bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Leninist Reforms, Workplace Cleavages, and Teachers in the Chinese Cultural Revolution
Authors: U Eddy
Published: April 2008

Andrew Walder's “neo-traditional” image of Chinese socialism has profoundly shaped understanding of China before market reform. It has also influenced the broader debate on the nature of ‘actually existing socialisms.’ Walder argues that the Communist state dominated the industrial workforce through the institutionalization of organized dependence and clientelism in the workplace. State-appointed management tightly controlled access to goods, services, and positions and used these resources to reward cooperative workers and activists. Their actions created webs of clientelist relations but also a chasm on the shop floor, as ordinary workers resented the activists for acting against workers' general interest. But since ordinary workers could rarely obtain what they wanted beyond the factory, they, too, curried favors from factory officials. Walder observes that the growth of clientelist relations and personal ties within the industrial enterprise dampened workers' capacity for collective resistance and their pursuit of their personal welfare further depoliticized the working class. As a result, workers exhibited “a stable pattern of tacit acceptance and active cooperation” toward Communist political rule.
Islamist Critique in Modern Turkey: Hermeneutics, Tradition, Genealogy
Authors: Silverstein Brian
Published: April 2008

What is the status of Islamic traditions of discourse and practice in Turkey as it is ever more self-consciously heir to the Islamic heritage of the Ottoman Empire, and yet has seen such dramatic social, economic, and political transformation during the last two centuries? In recent years a considerable and ever-increasing proportion of scholarly and popular effort has been directed on the part of self-identifying Islamist (İslâmcı) writers in Turkey toward addressing these issues by way of genealogies of contemporary social forms and practices—critical histories of the present. Simultaneously, methodological debates about the nature of sources and interpretation have begun to appear with increasing regularity in monographs, journals, and even dailies. These two concerns with the status of the present and correct method are not solely the concern of Islamist writers in Turkey; indeed, they are arguably the prevailing mode of history and social science writing in Turkey today. As we shall see, informing both of these currents is an interrogation of the grounds from which authoritative, normative discourses on Islamic practice can be elaborated in the wake of empire and sovereign reform on the near-margin of industrial capitalism. At stake are not only discourses, or ‘representations’ of Islamic tradition. Like other traditions, central to Islam is the discursive elaboration of normative judgments about correct practice; indeed, these discursive elaborations are important Islamic practices. The critical work currently flourishing in Turkey is thus conceived by its practitioners as an important form of contribution to the elaboration of Islamic traditions and entails important diagnoses of the status of enabling conditions for Islamic practice in the contemporary world. This article argues that attending to these interrogations indicates how the study of changes in Islamic discourse and practice in Turkey has profound implications for the issues of power and agency in modernity and Islam more broadly. Particularly in the context of Turkey's intensified juridical, economic, and political restructuring in dialogue with the European Community, an understanding of these currents in the Islamic discursive culture of Turkey offers insight into the oft-commented but poorly understood structure of the relationship between Turkey, Europe, and modernity.
Hybridity, Vacuity, and Blockage: Visions of Chaos from Anthropological Theory, Island Melanesia, and Central Africa
Authors: Scott Michael W.
Published: April 2008

Marshall Sahlins (1996) argues that anthropology has been the bearer of a “bourgeoisified” Judeo-Christian cosmology according to which an original state of chaos, akin to the Hobbesian state of nature, gives way to the order of society or the state. The central conundrum that this anthropology has sought to explain is how fallen and needy individuals come together in cooperative organization. Sahlins furthermore contends that, by universalizing this problematic as the key to interpreting human societies and social action, anthropology has subverted its attempts at cross-cultural understanding. My aim in this paper is to draw attention to a growing commitment within anthropology to a different cosmological paradigm with an inverse structure. Today, the elevation of ethnic and cultural hybridity as both an approximate return to primordial human unity and an emancipatory moral high ground renders socio-cultural difference at once the presumed telos of many social practices and a scandal to be overcome. Whereas the older anthropological cosmology uncovered by Sahlins posited progress from atomistic privation to social solidarity, this new cosmology posits the politically motivated splintering of essential human unity by the construction of ethnicity and culture. Although I iterate the caution that this emergent paradigm too has the potential to reproduce itself as ethnography, I emphasize as more important its promising and troubling potential to revalorize anthropological thinking on cosmology. Specifically, ownership of the meta-cosmology encoded in hybridity theory ought to prompt anthropologists to question our recently acquired aversion to the idea that cosmologies inform human action. At the same time, however, we need to scrutinize our fascination with hybridity for signs of an unintentionally Nietzschean glorification of dissolution or aestheticization of periodic destruction as the necessary foundation for political and moral renovation.
Re-Locating Gender in Latin America.A Review Essay
Authors: Dehart Monica
Published: April 2008

