bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Quine’s Question Mark
Authors: Sorensen Roy
Published: November 2023

Willard Van Orman Quine was born in Akron, Ohio, on “anti-Christmas,” June 25, 1908. He died on Christmas 2000. Beginning a lifelong affiliation with Harvard University, Quine wrote a dissertation on Principia Mathematica under the supervision of Alfred North Whitehead. Although Quine made contributions to computer science, he continued to use his 1927 Remington typewriter. As a logician, he “had an operation on it” to change a few keys to accommodate special symbols.
Stress Testing After Myocardial Infarction
Authors: Ellestad Myrvin H
Published: November 2023

This is probably the time to reevaluate the previously established beliefs about management of an acute myocardial infarction. The overall mortality is decreased significantly due to the use of thrombolysis and emergency angioplasty. The national mortality reported by the NRMI Registry is approximately 11% but in centers where emergent PTCA with stenting is frequently applied, mortality is between 4 and 6%. Even in hospitals where this treatment is common however, there are a significant number of patients who, because of late arrival or other reasons, are not treated with reperfusion. Thus, there is a marked variation in the coronary status as well as the myocardial function in what is a very heterogeneous cohort of patients. Some patients who have very early angioplasty or thrombolysis have very little myocardial necrosis but may be left with a great deal of myocardium still at risk. Others have large scars but may not have significant areas threatened. So in many of these patients an exercise test can be very useful in planning the patient’s future. It may even help to identify some who have hibernating myocardium, who would benefit from revascularization.
Pediatric Exercise Testing
Authors: Ellestad Myrvin H
Published: November 2023

In pediatrics, exercise testing is routine in evaluating working capacity, and adaptation to external work, growth, and level of fitness in normal subjects and in patients with cardiovascular or other disease processes. Modern technology has aided further development and the rediscovery of noninvasive or innocuous invasive procedures to do functional assessment of young subjects with different clinical problems of varying severity.

With estimates of working capacity, pulmonary ventilation, cardiac performance and function, myocardial perfusion, and rhythm and conduction of the heart, the oxygen transport system can be assessed under standardized conditions with low risk in children. The interpretation of the exercise study revealing the impact of specific diseases on the cardiovascular system, provides the clinical information for rational use in diagnosing and treating patients. Test results showing common response patterns that suggest a specific diagnosis often occur but must be accepted as a bonus because some physiological or pathophysiological pattern of exercise responses are common to several diagnoses.
The Origin and Evolution of Cultures
Authors: Boyd Robert , Richerson Peter J
Published: November 2023

Over the past 25 years, Boyd and Richerson have become well-known across a wide range of disciplines for their path-breaking work on evolution and culture. This work collects twenty of the influential but relatively inaccessible published articels that form the backbone of this research. It could not be more timely given the growing influence of evolutionary psychology. The papers – which were published in a diverse set of journals and which are not easily available – a conceptually linked and form a cohesive, unified evolutionary account of human culture. Their interdisciplinary research is based on two notions. First, that culture is crucial for understanding human behavior: unlike other organism, socially transmitted beliefs, attitudes and values heavily influence our behavior. Secondly, culture is part of biology: the capacity to acquire and transmit culture is a derived component of human psychology, and the contents of culture are deeply intertwined with our biology. Taking off from these two assumptions, Boyd and Richerson’s novel idea is that culture is a pool of information, stored in the brains of a population, that gets transmitted from one brain to another by social learning processes. Among their conclusions: culture can account for both our astounding ecological success as well as the maladaptations that characterize much of human behavior. Interest in Boyd and Richerson’s work spans anthropology, psychology, economics, philosophy, and political science, and has influenced work on animal behavior, economics and game theory, memes, and even archaeology.
Cross-System Perspectives on the Ecology and Evolution of Resilience
Authors: Levin Colleen T Webb Simon A
Published: November 2023

Ecological systems provide a wide spectrum of benefits to humans including the very life-support systems that sustain humanity. Thus, there is a compelling need to understand how robust these systems are in the face of a changing environment, and what the mechanisms are that underlie robustness. The notion of robustness or resilience of ecological systems for us denotes the ability of the system to maintain its macroscopic functional features, such as species diversity or nutrient cycling, rather than the narrower and unattainable possibility of constancy. Indeed, it is the lack of constancy at lower levels of organization that can convey robustness to ecosystems as a whole. The robustness of ecosystem processes, such as nutrient cycling, varies across different types of ecosystems and is related to structural properties such as the strength of interactions among species. This points to the importance of examining structure-function relationships and their evolution. The robustness of the whole ecosystem may fundamentally lie at the level of species themselves, in terms of the robustness of modules of closely interacting species, or as an emergent property of the whole, complex ecosystem. Evidence from diverse ecosystems suggests that biodiversity is correlated with system robustness, but causation is complicated to untangle. In part, biodiversity itself, through functional redundancy, can enhance robustness; but conversely, increased robustness can promote biodiversity over ecological and evolutionary time. Local disturbance may promote global predictability and higher biodiversity by selecting for suites of species with traits that provide the mechanisms for ecosystem recovery following larger scale or novel perturbations. We illustrate these issues via comparisons of the response of tropical and temperate forests to disturbance by wind storms. We discuss the role of biodiversity and other mechanisms in sustaining resilience, and the importance of evolutionary history.
The Anterior Pituitary and Hypothalamus
Authors: Ojeda Sergio R
Published: November 2023

