bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Functional SOCS1 polymorphisms are associated with variation in obesity in whites
Authors: Gylvin T. , Ek J. , Nolsøe R. , Albrechtsen A. , Andersen G. , Bergholdt R. , Brorsson C. , Bang‐Berthelsen C. H. , Hansen T. , Karlsen A. E. , Billestrup N. , Borch‐Johnsen K. , Jørgensen T. , Pedersen O. , Mandrup‐Poulsen T. , Nerup J. , Pociot F. 
Published: December 2008

Aims/hypothesis:  The suppressor of cytokine signalling 1 (SOCS1) is a natural inhibitor of cytokine and insulin signalling pathways and may also play a role in obesity. In addition, SOCS1 is considered a candidate gene in the pathogenesis of both type 1 diabetes (T1D) and type 2 diabetes (T2D). The objective was to perform mutation analysis of SOCS1 and to test the identified variations for association to T2D‐related quantitative traits, T2D or T1D.Methods:  Mutation scanning was performed by direct sequencing in 27 white Danish subjects. Genotyping was carried out by TaqMan allelic discrimination. A total of more than 8100 individuals were genotyped.Results:  Eight variations were identified in the 5′ untranslated region (UTR) region. Two of these had allele frequencies below 1% and were not further examined. The six other variants were analysed in groups of T1D families (n = 1461 subjects) and T2D patients (n = 1430), glucose tolerant first‐degree relatives of T2D patients (n = 212) and normal glucose tolerant (NGT) subjects. The rs33977706 polymorphism (−820G > T) was associated with a lower body mass index (BMI) (p = 0.004). In a second study (n = 4625 NGT subjects), significant associations of both the rs33977706 and the rs243330 (−1656G > A) variants to obesity were found (p = 0.047 and p = 0.015) respectively. The rs33977706 affected both binding of a nuclear protein to and the transcriptional activity of the SOCS1 promoter, indicating a relationship between this polymorphism and gene regulation.Conclusions/interpretation:  This study demonstrates that functional variations in the SOCS1 promoter may associate with alterations in BMI in the general white population.
Dose–response relationship of insulin glulisine in subjects with type 1 diabetes
Authors: Becker R. H. A. , Frick A. D. , Teichert L. , Nosek L. , Heinemann L. , Rave K. 
Published: December 2008

Aim:  Little is known about the dose–response relationships of rapid‐acting insulin analogues in subjects with diabetes. This study compared the dose–exposure and dose–response relationships of insulin glulisine and regular human insulin (RHI) in subjects with type 1 diabetes.Methods:  Eighteen male subjects with type 1 diabetes (mean glycosylated haemoglobin, HbA1c, 7.7%; body mass index 24.5 kg/m2) received subcutaneous injections of insulin glulisine followed by RHI (both at doses of 0.075, 0.15 and 0.3 U/kg) in the same three‐way crossover, randomized order in a euglycaemic glucose‐clamp study.Results:  Insulin glulisine and RHI showed dose‐proportional increases in exposure (INS‐AUCtotal) and maximum serum concentration (INS‐Cmax) in the dose ranges 0.075, 0.15 and 0.3 U/kg. At all doses, within 2 h after injection, about twice as much insulin glulisine was absorbed as RHI (INS‐AUC0–2h: 3855, 6832 and 13237 vs. 2356, 3630 and 6231 μU.min/mL; p < 0.05) and INS‐Cmax was reached in about half the time (INS‐Tmax: 47, 57 and 72 vs. 82, 104 and 119 min; p < 0.05). Corresponding glucose disposition was twice as large with insulin glulisine as with RHI (GIR‐AUC0–2h: 314, 491 and 536 vs. 127, 219 and 294 mg/kg; p < 0.05), but was similar in extent upon completion (GIR‐AUCtotal: 499, 1090 and 1476 vs. 416, 1076 and 1555 mg/kg; not significant). With escalating doses, a steady increase in insulin exposure was noticed for both insulins across the entire dose range, whereas glucose disposition increased in a dose‐proportional manner only for the dose range 0.075–0.15 U/kg with insulin glulisine only. For both insulins, the end of euglycaemia occurred at insulin concentrations <10 μU/mL, with a subsequent rise in plasma glucose taking 80–90 min to reach ≥8.3 mmol/L (≥150 mg/dL) and a difference in time of ∼120 min between the insulins at any dose.Conclusions:  Insulin glulisine presents rapid, dose‐proportional absorption, resulting in saturable glucodynamic activity in subjects with type 1 diabetes.
Manufacturing disability: HIV, women and the construction of difference
Authors: Gagnon Marilou , Stuart Meryn 
Published: December 2008

