bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Prospective Evaluation of the Clinical Prediction of Electrodiagnostic Results in Carpal Tunnel Syndrome
Authors: Lo Julian K. , Finestone Hillel M. , Gilbert Ken 
Published: July 2009

ObjectiveTo develop a unique clinical prediction point‐score system for the diagnosis of carpal tunnel syndrome (CTS) and to prospectively evaluate this clinical rule to determine its ability to predict electrodiagnostic results.DesignRetrospective case control to develop the clinical point‐score system and then prospective diagnostic study with blind comparison to electrodiagnostic results.SettingCommunity‐based electrodiagnostic laboratory.PatientsA total of 348 subjects referred to the electrodiagnostic laboratory with a clinical suspicion of CTS to develop the clinical point‐score system and then a different population of 278 subjects referred to the electrodiagnostic laboratory over a 1‐year period with a clinical suspicion of CTS to prospectively evaluate the ability of the clinical rule to predict electrodiagnostic results.Main Outcome MeasuresClinical point‐score system results were compared with the electrodiagnostic results for CTS, which served as the primary outcome measure.ResultsA “weighted” point‐score system was developed from 9 clinical variables including: gender, duration of symptoms, presence of wrist pain (negative predictor), presence of neck pain (negative predictor), nocturnal symptoms, presence of thenar atrophy, abductor pollicis brevis weakness, median sensory symptoms, and results of pinprick sensation examination. The prospective evaluation indicated that the clinical point‐score rule, overall, performed moderately in predicting electrodiagnostic results (receiver operator characteristic curve = 0.80). The clinical point score was most predictive in a small subset of subjects with very high scores. However, in most subjects, the clinical point score could not accurately predict electrodiagnostic outcome in CTS, particularly in subjects with middle to low clinical point scores.ConclusionsThe developed clinical point‐score rule was most predictive in subjects with high point score; however, the majority of the referrals to the electrodiagnostic laboratory indicated that the electrodiagnostic studies provided additional, independent information beyond what could be obtained by the clinical point score.
‘A Sublime Treasure of Pretious Manuscripts’: the Schultens's legacy in the Leiden University Library and the elusive purchase of 1806
Authors: VROLIJK ARNOUD 
Published: July 2009

AbstractUsing university archives and library catalogues as well as letters and diaries belonging to the Schultens, a Dutch family that produced three generations of outstanding Arabists in the 18th Century, this article looks at the circumstances surrounding the purchase of some annotated dictionaries and manuscripts by Leiden University Library.
Mongol Siege Warfare on the Banks of the Euphrates and the Question of Gunpowder (1260–1312)
Authors: RAPHAEL KATE 
Published: July 2009

AbstractThis article discusses the Mongol approach to warfare, then goes on to consider the Mongols' conversion to the notion that they would have to develop a siege train, since walled cities cannot easily be taken by a cavalry charge. The contribution of Chinese siege engineers is discussed, and there is a survey of Chinese siege techniques as they evolved before the Mongol period. The author considers the evidence for the use of inflammable materials, and then moves to the question of gunpowder. The widespread (not quite universal) consensus that the Chinese used gunpowder is discussed, and then attention moves to Hulegu's expedition to western Asia in the 1250s. It is pointed out that none of the major sources seems to imply the use of anything that might be construed as gunpowder technology during those campaigns. Lastly, the author considers, in some detail, sieges conducted by the Ilkhanid Mongols against Mamluk border strongholds during the succeeding decades, drawing attention to and explaining those sieges' increasing lack of success.
IMAGES OF BLACK AMERICANS
Authors: Fiske Susan T. , Bergsieker Hilary B. , Russell Ann Marie , Williams Lyle 
Published: July 2009

AbstractImages of Black Americans are becoming remarkably diverse, enabling Barack Obama to defy simple-minded stereotypes and succeed. Understood through the Stereotype Content Model's demonstrably fundamental trait dimensions of perceived warmth and competence, images of Black Americans show three relevant patterns. Stereotyping by omission allows non-Blacks to accentuate the positive, excluding any lingering negativity but implying it by its absence; specifically, describing Black Americans as gregarious and passionate suggests warmth but ignores competence and implies its lack. Obama's credentials prevented him from being cast as incompetent, though the experience debate continued. His legendary calm and passionate charisma saved him on the warmth dimension. Social class subtypes for Black Americans differentiate dramatically between low-income Blacks and Black professionals, among both non-Black and Black samples. Obama clearly fit the moderately warm, highly competent Black-professional subtype. Finally, the campaign's events (and nonevents) allowed voter habituation to overcome non-Blacks' automatic emotional vigilance to Black Americans.
ABLACKMAN IN THEWHITEHOUSE?
Authors: Parker Christopher S. , Sawyer Mark Q. , Towler Christopher 
Published: July 2009