The core of the neuroendocrine system is represented by the hypothalamic-pituitary complex. The hypothalamus is composed of a diversity of neurosecretory cells arranged in groups, which secrete their products either into the portal blood system that connects the hypothalamus to the adenohypophysis (see below) or directly into the general circulation after storage in the neurohypophysis (see Chapter 7). Because of the nature of their actions, the hypothalamic hormones are classified as releasing or inhibiting hormones (Table 6-1).
Neural Crest Formation
Authors: Bronner-Fraser Marianne
Published: November 2023

A central question in developmental biology is how a single cell, the fertilized egg, can give rise to multiple types of tissues in the complex adult organism. This is exemplified by the forming brain, where seemingly homogeneous neuroepithelial cells eventually differentiate into myriad of mature neurons and glia of the central nervous system. Equally intriguing is the neural crest, a population of cells that initially arises within the newly formed central nervous system. Subsequently, these cells undergo an epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition whereby they leave the neuroepithelium and transform into a migratory population that forms much of the peripheral nervous system. In addition, neural crest cells give rise to other diverse cell types as different as pigment cells, the craniofacial skeleton, adrenal chromaffin cells, and some vascular smooth muscle. This chapter serves as a general introduction to the formation, cell interactions, and migration pathways that are involved in generating this fascinating cell population.
Genetic Regulation of Early Nervous System Development
Authors: Carpenter Ellen M
Published: November 2023

The primordium of the central nervous system, the neural tube, appears by the end of the fourth week of human gestation. The neural tube develops through the process of neurulation, a set of morphogenetic movements that transform part of the embryonic ectoderm into the three dimensional neural tube. In the first step of this process, the neural plate is induced from the dorsal ectoderm by the underlying mesoderm, while in subsequent steps the neural plate becomes shaped and folded into the neural tube.
Physical Examination of the Spine
Authors: Mendoza Sergio A Stuart L , Weinstein Stuart L
Published: November 2023

Orthopedic problems frequently affect children with myelomeningocele. According to Swank and Dias (1992), 64% of these children require at least one orthopedic procedure before they turn 18, with an average of 5.4 procedures per patient. Spinal deformities affect children with myelomeningocele (MMC), regardless of their level of paralysis. Scoliosis has been described in 20% of patients with sacral-level compromise and in 94% of those with thoracic-level involvement (Christoferson and Brooks, 1985). These deformities may affect posture and sitting comfort, ultimately reducing self-sufficiency and, hence, social and academic development. For this reason, it is mandatory to carry out routine physical examination of the spine, including periodic radiographic screening.
Classification of Neural Tube Defects
Authors: Moore Cynthia A
Published: November 2023

The human neural tube develops and closes during the third and fourth weeks after conception and is normally completed by 28 days postconception (Sadler, 1998) (Fig. 6. lA,B). Malformations known as neural tube defects occur when the normal closure process fails. Several clinical types of neural tube defects are recognized, anencephaly and spina bifida being the most common; however, the basis for the variation among the recognized types is poorly understood. In this chapter, the major types of neural tube defects-anencephaly, craniorachischisis, spina bifida, encephalocele, and iniencephaly will be defined and the classification issues surrounding each will be discussed.
Syndromes with Neural Tube Defects
Authors: Stevenson Laurie H Seaver Roger E
Published: November 2023

The preponderance of all neural tube defects (NTDs) are isolated malformations of the central nervous system (CNS) and its protective encasements. Some common associated anomalies are considered secondary to the NTD, such as hydrocephalus, Amold-Chiari malformation, and clubfoot. Only about one in five NTDs will have a co-occurring defect of non-CNS structures that is not considered a typical secondary defect. Certain of these associated structural anomalies coexist with NTDs as components of recognizable malformation syndromes of genetic or environmental etiology. Other anomalies, not typically considered secondary, may indeed be related to the NTD due to disturbance of neural crest migration or spatial limitations placed on developing tissues. Beyond these two major categories of associated defects, small numbers of other structural anomalies that lack current explanation are also found. Studies of NTDs and associated anomalies are instructive in understanding embryonic development, identifying the causes of birth defects, determining recurrence risks, and guiding expectations for the efficacy of preventive strategies.
Methodological Issues in the Study of Neural Tube Defects
Authors: Kirby Russell S
Published: November 2023

