bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Mutation and Human Exceptionalism: Our Future Genetic Load
Authors: Lynch Michael 
Published: March 2016

AbstractAlthough the human germline mutation rate is higher than that in any other well-studied species, the rate is not exceptional once the effective genome size and effective population size are taken into consideration. Human somatic mutation rates are substantially elevated above those in the germline, but this is also seen in other species. What is exceptional about humans is the recent detachment from the challenges of the natural environment and the ability to modify phenotypic traits in ways that mitigate the fitness effects of mutations, e.g., precision and personalized medicine. This results in a relaxation of selection against mildly deleterious mutations, including those magnifying the mutation rate itself. The long-term consequence of such effects is an expected genetic deterioration in the baseline human condition, potentially measurable on the timescale of a few generations in westernized societies, and because the brain is a particularly large mutational target, this is of particular concern. Ultimately, the price will have to be covered by further investment in various forms of medical intervention. Resolving the uncertainties of the magnitude and timescale of these effects will require the establishment of stable, standardized, multigenerational measurement procedures for various human traits.
Correlation of wear characteristics with hardness of recycled carbon fiber prepreg reinforced polypropylene composites
Authors: Latiff Anisah Abd , Mohamad Noraiham , Jeefferie Abd Razak , Nasir Mohd Hayatunnufus Md , Siti Rahmah S. , Mahamood Mazlin Aida , Chua Abdullah Muhammad Ilman Hakimi , Ab Maulod Hairul Effendy 
Published: March 2016

Abstract
The Software Environment R for Official Statistics and Survey Methodology
Authors: Templ Matthias , Todorov Valentin 
Published: March 2016

The open-source programming language and software environment R is currently one of the most widely used and popular software tools for statistics and data analysis. This contribution provides an overview of important R packages used in official statistics and survey methodology and discusses the usefulness of R in the daily work of a statistical office. Examples of activities and developments in R related projects in several national and international statistical offices are given. The focus is not only on the internal infrastructure that national and international statistical offices provide for using R but also on some interesting R related projects carried out in those institutes. Two particular packages (laeken and sdcMicro) and one data set (Statistics on Earnings Survey) are used to illustrate the usefulness (and the user-friendliness) of R and to present methods available in R. In addition, the access to international statistical databases like WDI of World Bank and UN COMTRADE with R is illustrated.
Treatment of Multivariate Outliers in Incomplete Business Survey Data
Authors: Bill Marc , Hulliger Beat 
Published: March 2016

The distribution of multivariate quantitative survey data usually is not normal. Skewed and semi-continuous distributions occur often. In addition, missing values and non-response is common. All together this mix of problems makes multivariate outlier detection difficult. Examples of surveys where these problems occur are most business surveys and some household surveys like the Survey for the Statistics of Income and Living Condition (SILC) of the European Union. Several methods for multivariate outlier detection are collected in the R-package modi. This paper gives an overview of modi and its functions for outlier detection and corresponding imputation. The use of the methods is explained with a business survey dataset. The discussion covers pre- and post-processing to deal with skewness and zero-inflation, advantages and disadvantages of the methods and the choice of the parameters.
Exploitations of Embodiment: Born Freak and the Academic Bally Plank
Authors: Mitchell David , Snyder Sharon 
Published: March 2016

Freak show scholars must openly wrestle with the degree to which they imagine that one can learn something about disability by analyzing the social relations that constitute freak show exhibition. This is partially a question of the degree to which one believes that scholarly commentary can effectively divest interest in freak spectacle from an exploitative relationship. Additionally, one's relationship to this issue tends to rely upon whether the scholarly approach applied theorizes disability as unbridgeable difference from normativity or artificial augmentation of mere human variation into monstrous other. In order to probe this arena of thought — and reflect critically on the utility of the freak show for understanding the contemporary predicament of disabled people — we pursue an extended close reading of Mat Fraser's documentary film, Born Freak (2002), as a productive interrogation of extant critical traditions on the freak show. Born Freak literally takes up applications of various modes of freak show address as if it seeks to try on each one and assess its utility. The film employs its visual terrain as if it were an experimental lab where one can interrogate the pragmatic utility of each paradigm. Interestingly, Born Freak helps to expose the limits of current theories through Fraser's investigation into the experience of a contemporary disabled actor-turned-freak.
Enhancing the Full Potential of Persons with Disabilities through Sports in the 21st Century
Authors: Wanderi Mwangi P , Mwisukha Andanje , Bukhala Peter W 
Published: March 2016

