Creature Comforts Research Articles

Sacrifestivals: On Christianity and Mass Consumption in America

Daniel Boorstin and Herbert Gans gave us the tools a generation ago, but it has only been in the 1980s and 1990s, and primarily in the last few years, that a definite maturity has emerged in the historical study of consumption. In The Image (1962) and The Americans: The Democratic Experience (1973), Boorstin outlined a unique American dialectic between the culturally bred expectations of consumers and the enterprises of consumer-oriented entrepreneurs. The result of the dynamic interaction between buyer and seller was a whole new consumption-oriented world of concepts, meanings, hopes, and beliefs about the material and sensory world. This new world was good and bad-good because of its dynamic creativity in meeting the eternal human desire for comfort, and bad because of its peculiar capacity to dilute values and confuse meanings. Gans, in The Levittowners (1967) and Popular Culture and High Culture (1974), harpooned those elitist critics of mass culture who were too lacking in compassion and imagination to understand that average people like the Levittowners were not prototypes of Homer Simpson, the famously insipid suburban father of The Simpsons. The pursuit of massproduced creature comforts like Levitt homes, Gans argued, reflected the legitimate tastes of the majority of people, many of whom were deliberately fleeing the more communal lives of urban ethnic neighborhoods for greater privacy and quiet and for a new blend of city and country on the suburban frontier.

The Evolutionary Demography of the Fertility-Mortality Quasi-Equilibrium

Life history characteristics are an evolutionary response to probabilities of survival under given environmental conditions. Optimizing strategies are used to maximize fitness in association with creature comforts. The fertility outcome under this scheme is the production of two children. A quasi-equilibrium is re-established after the adjustment to the impacts from technological innovations plagues wars and other events. There is evidence of little growth in population size until the onset of industrialization. The trend until industrialization was for surviving female reproduction of slightly more than two offspring due to according some scholars individual regulation for the good of society but this view is discredited by biologists and demographers. Other explanations refer to established living standards available resources and the technical ability to extract resources from the environment. The balance shifted when productivity outpaced population growth. Charles Darwin contributed to the counter explanation that when population outpaces resources population stability is characteristic of all species. Modern evolutionary theory allows for planning the success of future generations. The constraints are scarcity of sustenance resources variable limitations on survival and the need for creature comforts. Life history further specifies behavioral physiological and anatomical factors. Biologic studies predict individual fitness in a population with high mortality benefits most from early reproduction a large number of offspring and smaller offspring who are energy-economic. Human fertility regulation is consciously or unconsciously provided by a reproductive psychology evolved through natural selection. Mortality characteristics are internalized by reaching puberty and sexual activity earlier engaging in shorter and less stable pair bonds and investing in fewer children.

Environmentally Enriched Housing for Cats When Housed Singly

AbstractIt is generally accepted that to carry out certain trials or procedures, particularly metabolism or digestibility studies, it is necessary to house animals singly, often in sterile metal cages which differ greatly from the animal's normal living accommodation. The lack of choice, mental and physical stimulation and general ‘creature comforts’ increases the stress of isolation.The design of the buildings at the Waltham Centre for Pet Nutrition aim to ameliorate these unsatisfactory conditions and provide environmental enrichment, freedom of choice and mental and physical stimulation, in housing as similar as possible to the normal housing of domestic pets.

