondents did not have their destinations defined, we set this value as “the mean distance from the station to every node in the study area”.First, we explain PEDESTRIANS and CARS. A field survey was conducted five times on sunny weekday afternoons (14:00–15:00) in October 2012. We charted a survey route that did not overlap. Then, we traveled along that route on a bicycle while recording the route on a video camera (GoPro) mounted on our heads. The survey was conducted by travelling in two bicycles, covering a total distance of 10 km each day. After the survey, we counted the number of people and cars that we had bypassed on each segment. We divided the number of pedestrians by the area of the sidewalk, and calculated the logarithm of this value. This value corresponds to the variable “PEDESTRIAN”. Similarly, we divided the number of cars by the segment length and denoted the resulting value as “CARS”. PEDESTRIANS included people who were walking, stationary, and sitting. CARS included cars, bikes, and vehicles parked on the segment. Jiyugaoka station has two railway routes. Each route has both inbound and outbound lines, with trains arriving every 3 to 5 min on each line. The trains constantly arrive at the station, and hence we cannot observe apparent pedestrian waves diffusing from the station.Next, we explain SHOPS. We obtained 1121 sets of shop data (retail shops and service shops) from Town Pages . The parThen, we counted the number of shops facing the street and divided it by the segment length. Shops facing intersections were included in every segment. This value was called SHOPS.Then, we explain ELEVATION. From 5 m DEM data by National Elevation Dataset, we got the closest points data of segments’ nodes and calculated the mean value of elevation between them. We used these values as ELEVATION of the segment.Then, we explain Int.V. We prepared an axial map that covers a 2-km radius from the Jiyugaoka Station. Then, we calculated the Axial Analysis , Angular Analysis , and Segment Analysis  by Depthmap. Finally, we explain WIDTH. We measured the street width in the study area using a walking measuring wheel. The widths of any sidewalks present were also measured.First, we evaluated the correlation between the predictor variables . Then, wThe model formula isThe multiple correlation coefficient was 0.728, and the contribution ratio was 0.530. The power of each predictor variable for the pedestrians’ distribution is in the order: DISTANCE > SHOPS > ELEVATION > Int.V > CARS.p-values were not appropriate. Although other factors may increase the accuracy of the model, we believe that the variables we used in the model are appropriate because they combine both street networks and other spatial compositions.We also considered other influencing factors such as CONNECTIVITY, CONTROL, and CHOICE, which are popular factors in space syntax analysis. However, these factors did not provide significant influence because their We carried out a questionnaire survey to examine the routes taken by pedestrians in Jiyugaoka. The pedestrians answered these questions and drew their routes on the A2-size map. We distinguished their street choices into the following categories: “headed toward their destination” and “having no set destination”. In this way, we used 46 persons’ routes (1211 street choices), which started from the Jiyugaoka Station. After this survey, we classified the respondents’ street choices by “toward destinations (TD)” or “non-destinations (ND)”, “male” or “female”, “couple”, “alone”, or “group”. ijnV indicates the utility when an individual n chooses street i from jnA choices at the diverging point j during the trip chain. jnA is a set of streets from which an individual j choose one street at the diverging point j. “Utility” is the same as desirability or as benefit-cost index which a subject i receive. In this case, ijnV represents the sum of the products inkX (K pieces of elements) and constant kθ (parameter).θ1…Kθ] is an unknown parameter vector, and ijnkX = [X1…KX] is a characteristic vector .Θ = [ijnV as follows:We assume that each individual consider both space connections and compositions and then choose a street to proceed. In this study, we set the representative utility function Each predictor variable is defined as follows:ijIX: Int.V (r = 9)ijSX: SHOPSijCX: CARSijEX: ELEVATIONijWX: WIDTHijnDX: DISTANCE ijnXDirection: Direction (0 or 1)ijnXDirection is not the variable of space connection or composition. If the individuals choose to proceed straight along the forward direction, this value is set as 0. Otherwise, it is set as 1. We consider the tendency of the people to choose the straight direction on the basis of the previously reported study by Golledge [Golledge ,5.n chooses subject i at diverging point j.Adopting random utility theory, logit model offers the probability function as formula (4). Formula (4) represents the probability that an individual ijnδ: ijnδ is 1 if individual n chose i at diversing point j, otherwise 0. Then, the joint probability, the likelihood L of individuals and their street choices is given as follows:Next, we formulate the likelihood function. We consider the chosen results as kθ, which maximize the likelihood function