bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Hepatic steatosis in obese patients: clinical aspects and prognostic significance
Authors: Festi D. , Colecchia A. , Sacco T. , Bondi M. , Roda E. , Marchesini G. 
Published: January 2004

SummaryNon‐alcoholic fatty liver disease is a new clinicopathological condition of emerging importance, now recognized as the most common cause of abnormal liver tests. It is characterized by a wide spectrum of liver damage: simple steatosis may progress to advanced fibrosis and to cryptogenic cirrhosis through steatohepatitis, and ultimately to hepatocellular carcinoma. Obesity is the most significant single risk factor for the development of fatty liver, both in children and in adults; obesity is also predictive of the presence of fibrosis, potentially progressing to advanced liver disease. From a pathogenic point of view, insulin resistance plays a central role in the accumulation of triglycerides within the hepatocytes and in the initiation of the inflammatory cascade. Chronic hepatocellular injury, necroinflammation, stellate cell activation, progressive fibrosis and ultimately, cirrhosis may be initiated by peroxidation of hepatic lipids and injury‐related cytokine release. In the last few years, several pilot studies have shown that treatment with insulin‐sensitizing agents, anti‐oxidants or cytoprotective drugs may be useful, but there is no evidence‐based support from randomized clinical trials. Modifications in lifestyle (e.g. diet and exercise) to reduce obesity remain the mainstay of prevention and treatment of a disease, which puts a large number of individuals at risk of advanced liver disease in the near future.
Effects of weight loss in overweight/obese individuals and long‐term lipid outcomes – a systematic review
Authors: Poobalan A. , Aucott L. , Smith W. C. S. , Avenell A. , Jung R. , Broom J. , Grant A. M. 
Published: January 2004

SummaryThis paper aims to review the evidence for long‐term effectiveness of weight loss on cholesterol, high‐density lipoprotein (HDL), low‐density lipoprotein (LDL) and triglycerides in overweight/obese people. Current evidence is mostly based on short‐term studies. A systematic review of long‐term lipid outcomes of weight loss in studies published between 1966 and 2001, was conducted. Inclusion criteria included all cohort studies and trials carried out on participants with body mass index of greater than or equal to 28 kg m−2. Studies had at least two weight change measurements and follow‐up of more than 2 years. Thirteen long‐term studies with a follow‐up of more than 2 years were included. Cholesterol has a significant positive linear relationship with weight change (r = 0.89) where change in weight explains about 80% of the cholesterol difference variation (Adj R2 = 0.80). For every 10 kg weight loss a drop of 0.23 mmol L−1 in cholesterol may be expected for a person suffering from obesity or are grossly overweight. Weight loss has long‐term beneficial effects especially on LDL and cholesterol. Weight loss in obese patients should be encouraged and sustained.
Is There a Third Way for Industrial Relations?
Authors: Howell Chris 
Published: January 2004

AbstractThere has been little systematic analysis of what the ‘Third Way’ means in the sphere of industrial relations. This paper examines the record of the New Labour government in order to evaluate the distinctiveness, innovation and coherence of its industrial relations policy. It argues that many of the limitations of this policy result from the institutional context within which it was introduced. In comparative perspective, Third Way industrial relations can be thought of as a policy adaptation specific to centre–left governments in weakly co‐ordinated liberal market economies.
Social Partnership or a ‘Complete Sellout’? Russian Trade Unions’ Responses to Conflict
Authors: Ashwin Sarah 
Published: January 2004

AbstractIn 1990 the former communist trade unions in Russia adopted a programme of social partnership, the aim of which was to defend their members’ interests during transition while also maintaining social peace. But critics of social partnership within the union movement argue that it amounts to little more than an excuse for inaction. To examine whether social partnership represents a departure from the collaborationist habits of the Soviet past, I examine 33 case studies of conflict at enterprise level conducted between 1999 and 2000. This analysis reveals considerable continuity with Soviet practice.
Global Collective Bargaining on Flag of Convenience Shipping
Authors: Lillie Nathan 
Published: January 2004