As early as 460 BC, Hippocrates, the famous Greek Physician and Father of Medicine acknowledged the importance of exercise for strengthening the body, enhancing recovery from diseases, and for prevention and care of mental problems. Indeed, according to the available literature, regular physical activity has been variously said to prevent osteoporosis, heart problems, type II diabetes mellitus, lower back ache, migraine headaches, among many other infirmities. Sports also liberate and enhance character development. These benefits of sports and exercise to the community must be enjoyed by people with and without disabilities without favor or discrimination. Similarly, a lot has so far been achieved on enhancing the full potential of people with disabilities through sports in Kenya and elsewhere in the world, both historically and in contemporary days. For instance, Pierre de Coubertin’s effort in reviving the Modern Olympics in 1896 emanated from his strong desire to transform the French population into a formidable, cohesive nation; a desire that he later extended to the rest of the world. de Coubertin’s modern Olympics desire of enhancing people’s capacity through sports has today led to the Paralympics movement which ensures among other things that, persons with disabilities are not marginalized in the local and global society. It is in line with this background that Kenya has made a tremendous effort in ensuring a full involvement of the persons with disabilities in sports for the aforementioned benefits. This paper illustrates the efforts that have been made in Kenya today toward enhancing the life of persons with disability via sports programs both within the educational institutions and within the community at large.
“Telling It Like It Is: The Role of Race, Class, & Culture in the Perpetuation of Learning Disability as a Privileged Category for the White Middle Class”
Authors: Blanchett Wanda J 
Published: March 2016

For more than 40 years, the American educational system has used mild disability special education categories to sort students on the basis of perceived disability, race, culture, language, and social class. Accordingly, African American and other students of color have the highest risk ratio for being placed in special education and they received the most segregated special education placements (Blanchett, Mumford, & Beachman, 2005; Dunn, 1968; Losen & Orfield, 2002; Mercer, 1973). How the social constructions of mild disabilities and learning disabilities, in particular, perpetuate learning disability as a privileged category for the White Middle Class while marginalizing students of color has been largely missing in the disability studies and disproportionality debates. The purpose of my paper is to commemorate and revisit Sleeter’s seminal work while contextualizing it within contemporary debates by address the following four questions: (1) What is the historical context of the treatment of African American and other students of color in special education?; (2) Is learning disabilities a category of privilege for the privileged?; ( 3) What is the social cultural context of learning disabilities in the 21st century?; and (4) In what ways do students who receive the same label of LD have very different in-school and post school experiences based upon the intersection of race and class with LD?
Toward a Feminist Reading of the Disability Memoir: The Critical Necessity for Intertextuality in Marya Hornbacher’s Wasted and Madness
Authors: Day Ally 
Published: March 2016

In this paper, I argue that, through an examination of Hornbacher’s intentional rhetorical intertexuality, we can provide a feminist reading of disability life writing that resists essentializing assumptions about illness and leaves room for intersectional understandings of disability key for feminist analysis. I ask: How does the comorbidity of mental illness challenge our understandings of the self in disability life writing? What does disability life writing, when mental illness is taken into account, do for Couser’s understanding of Disability as Identity? Using feminist theorists Mary Margaret Fonow and Judith Cook’s recent identification of intertextuality as a methodological tool for deconstructing representation, my reading of Hornbacher’s texts recognizes the moments where both Madness and Wasted present an incomplete rhetorical meaning, one that relies on the reader to draw on knowledge from both texts for a more complete symbolic recognition. A combination of trauma theory, disability theory, and feminist autobiographical theory all contribute to a feminist reading of disability life writing essential for expanding representations of mental illness.
Disability as Socio-Rhetorical Action: Towards a Genre-Based Approach
Authors: Carpenter Rick 
Published: March 2016

In many respects, the reconceptualization of genre over the past few decades mirrors that of disability. Just as disability scholars and activists reject rigid categories of fixed difference based solely on individual deviations from some supposedly neutral norm, so too have contemporary genre theorists rejected the traditional view of genre as static categories of discourse that share certain objective conventional features. Such a view is unsatisfactory because, in casting genres as decontextualized, ahistorical forms or receptacles, it fails to adequately reflect the inherently social nature of discourse and texts. Instead, genre theorists now (re)conceive genres as dynamic sites of social action. Disability is also a form of social action, a rhetorical convention used to construct and regulate human actions and interactions, and, as such, can be viewed and analysed in generic terms. Conceiving disability as genre (and metagenre) provides an additional theoretical lens for examining and transcending, among other things, the reductive and oppressive categorization deployed by the medical model of disability. A perspective informed by genre theory helps to shift critical attention from description to explanation, a necessary step in deconstructing hegemonic discourses.
Autism as Rhetoric: Exploring Watershed Rhetorical Moments in Applied Behavior Analysis Discourse
Authors: Broderick Alicia A. 
Published: March 2016