What role do specific geographic, political, and historical contexts play in how gendered identities and practices are mobilized to negotiate larger structures of inequality? Through innovative efforts to come to terms with the very contingent and situated nature of gender formation, four recent books reconfirm the important contributions of gender studies of Latin America to feminist studies in general. These texts apply unique methods of analysis to investigate gender's production in specific places and moments, thus producing new insights into how gender is articulated within particular translocal configurations of power. In particular, these texts ask: How does biography inform social activism against global neoliberal economic adjustments? How do discourses on sex provide the foundation for gendered forms of modern national culture and social control? How do local production strategies engender neoliberal labor in new ways? Through questions like these, the texts push us to consider gender not as a ubiquitous concept that can be taken for granted, but rather as a varied and relational process grounded in distinct material and historical conditions.
Editorial Foreword
Authors: Trautmann Thomas R.
Published: April 2008

DISPLACED PERSONS Territorial states create population displacements, if only by drawing boundaries. The longing that links displaced peoples and the places to which they seek to return is a potent force in history. The first two essays concern themselves with situations of return and re-emplacement, the first in Germany, the second in Rwanda.
Toward a History of Brazil's “Cordial Racism”: Race Beyond Liberalism
Authors: Owensby Brian
Published: April 2008

As anyone who has tried knows, the central problem in thinking about race in Brazil is how to. The almost quantum-theory-like indeterminacy of the ways Brazilians of different skin colors interact has exercised imaginations for decades, fromfin-de-sièclescientific racists, to the eugenists of the 1920s, to interwar modernists who promoted the idea of racial democracy, to the Brazilian and later North American revisionists of the 1950s and beyond. The complexities of Brazilian race have not always been in the forefront of these debates. For much of the period up to the 1970s, scholars focused on debunking Brazil's vaunted myth of racial democracy—the national ideology claiming Brazil to be free of racial prejudice (Costa 1985). The effort was roundly successful. From this literature, we learned not only how wide a gap there has been between the ideal of racial democracy and the reality of racial and color prejudice in Brazil, but also the role elites have played in manipulating the myth to defuse racial and other social tensions (Hanchard 1994). Recently, some scholars have suggested that it is high time to look beyond the debunking agenda and take up once again the complexities of the Brazilian situation. Anthropologists have led the way, seeking to reveal “the range of contemporary understandings” of racial democracy and to explain something of its persistence as a tangible “dream” in the face of ongoing discrimination and prejudice in everyday Brazilian life (Sheriff 2001:8).
Jenny White. Islamist Mobilization in Turkey: A Study in Vernacular Politics. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002.
Authors: Özyürek Esra
Published: April 2008

After more than seventy years of secularist rule in Turkey, victory of the Islam-based Welfare Party in the mid-1990s came as a surprise to many political observers. Electoral support for religious party politics increased despite heavy pressures from the secular army and state officials. Based on over twenty years of ethnographic research in a low-income neighborhood in Istanbul, Jenny White's Islamist Mobilization in Turkey explores the basis of this support and the meaning it carries in the daily lives of people.
Peter Mark. “Portuguese” Style and Luso-African Identity: Precolonial Senegambia, Sixteenth-Nineteenth Centuries. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002.
Authors: Sweet James H.
Published: April 2008

Peter Mark's “Portuguese” Style is a welcome contribution to the growing literature on the history and development of Atlantic world cultures. In particular, Mark examines the evolution and proliferation of “Portuguese”-style domestic architecture, primarily in Senegambia, but also in other parts of the Portuguese colonial world, including Cape Verde and Brazil. For Mark, “Portuguese”-style is an amalgamation of Jola and Manding architectural forms, and to a lesser extent, those of the Portuguese. This architectural style—sun-dried brick houses, rectangular in shape, with whitewashed walls, and a continuous veranda or vestibule at the entry—was most closely associated with Luso-Africans working as middlemen in the trade between the African interior and Portuguese traders on the coast.
Ming-cheng M. Lo. Doctors Within Borders: Profession, Ethnicity, and Modernity in Colonial Taiwan. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002.
Authors: Nakajima Chieko
Published: April 2008

In Doctors Within Borders, Ming-cheng Lo discusses the experience of Taiwanese doctors under Japanese colonial rule. By examining the viewpoints of colonial subjects, this work expands our understanding of colonialism in East Asia. The position of Taiwanese doctors continuously fluctuated between the colonial state, Taiwan society, and the culture of their medical profession. These doctors were ‘in-betweens’ in various ways. They received colonial education, and benefited from the Japanese rule, but at the same time they were a part of the Taiwan ethnic community. Though they enjoyed liberalism and autonomy within their professional culture, they remained subordinate to their Japanese mentors and colleagues. While they were the most modernized or ‘Japanized’ elements in Taiwan, they nonetheless engaged in social movements and contributed to the formation of Taiwan's civil society.
TENSOR PRODUCTS OF MAXIMAL ABELIAN SUBALGBERAS OF C*-ALGEBRAS
Authors: WASSERMANN SIMON
Published: April 2008

