bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Inhibitory effect of ramosetron on corticotropin releasing factor‐ and soybean oil‐induced delays in gastric emptying in rats
Authors: Hirata Takuya , Keto Yoshihiro , Yamano Mayumi , Yokoyama Toshihide , Sengoku Takanori , Seki Nobuo 
Published: May 2012

AbstractBackground and Aim:  Symptoms of functional dyspepsia (FD) are highly prevalent in patients with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS). However, the effects of therapeutic agents for IBS on the pathophysiology of FD are unclear. In this study, therefore, we examined the effects of ramosetron, a serotonin 5‐HT3 receptor antagonist, on corticotropin releasing factor (CRF)‐ and soybean oil‐induced delays in gastric emptying of rats, in comparison with anti‐diarrheal agent and spasmolytics. The involvement of 5‐HT and the 5‐HT3 receptor in delayed gastric emptying was also evaluated.Methods:  Corticotropin releasing factor was administered intravenously to rats 10 min before oral administration of 0.05% phenol red solution, and the amount remaining in the stomach was measured after 30 min. Soybean oil was administered orally with glass beads, and the number of residual beads in the stomach was counted 1 h later.Results:  Both CRF and soybean oil inhibited gastric emptying dose‐dependently. Ramosetron and itopride, a gastro‐prokinetic agent, significantly reduced both CRF‐ and soybean oil‐induced delays in gastric emptying, while an anti‐diarrheal agent and spasmolytics aggravated them. Pretreatment with p‐chlorophenylalanine for 2 days to reduced the synthesis of endogenous 5‐HT diminished the effects of both CRF and soybean oil on gastric emptying. A 5‐HT3 receptor agonist m‐chlorophenylbiguanide suppressed gastric emptying of both phenol red and glass beads, and those effects were reversed by ramosetron.Conclusions:  These results suggest that CRF and soybean oil suppress gastric emptying in rats by activating 5‐HT3 receptors, and that by antagonizing these receptors, ramosetron may ameliorate symptoms of FD in clinical settings.
Free tissue transfers at Hutt Hospital
Authors: Heather Jonathan P. S. , Avery Gary , Ackland Christina M. , Tan Swee T. 
Published: May 2012

AbstractBackground:  The Wellington Regional Plastic, Maxillofacial & Burns Unit based at Hutt Hospital provides comprehensive reconstructive services to central New Zealand with a population of 1.1 million. Free tissue transfer procedures in the Unit were audited to determine the indications and rate of usage in our population, our success and complication rates, and how these compare with published series.Methods:  Prospectively collected data on all free tissue transfer procedures between January 2006 and September 2010 were analysed.Results:  Two hundred and seven free flaps including 17 flap types being performed on 186 consecutive patients including 199 primary and 8 salvage flaps. Eighty‐three percent were elective and 17% were acute cases. The majority of the flaps were used for head and neck (48%) and breast (31.5%) reconstruction. Ulnar forearm flap was the most commonly used fasciocutaneous flap. 18.8% of patients had major complications requiring return to theatre. Microsurgical revision was performed in nine (4.3%) flaps of which six were successfully salvaged. Overall, 13 flaps (6.3%) failed completely, giving an overall success rate of 93.7%. Haematoma requiring formal drainage occurred in 12 (5.8%) cases.Discussion:  The wide variety of flaps used reflects the very broad range of defects requiring free flap reconstruction. We show a free flap success rate of 93.7% in our medium‐sized regional unit. Our microsurgical revision rate of 4.3% is lower than the revision rate of 10% in reported series with high overall success rates. More consistent early detection of failing flaps is likely to further improve our overall success rate.
The phenological window for western spruce budworm: seasonal decline in resource quality
Authors: Nealis Vincent G. 
Published: May 2012

Western spruce budworm Choristoneura occidentalis Free. (Lepidoptera: Tortricidae) emerge in the spring before budburst and then face a rapidly deteriorating host quality each season.
Measures of fitness, survival and fecundity, were made on cohorts of final‐instar spruce budworms deployed on host trees at several times during the season in four field locations in coastal and interior British Columbia, Canada.
Survival and fecundity were strongly correlated throughout the season and varied as much as four‐fold from maxima at mid‐season to minima at the end of the season.
Fitness values overall were greatest in the coastal compared with interior locations. Among interior locations, fitness was greatest at the highest elevation and least at the lowest elevation. Both cohort and sample‐based estimates of survival of wild, final‐instar budworms were relatively high in these outbreak populations.
The influence of the phenological window and degree of synchrony with the host plant on herbivore abundance often depends on other processes affecting population rates of change.
Context and Action in the Transformation of Strategy Scholarship
Authors: Sminia Harry , de Rond Mark 
Published: May 2012

abstractWe revisit Andrew Pettigrew's seminal ‘Context and action in the transformation of the firm’, first published in this journal in November 1987. In doing so, we not only review Pettigrew's contributions, but contextualize these with respect to adjoining strategy scholarship. Our discussion concludes with some novel, and fairly speculative, ways forward, designed to advance strategy scholarship. Working with the ideas contained in Pettigrew's article and drawing on insights from institutional entrepreneurship, we make a case for the processualization of strategy content research. This allows us to add the issue of effectiveness of strategy practices to current strategy‐as‐practice research while arguing for a further humanization of strategic management.
‘A wondrous adventure’: mutuality and individuality in Internet adoption narratives
Authors: BLASCO PALOMA GAY Y 
Published: May 2012