AbstractThe most significant case of transnational union bargaining co‐ordination in existence is in the maritime shipping industry. A global union association, the International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF), and a global employers’ federation, the International Maritime Employers’ Committee (IMEC), now negotiate over pay scales for seafarers on Flag of Convenience (FOC) ships. These negotiations set the pattern for pay and working conditions for a signifi‐cant portion of the global seafaring work‐force. The ITF brought about global wage bargaining by building and enforcing a global inter‐union consensus between developed and developing countries around a uniform wage rate.
Influences on Trade Union Organizing Effectiveness in Britain
Authors: Charlwood Andy 
Published: January 2004

AbstractDo British trade unions vary in their effectiveness in maintaining organization and membership in workplaces where they have an established bargaining presence? Do highly developed national union recruitment strategies and innovation in recruitment strategy boost consolidatory organizing and recruitment effectiveness (CORE)? Results suggest that (1) there is some variation in internal organising effectiveness between unions, and (2) national union innovation in recruitment policy is positively associated with internal organizing effectiveness where unions organize blue‐collar workers, but negatively associated with internal organizing effectiveness where unions organize white‐collar workers.
Works Councils and Plant Closings in Germany
Authors: Addison John T. , Bellmann Lutz , Kölling Arnd 
Published: January 2004

AbstractThis paper is the first study to investigate the impact of workplace representation on plant closings in Germany, using data from a nationally representative establishment panel. Across all establishments in our sample, we find evidence of a positive association between works council presence and plant closings. There is the contrary suggestion that industry‐wide collective bargaining plays a neutral to benign role. As for the interaction between collective bargaining and workplace representation, this appears strongest for establishments with fewer than 50 employees: such plants are much more likely to close if they have a works council and are not covered by a collective agreement.
Actual and Preferred Working Hours
Authors: Böheim René , Taylor Mark P. 
Published: January 2004

AbstractWe use British panel data to investigate whether or not subjective data on desired labour supply provide information on future labour market behaviour. We find that, although men and women are able to adjust their work hours in line with preferences, this is greatly facilitated through within‐ and between‐employer job changes. We also find that hours constraints are significant determinants of leaving the labour market and within‐ and between‐employer mobility. We conclude that rigidities in the labour market exist and that these rigidities impair the welfare of employees.
On the Intergenerational Incidence of Wage and Consumption Taxes
Authors: Wigger Berthold U. 
Published: January 2004

AbstractThis paper identifies the conditions that determine the intergenerational incidence of wage and consumption taxes. It emphasizes the role of the households' age‐earnings and age‐consumption profiles for an understanding of various intergenerational incidence patterns. Furthermore, the paper considers some political economy implications of the intergenerational incidence of wage and consumption taxes. It demonstrates that the distributional impact of wage versus consumption taxes bears the potential of a conflict between the young and the old on the one side and the middle‐aged on the other.
Time Consistent Optimal Redistribution Policy in an Overlapping Generations Model
Authors: Lorz Oliver 
Published: January 2004

AbstractThis paper analyzes optimal redistribution policy in a two‐period version of the overlapping generations model with heterogeneous individuals and asymmetric information between the government and the private sector. The government of the first period determines redistribution transfers for the first period but is not able to set the policy variables for the second period. With respect to savings the paper considers two scenarios: In the first scenario savings are observable and the government can set individual savings levels in addition to redistributive transfers. In the second scenario savings and capital incomes are not observable. In both cases the redistribution equilibrium is not second‐best efficient.
Efficient Allocations in Club Economies
Authors: Berliant Marcus , Edwards John H. Y. 
Published: January 2004

AbstractWe explore the characteristics of Pareto‐optimal allocations in the context of local public goods or clubs. A set of first‐order conditions for Pareto optimality is provided. Classical treatments apparently neglect an important term related to migrant compensation, and thus are incorrect. A Pareto optimum is shown to exist.
Decentralization via Federal and Unitary Referenda
Authors: Lockwood Ben 
Published: January 2004