The design and conduct of epidemiologic investigations into the etiology of neural tube defects (NTDs) requires attention to several methodological issues. While some of these issues are common to perinatal research, others are more specific to the epidemiology of birth defects in general and NTDs in particular. In this chapter, we begin by examining some methodological issues associated with assessment of the occurrence of NTDs, followed by a discussion of methodological issues specific to the study of NTDs using the major epidemiologic study designs.
Birth Defects Surveillance Systems and Neural Tube Defects
Authors: Sever Lowell E
Published: November 2023

Birth defects surveillance programs, particularly in Europe and the United States, developed following the recognition of the teratogenicity of thalidomide. The argument was that if there had been a routine way of monitoring the occurrence of birth defects, the introduction of a drug or any other environmental agent that caused abnormal development would have been recognized earlier than through the observations of alert practitioners. Acceptance of this premise continues; the introduction of the Birth Defects Prevention Act of 1998 included the justification that the presence of a birth defects surveillance program in Texas would have alerted the medical community to an “epidemic” of anencephaly in the Lower Rio Grande Valley earlier than occurred through the observations of an alert nurse. Supposedly, had there been an earlier recognition of the epidemic, something could have been done to stop it. While the logic of this premise holds, birth defects surveillance programs have yet to be the first to identify a new teratogen, and investigations of birth defect clusters identified through surveillance have yet to establish a responsible agent.
Mouse Mutants as Models of Neural Tube Defects
Authors: Copp Andrew J , Greene Nicholas D E , Murdoch Jennifer N
Published: November 2023

While most animals have a central nervous system (CNS), the process of neurulation, in which neural folding and fusion create a closed neural tube (reviewed in Chapter 2), occurs only in higher vertebrates. Embryos with an abnormal open neural tube are seen, therefore, only in higher animals, including amphibians, birds, and mammals. This fact has precluded advances in our understanding of the genetic basis of neural tube defects (NTDs) from studies of lower organisms. Genetic studies in the fruit fly Drosophila, and in the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans, have unraveled the mechanisms underlying many developmental events, including the specification, differentiation, and programmed death of CNS neurons (Ellis and Horvitz, 1986; Gaiano and Fishell, 2002). In contrast, invertebrate studies have not contributed directly to an understanding of the morphogenetic process of neurulation or the molecular basis of NTDs.
Postnatal Surgery for Myelomeningocele
Authors: Miller Jonathan P , Cohen Alan R
Published: November 2023

Myelomeningocele, the most serious form of spina bifida, affects 2500 to 6000 newborns per year in the United States (McLone, 1998). For neonates born with this condition, the initial management has a profound impact on their survival and the disabilities they may have to cope with throughout their lives. Postnatal surgical treatment for myelomeningocele has been well established for many years. The surgeon must first replace the neural tissues within the spinal canal and then reconstruct the thecal sac and close the back. Large areas may be difficult to close and sometimes require innovative techniques, particularly if there is an associated kyphotic deformity. Associated abnormalities including hydrocephalus and the Chiari II malformation must also be addressed by the neurosurgeon.
Orthopedic Surgery
Authors: Dias Luciano
Published: November 2023

The overall management of the child with spina bifida has evolved significantly in the past 30 years. The orthopedic management has also evolved. With better knowledge of the orthopedic pathology, new surgical techniques have been developed to improve function.
Genetic Counseling and Interpretation of Risk Figures
Authors: Saul Robert A
Published: November 2023

Genetic counseling (providing genetic information, recurrence risks, and psychological support) as an activity did not begin in earnest until the twentieth century (Walker, 1998). Prior to that time, most birth defects such as neural tube defects and familial disorders such as mental retardation were attributed to external factors. These external factors included a variety of causes such as misdeeds, punishment by God, or being “marked” by some phenomenon during pregnancy. In the last category, everything from eclipses to runaway horse carts was implicated. The recognition of genetic traits, the possible transmission of those traits, and their possible recurrence was slow to evolve in the first half of the twentieth century. The second half of the century witnessed an explosion of such information. The ability to recognize genetic traits and their characteristics has led not only to the activity but also to the profession of genetic counseling.
The Half-Life of Cost-of-Illness Estimates: The Case of Spina Bifida
Authors: Waitzman Norman J , Romano Patrick S , Grosse Scott D
Published: November 2023