In this article, I analyse the narratives that American adopters of Chinese children put up on Internet family websites in the early 2000s. I focus on what these narratives reveal about the complex articulation of notions of kinship and of individuality in twenty‐first‐century America. These website accounts illustrate both the relational nature of middle‐class American individualism and its embeddedness in a deeply racialized world‐view and a political economy of desire that turns Chinese children into vehicles for the assertion of American personal and communal selves.RésuméLe présent article analyse les récits mis en ligne au début des années 2000, sur des sites Web consacrés à la famille, par des parents américains ayant adopté des enfants chinois. L'auteure se concentre sur ce que ces narrations révèlent de la complexe articulation des notions de parenté et d'individualité dans l'Amérique du XXIème siècle. Ces récits en ligne illustrent à la fois la nature relationnelle de l'individualisme américain des classes moyennes et son enracinement dans une vision du monde profondément racialisée et dans une économie politique du désir qui transforme des enfants chinois en moyens d'affirmer le moi personnel et communautaire des Américains.
Exploring Geomorphometry through User Generated Content: Comparing an Unsupervised Geomorphometric Classification with Terms Attached to Georeferenced Images in Great Britain
Authors: Gschwend Christian , Purves Ross S. 
Published: May 2012

AbstractUser generated content such as the georeferenced images and their associated tags found in Flickr provides us with opportunities to explore how the world is described in the non‐scientific, everyday language used by contributors. Geomorphometry, the quantitative study of landforms, provides methods to classify Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) according to attributes such as slope and convexity. In this article we compare the terms used in Flickr and Geograph in Great Britian to describe georeferenced images to a quantitative, unsupervised classification of a DEM, using a well established method, and explore the variation of terms across geomorphometric classes and space. Anthropogenic terms are primarily associated with more gentle slopes, while terms which refer to objects such as mountains and waterfalls are typical of steeper slopes. Terms vary both across and within classes, and the source of the user generated content has an influence on the type of term used with Geograph, a collection which aims to document the geography of Great Britain, dominated by features which might be observed on a map.
Precautionary and Entrepreneurial Savings: New Evidence from German Households*
Authors: Fossen Frank M. , Rostam‐Afschar Davud 
Published: May 2012

AbstractVarious studies interpret the positive correlation between income risk and wealth as evidence of significant precautionary savings. However, these high estimates emerge from pooling non‐entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs, without controlling for heterogeneity. This article provides evidence for Germany based on representative panel data that includes private wealth balance sheets. Entrepreneurs, who face high income risk, hold more wealth than employees, but this tendency is not because of precautionary motives. Instead, they appear to save more for their old age, because they are usually not covered by statutory pension insurance. The analysis accounts for endogeneity in entrepreneurial choice and heterogeneous risk attitudes.
ON LAWFULNESS IN HISTORY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY
Authors: LEURIDAN BERT , FROEYMAN ANTON 
Published: May 2012

ABSTRACTThe use of general and universal laws in historiography has been the subject of debate ever since the end of the nineteenth century. Since the 1970s there has been a growing consensus that general laws such as those in the natural sciences are not applicable in the scientific writing of history. We will argue against this consensus view, not by claiming that the underlying conception of what historiography is—or should be—is wrong, but by contending that it is based on a misconception of what general laws such as those of the natural sciences are. We will show that a revised notion of law, one inspired by the work of Sandra D. Mitchell, in tandem with Jim Woodward's notion of “invariance,” is indeed applicable to historiography, much in the same way as it is to most other scientific disciplines. Having developed a more adequate account of general laws, we then show, by means of three examples, that what are called “pragmatic laws” and “invariance” do in fact play a role in history in several interesting ways. These examples—from cultural history, economic history, and the history of religion—have been selected on the basis of their diversity in order to illustrate the widespread use of pragmatic laws in history.
HISTORY'S DEMARCATION PROBLEM
Authors: Tyynelä Jenni , De Mey Tim 
Published: May 2012

