3rd Time

A series of pages. "Intended to provide a brief overview of the conditions at the end of Europe's Middle Ages, the tutorial is presented in a series of chapters that summarize the economic, political, religious, and intellectual environment of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

The main objective of the tutorial is to furnish a baseline against which the vast changes of the following centuries may be measured." Pages on Economy, Feudal Institutions, New Monarchies, Holy Roman Empire, Italy's City-States, Eastern Europe, Ottoman Turks, The Church, Literature, Intellectual Life, Visual Arts, and Music. (4/6/99)

This section is intended to collect and annotate links which deal with Chaucer's life and times, general historical and background information.

Post Second

For this cross-sectional study, we mailed a questionnaire in November 2006 to the 1000 patients in each group. We sent 2 reminder letters (each with a copy of the questionnaire and a self-addressed stamped envelope) to nonrespondents 6 and 12 weeks after the initial mailing. We did not send follow-up correspondence to patients in the group scheduled for surgery if they had either undergone or cancelled their surgery since the initial mailing. We asked patients for consent to link their questionnaire data to data in the Surgical Patient Registry (specifically waiting time and rural or urban residence). The research ethics boards of the University of Calgary, the University of Saskatchewan and the Regina Qu'Appelle Health Region provided ethics approval for the study.

Post One

An unprecedented attack on drug companies’ prices by the head of England’s drug approvals body shows that it is jockeying for a key role in the forthcoming overhaul of drug pricing, observers say.

Michael Rawlins, who chairs the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), has criticised the industry for profiteering. In an interview in The Observer (www.guardian.co.uk, 17 Aug, "Health chief attacks drug giants over huge profits") he said that drug companies aimed for "double-digit growth year on year ... not least because their senior management’s earnings are related to the share price."