Commercial Traveler Research Articles

Successful treatment of highly recurrent facial baroparesis in a frequent high-altitude traveler: a case report

BackgroundFacial baroparesis is a palsy of the seventh cranial nerve resulting from increased pressure compressing the nerve along its course through the middle ear cavity. It is a rare condition, most commonly reported in barotraumatic environments, in particular scuba diving and high-altitude air travel. We report here an unusual case of highly frequent baroparesis, workup, and successful treatment.Case presentationA 57-year-old Caucasian male frequent commercial airline traveler presented with a 4-year history of recurrent episodes of right-sided facial paralysis and otalgia, increasing in both frequency and severity. Incidents occurred almost exclusively during rapid altitude changes in aircraft, mostly ascent, but also during rapid altitude change in an automobile. Self-treatment included nasal and oral decongestants, nasal corticosteroids, and warm packs. Temporal bone computed tomography (CT) scan revealed possible right-sided dehiscence of the tympanic bone segment; audiogram and magnetic resonance imaging of the internal auditory canals were unremarkable. After a diagnosis of facial nerve baroparesis was made, the patient underwent myringotomy with insertion of a pressure equalization tube (PET) into the right tympanic membrane. Despite re-exposure to altitude change multiple times weekly post-treatment, the patient reported being symptom-free for more than 6 months following intervention.ConclusionsPrompt PET insertion may represent the preferred treatment for individuals who suffer recurrent episodes of facial baroparesis. Education regarding this rare condition may prevent unnecessary testing and treatment of affected patients. Future studies should explore the pathophysiology and risk factors, compare therapeutic options, and provide follow-up data to optimize the management of affected patients.

Correspondence; Revisiting H. P. Lovecraft

135 he package never properly arrived.Instead,there was a brown note stuck to my front door saying that it couldn’t be delivered. When I recovered it from the post office, the box was shipwrecked, cardboard burst and buckled. Inside, some of the books had turned to pulp; others had been soaked and slowly dried, their pages curled arthritically. Tucked among them was a green folder, the papers within damp but legible. I’d mailed the box to my home in Brookline, Massachusetts, from my parents’ house in the suburbs of Hull, the industrial city in East Yorkshire where I grew up. Twenty years earlier, I had come to the U.S. for graduate school, met my future wife, and stayed. These days, I teach philosophy at MIT. The house my essay Correspondence Revisiting H. P. Lovecraft Kieran Setiya T 136 | Kieran Setiya parents live in now is not my childhood home. But there is a room in it that they call mine, where the relics of my life sink beneath the sediment of theirs. On my last visit, I had mined the box’s contents from the bottom drawer of a dresser filled with books and papers dating from my teen infatuation with the author H. P. Lovecraft, who fused horror with sci-­ fi in “The Call of Cthulhu” and other stories. For more than a year after it came, the folder lay unopened on my bedside table. I would glance at it occasionally, sidelong, as if it held some terrible secret, like a forbidden book in one of Lovecraft’s tales. Of course I knew in outline what the documents were. But when I tried to recall the passion that went into them, the dedication of weeks and months absorbed in Lovecraft’s work, I met an almost total blank. There was a void where memory should have been. For the most part, I am happy not to think about my childhood; those are years I am glad to have left behind. A lot of what I can recall I wish I could forget. What I want now to remember, I cannot : the liberating fervor of obsession. Reading Lovecraft changed my life. I was a solitary, introspective child. Through Lovecraft, I escaped into melodrama: a myth of alien beings whose capacities dwarf our own and whose intentions threaten all of life on earth. And I found a way into philosophy. Lovecraft used the trappings of pulp fiction to philosophical ends. He wrote allegories of human insignificance, of the limits of knowledge, of mechanism and a world without purpose. These were problems in which I was already, inarticulately, lost. It was as if he could read my mind. howard phillips lovecraft was born in providence, Rhode Island, August 20, 1890, in the house of his maternal grandfather. His childhood reads like the blueprint for an author of weird fiction : an attic library of old books; a father who goes insane and winds up in a lunatic asylum; a mother so protective that she monitors her one son’s every move, so doting she believes he will be “a poet of the highest order,” so critical she tells him he is physically Correspondence | 137 repulsive. The child is, of course, a prodigy, but a high school dropout; he has a nervous breakdown. A decade later, the mother goes insane and is sent to the same asylum where the father died; she dies there, too. We don’t know how much Lovecraft knew about his father. Winfield Lovecraft was a commercial traveler for a Providence silversmith . When Lovecraft was three, Winfield was diagnosed with “general paresis”—known to us now as syphilis, which in its tertiary stage can lead to madness. He would remain in Butler Hospital until his death five years later. Was all of this kept from his young son? Or did the child witness symptoms of insanity, erratic behavior , changes in personality? “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear,” Lovecraft would later write, “and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” The boy was a precocious reader, graduating around age five from Grimms’ Fairy Tales and the Arabian Nights to...

