The ECF regimen results in a survival and response advantage, tolerable toxicity, better QL and cost-effectiveness compared with FAMTX chemotherapy. This regimen should now be considered the standard treatment for advanced esophagogastric cancer.

How do common household items such as basic plastic house wares or high-tech digital cameras transform our daily lives? The Design of Everyday Life considers this question in detail, from the design of products through to their use in the home. Drawing on interviews with consumers themselves, the authors look at how everyday objects, ranging from screwdrivers to photo management software, are used on a practical level. Closely investigating the design, production and use of mass-market goods, the authors offer new interpretations of how consumers’ needs are met and manufactured. They examine the dynamic interaction of products with everyday practices. The Design of Everyday Life presents a pathbreaking analysis of the sociology of objects, illuminating the connections between design and consumption.

This article conceptualises the marked downturn in UK house prices in the [2007][2008][2009] period in relation to longer-term processes of national economic restructuring centred on a new model of homeownership. The structure of UK house prices has been impacted markedly by the Labour Government"s efforts to ingrain a particular notion of financial literacy amid the move towards an increasingly asset-based system of welfare. New model welfare recipients and new model homeowners have thereby been co-constituted in a manner consistent with a new UK growth regime of "house price Keynesianism". However, the investor subjects who drive such growth are necessarily rendered uncertain as compared with the idealised image of Government policy because of their reliance on the credit-creating decisions of private financial institutions. The recent steep decline in UK house prices is explained here as an epiphenomenon of the disruptive effect on the idealised image caused by the dependence of investor subjects on pricing dynamics not of their making.

Although widely and convincingly discredited in academic circles, the crude 'business school' globalisation thesis of a single world market continues to dominate the political discourse of globalisation, as does the political 'logic of no alternative' that it is seen to conjure. The British Labour Party was an early convert to such a thesis, forging its votemaximising economic policy for the 1997 General Election within a discursive context bounded by the assumption of globalisation. After re-election in 2001, the Party continued to defend such an assumption. In this article, we seek to move beyond simple empirical rejections of the 'business school' globalisation thesis. Instead, we focus explicitly on the discourse of globalisation. Firstly, we argue that there are three separate, albeit reinforcing, articulations of the policy 'necessities' associated with global economic change -each grounded in a different intellectual tradition. In other words, globalisation's 'logic of no alternative' is, in fact, a flexible synthesis of three distinct political-economic logics. Secondly, we scrutinise the narratives of globalisation upon which the Labour Party's governance strategy was publicly predicated, tracing the implications for the conduct of economic policy in Britain since 1997. We show that Labour's leaders utilised precisely such a flexible synthesis of (often mutually incompatible) ideas in constructing its political discourse of globalisation. We conclude that the Party appealed to the image of globalisation as a non-negotiable external economic constraint in order to render contingent policy choices 'necessary' in the interests of electoral rejuvenation.

This article focuses on core aspects of the political economy of New Labour and surveys the strategic priorities to which it is likely the planning process will have to adapt. As with other policy areas, the effects of enhanced Treasury micromanagement of the Government's reform agenda has begun to impact upon the field of planning. The prime example in this respect is the Treasury's preference for replacing state provision of welfare-enhancing services with the move towards an individualized system of asset-based welfare. The article begins with an analysis of this shift, showing how it is dependent on creating financialized economic agents who think instinctively as active saver-investors in their quest to accumulate assets to fund future consumption of welfare. In contemporary Britain the housing market dominates the accumulation of assets amongst everyday saver-investors. The article concludes by analysing the possible tension that will be introduced into the planning process because of New Labour's twin goals: (1) to defend the current value of asset wealth even as the mortgage lending market has stalled and confidence in the stability of house prices has temporarily evaporated; and (2) to restrict exclusion from private ownership in the housing market so that broadening access can be used to propel a universal move towards an individualized system of asset-based welfare.

The 2009 H1N1 pandemic stimulated a nationwide response that included a mass vaccination effort coordinated at the federal, state, and local levels. This article examines a sampling of state and local efforts during the pandemic in order to better prepare for future public health emergencies involving mass distribution, dispensing, and administration of medical countermeasures. In this analysis, the authors interviewed national, state, and local leaders to gain a better understanding of the accomplishments and challenges of H1N1 vaccination programs during the 2009-10 influenza season. State and local health departments distributed and administered H1N1 vaccine using a combination of public and private efforts. Challenges encountered during the vaccination campaign included the supply of and demand for vaccine, prioritization strategies, and local logistics. To improve the response capabilities to deal with infectious disease emergencies, the authors recommend investing in technologies that will assure a more timely availability of the needed quantities of vaccine, developing local public health capacity and relationships with healthcare providers, and enhancing federal support of state and local activities. The authors support in principle the CDC recommendation to vaccinate annually all Americans over 6 months of age against seasonal influenza to establish a standard of practice on which to expand the ability to vaccinate during a pandemic. However, expanding seasonal influenza vaccination efforts will be an expensive and long-term investment that will need to be weighed against anticipated benefits and other public health needs. Such investments in public health infrastructure could be important for building capacity and practice for distributing, dispensing, and administering countermeasures in response to a future pandemic or biological weapons attack.

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Figure 1: The table-chair sets, arm chairs, plants, shelves, and floor lamps in this coffee shop were arranged using our locally annealed reversible jump MCMC sampling method. The users don't need to specify the number of objects beforehand. Abstract We present a novel Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm that generates samples from transdimensional distributions encoding complex constraints. We use factor graphs, a type of graphi-cal model, to encode constraints as factors. Our proposed MCMC method, called locally annealed reversible jump MCMC, exploits knowledge of how dimension changes affect the structure of the factor graph. We employ a sequence of annealed distributions during the sampling process, allowing us to explore the state space across different dimensionalities more freely. This approach is motivated by the application of layout synthesis where relationships between objects are characterized as constraints. In particular, our method addresses the challenge of synthesizing open world layouts where the number of objects are not fixed and optimal configurations for different numbers of objects may be drastically different. We demonstrate the applicability of our approach on two open world layout synthesis problems: coffee shops and golf courses.