Quasigroups Research Articles

“Integration was a Solution, but Integration does not Address Quality Education”: A Conversation about School Desegregation with Dr. Michael A. Middleton

Dr. Michael A. Middleton is Deputy Chancellor of the University of Missouri–Columbia. He is an expert in civil rights and employment discrimination and served as lead counsel for plaintiffs in the St. Louis metropolitan school desegregation litigation. Dr. Middleton previously served as director of the St. Louis District Office of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). He was also an associate general counsel at the EEOC in Washington, DC for three years. During this time, he managed the commission's national litigation program and supervised 250 attorneys at 22 district offices in federal court litigation activities. He has held several other high-level government positions, including deputy assistant secretary of education at the U.S. Department of Education; director of the Office of Systemic Programs at the EEOC; and assistant deputy director of the Office for Civil Rights at the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. As deputy chief counsel and director of the Government Employment Project for the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law in the early 1970s, Middleton handled civil rights litigation focusing on voting rights and government employment throughout the South. He began his career as a trial attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division, where he actively litigated several major employment discrimination cases in the federal courts across the country. On February 15, 2013, we sat down with Dr. Middleton to discuss the history, current status, and future of school desegregation.

Validity of using lobe-specific regional lymph node stations to assist navigation during lymph node dissection in early stage non-small cell lung cancer patients

The validity of our proposed lobe-specific regional lymph node stations (LSRLNS) was evaluated as a method for navigation during lymphadenectomy in patients with early stage non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). A total of 725 NSCLC patients with c-T2N1M0 or less extensive disease who had undergone a curative operation with complete mediastinal lymph node dissection (MLND) were studied. The LSRLNS were #2, #3, #4 and #10 for the right upper lobe, #11i, #11s, #7 and #8 for the right lower lobe, #4, #5 and #6 for the left superior division, #11, #5 and #7 for the left lingular division and #11, #7 and #8 for the left lower lobe. If the LSRLNS were used for pathological examinations during surgery, 599 p-N0 and 39 p-N1 patients diagnosed with no metastasis would have been subjected to a selective MLND, while 20 p-N1 and 65 p-N2 patients who had a diagnosis of metastasis would have been navigated to a complete MLND. Two p-N2 patients with a diagnosis of no metastasis would have inappropriately undergone a selective MLND, resulting in the false negative rate at 0.3 %. Intra-operative pathological examination using our LSRLNS may accurately reveal the status of metastasis, and appropriately lead to a selective or complete MLND in patients with c-T2N1M0 or less extensive disease.

Effects of left renal vein division on postoperative renal function during open repair of abdominal aortic aneurysm

To explore the effects of left renal vein division (LRVD) on postoperative renal function and examine the overall prognosis in patients undergoing open repair of abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA). Retrospective analyses were conducted for the clinical data of AAA patients with open repair at our hospital from January 2000 to December 2011. They were divided into LRVD (n = 35) and non-LRVD (n = 141) groups. The 30-day mortality, cardio-cerebrovascular complications, pulmonary complications, preoperative and postoperative levels of creatinine and glomerular rate filtration (GFR), aortic cross-clamping time, blood loss volume, intensive care duration and dialysis or continuous renal replacement therapy (CRRT) rate were compared between two groups. A total of 189 AAA repair were performed. And 13 patients with suprarenal clamping were excluded. The LRVD group had a significant higher proportion of ruptured AAA (48.6% vs 27.7%, P < 0.01), higher 3-day postoperative creatinine (P < 0.01), longer intensive duration (P < 0.05) and decreased 3-day postoperative GFR (P < 0.01). No significant difference existed in 30-day mortality, incidence of major complications, creatinine or GFR at discharge (P > 0.05). LRVD during open surgery of AAA has no effect on the postoperative mortality and renal function.