Neural tube defects, which include spina bifida, are one of the most frequent and most important categories of birth defects. Accordingly, there has been considerable interest in studying the impact of spina bifida as a public health problem. This impact can be measured in various ways, including disease-specific mortality, morbidity, functional limitation or disability, and quality-of-life impairment. Each of these measures captures one component of the total burden of disease. Such measures of impact are important because they allow public health agencies, re­ searchers, and health-care providers to understand the effects of preventive or diagnostic interventions, changes in disease incidence or prevalence, and new technologies. In recent years, cost-of-illness estimates have been widely used. The cost of illness reflects the direct costs of providing medical care, rehabilitative care, developmental services, and special education to affected children, as well as the so-called indirect costs of reduced workforce and household productivity.
Australian Shrub Grevillea caleyi: Recovery through Management of Fire and Predation
Authors: Regan Helen M , Auld Tony D
Published: November 2023

Fire plays an important role in the survival and ecology of many plant species. For many of these species, recruitment from a soil or canopy-stored seed bank depends on fire events; these include a number of Acacia spp., Banksia spp., Pinus spp., and Protea spp. (Whelan 1995, Bond and van Wilgen 1996). And this is particularly important for species in which all above-ground life history stages are killed by fire. One of the threats species in fire-prone habitats face is the alteration of natural fire regimes, and this threat is exacerbated when it exists in combination with habitat destruction. Such a combination can particularly affect the plants that occur in fragmented populations (a population of genetically indistinct individuals that has been fragmented into small groups) within cleared landscapes or on the edge of urban areas. Management of species in fire-prone, fragmented landscapes presents a number of challenges, one of which is how to determine an effective fire regime that will ensure the long-term persistence of populations. The optimal fire-management strategy will be one that ensures that seed production, survival of adult plants, and recruitment occur at complementary rates and times. In this chapter we use population viability analysis (PVA) to investigate a range of management strategies for fragmented populations of an endangered plant species, Grevillea caleyi (Proteaceae).
Yellow-Shouldered Parrot (Amazona barbadensis) on the Islands of Margarita and La Blanquilla, Venezuela : Poaching and the Survival of a Threatened Species
Authors: Rodríguez Jon Paul , Fajardo Laurie , Herrera Ileana , Sánchez Ada , Reyes Annedis
Published: November 2023

Approximately one-third of the 140 New World parrot species are considered at risk of extinction (Collar and Juniper 1992, Collar 1996, Snyder et al. 1999, BirdLife 2000). Venezuela is home to 14 genera and 49 species in the family Psittacidae, representing 35% of neotropical taxa (Desenne and Strahl 1991, 1994; Phelps and Meyer de Schauensee 1994). They occupy all habitat types in the country, from the dry scrub across the Caribbean and Atlantic coasts to the highland meadows (known locally as páramos) of the Andean cordillera in the west. Some 7 parrot taxa are considered nationally threatened, while 11 more are listed as facing a lower extinction risk (Rodríguez and Rojas-Suárez 1999).
A Paradox in English Syntax
Authors: Postal Paul M
Published: November 2023

“This is what I understand by a paradox: an apparently unacceptable conclusion derived by apparently acceptable reasoning from apparently acceptable premises. Appearances have to deceive, since the acceptable cannot lead by acceptable steps to the unacceptable. So, generally, we have a choice: Either the conclusion is not really unacceptable, or else the starting point, or the reasoning, has some nonobvious flaw.” Early sections of this study argue that common, perhaps even standard assumptions about English grammar yield a paradox in this sense when combined with certain observations about a puzzling class of sentences. It is ultimately claimed that one can resolve the paradox by adopting a particular set of grammatical assumptions; a partial development of these makes up section 9. A characteristic feature of one rather formal style of English is the existence of structures I refer to with considerable theoretical prejudice as null expletive subject (NEX) clauses. They are illustrated by the sentences in (2):
Oppenheimer’s Opinion Of His Own Teaching And Research In California
Authors: Pais Abraham
Published: November 2023

When in 1963 Oppenheimer, then director of the Princeton Institute, was asked whether he missed his earlier successful teaching activities, he replied, “I think that the charm went out of teaching after the great change of the war because I did teach at Caltech and Berkeley and for one thing I was always called away and distracted because I was thinking about other things, but actually I don’t think I ever taught well after the war. I have a feeling that what my job was was to get a part of the next generation brought up and that job was done when I came here.”
Narrative Features of Medicine
Authors: Charon Rita
Published: November 2023

The divides in health care need to be bridged in order for effective treatment to proceed. I have proposed that narrative means might help to bridge these chasms, because narrative ways of knowing and experiencing the world and self are held in common by health care professionals and patients. Anterior to our differentiating into doctors, nurses, and patients, that is, we are united and can be reunited. Furthermore, the specific divides that separate doctors from patients—beliefs about mortality, the contextualization of illness, understanding of disease etiology, and emotional factors that lead to suffering—have direct correlates in narrative aspects of medicine.
The Bioethics of Narrative Medicine
Authors: Charon Rita
Published: November 2023

