Polarographic reduction behaviour of clay minerals.

Suspensions of the clay minerals bentonite, kaolinite illite and chlorite have been examined polarographically and reduction waves found. The differences in their behaviour, with and without the addition of surface active reagents, are reported.

Student attrition. A challenge for allied health education programs.

The Committee on Allied Health Education and Accreditation (CAHEA) attrition data, collected annually by the American Medical Association (AMA), are nationally representative and constitute the largest source of information on attrition and retention in allied health education. These data provide a cornerstone for education and manpower planning. Consistent with previous years, men who were enrolled in CAHEA-accredited allied health education programs for the 1989-1990 academic year were significantly more likely to be lost to attrition than were women. When compared with all other categories of race and ethnic origin, black students not of Hispanic origin showed a significantly higher attrition rate (25.4%), while students designated as Asian or Pacific Islander showed a significantly lower rate (13%). Congruent with attrition data documented in the literature, CAHEA attrition data show wide variances across 26 allied health occupations and within the three disciplinary groupings that comprise approximately 75% of all CAHEA-accredited programs. Attrition rates measured by the type of sponsoring institution range from 7.1% (academic health centers and medical schools) to 24.3% (vocational and technical schools). Programs sponsored by for-profit institutions and federal government-owned institutions report substantially higher attrition rates, 25.1% and 21.1%, respectively.

Stroke direction asymmetry in figure drawing: influence of handedness and reading/writing habits.

Recent studies suggest that asymmetries noted in certain nonlinguistic tasks used in laterality research (e.g., facial affect judgment, line bisection) may in part be influenced by prior reading/writing habits. The present study examined the relative influence of reading/writing direction and handedness on the direction of stroke movement in free-hand figure drawing. One hundred twenty right and left handed brain-intact adult readers of scripts with opposing directionality (Hindi vs Urdu) and illiterate controls were observed while drawing a tree, a hand, a house, an arrow, a pencil, and a fish. Right-handers (including right-handed illiterates) and left-to-right readers drew most figures in a left-to-right direction, whereas left handers (including left handed illiterates) and right-to-left readers more often drew the figures from right to left. These results extend previous findings and contribute to a growing body of evidence demonstrating reading scan biases in nonlinguistic perception and production tasks. It would appear that reading/writing habits cannot be ignored as a potential artifact in studies of hemisphere functional asymmetry employing nonlinguistic stimuli.