It is shown that if C1 and C2 are maximal abelian self-adjoint subalgebras (masas) of C*-algebras A1 and A2, respectively, then the completion C1 ⊗ C2 of the algebraic tensor product C1 ⊙ C2 of C1 and C2 in any C*-tensor product A1 ⊗βA2 is maximal abelian provided that C1 has the extension property of Kadison and Singer and C2 contains an approximate identity for A2. Examples are given to show that this result can fail if the conditions on the two masas do not both hold. This gives an answer to a long-standing question, but leaves open some other interesting problems, one of which turns out to have a potentially intriguing implication for the Kadison-Singer extension problem.
SOLUTIONS OF THE DIOPHANTINE EQUATION xy+yz+zx=n!
Authors: CIPU (BUCHAREST) MIHAI , LUCA (MORELIA) FLORIAN , MIGNOTTE (STRASBOURG) MAURICE
Published: April 2008

We prove that the only solutions in coprime positive integers to the equation

are (x, y, z)=(n!–2, 1, 1, n), n≥3.
NORMALIZED EIGENVECTORS OF A PERTURBED LINEAR OPERATOR VIA GENERAL BIFURCATION
Authors: CHIAPPINELLI RAFFAELE , FURI MASSIMO , PERA MARIA PATRIZIA
Published: April 2008

LetXbe a real Banach space,A:X→Xa bounded linear operator, andB:X→Xa (possibly nonlinear) continuous operator. Assume that λ = 0 is an eigenvalue ofAand consider the family of perturbed operatorsA+ ϵB, where ϵ is a real parameter. Denote bySthe unit sphere ofXand letSA=S∩ KerAbe the set of unit 0-eigenvectors ofA. We say that a vectorx0∈SAis abifurcation pointfor the unit eigenvectors ofA+ ϵBif any neighborhood of (0,0,x0) ∈$\R$×$\R$×Xcontains a triple (ϵ, λ,x) with ϵ ≠ 0 andxa unit λ-eigenvector ofA+ ϵB, i.e.x∈Sand (A+ ϵB)x= λx.

We give necessary as well as sufficient conditions for a unit 0-eigenvector ofAto be a bifurcation point for the unit eigenvectors ofA+ ϵB. These conditions turn out to be particularly meaningful when the perturbing operatorBis linear. Moreover, since our sufficient condition is trivially satisfied when KerAis one-dimensional, we extend a result of the first author, under the additional assumption thatBis of classC2.
CHAOTIC POLYNOMIALS IN SPACES OF CONTINUOUS AND DIFFERENTIABLE FUNCTIONS
Authors: ARON RICHARD M. , MIRALLES ALEJANDRO
Published: April 2008

We construct chaotic m-homogeneous maps acting on $\mathcal{C}^{r}_{\mathtt{+}}( [0,\infty ))$ for any m ≥ 2, $r\in\mathbb{N}\cup\{0\},$ and on the Fréchet spaces $\mathcal{C}_{\mathbb{R}}(\mathbb{R})$ for odd values of m ≥ 3 and $\mathcal{C}_{\mathbb{C}}(\mathbb{R})$ for any m ≥ 2.
NORMALLY ORDERED SEMIGROUPS
Authors: FERNANDES VÍTOR H.
Published: April 2008

In this paper we introduce the notion of normally ordered block-group as a natural extension of the notion of normally ordered inverse semigroup considered previously by the author. We prove that the classNOSof all normally ordered block-groups forms a pseudovariety of semigroups and, by using the Munn representation of a block-group, we deduce the decompositions in Mal'cev productsNOS=EI$\petite m$POIandNOS∩A=N$\petite m$POI, whereA,EIandNdenote the pseudovarieties of all aperiodic semigroups, all semigroups with just one idempotent and all nilpotent semigroups, respectively, andPOIdenotes the pseudovariety of semigroups generated by all semigroups of injective order-preserving partial transformations on a finite chain. These relations are obtained after showing the equalitiesBG=EI$\petite m$Ecom=N$\petite m$Ecom, whereBGandEcomdenote the pseudovarieties of all block-groups and all semigroups with commuting idempotents, respectively.
Globalization, Taxation, and Burden-Shifting in Latin America
Authors: Wibbels Erik , Arce Moisés
Published: April 2008

Most researchers interested in the relationship between global markets and public policy focus on advanced industrial democracies. In contrast, we examine competing hypotheses as to globalization's effect on governments by expanding the scope of the discussion to include developing nations. More specifically, we investigate the relationship between international market integration and the evolving burden of taxation on capital, as well as the subsequent response of markets to shifts in tax policy in Latin America since the late 1970s. Consistent with our theoretical expectations, we find that global market forces are more constraining vis-à-vis tax policy in Latin America than in the world's wealthiest nations. Despite these market-based pressures, however, national politics continue to influence tax policy in Latin America in a manner consistent with findings on advanced industrial democracies. As such, developing nations continue to have some room to manipulate policy, though within the context of a more strictly neoliberal context than their counterparts in advanced industrial democracies.
Societal Preferences, Partisan Agents, and Monetary Policy Outcomes
Authors: Bearce David H.
Published: April 2008