Sickness calls forth stories. Whether in the patient’s “chief complaint,” the intern’s case presentation, the family member’s saga of surgery, or the coroner’s death note, patients and health professionals recognize problems, gauge progress, and lament defeat, in part, through telling about illness and having others listen. As we inspect the role of storytelling and bearing witness to narratives of illness in routine clinical practice, a specific instance of storytelling might need particularly close attention. This instance is the practice of bioethics. Not only are bioethicists called to assist at illnesses at particularly grave points in their courses—usually at the ends of life, especially the ends of contested lives—but the practice of ethics has of late been enlivened and itself contested by narrative knowledge and practice. In the same way that narrative competence alters what the nurse or doctor does in the office or on the ward, narrative competence fundamentally shifts what the ethicist does with patients, with families, with health care professionals, and with the self.
Changing Places: Language and Woman’s Place in Context
Authors: Bucholtz Mary
Published: November 2023

Commentators on Robin Tolmach Lakoff’s work on language and gender, and particularly her critics, often seem to believe that her ideas about women, language, and feminism stopped in 1975, the year when Language and Womans Place (LWP) was published in book form. Yet Lakoff explicitly stated in the text that she considered that work an initial foray into language and gender issues, not a definitive statement of the ways in which language reproduces an asymmetrical gender system: “I present what follows less as the final word on the subject of sexism in language —anything but that! —than as a goad to further research” (LWP 40).
Language and Marginalized Places
Authors: Hall Kira
Published: November 2023

In the early 1990s, the field of language and gender began to shift to what many scholars now identify as an ideological understanding of linguistic gender. This perspective views the “women’s language” and “men’s language” of previous generations not as indexically bound to the sex of the speaker, but as culturally and socially produced beliefs that are available for consumption, negotiation, and contestation (Gal 1991).
Exploring Women’s Language in Japanese
Authors: ide sachiko
Published: November 2023

It was not until I read Robin Lakoffs article “Language and Woman’s Place” in Language in Society (1973) in the mid-1970s that I awakened to the realization that a woman could be a full-fledged scholar. Lakoff keenly analyzed the mechanisms handicapping female students, who have to be “bilingual” in order to be perceived as appropriately serious in class and when talking to professors. As she noted, “It may be that the extra energy that must be (subconsciously or otherwise) expended in this game is energy sapped from more creative work, and hinders women from expressing themselves as well as they might otherwise, or as fully or freely as they might otherwise” (1973: 48, n. 2; cf. LWP 41-42). When I read this passage, I could not agree more.
Mother’s Place in Language and Womans Place
Authors: Kendall Shari
Published: November 2023

At seven years old in Utah, I asked my mother why all the cooks I knew were women but the chefs at the restaurants were men, why the church choir was stocked with sopranos but the voices I heard on the records my parents played were male. I was deeply unsatisfied when she replied that this was the way it was supposed to be. Granted, there were even then well-known female chefs and vocalists, the latter well represented on now defunct records and eight-track tapes, but I was overwhelmed by a pattern of women working at home unrecognized and men doing similar work with public approbation.
“I’m Eveiy Woman’’ Black Women’s (Dis)placement in Women’s Language Study
Authors: Morgan Marcyliena
Published: November 2023

For nearly three decades, scholars in the humanities and social sciences have participated in the long march to reevaluate, reconstruct, and, in many cases, expose systems of misrepresentation, exclusion, and marginalization regarding the study of gender and language. At the same time, scholarship on women of color has actively asserted that the interrelationship between race, gender, and class is integral to understanding both race and gender. Paradoxically, rather than social science and linguistic canons and paradigms shifting in light of the extensive writings on African American and other nonwhite and working-class women, academic theories of gender have simply shrugged in disregard.
Contradictions of the Indigenous Americas Feminist Challenges to and from the Field
Authors: Trechter Sara
Published: November 2023

Robin Lakoffs Language and Womans Place (LWP) (1975) called linguists to realize their obligation to analyze and transform the place of women in English. Recognizing that language cannot solely determine social reality, Lakoff nevertheless encourages the linguist to take an active role in social transformation because of her understanding of how language reflects “the weaknesses and strengths of a culture” (LWP 75; see also Ehrlich, this volume). In the same year that Lakoffs work was published, Anne Bodine (1975) surveyed the languages of the world that overtly encoded “sex differentiation” in their phonology or grammar; that is, languages that contained linguistic structures indicating the gender of the speaker, the listener, or both (cf. Matsumoto, this volume). Sixty percent of the languages she cited were indigenous languages of the Americas.
The Way We Wish We Were Sexuality and Class in Language and Woman’s Place
Authors: Gaudio Rudolf P
Published: November 2023

It’s no wonder I became an academic. As an Ivy League-educated gay man who came of age just a few years after Robin Lakoffs Language and Womans Place (LWP) (1975) was published, I couldn’t possibly have gone into hairdressing or interior decorating. What a waste of a good education, and what would my parents tell their friends? Nor could I enter the more manly professions of banking, law, or medicine, where Fd have to repress my emotions, hide my knowledge of color terms, and tell dirty jokes during happy hour.
As Much as We Use Language Lakoff’s Queer Augury
Authors: Barrett Rusty
Published: November 2023