Creature Comforts

Creature Comforts

A Distaff Dream Deferred? Ann Petry and the Art of Subversion

he has been a prominent subject in literature, especially during first half of twentieth century. Dreiser, Fitzgerald, Miller-all of these writers have depicted characters in search of utopian dream, few of whom find it. Their African-American counterparts' variation on this mythic search has followed a similar pattern in that their characters have also sought psychological and material fulfillment-a fact making Ralph Ellison's declaration that the values of my own people are neither 'white' nor 'black,' they are American (Shadow and Act 270) particularly resonant. But unlike Jay Gatsby or Willy Loman, men whose demons are internal, most black protagonists prior to 1960s have faced flesh-and-blood demons. Black Bigger Thomas differs substantially from white Jay Gatsby or Willy Loman, for race and class of black character preclude even marginal access to Dream and its attendant creature comforts. At least prior to Civil Rights Movement, then, Lift yourself up by your rang as a specious aphorism, since typical black protagonists in protest fiction neither owned bootstraps nor had access to means of acquiring them. While something of an anachronism in 1990s, AfricanAmerican protest novel of 1940s and 1950s maintained a symbiotic relationship with mythic Dream: It decried a history of racism which made achieving Dream a chimera for blacks. While Richard Wright is considered father of genre, and Native Son (1940) its quintessential document, Ann Petry emerged as another strident voice-a progenitor or native daughter. While her novel The Narrows (1953) deviated somewhat, it nevertheless continued Wrightian tradition. Link Williams, protagonist, differs superficially from Bigger in that he has attained a Dartmouth education and enjoys relative freedom from economic hardships; it would appear that he has means to acquire bootstraps over which Bigger can only ruminate. However, Link's success' cannot shield him in an America which insists upon his inhumanity. When he breaks taboos of class and race by having an affair with a white heiress, his violent murder becomes ritual-an inexorable response to a black stepping out of his place. While Petry's New England novel echoes Native Son thematically, more ostensibly it also foregrounds black male as victim of an America which denies African-Americans their very personhood. But in The Street (1946), Petry recasts Herculean quest for Dream in an unequivocally female context. Indeed, novel represents

'A happy rural seat': Milton's Paradise Lost and the English country house poem

'A happy rural seat': Milton's Paradise Lost and the English country house poem A foundation essay on one kind of poetry from the seventeenth century begins with the statement that 'Through the poetry of the early seventeenth century there runs a thin but clearly defined tradition of poems in praise of the EngUsh country house and of the whole way of life of which the country house was the centre'. The essay is by G.R. Hibbard and is entided 'The Country House Poem of the Seventeenth Century'.1 Hibbard correctly identifies the country house as a physical reality that becomes a symbolic focus in poetry celebrating life on the country estate, though there is in his approach a certain literal-mindedness that unnecessarily delimits the area of his discussion. Just as somefinehouses are metonymically evoked as representing ethical and aesthetic values in the poems allowed by Hibbard as constituting the tradition, so too there are other poems that express very simdar concerns without concentrating on architecture. Perhaps it would be better to speak of the specific kind of poem Hibbard identifies as a discrete genre within a much wider tradition. There are many poems and passages in longer poems that share significandy in the characteristics of the English country house poem as identified by Hibbard without expressly evoking a Penshurst, a Saxham, a Wrest Park, or an Appleton House. One such additional instance, I shall argue, is Milton's account of Eden in Paradise Lost. The country house poem, in its strictest form, congratulates a family drawn from the rural aristocracy or landed gentry on its way of life. From the Sidneys of Jonson's 'To Penshurst' to the Fairfaxes of Marvell's 'Upon Appleton House', this famtiy of the poem is eulogized as being the last exemplar of right living in a corrupt world. Living well, in the sense of being well-off and enjoying creature comforts, the family and its dependents live the vita beata of the golden world; living well, in the sense of practising ethical values, this close-knit community embodies the vita bona. The happy life of the vita beata and the honest life of the vita bona have been identified respectively with the Epicurean and Stoic philosophies.2 The blend of Stoic and Epicurean is 1 Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 19 (1956), 159-74. For further discussions since Hibbard, see Charles Molesworth, 'Property and Virtue: The Genre of the Country house Poem in the Seventeenth Century', Genre 1 (1968), 141-57; Mary Anne C. McGuire, 'The Cavalier Country-House Poem: Mutations on a Jonsonian Tradition', Studies in English Literature 19 (1979), 93-108; and William A. McClung's two books, The Country House in English Renaissance Poetry, Berkeley, 1977, and The Architecture of Paradise, Berkeley, 1983. 2 The concepts of the vita bona and the vita beata as discussed in this context are enunciated by Earl Miner in The Cavalier Mode from Jonson to Cotton, Princeton, 1971, pp. 43-99. 138 C. Wortham characteristic of Renaissance humanism, but it may be directiy attributed also to Horace, who is the prime classical source for the English country house poem. These Horatian values are invariably accommodated to the Judaeo-Christian tradition, and so the golden world of classical mythology and the garden of Eden are seen to meet on this blessed estate. The term 'country house' evokes the house itself, but it subsumes, of course, the lawns and flower gardens, the vegetable gardens and orchards, and the surrounding demesne oftenantfarms. Politically, the country house poem is conservative. The litde world it celebrates is seen as the brave remnant of a feudal order that has passed away: significantly, the medieval custom of 'house-keeping' or hospitality is a central motif in this poetry.3 All who come to the great house—whether strangers from afar or tenants of the manor—are treated with equal courtesy and generosity. All are treated as equals at the generous board, for where hierarchy is unquestioningly acknowledged there is no need to insist upon rank. The very emergence of the country house poem as a genre in the early seventeenth century is an indication that the way...

