bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Managing coeliac disease in patients with diabetes
Authors: Leonard M. M. , Cureton P. A. , Fasano A.
Published: May 2014

The association between coeliac disease and type 1 diabetes has long been established. The combination of genetic susceptibility along with a potential role for gluten in the pathogenesis of autoimmunity makes defining gluten's role in type 1 diabetes extremely important. Evidence supporting the role of a gluten‐free diet to improve complications associated with type 1 diabetes is not robust. However there is evidence to support improved growth, bone density and potentially the prevention of additional autoimmune diseases in patients with coeliac disease and type 1 diabetes. The gluten free diet is expensive and challenging to adhere to in people already on a modified diet. Early identification of those who have coeliac disease and would benefit from a gluten‐free diet is of utmost importance to prevent complications associated with type 1 diabetes and coeliac disease.
Seizures in fetal alcohol spectrum disorders: Evaluation of clinical, electroencephalographic, and neuroradiologic features in a pediatric case series
Authors: Nicita Francesco , Verrotti Alberto , Pruna Dario , Striano Pasquale , Capovilla Giuseppe , Savasta Salvatore , Spartà Maria Valentina , Parisi Pasquale , Parlapiano Giovanni , Tarani Luigi , Spalice Alberto
Published: May 2014

Seizures are observed with a frequency of 3–21% in children with fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASD). However, clinical, neuroradiologic, and electroencephalography (EEG) features are poorly described. In this study, 13 patients with FASD and epilepsy or seizures were identified retrospectively from the databases of seven Italian pediatric neurology divisions. Eleven children were affected by epilepsy, and two had at least one documented seizure. Both generalized and focal seizures were observed. EEG showed diffuse or focal epileptic activity; two children developed electric status epilepticus during sleep (ESES). Structural brain anomalies, including polymicrogyria, nodular heterotopia, atrophy, and Arnold‐Chiari type 1 malformation, were discovered in almost 50% of patients. Control of seizures was not difficult to obtain in 11 cases; one patient showed pharmacoresistant epilepsy. EEG and clinical follow‐up are recommended in children with FASD and epilepsy, since severe conditions requiring aggressive treatment, such as in ESES, may develop. Neuroradiological evaluation is warranted because several types of brain anomalies could be associated with maternal alcohol consumption during pregnancy.

A PowerPoint slide summarizing this article is available for download in the Supporting Information section here.
Extraoperative neurostimulation mapping: Results from an international survey of epilepsy surgery programs
Authors: Hamberger Marla J. , Williams Alicia C. , Schevon Catherine A.
Published: May 2014

Objective

Extraoperative electrical stimulation mapping (ESM) to identify functional cortex is performed prior to neurosurgical resection at epilepsy surgery programs worldwide. However, the procedure remains unstandardized, with no established clinical guidelines. We sought to determine the current range in ESM practice parameters across established epilepsy surgery centers.

Methods

We developed and distributed a 31‐question survey to 220 epilepsy centers worldwide regarding current practice parameters of ESM. Questions addressed preoperative assessment, technical stimulation parameters, language testing protocols, criteria for identification of positive or negative functional sites, management of mapping complications, and postoperative functional outcome.

Results

Survey responses were obtained from 56 centers. These revealed marked practice variability in virtually all aspects of the ESM procedure. These aspects included critical procedure components such as electrical stimulation settings, the types of language functions tested, the operational definition of a language error, size of surgical resection margin, cortical locations mapped for language, testing in the presence of afterdischarges, and medical management of mapping complications. Forty‐one percent of centers reported at least one persistent adverse language outcome despite preserving all eloquent sites defined by their stimulation mapping procedure.

Significance

The striking variations in practice across centers are likely to influence mapping results, which directly affect the boundaries of cortical resection and, consequently, might worsen either seizure or functional outcomes. Clearly, adverse functional outcomes occur despite mapping procedures that were perceived to be adequate. Investigation of critical technical and procedural aspects of stimulation mapping is warranted, with the ultimate goal of establishing empirically based practice guidelines to improve the safety and efficacy of ESM and resective epilepsy surgery.

