bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
A Portrait of Refugees from Burma/Myanmar and Bhutan in the United States
Authors: Trieu Monica M. , Vang Chia Youyee
Published: December 2015

Who are Burmese and Bhutanese Americans? What caused their migration? While national data shows Bhutanese and Burmese constituting a large proportion of refugees entering the United States in recent years, they, however, remain largely invisible in the current national discourse on Asian American socioeconomic outcomes. This article addresses this gap by providing a historical and demographic portrait of the Burmese and Bhutanese communities—specifically addressing their social, economic, political, and educational adaptation patterns. Data in this article draws from U.S. Census Bureau data, and interviews with Burmese and Bhutanese refugees who are working in different capacities in their respective communities.
The impact of conditioning variables on the acquisition of variation in adult and child learners
Authors: Kam Carla L. Hudson
Published: December 2015

Natural human languages often contain variation (sociolinguistic or Labovian variation) that is passed from one generation of speakers to the next, but studies of acquisition have largely ignored this, instead focusing on aspects of language that are more deterministic. Theories of acquisition, however, must be able to account for both. This article examines variation from the perspective of the statistical learning framework and explores features of variation that contribute to learnability. In particular, it explores whether conditioning variables (i.e. where the pattern of variation is slightly different in different contexts) lead to better learning of variation as compared to when there are no conditioning variables, despite the former being conceptually more difficult. Data from two experiments show that adult learners are fairly good at learning patterns of both conditioned and unconditioned variation, the latter result replicating earlier studies. Five-to-seven-year-old children, in contrast, had different learning outcomes for conditioned versus unconditioned variation, with fewer children regularizing or imposing deterministic patterns on the conditioned variation. However, the children who did not impose deterministic patterns did not necessarily acquire the variation patterns the adults did.
A -adjectives, statistical preemption, and the evidence: Reply to Yang (2015)
Authors: Goldberg Adele E. , Boyd Jeremy K.
Published: December 2015

A certain class of English adjectives known as a -adjectives resist appearing attributively as prenominal modifiers (e.g. ?? the afraid boy , ?? the asleep man ). Boyd & Goldberg 2011 had offered experimental evidence suggesting that the dispreference is learnable on the basis of categorization and statistical preemption : repeatedly witnessing predicative formulations in contexts in which the attributive form would otherwise be appropriate. The present reply addresses Yang’s (2015) counterproposal for how a -adjectives are learned and his instructive critique of statistical preemption. The counterproposal is that children receive evidence that a -adjectives behave like locative particles in occurring with certain adverbs such as far and right . However, in an analysis of the 450-million-word COCA corpus, the suggested adverbial evidence is virtually nonexistent (e.g. * far alive , * straight afraid ). In fact, these adverbs occur much more frequently with typical adjectives (e.g. far greater, straight alphabetical ). Furthermore, relating a -adjectives to locative particles does not provide evidence of the restriction, because locative particles themselves can appear as prenominal modifiers ( the down payment, the outside world ). The critique of statistical preemption is based on a 4.3-million-word corpus analysis of child-directed speech that suggests that children cannot amass the requisite evidence before they are three years old. While we clarify which sorts of data are relevant to statistical preemption, we concur that the required data is relatively sparsely represented in the input. In fact, recent evidence suggests that children are not actually cognizant of the restriction until they are roughly ten years old, an indication that input of an order of magnitude more than 4.3 million words may be required. We conclude that a combination of categorization and statistical preemption is consistent with the available evidence of how the restriction on a -adjectives is learned.
Negative knowledge from positive evidence
Authors: Yang Charles
Published: December 2015

Why can’t we say the asleep cat ? There is a class of adjectives in English, all of which start with a schwa (e.g. afraid, alone, asleep, away , etc.), that cannot be used attributively in a prenominal position. A frequently invoked strategy for the acquisition of such negative constraints in language is to use indirect negative evidence. For instance, if the learner consistently observes paraphrases such as the cat that is asleep , then the conspicuous absence of the asleep cat may be a clue for its ungrammaticality (Boyd & Goldberg 2011). This article provides formal and quantitative evidence from child-directed English data to show that such learning strategies are untenable. However, the child can rely on positive data to establish the distributional similarities between this apparently idiosyncratic class of adjectives and locative particles (e.g. here, over, out , etc.) and prepositional phrases. With the use of an independently motivated principle of generalization (Yang 2005), the ungrammaticality of attributive usage can be effectively extended to the adjectives in question.
On statistical measures and ancient writing systems
Authors: Rao Rajesh P. N. , Lee Rob , Yadav Nisha , Vahia Mayank , Jonathan Philip , Ziman Pauline
Published: December 2015

An article published in Language (Sproat 2014a) questions our findings on the Indus script and Pictish symbols published in the journals Science (Rao et al. 2009a), PNAS (Rao et al. 2009b), IEEE Computer (Rao 2010), and the Proceedings of the Royal Society (Lee et al. 2010a,b). Sproat’s article does not accurately present our methods and findings, and its conclusions are based on what appears to be a misunderstanding of our proposed approach. For example, the article’s results on entropic measures seem to favor, rather than contradict, the inductive hypothesis that the Indus script may represent writing. The article selects results to draw a particular set of conclusions and convey a specific viewpoint. In light of these issues, we stand by our original findings.
Person shift at narrative peak
Authors: Margetts Anna
Published: December 2015