Reviving a Forgotten Pyrotechnical Art Form: Pyrotechnics and Twentieth-Century Performance Art

Fireworks are an artistic medium. Like most media, fireworks have their own features and limitations. The brilliance of fireworks is the most unique feature, while their ephemeral quality is the most obvious and fundamental limitation. But the ephemeral quality is also a positive aspect of the medium because it produces a psychological longing in the viewer, associated through the centuries with life, death and sex. The fascination with fire is a deeply ingrained part of the human psyche and goes beyond the creature comforts of heat, as evidenced by the rituals of bonfires, birthday cakes and American Fourth-of-July festivities, the replays of the burning of the Hindenburg and the ill-fated space shuttle and the recent televised coverage of the high-technology weaponry deployed in the Persian Gulf war.

Current Trends in Preservation Research and Development

In the 1980s, librarians and archivists accepted responsibility for conservation management as a vitally important aspect of their work. Their increased role in this area influenced research and development trends towards a concentration on mass techniques. These included environmental control with emphasis on preservation rather than creature comfort, fire prevention, and disaster recovery, but developments in mass deacidification have eclipsed all else. And now there are indications that developments in the mass strengthening of paper could make mass deacidification by itself obsolete. Archivists need to become familiar with these developments so as to evaluate their use and/or modify them to suit particular archival needs.

Medical education: A continuum in disarray

I have addressed the issue of medical education from the standpoint of a person who has been actively involved in the field for more than 30 years. The enthusiasm for technologic advancements and the emphasis on a regulated life with adequate creature comforts has made the teaching of the basics of good medicine, that is, listening carefully to the patient and examining carefully all of the patient, at best, a secondary effort. This has been enhanced by the emphasis in medical schools on research and the results of research, publications which are more often than not counted or weighed rather than read. Suggestions for change include (1) putting the patient first in the health care equation; (2) rewarding teaching and clinical care equally with research; (3) placing real clinicians on medical school faculties; and (4) establishing a national health service in which all medical school graduates must serve in physician-sparse areas for a period of time after graduation, preferably without a single computerized tomography scanner, magnetic resonance imaging unit, or advanced radiologic imaging device within reach.

Beauty — for the use of

Researching, developing, producing and selling anti‐corrosive pigments contributes in imperative fashion to the well‐being of our manufacturing base and, without arrogance we can record, value for money is axiomatic. Without the UK sophisticated technology of pigment (cum media) systems, the world would be a sadder place. But, though the world might be like the curate's egg — sad in places — overall, a great many of us experience much happiness as a direct result of creature comforts, suffused with colour and guarded against debilitating corrosion.

Looking beyond creature comforts

Laboratory Animal Husbandry: Ethology, Welfare and Experimental Variables. By Michael W. Fox. State University of New York Press: 1986. Pp.267. Hbk 39.50; pbk9.95.

