bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Mobile, one stage, bilateral ear surgery for chronic otitis media patients in remote areas
Authors: Homøe P , Sørensen H C Florian , Tos M 
Published: July 2009

AbstractObjectives:We evaluated the results of mobile, one stage, bilateral ear surgery conducted in Greenland, where chronic otitis media with and without suppuration is prevalent. The study aimed to increase the number of operations conducted and to reduce the cost of ear surgery in remote areas.Materials and methods:The study was longitudinal and prospective, with a two-year follow up. Seventeen East Greenlandic patients with bilateral chronic suppurative otitis media or chronic otitis media were selected. Their median age was 16 years; 53 per cent were female and 47 per cent male. Hearing was assessed using median air conduction pure tone average gain, and the ‘take rate’ (i.e. the percentage of total ears with a closed perforation) was evaluated.Results:All patients attended for follow up. Eighty-two per cent had at least one perforation closed, and the overall take rate was 65 per cent of the 34 ears. The median air conduction pure tone average gain after two years was 18 dB and 13 dB for the right and left ears, respectively. Fourteen patients (82 per cent) obtained an air conduction pure tone average hearing level of ≤25 dB in at least one ear. In total, 71 per cent of the patients were satisfied. There were no hearing hazards.Conclusions:The results of mobile, one stage, bilateral ear surgery conducted in Greenland for long-lasting chronic suppurative otitis media and chronic otitis media were acceptable and safe, and more ears underwent surgery at reduced cost compared with unilateral ear surgery.
Ossicular chain reconstruction with a titanium prosthesis
Authors: Roth J A , Pandit S R , Soma M , Kertesz T R 
Published: July 2009

AbstractObjective:Ossicular chain damage from chronic ear disease is a significant problem in the Australian population. The ideal ossicular chain reconstruction prosthesis has yet to be defined. This paper examines, for the first time, the use of a titanium prosthesis for ossicular chain reconstruction in Australian patients.Study design:Retrospective chart review.Subjects and methods:All patients undergoing ossicular chain reconstruction with a titanium prosthesis between 1 February 2002 and 31 March 2007.Results:Results showed a low complication rate, with only one extrusion out of 55 cases (1.8 per cent). Successful rehabilitation of conductive hearing loss (i.e. to ≤20 dB air–bone gap) was obtained in 85 per cent of the partial ossicular chain reconstruction group and 77 per cent of the total ossicular chain reconstruction group. Pure tone thresholds improved by an average 18 dB in the partial reconstruction group and 25 dB in the total reconstruction group.Conclusion:Titanium is an ideal material for ossicular chain reconstruction due to its ease of insertion, low rate of extrusion and good functional results.
The construction of multiple identities in elderly narrators' stories
Authors: NORRICK NEAL R. 
Published: July 2009

ABSTRACTElderly storytellers are often at pains to represent multiple past identities even within the scope of a single account. Some of these identities may be incompatible, as when the teenage hell-raiser straightens out to become the perfect home-maker, and then after her husband dies becomes a successful business woman. Retrospective reassessment follows from long and varied experience, and hence becomes a natural resource for storytellers old enough to have had the time to re-evaluate events. Further, comments about people and places from the past automatically force a shift between the telling frame and the narrative frame; they create the impression that the teller's present identity is not representative of all aspects of the narrator's projected identity. In addition, elderly narrators insert others' perspectives into their stories, as when a widow explicitly introduces the perspective of her deceased husband into a story in progress. Elderly tellers convey multiple identities beyond what they project, and their listeners form opinions of them based both on what they reveal about their pasts and how they reflect on them from their current perspectives, and this also results in the construction of multiple and on occasion conflicting identities. This article reports an analysis of such discourse practices in stories told about themselves by people aged 80 or more years living in Indiana.
Writing about age, birthdays and the passage of time
Authors: BYTHEWAY BILL 
Published: July 2009