A PowerPoint slide summarizing this article is available for download in the Supporting Information section here.
Using scenarios to project the changing profitability of fisheries under climate change
Authors: Jones Miranda C , Dye Stephen R , Pinnegar John K , Warren Rachel , Cheung William W L
Published: May 2014

Over‐exploitation and economic underperformance are widespread in the world's fisheries. Global climate change is further affecting the distribution of marine species, raising concern for the persistence of biodiversity and presenting additional challenges to fisheries management. However, few studies have attempted to extend bioclimatic projections to assess the socio‐economic impacts of climate‐induced range shifts. This study investigates the potential implications of changes in relative environmental suitability and fisheries catch potential on UK fisheries by linking species distribution modelling with cost‐benefit analyses. We develop scenarios and apply a multimodel approach to explore the economic sensitivity of UK fisheries and key sources of uncertainty in the modelling procedure. We projected changes in maximum potential catch of key species and the resulting responses in terms of net present value (NPV) over a 45‐year period under scenarios of change in fuel price, discount rate and government subsidies. Results suggest that total maximum potential catch will decrease within the UK EEZ by 2050, resulting in a median decrease in NPV of 10%. This value decreases further when trends of fuel price change are extrapolated into the future, becoming negative when capacity‐enhancing subsidies are removed. Despite the variation in predictions from alternative models and data input, the direction of change in NPV is robust. This study highlights key factors influencing future profitability of UK fisheries and the importance of enhancing adaptive capacity in UK fisheries.
Residence time, expansion toward the equator in the invaded range and native range size matter to climatic niche shifts in non‐native species
Authors: Li Yiming , Liu Xuan , Li Xianping , Petitpierre Blaise , Guisan Antoine
Published: May 2014

Aim

Identifying climatic niche shifts and their drivers is important for the accurate prediction of the risk of biological invasions. The niches of non‐native plants and birds have recently been assessed in large‐scale multispecies studies, but such large‐scale tests are lacking for non‐native reptiles and amphibians (herpetofauna). Furthermore, little is known about the factors that contribute to niche shifts when they occur. Based on the occurrence of 71 reptile and amphibian species, we compared native and non‐native realized niches in 101 invaded ranges at a global scale and identified the factors that affect niche shifts.

Location

Global except the Antarctic.

Methods

We assessed climatic niche dynamics in a gridded environmental space that allowed niche overlap and expansion into climatic conditions not colonized by the species in their native range to be quantified. We analysed the factors that affect niche shifts using a model‐averaging approach, based on generalized linear mixed‐effects models.

Results

Approximately 57% of the invaded ranges (amphibians, 51%; reptiles, 61%) showed niche shifts (≥ 10% expansion in the realized climatic niche). Island endemics, species introduced to Oceania and invaded ranges outside the native biogeographical realm all showed a higher proportion of niche shifts. Niche shifts were more likely for species that had smaller native range sizes, were introduced earlier into a new range or invaded areas located at lower latitudes than the native range.

Main conclusions

 The proportion of niche shifts for non‐native herpetofauna was higher than those for Holarctic non‐native plants and European non‐native birds. The ‘climate‐matching hypothesis’ should be used with caution for species undergoing niche shifts, because it could underestimate the risk of their establishment.
The power of language on patient‐centredness: linguistic devices in the dietetic notes of patient records
Authors: Lövestam Elin , Fjellström Christina , Koochek Afsaneh , Andersson Agneta
Published: May 2014

In this paper, 30 notes written bySwedish dietitians in patient records are analysed, inspired by Critical Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis. Focusing on linguistic devices such as agency sources and evidential markers, we describe how patients are constantly referred to only in terms of the institutional patient role, or not referred to at all, through different techniques such as nominalization and passive verbs. The dietitians writing the notes are even more absent from the text, as they almost never refer to themselves as persons in the dietetic notes. There is a stated ambition in health care to provide patient‐centred care and a collaborative patient‐clinician relationship. However, we suggest that there might be a need for more person‐centred language in dietetics.
A quality improvement assessment of multiple, concurrent flow cytometry analyses at a tertiary care center
Authors: Karnes H. E. , Frater J. L.
Published: May 2014

Introduction

The utility of flow cytometry (FC) in diagnosis and staging of hematologic malignancy is controversial. Often, multiple specimens from the same patient are processed concurrently forFCanalyses, alongside tissue for histomorphologic diagnosis.

Methods

To assess the diagnostic utility of multiple, concurrentFCanalyses, a 10‐year retrospective review of cases with ≥2 concurrent specimens (from the same patient) submitted forFCwas conducted. Light microscopic (LM) diagnoses were compared toFCfindings, and the contribution ofFCresults to final diagnoses was examined.

Results

Of 4058 specimens (predominantly lymph nodes, bone marrows, and oropharyngeal tissues) submitted forFCanalyses, 129 (3.2%) represented cases with multiple (average: 2.19) concurrentFCanalyses. All were accompanied by tissues and/or aspirates forLMexamination. In 115 (89.1%) cases, multipleFCanalyses were performed prior to morphologic examination. In 87.0% of those cases, ≥1FCresult(s) aligned withLMfindings. In 15 (13.0%) cases whereFCresults differed from morphologic diagnoses, 86.7% (13/15) failed to detect an abnormal cell population byFCin the presence of a hematologic malignancy byLM. In one case (0.9%),FCdetected a lymphoma, without morphologic evidence byLM.