L, by Newton-Raphson method. This is a street choice model obtained by using the multinomial logit model.We find the values of parameter We made eight logit models with respect to the attribute of strolling people and their destination; and estimated the best weight parameters for their street choices in each model. With the estimated parameter; we can see the weight of criteria which the strolling people value for their street choice. p-value is lower than 0.1, we regard the variable as the element that influences the street choice. In all attributions, DISTANCE (from the destination) and DIRECTION produce a negative effect. Therefore, all people tend to proceed straight and choose streets that are near their destinations.If the People who have defined their destinations (TD) tend to take streets that have many shops, and are wider and downhill. It can be assumed that their street choices strongly depend on the location of their destinations. Accordingly, it is important to consider the position and the composition of the attractive space to which many people tend to choose.People whose destinations are undefined (ND) tend to take streets that have high Int.V. This implies that considering Int.V enables us to realize the city where people enjoy strolling even without purpose.Males prefer streets that are wider, have higher Int.V, more shops, and fewer cars. Females prefer streets that are wider and have more shops. Couples tend to choose downhill streets. The street choice of males is affected by various elements. Or in other terms, males tend to choose their strategic route by considering various elements. In contrast, females and couples choose streets in a simple manner without much consideration. They are attracted by areas that have many shops and few rises.Individual person tends to choose streets that are wider, downhill, and have higher Int.V, more shops, and fewer cars. On the other hand, people visiting as a group prefer streets that are wider and have more shops. The street choice of a person visiting alone is also affected by various factors. Therefore, they tend to choose streets by considering various elements like males.At this point, although the distribution model revealed that pedestrian density is higher on streets with high car density, the route choice model indicates that pedestrians tend to avoid such conditions. This high pedestrian density may have been indicated because streets with many cars are important in street networks and in the strolling routes of pedestrians. However, because pedestrians are likely not comfortable in high-traffic areas, they tend to use other streets.For ELEVATION, we conducted a questionnaire survey at nine points in the study area, which revealed that there are no confounders because of the route from a specific place. As shown In this study, we proposed a distribution model and a street choice model that considered both space connections and compositions. We developed a pedestrian distribution model that explained the characteristics of streets along which the density of pedestrians is high. It also clarified the power of each element. People are distributed on the streets that “are closer to the station”, “have more shops”, “are lower”, “have higher Int.V”, and “have more cars”. Although the distribution of pedestrians is less as being distant from the station, some spaces with high integration and shops have more pedestrians than other spaces. Therefore, it is highly imperative to carefully analyze the configuration of highly integrated space and shops.Next, we analyzed the street choice of pedestrians strolling in shopping district by logit model and explained the differences in the trends of street choices on the basis of pedestrians’ attributes. For all the attributes considered in this study, the influences of DISTANCE and DIRECTION are strong. Hence, it is assumed that all people tend to choose streets that are straight and have the shortest path to their destination. The influences of Int.V, SHOPS, CARS, ELEVATION, and WIDTH are different for each attribute. It may be considered that these variables represent the difference in street choices made by different attributions. People with defined destinations tend to choose streets that “have more shops and are wider and lower”. In contrast, people without destinations tend to choose streets of high Int.V. The street choice of males is affected by Int.V, SHOPS, WIDTH (positive) and CARS (negative). Females prefer streets that have many shops and are wider, and couples tend to choose downhill streets. The choice of individual persons is affected by all variables. The behavior of people visiting in groups is affected by SHOP and WIDTH (positive).These results correspond to the result of pedestrian distribution analysis. In order to realize a city that is more pleasurable for pedestrian walking, it is necessary to consider these characteristics of distribution and the mechanism underlining the street choice.In future, we hope to conduct further studies in other cities and to conduct a more generalized analysis of the mechanisms related to persons’ walking patterns. Analysis in other towns and shopping areas would be necessary to attain deeper insights.