“Slowly Becoming Sales Promotion Men?”: Negotiating the Career of the Sales Representative in Britain, 1920s–1970s

The commercial traveler, or traveling salesman, was an agent of commercialism and modernization as well as a stock character in British popular culture. To C. Wright Mills, salesmen faced particularly challenging demands to conform to managerial direction. This article examines how British salesmen negotiated their occupational identity during the twentieth century. Developments in marketing, corporate growth, and periods of war and recession all challenged salesmen’s status and autonomy. These influences prompted a lengthy and recurring debate about how best to present, defend, and justify their work and identity. New marketing techniques and management systems evolved steadily, rather than producing sudden or uniform changes in the ways in which salesmen worked. Their culture of enterprise and individualism persisted, in part as it was shared by employers and managers. The impact of new marketing methods proved greatest in confectionery, tobacco, and other consumer goods trades as sales of branded, packaged goods expanded. Even then, salesmen contributed to shaping their work and occupational identity, proving unable to establish professional credentials and dividing over whether adopting trade union methods could improve their position.

Fuzzy commercial traveler problem of trapezoidal membership functions within the sort of $$\alpha $$ α optimum solution using ranking technique

The commercial traveler problem (CTP) is one of the difficult real—life issues, attracting researchers of the numerous fields together with artificial intelligence, operations research and also algorithm design and analysis. The problems were studied completely on various fields and it has been resolved with different approaches like genetic algorithms and linear programming. Linear programming is intended to take care of crisp parameters, and however data regarding reality world systems is usually offered with in the style of imprecise descriptions. Fuzzy strategies are designed to handle imprecise terms, and are most suited to finding optimum solutions to issues with imprecise parameters. Throughout this paper, solving technique absolutely think about as a CTP with the assistance of trapezoidal membership functions and its arithmetic operations. Solving procedure has been applied from the approach of fuzzy assignment problem using Robust Ranking technique. The fuzzified version of the problem has been mentioned with the assistance of a numerical example associated it is proving that the Robust ranking methodology offers an efficient tool for handling the commercial traveler problem. Finally the optimal solution with in the kind of fuzzy numbers and justified its solution with in the nature of fuzzy membership functions.

“Slowly Becoming Sales Promotion Men?”: Negotiating the Career of the Sales Representative in Britain, 1920s–1970s

The commercial traveler, or traveling salesman, was an agent of commercialism and modernization as well as a stock character in British popular culture. To C. Wright Mills, salesmen faced particularly challenging demands to conform to managerial direction. This article examines how British salesmen negotiated their occupational identity during the twentieth century. Developments in marketing, corporate growth, and periods of war and recession all challenged salesmen’s status and autonomy. These influences prompted a lengthy and recurring debate about how best to present, defend, and justify their work and identity. New marketing techniques and management systems evolved steadily, rather than producing sudden or uniform changes in the ways in which salesmen worked. Their culture of enterprise and individualism persisted, in part as it was shared by employers and managers. The impact of new marketing methods proved greatest in confectionery, tobacco, and other consumer goods trades as sales of branded, packaged goods expanded. Even then, salesmen contributed to shaping their work and occupational identity, proving unable to establish professional credentials and dividing over whether adopting trade union methods could improve their position.

Point-to-point people with purpose—Exploring the possibility of a commercial traveler market for point-to-point suborbital space transportation

An argument was made at the First Arcachon Conference on Private Human Access to Space in 2008 [1] that some systematic market research should be conducted into potential market segments for point-to-point suborbital space transportation (PtP), in order to understand whether a commercial market exists which might augment possible government use for such a vehicle. The cargo market potential was subsequently addressed via desk research, and the results, which resulted in a pessimistic business case outlook, were presented in [2]. The same desk research approach is now used in this paper to address the potential business and wealthy individual passenger traveler market segment (“point-to-point people with purpose”). The results, with the assumed ticket pricing, are not encouraging.