AbstractThis paper studies a model where the power to set policy (a choice of project) may be assigned to central or regional government via either a federal or unitary referendum. The benefit of central provision is an economy of scale, while the cost is political inefficiency. The relationship between federal and unitary referenda is characterized in the asymptotic case as the number of regions becomes large, under the assumption that the median project benefit in any region is a random draw from a fixed distribution, G. Under some symmetry assumptions, the relationship depends only on the shape of G, not on how willingness to pay is distributed within regions. The relationship to Cremer and Palfrey's “principle of aggregation” is established. Asymptotic results on the efficiency of the two referenda are also proved.
Regular Distributive Social Systems
Authors: Y Thier Jean Mercier 
Published: January 2004

AbstractI consider abstract social systems where individual owners make gifts according to their preferences on the distribution of wealth in the context of a noncooperative equilibrium. I define a condition of regularity and a condition of strong regularity of these social systems. I prove notably that: regularity is generic, and implies the local uniqueness of equilibrium and the uniqueness of status quo equilibrium; strong regularity is nongeneric, implies that an equilibrium exists for all initial distributions of wealth, whenever an equilibrium exists for one of them, and implies the connectedness of the range of the equilibrium correspondence. These properties have strong implications for distributive theory and policy, summarized in a general hypothesis of perfect substitutability of private and public transfers. The formulation and discussion of this hypothesis lead to a general assessment of the explanatory power of the theory.
Restricted and Unrestricted Dominance for Welfare, Inequality, and Poverty Orderings
Authors: Duclos Jean‐Yves , Makdissi Paul 
Published: January 2004

AbstractThis paper extends the previous literature on the ethical links between the measurement of poverty, social welfare and inequality. We show inter alia, how, when the range of possible poverty lines is unbounded above, a robust ranking of absolute poverty may be interpreted as a robust ranking of social welfare, and a robust ranking of relative poverty may be interpreted as a robust ranking of inequality, and this, for any order of stochastic dominance.
Production Efficiency and the Direct‐Indirect Tax Mix
Authors: Blackorby Charles , Brett Craig 
Published: January 2004

AbstractIn the design of the optimal direct/indirect tax mix, the canonical view was laid by Atkinson and Stiglitz (1976) who showed that commodity taxes are unnecessary in an economy in which there is an optimal nonlinear income tax provided that commodities are separable from labor in the utility functions of all taxpayers, that the aggregators over these commodities are ordinally equivalent and that wages are fixed. When wages are endogenous, Naito (1999) showed that this result may not hold and in addition that production efficiency may not be Pareto optimal. Given an optimal nonlinear income tax, we show that production inefficiency is Pareto optimal if the aggregate technology set is strictly concave. The Atkinson–Stiglitz condition is neither necessary nor sufficient for zero commodity taxation and commodity taxes are part of almost all Pareto optima.
Multiple Refractions, or Winning Movement out of Myth: Barbara Köhler's Poem Cycle ‘Elektra. Spiegelungen’
Authors: Paul Georgina 
Published: January 2004

AbstractBarbara Köhler's poem cycle ‘Elektra. Spiegelungen’ (written 1984–5, first published 1991) is the response of the female poet to Heiner Müller's Die Hamletmaschine (1977). The paper examines the relation between Müller's Ophelia/Elektra, who swears revenge while being bound into a wheelchair in the course of the final scene, and Köhler's multiple figure (‘die gestalt nähert sich wird körper verdoppelt verviel‐/facht eins in allen bildern neigt sie sich zu und fordert’, I), focusing in particular on the strategies with which the woman writer seeks to elicit movement from the potential entrapment in immobility of the female figure in the mirror‐images of male‐created myth. If iconoclasm is rejected as an option –‘und schlag ich dann treffe ich/dein gesicht und mein gesicht//zerfällt’, III – the multiple refractions created by the eight‐poem cycle nevertheless win a liberating movement from reductive mythical images of Woman (in contrast to Christa Wolf's re‐entrapment of her Kassandra figure in an alternative heroic narrative in her 1983 Erzählung), opening out into a utopian space –‘traum hinter dem irrgarten beginnt eine landschaft’, VIII – in the final poem in the cycle.
Pina Bausch Choreographs Blaubart: A Transgressive or Regressive Act?
Authors: Mumford Meg 
Published: January 2004

