Victorian activists Mary Carpenter (1807–1877) and Frances Power Cobbe (1822–1904) held different standing in their day: the international founder of reform schools, considered a devout “noble worker,” mentored the Theist journalist who is better known today for feminism and animal-rights organizing. The essay draws on contemporary and recent studies of both figures and the short versions collected in books in Collective Biographies of Women, a database with an XML schema annotating the narratives. Examining different treatment of Carpenter and Cobbe in varied texts, the essay especially focuses on keywords and phrases, “noble,” “worker,” “perishing and dangerous classes,” and tropes of a lady entering low or dark places. Evangelical discourse is disparaged in the current climate among academics and activists seeking health care, education, or rights for the poor, but affect and faith-based activism should not be discounted then or now.

Higher intakes of Na may contribute to weight gain. The primary aim of this systematic review and meta-analysis was to examine the relationship between dietary Na intake and measures of adiposity in children and adults. Given the previous link between Na intake and the consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages (SSB), which are a known risk factor for obesity, a secondary aim examining the relationship between Na intake and SSB consumption was assessed. A systematic literature search identified cross-sectional and longitudinal studies and randomised controlled trials (RCT) which reduced dietary Na (≥3 months). Meta-analysis was performed for outcomes with ≥3 studies. Cross-sectionally higher Na intakes were associated with overweight/obesity in adults (five studies; n 11 067; OR 1·74; 95 % CI 1·43, 2·13) and in children (three studies; n 3625, OR 3·29; 95 % CI 2·25, 4·80), and abdominal obesity (five studies; n 19 744; OR 2·04; 95 % CI 1·72, 2·42) in adults. Overall, associations remained in sensitivity analyses which adjusted for energy. Findings from longitudinal studies were inconsistent. RCT in adults indicated a trend for lower body weight on reduced-Na compared with control diets (fifteen studies; n 5274; −0·29 kg; 95 % CI −0·59, 0·01; P = 0·06); however, it is unclear if energy intakes were also altered on reduced-Na diets. Among children higher Na intakes were associated with higher intake of SSB (four studies, n 10 329, b = 22, 16 and 26 g/d); no studies were retrieved for adults. Overall, there was a lack of high-quality studies retrieved. While cross-sectional evidence indicates Na intake was positively associated with adiposity, these findings have not been clearly confirmed by longitudinal studies or RCT.

It would be hard to discover a theoretical or aesthetic approach to George Eliot's Middlemarch that is not already anticipated in some way by the novel's sagacious narrator. Possibly that persona, the quintessential Victorian polymath, does not foresee digital humanities as we know it. But critics have been struck as much by Eliot's prototyping of information systems, semiotics, and network analysis as by her humanist ethics. Casaubon does not invent the database of myths any more than Lydgate discovers DNA, or than Marian Evans Lewes rivals Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage. As I illustrate a kind of digital research that adjusts to the minute particulars of narrative, I hope to keep sight of historical distances between the 1830s, the 1870s, and the era of feminist Victorian studies that I sketch here. Lydgate's penetrative “invention,” in the epigraph, is associated elsewhere in the novel with his actual “flesh-and-blood” vitality: “He cared not only for ‘cases,’ but for John and Elizabeth, especially Elizabeth” (Middlemarch, chap. 15). He is as dedicated to evidence as the narrator, in many scientific analogies, counsels readers to be, and yet he approaches his own life story and the characters of women with a kind of prejudgment that filters out most data. Eliot's readers, seeing Lydgate's errors, are flattered into believing we miss no signals and see all analogies. Can contemporary readers appreciate both numerical cases and individual stories of women? In this article I try to outline a feminist criticism that encompasses both typological classifications and flesh-and-blood individuality, both digital research and interpretative advocacy.

The Neotoma Paleoecology Database is a community-curated data resource that supports interdisciplinary global change research by enabling broad-scale studies of taxon and community diversity, distributions, and dynamics during the large environmental changes of the past. By consolidating many kinds of data into a common repository, Neotoma lowers costs of paleodata management, makes paleoecological data openly available, and offers a high-quality, curated resource. Neotoma’s distributed scientific governance model is flexible and scalable, with many open pathways for participation by new members, data contributors, stewards, and research communities. The Neotoma data model supports, or can be extended to support, any kind of paleoecological or paleoenvironmental data from sedimentary archives. Data additions to Neotoma are growing and now include >3.8 million observations, >17,000 datasets, and >9200 sites. Dataset types currently include fossil pollen, vertebrates, diatoms, ostracodes, macroinvertebrates, plant macrofossils, insects, testate amoebae, geochronological data, and the recently added organic biomarkers, stable isotopes, and specimen-level data. Multiple avenues exist to obtain Neotoma data, including the Explorer map-based interface, an application programming interface, the neotoma R package, and digital object identifiers. As the volume and variety of scientific data grow, community-curated data resources such as Neotoma have become foundational infrastructure for big data science.