Narrators like to highlight important events in their stories. In some languages, they may shift to first- or second-person pronouns to refer to third-person referents in order to do so. Such pronoun shifts show functional parallels with tense shifts like the historical present, as both highlight events through shifts in deictic categories. Longacre (1983:138–39) discusses the parallels between person and tense shifts in his account of narrative peak, that is, the formal marking of important narrative events. Labov (1972) analyzes similar strategies as internal evaluations. Person shifts constitute a phenomenon of the discourse-syntax interface and present a clear case of discourse structure influencing grammar. Both person shifts themselves and their motivation in narrative structure have been little investigated. The article reviews person shifts in a number of languages reported in the literature and analyzes in detail the characteristics of this discourse strategy in Saliba-Logea, an Oceanic language of Papua New Guinea. The study contributes to the growing body of research on pronouns and person markers, and on referring expressions more generally, by adding a new angle of investigation. Previous studies have tended to focus on the morphosyntactic choices of referring expressions and their motivations, that is, on the choices between lexical nouns, free vs. bound pronouns, and so forth. The present study focuses on the paradigmatic choices between different person forms within one and the same morphosyntactic expression type. In doing so it offers a new perspective on pronoun choice and the factors influencing it crosslinguistically. While some types of person shift appear to be rare, overall, the strategy of person shift at narrative peak seems to constitute a solid crosslinguistic phenomenon.
Which -hunting and the Standard English relative clause
Authors: Hinrichs Lars , Szmrecsanyi Benedikt , Bohmann Axel
Published: December 2015

Alternation among restrictive relativizers in written Standard English is undergoing a massive shift from which to that . In corpora of written-edited-published British and American English covering the period from 1961–1992, American English spearheads this change. We study 16,868 restrictive relative clauses with inanimate antecedents from the Brown quartet of corpora. Predictors include additional areas of variation regulated by prescriptivism. We show that: (i) relativizer deletion follows different constraints from the selection of either that or which ; (ii) this change is a case of institutionally backed colloquialization- cum -Americanization; and (iii) uptake of the precept correlates with avoidance of the passive voice at the text level but not with other prescriptive rules.
Distributional modification: The case of frequency adjectives
Authors: Gehrke Berit , McNally Louise
Published: December 2015

We argue that distributional modification is one strategy that language affords for composing propositions about the quantity of entities that participate in a given situation. Distributional modifiers apply to kind descriptions, contributing the entailment that the kind is instantiated by a set of tokens with a particular distribution. As a case study, we analyze frequency adjectives (FAs, e.g. occasional ). We show that previous work, including our own, has suffered for focusing on the paraphrases of FAs rather than on their morphosyntax. We argue for two subclasses of FAs: those that are intersective modifiers sortally restricted to events, and those that are not. The study reinforces two novel theoretical claims in Gehrke & McNally 2011: sometimes kinds are realized by sets of tokens, rather than individual tokens; and some clauses constitute descriptions of event kinds , rather than event tokens .
Code-switching and predictability of meaning in discourse
Authors: Myslín Mark , Levy Roger
Published: December 2015

What motivates a fluent bilingual speaker to switch languages within a single utterance? We propose a novel discourse-functional motivation: less predictable, high information-content meanings are encoded in one language, and more predictable, lower information-content meanings are encoded in another language. Switches to a speaker’s less frequently used, and hence more salient, language offer a distinct encoding that highlights information-rich material that comprehenders should attend to especially carefully. Using a corpus of natural Czech-English bilingual discourse, we test this hypothesis against an extensive set of control factors from sociolinguistic, psycholinguistic, and discourse-functional lines of research using mixed-effects logistic regression, in the first such quantitative multifactorial investigation of code-switching in discourse. We find, using a Shannon guessing game to quantify predictability of meanings in conversation, that words with difficult-to-guess meanings are indeed more likely to be code-switch sites, and that this is in fact one of the most highly explanatory factors in predicting the occurrence of code-switching in our data. We argue that choice of language thus serves as a formal marker of information content in discourse, along with familiar means such as prosody and syntax. We further argue for the utility of rigorous, multifactorial approaches to sociolinguistic speaker-choice phenomena in natural conversation.
More than Life: Human Dignity and the Problem of Rights
Authors: Gaon Stella
Published: December 2015

This essay interrogates the concept of “dignity” underlying rights discourse in order to show that the extension of human rights to animals is both oxymoronic and counter-productive. Because dignity signifies the sovereign power to transcend life, human rights theory would be better served by what Jacques Derrida calls a “power” of “not-being-able.”
The Mortality Project
Authors: Krell Salomé M.
Published: December 2015

These musings on mortality, gathered during my year of training and working as a hospice volunteer in New York City, trace the questions I had at the outset, the answers I was seeking, and the answers I received.
Cinematic Past Lives: Memory, Modernity, and Cinematic Reincarnation in Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
Authors: Bergstrom Anders
Published: December 2015