AbstractPina Bausch's Blaubart – Beim Anhören einer Tonbandaufnahme von Béla Bartók's Oper ‘Herzog Blaubarts Burg’ (1977) marked the beginning of the choreographer's trademark challenge to the boundaries between dance and theatre through collaborative improvisation and verbal expression. Given the extent to which the piece is transgressive, it is intriguing that it should be so strongly permeated by a musical setting which has often been described as a regressively misogynist appropriation of Charles Perrault's fairytales (1697). As Mererid Puw Davies has pointed out, Balázs's libretto and Bartók's opera Herzog Blaubarts Burg (1910/11) belong to a bleak canon typified by tragic, non‐utopian endings, a sympathetic portrayal of murderous Bluebeard and the disempowerment of female protagonists.When Bausch's work toured North America in 1984 it received much negative comment because of its unremitting presentation of violent gender relations and its cultural specificity. The following study questions whether the production is regressively bleak, contending instead that the experience of a fatalistic vision is dialogically opposed to a more utopian constructivist critique of learned sado‐masochistic behaviour. It also explores the way Bausch's Märchen articulates the interrelationship between gender and national cultural concerns, both darkly embodying and critically resisting the dynamics of authoritarian civilising structures.
Taking Back the Myth and Magic: ‘The Heroic Testament’ of Irmtraud Morgner
Authors: Herminghouse Patricia 
Published: January 2004

Abstract Das heroische Testament, the posthumously published fragments of Irmtraud Morgner's attempt to complete her ‘Salman trilogy’, may well be considered the last artefact of GDR literature, its ultimate postmodern manifestation, consisting of myriad voices, borrowings, allusions, parodies, bits of beginnings, and fragments of endings. It is also an angry document, which addresses abuses and deformations in the GDR and Morgner's own regret that her work had helped to sustain that state's political system. Yet here, too, myth and magic are invoked, not to offer an escape, but as a form of resistance, which she – in a clear allusion to Ernst Bloch – called ‘concrete utopia’. Like Thomas Mann in his Dr. Faustus, however, Morgner ‘takes back’ the fundamental optimism of her earlier works. If Morgner's famous Trobadora novel was written with faith in the ideology of a socialist utopia, Das heroische Testament clings to the possibility of ‘Heimat’ in something much more private and personal: the love of two human beings for one another.
Allegories of Cultural Relations: An Examination of Anne Duden's Mode of Reading Representations of St George and the Dragon
Authors: Ludden Teresa 
Published: January 2004

AbstractThis essay examines Anne Duden's literary‐philosophical text ‘Gegenstrebige Fügung’ in the light of Frankfurt School and feminist theories. It argues that Duden blurs the distinction between legend and myth in her writing about Vittore Carpaccio's paintings of St George and the Dragon to read the representation of the battle between man and dragon as illustrative of founding myths of Western Enlightenment culture. These include the emancipation of reason from nature, the belief in progress, and the privileging of mind and the autonomous subject over the object and matter. The essay examines Duden's mode of reading representations of the myth of the victory of good over evil as a disingenuous narrative which covers up what such representations actually produce: a discourse about normality and abnormality and about the types of selves, bodies and values which are privileged by Western culture. Duden's reading de‐mystifies traditional ways of interpreting St George's story in line with recent poststructuralist theory. However, rather than standard psychoanalytic readings of the story in which the dragon represents sexuality and femininity which needs to be repressed, I analyse Duden's more radical ‘Kulturkritik’ through her evocation of mechanisms of exclusion and the creation of binary oppositions as a prerequisite for the survival of culture and its myths and as a necessity for a repetition of culture's dominant narratives. The double sight that art allows, however, means that it functions in Duden's readings as a privileged realm where the forgotten and excluded may be remembered. Thus a reading against the grain becomes possible, activating alternative meanings.
Männermythos, Frauenmythos, und Danach? Anmerkungen Zum Mythos Ingeborg Bachmann
Authors: Albrecht Monika 
Published: January 2004