ABSTRACTHow do we experience ageing, how do we interpret changes in our lives and what do we say about the passage of time? The aim of this paper is to present longitudinal evidence about the personal and social significance of birthdays in adult life and, in particular, how birthdays contribute to a sense of ageing. The primary source of data is the Mass-Observation Archive at the University of Sussex. Members of its panel of ‘ordinary’ people living in the United Kingdom were in 1990 invited to write anonymously about celebrations, and in 2002 they were invited to write more specifically on the topic of birthdays. A total of 120 accepted both invitations and 55 included accounts of their last birthday in both submissions. As a consequence, it is possible to compare what they wrote on the two occasions and how this reflects their unfolding experience and changing feelings about age. The analysis reveals the personal salience of the date of a birthday and of continuity in how birthdays are celebrated. Who remembers birthdays and who participates in their celebration reflect the generational structure of families and age-related patterns of friendship. Birthdays are used to celebrate collective continuity more than individual change.
Time, the body and the reversibility of ageing: commodifying the decade
Authors: COUPLAND JUSTINE 
Published: July 2009

ABSTRACTContemporary popular culture proposes new ideological associations between time, ageing, the body and personal identity projects. In a range of magazine texts, television shows and associated websites, several commercialised discourses equate ageing, and women's ageing in particular, with the ‘look’ of ageing. They project a version of personal ageing that is reversible and repairable, on the presumption that looking younger is universally a desirable goal and one that can be reached through regimes of control operating on skin, body shape and weight, hair and clothing. Different moral stances are established in these discourses. One set offers magazine readers putative control over acknowledged risks and threats deemed inherent to ageing. Such texts invoke personal responsibility for maintaining and indeed for re-claiming a youthful appearance in middle and old age. Another set shames and vilifies people who ‘look older than they should’. In those cases, visible ageing needs to be urgently dealt with, on the gerontophobic assumption that the look of ageing renders the individual progressively less socially desirable or even less acceptable. Different frames of mediation, such as the keying of personal censure and humiliation as play, complicate the moral critique of these discourses, even though their ageist orientations are often stark. The decade is constructed as an important unit of bodily ageing, when the target is to look or in some ways to be ‘ten years younger’.
Discourse, identity and change in mid-to-late life: interdisciplinary perspectives on language and ageing
Authors: COUPLAND JUSTINE 
Published: July 2009

ABSTRACTThe papers in this special issue contribute to the growing body of research on sociolinguistic and discursive interpretations of mid and later life by investigating some of the identity affordances and constraints associated with ‘being middle-aged’ or ‘being old’. The papers here offer qualitative, contextually based analyses of a broad range of data and use various methodological and theoretical perspectives: narrative theory, critical pragmatics, social theory and discursive psychology. The main focus is on the ways in whichchangeimpacts on the ageing individual, and how this change is discursively interpreted and negotiated bothbyandfororaboutindividuals in diverse social frames. We examine age and change as they interact with personal and social identity in personal diary accounts, in print, on the television and web media, in conversations amongst friends and acquaintances, in interviews and during storytelling. Language and communication are examined as resources for making and interpreting the meanings of ageing, at both the macro (societal) and micro (individual and inter-personal) levels.
Dealing with life changes: humour in painful self-disclosures by elderly Japanese women
Authors: MATSUMOTO YOSHIKO 
Published: July 2009