Considering the way that cinema functions as memory, this essay suggests a comparison between the spiritual functions of memory and cinema’s role in modernity. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives illuminates cinema’s link to the preservation of human memory through its exploration of reincarnation.
Ghost Dance: Derrida, Stiegler, and Film as Phantomachia
Authors: Sherbert Garry
Published: December 2015

Against Bernard Stiegler’s ontological claim, following Roland Barthes, that in photography the photographic referent “was there,” present at one time in the past, Jacques Derrida proposes in Ken McMullen’s film Ghost Dance that the photographic referent is self-divided and “never had the form of presence,” making film “a phantomachia.”
Temporal Exile in the Time of Fiction: Reading Derrida Reading Blanchot’s The Instant of My Death
Authors: Langlois Christopher
Published: December 2015

This essay asks whether or not Martin Hägglund’s reassessment of the Derridean project of deconstruction as a project defending diachronic temporality is amenable to thinking the peculiar temporalities of literature and fiction that Derrida, in “Demeure: Fiction and Testimony,” detects in Maurice Blanchot’s The Instant of My Death .
“Courriers de la mort”: Denis Thériault, Sigmund Freud, and Jacques Derrida
Authors: Droske Kathryn
Published: December 2015

Tracing a tacit correspondence between Denis Thériault’s Le facteur émotif and, through the work of Jacques Derrida, Sigmund Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle , this essay considers how a speculative treatise published in 1920 and a Québécois novel released in 2005 echo and elucidate one another in their lifedeath , prostheses, and epistolarity.
The Psychic Machine: An Economic Phenomenon of Lifedeath
Authors: Ruiz Rosaura Martínez
Published: December 2015

The Freudian psyche is fundamentally a machine that defers death. I will argue that this economization is life in the form of memory and that the psychic apparatus is a bio-artefact in the sense of a machinery organization that, moving toward death, paradoxically produces and protects the life of an organism.
Against ‘vital materialism’: The Passive Creation of Life in Deleuze
Authors: Barker Joseph
Published: December 2015

Gilles Deleuze’s concept of life is valorized in the humanities today for its ability to grant agency or activity to non-human entities. This essay argues that, in fact, Deleuze sees the concept of life as a kind of passive creation which escapes the traces of subjectivity remaining in agency.
Russia’s “New Tsar”: Putin’s Reign is a New Chapter in a Very Old Book
Authors: Pavgi Kedar
Published: December 2015

In The New Tsar: The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin , Steven Lee Myers presents a detail-oriented account of Putin’s rise from a “middling spy” to the face of modern Russia. Myers’ telling emphasizes the means, speed, and geopolitical context by which Putin asserted his power, and in so doing shaped the country’s nationalism. Rather than demonizing the Soviet system as Yeltsin had, Putin sought to build a new and stable Russia through inclusion by co-opting institutions and values that already existed in Russia. However, despite the merits of this pragmatism, Putin’s methods for state-building proved rife with contradictions.
Navigating Nationalisms in Deeply Divided Societies: The Case of Northern Ireland’s Immigrant Communities
Authors: Gupta Devashree
Published: December 2015

In this study, the author examines major tensions and tradeoffs in Northern Ireland, focusing on how ethnic minority communities—including Chinese, Indian, and Polish populations—navigate the decision to take a more active role in political life as well as the capacity of the native Protestant and Catholic populations to adjust to these new entrants. Based on interviews with minority populations and political elites, the author argues that despite institutional obstacles and a historical context that has traditionally deterred ethnic minority communities from broad political and civil participation, there is evidence of robust participation in public life, both in political and civil society. The paper ultimately argues that Northern Ireland’s ethnic minorities have the potential to catalyze some change in the existing ethno-nationalist cleavage structure, but this potential is limited and largely outside of the conventional electoral arena.
Nationalism and Globalization: Challenging Assumptions
Authors: Hearn Jonathan
Published: December 2015

This article challenges a set of common assumptions and misconceptions about nationalism and globalization. First, nationalism and globalization are historically entwined and reinforcing processes, and not fundamentally opposed to each other. Second—and closely related—the modern nation-state is premised on interdependence of economic and political forms of power, not their opposition. Third, nation-states are highly variable in their powers, resources, and alignments, and form an evolving system, making it difficult to say anything sensible about the “fate of the nation-state” in the abstract. Fourth, the variable composition of national identities and cultures is considerably more complex than a dichotomy between “ethnic” and “civic” types might suggest. Together, these arguments point toward the continuing need for an understanding of global processes as an outcome of the negotiation of powers between nation-states, not as autonomous shaping forces over and above nation-states.
The Rise of Rojava: Kurdish Autonomy in the Syrian Conflict
Authors: Federici Vittoria
Published: December 2015