ABSTRACTIn his 1998 book Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds, Lubomír Doležel put forth a theory of narrative fiction based on the interdisciplinary framework of possible worlds. In Possible Worlds of Fiction and History: The Postmodern Stage, Doležel takes his earlier theory further and applies it to historiography as well, with the specific aim of showing how the study of history might be defended against the postmodern challenge via the use of possible worlds (PW) semantics. Doležel's book is essentially an argument against the postmodern views expressed by Roland Barthes and Hayden White, who have claimed that fundamentally, there is no difference between fictional and historical narratives. According to Doležel, this difference can be saved if the focus of attention is shifted from the textual features of these narratives to the fictional or historical worlds that the narratives project.Doležel's comparison of fictional and historical worlds to each other is quite illuminating and thorough. However, the question remains whether the application of PW semantics does anything besides offering a detailed analysis of the structure of the different types of narrative worlds. After all, one should not overlook the perhaps more practical way of differentiating between historical and fictional narratives through their institutional status. Furthermore, we argue that by focusing on the properties of the end products, that is, the resulting narratives, Doležel concedes too much to postmodernists. A stronger way to give postmodernists a taste of their own medicine would be to argue that the rules that historians follow in the process of generating, constructing, and evaluating weighed causal explanations (or historical models of the past) are fundamentally different from whatever rules govern the generation and construction of fiction.
NATIONAL IDENTITY IN THE VANQUISHED STATE: GERMAN AND JAPANESE POSTWAR HISTORIOGRAPHY FROM A TRANSNATIONAL PERSPECTIVE
Authors: Grimmer‐Solem Erik 
Published: May 2012

ABSTRACTThe defeat of Germany and Japan in 1945 required historians in both countries to reevaluate the past to make sense of national catastrophe. Sebastian Conrad's The Quest for the Lost Nation analyzes this process comparatively in the context of allied military occupation and the Cold War to reveal how historians in both countries coped with a discredited national history and gradually salvaged a national identity. He pays special attention to the role of social, discursive, and transnational contexts that shaped this process to highlight the different courses that the politics of the past took in postwar Germany and Japan. The picture that emerges of German and Japanese historiography and the respective attempts to come to terms with the past is at odds with the conventional narrative that usually praises West German historians and society for having come to terms with their dark past, as opposed to postwar Japan, which is usually regarded as having fallen short by comparison. There was in fact far more critical historiographical engagement with the past in Japan than in West Germany in the 1950s. Reasons for the divergent evolution of the politics of the past in Germany and Japan should not be sought in the peculiarities of postwar national history but rather in an entangled transnational context of defeat, occupation, and the Cold War, whose effects played out differently in each country. These conclusions and others reveal some of the opportunities and special challenges of comparative transnational history.
Nurse workload in implementing a tight glycaemic control protocol in a UK hospital: a pilot time‐in‐motion study
Authors: Gartemann Juliane , Caffrey Elizabeth , Hadker Nandini , Crean Sheila , Creed Gary M. , Rausch Carsten 
Published: May 2012

Aims and objectives: The cumulative time that critical care nurses spend implementing a tight glycaemic control (TGC) protocol was estimated in a time‐in‐motion (TiM) study conducted in a hospital in the UK.Background: TGC protocols were introduced to the critical care setting to reduce hyperglycaemic events in high‐risk patients. The time burden to critical care nurses of implementing such protocols has not yet been studied in the UK.Design: A prospective TiM pilot study was conducted in an eligible UK intensive care unit by four protocol‐trained observers over five consecutive weekdays from 3 to 7 November 2008. Three nurses were also interviewed on site to gather their attitudes and perceptions about the benefits of and time associated with administering a TGC protocol.Methods: Independent observers shadowed nurses, observing when a blood glucose measurement was taken, when each predefined subtask was completed and the duration of each task. Semistructured interviews with nurses were conducted in‐person and one‐on‐one by a trained study member.Results: Considered together, the episodic median duration of all TGC activities was 6·65 min. Across a total shift, nurses devoted approximately 7% of their time to administering a TGC protocol. Nurses perceived that a TGC protocol is beneficial to patient safety and outcomes in a critical care setting but acknowledged that the tasks can be mildly to moderately tedious.Conclusions: This TiM analysis indicated that the additional responsibility of implementing a TGC protocol represents a substantive commitment of nursing time in a critical care setting.Relevance to clinical practice: The episodic data of our pilot study in the UK contributes further evidence that TGC protocols may be arduous to maintain and constitute a substantial investment of nursing time.
Transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation (t‐VNS) in pharmacoresistant epilepsies: A proof of concept trial
Authors: Stefan Hermann , Kreiselmeyer Gernot , Kerling Frank , Kurzbuch Katrin , Rauch Christophe , Heers Marcel , Kasper Burkhard S. , Hammen Thilo , Rzonsa Martina , Pauli Elisabeth , Ellrich Jens , Graf Wolfgang , Hopfengärtner Rüdiger 
Published: May 2012

