bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Investigating Access to Educational Assessment for Students with Disabilities
Authors: Woods Kevin , Parkinson Gill , Lewis Sarah
Published: February 2010

Many countries have established systems for identifying, and providing for, the range of students with disabilities during their formal educational assessments. Most systems include the provision of variously termed ‘special access arrangements’ (SAAs), such as the provision of extra time or practical assistance with some aspect of an examination. There is, however, a paucity of outcome monitoring data relating to such systems, particularly that relating to the student and parent perspective. Using a combination of focus group, questionnaire and interview methods, the present study reports the views of 86 students with disabilities, their parents and teachers, upon the students’ educational assessment experiences. Findings indicate four specific areas for development of current practice: individualization of assessment of needs; utilization of student and parent voice; consideration of test anxiety factors; improved communication between schools, parents and students. From this, the researchers propose a revised system for needs identification and provision for students with disabilities during their formal educational assessments, highlighting a proactive role for school psychologists.
Catholics and Evangelical Protestants on Homoerotic Desire: Augustine vs. Pelagius
Authors: Nunan Richard
Published: February 2010

Catholic and Protestant religious responses to the emergence of the late nineteenth-century concept of a more or less fixed sexual orientation have taken three different directions: some have largely abandoned doctrinal hostility to homosexuality (“Mainline” Protestants, roughly speaking); some have conjoined the belief that homoerotic relationships are sinful with the conviction that homosexuality is a product of malleable individual choice, curable through reparative therapy (Evangelical Protestants, roughly speaking); while others contend that, although still potentially sinful, homoerotic dispositions are typically innate and immutable (chiefly the Vatican and other clerical authorities among Roman Catholics). This article offers a theological analysis of the dramatic divergence of opinion between the second and third groups. It is suggested that the differences depend on divergent theological commitments to the disparate accounts of human nature and sexual ethics implicit in Paul, Pelagius, and (more explicitly) Augustine. It is argued that both the Evangelical and Catholic positions on the morality of homoerotic relationships are internally incoherent.
Honor, Rhetoric and Factionalism in the Ancient World: 1 Corinthians 1-4 in Its Social Context
Authors: Finney Mark T.
Published: February 2010

This essay suggests that the central element of the factionalism and strife evident in 1 Corinthians 1-4 is the lust for honor by members of the early Christ-movement at Corinth. While the last few decades have seen a proliferation of social-scientific approaches to biblical interpretation, many demonstrating the centrality of issues of honor and shame, the letter of 1 Corinthians has remained largely untouched by issues related to honor. Yet it presents a unique exposé of numerous and vital aspects of social life in the Greco-Roman world. By analyzing the issues of factionalism and rhetoric within the social context of the time, and doing so within the framework of the central import of honor, it is hoped that the essay provides an appropriate and compelling framework within which to view this section of Paul’s letter.
A Non-Occidentalist West?
Authors: de Sousa Santos Boaventura
Published: February 2010

In this article I argue that, in spite of the apparently unshakable hegemony of the historical, philosophical and sociological arguments invoked by the canonical history of Europe and the world to demonstrate the uniqueness of the West and its superiority, there is room to think of a non-Occidentalist West. By that I mean a vast array of conceptions, theories, arguments that, though produced in the West by recognized intellectual figures, were discarded, marginalized or ignored because they did not fit the political objectives of capitalism and colonialism at the roots of Western modernity. In the article I tackle specifically three topics: the conceptions of antiquity, modern science and a teleology of the future. Among many others who might be selected, I resort to three eccentric figures — Lucian of Samosata, Nicholas of Cusa and Blaise Pascal — to exemplify some of the paths that might guide us in the construction of a non-capitalist, non-colonialist inter-cultural dialogue. Such paths are here designated as those of learned ignorance, ecology of knowledge, wager on another possible world and artisanship of practices.
Putting Modernity in its Place(s)
Authors: Pomeranz Kenneth
Published: February 2010

Jack Goody’s work on the origins, spatial extent and defining characteristics of modernity has vigorously questioned claims that only European history led to assorted modern characteristics: capitalism, science, democracy, romantic love, and inwardly-motivated personal restraint. He argues that many societies which experienced the Bronze Age urban revolution share certain important material similarities (and some differences) which set them apart from others, and are best understood by constructing an analytical grid rather than categorical stages. With respect to alleged affective differences, Goody takes a more strongly relativist stance, rejecting any developmental divide in the prevalence of romantic love, internalized self-discipline, etc. These useful steps nonetheless generate new problems. One concerns the relationship between material/technical changes, which seem to suggest a few very general historical periods (one marked by early metallurgy, writing, etc., and another by the modern energy revolution), and affective traits, which have no history in this schema. A second concerns periodization itself; while agreeing that periods defined by the experience of one region (e.g. a feudal era) are usually unhelpful, some general terms (such as early modern) do seem essential for conceptualizing developments that, though less epochal than writing or fossil fuels, are nonetheless important.
The Theft of Anthropology
Authors: Hann Chris
Published: February 2010