Social Science Research and Some Implications for Afro-American Scholars

The impact of science and technology on the values, customs, institutions, and social arrangements of this society has been complex and widespread. This influence has been in all areas of life. It has been negative as well as positive. On the positive side, developments in alleviating human misery and suffering are phenomenal. Through advancements in scientific knowledge, the quality of living has been enhanced. Many of the once common life-threatening diseases have been eliminated. Technological advances in telecommunications and transportation place the world at the fingertips-a dial or a credit card allows access to aircraft that can travel faster than sound. Moreover, a cluster of medical, social, and psychological advances has extended human longevity significantly. Material gains or creature comforts are evident in all sections of the country, and they are visible in all of the various social, ethnic, and cultural groups. In today's households it is often difficult to see the negative side of technology. Ironically, the same technology that put material comforts and conveniences within reach of the masses also made

Causality in Economics: A Review

Sir John Hicks has written a methodological tour de force in Causality in Economics (Basic Books, 1979). Despite some blemishes and some omissions, this slim volume explains to the intelligent layman and the mainstream economist why economics, despite the establishment of a Nobel Prize in the field during the last decade, has become in the words of Economist, The Unsuccessful Science (December 29, 1979, p. 41). Instead of resting on his laurels and financing creature comforts by spewing forth additional variations on the same old theme that won him a Nobel Prize (as others have done), Hicks has demonstrated in a series of books written since his 1972 award: (a) a dissatisfaction with the usefulness of the work for which he was hon-

A Modern Chopper Propulsion System or Rapid Transit Application with High Regeneration Capability

Rapid transit propulsion system requirements are becoming more stringent as increased emphasis on reducing energy consumption, minimizing environmental pollution, increasing safety, and improving creature comforts are being considered. In order to meet these new, sometimes mutually exclusive, requirements, considerable detail must be paid to the overall car system. This fact is not particularly novel; however, an intensive study of all the mentioned requirements resulted in the propulsion scheme to be described. A chopper controlled rapid transit propulsion system with five significant features is discussed: 1) fixed frequency crystal-controlled chopper, 2) separately excited traction motors with flashover protection, 3) minimum contactor operation for mode changes, 4) maximum regeneration commensurate with system capability, and minimum size and weight commensurate with regeneration capability.

Psychiatric Patients' Perceptions of Their Milieu Therapy Program

This study was designed to provide information concerning psychiatric patients' perceptions of their individual treatment program in an inpatient treatment facility with an established therapeutic milieu. The responses of 24 patients aged 16 to 69 years to an 8-item questionnaire, developed and administered by the investigator, constituted the data collected. The 24 patients identified 57 components as part of their treatment programs. Patients with more education mentioned more treatment components than those with less education. Talking with staff members was considered the most helpful treatment component by the most patients, and medication was the most frequently mentioned least helpful treatment component. Six categories were used to organize the data: recreation-physical, recreation-mental, verbal interaction, creature comforts, staff supervision, and diagnostic and medical services. More of the identified treatment components were categorized under verbal interaction than any other category. The second most mentioned category was recreation-physical. As patients listed the most helpful persons during their hospitalization, 36 students and staff members and four other patients were identified. Two psychiatric technicians, a registered nurse, and an occupational therapist were mentioned most often. Patients tended to see persons of their same sex and close to their age as particularly helpful.

Cities II: In support of megastructures: A scheme to bring people and their jobs back together again by constructing a multipurpose metropolis-under-one-roof

Scratch an architect or a city planner of note and he'll be glad to give you his philosophy for the ideal city of the third century of the U.S., complete with all of its ramifications: fuel and energy conservation; optimum mass-transit systems; ideal communications; and a milieu in which human needs, aspirations, creature comforts, leisure, and convenience are paramount considerations.

Satisfaction with Retirement Housing: Attitudes, Recommendations and Moves

This paper reports on the satisfaction of 600 persons who had chosen to live in special group housing for the well-elderly. Six widely varying types of housing facilities comprised the choices: retirement hotel, urban high-rise, life-care home and retirement villages appealing to three different socioeconomic groups. Responses were compared to those given by matched controls who lived in conventional housing. Satisfaction was measured in three ways: a direct global question; a series of projective questions; and the behavioral measure of moves away from the site: both those that had already taken place and those that were being contemplated. All satisfaction criteria were combined into a summed satisfaction score as well as analyzed separately. The elements related to satisfaction with retirement housing were concluded to be: proximity, security, balance of independence-dependence, proper amount of age-segregation, degree of financial commitment, psychological readiness, provision of creature comforts, reference group and relative satisfaction, and alienation or integration.