If different producer groups have divergent interests concerning macroeconomic policies, how do societal preferences translate into state policy outcomes? I develop and test a party-as-agent framework for understanding the importance of societal preferences with regard to monetary policy under capital mobility. Following the principal-agent model, political parties function as agents for different societal principals. Rightist parties tend to represent internationally oriented business groups with preferences for monetary convergence, while leftist parties do the same for domestically oriented groups preferring monetary autonomy under capital mobility. I present statistical evidence showing that OECD leftist governments have been associated with more monetary autonomy and currency variability than their rightist counterparts, even after controlling for basic economic indicators such as inflation. The statistical evidence also shows that societal group size tends not to explain either autonomous monetary policy choices or exchangerate stability. Thus even large and wealthy societal groups may be unable to obtain their preferred policy outcome when their respective partisan agents do not hold government power.
Beyond Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism: Diasporic Chinese and Neo-Nationalism in China and Thailand
Authors: Callahan William A.
Published: April 2008

This article highlights the dynamic interaction between Chinese, Thai, and Sino-Thai identity construction, on the one hand, and the mutual production of domestic and international politics, on the other. It questions how nationalism and cosmopolitanism are formulated by arguing against the popular notion that a diaspora is a cosmopolitan community situated in a foreign nation. Diasporic public spheres are critically examined to show how Sino-Thai identity is produced in relation first to neo-nationalism in Thailand and China, and second in specific contexts within Thailand that call into question essential notions of Thai, Chinese, and overseas Chinese identity. Diasporas thus both construct and deconstruct the seemingly opposing forces of nationalism and cosmopolitanism. The article uses the ethnographic approach of anthropological constructivism to build on sociological constructivism's focus on national identity, norms, and formal institutions. Rather than looking to culture as a substance, the article highlights how culture takes shape in context-sensitive relations between identity and difference. This ethnographic approach encourages one to look in different places for world politics, shifting away from state actors to transnational nonstate actors, from geopolitics and international political economy to economic culture, and from law and institutions as the foundations of international society to the less formal organizations of the diasporic public sphere. Diaspora thus not only adds new data to arguments about global/local relations—it helps one question the structures of world politics that look to the opposition between cosmopolitanism and nationalism.
Money Talks: Supplementary Financiers and International Monetary Fund Conditionality
Authors: Gould Erica R.
Published: April 2008

What explains the changes in International Monetary Fund (IMF) conditionality? I argue that IMF conditionality agreements are influenced by supplementary financiers. The IMF regularly relies on external financing to supplement its loans to countries facing payments imbalances. As a result, these supplementary financiers are able to exercise leverage over the IMF and the design of its conditionality programs. I consider the influence of one type of supplementary financier, private financial institutions, on IMF conditionality. “Conclusions are supported by a data set of 249 conditionality arrangements, coded according to their terms, and two case studies.”
Democratic Governance and Multinational Corporations: Political Regimes and Inflows of Foreign Direct Investment
Authors: Jensen Nathan M.
Published: April 2008

Foreign direct investment (FDI) is an important element of the global economy and a central component of economic development strategies of both developed and developing countries. Numerous scholars theorize that the economic benefits of attracting multinational corporations come at tremendous political costs, arguing that democratic political systems attract lower levels of international investment than their authoritarian counterparts. Using both cross-sectional and time-series cross-sectional tests of the determinants of FDI for more than 100 countries, I generate results that are inconsistent with these dire predictions. Democratic political systems attract higher levels of FDI inflows both across countries and within countries over time. Democratic countries are predicted to attract as much as 70 percent more FDI than their authoritarian counterparts. In a final empirical test, I examine how democratic institutions affect country credibility by empirically analyzing the link between democracy and sovereign debt risk for about eighty countries from 1980 to 1998. These empirical tests challenge the conventional wisdom on the preferences of multinationals for authoritarian regimes.
An Automated Information Extraction Tool for International Conflict Data with Performance as Good as Human Coders: A Rare Events Evaluation Design
Authors: King Gary , Lowe Will
Published: April 2008

Despite widespread recognition that aggregated summary statistics on international conflict and cooperation miss most of the complex interactions among nations, the vast majority of scholars continue to employ annual, quarterly, or (occasionally) monthly observations. Daily events data, coded from some of the huge volume of news stories produced by journalists, have not been used much for the past two decades. We offer some reason to change this practice, which we feel should lead to considerably increased use of these data. We address advances in event categorization schemes and software programs that automatically produce data by “reading” news stories without human coders. We design a method that makes it feasible, for the first time, to evaluate these programs when they are applied in areas with the particular characteristics of international conflict and cooperation data, namely event categories with highly unequal prevalences, and where rare events (such as highly conflictual actions) are of special interest. We use this rare events design to evaluate one existing program, and find it to be as good as trained human coders, but obviously far less expensive to use. For large-scale data collections, the program dominates human coding. Our new evaluative method should be of use in international relations, as well as more generally in the field of computational linguistics, for evaluating other automated information extraction tools. We believe that the data created by programs similar to the one we evaluated should see dramatically increased use in international relations research. To facilitate this process, we are releasing with this article data on 3.7 million international events, covering the entire world for the past decade.
Reviving Leviathan: Fiscal Federalism and the Growth of Government
Authors: Rodden Jonathan
Published: April 2008