Social anthropology flourished in the 20th century but ethnographic methods and intensifying ‘creative destruction’ in the elaboration of theory have combined to deflect attention away from earlier concerns with long-term historical change. The ‘theft of history’ that took place within anthropology refers to this loss, which is not to be confused with healthy interdisciplinary borrowing. With the demise of the evolutionist paradigm and intensifying global connectivity, anthropologists have struggled to find a new balance between empirical ethnographic description, the interpretation of other social worlds, and theoretical explanation. It is not so much that the canon has continued to change but that many practitioners no longer acknowledge any canon. The difficulties are illustrated with a critical discussion of the Anglophone anthropological literature in a field that is novel for the discipline: socialism and its aftermath. The work of Jack Goody has a surprising relevance here; more generally, Goody’s oeuvre shows how ethnographic excellence and intellectual originality can be harnessed together to serve a longue durée comparative historical anthropology.
Jack Goody and the Location of Islam
Authors: Al-Azmeh Aziz
Published: February 2010

This article considers Jack Goody’s studies of Islam in their various contexts. It starts with a consideration of Goody’s comparative historico-anthropological studies of specific topics such as flowers, cuisine, and kinship and the family, and of his studies of wider range and broader import. It analyses the elements and main thrust of his historical approach, paying attention to the conception of comparativism he uses, placing these in the context of current debates on method. It then moves on to Islamic material incorporated into these studies, and seeks to place them in the context of his work overall. Finally, the essay discusses works Goody devoted specifically to Islam and seeks to draw out the relationship between his views of Islamic history and of contemporary Islam and his comparative historical sociology of civilizations, and measures his more recent views of Islam against his overall approach.
A Counter-narrative of Argentine Mourning
Authors: Sosa Cecilia
Published: February 2010

This article suggests an oblique reading of The Headless Woman (2008), the latest film by Lucrecia Martel, a founder member of the so-called New Argentine Cinema and one of the major stylists of contemporary cinema. Unlike the many memorial films that surround the trauma of the dis- appeared in Argentina, The Headless Woman ‘countersigns’ the genre, proposing a hallucinatory experience of immersion within the affects of guilt, complicity and denial unleashed by the last dictatorship (1976—83). By presenting the existentialist drama of an upper-class woman involved in a seemingly minor car accident on a deserted provincial road, the film manages to stage a counter-narrative of the traumatic past that affected the whole of society beyond obvious sites of suffering. Through an engagement with Judith Butler’s account of mourning, this article argues that the film bears the traces of a collective mourning, an experience of grief that permeated the Argentine citizenry and challenged blood as the only form of kinship. The article contends that the affects explored in Martel’s film may be crucial in confronting the new faceless, that is, those whose social exclusion persists unnoticed during the current democratic regime, and whose lives are in a sense ‘ungrievable’. By proposing an entanglement of temporalities, the analysis suggests that the 30,000 lives made to disappear during dictatorial times cannot be grasped except in conjunction with the silence surrounding poverty, the new spectre of the present. In Martel’s film each viewer becomes a witness and also a survivor and is thereby subtlety compelled to respond. In this way, The Headless Woman also suggests an ethical key to future possibilities.
Mumbai: City-as-Target
Authors: Bishop Ryan , Roy Tania
Published: February 2010

This article introduces the themes and theoretical concerns of a special section that explores the various ways the specificities of the Mumbai attacks serve as a metonym for issues found in other urban sites within the conditions, concerns and vulnerabilities of globalization-as-urbanization and does so through the rubric of the city-as-target. As urbanization grows exponentially in unforecastable ways, the likelihood of violent urban targeting of many different kinds — state-sponsored, paramilitary, sectarian, economic, racial, tribal, etc., to name but a few — grows as well. Mumbai is a specific event, but it is also the common-place, the cityscape that is our daily lives and quotidian existence rendered unusual in all the expected ways. With Mumbai, the article argues, one does not necessarily see the future of the urban, but rather a reminder of what the urban has always been, even from the great walled cities of antiquity: a target. There is an imperative, then, to rethink urban space at all levels. The pieces in this section consider immaterial and material aspects of the city: its plan, infrastructure (economic and military bases), buildings and dwellings, polity and policy, protection and penetration. The technologies and technicities involved in the attacks, as well as the specific historicity, reveal a great deal about the Mumbai events, as well as revealing potential modes of engagement with cities in the present and future.
On Geoscapes and the Google Caliphate
Authors: Bratton Benjamin H.
Published: February 2010