India's New Rights Agenda: Genesis, Promises, Risks

Since 2004, India has introduced a series of progressive national bills that enact a right to new civic entitlements, ranging from information, work and education to forest conservation, food and basic public services. What explains the emergence of these laws? How are the rights conceived by these acts conceptualized, operationalized and pursued? What are the promises, challenges and risks–legal, political and economic–of enshrining socioeconomic entitlements as formal statutory rights? This paper engages these questions. In part one, I argue that three slow-burning processes since the 1980s, distinct yet related, catalyzed India’s new rights agenda: high socio-legal activism, rapid uneven development and the expanding popular foundations of its federal parliamentary democracy. Significantly, all three processes exposed the growing nexus between political corruption and socioeconomic inequality. Equally, however, each raised popular expectations for greater social justice that were only partly met. Part two of the paper evaluates India’s new rights agenda. The promise of these new laws is threefold: they breach the traditional division of civil, political and socioeconomic rights, devise innovative governance mechanisms that enable citizens to see the state, and provide fresh incentives for new political coalitions to emerge across state and society. Several risks exist, however. Official political resistance from above and below, the limited capacities of judicial actors, state bureaucracies and social forces, and the relatively narrow base of many of these new movements endanger the potential of these reforms. The paper concludes by considering several imperatives that India’s evolving rights movement must confront to realize its ambition.

Novel Secure Code Encryption Techniques Using Crypto Based Indexed Table for Highly Secured Software

Software security has become one of the active areas of research due to various cyber threats and attacks that can be very dangerous. The main goals of software protection are Intellectual property protection, Protection beside function investigation in mobile environments, Protection beside illegal copy and use of software. Software security is dependent on both security code and software protection. Various techniques have been developed to deal with the software threats and attacks. However, the available software protection approaches in the literature do not offer trustworthy security in all the scenarios. In recent years, cryptographic techniques are observed to be very efficient in dealing with a number of software threats and attacks. Code encryption has received much attention in the field of software security. This paper proposes novel software protection code encryption schemes based on the index table. This approach uses three novel and efficient encryption techniques namely quasigroup encryption, quasi group encryption with transformation and KIST approach

The atomic theory of left division of two-sided ideals of semirings with unit

We consider two-sided ideals of semirings with unit. We study the theory of two-sided ideals in the signature consisting of the binary predicate symbol ⊆ and a binary function symbol that denotes the left division of ideals. We prove the polynomial-time decidability of the problem of deciding whether a given atomic formula in this signature is valid for all semirings with unit and all valuations. A similar result holds for atomic formulas with the right division, but without the left division.

A Secure Fast 2D-Discrete Fractional Fourier Transform Based Medical Image Compression Using SPIHT Algorithm with Huffman Encoder

The arrival of CT and MRI imaging in the last two decades used for analysis of various diseases in medical field. Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) and Computed Tomography (CT) sequences have become essential in healthcare systems and an integral segment of a patient’s medical record. Such medical image data needed a huge amount of resources for storage and transmission. Compression of medical images for efficient use of storage space and transmission bit rate has become a necessity. A quasigroup successfully creates an astronomical number of keys which is used to confuse the hackers in determining the original data. However, quasi group encryption is not capable in diffusing the information of the plain text. Hence, in this paper the DICOM images are encrypted using a chained Hadamard transforms and Number Theoretic Transforms to introduce diffusion along with the quasigroup transformation. A secure Fast Two Dimensional Discrete Fractional Fourier Transform (DFRFT) and a SPIHT Algorithm with Huffman Encoder is used for compress the image and it provides a secure compression of medical images as compared to the other transform. The experimental results evaluate the performance of the proposed encryption approach based on the PSNR and MSE it shows the proposed approach gives better results.