A few days before I was to finish third grade, a tornado destroyed my family’s home in Arkansas, and we had to move to a new house across the street from the scariest girl in school. One day that summer, she tied her younger brother to a tree and spent the afternoon throwing a small axe at him like a knife thrower at the circus. When I screamed for her to stop before she hurt him, she simply glared at me and said, “Go to hell, you motherfucker.”
Genetic Tinkering with Humans
Authors: Avise John C
Published: November 2023

Most of the genetic techniques that might be used to engineer human beings differ little from those that have been used routinely since the 1970s to modify the genes of numerous microbes, plants, and other animals. The ethical issues, however, may be altogether different. Some of the proposed genetic alterations would apply only to individual recipients of the GM procedures, whereas others would impact the human germline and thereby potentially influence future generations of Homo sapiens as well. Should we assume godlike command and attempt to engineer our own species intentionally? Should we take the unprecedented medical and evolutionary reins now available to us and use them to direct our own genetic fates? No prior generation has had the immediate opportunity nor the responsibility to tackle such questions in practical, as well as in philosophic terms. The biotechnology revolution, when applied to the purposeful genetic alteration of people, raises profound issues that will challenge the deepest judgment and wisdom of Homo sapiens, the “cognizant” primate.
Posttraumatic Cranial Neuropathies
Authors: Keane James R , Baloh Robert W
Published: November 2023

Perseverance is required to diagnose cranial nerve injury in the presence of severe head trauma.49 Coma may obscure all but cranial nerve III, VI, and VII damage. Diagnosis of trochlear nerve injury in particular requires a high level of patient cooperation. Injury to the orbital muscles may be impossible to distinguish from ocular motor nerve damage. Loss of smell from nasal obstruction may be confused with olfactory nerve damage, and blockage of the auditory canal or damage to the middle ear may be difficult to distinguish from nerve VIII interruption. Craniofacial and skull base fracture can be overlooked while treating more life-threatening injuries.
Traumatic Intracranial Hemorrhage
Authors: Ammerman Joshua M , Jarell, S Taylor , Polin Richard S
Published: November 2023

In the United States, the direct and indirect costs of care for individuals suffering a traumatic brain injury (TBI) are estimated at more than $56 billion annually. The overall impact is even more substantial when one considers that the majority of severe head injuries occur in adolescents and young adults. Following head trauma, the spectrum of TBI ranges from concussion to diffuse axonal injury with irreversible coma. Within this spectrum lie the patients with traumatic intracranial hemorrhages (TIH).
Neurobehavioral Outcome of Head Trauma
Authors: Capruso Daniel X , Levin Harvey S
Published: November 2023

Neurobehavioral outcome in survivors of head trauma ranges from rapid recovery of cognition with no discernible sequelae to survival without recovery of consciousness. For those patients whose outcome falls between these two extremes, cognitive deficits and personality change frequently result in marked impairments of social and occupational functioning. These deficits in thought and behavior contribute more to disability than do physical (motor and sensory) sequelae in 72% of severe head trauma survivors.
Neurology of Microgravity and Space Travel
Authors: Fujii Mavis D
Published: November 2023

The environment of space is toxic to humans and most other forms of life that have evolved on this planet. The toxicity occurs because space lacks gravity, a radiation shield, an atmosphere, warmth, food, water, and other humans—in short, all those things that ensure survival and provide physical and psychological happiness (Table 32.1). After a discussion of the methodological limitations of space science and a history of the exploration of space, this chapter reviews the environment of spaceflight in terms of the major effects of space, particularly of microgravity, on the nervous system and on those systems that have an impact on the nervous system.
Psychiatric Aspects of the Neurology of Trauma
Authors: Merskey Harold
Published: November 2023

The cognitive effects of neural trauma frequently run side by side or are intermingled with emotional changes. This chapter deals with the psychiatric aspects of trauma other than changes in cognitive function. The recognition of psychological and neurological responses to trauma is discussed first. Some of the emotional changes that can occur in reaction to physical lesions, including neurological lesions, are then considered. Lastly, specific changes in personality or mental state that can result directly from brain damage are reviewed.
Physical Trauma, Psychological Stress, and Multiple Sclerosis
Authors: Goodin Douglas S
Published: November 2023