Scientific Management and the American Hotel

In the early 20th century, the values associated with Frederick Taylor and scientific management affected the American hotel industry through three different avenues: Modern architecture was regarded as the reification of theTaylorist ideal, and secondly, the internal management of hotels reflected theTaylorist ethos.Thirdly, the occupation of traveling sales representative (commercial traveler), who comprised the key market niche for many hotels, grew in numbers and became more tightly organized due to a combination of legal developments and shifts in management philosophies.Numerous large hotels were built in American cities, reflecting the confluence of these three currents in scientific management.

“Ambassadors of Commerce“: The Commercial Traveler in British Culture, 1800–1939

This paper presents a reading of British literary representations of commercial travelers between 1800 and 1939. Three forms of representation are used: nonfiction representations by others, travelers' self-representations, and fictional representations. We find remarkable continuity in representations of commercial travelers across this long time period, particularly in terms of a sustained tension between the image of the disreputable “drummer” and the more respectable “model” salesman. These readings and findings are used to address two debates: one concerned with the timing of any transition to “modern” selling and salesmanship in Britain; and the second having to do with the processes whereby British society accommodated itself to modernity, commercialization, and the birth of a consumer society.

Excerpts from "In Red"

Whoever has been everywhere and seen everything should be sure to travel to Sciegi. Simply sit in a sleigh and, before succumbing to sleep, speed across a plain that is empty as a sheet of white paper, boundless as life. Sooner or later this person-perhaps a commercial traveler with a suitcase full of samples-will see the great piles of snow extending along the streets in the four directions towards the bare, frozen expanses. They will see columns of icicles, pillars of snowy caps sinking in the darkness of a wintry sky. They will draw into their lungs air sharp as a razor cutting feeling away from breath. They will come to appreciate the virtues of a climate forever free of disquieting springtime breezes, the torpor of summer heat, the misty sorrows of the fall. They will take a liking to the frost, which conserves feelings and capital, protecting the one and the other from the canker of decay. Winter on every day of the year, and darkness, which softens contrasts and smoothes the sharpness of angles. The gloom in Sciegi dissipated for a short while during dinner time. Before the soup a pink glow lit up the sky; during the main course the sun would cast a few oblique rays over the rooftops, then after dessert dusk would irreversibly set in. The stars in the local sky were strangers to movement and change, just like the gaslights, which held their place amid the constellations. In the darkness there developed the company of Loom & Son, Strobbel's plant and Neumann's factory, the affairs of which were interwoven with the affairs of the Swedish garrison. In that wilderness, frozen solid, where only the winds howled from all four directions, the garrison abided in its daily routine, needed only for ceremonies. Its very existence must be recognized as an indication of a particular good fortune, bearing in mind the fact that a Swedish garrison is better than a Russian, Prussian, or Austrian garrison in every respect, just as the Swedish partition is better than all other possible partitions. The officers' casino, the barracks, the stables, the riding school, the powder magazine, and the drill-ground covered in packed, slippery snow-on which, if it was necessary, the men played leapfrog in full uniform to the point of exhaustion-emerged from around successive corners, unexpectedly, like sudden changes of fate. For Guards Street took its form from the winding melody of the last post played every evening on a bugle. The golden sound of the instrument rose high and soared over the roofs of the apartment buildings. Yet on the other side of the market square it dropped in the labored flight of a stunned bird. Because there, in the shanty town, boys in caps with ear-flaps threw snowballs at anything that managed to rise above that which is earth-bound. The factory whistle carried low, just above ground level, howling every morning on a single note capable of expressing only the immensity of the darkness that flowed down the ravine of Factory Street through all the hours of day and night. The wailing of the whistle reverberated against the unbaked brick exterior of the barracks like peas against a wall. Guards Street and Factory Street fled from each other in opposite directions. Strobbel's plant was a porcelain factory. In its warehouses were stacks of hotel services: mute piles of plates and bowls, large and small, countless silent gravy boats and soup tureens with the sign of a four-pointed snowflake on the bottom. In Neumann's gramophone record factory, noble tenors, supercilious baritones, terrifying or amusing basses, and crystal-clear sopranos were beaten with the aid of unmelodiously noisy machines into black vulcanite, where they remained invisible yet audible, forever enwrapped in the cotton of incomprehensible Italian words. The factory workers, falling asleep over their soup after work, could see spinning discs, white in the case of those from Strobbel's plant, black for those from Neumann's factory. …

100 years on the road: the traveling salesman in American culture

Vividly illustrated, this lively book presents the first in-depth study of the traveling salesman, illuminating his role in American culture from 1830 to 1920. Drawing on letters, diaries, and autobiographies, as well as on literary works by Crane, Dreiser, Lewis, and Miller, Spears examines the impact of the commercial traveler both on the national market economy and on American imagination.