This manuscript offers an analysis of what I argue are three watershed moments in contemporary autism and applied behavior analysis (ABA) rhetoric (1987-2010). The first of these moments is the 1987 publication of O. I. Lovaas's treatment effect study, which introduced the rhetoric of recovery from autism and linked this rhetorical construct with a particular intervention methodology—ABA. The second moment consists in the 1993 publication of Catherine Maurice’s autobiographical account of employing Lovaas-style ABA intervention programs with her two young children—an account that both popularizes Lovaas's rhetorical construct of recovery and reiterates its linking with ABA, but more significantly, that also introduces to popular autism discourse the rhetoric of science as a means of constituting the legitimacy of ABA. The third watershed moment in contemporary autism rhetoric is the 2005 establishment of the organization Autism Speaks, which has effectively changed the face of autism rhetoric through its comprehensive deployment of corporate-style rhetorical and political strategy.
Stressing Reproduction: Reading Into Parents of Disabled Children
Authors: Gibson Margaret F. 
Published: March 2016

What does is mean to be the parent of a disabled child? This article explores assumptions which permeate the author's encounter with of a prominent Canadian newspaper text on "stress". Through a hermeneutic phenomenological method, the author opens up broader cultural meanings that contribute to and rely upon the category of "parents of disabled children". In particular, the author explores the prescriptions presented on disability, race, class, gender, nationality, and sexuality which emerge in the reading process. Additionally, the author considers how medico-scientific authority is asserted in this textual encounter, and examines the historical grounding of such interpretive moves. Keywordsstress, parents, mothers, fathers, history, disability, gender, nation, race, class, sexuality, reproduction, children
Trapped Between Ableism and Neoliberalism: Critical Reflections on Disability and Employment in India
Authors: Kumar Arun , Sonpal Deepa , Hiranandani Vanmala 
Published: March 2016

Despite affirmative actions such as reservations in government employment, incentives and subsidies to employers, tax exemptions to persons with disabilities, skill-development trainings etc, employment for persons with disabilities continues to be characterised by lower work-force participation, lower wages, lack of career advancement opportunities, and discrimination at the workplace. Simultaneously, social security benefits have been declining due to shrinking state role. With the ratification of the UNCRPD, preparation of the new disability legislation and increasing pressure from the disability rights movement in India, questions of work and employment have begun to gain attention. Using a case study approach, this article interrogates the outcomes of three employment initiatives in India. We contend that while access to employment opportunities for persons with disabilities may have increased, the responses remain trapped in constructs of ableism and the outcomes adversely affected by neoliberalism. The article calls for developing a more critical research agenda and building capacities for wider contestation against ableism and neoliberalism. Keywords: ableism, employment, disability rights, India, neoliberalism
Disability as an Asset? Reflections on Employment Patterns in the Health and Social Care Sector
Authors: Andreassen Tone Alm 
Published: March 2016

The number of people with health problems and disabilities living outside the labor market and on public income security puzzles politicians. The problems associated with having a disability seem to be countered by measures directed either towards people with disabilities (employability programs) or towards employers (anti-discrimination legislation). These problems are at the forefront of many policy discussions. In this article I discuss an alternative perspective, reflecting on whether, in some segments of the labor market, there are dynamics which indicate that disability is an asset, not a liability. I use the Norwegian labor market as the case for this discussion. The proportion of workers with disabilities is higher in the health and social care sector than in the total Norwegian labor market. This overrepresentation of workers with disabilities has remained constant since 2000 and may indicate a particularly unhealthy and impairment-producing sector. This article examines whether this overrepresentation might also indicate that this sector of the labor market considers disability to be an asset – a unique qualification required for certain tasks in the sector. Keywords: disability concepts, labor market, employment, health sector, employer attitudes
"Look at Me:" Portraiture and Agency
Authors: Sauer Janet S. 
Published: March 2016

Keywords: disability, methodology, portraiture, social justice, special education Historically, the dominant research paradigms involving the study of people with disabilities involved experimentally designed studies or other medically orientated approaches. This paper examines portraiture as a form of qualitative inquiry offering emancipatory possibilities for children with significant disabilities and transformative positive reinterpretations of disability as a social construct for their teachers and other people in their lives. Three narrative portraits of young people with disabilities were created based on a year-long portraiture study involving the collection of observational data, informal interviews, artifacts, and discourse analysis to capture the “essence” of their humanness. Through an examination of this portrait study and others from across the humanities, this paper provides examples where the “subjects” asserted themselves in ways akin to Giroux’s agency (1987) suggesting portraiture might provide a unique and credible avenue to respectfully study and learn more about people with disabilities too often left on the fringe of society.
The Myth of American Ability: Cooper’s Leatherstocking, the Frontier Tradition, and the Making of the American Canon
Authors: Jordan Thomas 
Published: March 2016