AbstractIn 1998, the US Supreme Court first held that asymptomatic HIV infection constituted a disability when it ruled on the case of Bragdon v. Abbott. The use of yet another label (disabled) to identify women living with HIV has been rarely (if ever) questioned. While we do value the use of this label as an anti‐discriminatory strategy, we believe that there is a need to examine how language and more specifically, the use of words such as disability, limitation, and impairment may create new forms of identities for women living with HIV. Using this legal case as a starting point, the goal of this paper is to critically examine the ‘fabrication’ of asymptomatic HIV infection as a disability. Grounded in a feminist poststructuralist perspective, this paper exposes the relationship between language, social institutions, subjectivity, and power in the construction of difference. By doing so, it addresses the identification of women living with HIV/AIDS as disabled and the self‐differentiation process that they must go through in order to live as normally as possible.
Doomed to fail: the persistent search for a modernist mental health nurse identity
Authors: Hurley John , Mears Audrey , Ramsay Michael 
Published: December 2008

AbstractThe perennial issue of the distinctiveness of the mental health nurse (MHN) is once again to the fore. Previous attempts to resolve this apparent identity crisis in the discipline have included proposals for new models, new research and new educational preparation as well as new alliances, and new ways of practising. Now the politically driven concept of the generic nurse is gaining enough momentum to potentially end the discussion once and for all. This paper takes a postmodernist approach to MHN identity that questions the requirement for MHNs to articulate their distinctiveness, and offers alternative constructions of this identity to those promulgated by policy makers and by other health disciplines.
Market Implications of the Audit Quality and Auditor Switches: Evidence from China
Authors: Lin Z. Jun , Liu Ming , Wang Zhemin 
Published: December 2008

AbstractIndependent audits enhance the credibility of corporate financial reports and assist investors to make rational decisions in the capital market. Nonetheless, the utility of the auditing function depends upon the quality of audits, which is determined by the independence and expertise of auditors. Hence, auditor choice and switch will not only affect an audit's quality, but will also influence decisions made by investors and other market participants. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how investors respond to the quality of audits and auditor switches in the Chinese context. Empirical results show that the quality of an audit and switching to a larger auditor have a positive (negative) impact on earnings response coefficients (ERCs) for firms with positive (negative) abnormal earnings. In contrast, switching to a smaller auditor has a negative (positive) impact on ERCs for firms with positive (negative) abnormal earnings. These results suggest that large auditing firms (Top 10) in China are perceived as more effective for curbing income‐increased earnings management, which leads to higher (lower) ERCs for clients with positive (negative) abnormal earnings. Firms' switching to a larger auditor may signal high‐quality earnings. Therefore, investors more often increase stock prices when firms have positive abnormal earnings and less often depreciate prices for negative abnormal earnings. Similarly, switching to a smaller auditor may signal lower earning quality, resulting in opposite market responses. In general, the empirical evidence suggests that audit information is valued by the capital market in China. Large auditing firms have been able to product‐differentiate themselves within the Chinese stock market.
Plasticity of ability to form cross‐modal representations in infant Japanese macaques
Authors: Adachi Ikuma , Kuwahata Hiroko , Fujita Kazuo , Tomonaga Masaki , Matsuzawa Tetsuro 
Published: December 2008