Athletes as Objects of Property: A Kantian Rethinking of Flood v. Kuhn

In the 1972 case Flood v. Kuhn, St. Louis Cardinals outfielder Kurt Flood petitioned to the United States Supreme Court arguing that professional baseball’s century-old reserve system was illegal. In the case, which was ultimately unsuccessful but led to the establishment of modern free agency, Flood argued that by granting teams the perpetual right to renew players’ contracts and the right to unilaterally trade players to other teams, the reserve system treated him as “a piece of property to be bought and sold” and reduced him to a “well-paid slave”. In this paper, I justify Flood’s claim by appeal to a Kantian division of rights. I argue for a Kantian conception of rights under which property rights are properly defined as rights in rem in external objects; on the basis that the right a team holds in a ballplayer under the reserve system is alienable and holds against all the world, I argue that it is a right in rem and accordingly constitutes a property right under Kant’s view. I then argue that the reserve system treats the player as a slave by constraining his purposiveness such as to violate a Kantian conception of the innate right of humanity. On this basis I argue that Flood was right to conclude that the reserve system treats the player as an object of property akin to a slave.

Enforcement of entailment constraints in distributed service-based business processes

ContextA distributed business process is executed in a distributed computing environment. The service-oriented architecture (SOA) paradigm is a popular option for the integration of software services and execution of distributed business processes. Entailment constraints, such as mutual exclusion and binding constraints, are important means to control process execution. Mutually exclusive tasks result from the division of powerful rights and responsibilities to prevent fraud and abuse. In contrast, binding constraints define that a subject who performed one task must also perform the corresponding bound task(s). ObjectiveWe aim to provide a model-driven approach for the specification and enforcement of task-based entailment constraints in distributed service-based business processes. MethodBased on a generic metamodel, we define a domain-specific language (DSL) that maps the different modeling-level artifacts to the implementation-level. The DSL integrates elements from role-based access control (RBAC) with the tasks that are performed in a business process. Process definitions are annotated using the DSL, and our software platform uses automated model transformations to produce executable WS-BPEL specifications which enforce the entailment constraints. We evaluate the impact of constraint enforcement on runtime performance for five selected service-based processes from existing literature. ResultsOur evaluation demonstrates that the approach correctly enforces task-based entailment constraints at runtime. The performance experiments illustrate that the runtime enforcement operates with an overhead that scales well up to the order of several ten thousand logged invocations. Using our DSL annotations, the user-defined process definition remains declarative and clean of security enforcement code. ConclusionOur approach decouples the concerns of (non-technical) domain experts from technical details of entailment constraint enforcement. The developed framework integrates seamlessly with WS-BPEL and the Web services technology stack. Our prototype implementation shows the feasibility of the approach, and the evaluation points to future work and further performance optimizations.

Feasibility Analysis of Low Cost Graphical Processing Units for Electromagnetic Field Simulations by Finite Difference Time Domain Method

Among several techniques available for solving Computational Electromagnetics (CEM) problems, the Finite Difference Time Domain (FDTD) method is one of the best suited approaches when a parallelized hardware platform is used. In this paper we investigate the feasibility of implementing the FDTD method using the NVIDIA GT 520, a low cost Graphical Processing Unit (GPU), for solving the differential form of Maxwell's equation in time domain. Initially a generalized benchmarking problem of bandwidth test and another benchmarking problem of 'matrix left division is discussed for understanding the correlation between the problem size and the performance on the CPU and the GPU respectively. This is further followed by the discussion of the FDTD method, again implemented on both, the CPU and the GT520 GPU. For both of the above comparisons, the CPU used is Intel E5300, a low cost dual core CPU.

Bronchial obstruction by tumor embolus of contralateral lung during pneumonectomy: report of a case

Bronchial obstruction due to a tumor embolus of the contralateral lung during pneumonectomy is an uncommon and fatal complication. According to previous cases, a bronchial balloon of double-lumen endotracheal tube (DLT) could prevent a dislodged tumor from traveling to the contralateral lung. We experienced a tumor embolism from the bronchus with cancer to the other bronchus despite applying DLT. A 59-year-old male with endobronchial lung cancer underwent a left pneumonectomy. One-lung ventilation was established by the right-sided DLT. After a left bronchial division, a sudden increase of peak airway pressure and reduction of the expired tidal volume to 50 ml was observed. Intraoperative fiberoptic bronchoscopy showed a near total obstruction of the right main bronchus due to tumor emboli. It was not possible to remove the tumor embolus through bronchoscopic suction and forceps. Therefore, we reopened the left bronchial stump and successfully extracted tumor embolus under bronchoscopic guidance.