AbstractDer Essay setzt sich kritisch mit zwei Aspekten des gegenwärtigen Bachmann‐Bildes auseinander, mit der Rückkehr des ‘Männermythos’ Ingeborg Bachmann in der literarischen Öffentlichkeit und mit der Fortschreibung des feministischen Bachmann‐Mythos in der deutschen Literaturwissenschaft. Zunächst zeigt ein Blick auf das Bachmann‐Bild in der neueren Zeitungskritik, dass dort inzwischen wieder präfeministische Vorstellungen und Klischees reaktiviert werden, die den Bachmann‐Mythos der 1950er Jahre im neuen Gewand des ausgehenden 20. Jahrhunderts auferstehen lassen. Aber auch das Bachmann‐Bild der feministischen Literaturwissenschaft hat sich noch nicht von Konstruktionen der 1980er Jahre gelöst, vor allem insofern, als nach wie vor an der Vorstellung von Bachmann als einer feministischen Vordenkerin festgehalten wird. Damals galt die Schreibweise der Autorin als vorweggenommene Konkretisierung poststrukturalistischer Thesen, heute werden ebenfalls wieder die neuesten geistes‐ und kulturwissenschaftlichen Errungenschaften in ihre Texte hineingelesen. Demgegenüber wird im folgenden darauf bestanden, daß es, will man Bachmann mit neueren Gender‐Theorien in Verbindung bringen, keineswegs ausreicht, wenn ihre Texte die herrschenden Geschlechterverhältnisse kritisch in Frage stellen. Auch wenn Bachmann die Frage der Geschlechtsidentität zunehmend beschäftigt hat: den radikalen Gedankenschritt, der in der Verabschiedung von essentialistischen Begriffen von Geschlechtsidentität besteht, hat die Autorin noch nicht vollzogen. Der folgende Essay versteht sich also als Plädoyer dafür, die Leistungen, aber auch die Grenzen von Bachmanns Texten im Horizont ihrer historischen und gesellschaftlichen Bedingtheit zu sehen – und nicht zuletzt die Macht der Geschlechtermythen ihrer Zeit ernst nehmen.
Mutual expectations: a study of the three‐way relationship between employment agencies, their client organisations and white‐collar agency ‘temps’
Authors: Druker Janet , Stanworth Celia 
Published: January 2004

ABSTRACTThis paper examines the mutual expectations of employment agencies, the temporary workers who are placed by them and the client or host companies with whom they are placed. It considers the ambiguities and complexities inherent in the psychological contracts of agency temps, pointing to positive dimensions of the agency relationship with temps coupled with a tough transactional regime. In periods of uncertainty agency temping provided individuals with an illusion of freedom and control.
Building the New Europe: western and eastern roads to social partnership
Authors: Iankova Elena , Turner Lowell 
Published: January 2004

ABSTRACTThis article focuses on the struggle for a social Europe by examining social partnership developments in two western countries, Germany and Britain, and two eastern countries, Bulgaria and Poland. The resurgence of social partnership in the west, even in the weakest case (Britain), is paradoxically driven in part by neoliberal EU economic policies. In the east, post‐communist tripartism helped preserve social peace with the coming of markets, while both international lending agencies and subsequent EU accession processes pushed domestic actors towards social dialogue. The coming or deepening of markets has therefore surprisingly promoted or reinforced relations of social partnership throughout Europe.
Detecting Infrared Radiation with a Phototransistor and an IR Filter
Authors: Lee Edward V. 
Published: January 2004

This paper presents experiments to detect infrared radiation (IR).1 The key materials, which are readily available, are the following:
» A phototransistor detector, whose circuit diagram is shown in Fig. 1. The response of the phototransistor, which extends into the near infrared, is shown in Fig. 2, along with the response of the human eye.
» An inexpensive infrared filter2,3 — a piece of unexposed, processed Ektachrome® film, which absorbs visible light but transmits infrared.