ABSTRACTThis paper examines the ways in which older people depict verbally the life changes that accompany old age. It reports a study of Japanese elderly women's casual conversations with their friends, during which they talked about their husbands' deaths and illnesses. A frequently observed discourse practice among old people is ‘painful self-disclosure’ (PSD), in which unhappy personal information on one's ill health, immobility or bereavement is revealed and speakers describe themselves using negative stereotypes of old age. During the observed conversations, however, the PSD accounts were frequently accompanied by humour and laughter. This paper examines the complex structure of the PSDs. To exemplify, a simple statement of death and illness given early in a conversation is later elaborated with descriptions of unremarkable domestic events, e.g. complaints about the husband's behaviour. Through shifting the frame of the narrative to quotidian normality, the elderly speakers convert painful life events to everyday matters that they can laugh about. Furthermore, it was found that the humour is sustained through interactions during which the hearers often laughed with the speaker. The study suggests that the disclosure of age-related negative experiences is not necessarily uniformly gloomy, but rather is combined with expressions of personal and social identities and nuanced and modulated through a complex resolution of the speaker's intentions and social expectations.
Doing change and continuity: age identity and the micro–macro divide
Authors: NIKANDER PIRJO 
Published: July 2009

ABSTRACTThis paper is a study of the discursive management of notions of change and continuity in interview talk. It presents selected short empirical examples from interviews with 22 Finnish baby-boomers, and discusses the methodological and theoretical issues that arise. Following a review of the major approaches to the study of age identity, the analytic intersection between qualitative gerontology and discursive psychology is explored. The analysis identifies how the frequent use of a ‘provisional continuity device’ enables speakers simultaneously both to acknowledge and to distance themselves from factual notions of physical or psychological lifespan change. The key methodological argument is that the discursive analysis of age-in-interaction cannot necessarily be achieved through the myopic micro-study of discursive strategies, but rather two suggestions are made. First, it is argued that analytically-anchored and rigorous discursive gerontology that both systematically draws on and contributes to the broad field of discursive research provides a means by which to test empirically post-modern conceptualisations of age identity. Second, it is suggested that analyses of age-talk in everyday and institutional settings provide an analytical and theoretical middle-ground between the macroversusmicro or ‘microfication’ debate in gerontology.
Egalitarian challenges to global egalitarianism: a critique
Authors: BARRY CHRISTIAN , VALENTINI LAURA 
Published: July 2009

AbstractMany political theorists defend the view that egalitarian justice should extend from the domestic to the global arena. Despite its intuitive appeal, this ‘global egalitarianism’ has come under attack from different quarters. In this article, we focus on one particular set of challenges to this view: those advanced by domestic egalitarians. We consider seven types of challenges, each pointing to a specific disanalogy between domestic and global arenas which is said to justify the restriction of egalitarian justice to the former, and argue that none of them – both individually and jointly – offers a conclusive refutation of global egalitarianism.
International justice and the reform of global governance: a reconsideration of Michael Walzer's international political theory
Authors: SUTCH PETER 
Published: July 2009

AbstractWalzer has recently updated his just war theory to take account of terrorism, humanitarian military intervention and new interpretations of the doctrine of self-defence, pre-emptive and preventative warfare The ethical considerations that underwrite Walzer's most recent work invite us beyond the routine citation of his work to a proper consideration of the moral parameters of international politics. Beyond Just and Unjust Wars Walzer has a wealth of insight into the key questions of international theory. His work on toleration, the nature of universality or on the role of social criticism has always been the basis of his insight in to the hard questions of international ethics. Despite being heavily criticised for being communitarian or conservative (both charges that need serious re-evaluation) Walzer's ideas offer a real alternative to the dominant neo-Kantian cosmopolitan tradition and a workable ethical framework for thinking about the challenges of contemporary international politics and international law. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the final essay of Arguing About War. The essay, entitled ‘Governing the Globe’ offers a radical vision of a reformed international society inspired by the principles that underpin Walzer's development of his just war theory and it is vital that we take notice.
A haunted past: requesting forgiveness for wrongdoing in International Relations
Authors: LÖWENHEIM NAVA 
Published: July 2009