Abstract In a previous study, Adachi, Kuwahata, Fujita, Tomonaga & Matsuzawa demonstrated that infant Japanese macaques (Macaca fuscata) form cross‐modal representations of conspecifics but not of humans. However, because the subjects in the experiment were raised in a large social group and had considerably less exposure to humans than to conspecifics, it was an open question whether their lack of cross‐modal representation of humans simply reflected their lower levels of exposure to humans or was caused by some innate restrictions on the ability. To answer the question, we used the same procedure but tested infant Japanese macaques with more extensive experience of humans in daily life. Briefly, we presented monkeys with a photograph of either a monkey or a human face on an LCD monitor after playing a vocalization of one of these two species. The subjects looked at the monitor longer when a voice and a face were mismatched than when they were matched, irrespective of whether the preceding vocalization was a monkey's or a human's. This suggests that once monkeys have extensive experience with humans, they will form a cross‐modal representation of humans as well as of conspecifics.
The relative salience of discrete and continuous quantity in young infants
Authors: Cordes Sara , Brannon Elizabeth M. 
Published: December 2008

Abstract Whether human infants spontaneously represent number remains contentious.

Clearfield & Mix (1999

) and

Feigenson, Carey & Spelke (2002

) put forth evidence that when presented with small sets of 1–3 items infants may preferentially attend to continuous properties of stimuli rather than to number, and these results have been interpreted as evidence that infants may not have numerical competence. Here we present three experiments that test the hypothesis that infants prefer to represent continuous variables over number. In Experiment 1, we attempt to replicate the Clearfield & Mix study with a larger sample of infants. Although we replicated their finding that infants attend to changes in contour length, infants in our study attended to number and perimeter/area simultaneously. In Experiments 2 and 3, we pit number against continuous extent for exclusively large sets (Experiment 2) and for small and large sets combined (Experiment 3). In all three experiments, infants noticed the change in number, suggesting that representing discrete quantity is not a last resort for human infants. These results should temper the conclusion that infants find continuous properties more salient than number and instead suggest that number is spontaneously represented by young infants, even when other cues are available.
Choosing not to choose: reproductive responses of parents of children with genetic conditions or impairments
Authors: Kelly Susan E. 
Published: December 2008

AbstractParents of children with genetic conditions or impairments stand in a unique position with regard to choices and dilemmas posed by prenatal screening and testing options offered to at‐risk parents as a means to a ‘healthy’ baby. This article reports the results of a qualitative study of parents whose children are clients of a state‐wide rural genetic outreach programme in the US. The analysis seeks to connect the lived experience of parents of children with genetic conditions or impairments to choices with which women are confronted as prenatal testing technologies continue to proliferate. It reports the finding that a majority of parents in the study chose not to choose: avoiding future pregnancies, declining prenatal testing for subsequent pregnancies, or limiting testing to ‘for information only’. These decisions do not reflect simple rejection of medical intervention, opposition to abortion, and/or affirmation of a positive parenting experience with an affected child. Rather, choosing to avoid the condition of choice appears to be a strategy of responsible parenting that emerges from ambivalence towards the options presented by reproductive technologies.
Violence, dignity and HIV vulnerability: street sex work in Serbia
Authors: Simić Milena , Rhodes Tim 
Published: December 2008

AbstractSex work can be contextualised by violence, social and material inequality, and HIV vulnerability. We undertook a qualitative study to explore female and transvestite sex workers’ accounts (n = 31) of HIV risk environment in Belgrade and Pančevo, Serbia. Violence emerged as a key theme. Accounts emphasise the ubiquity of multiple forms of everyday violence – physical, emotional, social – in street sex work scenes, linked to police as much as clients. We highlight the salience of emotions in sex work risk management, in which the preservation of dignity is of prime importance. Accounts draw upon narratives of hygiene and responsibility which, we argue, seek to resist portrayals, normative to this setting, of sex workers as contaminated and irresponsible. Findings highlight how the ubiquity of the risk of violence in street sex work scenes reflects institutionalised social inequalities and injustices. Sex workers are inevitably participant in the cycle of symbolic violence they seek to resist. The challenges for HIV prevention are therefore considerable, and require interventions which not only seek to foster safer micro‐environments of sex work but structural changes in the welfare, criminal justice and other social institutions which reproduce the cycle of violence faced by sex workers day to day.
How work reconfigures an ‘unwanted’ pregnancy into ‘the right tool for the job’ in stem cell research
Authors: Pfeffer Naomi 
Published: December 2008