This article revisits the influential “Leviathan” hypothesis, which posits that tax competition limits the growth of government spending in decentralized countries. I use panel data to examine the effect of fiscal decentralization over time within countries, attempting to distinguish between decentralization that is funded by intergovernmental transfers and local taxation. First, I explore the logic whereby decentralization should restrict government spending if state and local governments have wide-ranging authority to set the tax base and rate, especially on mobile assets. In countries where this is most clearly the case, decentralization is associated with smaller government. Second, consistent with theoretical arguments drawn from welfare economics and positive political economy, I show that governments grow faster as they fund a greater portion of public expenditures through intergovernmental transfers.
The Diffusion of Tractor Technology
Authors: MARTINI DINAH DUFFY , SILBERBERG EUGENE
Published: April 2008

A substantial literature exists claiming the adoption of tractors was inefficiently slow. We develop a linear programming model of farms that specifically incorporates the opportunity cost of the farmer's time and apply it to farms in Iowa during the interwar period. We develop technological coefficients derived at the task level, based on the data and agricultural reports from that period. By valuing the time saved by tractors, we demonstrate that the seemingly slow rate of tractor adoption was in fact wealth maximizing. Tractors were widely adopted only after the improvement in implements that came late in this period.
The Role of Private Property in the Nazi Economy: The Case of Industry
Authors: BUCHHEIM CHRISTOPH , SCHERNER JONAS
Published: April 2008

Private property in the industry of the Third Reich is often considered a mere nominal provision without much substance. However, that is not correct, because firms, despite the rationing and licensing activities of the state, still had ample scope to devise their own production and investment profiles. Even regarding war-related projects, freedom of contract was generally respected; instead of using power, the state offered firms a number of contract options to choose from. There were several motives behind this attitude of the regime, among them the conviction that private property provided important incentives for increasing efficiency.
Early State Banks in the United States: How Many Were There and When Did They Exist?
Authors: WEBER WARREN E.
Published: April 2008

This article describes a newly constructed data set of all U.S. state banks from 1782 to 1861. It contains the names and locations of all banks and branches that went into business and an estimate of when each operated. The compilation is based on reported balance sheets, listings in banknote reporters, and secondary sources. Based on these data, the article presents a count of the number of banks and branches in business by state. I argue that my series are superior to previously existing ones for reasons of consistency, accuracy, and timing. The article contains examples to support this argument.
Why Did Income Growth Vary Across States During the Great Depression?
Authors: GARRETT THOMAS A. , WHEELOCK DAVID C.
Published: April 2008

This note investigates the sources of variation in the growth of per capita personal incomes across U.S. states during the Great Depression. States entering the economic contraction with relatively low per capita incomes tended to suffer larger percentage declines in per capita income than did high income states. By contrast, low-income states tended to experience larger percentage gains during the recovery. Hence, state per capita incomes diverged during the contraction phase and converged during the recovery phase.
Institutional Reforms, Financial Development and Sovereign Debt: Britain 1690–1790
Authors: Sussman Nathan , Yafeh Yishay
Published: April 2008

We revisit the evidence on the relations between institutions, the cost of government debt, and financial development in Britain (1690–1790) and find that interest rates remained high and volatile for four decades after the Glorious Revolution, partly due to wars and instability; British interest rates co-moved with those in Holland; Debt per capita remained lower in Britain than in Holland until around 1780; and Britain did not borrow at lower rates than European countries with more limited protection of property rights. We conclude that, in the short run, institutional reforms are not rewarded by financial markets.
Banking on the King: The Evolution of the Royal Revenue Farms in Old Regime France
Authors: Johnson Noel D.
Published: April 2008

The writing and allocation of French tax farm contracts changed dramatically after theFronde(1648–1653): they were gradually transformed from small, competitively auctioned, units into a large cartel known as the Company of General Farms. Surprisingly, the crown's revenues increased. I present a transaction cost argument to explain the behavior of tax farm lease prices as tax farming changed during the seventeenth century. Cartelization of tax farms lowered costs faced by the crown. The tax farm system's evolution offers insights into how organizations evolve to protect their property rights in the absence of well functioning representative institutions.
The Socioeconomic Return to Primary Schooling in Victorian England
Authors: LONG JASON
Published: April 2008

In this article I provide a micro-level analysis of primary schooling in Victorian England. Using a new dataset of school-age males linked between the 1851 and 1881 population censuses, I examine the determinants of childhood school attendance and the impact of attendance on adult labor market outcomes. I find that schooling had a positive effect on adult occupational class and that the associated wage gains were likely to have outweighed the cost of schooling. However, this effect was small relative to father's class, and the effect of education on earnings appears to have been small relative to modern results.
The Business of Transatlantic Migration between Europe and the USA, 1900–1914
Authors: KEELING DREW
Published: April 2008