Conclusions

Overall, multipartFCfailed to demonstrate a significant contribution in initial diagnoses of hematologic malignancies compared with analysis of a single specimen.
Health‐care assistants, aspiration, frustration and job satisfaction in the workplace
Authors: Clark Ian
Published: May 2014

This paper focuses on health‐care assistants as individuals and a sectional group in terms of how they experience the NHS modernisation and skill mix agenda. Empirical material focuses on aspiration, frustration and job satisfaction. Findings report highly sectional work groups which promote populist coping strategies.
Advanced Manufacturing Technologies: Work Organisation and Social Relations Crystallised
Authors: Webster Juliet
Published: May 2014

This paper considers the ways in which technologies are underpinned by patterns of work organisation and power relations in manufacturing industry. It takes as its starting point the emergence of manufacturing technologies during the Industrial Revolution, showing how these were imbued with the methods of factory organisation which were then gaining currency - the visions of industrial entrepreneurs, engineers and political economists. Technologies have continued to be associated with particular patterns of work organisation, both actual and envisioned. The major concern of the paper is with a contemporary manufacturing technology, Computer-Aided Production Management (CAPM). It shows how CAPM has developed according to the dominant templates of manufacturing organisation - first American and now Japanese.

It charts the growth of the ‘enterprise culture’ in the West — a discourse which stresses flexibility and prescribes production methods, such as just-in-time, which mimic those of the Japanese. It looks at the promotion of CAPM as a technology which can assist in this process and at the incorporation within CAPM of facilities for doing so. Finally, the paper shows that these manufacturing agendas are not easily implemented. CAPM user organisations find the technology inappropriate to their existing patterns of work, and so modify systems to fit these. CAPM technology therefore embodies patterns of work organisation at several levels. It incorporates both the dreams and programmes for work organisation which are promoted by the industrially powerful at anyone time, and the actual practices of work organisation which pertain in the sphere of use.
Cyberpunks in Cyberspace: The Politics of Subjectivity in the Computer Age
Authors: Edwards Paul N.
Published: May 2014

In the Cold War, Americans constructed the political world as a closed system of ideological conflict. Computers were developed to support a closed-world discourse with centralized, computerized military command and control, embodied in Vietnam-era systems and Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative. Simultaneously, at the level of individual minds, a cyborg discourse about intelligent machines linked the microworlds constituted by computer programs to human thought processes. Popular science fiction of the 1980s, such as the Star Wars film trilogy, Neuromancer, and The Terminator merged closed-world political themes, such as military computing and global conflict, with cyborg discourse about machine subjectivity and virtual space. This political history provides a critical counterpoint to cyberpunks' overenthusiastic embrace of cyberspace.
Into the Heart of Irony: Ethnographic Exhibitions and the Politics of Difference
Authors: Riegel Henrietta
Published: May 2014

The paper discusses the ‘western’ museum practices of representing culture within a dominant visual metaphor as an inherently political act which separates those who view the exhibit from those who are on display. The act of viewing is related to the acts of ordering, defining and representing according to the categories of the ‘viewing’ culture, and serves to deny shared space and time occupied by the representing and represented cultures, a process related to the anthropological construction of ethnographic distance in ethnographic texts. Two recent Canadian exhibitions which attempt to use irony to subvert traditional exhibit practices are analysed: Into the Heart of Africa and Fluffs and Feathers. Into the Heart of Africa attempted to mount a postmodern critique of colonial collecting practices, but its one-sided use of irony reproduced, for many visitors, the colonial relations of power that made it possible for one group to dominate another. The narrative structure of the exhibit was predicated on a relation of difference. Fluffs and Feathers, on the other hand, directly challenged the white visitor's power to view and define native peoples, by dialogically inviting visitors to try on alternate subject positions that help to fracture essentialist notions of self and culture. Thus irony, a risky trope, can lead to very different results in museum exhibitions depending on who it is aimed at and who does the aiming.
Seeing through Solidity: A Feminist Perspective on Museums
Authors: Porter Gaby
Published: May 2014