Double Outlet Right Ventricle Versus Aortic Dextroposition: Morphologically Distinct Defects

This study concerns the morphological differentiation between double outlet right ventricle (DORV) and aortic dextroposition (AD) defects, namely tetralogy of Fallot and Eisenmenger anomaly. Indeed, despite the similar condition in terms of sequential ventriculo-arterial connections, DORV and AD are two distinct morphological entities. It is proposed that the borderline between these two groups of malformations is represented by the specific insertion of the infundibular septum into the left anterior cranial division of the septomarginal trabeculation (or septal band) occurring in ADs and lacking in DORV. Furthermore, the spiraliform versus straight parallel arrangement of the great arteries in the two groups of anomalies is emphasized as an additional and distinctive morphological feature. Emphasis is also given to the association of straight parallel great arteries conotruncal malformations, DORV and transposition of the great arteries, with the asplenia type of heterotaxy laterality defects. Within this context, the absence of subaortic ventricular septal defect and concomitantly of spiraliform great arteries in the asplenia group of heterotaxy anomalies, as detected by this study, further substantiates our belief of not mixing collectively the ADs with the DORV in clinico-pathological diagnosis.

A good practice guide for the use of forensic genetics applied to human rights and international humanitarian law investigations

A consequence of armed conflict and other situations of violence is that individuals go missing; these individuals have often been killed and their remains have not been identified or in some cases may be alive but have been separated from their families and are unable to re-establish family links. Forensic genetics provides a powerful tool for the identification of both the dead and living and can be used to assist in identifying missing persons. Guidelines exist that detail technical aspects of human identification using forensic genetics, particularly when identifying victims of disasters such as plane crashes; however, limited emphasis is given to circumstances often faced by investigations of abuses and violations of international humanitarian and human rights’ law. The Argentine government's Human Rights Division in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Worship (MREC) proposed that the United Nations (UN) should promote best practices in the use of forensic genetics for this type of investigation; this was adopted in Resolutions A/HRC/RES/10/26 and A/HRC/RES/15/5. Following these resolutions MREC has coordinated, with support from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), the drafting of a set of guidelines, with input from several national and international organisations, which it plans to promote through national agencies, international organisations such as South America's MERCOSUR and the UN.

Privatization, the Role of Enterprises and the Implementation of Social and Economic Rights: A Comparison of Rights-Based and Administrative Approaches in India and China

From the middle of the last century, socio-economic rights have been bound up in the ideology of the state within national legal orders and through the construction of an important edifice of public international law and institutions. Globalization may be changing both the focus and locus of socio-economic rights, adding a private sector dimension to what had been an almost purely public institution project. The state and public international organizations have been making room for the multinational corporation and global civil society. In lieu of a hierarchically arranged global system of public power managing socio-economic rights, governance fracture and polycentricism have complicated the regulatory landscape, making it sometimes harder to see where public law ends and private affairs begin. This study examines the ways in which the development of socio-economic rights has moved beyond the state in two of the most important emerging free market economies — China and India. After introducing the current formal division of human rights between political and civil rights (a focus of the Global North discourse) and social and economic rights (a focus of Global South discourse), Part II of this Article briefly focuses on the way in which social and economic rights are understood within India and China. Part III then considers two case studies as a means of structuring discussion; the first from India, involving two large multinational enterprises and the rights-based approach; the second from China, involving the development of complex administrative and rules-based private corporate social responsibility (CSR) codes of conduct. Part IV concludes with some general observations about globalization, privatization, and the advancement of human rights regimes. In China, privatization is grounded in state obligation, administrative approaches, and private rule systems. In India, privatization is grounded in individual rights-based and civil and political rights-based judicial approaches. Though both incorporate international norms, they achieve this incorporation in substantially different ways. These examples will serve to suggest the ways in which both privatization and corporate actors now play an increasingly important role in realizing socio-economic rights, and the way approaches to economic and social rights are fracturing at the private as well as the public law level. Indeed, within the forms of privatized frameworks for the development of economic and social rights, India and China evidence the ways in which political division has now also been privatized and replicated — providing an additional space within which the tensions, already quite evident in the state system’s difficulties with human rights, may be replayed.