It seems clear that physical trauma and/or psychological stress can either cause or exacerbate certain medical conditions. For example, trauma is known to precipitate seizures, headache, or focal neurological deficits in previously asymptomatic individuals. Similarly, psychological stress seems to be a factor in the development of some peptic ulcers, anxiety disorders, and other psychiatric states. In addition, trauma and/or stress have been suspected to have links to many other medical disorders. It is perhaps not surprising, therefore, that both physical trauma and psychological stress have been posited to be causal factors in either the onset or exacerbation of multiple sclerosis (MS). Indeed, this notion has been a conspicuous part of the lore of this illness dating back to its earliest clinical descriptions.
Principles Of Nutritional Assessment
Authors: Gibson Rosalind S
Published: November 2023

This is a comprehensive text on the methods—dietary, anthropometric, laboratory and clinical—of assessing the nutritional status of populations and of individuals in the hospital or the community. The second edition incorporates recent data from national nutritional surveys in the US and Europe; the flood of new information about iron, vitamin A and iodine; the role of folate in preventing neural tube defects; the use of HPLC techniques and enzyme assays; improvements in data handling; and many other developments since 1990.
Anthropometric assessment of body size
Authors: Gibson Rosalind S
Published: November 2023

The most widely used anthropometric measurements of body size are those of stature (height or length) and body weight. These measurements can be made quickly and easily and, with care and training, accurately. Head circumference measurements are often taken in association with stature. Details of standardized procedures for these measurements of body size are summarized below and are given in detail in Lohman et al. (1988).
Laboratory assessment of body composition
Authors: Gibson Rosalind S
Published: November 2023

As the human body is a complex unit, it is normal to use a simplified model to represent its composition: two-or four-compartment models are most commonly used. The two-compartment model assumes that the total body mass is composed of two major molecular compartments: body fat and the fat-free mass. The four-compartment model divides the body into four molecular fractions — minerals, water, protein, and fat — all of which can now be determined in vivo. Wang et al. (1995) have formally proposed that the body can be divided not only on a four-compartment molecular basis but also according to parallel elemental, cellular, and functional frameworks. This scheme has become accepted and is shown in Figure 14.1.
Content and Context of Peer Assessment
Authors: Arnold Louise , Stern David Thomas
Published: November 2023

In the current climate of clinical medical education, medical teachers have less time to spend in direct contact with students and residents. Thus, opportunities for learners to demonstrate a wide variety of professional and unprofessional behaviors are more likely to occur among peers who spend more time with one another and work closely together as a team. Moreover, the professional behaviors of responsibility, effective communication, interprofessional respect, thoroughness, and altruism either have a direct impact on peers or reflect values that peers might be able to infer and observe more easily from the actions of their counterparts than would faculty or other supervisors.
An Overview of the Implicit Genome
Authors: Caporale Lynn Helena
Published: November 2023

Most analyses assume that genomes are to be read as linear text, much as a sequence of nucleotides can be translated into a sequence of amino acids by looking in a table. However, information can evolve in genomes with distinct forms of representation, such as in the structure of DNA or RNA and the relationship between nucleotide sequences. Such information has importance to biology yet is largely unexpected and unexplored. As described in this volume, much of this information, through mechanisms ranging from alternative splicing of RNA to the generation of bacterial coat protein diversity, affects the probability of distinct types of alterations in the nucleic acid sequence. Some genomic DNA sequences affect genome stability, handling, and organization, with implications for the robustness of lineages over evolutionary time. The examples reviewed in this volume, taken from a broad range of biological organisms, both extend our view of the nature of information encoded within genomes and deepen our appreciation of the power of natural selection, through which this information, in its various forms, has emerged.
The Role of Repeat Sequences in Bacterial Genetic Adaptation to Stress
Authors: Rocha Eduardo P C
Published: November 2023

Because stress is a major component of the life history of living species, many mechanisms have been created to deal with it. Even though stress is often unpredictable, it may be overcome by mechanisms allowing the generation of genetic variability upon which natural selection can act. As a result, recent work has been aimed at identifying the elements and the mechanisms allowing the generation of such genetic variability. Among these, repeated sequences have a prominent role. Bacteria can evolve very quickly through intrachromosomal recombination between repeats, which increases significantly in times of stress. In this chapter, the instabilities produced by repeats in genes of stress response and what results from it are described. While some of these instabilities lead to deletion of genetic material, the loss of this information is not irreversible as mechanisms have evolved that facilitate its recovery. The resulting genetic variability allows the fast adaptation of bacterial populations to stresses, such as host defenses, or to toxic agents, such as antibiotics.
Immunoglobulin Recombination Signal Sequences: Somatic and Evolutionary Functions
Authors: Hsu Ellen
Published: November 2023

Vertebrates defend themselves against the onslaught of a vast and evolving array of pathogens by drawing from a vast antibody repertoire that is encoded by somatically generated DNA sequences. This diversity can be achieved because it is implied, rather than explicity encoded, in the germline genome. This chapter describes our current understanding of the rules by which this diversity of immunoglobulin combining sites is created in B lymphocytes.
Regulated and Unregulated Recombination of G-rich Genomic Regions
Authors: Maizels Nancy
Published: November 2023