Applying poststructuralist and feminist theory to museums, this chapter traces the gendered relations of representation in museums. The author takes the relation of text, author and reader from poststructuralist studies and translates these to the museum forms of exhibition, curator and visitor. She examines the relations between men and women, masculine and feminine as they are constituted in museums, tracing a series of gendered, hierarchical oppositions. These are central to the ways in which museums organize their identity, space, collections and exhibitions to make meanings. She concludes that the roles of women as they are represented are relatively passive, shallow, undeveloped, muted and closed; the roles of men are, in contrast, relatively active, deep, highly developed, fully pronounced and open. Together, these provide a thread for the museums in the stories and narratives they construct. The author addresses the challenge of applying abstract and theoretical ‘readings’ to museums – where the collections appear to resist such readings through their concrete and solid presence, and where the prevailing professional culture is empirical and anti-theoretical. This challenge was also her own, as a museum worker struggling to develop a theoretical critique. Finally, she describes exhibitions in Britain and northern Europe which are more productive, diverse and open to re-reading. They are interdisciplinary and irreverent, breaking new ground in museum exhibition-making, developing new methods, forms of expression and themes.
Becoming a Consumer of Care: Developing a Sociological Account of the ‘New Community Care’
Authors: Baldock John , Ungerson Clare
Published: May 2014

The chapter evaluates the reformed arrangements for the management and delivery of social care following the NHS and Community Care Act 1990 using a framework drawn from economic sociology. Research findings describing how a group of newly disabled older people fared as consumers of the services are summarized. An explanatory account is given drawing upon concepts and theory to be found in the growing literature on the sociology of economic life, particularly studies of consumption. The central conclusion is that it is difficult to account for the effects of the recent reforms on community care consumers without situating them within a context of existing social relations and institutions. If the reforms are to succeed they must change not just the practical mechanics of service funding and delivery but deeply embedded values and behavioural norms.
Production, Disbursement and Consumption: The Modes and Modalities of Goods and Services
Authors: Dowding Keith , Dunleavy Patrick
Published: May 2014

Two completely separate literatures have analysed government involvement in consumption; the collective consumption stream in urban studies and neo-classical economics' account of public goods. Both traditions have significantly converged in recent years, especially in recognizing a differentiated spectrum of provision in place of previous dichotomous categories. Collective consumption theories have poorly explained consumption process trends, but captured many of the key social and political causes of change. Public goods theories have underpinned public policy shifts, and thus been congruent with the direction of change, but poorly explained the social and political dynamics involved. An integrated theory bridging both approaches should better explain the relative autonomy of consumption processes.
Producing Consumption: Women and the Making of Credit Markets
Authors: Ford Janet , Rowlingson Karen
Published: May 2014

The importance of credit to low-income households is widely recognized, providing a mechanism for managing poverty. In such households women are generally the money-managers, and as such they are significant consumers of credit. Much less attention has been paid, however, to the role that women play in creating and maintaining some credit markets, thereby becoming central to a key means of consumption. Using data from two recent qualitative studies, one on moneylending and one concerned with mail order (both forms of credit widely used in low-income communities), the paper will explore processes whereby access to credit comes to be largely in the hands on women and the continuing importance of gender in the recruitment of customers and maintenance of credit markets. The paper will suggest that the role of credit provider is a consequence of women's economic vulnerability and domestic responsibilities but that the structure and process of credit provision has the potential to reinforce the providers' economic hardship and financial distress. Central to these outcomes is the need to both ‘risk and trust’ in order to develop and maintain the market and thereby earn. The paper will examine how risking and trusting are undertaken and the consequences of a failure of trust for credit providers.
The Enigma of Christmas: Symbolic Violence, Compliant Subjects and the Flow of English Kinship
Authors: Werbner Pnina
Published: May 2014

Adopting a structural position, this chapter argues against the view of Christmas as an orgy of self-indulgent, hedonistic personal consumption. Instead, drawing on the myths and traditions of Father Christmas, the Nativity and Christmas Pantomime enacted in England every Christmas, it elaborates the notion of a hierarchical gift economy in which the directionality of Christmas gifting coincides with the flows of obligation, nurture and sentiment animating English kinship. Such unilateral gifting—from old to young and from rich to poor—serves to legitimize hierarchical structures of power by converting them into ‘soft’ domination through symbolic violence, thus creating compliant subjects—individuals who, as members of families, corporate organizations and the ‘family’ of the nation, are dialogically made through the imaginings of significant others. The simultaneity of millions of acts of consumptive giving each Christmas reproduces the imagined community of the nation, while excluding ethnic and religious minorities who, in effect, redefine themselves as internal stranger-citizens by their non-participation in this annual sacrificial potlatch.
Consuming the Past
Authors: Bagnall Gaynor
Published: May 2014

This chapter reports preliminary findings from case studies of two heritage-based sites in north west England: Wigan Pier and The Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester. The research has involved examining both the production and consumption processes at work at these sites. The author focuses here on the area of consumption and presents data, collected in interviews with visitors to the two sites which suggest that visitors use emotional, imaginary and bodily maps to make sense of the past. The authenticity of the experience is sustained by an ‘emotional realism’ which enables and enhances the process of consumption. The author also argues that the manner in which these sites are consumed supplies one way of understanding the definitions and significance of the concept of heritage articulated by the visitors.
Materiality: Juggling Sameness and Difference
Authors: Dugdale Anni
Published: May 2014