The free one-generated left distributive algebra: basics and a simplified proof of the division algorithm

AbstractThe left distributive law is the law a· (b· c) = (a·b) · (a· c). Left distributive algebras have been classically used in the study of knots and braids, and more recently free left distributive algebras have been studied in connection with large cardinal axioms in set theory. We provide a survey of results on the free left distributive algebra on one generator, A, and a new, simplified proof of the existence of a normal form for terms in A. Topics included are: the confluence of A, the linearity of the iterated left division ordering &lt;L of A, the connections of A to the braid groups, and an extension P of A obtained by freely adding a composition operation. This is followed by a simplified proof of the division algorithm for P, which produces a normal form for terms in A and is a powerful tool in the study of A.

Music and Cultural Rights (review)

Reviewed by: Music and Cultural Rights Rachel Tollett (bio) Music and Cultural Rights. Edited by Andrew Weintraub and Bell Yung. Chicago; Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009. ix + 313 pp., photographs, charts, music, Chinese language glossary, index. ISBN: 9780252034732 (Cloth), $70.00; ISBN: 9780252076626 (Paperback), $25.00. Andrew Weintraub and Bell Yung, both known for their extensive work on musics in Southeast and East Asia, center their edited volume, Music and Cultural Rights, on carving a discursive space between official policies on human rights and real-life encounters between governments and musical communities. Formed from papers presented at a conference at the University of Pittsburgh in 2005 with funding from the Human Rights Division under the Peace and Social Justice Program of the Ford Foundation, the volume contains many chapters of interest to readers of this journal, including three essays concerning the People's Republic of China, and others examining music of the Philippines, Tibet, Hawai'i, Ukraine, Peru, and Brazil. Collectively, these case studies explore eight viewpoints on cultural rights, particularly the elements of musical activity not explicitly protected by current international resolutions. Throughout the eight chapters, all authors consistently express some form of discomfort with the formalized protection afforded to human rights and cultural rights provided primarily by the United Nations Resolution on Human Rights (UNHR) and the UNESCO conventions on Indigenous Peoples and Intangible World Heritage. Both the UNHR and the resolutions from UNESCO on Indigenous Peoples and Intangible Heritage receive repeated criticism in this volume for running counter to the aims and desires of musicians present in the nations. In his introduction Weintraub carefully constructs the history of cultural rights, beginning with Charles Seeger's desire for a "cultural democracy" and Seeger's statements that music acts as a commodity and musical structures are the controlling forces trading that commodity. Furthermore, Weintraub delineates immediately that cultural rights cannot be limited to copyright laws concerning individual ownership, and he further defines cultural rights as the right to any form of expression that "asserts one's cultural identity and heritage" (3). The questions Weintraub poses at the end of his introduction set the tone for the rest of the volume: What do cultural rights on a global scale mean and how [End Page 140] does this affect their definition? Thus, Weintraub contends that the goal is to create a space for universal rights to be placed in dialogue with cultural specifics. Ricardo Trimillos follows Weintraub's introduction with an essay on the representation of the Philippines at the 1998 Smithsonian Folklife Festival. This essay dovetails with the dialogic space Weintraub invites in his introduction as Trimillos lays out three categories: right to access, right to steward, and right to control. Within this schema are several subheadings, and these methods of access, stewardship, and control are used as frameworks in the subsequent essays ensuring methodological consistency throughout the volume. Many of the issues the authors raise, ranging from ownership to rights of representation, already exist in the ethnomusicological literature, for example, in Nettl's Encounters in Ethnomusicology: A Memoir (2002) and Barz and Cooley's Shadows in the Field: New Perspectives for Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology (2008). While the presence of dialogues circling the issue of cultural rights exists in other volumes, by reframing these issues as part of a larger dialogue on music and cultural rights, political lines of persuasion that are often relevant to many of these situations become clear. Following Trimillos's essay, Helen Rees, Amy Ku'uleialoha Stillman, and Javier Leόn all devote some portion of their essays to the delineation of cultural rights as often targeted toward the individual and not the group. Here various charters, lists, and resolutions from the United Nations are criticized for clearly supporting the role of the individual—particularly those recognized as artists by the nation-state—more than the role of group creators in group-focused societies. Within the collection of essays it is clear that the representation of minorities, both individuals and groups, is a constant struggle between the rights protected by the various charters and the rights restricted by the nations in which those minorities reside. Isolating the essays dealing with cultural rights in China, it...