When advanced technologies of globalization that are closely associated with secular cosmopolitics are opportunistically employed by fundamentalist politico-theologies for their own particular purposes, an essential irresolution of territory, jurisdiction and programmatic projection is revealed. Where some may wish to identify an ideal correspondence between a global political sphere into which multiple differences might be adjudicated and the visual, geographic representation of a single planetary space, this conjunction is dubious and highly conditional. Instead multiple territorial projections and competing claims on space are also generative of the very qualities of the spatial as a political medium altogether. For example, the well-publicized use of satellite-based mapping and telecommunications tools, such as Google Earth, by the terrorist group that attacked Mumbai in November 2008, raises several knotty and important questions about how contrary comprehensive images of the world can make use of one another in ways that undermine the ‘unitotality’ of global territory. It is not that Google and Jihad are ‘equivalent’ or even ‘translatable’, but rather because they are not, they are in practice interoperable. Instead links between urbanism, cosmography, and the socialization of planetary software networks demonstrate the centrality of design to the ongoing fashioning of the territory of territories, the geoscape.
Waiting Time
Authors: Vitus Kathrine
Published: February 2010

This article analyses the relationship between time and subjectification, focusing on the temporal structures created within Danish asylum centres and politics, and on children’s experiences of and reactions to open-ended waiting. Such waiting leads to existential boredom which manifests in the children as restlessness, fatigue and despair. The article argues that in Danish asylum centres children live neither in the present nor in the future; they live without a justified existence and thus in processes of de-subjectification.
Gender Segregation in Pre-Adolescent Peer Groups as a Matter of Class
Authors: Pfaff Nicolle
Published: February 2010

This study examines social class differences in the gender segregation of children and pre-adolescents and draws upon data from two recent German studies. Based on longitudinal quantitative data from a representative children’s survey, the first analysis suggests that in comparison to children from upper-class families, lower-class children tend to remain longer in gender-heterogeneous peer groups, a major proportion of students continue to have opposite-sex friends and changes between same- and opposite-sex peers appear earlier. In two further sections, material from a reconstructive study of 10- to 12-year-old pre-adolescents is used to describe more in-depth reflections of children themselves on gender segregation as well as orientations that develop in same-sex peer groups in contrasting social classes.
Parental Regulation of Teenagers’ Time
Authors: Sarre Sophie
Published: February 2010

Parental regulation of teenagers’ time is pervasive. Parents attempt to constrain, well into adolescence, what their children do with their time, when they do it and how long they do it for. This article draws on interviews with 14- to 16-year-olds in the UK to explore teenagers’ experiences of parents’ temporal regulation, and whether their perceptions are affected by the processes and meanings attached to it. Where values, meanings and rationalities around temporalities are shared, regulation can be relatively unproblematic. Sometimes however, there is a clash of frames, which impacts on teenagers’ subjective experiences and can lead to strategies to escape parental regulation of time.
Interrogating Childhood and Diaspora Through the Voices of Children in Sweden
Authors: Bak Maren , von Brömssen Kerstin
Published: February 2010

This article introduces the concepts of diaspora and transnational networks to research on children with migrant backgrounds. It is based on interviews with children who live in a Swedish multicultural area and the research questions focus on issues relating to diasporic consciousness and diasporic practices from a child’s perspective. The results show how the children negotiate their identity and belongings to places, how they make their own distinctions between home and homeland and how in everyday life they actively contribute to sustaining transnational kin networks.
‘Aux armes, citoyens!’: Mapping Regime Change in Charles Motte’s Plan figuratif des barricades (1830)
Authors: Olson Kory E
Published: February 2010

The July 1830 ‘Trois Glorieuses’ abruptly ended Charles X’s absolutist regime, and Charles Motte’s Le Plan figuratif des barricades (1830), published shortly afterwards, documents the violent struggle between the forces loyal to the last Bourbon monarch and the victorious ‘citoyen armés’. Much more than a simple map documenting yet another Paris revolution, Motte’s Plan provides the reader with a social and historical overview of a society in turmoil. Le Plan figuratif contrasts with traditional historical narrative, and this article will examine Motte’s map discourse (use of text, colour, shapes and symbols) and its presentation of a divided city — one where easy-to-see, hand-drawn red gunfire and bright yellow barricades illustrate to what extent the working-class population from the central and eastern arrondissements of Paris were willing to take to the streets, participate in combat, and challenge French royal authority. This contrasts with the bourgeois western districts which remain largely free of both violence and colour. In sum, Motte’s map affords hope to the underprivileged, showing them the efficacy of their numbers. Yet he also alerts future administrations as to which neighbourhoods to survey in order to maintain control over their capital city, many of which would be targeted by Haussmann’s renovations of Paris under the Second Empire.
Punk Beur : Popular Music, Itinerancy and Identity in Sakinna Boukhedenna’s Journal ‘Nationalité: immigré(e)’
Authors: Farhoud Samira , Watt Carey A.
Published: February 2010