The Syrian conflict has contributed to the establishment of a de facto autonomous Kurdish region in Syria known as Rojava (Western Kurdistan). The Syrian army’s withdrawal from Kurdish-populated areas in the north of the country during July 2012, followed by the rise of the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) and its armed wing—the People’s Protection Units (YPG)—have played key roles in empowering a Kurdish nationalist project in Syria. The project has further gathered legitimacy and support through the YPG’s struggle against the Islamic State group (ISIS). Kurdish gains still face numerous challenges, however, and will not consolidate unless the PYD takes serious steps to broaden its Kurdish support base and normalize relations with its non-Kurdish neighbors, including Turkey. Should the PYD fail to do so, the result will likely be the intensification of ethnic conflict, both in Syria and across its borders.
Political Geography, New Regionalism, and Rescaling Identity
Authors: Charron Austin , Diener Alexander C.
Published: December 2015

Scholars of international relations and the general public alike often take the nation-state for granted as the fundamental unit of territorially divided space, around which socio-spatial identities are constructed. Political geography offers a critical perspective on the nation-state, demonstrating that its command of geopolitical imagination is a contingent historical development, and that alternative territorial constructs—such as the regional and the supranational—are also significant in processes of identity formation. This paper argues increased attention should be paid to the processes of institutionalization and identity formation that take place at territorial scales above, below, and across the nation-state. Moreover, because of political geography’s critical focus on the historical trajectory of the nation-state and its contingent geopolitical role, the paper advocates for the consideration and inclusion of political geographic theory in any critical assessment of nationalism and the rescaling of identities.
Why Public Finance Matters: Evolution of Independence Movements in Catalonia and the Basque Country during the Twenty-First Century
Authors: Barón Alejandro
Published: December 2015

This paper analyzes trends of regional devolution throughout Spain’s modern history—as well as equivalent trends of public favor for such devolution—to inform ongoing discussions on how the country can maximize its political and economic efficiency, while accounting for constituencies’ preferences and a federal affirmation of sub-state identities. The article describes evolution of public support for secession in the Basque Country and Catalonia; assesses the historical-institutional framework of region-state relations following Spain’s transition to democracy; and evaluates economic motivations of political interest groups across the Basque and Catalan regions. Having considered these frameworks, the piece concludes by discussing obstacles toward secessionist movements in Spain within the EU and United Nations frameworks.
The Five Rings and the “Imagined Community”: Nationalism and the Modern Olympic Games
Authors: Rider Toby C. , Llewellyn Matthew P.
Published: December 2015

This paper distills the many forms or expressions of nationalism associated with the Olympic Games into four historical themes: the Olympic athlete, or team, as a tangible representation of the nation incarnate; the symbolic value of victories and medals; the diplomatic significance of recognition in the International Olympic Committee; and the political currency of hosting an Olympic festival.
Nationalism and Political Identity in Pakistan: The Rise and Role of Indigenous Identities
Authors: Qaiser Raja
Published: December 2015

As a federal republic since its inception, Pakistan has experienced endemic problems that have plagued its center-province relations, including perceived inequities in the allocation of financial resources and the extent of political autonomy. Current crises include a rise in separatist and violent secessionist movements; a demand for new provinces; and a marked rise in peripheral politics. This study explores the structural patterns and political processes that facilitated the rise of indigenous identities in Pakistan. In particular, it seeks to explain the changing landscape of ethnic politics within the context of Pakistan’s political history.
Iran’s Soft War with the West: History, Myth, and Nationalism in the New Communications Age
Authors: Blout Emily
Published: December 2015

Tehran believes itself to be embroiled in a “soft war.” “Countering the soft war is the main priority for us today,” said Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei soon after the disputed presidential elections of 2009. “In a soft war the enemy tries to make use of advanced cultural and communication tools to spread lies and rumors.” What is this “soft war?” How did it emerge in Iranian discourse? This paper will trace the genesis of the term in Iranian politics from pre-revolutionary Iran to 2012. It will argue that the “soft war” is the latest iteration of a long-standing myth, in which outside powers seek to dominate Iranian identity and sovereignty through cultural means.
The China Challenge, Abe Shinzo’s Realism, and the Limits of Japanese Nationalism
Authors: Pugliese Giulio
Published: December 2015

The China-Japan standoff over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands has unleashed a top-down information war that has cemented the two governments’ positions over their territorial dispute. Under the Abe administration, Tokyo has stood up to an assertive China and drummed up nationalistic narratives of a virtuous Japanese “Self” (“us”) pitted against an aberrant and aggressive Chinese “Other” (“them”). It has done so along a markedly realist logic in order to (1) cement domestic resolve in direct response to China’s assertiveness and heated rhetoric; and (2) legitimize a swift passage of the contested security bills to enhance deterrence. Yet, while Japanese popular anxieties have echoed top-down instrumentalist narratives of an assertive China, they have also signaled a clear fear of entanglement in provocations of Tokyo’s making. This paper will provide evidence of the Japanese government’s active reconstruction of China’s assertiveness in the public discourse—with an eye on the realpolitik of Sino-Japanese relations. It concludes that the Japanese government needs also to cater more to grassroots sensitivities, something that has been a clear limit to Abe’s security agenda.
Embodied Reading and Narrative Empathy in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road
Authors: White Christopher T.
Published: December 2015

Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road presents itself as a fascinating case study in aesthetic emotion. Recent work in cognitive-oriented narrative theory helps to illuminate the formal and stylistic features through which The Road elicits a powerfully immersive, empathic experience in its readers. McCarthy achieves this effect through careful modulations of narrative voice and point of view designed to stimulate the reader’s embodied identification with the novel’s central protagonist, though in a resolutely controlled manner—which in effect allows us to experience the extreme depravity, terror, and sadness of the storyworld without the whole thing becoming too unbearable. Read in this way, the novel becomes itself a powerful literary reflection on the nature of narrative empathy and aesthetic emotions.
From Disposability to Recycling: William Faulkner and the New Politics of Rewriting in Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones
Authors: Moynihan Sinéad
Published: December 2015

This essay argues that Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones (2011) engages in a form of rewriting (of William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying [1930]) that cannot be described in terms of existing models of parody, revision, and “writing back to the center” most often associated with feminism and/or postcolonialism and/or postmodernism. Rather, it capitalizes on the status of the canonical text—which is always already associated with longevity and durability—in order to assert the resistance of one particular African American family to neoliberal discourses that would consign them to the category of “waste” (Giroux 187). In so doing, Ward thus moves towards a new, more politicized model of rewriting that can more accurately be called “recycling,” a term with connotations of more resolute social engagement and looking outward and forward as opposed to the potentially solipsistic and retrospective textual worlds with which rewriting tends to be concerned. The recycling of Faulkner’s novel in Salvage the Bones , through its combined social and textual emphases, provides a means of revivifying revisionary fiction as a literary-political enterprise.
“Taste in Noises”: Registering, Evaluating, and Creating Sound and Story in Jane Austen’s Persuasion
Authors: Nesbit Kate
Published: December 2015

This essay examines the focalization of Jane Austen’s Persuasion and argues that the ear (and not the eye) of Austen’s heroine, Anne Elliot, primarily guides the novel’s narration. Furthermore, this essay revises conceptualizations of Anne “as a listener” by tracing the parallel changes in Anne’s relationship to sound and the development of her character. Listening does not define Anne’s character; instead, changes in Anne’s character define how Anne listens. Anne’s aural attention shifts as she transforms from a passive auditor to an involuntary commentator, an evaluative analyst, and, at the novel’s close, a creator of sound and story.
Robust Body and Social Souls: Reassessing Ronald Firbank’s Effeminate Queer Men
Authors: Deutsch David
Published: December 2015

This article places Ronald Firbank into context with Edward Carpenter and Havelock Ellis, who promoted a form of muscular homoeroticism that they distinctly distanced from an allegedly degenerate effeminacy. Examining Firbank alongside Carpenter and Ellis provides a new angle from which to examine Firbank’s complex constructions of sex and gender in his novels. Reflecting yet implicitly critiquing Carpenter’s and Ellis’s work, Firbank offers a similar reorientation of queerness but does so by celebrating effeminate men. For Firbank, gender ambiguities do not bring about effeteness or social alienation. His same-sex desiring male characters are effeminate, but they are concurrently strong, productive, and capable of attracting admirers. He presents them as exhibiting robust bodies and social souls. Consequently, Firbank offers a rare, almost unique, positive relationship between effeminacy and a healthy male homoeroticism in the early-twentieth-century British novel, while revitalizing conventional feminine interests as a valuable element of a desirable homosexual identity.
“Discordant Syllabling”: The language of the Living World in Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts
Authors: Tazudeen Rasheed
Published: December 2015

Towards the end of her life, Woolf became increasingly interested in thinking animal life outside of an anthropocentric frame and in imagining a future beyond the time of the human. This essay analyzes Woolf’s use of metaphor in her unfinished final novel Between the Acts (1941) as a tool for critiquing the supposed universality of human-based modes of knowledge. Through the figure of the playwright Miss La Trobe, Woolf gestures towards the creation of a new language and a new artistic form capable of expressing the knowledge-resistant otherness of nature. I argue that the anti-fascist politics of Between the Acts , which have been noted by several critics, are inseparable from Woolf’s critique of human exceptionality and her attempt to create new, noninstrumental modes of relation towards the nonhuman world.
Constructing a Post-Victorian Empire: Rupert Gray, a Tale in Black and White
Authors: Ficke Sarah
Published: December 2015

This essay examines Stephen Cobham’s 1907 novel Rupert Gray: A Tale in Black and White in the context of nineteenth-century British and American popular literature. Cobham’s critique of familiar literary genres like the adventure story and “tragic mulatta” narrative, as well as the nonfictional works of Booker T. Washington, highlights Rupert Gray ’s importance as a transitional novel in Trinidadian literary history. By subverting and dismissing restrictive narrative devices from the previous century, Cobham creates space for a new kind of fiction that can recognize the modern, international, multiracial future of the island.
Representaciones sociales y orientación educativa del profesorado
Authors: San Román Sonsoles , Vecina Carlos , Usategui Elisa , Del Valle Ana Irene , Venegas Mar
Published: December 2015