AbstractTissue derived from the aborted fetus is considered ‘the right tool for the job’ in some stem cell laboratories. Relatively little is known of the arrangements in Britain for sourcing aborted fetuses for research purposes. This paper uses data from interviews with stem cell scientists, policy makers, tissue bankers, sponsors of stem cell research, clinicians and nurses, and ‘pro‐choice’ and ‘pro‐life’ activists to reconstruct the work involved in reconfiguring an ‘unwanted’ pregnancy into a source of fetal stem cells. A close scrutiny of the work allows the politics of collections to emerge. Aborted fetuses undergo a process of decorporealisation that enables scientists to claim them for their professional and economic advantage. The work, however, has consequences for women rhetorically through being reconfigured into a repository of usable fetal tissue, and, in some sites, materially, through alteration in method of abortion.
Finding an Unknown Number of Multivariate Outliers
Authors: Riani Marco , Atkinson Anthony C. , Cerioli Andrea 
Published: December 2008

SummaryWe use the forward search to provide robust Mahalanobis distances to detect the presence of outliers in a sample of multivariate normal data. Theoretical results on order statistics and on estimation in truncated samples provide the distribution of our test statistic. We also introduce several new robust distances with associated distributional results. Comparisons of our procedure with tests using other robust Mahalanobis distances show the good size and high power of our procedure. We also provide a unification of results on correction factors for estimation from truncated samples.
Cardiological diagnostic work‐up in stroke patients – a comprehensive study of test results and therapeutic implications
Authors: Schaer B. , Sticherling C. , Lyrer P. , Osswald S. 
Published: December 2008

Background and purpose:  In some Western countries, many stroke patients undergo routine tests including ECG, echocardiography, carotid ultrasound and Holter monitoring, even though they have been shown to express limited value in unselected patients. Comprehensive data on yield of tests, especially on consequences taken from positive test results, are scanty.Methods:  Consecutive stroke patients with evidence of ischaemic lesions by imaging techniques were included. Aetiology was determined using TOAST‐classifications. Rates of positive test results and their impact on drug therapy, especially anticoagulation were evaluated.Results:  Two hundred and forty‐one consecutive patients, age 69 ± 13 years were included. Positive test results were documented in 19% with 12‐lead ECG, 24% with carotid ultrasound, 24% with echocardiography and never with Holter monitoring. Overall, in 41% positive test results were present. Apart from echocardiography (37%), a change of therapy resulted in 51–56% of patients with a positive test result.Conclusions:  Even though 12‐lead ECG, carotid ultrasound and echocardiography only had relatively low incidences of positive findings, their impact on management in case of positive test results was quite high. Nevertheless, future studies to select patients more appropriately are needed. In contrast, Holter monitoring had no impact and should not be used in routine evaluation of stroke patients.
From Annankatu to Antinkatu: Contracts, Development Rights and Partnerships in Kamppi, Helsinki
Authors: HAILA ANNE 
Published: December 2008