Sakinna Boukhedenna’s Journal ‘Nationalité: immigré(e)’ contains many stimulating invocations of popular music, and these highlight familiar Beur themes of marginalisation, movement, liminality and identity in a highly interesting way. Engaging seriously with Sakinna’s musical interests and her commentaries about the rock and proto-punk music of Lou Reed, the punk rock of the Sex Pistols, the reggae music of Max Romeo, Rastafarian culture, and the Arab music of Umm Kulthum is crucial for understanding the importance of movement and itinerancy in her struggle to construct a viable postcolonial identity. Sakinna’s treatment of music also takes us out of the usual Beur geographical frame (France / Mediterranean / North Africa) to the worlds of the Atlantic and the Caribbean, and it reminds us of the richness of Beur writing and the multimedia modalities of Beur culture more generally.
Women’s Work and the Societal Discourse of Stress
Authors: Becker Dana
Published: February 2010

The concept of stress has become an important vehicle for explaining human dilemmas, at least in part because of the variety of social functions it performs. In the United States the contemporary discourse of stress and the metaphors associated with it pervade both academic and popular accounts of women’s stress, emphasizing the stressful nature of working motherhood. The social origins of the tensions in working mothers’ lives are obscured in the rush to help women calm down so that they can defend against assaults on their immune systems. I argue that the feminized, medicalized discourse of stress offers an ultimately unworkable resolution of societal tensions centering around work and family. By means of an aspirational rhetoric related to the achievement of ‘balance’ it reinforces the dominant culture’s historical attachment to the separate spheres, thereby reaffirming women’s natural place in the social order as nurturers and domestic laborers.
Are We Medicalizing Women’s Misery? A Critical Review of Women’s Higher Rates of Reported Depression
Authors: Ussher Jane M.
Published: February 2010

Epidemiological research consistently reports that women experience higher rates of depression than men. Competing biomedical, psychological and sociocultural models adopt a realist epistemology and a discourse of medical naturalism to position depression as a naturally occurring pathology within the woman, caused by biology, cognitions or life stress. Feminist critics argue that this medicalizes women’s misery, legitimizes expert intervention, and negates the political, economic and discursive aspects of experience. However, the alternative model of social constructionism may appear to dismiss the ‘real’ of women’s distress, and deny its material and intrapsychic concomitants, as well as negate relevant research findings. A critical review of sociocultural and psychological research on women’s depression is conducted. It is argued that a critical-realist epistemology allows us to acknowledge the material-discursive-intrapsychic concomitants of experiences constructed as depression, without privileging one level of analysis above the other, in order to understand women’s higher rates of reported depression.
Technologies of Sexiness: Theorizing Women’s Engagement in the Sexualization of Culture
Authors: Evans Adrienne , Riley Sarah , Shankar Avi
Published: February 2010

‘Raunch’ culture and ‘porno-chic’ are examples of a dramatic rise in the re-sexualization of women’s bodies. Wrapped in discourses of individualism, consumerism and empowerment, and often excluding those who are not white, heterosexual and slim, this sexualization of culture has created significant debates within feminist literature with regard to the question of how to value women’s choices of participation in sexualized culture while also maintaining a critical standpoint towards the cultural context that has enabled such postfeminist sexual subjectivities. In this paper we contribute to these debates by presenting ‘technologies of sexiness’, a theoretical framework that draws on Foucauldian theorizing of technologies of the self and Butler’s work on performativity. The technology of sexiness framework conceptualizes a blurring between subjectivity and consumer and media culture and highlights the doubled movements in which agency is complexly enabled and disabled in relation to technology, performance/parody, multiplicity and recuperation.
Thinking as Action
Authors: Santamaría Andrés , Cubero Mercedes , de la Mata Manuel L.
Published: February 2010

The aim of cultural psychology is understanding how mind is related to cultural, social, institutional, and historical contexts. This endeavor requires an adequate unit of analysis. We believe this unit of analysis to be mediated action. Our view of action as the unit of analysis has important theoretical and methodological consequences. In the theoretical domain , it means assuming a notion of culture as a set of semiotically mediated activity settings, and a view of cognition as heterogeneous, contextually and historically-culturally situated and semiotically mediated. We outline three methodological implications: a historical or genetic perspective, the analysis of activity in everyday cultural contexts, and the use of semiotically mediated action as a unit of analysis. Finally, we explain the way in which we have employed mediated action as a conceptual and methodological tool for conducting research in cultural psychology and illustrate some of these ideas with reference to specific studies carried out by our research group.
Making the familiar strange: can visual research methods render the familiar setting more perceptible?
Authors: Mannay Dawn
Published: February 2010

The centrality of the researcher and their position in relation to the research setting has been subject to controversy and long standing debates threaded with the narratives of insider and outsider myths. Insiders are often charged with the tendency to present their group in an unrealistically favourable light, and their work is often considered to be overshadowed by the enclosed, self-contained world of common understanding. This article draws upon data generated by six participants from a research project, which aimed to explore and represent the everyday experiences of working-class mothers and daughters residing on a peripheral social housing estate. The article describes how I, as an indigenous researcher, employed visual methods of data production in order to suspend my preconceptions of familiar territory, and facilitate an understanding of the unique viewpoints of mothers and daughters on the margins of contemporary Britain. The article focuses the usefulness of the approach for making the familiar strange when the researchers own experience mirrors that of their participants.
Using the telephone for narrative interviewing: a research note
Authors: Holt Amanda
Published: February 2010