"All Things to All Men": The Commercial Traveler and the Rise of Modern Salesmanship

"All Things to All Men": The Commercial Traveler and the Rise of Modern Salesmanship

The Dark Is Light Enough: Affirmation from Despair in Jean Rhys's "Good Morning, Midnight"

The protagonist-narrator of Jean Rhys's Good Morning, Midnight does not provide us with any salutary account of how she escaped from some dark wood of despair to the light of a rekindled affirmation of life. Nor should she, considering the evidence at hand. One gigolo, somewhat prone to violence but surprisingly reluctant to take, in the monetary sense, a woman not rich for the taking, hardly constitutes any conclusive demonstration of pervasive human goodness. In brief, the world of Sasha Jansen continues to turn in very much the same fashion that it has always turned, and the catastasis of the novel does not at all cancel out the protagonist's previous sad experience with men. Yet, somehow, the penultimate episode, Sasha's disaster with the gigolo, can still be followed by her yes to a man hitherto despised. That unlikely assent making do with the partner at hand? a recognition of the narrow limits of her own life? an act of supreme charity? constitutes the crux and resolution of this difficult work. It is a yes that has not yet been adequately assessed. Judging by all that has gone before, the final action in the novel should constitute Sasha's most humiliating defeat. Her listening neighbor, the commis voyageur (commercial traveler), overhears the gigolo depart and decides to fill the role his rival has apparently abdicated. Sasha has just wept and prayed for the return of the young man whom minutes before she had asked and paid to leave:

The Comfort and Satisfaction of Air Travelers—Basis for a Descriptive Model

The results of a questionnaire and interview survey are used as a basis for proposing a descriptive model of the comfort and satisfaction of the commercial air traveler. Passenger attitudes toward the present commercial air travel system are examined. Comfort is interpreted as being represented by a four-dimensional composite of commonly encountered environmental variables. Satisfaction is represented as a composite of safety, cost-benefit, luxury, and in-flight activity dimensions.

Nicolas Perrot, the First Commercial Traveler on the Upper Mississippi

Nicolas Perrot, the First Commercial Traveler on the Upper Mississippi

Carriers. Baggage. Commercial Traveler. Samples. Extra Compensation. Trimble v. New York Cent. and H. R. R. Co., 56 N. E. 532 (N. Y.)

Carriers. Baggage. Commercial Traveler. Samples. Extra Compensation. Trimble v. New York Cent. and H. R. R. Co., 56 N. E. 532 (N. Y.)

A CASE OF CARCINOMA OF THE NASAL PASSAGES.

Mr. J. A. S., a commercial traveler, 51 years of age, was referred to me by Dr. F. E. Cheney of Boston, June 4, 1898. Previous History. —For thirty-three years the patient had had nasal polypi removed at regular and frequent intervals from the left nasal passage, by various physicians, and within the past few years also occasionally from the right side. Otherwise the health had been good. There was no evidence of syphilis. Present Illness. —Six months ago the polypi on the left side were said to have become firmer and their removal attended with more bleeding than formerly. The left eye simultaneously became painful and began to exhibit protrusion from the orbit. A progressive impairment of flesh and strength was observed. Examination. —He was well developed and fairly well nourished. The right nasal passage contained a few small polypi; the left was nearly completely filled with small and

PARETIC DEMENTIA AND LIFE INSURANCE.Read in the Section of Medical Jurisprudence and Neurology, at the Forty-second Annual Meeting of the American Medical Association, held at Washington, D. C., May, 1891.

The increase of paretic dementia among civilized nations has created many important legal problems for solution. The present question has puzzled the solicitors of more than one insurance company. In a case which came under my own observation, a paretic dement insured his life. A month later he was adjudged insane and sent to the Cook County insane hospital, of which I was then Superintendent. Eight months later he died in an apoplectiform attack. Dr. S. V. Clevenger has had under care a commercial traveler addicted to sexual excess and luetic, who, precedent to May 6, 1889, had spinal symptoms of paretic dementia, following which came a condition of emotional exaltation. His life was insured precedent to the spinal symptoms for $5,000. In a period of emotional exaltation he desired to increase this to $20,000, which was done in January, 1890. June 4, 1890, he died in an apoplectiform attack.