En este artículo pretendemos informar del planteamiento teórico y metodológico de un proyecto de investigación, que hemos iniciado recientemente, sobre  las representaciones sociales y culturales que condicionan al profesorado en la función docente y práctica orientadora[1], así como de los estudios previos en cuyos resultados nos hemos apoyado para avanzar en nuestras hipótesis. Nuestro planteamiento parte de la consideración de las transformaciones sociales y su influencia en la institución escolar, favoreciendo un contexto de incertidumbre para el profesorado, consideramos claves las representaciones sociales como guía de su actuación en la relación con los alumnos, pudiendo determinar la orientación escolar y profesional que sobre éstos ejercen. Como punto final, se pretende analizar desde una mirada sociológica, la identificación de criterios y posibles modelos de orientación desplegados y practicados por los docentes, como un fenómeno que se construye socialmente.Para acabar se presentan brevemente los resultados de estudios previos realizados por el equipo de investigación, referentes a las representaciones sociales de los alumnos en el profesorado, cuestiones que hacen plantear el camino que toma la orientación de dichos estudiantes. Estudios que nos han aportado conclusiones para la configuración del trabajo de investigación actual.[1] Se trata de un proyecto de I+D+i, Contexto Socioeconómico y Orientación Educativa y Profesional del Profesorado de Secundaria, aprobado por el Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (España), para su realización durante el período 2014-2016, con referencia CSO2013-47168-R, bajo la dirección de la investigadora principal Sonsoles San Román Gago (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid).
Estudio de las actitudes hacia la escuela y de las expectativas educativas de los estudiantes de origen inmigrante
Authors: Rodríguez Izquierdo Rosa María
Published: December 2015

La continua llegada de población inmigrante al sistema educativo español está produciendo transformaciones sociales. La escuela no es ajena a estos cambios y ha visto incrementado el número de recién llegados procedentes de lugares geográficos muy diversos. Se suele vincular a este alumnado con sujetos con actitudes poco positivas hacia la escuela y con bajas expectativas educativas aunque existen pocos trabajos que indaguen estas representaciones desde los propios sujetos. Este artículo presenta los principales resultados de una investigación cuyo objetivo es, en primer lugar, conocer las actitudes hacia la escuela y las expectativas de los estudiantes de origen inmigrante. Y en segundo, analizar la incidencia del tiempo de permanencia en España y la procedencia geográfica en la percepción de estas cuestiones. Finalmente, se discuten las implicaciones teóricas y prácticas de estos hallazgos. La técnica de investigación utilizada fue la entrevista realizada a 189 estudiantes de educación secundaria y primeros años de bachillerato de la provincia de Sevilla (España) y de procedencia latinoamericana, africana, asiática y de Europa del Este. El estudio concluye que estos estudiantes se sienten fuertemente comprometidos con sus estudios manifestando un alto sentido de las expectativas educativas con algunas diferencias según el lugar de procedencia y el tiempo de permanencia en el país. Estos datos ponen en entredicho o cuestionan las generalizaciones reduccionistas y estereotipadas que vinculan a los alumnos inmigrantes con bajo rendimiento escolar y actitudes poco positivas hacia la escuela.
Odnos študentov zdravstvene nege do e-izobraževanja
Authors: Hvalič Touzery Simona , Skinder Savić Katja
Published: December 2015

Uvod: E-izobraževanje je v terciarnem izobraževanju vse bolj pomembno, kljub temu pa tovrsten način učenja ni povsod uspešno implementiran. Na uspešnost uvajanja e-izobraževanja v študij pomembno vpliva pripravljenost na tovrstno obliko izobraževanja in odnos študentov do njega. Namen raziskave je bil proučiti naklonjenost študentov zdravstvene nege do e-izobraževanja. Metode: Kvantitativno raziskavo s spletnim anketiranjem smo izvedli v marcu 2014, na priložnostnem vzorcu (n = 92) študentov Fakultete za zdravstvo Jesenice. Koeficient Cronbach alfa je bil 0,966. Podatke smo obdelali s SPSS 20.0. Uporabili smo frekvenčno analizo, t-test za neodvisne vzorce, enosmerno analizo variance, korelacijsko, faktorsko in regresijsko analizo. Rezultati: Prednosti e-izobraževanja so najvišje ocenjene s strani študentov, ki so v e-učilnici sodelovali pri treh predmetih (p = 0,000). Odnos do e-izobraževanja je povezan z računalniško pismenostjo študentov (p < 0,05). Na odnos študentov do e-izobraževanja statistično značilno pozitivno vplivajo njegove prednosti (0,211< β
The prevalence of violence directed at paramedic services personnel
Authors: Gabrovec Branko
Published: December 2015