Much social science research dictates that the most productive mode for producing narrative data is through face-to-face interviews, with other modes of data production assumed to be ‘second best’. This research note makes a unique contribution to this debate by reflecting on a research project which used telephones to produce participant narratives. It draws on data from both the researcher’s field notes and the participants themselves, who were asked after the narrative interview about their experiences of participating in a seemingly ‘strange’ research encounter. Furthermore, it describes the particular ideological, methodological and practical benefits that using telephones produced and reflects how such findings speak to Stephens’ (2007) recent work concerning telephone interviewing. This research note concludes that the use of telephones should be seriously considered as a preferred alternative to face-to-face interviews when considering how to conduct narrative interviews with particular groups of participants.
Elephants, gold standards and applied qualitative research
Authors: Fielding Nigel
Published: February 2010

In a recent article in Qualitative Research, Norman Denzin discussed a variety of threats to qualitative research posed by institutional and professional organizational actors who would elevate Randomized Control Trials and associated practices as the gold standard indexing the quality of all social research. Informed by his long established contributions to the constantly changing field of research methodology, Denzin brought passion, and a rich variety of arguments, to the debate. I argue that this also brought some lapses of rigour that require attention if qualitative methodologists are to put their best case against the narrow and intolerant vision offered by the proponents of gold standards.
Failsafe automation of Phase II clinical trial interim monitoring for stopping rules
Authors: Day Roger S
Published: February 2010

Background In Phase II clinical trials in cancer, preventing the treatment of patients on a study when current data demonstrate that the treatment is insufficiently active or too toxic has obvious benefits, both in protecting patients and in reducing sponsor costs. Considerable efforts have gone into experimental designs for Phase II clinical trials with flexible sample size, usually implemented by early stopping rules. The intended benefits will not ensue, however, if the design is not followed. Despite the best intentions, failures can occur for many reasons.

Purpose The main goal is to develop an automated system for interim monitoring, as a backup system supplementing the protocol team, to ensure that patients are protected. A secondary goal is to stimulate timely recording of patient assessments.

Methods We developed key concepts and performance needs, then designed, implemented, and deployed a software solution embedded in the clinical trials database system.

Results The system has been in place since October 2007. One clinical trial tripped the automated monitor, resulting in e-mails that initiated statistician/investigator review in timely fashion.

Limitations Several essential contributing activities still require human intervention, institutional policy decisions, and institutional commitment of resources.

Conclusions We believe that implementing the concepts presented here will provide greater assurance that interim monitoring plans are followed and that patients are protected from inadequate response or excessive toxicity. This approach may also facilitate wider acceptance and quicker implementation of new interim monitoring algorithms. Clinical Trials 2010; 7: 78—84. http://ctj.sagepub.com
A simulation study evaluating approaches to the analysis of ordinal outcome data in randomized controlled trials in traumatic brain injury: results from the IMPACT Project
Authors: McHugh Gillian S , Butcher Isabella , Steyerberg Ewout W , Marmarou Anthony , Lu Juan , Lingsma Hester F , Weir James , Maas Andrew I R , Murray Gordon D
Published: February 2010

Background Clinical trials in traumatic brain injury have a disappointing track record, with a long history of ‘negative’ Phase III trials. One contributor to this lack of success is almost certainly the low efficiency of the conventional approach to the analysis, which discards information by dichotomizing an ordinal outcome scale.

Purpose Our goal was to evaluate the potential efficiency gains, which can be achieved by using techniques, which extract additional information from ordinal outcome data — the proportional odds model and the sliding dichotomy. In addition, we evaluated the additional efficiency gains, which can be achieved through covariate adjustment.

Methods The study was based on simulations, which were built around a database of patient-level data extracted from eight Phase III trials and three observational studies in traumatic brain injury. Two different putative treatment effects were explored, one which followed the proportional odds model, and the other which assumed that the effect of the intervention was to reduce the risk of death without changing the distribution of outcomes within survivors. The results are expressed as efficiency gains, reported as the percentage reduction in sample size that can be used with the ordinal analyses without loss of statistical power relative to the conventional binary analysis.

Results The simulation results show substantial efficiency gains. Use of the sliding dichotomy allows sample sizes to be reduced by up to 40% without loss of statistical power. The proportional odds model gives modest additional gains over and above the gains achieved by use of the sliding dichotomy.

Limitations As with any simulation study, it is difficult to know how far the findings may be extrapolated beyond the actual situations that were modeled.