AbstractRace and patriotism were recurring themes during the 2008 presidential campaign that were used to highlight differences between Barack Obama and his opponents. Yet we know little about how racism and patriotism ultimately affected support for Obama among Whites. Appeals to working-class Whites, a lot of which were thinly veiled allusions to Obama's race and perceived lack of patriotism, also figured prominently in the campaign. Accordingly, this paper explores how racism and patriotism shaped support for Obama, as well as the extent to which the effect of each is moderated by class. We find that rising symbolic racism dampened his support among Whites, as did patriotism. Moreover, we find the effects of patriotism on support for Obama were contingent upon class.
CAN THE NEW COMMANDER IN CHIEF SUSTAIN HIS ALL-VOLUNTEER STANDING ARMY?
Authors: Burch Traci 
Published: July 2009

AbstractDuring his campaign, Barack Obama inspired record numbers of Americans to donate their time and money to his electoral efforts. Now that the campaign is over, can Obama sustain this civic engagement as he begins to govern? This paper examines the possibilities for sustaining Obama's electoral mobilization, introducing new data from fieldwork conducted from September 2008 to Election Day 2008 in Atlanta, Georgia; Chicago, Illinois; and Charlotte, North Carolina. The data include staff interviews and observations of canvassing, rallies, and other get-out-the-vote efforts of the local Obama and McCain campaigns, the local Democratic and Republican Parties, and various nonprofit groups in each city. Based on these data it is clear that each city was characterized by excitement and heightened activity; however, the number of activities and the strength of the grassroots organization varied across the cities according to national electoral imperatives in ways that should affect the potential for future mobilization. As such, sustaining the mobilization of Obama's supporters faces several hurdles: campaign staff and volunteers in many cities were drawn from outside the community, tensions arose between local grassroots organizations and the campaign over resources and issue focus, and the extremely large amounts of money needed to finance the mobilization were not distributed evenly across cities and states.
RACE-BASED CONSIDERATIONS AND THE OBAMA VOTE
Authors: Ramakrishnan S. Karthick , Wong Janelle , Lee Taeku , Junn Jane 
Published: July 2009

AbstractIn the 2008 presidential primaries, Barack Obama seemed to have a problem connecting with Asian American voters, as he lost heavily to Hillary Clinton in states such as California and New Jersey. Many speculated that race-based considerations played a significant role in Asian Americans' overwhelming support for Clinton over Obama, with conjectures built on a limited set of aggregate exit poll data from three states. Race may also have accounted for the high proportion of Asian Americans who in polls said they were undecided heading into the November election. In this article, we analyze the importance of race-based considerations in the Asian American vote, after controlling for other factors such as partisanship, issue preferences, age, and gender. We rely on the National Asian American Survey, a large-scale telephone survey of Asian American voters conducted mostly in the fall of 2008, with interviews in eight languages and with sizable numbers of respondents from the six largest national-origin groups. We find that race-based considerations do indeed help explain the Asian American vote in 2008. Respondents who failed to see political commonality between Asian Americans and Blacks were less likely to vote for Obama in the primary, although other factors, such as age and gender, played a more significant role. Finally, the role of race-based considerations paled in comparison to party identification and issue preferences in the general election, suggesting that election contexts can play an important role in shaping whether or not race is relevant to vote choice.
PERSONALITY AND IDEOLOGY AS DETERMINANTS OF CANDIDATE PREFERENCES AND “OBAMA CONVERSION” IN THE 2008 U.S. PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION
Authors: Jost John T. , West Tessa V. , Gosling Samuel D. 
Published: July 2009

AbstractWe conducted a longitudinal study involving 734 college students over a three-month period that included the 2008 U.S. presidential election. The study investigated factors such as respondents' personality characteristics and ideological proclivities in predicting perceptions of the major candidates and both stability and change in voting preferences for Barack Obama and John McCain. Previous research on personality and political orientation suggests that Openness to New Experiences is positively associated with liberal political preferences, whereas Conscientiousness is positively associated with conservative preferences; we replicated these results in the context of the current study. Several ideological factors also predicted conversion to Obama's candidacy. These included respondents' degree of self-reported liberalism, perceptions of their parents as liberal (versus conservative), and lower scores on measures of authoritarianism and political system justification (i.e., support for the prevailing system of electoral politics and government). The effects of Openness and Conscientiousness on candidate preferences were statistically mediated by ideological variables, providing further evidence that general predispositions exist that link personality and political orientation, and these are likely to play a significant role in electoral politics. Implications for the integration of “top-down” (institutional) and “bottom-up” (psychological) approaches to the study of political behavior are discussed.
JUST DO IT
Authors: Winant Howard 
Published: July 2009