Many studies of controversy tell stories of convergence, of movement from difference to sameness, of a narrowing from many competing versions to a single stabilised ‘reality’. This paper explores a case of science policymaking about IUDs in Australia. What begins in controversy ends with a single view of the IUD—a view presented in a consumer information leaflet. But surprisingly, what is found is that this stabilisation of a singularity depends on multiplicity. The negotiation of a compromise involves the making of a centred knowing position, an object—the IUD, and a consumer choice. But this is only made possible by the proliferation of difference: the decentring of the knowing subject, the ‘doing’ of many different IUDs, and the dispersion of choice from the head of the consumer across time and space. Closure then becomes a very different story, a story of oscillation between sameness and difference, of doing singularity and multiplicity together.
Staying True to the Laughter in Nigerian Classrooms
Authors: Verran Helen
Published: May 2014

Growing from my years as a lecturer in a Nigerian university in the early 1980s, the stories which begin this paper evoke puzzling, small moments in the life of contemporary Nigerian (Yoruba) classrooms, particularly in the teaching of mathematics and science. Conventional wisdom would pass these by as irrational glitches, yet because they challenged my assumptions about numbers, they shook me, and this effect was magnified because no one else seemed to feel anything amiss. These moments of disconcertment sometimes spontaneously expressed themselves in an up-welling laughter. In responding to the stories I argue that keeping the disconcertment is important, it alerts us that here is an occasion for telling stories which might generate new possibilities for answering moral questions of how to live. I go on to juxtapose three accounts of quantifying: a universalist account; a relativist account; and finally an account of quantifying as realized through embodied routines and repetitions. We can understand the last as a version of an ‘actor network’ account. I argue that the problem with the universalist and relativist accounts of quantifying is that they explain away the disconcertment in distributing praise and blame and legislating answers to the question ‘How should we live?'. An embodied account of quantifying brings with it the possibility of in/foresightful stories and showing how the truths which numbers make, came to be.
Actor-Network Theory—The Market Test
Authors: Callon Michel
Published: May 2014

It is often argued that ANT fails to offer a satisfactory theory of the actor which is allegedly endowed either with limitless power, or deprived of any room for manoeuvre at all. The aim of this paper is to show that the absence of a theory of the actor, when combined with the role attributed to non-humans in the description of action, is precisely one of the strengths of ANT that it is most important to preserve. This is because this combination makes it possible to explain the existence and the working of economic markets. Any particular market is the consequence of operations of disentanglement, framing, internalization and externalization. ANT makes it possible to explain these operations and the emergence of calculating agents. Homo economicus is neither a pure invention, nor an impoverished vision of a real person. It indeed exists, but is the consequence of a process in which economic science places an active role. The conclusion is that ANT has passed one of the most demanding tests: that of the market.
Language, Autonomy and National Identity in Catalonia
Authors: Hoffmann Charlotte
Published: May 2014

This chapter examines the role of language planning in the promotion of regional identity in Catalonia and discusses the factors that influence the sociolinguistic development of ‘Catalonia's own language’. Issues of bilingualism, devolution and democracy in Spain's largest autonomous region, where a sizeable proportion of the population is of non-Catalan origin, have a bearing on the sense of national (both Spanish and Catalan) identity. It is argued that the time has come for a reassessment of Catalonia's language policies.
A Community That Can Communicate? The Linguistic Factor in European Integration
Authors: Wright Sue
Published: May 2014

Language is an important but often neglected aspect of the political process, this chapter gives a brief overview of the main phases of the past thousand years of European history in terms of language choice and shift, showing how communities of communication developed in tandem with political power centres. This history reveals that all political associations develop the communication solutions which promote and serve their political ambition and that new ways of organising society are accompanied by new language practices. In this context it is unlikely that the European Union will prove an exception.