Conclusions Both ordinal techniques offer substantial efficiency gains relative to the conventional binary analysis. The choice between the two techniques involves subtle value judgments. In the situations examined, the proportional odds model gave efficiency gains over and above the sliding dichotomy, but arguably, the sliding dichotomy is more intuitive and clinically appealing. Clinical Trials 2010; 7: 44—57. http://ctj.sagepub.com
Impact of supplemental site grants to increase African American accrual for the Selenium and Vitamin E Cancer Prevention Trial
Authors: Cook Elise D , Arnold Kathryn B , Hermos John A , McCaskill-Stevens Worta , Moody-Thomas Sarah , Probstfield Jeffrey L , Hamilton Sandra J , Campbell Russell D , Anderson Karen B , Minasian Lori M
Published: February 2010

Background African American accrual to prevention trials at rates representative of the disease burden experienced by this population requires additional resources and focused efforts.

Purpose To describe the rationale, context, and criteria for selection of sites that received Minority Recruitment Enhancement Grants (MREGs) to increase African American recruitment to the Selenium and Vitamin E Cancer Prevention Trial (SELECT). To determine if African American accrual was higher among the 15 MREG sites when compared with similar nonawarded sites.

Methods Changes in African American accrual at sites that received MREGs are compared with changes in a group of 15, frequency-matched, nonawarded sites using a quasi-experimental, post hoc analysis. Successful and unsuccessful recruitment strategies reported by the MREG sites are described.

Results The increased number of African American participants accrued per month at MREG sites post-funding was higher than the change at comparison sites by a factor of 3.38 (p = 0.004, 95% CI: 1.51—7.57). An estimated 602 additional African American participants were recruited at MREG sites due to MREG funding, contributing to the overall 14.9% African American recruitment. Successful recruitment strategies most reported by MREG sites included increasing staff, transportation resources, recruiting through the media, mailings, and prostate cancer screening clinics during off-hours.

Limitations Comparison sites were chosen retrospectively, not by randomization. Although comparison sites were selected to be similar to MREG sites with regard to potential confounding factors, it is possible that unknown factors could have biased results. Cost-effective analyses were not conducted.

Conclusions MREG sites increased African American accrual in the post-funding period more than comparison sites, indicating MREG funding enhanced the sites’ abilities to accrue African American participants. Targeted grants early in the accrual period may be a useful multi-site intervention to increase African American accrual for a prevention study where adequate African American representation is essential. Clinical Trials 2010; 7: 90—99. http://ctj.sagepub.com
Telephonic nurse case management for patients with diabetes and mental illnesses: a qualitative perspective
Authors: Kahn Linda S. , Fox Chester H. , Carrington June , Desai Urmi , Bartlett Donald P. , Lyle Heather , Kowalski Michelle
Published: February 2010

Objectives: Gold Choice, a partially capitated Medicaid managed care programme for individuals with a behavioural health diagnosis, implemented a telephonic nurse case management (TNCM) programme to improve diabetes self-management. We sought to identify issues faced by patients with co-morbid behavioural health diagnoses and diabetes as documented in the telephonic nurse case manager’s progress notes. We also explored the role of the TNCM in addressing members’ needs.

Methods: We undertook a qualitative analysis of 853 de-identified progress notes from 539 Gold Choice members and conducted a semi-structured interview with the TNCM.

Results: Seven major themes emerged reflecting the nurse’s perspectives on challenges faced by Gold Choice members and addressed by the TNCM: (1) Transience of the population. (2) Complex needs, involving not only medical and psychiatric conditions but also housing, transportation and survival. (3) Confusion regarding diabetes diagnosis. (4) Mistrust and suspicion. (5) Difficulties with medical care. (6) Need for diabetes self-management education/skills. (7) Marked appreciation that the TNCM would initiate contact and care about the patient.

Discussion: Members with co-morbid behavioural health diagnoses and diabetes constitute a complex population with extensive needs. The TNCM’s role extends beyond diabetes care and entails social support as well as navigation of the healthcare and social service systems.
The Practice of Leadership in the Messy World of Organizations
Authors: Denis Jean-Louis , Langley Ann , Rouleau Linda
Published: February 2010

This article examines the practice of leadership in organizations characterized by ambiguous authority relationships. Drawing on three empirical case studies illustrative of a long-term research program on change in health care organizations, we examine leadership as a practical activity focusing particularly on its dynamic, collective, situated, and dialectical nature. We invite researchers on leadership to look carefully at the embeddedness of leadership roles in context and at the type and consequences of practices that leaders develop in such contexts. Implications of these ideas for further research and for would-be leaders are discussed.
Contextualizing Leader Dynamics: How Public Service Leaders Endeavour to Build Influence
Authors: Wallace Mike , Tomlinson Michael
Published: February 2010

A generic conceptualization is developed of the evolutionary relationship between leader activity and context, informed by structuration theory. It is argued that theoretical development to date has underplayed the extent of leaders’ attempted — and more or less successful — manipulation of contextual factors, within structural parameters that bound their agency. A heuristic model of leaders’ interaction with their context is articulated. This links their degree of agency and its delimitation with the degree to which contextual factors can be manipulated to extend leaders’ platform for future influence. Findings from qualitative research on the perceptions of ‘top’ organization leaders in the English public services illustrate the application of the model. Indicative factors are perceived to be variably manipulable. The experience of one successful secondary school headteacher portrays how the context—leader dynamic operates cumulatively and recursively. The conclusion considers the implications of this conceptualization for theorizing, research, and policy for improving leadership practice.
Papering the Cracks with Discourse: The Narrative Identity of the Authentic Leader
Authors: Shaw Jan
Published: February 2010