AbstractPresident-elect Barack Obama will take office after a campaign that was pathbreaking on many levels. The argument here, necessarily somewhat speculative, is that Obama's management of his racial identity and of racial politics is roughly predictive of his soon-to-begin management of executive power in the United States. Obama is characterized as a “practical idealist,” a true pragmatist in the deeply grounded, philosophical (as opposed to vulgar) sense of that term. Attention is directed to the way Obama has handled or may be likely to handle the racial politics of the election itself, the ongoing realities of structural racism in the United States and the problem of exercising executive power in an endemically racial state, the role of race in national politics, and the role of race in global politics. The uniqueness of this new administration—headed by a preternaturally skilled and intellectually prepared Black politician—is not chiefly located in the symbolism of Obama's Blackness, important as that is. Rather it is Obama's formation as a Black intellectual and politician that may be expected to guide his thought and action in the White House.
BARACK OBAMA AND THE FUTURE OF AMERICAN RACIAL POLITICS
Authors: Smith Rogers M. , King Desmond S. 
Published: July 2009

AbstractIn 2008, following a campaign in which racial issues were largely absent, Americans elected their first Black president. This article argues that Obama's election does not signal the dawn of a postracial era in U.S. politics. Rather, it reflects the current structure of racial politics in the United States—a division between those who favor color-blind policies and seek to keep racial discussions out of politics, and those who favor race-conscious measures and whose policies are often political liabilities. The Obama campaign sought to win support from both camps. Only if pervasive material racial inequalities are reduced can such a strategy succeed in the long run.
Life after a diagnosis with endometriosis ‐ a 15 years follow‐up study
Authors: FAGERVOLD BENTE , JENSSEN MARITA , HUMMELSHOJ LONE , MOEN METTE HAASE 
Published: July 2009

AbstractObjective. Previous studies have elucidated the negative impact of endometriosis on life, but the patient selection may have contributed to a skewed picture. The aim of this study was to investigate longitudinally the consequences of the disease in women diagnosed with endometriosis 15 years ago. Design. Retrospective descriptive. Setting. Trondheim 2007. Sample. One hundred thirty women diagnosed with endometriosis at St. Olav's Hospital in Trondheim between 1991 and 1993. Methods. Questionnaires. Response rate of 60%. Main outcome measures. Consequences of living with endometriosis. Results. Of the women, 19.2% never experienced pelvic pain and 21.8% did not have any further visits to the gynecological department after being diagnosed. Almost 70% had received pharmaceutical treatment and positive effect on pain was reported by 41% for NSAIDs and oral contraceptives, and by 62% for progestins and GnRH‐analogues. Satisfactory effect on pain after surgical interventions at the time of diagnosis was reported by 60.9%, and by 89.9% after later surgeries. Of the infertile patients, 75.6% succeeded in delivering one or more biological children. Half of the women reported that endometriosis had some negative impact on their lives. After menopause, 96.9% were free from pain. Conclusion. This study confirms that endometriosis is a condition that often has considerable impact on a woman's life. However, the study also found that endometriosis does not always cause pain, that treatment in many cases is effective, that infertility may be overcome, and that almost all postmenopausal women were free from endometriosis‐associated pain.
The Painted Turtle, Chrysemys picta: A Model System for Vertebrate Evolution, Ecology, and Human Health
Authors: Valenzuela Nicole 
Published: July 2009

INTRODUCTIONPainted turtles (Chrysemys picta) are representatives of a vertebrate clade whose biology and phylogenetic position hold a key to our understanding of fundamental aspects of vertebrate evolution. These features make them an ideal emerging model system. Extensive ecological and physiological research provide the context in which to place new research advances in evolutionary genetics, genomics, evolutionary developmental biology, and ecological developmental biology which are enabled by current resources, such as a bacterial artificial chromosome (BAC) library of C. picta, and the imminent development of additional ones such as genome sequences and cDNA and expressed sequence tag (EST) libraries. This integrative approach will allow the research community to continue making advances to provide functional and evolutionary explanations for the lability of biological traits found not only among reptiles but vertebrates in general. Moreover, because humans and reptiles share a common ancestor, and given the ease of using nonplacental vertebrates in experimental biology compared with mammalian embryos, painted turtles are also an emerging model system for biomedical research. For example, painted turtles have been studied to understand many biological responses to overwintering and anoxia, as potential sentinels for environmental xenobiotics, and as a model to decipher the ecology and evolution of sexual development and reproduction. Thus, painted turtles are an excellent reptilian model system for studies with human health, environmental, ecological, and evolutionary significance.
Ants (Formicidae): Models for Social Complexity
Authors: Smith Chris R. , Dolezal Adam , Eliyahu Dorit , Holbrook C. Tate , Gadau Jürgen 
Published: July 2009