SummaryTo elucidate, in a pilot‐study, whether noninvasive transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation (t‐VNS) is a safe and tolerable alternative treatment option in pharmacoresistant epilepsy. t‐VNS was applied to 10 patients with pharmacoresistant epilepsies. Stimulation via the auricular branch of the vagus nerve of the left tragus was delivered three times per day for 9 months. Subjective documentation of stimulation effects was obtained from patients’ seizure diaries. For a more reliable assessment of seizure frequency, we carried out prolonged outpatient video–electroencephalography (EEG) monitoring. In addition, computerized testing of cognitive, affective, and emotional functions was performed. Three patients aborted the study. Of the remaining seven patients, an overall reduction of seizure frequency was observed in five patients after 9 months of t‐VNS. The noninvasive t‐VNS stimulation is a safe and well‐tolerated method for relatively long periods, and might be an alternative treatment option for patients with epilepsy.
Symptomatic generalized epilepsy after HHV6 posttransplant acute limbic encephalitis in children
Authors: Howell Katherine B. , Tiedemann Karin , Haeusler Gabrielle , Mackay Mark T. , Kornberg Andrew J. , Freeman Jeremy L. , Harvey A. Simon 
Published: May 2012

SummaryHuman herpesvirus 6 (HHV6) is the major cause of posttransplant acute limbic encephalitis (PALE) in immunosuppressed patients following hematopoietic stem cell transplant. Memory impairment and temporal lobe epilepsy following PALE are reported in adults, but sequelae in young children are unknown. We report three children with HHV6‐associated PALE 20–23 days after cord blood transplantation for leukemias who developed symptomatic generalized epilepsy. Patients were followed for 2–8 years and underwent magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and video–electroencephalography (EEG). Two patients underwent viral and autoimmune testing and immunotherapies. Generalized seizures, including tonic seizures, developed 11–18 months after HHV6‐associated PALE. Seizures were frequent and resistant to multiple antiepileptic drugs (AEDs). Generalized slow spike‐wave and low‐voltage fast activity were recorded on interictal and ictal EEGs. The two younger patients regressed in their general abilities, synchronous with seizure evolution, whereas the older patient developed a severe amnestic syndrome that halted intellectual development. Serial MRI studies revealed bilateral signal change and atrophy in the medial temporal structures of all patients. In the two investigated patients, there was no evidence of chronic HHV6 infection, minimal evidence of cerebral inflammation, and no significant improvement with pulse with intravenous methylprednisolone and immunoglobulin. The severe and generalized seizure, cognitive, and EEG sequelae of HHV6‐related PALE in these children may be due to a chronic, viral, or immune‐mediated inflammatory process or developmental epileptogenesis resulting from bilateral hippocampal injury at an early age, although there was a paucity of evidence for either.
Callosal White Matter Microstructural Recovery in Abstinent Alcoholics: A Longitudinal Diffusion Tensor Imaging Study
Authors: Alhassoon Omar M. , Sorg Scott F. , Taylor Michael J. , Stephan Rick A. , Schweinsburg Brian C. , Stricker Nikki H. , Gongvatana Assawin , Grant Igor 
Published: May 2012

BackgroundPrevious neuroimaging studies of recently detoxified alcohol‐dependent patients (RDA) have found significant loss of white matter integrity associated with the shrinkage of the frontal lobes and thinning of the corpus callosum, especially the genu. The current study hypothesized that, in addition to exhibiting the most microstructural white matter disruption inRDA, the genu will also evidence the most recovery after abstinence. This microstructural recovery will be associated with improvements in executive functioning measures.MethodsFifteenRDAwere examined approximately 2 weeks after abstinence and again after 1 year of abstinence and compared to 15 age‐ and education‐matched nonalcoholic controls using diffusion tensor imaging (DTI). The effects of group, time, and their interactions on fractional anisotropy, radial diffusivity, and axial diffusivity were evaluated with repeated measuresMANOVA; in addition, 2 × 2ANOVAwas used to test changes in measures of executive functioning in the 2 groups.ResultsAt 2 weeks of abstinence,DTIofRDAshowed significantly lower fractional anisotropy and greater radial diffusivity compared to controls in the genu and body of the corpus callosum. Reexamination after 1 year showed significant time by group interaction with fractional anisotropy increasing and radial diffusivity decreasing inRDAbut not controls in these 2 regions. A smaller relapsed group did not show improvements between the 2 time points. AbstinentRDAalso showed improvement on Digit Span Backward, a measure of working memory, but did not benefit from practice effects on the Halstead Category Test compared to controls.ConclusionsThe results suggest susceptibility of the genu and body of the corpus callosum to the effects of alcohol, and the potential for recovery of both these regions after abstinence, perhaps via mechanisms involving myelin reconstitution.