Authentic leadership has been described as ‘the root construct underlying all positive forms of leadership and its development’ (Avolio & Gardner, 2005: 316). Authentic leadership revolves around the somewhat clichéd idea of ‘being true to the self ’, or more precisely, ‘being true to one’s core beliefs and values and exhibiting authentic behaviour’ (Gardner et al., 2005: 345). Authenticity ‘involves “owning” who one truly is’ (Sparrowe, 2005: 421). But who is one ‘truly’? What constitutes this true self? Narrative theory has been invoked to explore this question of identity. This article examines and critiques the use of narrative as an exploratory mechanism in the search for authenticity and the authentic self. It argues that the current methodologies have a tendency to replicate existing paradigms rather than discover new possibilities. This article then proposes an alternative perspective on narrative based on the work of Adriana Cavarero, offering a new configuration of what constitutes the self, including a recognition of the unique existent and an acknowledgement of the distance between the existent and narrative identity. In conclusion, this article presents some implications and possibilities for further leadership research.
Synthesis and Characterization of Allylic Dinuclear Molybdenum Complexes with Bridging Oxygen and Sulfur Containing Ligands
Authors: Shatnawi Mazin Y , Tanash Samer A , Al-Ahmad Saleem A , Challen Paul R , Henkel Gerald
Published: February 2010

Complexes of the type [NEt4][{Mo(CO)2(η3-C3H5)}2(μ-L)3] and [Na(thf)x][{Mo(CO)2(η3-C3H5)}2(μ-L)3] (L = OC2H5, SC2H5, OPh, SPh, OC6H4CH3, and SCH2Ph) were synthesized using two different methods. The first was by the reaction of the starting material [Mo(CO)2(CH3CN)2(η3-C3H5)Cl] with NaSR or NaOR and [NEt4]+, using 2:3 (metal:ligand) mole ratio in thf at room temperature. The second was by the in situ reactions of the ligands with the intermediate [Mo(CO)2(CH3CN)2(η3-C3H5)(thf)]+, which was generated by reacting the starting material [Mo(CO)2(CH3CN)2(η3-C3H5)Cl] with Ag[BF4]. The complexes were characterized by means of IR, NMR, and elemental analysis. The X-ray structure of the complex [NEt4][{Mo(CO)2(η3-C3H5)}2(μ-SC6H5)3] was determined, and cyclic voltammetery measurements for the complexes [NEt4][{Mo(CO)2(η3-C3H5)}2(μ-SC6H5)3] and [NEt4][{Mo(CO)2(η3-C3H5)}2(μ-OC6H4CH3)3] were carried out. The OC6H4CH3 complex exhibited a reversible oxidation wave at ca. 0.1 V whereas the SC6H5 complex did not.
Viscoelasticity, Leachability, and Antimicrobial Activity of Poly(vinyl chloride) Blended with Benzyldimethyltetradecylammonium Bis(2-ethylhexyl) Sulfonatosuccinate
Authors: Katano Hajime , Tsukatani Toshihide
Published: February 2010

Benzyldimethyltetradecylammonium (BA14+) salt with bis(2-ethylhexyl) sulfonatosuccinate (BEHS−) anion maintains its liquid state even at room temperature, so it can be regarded as a halogen-free low-volatile liquid material. In this study, the potential use of BA14BEHS as additive for poly(vinyl chloride) (PVC) has been investigated. The temperature dependence of the storage and loss moduli of PVC films blended with BA14BEHS showed a similar trend of that with a traditional plasticizer bis(2-ethylhexyl) phthalate. The glass transition temperature of the PVC films determined as the peak top temperature in loss modulus was lowered with increasing BA14BEHS content. The 10% BA14BEHS-blended PVC film was placed in contact with water and heptane, but BA14BEHS could not be detected from the aqueous and organic media. The results indicate that BA14BEHS can be applied as a plasticizer for PVC. Since BA14BEHS can be used to give textiles antimicrobial properties, the activity of the BA14BEHS-blended PVC film was assayed against Escherichia coli JM109. In spite of the low-leachability of BA14BEHS, the PVC film showed a significant antimicrobial activity.
A Novel 3D Photoluminescent Silver(I) Coordination Polymer Featuring Unusual μ4-Bonded and Usual μ2-Bonded 2-Aminopyrazine
Authors: Sun Di , Luo Geng-Geng , Zhang Na , Xu Qin-Juan , Wei Zhan-Hua , Yang Cheng-Feng , Lin Li-Rong , Huang Rong-Bin , Zheng Lan-Sun
Published: February 2010