3. Dyslexia international—1971

Informative, stimulating, warm and friendly, esthetically delightful and laced with creature comforts might describe any trip to Europe—or to most other places, for that matter. My recent visit was all that, but was focused on dyslexia and most of my time was spent with people who are as deeply interested and as effectively involved in the problem as any of us who are here. Like us, they are eager to learn what their opposite numbers across the water and on their own continent are doing. In the New British Dyslexia Association, now forming as a union of several local groups, a communication network is developing; and there are Polish-Czech interchanges, and within-country connections. However, I found quite frequently some sense of isolation from "dyslexia-international," even where within a country there were contacts and conferences. This was paral leled by interested, enthusiastic reception of your emissary-ecumenical from the Orton Society. For today's talk I thought of apologizing for not bringing you a full grown statistical analysis, but I think you will be glad to be spared that. I have neither the time nor the necessary hard data and, besides, in seven weeks I could only skim off some delicious cream. If you know of a well-funded graduate student or two, well-informed in the language field (for our friends over there are thus sophisticated), I'll be glad to help work out a dissertation plan, for which my trip can serve as a pilot study. I have my eye on one such person, but there's room for more, perhaps on a collaborative project. My next thought was to give you a running account, even though I haven't had time yet to review my 15 tapes and edit properly the 400 or so slides, but I'm not allowed to keep you here long enough for such an account. Besides, The Ancient Mariner was never an acceptable model. These statistics, though, I do have. Not counting a couple of lecture groups, and the children in a score or more of classrooms, I saw individually on professional matters at least 112 of our colleagues (and often also their relatives and non-dyslexia-related friends). Most particularly, I bring you

The Context of Technology Assessment: A Changing Perspective for Public Organization

OFFICIALS, our nation has developed an enormous enthusiasm for the use of scientific technologies in the solution to public problems. We implicitly turn to the fix as a solution to many social and economic problems. Recently this enthusiasm has been focused upon our urban scene in a seeming desperate hope that technology can somehow help us break out of the apparent pathway to social disaster we amble along. With less hope, I suspect the converts to ecology also implicitly hold largely technological solutions to the fouling of our world; somehow science must find a way to re-establish our resource balance while at the same time maintaining our level of creature comforts.

READING RETARDATION: I. PSYCHIATRIC AND SOCIOLOGIC ASPECTS

THE modern species of the genus Homo has been christened variously: sapiens, the wise; faber, the tool-maker; loquens, the speaker; but man's most extraordinary accomplishment warrants the epithet: Homo scribens et legens, man the writer and reader. Contemporary man, wherever he has been found and whatever his state of culture, has possessed a spoken language; every language thus far encountered has been complex and sophisticated. The origins of the faculty of speech are lost in antiquity. It can be deduced confidently that Cro-Magnon man, who lived from 25,000 to 10,000 years ago, possessed language; his fabrication of tools, his ceremonial burials, and, most of all, his cave paintings, all bespeak the necesary level of conceptulization. It seems not unreasonable to suppose that Neanderthal man, the maker of stone tools and of fire, knowledgeable enough to cook his food, a man with a cranial capacity in no wise inferior to our own and with endocranial markings indicative of frontal and parietal lobe differentiation, may have possessed the gift of tongues as long as 50,000 years ago. The invention of writing, on the other hand, dates no earlier than the fourth millenium before Christ. Consider the exponential rate of development of society in the 5,000 years since written language as against the limited progress in the 50,000 years of spoken language that preceded it. True, technological advances other than literacy have been catalysts of this revolutionary transformation but few are the advances that have not been mediated by written symbols. The magnificence of this accomplishment transcends the creature comforts it has enabled man to attain.