To explore the effects of a discrepancy between actual and preferred living arrangements on the relationship between living arrangements and life satisfaction among the elderly in China.Secondary analysis of the 2005 dataset of the Chinese Longitudinal Healthy Longevity Survey was performed. A binary logistic regression model was used to analyze the relationship between life satisfaction and living arrangements.Among those with concordant actual and preferred living arrangements, living in a nursing home increased the likelihood of life satisfaction, whereas living alone and living with a spouse decreased the likelihood of life satisfaction compared to living with the next generation and a spouse. Among those with discordant living arrangements, there were no differences in life satisfaction between the various living arrangements, except that living with a spouse increased life satisfaction compared to living with the next generation and a spouse.A discrepancy between actual and preferred living arrangements modifies the relationship between life satisfaction and actual living arrangement. Living in a nursing home is a good option for Chinese elder care only if the older individual emotionally accepts it. Living alone or with a spouse is not a good arrangement for elder care, even though it is often preferred by the elderly. Those with discordant living arrangements are more satisfied living with their spouses. Like many other Asian cultures, Chinese culture emphasizes filial piety. It is considered the responsibility of a son to respect and care for his parents. Co-residence with the next generation is the traditional and most common living arrangement of the elderly in China. However, China is currently experiencing an aging boom. The proportion of the population aged 60 or older in China has dramatically increased, from just over 7% in 1953 to more than 10% in 2000 Living arrangements are important to the elderly because “various household structures make very different demands on the adults in them and offer very different levels and types of resources” In the self-discrepancy theory, Higgins The dataset, which was downloaded from the Public Health Scientific Data Sharing Service, came from the 2005 CLHLS. Only elderly people who expressed their living arrangement preferences clearly were included in the study. Those who did not have a preference were excluded. The final sample size was 13,490 of the original 15,638.The key dependent variable was the self-evaluated life satisfaction, which was a two-category variable. It was derived from a single question, “How do you feel about your life?” The following five levels of responses were possible: very good, good, average, bad, and very bad. We coded “very good” and “good” as 1, to represent “satisfaction”, and we coded “average”, “bad” and “very bad” as 0, to represent “fair/unsatisfied”.Actual living arrangement was the key independent variable and was classified into five mutually exclusive categories: living with the next generation and a spouse , living with the next generation (no spouse), living with a spouse (without the next generation), living alone, and living in a nursing home.The variable “discrepancy between actual and preferred living arrangement” was derived from the concordance between the actual and preferred living arrangement. In these data, the preferred living arrangement included three choices: co-residing with the next generation, living alone/with a spouse, and living in a nursing home. The discrepancy between the actual and preferred living arrangement, which was a category variable, was coded 1 to represent discordance and 0 to represent concordance.Five sets of covariates were included in this study. The first set consisted of demographic variables, including ① age and ② gender; male was coded as 0, and female was coded as 1.The second set of covariates included the following socioeconomic variables: ① Education: no education was coded as 0, and at least one year of education was coded as 1; ② Residence: rural was coded as 0, and city/town was coded as 1; ③ Self-rated economic status: the participants were asked, “How do you rate your economic status relative to that of other local people?” Five levels of response were possible: very rich, rich, average, poor, and very poor. This variable was treated as a three-level variable by coding poor and very poor as 1, average as 2, and rich and very rich as 3.The third set of covariates included the following physical health status variables: ① Self-rated health: this was assessed using a single question, “In general, would you say your health is very good, good, fair, poor, or very poor?” This variable was treated as a three-level variable by coding poor and very poor as 1, fair as 2, and good and very good as 3. ② Activities of Daily Living (ADL):there were six ADL items in this study, including bathing, dressing, indoor transferring, toileting, incontinence, and eating. A binary variable was created. If the respondents needed assistance in any of the six ADL items, they were coded as 1 to represent disabled. If they did not need assistance, they were coded as 0 to represent non-disabled. ③ Cognitive status: this was measured