The coexistence of unusual μ4- and usual μ2-bonding modes of 2-aminopyrazine (NH2pyz) is observed for the first time in a novel 3D AgI coordination polymer [Ag4(NHpyz)2(NH2pyz)3(PF6)2]n (1). The structure of 1 possesses 1D {[Ag4(μ4-NHpyz)2]2+}n cylinders which are further extended by μ2-NH2pyz into a 3D framework.
Adsorption of Simazine on a Glassy Carbon Electrode
Authors: Pintado Sara , Mellado José Miguel Rodríguez
Published: February 2010

Differential capacity–potential curves have been measured for the s-triazine herbicide simazine at different concentrations. The decrease in capacity was independent of the applied potential, so the adsorption is also independent of the potential. The adsorption follows a Langmuir type isotherm. The adsorption constant was obtained.
Unrecognizable bonds: Bleeding kinship in Pedro Almodvar and Gregg Araki
Authors: Asibong Andrew
Published: February 2010

Up to the early 2000s, Pedro Almodvar's and Gregg Araki's films, for all their colourful queerness, could be read as symptomatic of a quasi de rigueur trend in art-house cinema towards the gleeful deconstruction of the love story. But more recent work by the two auteurs suggests that
each is increasingly interested in more demanding visions of how humans might achieve something like loving relations, visions based neither on cinema's return to traditional narratives of romance nor on its brittle championing of post-modern desire, but rather on its dreaming of a shared
survival of and identification with something like unrepresentable suffering. This article argues that the shift by Almodvar and Araki into new cinematic representations of non-realist and unthinkable forms of love, beyond either singularizing romance or multiplicitous desire, is both ethically
and politically crucial in an era of the increasingly easy leftfield posture of post-ideological disillusionment.
Theorizing film realism empirically
Authors: Nakassis Constantine V
Published: February 2010

In this article I argue that theories of fictional film realism are epistemologically and methodologically flawed because they reason in the abstract about empirically investigable phenomena, particularly spectatorship. Through the investigation of so-called realist, commercial Tamil
film, the article explores what a theory of realism would look like if approached through work with viewers, filmmakers and film form.
Reviews
Authors: Wheeler Duncan , Rawnsley Ming-Yeh T
Published: February 2010

All about Almodvar: a passion for cinema, Brad Epps and Despina Kakoudaki (eds.), (2009)Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 496 pp., ISBN 978-0-8166-4961-7 (pbk), $24.95

Lee, Vivian P.Y. (2009)Hong Kong Cinema Since 1997: The Post-Nostalgic Imagination. London: Palgrave Macmillan
Matrix Metalloproteinase‐3 and Vitamin D Receptor Genetic Polymorphisms, and Their Interactions with Occupational Exposure in Lumbar Disc Degeneration
Authors: Yuan Han‐Yan , Tang Ying , Liang You‐Xin , Lei Ling , Xiao Guo‐Bing , Wang Sheng , Xia Zhao‐Lin
Published: February 2010

Matrix Metalloproteinase‐3 and Vitamin D Receptor Genetic Polymorphisms, and Their Interactions with Occupational Exposure in Lumbar Disc Degeneration: Han‐Yan Yuan, et al. Department of Occupational Health, School of Public Health, Fudan University, China

Objectives

To investigate the occupational and genetic risk factors inducing lumbar disc degeneration in a Chinese population, and to explore their synergistic interactions.

Methods

A case‐control study involving 178 low back pain patients with lumbar disc degeneration and 284 controls was carried out. Five types of work‐related factors were investigated using questionnaires. Polymerase chain reaction and restriction fragments length polymorphism was used to detect the polymorphisms of MMP‐3 (matrix metalloproteinase‐3)(rs731236), VDR‐Taq (vitamin D receptor‐Taq) and VDR‐Apa (vitamin D receptor‐Apa)(rs35068180). Rothman's synergy index was used to measure the synergistic interactions between gene polymorphisms and occupational risk factors.

Results

Family history of lumbar disc diseases, back injury history, whole‐body vibration, bending/twisting, heavy physical workload, age, mutation alleles 5A of MMP‐3 and A of VDR‐Apa were significantly associated with lumbar disc degeneration (OR=12.70, 11.79, 8.96, 5.46, 1.05, 1.96 and 1.70, respectively, p<0.05). Synergistic interactions existed between the mutation allele 5A of MMP‐3 and whole‐body vibration exposure, the mutation allele 5A of MMP‐3 and bending/twisting, and the mutation allele A of VDR‐Apa and bending/twisting (SI=13.27, 2.91, 2.35, respectively, p<0.05).

Conclusions

The results of this study suggest that gene‐occupation interaction might play a certain role in exaggerating lumbar disc degeneration. There is a possibility that subjects who carry mutation alleles 5A of MMP‐3 and/or A of VDR‐Apa are more vulnerable to lumbar disc degeneration when they are exposed to whole‐body vibration and/or bending/twisting under ergonomic loads.