Europeanisation is not happening within a vacuum. Political power is also leaking away from state governments to relocate at global and regional level. The growing use of English as a global lingua franca and the renaissance of languages eclipsed in the period of nation building are further factors that affect the community of communication which is developing in Europe. Since the European project is developing in tandem with these other societal changes, the communication solutions it provokes will not be simple cause and effect relationships. Nonetheless, we can be sure that, if European integration progresses, new language practices will evolve to facilitate the circulation of information and ideas, the construction of democratic governance and individual access to centres of power. If they do not, then European integration will find itself halted at the level of a common market and a technocratic bureaucracy.
The European Public Sphere and the Deficit of Democracy
Authors: Grundmann Reiner
Published: May 2014

This chapter explores a threefold European deficit: a democratic deficit, a deficit in European identity, and a deficit in the European public sphere. It argues that although interests such as social movements have most leverage at the national level, since this is the level at which the media are largely organised, the emergence of distinctively ‘European’ issues such as BSE means that national cycles of media attention are becoming increasingly synchronised. This makes it more likely that a homogenisation of issues and opinion will occur at the European level. This would favour the eventual emergence of a supranational identity. The creation of a European public sphere through the synchronisation and homogenisation of cycles of media attention on contentious ‘European’ issues is a more realistic prospect than direct attempts to create a ‘new European’ identity through public education or the legal system.
Extending Ethnolinguistic Democracy in Europe: The Case of Wales
Authors: May Stephen
Published: May 2014

The recent establishment of political devolution in Scotland and Wales would appear to herald far greater national, and eventually regional autonomy within a British state long dominated by England. However, support for devolution in Wales remains, at best, ambivalent; in contrast to Scotland where devolution is far more strongly supported. Much of this can be explained by the fact that Wales, unlike Scotland, is almost indistinguishable from England with respect to its institutional structure. As such, Wales has historically sought a distinctive identity from England principally through the promotion and retention of Welsh language and culture within rather than outside these shared institutional arrangements. This, in turn, has led in recent years to a significantly increased role for the Welsh language in the public domain in Wales, after centuries of proscription, and the emergence of a nascent Welsh bilingual state. The prospect of greater self-government is likely to solidify these developments. However, it can be argued that the contribution of Wales is most significant here not as an example of political devolution but as a model of ethnolinguistic democracy. In this latter respect, Wales provides us with a democratic model that specifically accommodates and promotes bilingualism and minority language rights while, in so doing, redefining the traditional role of language(s) in the nation-state. Both these aspects offer important lessons for the rest of Europe's nation-states which, despite moves to greater political devolution and regionalism, often remain reluctant to protect, let alone foster the minority languages still spoken within their borders.
Making Europe—Processes of Europe-Formation since 1945
Authors: Smith Dennis
Published: May 2014

Dennis Smith argues that the development of the European polity that has become the European Union has been shaped by social processes similar in many respects to those analysed by Norbert Elias in The Court Society and The Civilizing Process. However, these processes have occurred at the supra-state level whereas Elias described them as they occurred at the level of the developing national state, especially during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. During the 1940s and 1950s the United States played a key role in pacifying the European nations and imposing a framework of rules for the conduct of their economic and diplomatic affairs. States in western Europe were increasingly locked into tight bonds of interdependence. This movement towards integration was complemented by the disembedding of regions and large businesses from their close ties to the national state; they became ‘Europeanised’. Brussels became Europe's Versailles, a place where the courtier's skills were employed by the lobbyist. It is suggested that just as France represented, in Elias's eyes, a vanguard society within Europe in respect of the civilising process at the level of the national society, the European Union may play such a role globally in respect of developments at the supra-state level.
Democracy in Eastern Europe as a Civilising Process
Authors: Wydra Harald
Published: May 2014

In this chapter, Harald Wydra argues that the rise of democracy in Eastern Europe has been a long-term social process interwoven with the collapse of communism whose origins are long before 1989. He challenges the vision of East and West as two isolated blocs that prevailed in the 1950s and the assumption of gradual convergence that became widespread in the 1970s and 1980s. His main focus is upon the East where, he believes, dissident movements created a ‘second reality’, undermining the myths propounded by the official communist establishment. He argues that there was an increase in self-restraint on the part of the communist state accompanied by the growth of civil society and non-violent political opposition. The East experienced a feeling of ‘unrequited love’ in its relationship to the West. Dissidents took their standards and aspirations from Western experience but found themselves largely ignored by the West. Since 1989, democratisation has increased the influence of western models and standards but it has also led to a breakdown of self-restraint and an upsurge of violence.
Writing Utopia
Authors: Lightfoot Geoff , Lilley Simon
Published: May 2014

Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from. (AGENT SMITH, computer simulacrum: Wachowski & Wachowski, 1999)1
The Two Traditions in the Sociology of Emotions
Authors: Shilling Chris
Published: May 2014

The sociology of emotions is an established specialism within the discipline and its products have become increasingly visible parts of the sociological landscape since the late 1970s. This specialism has also demonstrated, at least to its own satisfaction, the importance of emotions for social action and order, and for those related moral issues concerned with self-determined and other-oriented action. Paradoxically, however, the relationship between the sociology of emotions and mainstream sociology remains relatively cool. Emotional issues are still portrayed in many general accounts of the discipline as a luxurious curiosity that properly resides on the outer reaches of the sociological imagination. Just as unfortunately, certain sociologists of emotions have accused the foundations of the discipline of neglecting emotional issues, and have sometimes excluded classical theorists from their discussions.