using the Chinese version of the MMSE, which includes orientation, registration, attention, calculation, recall, and language, with scores ranging from 0 to 23 The fourth set of covariates included social support variables. The following three questions were used to assess social support: “Who do you usually talk to frequently in daily life?”, “Who do you talk to first when you need to share your thoughts?”, and “Who do you ask for help when you have a problem/difficulties?” Again, a binary variable was created. If the respondents answered any of the three questions by saying that they had no one to talk to or to help them, they were coded as 0 to represent poor social support. The other responses were coded as 1 to represent good social support.The last set of covariates included psychological resources for well-being. A total of 7 items were used to measure access to psychological resources, including resources for positive well-being 4 items) and to prevent negative well-being 3 items). For each positive well-being question, the following five levels of responses were possible: never  items. F items anP-values less than 0.05 were considered statistically significant. All of the statistical analyses were performed using IBM SPSS Statistics 22.0 software. The logistic regression model used was as follows:The data are described by frequencies, percentages, means, and standard deviations. A binary logistic regression model that was based on previous knowledge was used to analyze the relationship between life satisfaction and living arrangements. Note: Y , discrepancy , with next generation , couple alone , alone , and nursing home .The characteristics of the subjects in this study are summarized in p<0.05) were associated with a decreased likelihood of life satisfaction compared to living with the next generation and a spouse. Among those with a discordant arrangement, there was no difference in life satisfaction among all of the living arrangements, except that increased life satisfaction was reported by respondents living with a spouse .After controlling for age, gender, education, residence, self-rated economic status, self-rated health, ADL, cognitive status, social support and psychological resources for well-being, the adjusted ORs for the relationship between life satisfaction and living arrangement among those with concordant and discordant living arrangements are shown in There are several versions of the CLHLS, namely the 1998, 2000, 2002, 2005, 2008 and 2011 versions In this study, we found that 2,305 17.2%) of the elderly adults experienced a discrepancy between their actual and preferred living arrangements, which is lower than the one-third ratio published by Logan and Bian .2% of thEven among the very old individuals in this study, the discrepancy rate was still not particularly high (17.2%). Conflicting beliefs about one's living arrangements are believed to trigger emotional distress When the data were stratified according to discrepancy between actual and preferred living arrangements, the relationships between life satisfaction and living arrangements provided considerable interesting information. First, living in a nursing home is a promising way to care for elderly Chinese adults. However, two challenges must be overcome for elderly Chinese adults to enjoy life in a nursing home. One is psychological resistance to living in a nursing home. In this study, only 463 (3.5%) of the elderly adults preferred to live in a nursing home, whereas 8,026 (59.8%) of the elderly adults preferred to co-reside with the next generation. The majority of elderly Chinese people still prefer to live in the communities they are familiar with and enjoy life with their families. The other challenge is that there are currently few elder care organizations in China. In 2012, there were 193.9 million elderly people aged 60 years and older but only 42 thousand elder care organizations; altogether, these organizations provide 3.810 million beds Second, the so-called “empty nest” elderly adults are those who live alone or with only a spouse because they do not have children or because their children have already left home Third, the life satisfaction of those living with a spouse, which can be considered a special type of empty nest living situation, was very different that of those living alone, even though neither arrangement involves co-habitation with the next generation. In our study, among the total population, the life satisfaction rate among those who lived with a spouse (58.9%) was much higher than the rate among those who lived alone (49.4%) . Among tIn our study, individuals who would prefer not to co-reside with the next generation but who did live with them represent a type of discordance. Some elderly individuals may not want to live with the next generation because they want to have their own independent life and avoid conflict with the next generation


