This issue of Veterinary Clinics of North America: Exotic Animal Practice focuses on Soft Tissue Surgery. Articles include: Update on Surgical Principles and Equipment, Updates on Principles of Perioperative Care, Updates on Principles of Wound management, Enucleation techniques in exotic pets, Reptile Soft Tissue Surgery, Fish surgical procedures, Rabbit Soft Tissue Surgery, and more!

Learn to treat a wide variety of small mammals and pocket pets with Ferrets, Rabbits, and Rodents: Clinical Medicine and Surgery, 4th Edition. Covering the conditions most often seen in veterinary practice, this highly readable and easy-to-navigate text covers preventative medicine along with disease management, ophthalmology, dentistry, and zoonosis. More than 700 full-color photographs and illustrations highlight radiographic interpretation as well as diagnostic, surgical, and therapeutic techniques. This fourth edition also features new coverage of degus (large rodent species); new coverage of prairie dogs; and expanded coverage of surgical procedures, physical therapy rehabilitation and alternative medicine for rabbits, neoplasia in rabbits, and zoonotic disease. With expert contributors from around the globe, Ferrets, Rabbits, and Rodents is the authoritative, single point of reference for small mammal care that is hard to find elsewhere. Logical organization lays out sections by different animals and organizes parts within chapters by body system - making it quick and easy to access important information. Drug formulary provides dosage instructions for a wealth of species including ferrets, rabbits, guinea pigs, chinchillas, hamsters, rats/mice, prairie dogs, hedgehogs, and sugar gliders. More than 700 photographs and illustrations highlight key concepts such as radiographic interpretation and the main points of diagnostic, surgical, and therapeutic techniques. Chapter on ophthalmology provides an area of study that is difficult to find for ferrets, rabbits, rodents, and other small mammals. Chapter outlines offer an at-a-glance overview of the chapter contents at the beginning of the chapter. Access to Expert Consult site provides an excellent comprehensive reference and a fully searchable eBook. NEW! Coverage of surgical procedures has been further expanded in this edition. Surgical procedures are presented in a separate section and shown step by step through color photographs and radiographs, accompanied by line drawings. NEW! Additional information on physical therapy rehabilitation and alternative medicine for rabbits includes chiropractic care and acupuncture. NEW! Expanded content on neoplasia in rabbits incorporates lymphoreticular disorders, thymoma, and other neoplastic diseases of rabbits. NEW! All new chapter on prairie dogs has been added. NEW! All new chapter on degus (large rodent species) has been added. UPDATED! Chapter on zoonotic disease has been updated to further cover specific zoonotic diseases in addition to addressing the increased potential for disease transmission from animals to humans. NEW! Global author perspective incorporates the expertise of authors practicing outside of North America. UPDATED! Photographs show the diseases and disorders that are more commonly seen in practice.

A native of Georgia, William L. Dawson experienced a political awakening during World War I when he witnessed the U.S. military's unfair treatment of black soldiers. After the war, he became involved in the Republican Party in Chicago and, in 1933, won election as Second Ward Alderman. When his campaign against discrimination in housing and employment failed and he recognized that Republicans were losing power, Dawson decided to switch parties and change tactics. In 1938, he joined forces with two former Army colleagues to create an independent black wing of the Democratic Party. The plan succeeded, and within four years, Dawson was elected as a representative of the First Congressional district. Over the next decade, he became one of the most powerful black politicians of the twentieth century. Dawson was the first African American to create and sustain a powerful black Democratic faction in Chicago, to chair a standing committee in Congress, to serve as vice-chairman of the Democratic Party, and to receive a Cabinet nomination. Despite these personal achievements, Dawson was not as successful in making gains for his constituents. This detailed analysis of Dawson's career-from his work with the local Republican Party in Chicago in the 1920s to his declining years as a Congressman in Washington, D.C., four decades later-assesses the viability of electoral politics as a tool for racial advancement. Manning broadens our understanding of the development of modern American politics by outlining the strengths and limitations of black electoral leadership in the postwar era. He argues that black electoral leadership, as embodied in Dawson's political strategies, provided considerable opportunities for advancing a racially progressive agenda at the national level of the Democratic Party but faced severe limitations within Congress and could do nothing to ease systemic inequality in Chicago. This political biography will appeal to scholars of African American history, to U.S. political historians, and to those interested in black politics.

Statistical approaches to processing natural language text have become dominant in recent years. This foundational text is the first comprehensive introduction to statistical natural language processing (NLP) to appear. The book contains all the theory and algorithms needed for building NLP tools. It provides broad but rigorous coverage of mathematical and linguistic foundations, as well as detailed discussion of statistical methods, allowing students and researchers to construct their own implementations. The book covers collocation finding, word sense disambiguation, probabilistic parsing, information retrieval, and other applications.