INTRODUCTIONThe family Formicidae (ants) is composed of more than 12,000 described species that vary greatly in size, morphology, behavior, life history, ecology, and social organization. Ants occur in most terrestrial habitats and are the dominant animals in many of them. They have been used as models to address fundamental questions in ecology, evolution, behavior, and development. The literature on ants is extensive, and the natural history of many species is known in detail. Phylogenetic relationships for the family, as well as within many subfamilies, are known, enabling comparative studies. Their ease of sampling and ecological variation makes them attractive for studying populations and questions relating to communities. Their sociality and variation in social organization have contributed greatly to an understanding of complex systems, division of labor, and chemical communication. Ants occur in colonies composed of tens to millions of individuals that vary greatly in morphology, physiology, and behavior; this variation has been used to address proximate and ultimate mechanisms generating phenotypic plasticity. Relatedness asymmetries within colonies have been fundamental to the formulation and empirical testing of kin and group selection theories. Genomic resources have been developed for some species, and a whole-genome sequence for several species is likely to follow in the near future; comparative genomics in ants should provide new insights into the evolution of complexity and sociogenomics. Future studies using ants should help establish a more comprehensive understanding of social life, from molecules to colonies.
Marking Individual Ants for Behavioral Sampling in a Laboratory Colony: Figure 1.
Authors: Holbrook C. Tate 
Published: July 2009

INTRODUCTIONAnt societies are tractable and malleable, two features that make them ideal models for probing the organization of complex biological systems. The ability to identify specific individuals while they function as part of a colony permits an integrative analysis of social complexity, including self-organizational processes (i.e., how individual-level properties and social interactions give rise to emergent, colony-level attributes such as division of labor and collective decision making). Effects of genotype, nutrition, and physiology on individual behavior and the organization of work also can be investigated in this manner, through correlative and manipulative approaches. Moreover, aspects of colony demography (e.g., colony size, and age and size distributions of workers) can be altered experimentally to examine colony development and regulatory mechanisms underlying colony homeostasis and resiliency. This protocol describes how to sample the behavior of ants living in a colony under laboratory conditions. Specifically, it outlines how to identify and observe individuals within a colony, an approach that can be used to quantify individual- and colony-level patterns of behavior. When a lower-resolution measure of overall group behavior is desired, individual identities might not be required. Given the diversity of ants and their study, this protocol provides a very general methodology; the details can be modified according to the body size, colony size, and ecology of the focal species, as well as to specific research aims. These basic techniques can also be extended to more advanced experimental designs such as manipulation of colony demography and hormone treatment.
General Dissection of Female Ant Reproductive System and Brain
Authors: Dolezal Adam , Brent Colin 
Published: July 2009

INTRODUCTIONDissection of the reproductive system of ant workers and queens can be useful for answering many questions. Observations of ovarian status in both female castes can be used to identify relationships between other factors and the ovaries, determine whether an individual has laid eggs, and, with more advanced molecular techniques, identify the end product of the oocyte in question (e.g., trophic egg, viable egg, nonviable egg). In addition, dissection of queens allows for observation of the spermatheca (the sperm storage organ), and thus identification of whether an individual has mated. Sperm can also be sampled for genetic analyses. In this protocol, we describe the dissection of the female ant reproductive system. We also discuss dissection of the corpora allata glands, where juvenile hormone is produced.
GC-MS for Characterization and Identification of Ant Semiochemicals
Authors: Eliyahu Dorit 
Published: July 2009

INTRODUCTIONLiving in a predominantly dark environment, ants rely mostly on chemical signals for communication. Trail and alarm pheromones are the most widely studied and best characterized of all ant semiochemicals, but other such compounds can influence a variety of other behaviors, including reproductive activities, sexual development, nest mate and caste recognition, and defense. A typical worker body contains more than 10 different semiochemical-producing glands, and the surface of the cuticle is covered with lipids that serve as recognition signals. The methods of choice for collection and identification of ant semiochemicals should be determined based on results of behavioral analyses. These can indicate the source (e.g., glandular, cuticular) and the nature (volatile vs. nonvolatile) of the chemical. This protocol presents a number of different methods for collecting lipid semiochemicals. These can be followed by gas chromatography (GC) coupled with mass spectrometry (MS) to better characterize, and possibly identify, the semiochemical in question.
Using Iterative Methods for Global Multiple Sequence Alignment
Authors: Mount David W. 
Published: July 2009

INTRODUCTIONFinding a global optimal alignment of more than two sequences that includes matches, mismatches, and gaps and that takes into account the degree of variation in all of the sequences at the same time is especially difficult. The dynamic programming algorithm used for optimal alignment of pairs of sequences can be extended to global alignment of three sequences, but for more than three sequences, only a small number of relatively short sequences may be analyzed. Thus, approximate methods are used for global alignment. One class of these is iterative global alignment, which makes an initial global alignment of groups of sequences and then revises the alignment to achieve a more reasonable result. This article discusses several iterative alignment methods. In particular, steps are provided for using the Sequence Alignment by Genetic Algorithm (SAGA).