Value Collectivism, Collective Rights, and Self-Threatening Theory

This review article discusses the conception of collective rights necessary to ground contemporary entrenchments of minority educational rights, Indigenous rights and collective bargaining rights, as discussed in Miodrag Jovanović’s book, Collective Rights: A Legal Theory. Jovanović argues for a role for value collectivism in elucidating a rationale for the entrenchment of rights held by what he conceives of as pre-legally existing groups with interests not reducible to those of their individual members. This approach can offer an explanation for the entrenchment of minority educational rights and Indigenous rights. The article extols Jovanović’s attempt to grapple with an explanation for rights not explained within standard liberal theory, even in Will Kymlicka’s attempt to justify minority rights within liberalism. The review also critiques the argument offered by Jovanović. First, the review argues that a full-fledged adoption of value collectivism is not necessary to provide a justification for irreducibly collective rights and that the unnecessary adoption of such a theoretical construct may, in practical terms, work counter to the ongoing entrenchment of the rights it seeks to justify, thus becoming what it will categorize as a ‘self-threatening theory’. Second, the review argues that Jovanović’s stark division of rights held by pre-legally existing groups and legally constituted collective entities undermines his account’s ability to explain collective bargaining rights of trade unions that are entrenched in some jurisdictions.

An Enhanced Code Encryption Approach with HNT Transformations for Software Security

threats such as viruses, worms, trojans and spyware affects the security and authentication of software codes, forcing software developers to build security schemes for better software protection. These software threats exploit the authenticated data of the software and confidentiality, integrity and accessibility is greatly affected by these software threats. A number of code security techniques like tamper resistant packaging, code obfuscation, register encoding etc have been developed which mainly concentrates on providing solutions for a particular type of threats and are vulnerable to code tampering and code injection by complicated attackers. Hence, code encryption technique has become an active area of research. This paper proposes a novel software protection code encryption scheme based on the index table. This approach uses a novel and efficient encryption technique called quasigroup encryption for encryption the indexed table. It provides least resemblance of the original data when encrypted. But, quasi group encryption is not efficient in diffusing the statistics of the plain text. This drawback can be overcome by using transforms. Hence, this approach uses chained Hadamard transforms and Number Theoretic Transforms to introduce diffusion along with the quasigroup transformation. The proposed approach is compared with the other encryption approaches and is observed to provide better results.

Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle (review)