AbstractThis article examines why states ask for forgiveness from other states or peoples that they have harmed. Asking for forgiveness has significant political, legal, and moral implications. But beyond these, the subject concerns how states confront their history and their collective responsibility for wrongdoing. My focus on the reasons states have for asking forgiveness could also improve our understanding of conflict resolution. The article introduces an innovative typology of requests for forgiveness by presenting important conceptual distinctions in the terminology currently employed in the field. Apologies, regrets, and expressions of sorrow are conceptualised as distinct avenues of asking forgiveness with varying degrees of significance and meaningfulness. I assert that the type of request for forgiveness is influenced by the degree of severity attributed to a wrongdoing and by the extent to which a state perceives its image as threatened by its wrongful act. The article analyses the important 1951 statement of West Germany's Chancellor Adenauer regarding the Jewish Holocaust as an example of a type of request for forgiveness.
A post-liberal peace: Eirenism and the everyday
Authors: RICHMOND OLIVER P. 
Published: July 2009

AbstractThe ‘liberal peace’ is undergoing a crisis of legitimacy at the level of the everyday in post-conflict environments. In many such environments; different groups often locally constituted perceive it to be ethically bankrupt, subject to double standards, coercive and conditional, acultural, unconcerned with social welfare, and unfeeling and insensitive towards its subjects. It is tied to Western and liberal conceptions of the state, to institutions, and not to the local. Its post-Cold War moral capital, based upon its more emancipatory rather than conservative claims, has been squandered as a result, and its basic goal of a liberal social contract undermined. Certainly, since 9/11, attention has been diverted into other areas and many, perhaps promising peace processes have regressed. This has diverted attention away from a search for refinements, alternatives, for hybrid forms of peace, or for empathetic strategies through which the liberal blueprint for peace might coexist with alternatives. Yet from these strategies a post-liberal peace might emerge via critical research agendas for peacebuilding and for policymaking, termed here, eirenist. This opens up a discussion of an everyday ‘post-liberal peace’ and critical policies for peacebuilding.
Reclaiming the Utopian imaginary in IR theory
Authors: BRINCAT SHANNON 
Published: July 2009

AbstractThis article aims to reinvigorate the utopian imagination as a vital and necessary component in IR theory. Since the First Great Debate between the Realists and the Utopianists (or more accurately, the Liberal-Internationalists) the utopian tradition has been viewed as being both subjective and arbitrary, leading to its dismissal as vain idealism in world politics. This article re-interrogates the arguments of Carr and Morgenthau and finds that they have relevance today only as against closed systems of utopia and have little bearing against the open-dialectical utopianism which is advocated here as a viable alternative to the sterility of realism. The article also examines the historical nexus between realism's dismissal of utopianism and the wider movements in political philosophy via a critical engagement with the works of Popper, Berlin and Arendt. Finally, after exploring the limitations of Booth's idea of ‘Utopian Realism’, the article argues that utopianism should no longer be assumed to be a blueprint for a future, perfect society, a tradition fraught with the danger of proto-totalisation, but as a critical imaginary that acts as a heuristic device to reveal the fissures in existing reality and as an ideational motivating force for progressive change in world politics.
Feminist fatigue(s): reflections on feminism and familiar fables of militarisation
Authors: STERN MARIA , ZALEWSKI MARYSIA 
Published: July 2009

AbstractIn this article we critically consider the idea that feminism has performatively failed within the discipline of International Relations. One aspect of this failure relates to the production of sexgender through feminism which we suggest is partly responsible for a weariness inflecting feminist scholarship, in particular as a critical theoretical resource. We reflect on this weariness in the context of the study and practice of international politics – arenas still reaping the potent benefits of the virile political energies reverberating since 9/11. To illustrate our arguments we re-count a familiar feminist fable of militarisation – a story which we use to exemplify how the production of feminist IR is ‘set’ up to ‘fail’. In so doing we clarify our depiction of feminism as seemingly haunted by its inherent paradoxes as well as explaining why it matters to discuss feminism within the locale of the academic study of international politics. We conclude with a consideration of the grammar of temporality that delimits representations of feminism and move to recast feminist failure as aporetic and concomitantly implicated in the process of intervening politically.
The laws of war and the state of the American exception
Authors: RALPH JASON 
Published: July 2009