The relocation of Europeans across the North Atlantic during the first decade and a half of the twentieth century was the culmination of the longest-lived and most widely documented transoceanic migration of modern times. This enormous population transfer was a great human drama, a major international demographic shift, and a massive historical experiment in cultural transformation during a period of unprecedented globalization. This migration was also a complex and powerful travel business containing both risks and rewards for its three fundamental participants: the movers, the moved, and the sovereign authorities on either side of the borders being traversed. Prior studies have not adequately explained this business nor appreciated the extent to which the various strategies for dealing with its associated risks were crucial, largely congruent, and self-reinforcing elements of the overall migration process.
Pre-operative prediction of ‘dry taps’
Authors: Henney S , Counter P , Mirza S , Gedling P , Watson C
Published: April 2008

Objectives:

The treatment of children with ‘glue ear’ often presents surgeons with the question of whether or not to insert a grommet when myringotomy reveals no fluid in the middle ear. We present a study designed to assess which factors contribute to the presence of a ‘dry tap’.

Design:

We prospectively gathered data from a cohort of 280 children (504 myringotomies). The cohort included two subgroups, one received halothane and nitrous oxide anaesthesia, and the other received enflurane anaesthesia.

Setting:

The ENT department of a district general hospital.

Participants:

Children (aged less than 17 years) requiring myringotomy.

Main outcome measures:

The presence of a ‘glue’ or dry tap at myringotomy was documented. We also recorded data on the following: pre- and post-induction tympanometry; age; season; anaesthetic type; and the delay from listing to actual operation.

Results:

A non type B pre-induction tympanogram and delay to operation were strong indications of finding a dry tap at surgery.

Conclusions:

In our study population, the proportion of dry taps at myringotomy was 18 per cent. The presence of a dry tap was rarely due to the induction of anaesthesia. Multivariate analysis revealed that the combination of factors most likely to predict a dry tap were non type B tympanogram and delay to operation.
Studies on antimalarial drug susceptibility in Colombia, in relation to Pfmdr1 and Pfcrt
Authors: RESTREPO-PINEDA E. , ARANGO E. , MAESTRE A. , ROSÁRIO V. E. DO , CRAVO P.
Published: April 2008

In Colombia, Plasmodium resistance to antimalarials such as chloroquine and antifolates is a serious problem. As a result, the national Colombian health authorities are monitoring the efficacy of alternative drugs and schemes. The study of genetic polymorphisms related with drug resistance is required in the region. In vitro responses to chloroquine, quinine, mefloquine, amodiaquine, desethylamodiaquine, artesunate and dihydroartesunate were carried out by HRP ELISA. SNP analysis in Pfcrt and Pfmdr1 genes was performed by PCR-RFLP in 77 samples from the North West region of Colombia. In vitro resistance to chloroquine was high (74%), followed by mefloquine (30%) and desethylamodiaquine (30%). A positive correlation between the IC50 of paired drugs was also detected. The allele Pfmdr1 N86 (wild) was present in 100% of the samples and 1246Y (mutant) in 92%. However, their presence did not correlate with in vitro drug resistance. Presence of the mutations K76T and N75E in Pfcrt was confirmed in all samples. Analysis of 4 codons (72, 74, 75 and 76) in pfcrt confirmed the presence of the haplotypes CMET in 91% and SMET in 9% of the samples.
The prevalence and workplace costs of adult attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in a large manufacturing firm
Authors: Kessler R. C. , Lane M. , Stang P. E. , Van Brunt D. L.
Published: April 2008

Background

Little is known about the effects of adult attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) on work performance or accidents-injuries.

Method

A survey was administered in 2005 and 2006 to employees of a large manufacturing firm to assess the prevalence and correlates of adult ADHD. Respondents (4140 in 2005, 4423 in 2006, including 2656 in both surveys) represented 35–38% of the workforce. ADHD was assessed with the World Health Organization (WHO) Adult ADHD Self-Report Scale (ASRS), a validated screening scale for DSM-IV adult ADHD. Sickness absence, work performance and workplace accidents-injuries were assessed with the WHO Health and Work Performance Questionnaire (HPQ).

Results

The estimated current prevalence (standard error) of DSM-IV ADHD was 1.9% (0.4). ADHD was associated with a 4–5% reduction in work performance (χ12=9.1,p=0.001), a 2.1 relative-odds of sickness absence (χ12=6.2,p=0.013), and a 2.0 relative-odds of workplace accidents-injuries (χ12=5.1,p=0.024). The human capital value (standard error) of the lost work performance associated with ADHD totaled US$4336 (676) per worker with ADHD in the year before interview. No data were available to monetize other workplace costs of accidents-injuries (e.g. destruction of equipment). Only a small minority of workers with ADHD were in treatment.