This chapter argues that emotional phenomena occupy an important place in sociology's heritage which has yet to be explicated fully by the sub-discipline. The subject of emotions, like the closely related subject of the body, may fade from various classical writings. Nevertheless, the major traditions of sociological theory developed particular orientations towards the social and moral dimensions of emotional phenomena. I begin by examining the relevance of emotions to the context out of which the discipline emerged, and then focus on how the major theorists of order (Comte and Durkheim) and (inter)action (Simmel and Weber) conceptualized emotional phenomena. The chapter concludes with a brief assessment of Parsons's contribution, and suggests that his analysis of the religious foundations of instrumental activism provides a provocative account of the relationship between values, emotions and personality that can usefully be built on.
Secure States: Towards a Political Sociology of Emotion
Authors: Berezin Mabel
Published: May 2014

Emotion and politics is the study of the non-cognitive core of politics. Emotion and politics presents its own special set of difficulties. First, emotions are experienced individually but politics is by definition a collective phenomena. This means that the social analyst has to attempt to understand how an individual micro-level instinct, an emotion, contributes to collective macro-level processes and outcomes. Second, emotions are ontologically in the moment. Emotions and sound have similar properties. Music or noise either soothes or jars the central nervous system. Emotions too affect the central nervous system and even social scientists have begun to acknowledge the relevance of neurobiology to their studies. The physicality of emotion suggests that a robust analysis of emotion demands a multi-disciplinary approach, and not that emotions are outside of the purview of the social sciences. This chapter begins from the position that much theoretical, analytic and empirical work remains to be done in the study of politics and emotions. It represents a first attempt to explore, from multiple angles, how emotions matter to politics. The chapter proceeds on four levels: first, it develops the concepts secure state and community of feeling as analytic frames that unite politics and emotion; second, it explores how emotions are embedded in political institutions; third, it takes up the issue of emotion and collective action; and lastly, it suggests the conceptual issues that a political sociology of emotions might address.
Complex Emotions: Relations, Feelings and Images in Emotional Experience
Authors: Burkitt Ian
Published: May 2014

In this chapter I argue that emotions are experienced primarily as structures of feeling which give meaning to relational experience. These feelings can be articulated through speech genres or discourses which give them form as specific emotions that have a place in the emotional vocabulary of a culture. Thus, I seek to distinguish between feeling and thought and attempt to trace the complex process through which feelings become emotions. This involves a reconsideration of the relation between body and thought, and the material and the ideal, as it appears in the work of various thinkers. Central to this is the role of image-schemata (Johnson, 1987) that mediate between the recurring relational patterns of bodily activity in the world, which makes experience meaningful, and the symbolic structures of the social group that can be used to articulate bodily feelings metaphorically. Feelings and emotions, then, while in a complex relationship to one another, are not always identical: they can in fact diverge, giving rise to the ambiguous nature of much emotional experience. Finally, all of this is considered in the light of power relations and the way that emotional dynamics play a central role in power.

Anglo-Saxons who are uncomfortable with the idea that feelings and emotions are the outward signs of precise and complex algorithms usually have to be told that these matters, the relationship between the self and others, and the relationship between self and environment, are, in fact, the subject matter of what are called ‘feelings’— love, hate, fear, confidence, anxiety, hostility, etc. It is unfortunate that these abstractions referring to patterns of relationship have received names, which are usually handled in ways that assume that the ‘feelings’ are mainly characterized by quantity rather than by precise pattern. This is one of the nonsensical contributions of psychology to a distorted epistemology (Bateson, 1973: 113).
Foraging strategy of the little auk Alle alle throughout breeding season – switch from unimodal to bimodal pattern
Authors: Jakubas Dariusz , Wojczulanis‐Jakubas Katarzyna , Iliszko Lech , Darecki Mirosław , Stempniewicz Lech
Published: May 2014