AbstractMega‐projects are usually analyzed as state‐led public–private partnerships and iconic architecture aiming at branding the city and attracting tourists and global investors. This article adopts a different approach, analyzing the construction of Helsinki's Kamppi mega‐project in terms of the politics of property as a process of creating and distributing rights –– property rights, development rights and use rights. Although the Kamppi project did not follow ordinary planning regulations, this did not mean that there was no regulation; on the contrary, there was more than usual, but through contracts rather than planning. Regulation through contracts denied citizens any voice and negated the celebrated provision for participation in Finland's reformed planning legislation. The Kamppi contracts also show that property rights are negotiated, alienated, compensated, struggled over and constructed. Citizens protested against the demolition of historic buildings, but overlooked the series of Kamppi contracts, which limited their rights and introduced a whole new system in which use rights are connected to ownership. Finally, the long duration of the Kamppi project meant that many people also overlooked the privatization of formerly public space.Résumé En général, les mégaprojets sont analysés en tant que partenariats public‐privéà l’initiative de l’État ou en tant qu’icône architecturale pour identifier la ville et attirer touristes et investisseurs internationaux. L’approche de cet article est différente: elle analyse le mégaprojet de construction de Kamppi, à Helsinki, dans le cadre de la politique de la propriété considérée comme processus de création et de distribution de droits (de propriété, d’aménagement et d’usage). Même si le projet de Kamppi n’a pas suivi les règlements d’urbanisme normaux, on ne peut pas dire qu’il se soit fait sans réglementation. Au contraire, celle‐ci a été plus présente que d’ordinaire, mais au moyen d’accords contractuels. Cette forme de régulation, qui a privé les habitants de leur capacité d’expression, a annihilé la fameuse disposition participative apportée par la réforme législative finlandaise sur l’urbanisme. Les contrats liés à Kamppi montrent également que les droits de propriété sont négociés, transférés, indemnisés, disputés et interprétés. Les citoyens ont protesté contre la démolition de bâtiments historiques, mais ont omis la série de contrats sur Kamppi, ce qui a restreint leurs droits et instauré tout un nouveau système dans lequel les droits d’usage sont liés à la propriété. Pour finir, à cause de la durée prolongée du projet, bien des gens n’ont pas non plus remarqué la privatisation d’espaces autrefois publics.
The Politics of Urban Waterfront Regeneration: The Case of Haliç (the Golden Horn), Istanbul
Authors: BEZMEZ DIKMEN 
Published: December 2008

AbstractThis article analyzes the efforts to regenerate Istanbul's urban waterfront area of Haliç (the Golden Horn), since the mid‐1980s, from the perspective of the actors involved and their power dynamics. It uses as examples three projects: the Fener‐Balat neighborhood rehabilitation, Feshane Cultural Center, and Rahmi M. Koç Museum initiatives. It argues that the case of Haliç cannot be understood through concepts such as the public‐private partnerships, intense processes of urban entrepreneurialism, gentrification etc., which have often explained the experience of the North American and Western European city. Instead, this process has been shaped by a top‐down initiative on the part of public sector actors initially, and a lack of private sector involvement, ambivalent public sector actors and reluctant local communities subsequently. One needs to highlight the particularities of the institutional arrangements and urban politics at the district, city and national levels in order to explain the case of Haliç. These concern low amounts of self‐generated revenue in district and metropolitan municipalities, the specificities to be found in the local community–municipality relations in Istanbul, the presence of a relatively weak private sector in Turkey and, finally, the unfavorable market position of Haliç more generally and the projects in question more specifically.RésuméLes efforts de régénération du front de mer d'Istanbul entrepris dans sa partie urbaine de Haliç (la Corne d'Or) depuis le milieu des années 1980 sont analysés du point de vue des acteurs impliqués et de leurs dynamiques de pouvoir. Ce travail s'appuie sur trois projets: la réhabilitation du quartier de Fener‐Balat, ainsi que les initiatives du Centre culturel Feshane et du Musée Rahmi M. Koç. Apparemment, le cas de Haliç ne peut être appréhendé dans le cadre de concepts tels que les partenariats public‐privé, les approches d'urbanisme de type entrepreneurial, la gentrification, etc., lesquels ont souvent expliqué l'expérience de la ville nord‐américaine ou ouest‐européenne. Au contraire, le processus est marqué, au départ, par une démarche directive de la part d'acteurs du secteur public, puis par une absence d'implication du secteur privé, par des acteurs indécis du secteur public et par des communautés locales réticentes. Pour expliquer le cas de Haliç, il faut souligner les particularités des dispositifs institutionnels et de la politique urbaine au niveau de l'arrondissement, de la ville et du pays. Celles‐ci concernent le faible niveau des recettes auto‐générées dans les municipalités d'arrondissement ou de la métropole, les spécificités propres aux relations entre municipalité et communauté locale à Istanbul, la présence d'un secteur privé relativement effacé en Turquie et, pour finir, la position défavorable sur le marché propre à Haliç de manière générale, et aux projets en question plus spécifiquement.