Key Words: Disability; Able-bodiedness; Frontier; MythJames Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales have achieved canonical literary status in the US academy and provide a representative example of the frontier tradition in American writing. Through a close reading of Cooper’s first romance, I argue that America’s longstanding frontier narrative is predicated on the cultural projection of the able-bodied hero. In The Pioneers, Cooper relies on dueling constructions of disability and able-bodiedness to distinguish his white hero from his friend and Native American counterpart, Chingachgook. While Chingachgook’s disability provides the logic for his eventual suicide and removal from the narrative, Natty Bumppo’s strength of character becomes registered through the physical perfection of his body. In celebrating Natty Bumppo’s passage from old age in The Pioneers to new youth in The Deerslayer, the critical tradition surrounding the Leatherstocking series has tacitly endorsed Cooper’s corporeal hierarchy, suggesting that the myth of the American frontier relies upon a much deeper myth of American ability.
Autistic Human Rights-A Proposal
Authors: Sarrett Jennifer 
Published: March 2016

Autism and related disorders are increasingly discussed in disability literature as the field is more confidently discussing intellectual and developmental impairments. The current paper describes how autism is considered within critical issues in the disability literature with a special focus on disability definition and politics of identity. These issues are central to discussions of human rights from a disability perspective, one which autism is uniquely situated to address. Definitions and traits of autism are related to physical, intellectual, and psychiatric differences making this diagnostic or identity category well suited to address to the issues of all disabilities groups. Using autism as a basis, a model for human rights is built around the interconnected traits of interdependence, individuality, and a consideration for the sphere of human diversity. Though developed around autism, the paper shows how the model is applicable to all states of being and addresses major disability issues. Keywords: Neurodiversity, Human Rights, Autism, Disability Studies
Toward an Understanding of the 'Medical Plantation' as a Cultural Location of Disability
Authors: Dudley Rachel 
Published: March 2016

This article uses Sharon Snyder and David Mitchell's concept of "cultural locations of disability" to theorize the 19th century medical plantation as a space in which black enslaved women were used as raw materials for medical-scientific advancement. The central argument is that the history can be perceived in new ways by applying the dual frameworks of black feminist theory and cultural disability theory to understand the medical plantation as a cultural location of disability. In so doing, the article demonstrates that on the 19th century medical plantation—a locality spatially separate from the agricultural plantation—black women's bodies were imagined as the ideal test subjects of research and innovation within what became modern gynecology.Keywords: medical plantation, cultural locations of disability, slavery, nineteenth-century medicine, black feminist theory, women's health, disability theory
Next to Normal and the Persistence of Pathology in Performances of Psychosocial Disability
Authors: Wallin Scott 
Published: March 2016

The award-winning musical Next to Normal is widely lauded for addressing the stigma of mental illness. However, the play uses a medical model of psychosocial disability in a way that narrows and sanitizes the representation of people who have such disabilities. Analyzing Next to Normal’s performances, critical reviews, artist commentary, and audience reactions, this article argues that the musical fails to remove stigma associated with people with psychosocial disabilities and overlooks an ecological perspective that would better honor their experiences. Keywords: psychosocial disability, madness, mental illness, theater, performance
Psychomimesis: LSD and Disability Immersion Experiences of Schizophrenia
Authors: Donaldson Elizabeth J. 
Published: March 2016

Before LSD became infamous as a psychedelic in the late 1960s, it had an earlier career as a psychotomimetic--a drug which could produce a “model psychosis” or “artificial schizophrenia.” This paper focuses on the use of LSD in psychiatry in this often overshadowed period. I examine experiments that use LSD as a prosthetic tool to produce “disability immersion” experiences of schizophrenia in people without psychiatric symptoms or diagnoses. This use of LSD reversed the traditional way drugs circulate in psychiatry: instead of patients receiving mind-altering medication to ameliorate disabling psychiatric symptoms, mental health professionals took LSD to temporarily disable their normal cognition. Despite the problematic nature of disability immersion experiences in general and the negative valence often attached to mental illness in these accounts, these trips into madness produced, I will argue, positive therapeutic insights, perhaps best illustrated by architect Kiyo Izumi’s LSD-inspired design for Yorkton Psychiatric Centre.Keywords: schizophrenia, mental illness, psychiatry, disability simulation, LSD