AbstractThis article examines the US response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks using Carl Schmitt's concept of the exception. It argues that the Bush administration's response is consistent with Schmitt's view, which argued that US policy continued the historical practice of drawing lines that separated ‘civilisation’ from zones of exception where the normal laws governing warfare did not apply. This suggests that the state of exception declared after 9/11 is not contingent on the rise and fall of the terrorist threat, rather it is the latest manifestation of ‘global linear thinking’ and therefore a permanent feature of American hegemony. However, the article does not accept this pessimistic conclusion. US policy since 9/11 fits squarely with a Schmittian explanation only because conservative nationalists have used the war on terror to help reconstruct a sense of American ‘exceptionalism’. An alternative reading of how American liberalism should respond to terrorism can be found in the manner in which the Bush administration's policy was rejected by the US Supreme Court.
Related powers of the United Nations: reconsidering conflict management of international organisations in Ontological light
Authors: PIIPARINEN TOUKO 
Published: July 2009

AbstractThe mainstream literature on the UN has been underlain by a methodological individualist philosophy, according to which all social phenomena, and particularly the functioning of all social institutions, should always be seen as resulting from the decisions of individual actors, as if the whole (organisation) was never more than the sum of its parts (members of an organisation). Such a fallacy has been denounced by social constructivist approaches which account for the existence of certain emergent properties of the UN, such as collective identity, which cannot be reduced to its constituent units, namely, states. These accounts, however, have offered a partial picture of the holistic understanding of the UN, as they have failed to comprehend, or perhaps simply ignored the causal powers of such emergent properties. This article enhances constructivist approaches by dint of the critical realist models of Synchronic Emergent Powers Materialism and Transformational Model of Social Activity. The value added of these two models in comprehending the powers associated with the UN Security Council lies in their ability to function as instructive metaphors; they allow for the independent and irreducible existence of certain mechanisms by which the Council controls international conflicts but nevertheless recognises that these can only emerge from the mutual interaction between agents (states) and structure (UN institutions).
International criminal bodies
Authors: GOULD HARRY D. 
Published: July 2009

AbstractOne of the insights of Constructivism is that our world is, in part, made by what we say about it. We make things what they are by saying what they are. One way is through the use of metaphor; by asserting that one thing is another thing. Does our saying that a state is a person make it a person?A way to intervene in this discussion is by addressing it not in the abstract, but guided by a cognate question: Can states commit crimes, a uniquely human act? If states can commit and be liable for crimes, they must be able to form intents. If they are indeed persons in the relevant sense, this is no problem; if their personality is trope, however, attribution of criminal responsibility becomes tenuous.To analyse the issue, I trace the development of the trope of speaking of a group as if it were an individual from Roman Law, through to Hobbes, corporate law and IR Theory. Much hinges on Hobbes' elision of ‘body’ and ‘person’. I conclude that it is too much to expect of a metaphor that it act, that it have reasons, beliefs, and desires, and that these sum to intentions.
On the normal concentration of divisors, 2
Authors: MAIER HELMUT , TENENBAUM GÉRALD 
Published: July 2009

AbstractWe improve the current upper and lower bounds for the normal order of the Erdős–Hooley Δ–function

obtaining, for almost all integers n, the inequalities

where the exponent γ := (log 2)/log((1−1/log 27)/(1 − 1/log 3)) ≈ 0.33827 is conjectured to be optimal.
Unknotting sequences for torus knots
Authors: BAADER SEBASTIAN 
Published: July 2009

AbstractThe unknotting number of a knot is bounded from below by its slice genus. It is a well-known fact that the genera and unknotting numbers of torus knots coincide. In this paper we characterize quasipositive knots for which the genus bound is sharp: the slice genus of a quasipositive knot equals its unknotting number, if and only if the given knot appears in an unknotting sequence of a torus knot.