Conclusions

Adult ADHD is a significantly impairing condition among workers. Given the low rate of treatment and high human capital costs, in conjunction with evidence from controlled trials that treatment can reduce ADHD-related impairments, ADHD would seem to be a good candidate for workplace trials that evaluate treatment cost-effectiveness from the employer's perspective.
The emperors of the schizophrenia polygene have no clothes
Authors: Crow T. J.
Published: April 2008

A substantial body of research literature, identified by nine out of ten papers on genetics in the recent ISI research front on schizophrenia, claims to have established associations between aspects of the disease and sequence variation in specific candidate genes. These candidatures have proven unreplicated in large sibling pair linkage surveys and a targeted association study. Even if the case for an association be regarded as a lucky guess (assuming one gene in 30 000 was guessed right) the large linkage and association studies provide no evidence of sequence variation relating to psychosis at any of these gene loci. Thus this body of work must be regarded as an indicator of the extent to which the ‘eye of faith’ is able to discern meaning in complex data when none is present.
Dennis Ager, Motivation in language planning
and language policy. Clevedon, England: Multilingual Matters,
2001. Pp. vi, 210. Pb. $24.95; Kas Deprez & Theo du
Plessis, eds., Multilingualism and government: Belgium,
Luxembourg, Switzerland, former Yugoslavia, South Africa.
(Studies in language policy in South Africa.) Pretoria: Van
Schaik, 2000. Pp. xii, 179.
Authors: Paulston Christina Bratt
Published: April 2008

The two books under review, Motivation
in language planning and language policy (MLPP)
and Multilingualism and government (M&G),
are both about language policy, at least at one level, and both
are, or claim to be, based on case studies. That is the end of
any similarity between them.
Stephen Barbour and Cathie Carmichael,
eds., Language and nationalism in Europe. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2000. Pp. 319. Hb, $70.00.
Authors: Argenter Joan A.
Published: April 2008

As stated in the title, the topic of this
book is the relationships between language and nationalism in
Europe, and particularly the “significance of language
for nationalism and national identity” (p. 9) –
a topic qualified as “fascinating” by the editors
(v) and in Barbour's initial chapter (16, 17). A question
arises in the reviewer's mind: Is this a unitary, unequivocal
subject? Of course, in a certain rather philosophical way it
is unitary – which does not mean general agreement even
from this philosophical view, but at least it may be identified
as “a proper subject.” However, it is not at all
unequivocal insofar as the terms of the relationship are not
clarified. This is precisely what Barbour's opening chapter
intends.
Regulatory comments as tools of family socialization: A
comparison of Estonian, Swedish and Finnish mealtime interaction
Authors: TULVISTE TIIA , MIZERA LUULE , DE GEER BOEL , TRYGGVASON MARJA-TERTTU
Published: April 2008

The present study's aim is to pinpoint
the characteristics of verbal socialization in family interaction
in five different sociocultural contexts. Families with early
adolescent children (M = 11.5 years) were compared with regard
to regulatory comments issued during family mealtimes. Three
monocultural groups consisted of 20 Estonian, 20 Swedish, and
20 Finnish families living in their countries of origin; two
bicultural and bilingual groups consisted of 20 Estonian and
20 Finnish families residing in Sweden. Regulatory comments
were defined as utterances aimed at influencing the conversational
partner to behave according to social and conversational rules.
Contrary to expectations, cultural differences were not found
in discussions dealing with table manners and conversational
rules, but the number of comments on perceived violations of
moral rules was much greater in the Swedish material. Swedish
early adolescents commented significantly more than their Estonian
and Finnish counterparts, indicating more asymmetrical
communication in Estonian and Finnish families.
Models of complexity: The example of emotions
Authors: Belzung Catherine , Chevalley Catherine
Published: April 2008

Using the example of the difficulties which emerge when trying to model complex behaviors – such as emotional expression – that result from stochastic interactions between different components, we argue that biorobotics may well describe one possible evolution of certain features of a biological system, but cannot pretend to be a simulation of the whole behavior of the system.
Biorobotics researcher: To be or not to be?
Authors: Chang Carolina
Published: April 2008

Much confusion exists within the robotics and the biology communities regarding the definition of biorobotics and the aims and strategies that characterize this approach. Not even the basic criteria for identifying biorobotic research are being applied consistently. Barbara Webb has taken a crucial step towards setting a common ground from which biorobotic systems can be described, analyzed, and compared.
Theory of mind and the “somatic marker mechanism” (SMM)
Authors: Charlton Bruce G.
Published: April 2008

The “somatic marker mechanism” (SMM; Damasio 1994) is proposed as the cognitive and neural basis of the theory of mind mechanism. The SMM evolved for evaluating the intentions, dispositions, and relationships of conspecifics; hence, it is adaptive in the social domain. It is predicted that chimpanzees will indeed have theory of mind (ToM) ability, but that this will be socially domain-specific. Domain-general ToM will be found only in primates with abstract, symbolic language (adult humans). Putative ToM tests require revision in the light of these distinctions.
Programs, models, theories, and reality
Authors: Damper Robert I.
Published: April 2008

The question “Are ‘biorobots' good models of biological behaviour?” can be seen as a specific instance of a more general question about the relation between computer programs and models, between models and theories, and between theories and reality. This commentary develops a personal view of these relations, from an antirealism perspective. Programs, models, theories and reality are separate and distinct entities which may converge in particular cases but should never be confused.
Biorobotic models can contribute to neurobiology
Authors: Delcomyn Fred
Published: April 2008