Reviewed by: Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle Zoe Trodd Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle Leigh Raiford Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011; 312 pages. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-8078-3430-5 During the peak years of the desegregation movement, Martin Luther King Jr. repeatedly explained that visibility was vital to success. “Injustice must be exposed, with all the tensions its exposure creates,” he wrote in 1963. The following year, he noted that the [End Page 149] activist should “force his oppressor to commit his brutality openly . . . with the rest of the world looking on.” He referenced the media’s coverage of the Birmingham campaign and explained, “The brutality with which officials would have quelled the black individual became impotent when it could not be pursued with stealth and remain unobserved. It was caught—as a fugitive from a penitentiary is often caught—in gigantic circling spotlights. It was imprisoned in a luminous glare revealing the naked truth to the whole world.” King’s observations reflect a broader understanding on the part of civil rights activists that photography was a key weapon in the freedom struggle. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) enlisted and trained photographers, while the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Congress of Racial Equality supported several. Some leaders took photographs themselves, including Wyatt Walker and Andrew Young of SCLC, and James Forman and Robert Zellner of SNCC. Activists turned photographs into posters, printed them in pamphlets, and displayed them in freedom houses. Outside civil rights organizations, Gordon Parks, Charles Moore, and Frank Dandridge photographed the movement’s events and figures for Life, and photographs of violence against protestors appeared on the front pages of the New York Times and other newspapers. Responding to photographs of the 1963 Birmingham campaign that showed police dogs attacking student demonstrators and fire hoses knocking down protestors, Burke Marshall of the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice claimed the images “stirred the feelings” of most whites in the country. For his part, President Kennedy said that the images made him “sick”—their eloquence exceeding that of “explanatory words.” Leigh Raiford, an associate professor of African American Studies at the University of California at Berkeley and previously the coeditor of The Civil Rights Movement in American Memory (University of Georgia Press, 2006), takes her book’s title from King’s description of such photographs as a “luminous glare.” In this first full length study of photography’s relationship to the freedom struggle, she goes further than a recent cluster of very strong books about visuality and the long civil rights movement that began in anti-lynching, including Shawn Michelle Smith’s Photography on the Color Line: W. E. B. Du Bois, Race, [End Page 150] and Visual Culture (Duke University Press, 2004), Dora Apel and Shawn Michelle Smith’s Lynching Photographs (University of California Press, 2008), Amy Louise Wood’s Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890–1940 (University of North Carolina Press, 2009), Elizabeth Abel’s Signs of the Times: The Visual Politics of Jim Crow (University of California Press, 2010), and Martin Berger’s Seeing Through Race: A Reinterpretation of Civil Rights Photography (University of California Press, 2011). By stretching her analysis from the anti-lynching campaign (mainly Ida B. Wells and the [National Association for the Advancement of Colored People] NAACP), through the Civil Rights Movement (mainly SNCC), to the Black Power Movement (mainly the Black Panther newspaper and Emory Douglas’s photo collages), Raiford is able to chart a shifting, complex, and longstanding relationship between photography and activism, ultimately proving that black visuality has been inextricably connected to the freedom struggle’s construction, development, and consumption. Activists used photographs to remake black identity, reframe national identity, and reject dominant racial ideology, as Raiford demonstrates in this deeply researched and persuasively argued book. Some of the book’s numerous other contributions include an assessment of how activists recontextualized lynching photographs so that their purpose became protest rather than celebration; the demonstration that SNCC’s control of its own media was vital to the movement; and the argument that...

Leiomyosarcoma involving the sciatic nerve: Case report and review of the literature

Soft tissue sarcomas (STSs) represent 1% and 15% of adult and pediatric tumors, respectively, and almost 75% of all sarcomas; primary STSs occur commonly in the lower extremities. Leiomyosarcomas originate from the malignant transformation of a smooth muscle cell, which in turn may arise from a pluripotent mesenchymal stem cell. The present case report describes a patient with a leiomyosarcoma arising from the posterior thigh musculature, which invaded all layers of the left sciatic nerve's tibial division. Only two similar case reports exist in the literature, documenting sciatic nerve involvement by a leiomyosarcoma. The current patient underwent preoperative fractionated external beam radiation therapy (FEBRT) to the tumor and then had its removal which resulted in a 12 cm resection of the tibial division of the sciatic nerve. This defect was repaired with an intrafascicular sural nerve graft. Postoperatively, she had weakness of left hip flexion, dorsi- greater than plantar flexion, and left eversion, all of which reverted to normal after approximately two years. After surgery, the patient received further FEBRT, developed pulmonary involvement by leiomyosarcoma and underwent bilateral thoracotomies with removal of all nodules. She underwent chemotherapy (CTX) with ifosfamide and doxorubicine, the latter switched to epirubicin, but developed a new pulmonary nodule five months after CTX completion. Other CTX trials were unsuccessful, and she succumbed five years after her original extremity tumor complete resection.