We literally say milk is the Rosetta Stone of nourishment”—Bruce German, UC Davis professor and food scientist.One in eight babies is born premature, at least 3 weeks before his or her due date, each year in the United States. A large portion of infant deaths are attributed to early term births and surviving infants are more likely to suffer difficulty breathing, hearing loss, intellectual disabilities, and other health problems .Monotremes on the other hand, representing the oldest lineage of mammals, begin feeding their young milk while they are still extremely immature, less than a month after conception. These tiny, practically embryonic, young thrive. Just how is a mystery, but the answer, researchers believe, is in the mother’s milk.“By studying the milk of such species,” says Danielle Lemay, a bioinformatician and nutrition scientist at the University of California, Davis, “scientists can look for aspects unique to this premature-supportive milk to figure out how to [potentially] augment the nutrition of our own young when they are born too soon.”Genome Biology Evolution, highlight a unique protein, absent in modern mammals , that selectively protects against certain bacterial species.A team of biologists from Australia recently investigated the protein components of the milk of extant monotremes to search for clues . Their rA long-standing point of discussion in the field, says Bruce German, milk researcher at UC Davis, is whether milk is primarily about providing nutrition to offspring or providing protection. The answer, he says, affects our view of breastfeeding, baby formula, and the nurturing of premature babies.“The thing that really excites me is that this is so early on in evolution and yet at that point these tiny—somewhere between birds and mammals—they were already selecting for proteins that were antimicrobial,” German says.Upon hatching from their egg, monotremes enter into a world teeming with microbiota. This they must navigate with essentially no immune system to speak of. Their sole source of nutrition and protection is their mother’s milk which comes from nipple-less ducts on her underside. It is a hairy, nonsterile environment in which the offspring feed by licking.Staphylococcus aureus and commensal Enterococcus faecalis bacteria. Upon other bacteria, such as Escherichia coli, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Staphylococcus epidermidis, and Salmonella enterica, it showed no effect. Field reports show that platypus and echidnas are susceptible to common pathogenic Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacterial infections, such as S. aureus and P. aeruginosa. In fact, MLP may also be for the mother’s protection, as her mammary gland could be susceptible to a S. aureus infection, says primary author Ashwantha Kumar Enjapoori.“It is quite possible to speculate the mother-to-hatchling transfer of pathogens,” write the authors. When tested in the lab, Monotreme Lactation Protein (MLP), a major component of monotreme milk, inhibited both opportunistic pathogenic For the field work, Enjapoori et al. captured platypuses from river banks in Australia and Tasmania and echidnas from Tasmania, Australia, and New Guinea. The animals must be massaged to collect milk. Though the amount collected is not great , the researchers collected enough from a few to have a small taste of the “liquid gold.”The creamy white milk of the platypus is thick and intensely sweet, but pleasant, says Enjapoori. Echidna milk, which he did not get to taste, carries a lot of iron  and is pinkish in color.Following collection, RNA was extracted from the milk cells for sequencing. Although MLP in platypus is closely related to the MLP in echidnas (and likely of the same origin), the researchers were somewhat surprised that they found no homologous protein in modern mammals. Given the unique presence of MLP in monotremes, Enjapoori believes that MLP is “necessary only for the monotreme way of primitive lactation.”“As marsupial lineages evolved with nipples, and eutherians later adopted a longer gestation period supported by intrauterine development and placental support,” he says, “MLP was not needed.”Nonetheless, the presence of such an effective and selective antimicrobial compound is exciting. “The beauty of it is you are not doing this for monotremes, however cute they are,” says German. “We want to know how to manipulate complex ecosystems in which bacteria are prominent players.”Many antibiotics are broadly acting, often lethal to benign beneficial and commensal bacteria. A disrupted microbiome can lead to multiple problems, including digestion, weight fluctuations, and rheumatoid arthritis .“What you want is surgical precision,” German says, “something to support the elimination of bad bacteria, but not kill all the good guys. Since milk already has this strategy one could imagine that these components wouldn’t suffer from this problem of broad based antibiotics.”Granted, a heavy dose of additional research is required before MLP could lead to new therapeutic approaches. Yet Enjapoori is hopeful. “Monotreme milk represents a rich source of untapped and potentially novel bioactive proteins with developmental or antimicrobial roles,” he says.In the next stages of research, members of his team plan to analyze the genes and proteins expressed at different stages of monotreme lactation (the milk is known to change composition over time) to search for new bioactive compounds and new clues to the “Rosetta stone”-like mystery of milk.