Introduction: Providers of health care are frequently subject to violence. The purpose of this research is to identify the type of violence suffered by first responders and the frequency of violence, since there is a lack of research in this area. Methods: A non-experimental sampling research method was used for this research; the research instrument is a structured questionnaire. We invited 36 rescue stations in Slovenia to participate, and 29 responded to the request; 246 questionnaires (68.3 %) were returned out of a total of 360. Data were analysed by means of descriptive statistics, correlation, the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test, Pearson's chi-square test, Mann-Whitney U test and linear regression with a significance of p < 0.05. Results: Seventy-eight per cent of respondents reported they had been verbally abused by their patients in the reporting year, while 49.6 % respondents reported they had been physically abused and 26.8 % of all respondents suffered injuries inflicted by patients. In the reporting year, 24.4 % of respondents experienced sexual harassment. A correlation was established between facing and experiencing fear (p = 0.017), between physical violence and feelings of vulnerability (p = 0.005), and between experiencing physical violence by the patient and lack of knowledge of how to manage patients' aggression (p = 0.012). Discussion and conclusion: The research could serve as a basis for a comprehensive approach to aggression management for nursing care professionals in paramedic services.
Enduring personality changes in patients living at home and challenges for community nursing
Authors: Maček Bernardka , Dernovšek Mojca Zvezdana , Kobentar Radojka
Published: December 2015

Introduction: Personality and behaviour disorders include enduring personality changes which cannot be attributed to brain injury or disease. Traumatic experiences can cause personality vulnerability. The research aimed to determine the characteristic enduring personality changes, the risk factors and the quality of life of patients living in their home environment. Methods: The field research is based on a quantitative method. The data were gathered through a structured questionnaire. The sample consisted n = 606 of patients (18.56 %) from the Central Slovenia region, aged between 20 and 92 years. The data were processed using descriptive statistics, the χ2 test, group classification and discriminant analysis. Results: The enduring personality changes are present in 9 % (n = 53) of the patients who tend to be older, with lesser educational attainment. Only a quarter of the enduring personality changes patients (n = 10) are receiving psychiatric treatment. Among the groups of patients with or without enduring personality changes statistically significant differences have been observed in relation to their past experiences with a traumatic event (p < 0.001), level of independence in the performance of the activities of daily living (p < 0.001), incidence rate of chronic pain (p = 0.002), social integration (p = 0.016), suicidal thoughts (p < 0.001) and incidence rate of comorbidity of somatic illnesses and psychological disorders (p < 0.001). Discussion and conclusion: Results of the study point to the share of enduring personality changes patients living at home in which the condition remains largely unrecognized, untreated and shadowed by other mental and physical health issues. Community nurses play a crucial role in timely recognition and detection of the changes and the patients' referral to multidisciplinary treatment. A national research project conducted by community nurses is needed to highlight the prevalence, treatment and good practice in the delivery of pertinent services.
Povezave med razjedo zaradi pritiska in ohranjanjem integritete kože pacienta v intenzivni zdravstveni obravnavi: pregled literature
Authors: Emeđi Dragica , Skela-Savič Brigita
Published: December 2015

Uvod: Namen raziskave je prikazati večdimenzionalne potrebe in možne dejavnike tveganja za razjedo zaradi pritiska pri odraslih pacientih v intenzivni zdravstveni obravnavi.

Metode: Uporabili smo analizo in sintezo pregleda dokazov iz zbirke podatkov EMERALD, CINAHL, PubMed in ProQuest. Ključne iskalne besedne zveze so bile: »quality of care«, »pressure ulcer«, »prevention and treatment of pressure ulcers«, »skin integrity critical care patients«. Omejitveni kriteriji iskanja so bili: obdobje 2010 do 2013, celotno besedilo člankov v angleščini. Začetna merila je izpolnjevalo 280 zadetkov in 40 izbranih ustreznih prispevkov. Potek raziskave je prikazan v skladu z načeli Cochranove zbirke, ocena kakovosti dokazov pa v hierarhiji dokazov.

Rezultati: Identificiranih je 191 kod, ki so združene v 11 vsebinskih kategorij: okolje intenzivne terapije – značilnosti nekaterih dejavnikov tveganja, čas bivanja v enoti, vazoaktivne učinkovine, spol, starost, administrativno diagnostična kategorija, postelja, ležišče, lestvica Waterlow, razjeda zaradi pritiska in pomen prve stopnje razjede.

Diskusija in zaključek: Raziskava pokaže pomen uvedbe proaktivnih ukrepov za ohranjanje integritete kože pacienta. Osredotoča se na vitalnost tkiva in promocijo kakovostne zdravstvene oskrbe z vidika teorije. Potrebne so raziskave, ki bi za boljše razumevanje pojasnjevale številna druga tveganja in učinkovite programe za vitalnost kože.
No health without workforce, no workforce without nurses and midwifes
Authors: Shamian Judith , Požun Peter
Published: December 2015

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Nurses' impact on quality of care: lessons from RN4CAST
Authors: Sermeus Walter
Published: December 2015

Introduction: The RN4CAST - study (acronym for Nurse Forecasting in Europe) was launched in 2009 and ended in 2011 under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme. The aim of the RN4CAST-study was to study how features of work environments and qualifications of the nurse workforce impact nurse retention, burnout among nurses and patient outcomes.

Methods: The study was conducted in twelve European countries and was conducting a cross-sectional survey in 500 hospitals in which more than 33,000 nurses and more than 11,000 patients were involved. These data were linked to patient outcome data from administrative databases.