To judge by debates over distant reading, literary scholars might have something in common with the unadaptable tutor in george Eliot's The Mill on the Floss, the Rev. Mr. Stelling, who applies the same educational method to any boy in his charge: he sees Tom Tulliver's mind as a field to be plowed with the classics, not as a stomach that can't digest them. But if we look more closely at the range of projects in literary studies, from digital humanities to the new formalist poetics, we find few hidebound Stellings. Applying one's favorite method to all sizes and shapes of data is an obvious genre of error, and scholars and critics of all sorts studiously avoid it. In a maxim now popular among practitioners of digital humanities, when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. The humorous warning not to become enamored of shiny tools and ply them regardless of object (a schoolboy, all schoolboys) can come from people who use MALLET (MAchine Learning for LanguagE Toolkit) or other software to produce statistical analyses of words or of white spaces in nineteenth-century newspapers. As researchers who are primed to question the prescriptive bias of our doxa, our samples, our models, and our tools, we nevertheless have incentives to overstate the predictable errors of competing approaches.

This meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials assessed the effect of Ca on body weight and body composition through supplementation or increasing dairy food intake. Forty-one studies met the inclusion criteria (including fifty-one trial arms; thirty-one with dairy foods (n 2091), twenty with Ca supplements (n 2711). Ca intake was approximately 900 mg/d higher in the supplement groups compared with control. In the dairy group, Ca intake was approximately 1300 mg/d. Ca supplementation did not significantly affect body weight (mean change ( − 0·17, 95 % CI − 0·70, 0·37) kg) or body fat (mean change ( − 0·19, 95 % CI − 0·51, 0·13) kg) compared to control. Similarly, increased dairy food intake did not affect body weight ( − 0·06, 95 % CI − 0·54, 0·43) kg or body fat change ( − 0·36, 95 % CI − 0·80, 0·09) kg compared to control. Sub-analyses revealed that dairy supplementation resulted in no change in body weight (nineteen studies, n 1010) ( − 0·32, 95 % CI − 0·93, 0·30 kg, P= 0·31), but a greater reduction in body fat (thirteen studies, n 564) ( − 0·96, 95 % CI − 1·46, − 0·46 kg, P < 0·001) in the presence of energy restriction over a mean of 4 months compared to control. Increasing dietary Ca intake by 900 mg/d as supplements or increasing dairy intake to approximately 3 servings daily (approximately 1300 mg of Ca/d) is not an effective weight reduction strategy in adults. There is, however, an indication that approximately 3 servings of dairy may facilitate fat loss on weight reduction diets in the short term.

Background: The Centre for Reviews and Dissemination (CRD) funded through the United Kingdom National Institute for Health Research undertakes systematic reviews evaluating the research evidence on health and public health questions of national and international importance. CRD is involved in methods research and produces internationally accepted guidelines for undertaking systematic reviews. A core product of the Centre are the CRD databases; a key resource for health professionals, policy makers, and researchers around the world. Research evidence evaluating the effects and cost-effectiveness of healthcare interventions is growing year on year, and can be difficult and time consuming to identify and appraise. The databases assist decision makers by systematically identifying and critically describing systematic reviews and economic evaluations, appraising their quality and highlighting their relative strengths and weaknesses; and providing a comprehensive listing of ongoing and published health technology assessments.

Methods and Results: This article briefly outlines the processes behind each of the three databases, gives details of the records, the information they contain and the value added by CRD. An overview of the new public interface for the CRD databases to be launched later this year is given. Improvements and innovations to supplement existing functions are listed, including enhanced and new search options, the addition of quick links to relevant material from within individual records, an integrated PubMed search and the ability to select personal preferences.

Conclusions: CRD's databases provide free access to an important knowledge base and are used widely to underpin evidence informed healthcare decisions in the United Kingdom and internationally.

HAVING SURVIVED THE Y2K HYSTERIA, we may feel we have entered new corridors of one hundred and one thousand years. But it is only in 2001 that the punctilious and historical among us may at last observe a centennial, truly the final year of the past century and the hundredth anniversary of the death of Queen Victoria.1 The Jubilees in the last decades of Victoria’s life, and the ceremonies of international mourning that followed her death, might seem to have said goodbye to all that, but in many ways we are still under the sway of the great queen who lent her name to the age before “the American century.” Our own fin-de-siècle urges us to rediscover the many forms of Victoria that have “been hidden in plain view for a hundred years,” as Margaret Homans and Adrienne Munich put it in their co-edited collection of essays, Remaking Queen Victoria (1).2 While North American and British feminist studies have dwelt among Victorian ways since the 1970s — with implications that I will consider below — the queen herself has recently commanded critical attention that might seem, like so many features of Victoria’s public performance, out of proportion. Yet that excess, like our obeisance to the arbitrary power of the calendar, seems to be the very stuff of imagined community and ideological construction, and thus worth watching in action. In any case, when feminist literary critics such as Adrienne Munich, Margaret Homans, and Gail Turley Houston