Energy and time allocation differs between incubation and chick‐rearing periods, which may lead to an adjustment in the foraging behaviour of parent birds. Here, we investigated the foraging behaviour of a small alcid, the little auk Alle alle during incubation and compared it with the chick‐rearing period in West Spitsbergen, using the miniature GPS (in Hornsund) and temperature loggers (in Magdalenefjorden). GPS‐tracking of 11 individuals revealed that during incubation little auks foraged 8–55 (median 46) km from the colony covering 19–239 (median 120) km during one foraging trip. Distance from the colony to foraging areas was similar during incubation and chick‐rearing period. During incubation 89% of foraging positions were located in the zone over shallower parts of the shelf (isobaths up to 200–300 m) with sea surface temperature below 2.5°C. Those environmental conditions are preferred by Arctic zooplankton community. Thus, little auks in the Hornsund area restrict their foraging (both during the incubation and chick‐rearing period) to the area under influence of cold, Arctic‐origin water masses where its most preferred prey, copepod Calanus glacialis is most abundant. The temperature logger data (from 4 individuals) indicate that in contrast to the chick‐rearing period, when parent birds alternated short and long trips, during the incubation they performed only long trips. Adopting such a flexible foraging strategy allows little auks to alter their foraging strategy to meet different energy and time demands during the two main stages of the breeding.
Extra‐pair paternity in relation to breeding synchrony in ground tits: an individual‐based approach
Authors: Wang Chen , Lu Xin
Published: May 2014

Previous studies thought that at the within‐population level, whether a female bird engages in extra‐pair (EP) mating depends on how synchronous she is in breeding time with all other females around her, presumably the synchronization might affect the female's opportunities to meet potential EP sires who socially pair with these other females. However, when females or males are choosy about EP partners and mate with one EP individual only, the probability of EP mating may be most influenced by breeding synchrony between the EP partners. In such a case, the ‘individual‐level’ synchrony should act to determine EP mating success. We test this idea in a socially monogamous passerine, the ground tit Parus humilis. Fifty‐five out of 172 sampled females produced 122 EP offspring, each mating with one EP sire in most cases (92%), usually her intermediately‐related kin. As expected, the broader‐scale synchrony did not predict the probability of EP paternity but the individual‐level did, for females having EP offspring bred more synchronously with their EP than with their nearest neighbors, and females without EP offspring were least synchronous with their nearest neighbors. We argue that this kind of individual‐based approaches will shine light on the synchrony‐EP mating relationship in birds.
For every complex problem, there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong
Authors: Sturmberg Joachim , Topolski Stefan
Published: May 2014

Rationale, Method

This essay examines the notions of knowledge, truth and certainty as they apply to medical research and patient care. The human body does not behave in mechanistic but rather complex adaptive ways; thus, its behaviour to challenges is non‐deterministic. This insight has important ramifications for experimental studies in health care and their statistical interrogation that are described in detail.

Results and Conclusions

Four implications are highlighted: one, there is an urgent need to develop a greater awareness of uncertainties and how to respond to them in clinical practice, namely, what is important and what is not in the context of this patient; two, there is an equally urgent need for health professionals to understand some basic statistical terms and their meanings, specifically absolute risk, its reciprocal, numbers needed to treat and its inverse, index of therapeutic impotence, as well as seeking out the effect size of an intervention rather than blindly accepting P‐values; three, there is an urgent need to accurately present the known in comprehensible ways through the use of visual tools; and four, there is a need to overcome the perception, that errors of commission are less troublesome than errors of omission as neither's consequences are predictable.
Application of system thinking concepts in health system strengthening in low‐income settings: a proposed conceptual framework for the evaluation of a complex health system intervention: the case of the BHOMA intervention in Zambia
Authors: Mutale Wilbroad , Balabanova Dina , Chintu Namwinga , Mwanamwenge Margaret Tembo , Ayles Helen
Published: May 2014

Background

The current drive to strengthen health systems provides an opportunity to develop new strategies that will enable countries to achieve targets for millennium development goals. In this paper, we present a proposed framework for evaluating a new health system strengthening intervention in Zambia known as Better Health Outcomes through Mentoring and Assessment.

Approach

We briefly describe the intervention design and focus on the proposed evaluation approach through the lens of systems thinking.

Discussion

In this paper, we present a proposed framework to evaluate a complex health system intervention applying systems thinking concepts. We hope that lessons learnt from this process will help to adapt the intervention and limit unintended negative consequences while promoting positive effects. Emphasis will be paid to interaction and interdependence between health system building blocks, context and the community.
Observations of growth and postspawning survival of lumpfish Cyclopterus lumpus from mark‐recapture studies
Authors: Kasper J. M. , Bertelsen B. , Ólafsson H. G. , Holst J. C. , Sturlaugsson J. , Jónsson S. P.
Published: May 2014

Growth and postspawning survival of lumpfish Cyclopterus lumpus are described by mark‐recapture experiments using juveniles in offshore areas in the north‐east Atlantic Ocean and spawning adults in coastal Norway and Iceland. A female fish tagged as a juvenile and recaptured as an adult matured in a period of 18 months, providing the first observation on development in a wild C. lumpus. The von Bertalanffy growth function, fitted to data from recaptured fish, was used to estimate K and L∞ and recaptured fish spawning after a year at liberty indicated a postspawning survival of c. 10% in Iceland.