Results: The study showed that patient outcomes such as patient mortality and patient satisfaction is highly related to nurse staffing characteristics such as patient-to-nurse ratios, nurse qualification and nursing work environment. Also nurse outcomes such as burnout, intention-to-leave, job satisfaction are related to staffing adequacy and nursing work environment.

Discussion and conclusion: The RN4CAST study generated a large evidence base of nurse workforce issues across European health systems which is quite unique in terms of the number and qualification of nursing staff, the quality of working environments, burnout rates, job satisfaction rates, intention-to-leave rates that can be used for policy making.
Smernice za izobraževanje v zdravstveni negi na študijskem programu prve stopnje Zdravstvena nega (VS)
Authors: Skela-Savič Brigita
Published: December 2015

Uvod: Področje izobraževanja v zdravstveni negi na ravni Evropske unije ureja Direktiva 2013/55/EU. Nacionalnih smernic za področje izobraževanja v zdravstveni negi, ki bi bile nadgradnja direktivi na tem področju, v Sloveniji ni, prav tako v zadnjih desetih letih ni opredeljenih potreb po izobraževanju v zdravstveni negi.

Metode: Uporabljena je bila komplementarna kombinacija kvalitativnih metod konsenza (panelna skupina ekspertov, tehnika skupinskega konsenza), kvantitativna neeksperimantalna opisna metoda Delfi in metoda pregleda literature. Vključeni so bili predstavniki visokošolskih in zdravstvenih zavodov, nacionalno združenje v zdravstveni negi in študenti zdravstvene nege.

Rezultati: Obdobje razvoja smernic je trajalo od leta 2013 do 2015 in je vključevalo šest iteracij različnih metod konsenza. Po metodi »snežne kepe« in institucijske pripadnosti je sodelovalo več kot 150 strokovnjakov na področju zdravstvene nege (visoko šolstvo, zdravstveni zavodi), od tega 18 študentov zdravstvene nege. Prepoznanih je bilo osem vsebinskih področij smernic.

Zaključek in implementacija: Smernice so dobro izhodišče za poenotenje visokošolskega izobraževanja na področju zdravstvene nege v Republiki Sloveniji. Dajejo osnove za presojo kakovosti izobraževanja v zdravstveni negi in so podlaga tudi za politiko, ki mora prevzeti odgovornost na ravni količine in kakovosti visokošolskega izobraževanja v zdravstveni negi.
Mapping the New Landscape of Religion
Authors: Flory Richard , Gajaweera Nalika , Johnson Andrew , Street Nick
Published: December 2015

Traditional Protestant religious practice is on the wane in the United States of America. For various reasons, many of the institutions that formed centuries or even millennia ago are no longer fulfilling the yearnings of the current generation of seekers. Still, the news of religion’s imminent demise is premature. A search for self-transcendence, both through a commitment to some form of practice associated with the examined life and within a community of likeminded practitioners, has not withered away. This study of the diverse congregations in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Los Feliz yields a complex—and dynamic—picture of the potential future of American religion.
Jesus on LSD
Authors: Sexton Jason S.
Published: December 2015

The California spirit of innovation and transmogrification showed itself when Alex Grey’s “Purple Jesus” oil-on-wood painting made its way to San Francisco. It was purchased by a shrewd collector, Mark McCloud, who turned the image into what became Purple Jesus Blotter in the early 1990s. Through a complicated history and even more complicated philosophy of psychedelia, the lasting significance of Jesus for both McCloud and the California narrative highlight the significance of this trippy Jesus story.
Rethinking Shari’a
Authors: Massoud Mark Fathi , Moore Kathleen M.
Published: December 2015

This article reveals new thinking about the meaning of shari’a (roughly translated as Islamic law) in the everyday lives of Muslims. Proposals to ban shari’a, adopted across the United States and overseas, beg the question, “what is shari’a?” Varied individual Mulsim responses to that question appear in this article. Research is based on two years of fieldwork and more than 100 semi-structured interviews conducted by a University of California-based research team. Themes of daily guidance, family, social justice, equality and inequality, Islamic living, excessively legalistic codes, and more emerge from the narratives of identity and of learning religious values and unlearning media-driven stereotypes.
Role of Cardiac Troponin Levels in Acute Heart Failure
Authors: Wettersten Nicholas ,   University of California San Diego, Maisel Alan ,   Veterans Affairs San Diego Healthcare System, La Jolla, CA, USA
Published: December 2015

Cardiac troponin (cTn) is the primary biomarker for the diagnosis of myocardial necrosis in an acute coronary syndrome (ACS). cTn levels can also be elevated in many other conditions, including heart failure, with significant prognostic value. An elevated cTn level can be found in both acute and chronic heart failure and its presence is believed to be due to multiple different pathophysiological processes. In acute decompensated heart failure (AHF), an elevated cTn level has been repeatedly shown to correlate with increased short- and long-term mortality and, to a lesser extent, readmission rates. These associations have been demonstrated with both I and T isoforms of cTn, as well as when troponin is measured with conventional assays or new high-sense assays. In multimarker models, cTn has repeatedly been found to be an independent predictive variable enhancing prognostic ability of the model. cTn is therefore an important biomarker for prognosis in AHF.