One of the surprises emerging from genomic sequencing has been the unevenness of the genomic landscape. Even simple features, like base composition, strand bias, and identity and density of repetitive elements, are nonuniformly distributed among chromosomes and along specific chromosomes. The unevenness of the genome can be seen either as reflecting the dictates of biological function, or as a curious characteristic without biological rationale. The more we learn about mechanisms responsible for genomic maintenance and evolution, the less accidental genomic sequence appears to be, and even simple sequence motifs become informative about function.
Life without God: Some Personal Costs
Authors: Farrell Daniel M
Published: November 2023

I‘m damned if I know where I got the idea, but there it was, as clear and firm in my five-year-old mind as any idea could possibly be: all I had to do to get to heaven was somehow get into our parish church when no one else was around, climb up onto the high altar, open the door to the tabernacle, which seemed to me to be the focal point of the Mass (it didn’t occur to me that doing this might be difficult), enter (on my hands and knees, since it looked just big enough to admit me in that posture), and slowly make my way, still on hands and knees, to heaven. (I never worried, for some reason, that it might take a very long time to get there.) I was not a stupid child: it puzzled me, intensely, that no one else seemed ever to have thought of this easy route to our common goal—family and friends weren’t gradually disappearing, at any rate, as one might have expected, had they known what I thought I knew—and this in turn made me worry that there must be something problematical about my plan. But for the life of me I couldn’t think what it was, and so I bided my time, confident that it would not be long before I would be with God and our Lord, his Son, in heaven.
Mere Stranger
Authors: Belzer Marvin
Published: November 2023

We sang a simple song in Sunday School when I was five or six years old: Into my heart, into my heart, come into my heart, Lord Jesus It made perfect sense to invite Jesus into my heart. I knew my heart was located roughly in the middle of my chest. Inviting Jesus there had palpable effects— pleasant physical sensations and emotions in that part of my body–warm, open, and peaceful feelings. By the time I was eight or nine years old, I had a sense of taking responsibility for myself when there was a message in church about sin and the need for repentance. I accepted my own sinful nature and my need to be forgiven. Sometimes there were specific sins to repent (and I would always be on the lookout for flaws
Reasonable Religious Disagreements
Authors: Feldman Richard
Published: November 2023

A few years ago I co-taught a course called “Rationality, Relativism, and Religion” to undergraduates majoring in either philosophy or religion. Many of the students, especially the religion majors, displayed a pleasantly tolerant attitude. Although a wide variety of different religious views were represented in the class, and the students disagreed with one another about many religious issues, almost all the students had a great deal of respect for the views of the others. They “agreed to disagree” and concluded that “reasonable people can disagree” about the issues under discussion. In large part, the point of this essay is to explore exactly what this respectful and tolerant attitude can sensibly amount to. The issue to be discussed is a general one, applying to disagreements in many areas other than religion. However, I will focus here on religious disagreement.
If God Is Dead, Is Everything Permitted?
Authors: Anderson Elizabeth
Published: November 2023

At the Institute for Creation Research Museum in Santee, California, visitors begin their tour by viewing a plaque displaying the “tree of evolutionism,” which, it is said (following Matt. 7:18), “bears only corrupt fruits.” The “evil tree” of evolution is a stock metaphor among proponents of the literal truth of the biblical story of creation. In different versions, it represents evolutionary theory as leading to abortion, suicide, homosexuality, the drug culture, hard rock, alcohol, “dirty books,” sex education, alcoholism, crime, government regulation, inflation, racism, Nazism, communism, terrorism, socialism, moral relativism, secularism, feminism, and humanism, among other phenomena regarded as evil. The roots of the evil tree grow in the soil of “unbelief,” which nourishes the tree with “sin.” The base of its trunk represents “no God”—that is, atheism.
Josephine Lang
Authors: Krebs Harald , Krebs Sharon
Published: November 2023

Josephine Lang (1815-80) was one of the most gifted, respected, prolific, and widely published song composers of the nineteenth century, yet her life and works have remained virtually unknown. Now, this carefully researched, compelling, and poignant study recognizes the composer for her remarkable accomplishments. Based on years of study of unpublished letters, musical autographs, reviews, and the autobiographical poetry of Lang’s husband, Reinhold Köstlin, the biographical portions of the book offer a stunning portrait of the composer as a woman and an artist. In-depth musical analyses interwoven with the biography will be illuminating to scholars and to musicians of all skill levels. The analyses reveal Lang’s sensitivity to her chosen poetic texts, as well as the validity of her claim that her songs were her diary; the authors demonstrate that many of the songs are directly connected to the events of Lang’s life. The analyses are illustrated by an abundance of musical examples, including a number of complete songs. A companion CD, on which the authors have recorded 30 songs by Lang, complements the text.