The idea that biorobots can be used as a testbed for the evaluation of hypotheses about how an animal functions is supported. Generation of realistic feedback is a major advantage of biorobotic models. Nevertheless, skeptics can only be convinced that this approach is valid if significant biological insights are generated from its application.
Feature development, object concepts, and the scope slip
Authors: Dawson Michael R. W.
Published: April 2008

Schyns et al.'s (1998) target article raises a conflict between the need for a fixed functional architecture in an explanatory cognitive science and the need for a system to learn to detect new features. This conflict can be resolved by avoiding the scope slip in which properties of objects are erroneously viewed as being properties of their representations.
Biorobotic simulations might offer some advantages over purely computational ones
Authors: Franceschetti Donald R.
Published: April 2008

A slight modification of Webb's diagrammatic representation of the dimensions for describing models is proposed which extends it to cover a range of theoretical models as well as material models. It is also argued that beyond a certain level robotic simulations could offer a number of real advantages over computer simulations of organisms interacting with their environment.
How fast does a child learn a word?
Authors: Maratsos Michael
Published: April 2008

This discussion argues that for many word meanings, the child has to assemble a new category, using relatively slow information-sifting processes. This does not cause high semantic errors, because children probably hold off using a word until much such sifting has occurred, rather than producing the new word as soon as they have any information on it.
Models as implementations of a theory, rather than simulations: Dancing to a different drummer
Authors: Franklin Stan
Published: April 2008

Robots, as well as software agents, can be of use in biology as implementations of a theory rather than as simulations of specific real world target systems. Such implementations generate hypotheses rather than representing them. Their behavior is not predicted, but rather observed, and is not expected to duplicate that of a target system. Scientific knowledge is gained through the testing of generated hypotheses.
Can robots without Hebbian plasticity make good models of adaptive behaviour?
Authors: Hokland Jørn , Vereijken Beatrix
Published: April 2008

No. Animals' primary problem is the shaping of movements, guided by and adapting to sensory signals. This requires a narrower class of biorobotic models than that spanned by Webb's dimensions and examples. We claim that all model variables and mechanisms must have real counterparts, input vectors must model known sensor fields, internal state vectors and transformations must model neurophysiological processes, and output vectors must model coordinated muscle signals.
The usefulness property of biorobotic sensorimotor models: A natural source of prosthetic designs
Authors: Jaax Kristen N.
Published: April 2008

This commentary addresses an additional feature of biorobotic modeling: usefulness in prosthetic design. By implementing structurally and behaviorally accurate models as prosthetics, biologically accurate restoration can be approximated. This has potential to reestablish important peripheral elements of the sensorimotor control system, including limb biomechanics, proprioception, and vision. Examples given include musculoskeletal prosthetics and retinal implants.
Some cognitive tools for word learning: The role of working memory and goal preference
Authors: Racsmány Mihály , Lukács Ágnes , Pléh Csaba , Király Ildikó
Published: April 2008

We propose that Bloom's focus on cognitive factors involved in word learning still lacks a broader perspective. We emphasize the crucial relevance of working memory in learning elements of language. Specifically, we demonstrate through our data that in impaired populations knowledge of some linguistic elements can be dissociated according to the subcomponent of working memory (visual or verbal) involved in a task. Further, although Bloom's concentration on theory of mind as a precondition for word learning is certainly correct, theory of mind being a necessary condition does not make it a sufficient one. On the basis of our studies we point out the importance of a theory of mind related goal preference in acquiring spatial language. In general, we claim that more specific cognitive preferences and constraints should be outlined in detail for the preconditions of acquiring linguistic elements.
Empiricist word learning
Authors: Ryder Dan , Favorov Oleg V.
Published: April 2008

At first, Bloom's theory appears inimical to empiricism, since he credits very young children with highly sophisticated cognitive resources (e.g., a theory of mind and a belief that real kinds have essences), and he also attacks the empiricist's favoured learning theory, namely, associationism. We suggest that, on the contrary, the empiricist can embrace much of what Bloom says.
The other way to learn the meaning of a word
Authors: Scott Sam
Published: April 2008

Bloom's book can be viewed as a long argument for an anti-Whorfian conclusion. According to Bloom, word learning is usually a process of mapping new words to pre-existing concepts. But an exception to this generalization – the learning of words from linguistic context – poses a problem for Bloom's anti-Whorfian argument.
Children request teaching when asking for names of objects
Authors: Strauss Sidney , Ziv Margalit
Published: April 2008

We propose that in addition to children's requests for word names being a reflection of an understanding of the referential nature of words, they may also be requests for adult's teaching. These possible requests for teaching among toddlers, along with other indications, suggest that teaching may be a natural cognition that may be related to the development of theory of mind.
Could we please lose the mapping metaphor, please?
Authors: Tomasello Michael
Published: April 2008

Although Bloom gives more credit to social cognition (mind reading) than do most other theorists of word learning, he does not go far enough. He still relies fundamentally on a learning process of association (or mapping), neglecting the joint attentional and cultural learning skills from which linguistic communication emerges at one year of age.