Lone Voices Research Articles

Categorization Format for YouTube Medical Educational Videos: An Experience with Embryology

Background: Users of YouTube videos face considerable difficulty in handling the rapidly growing uploaded material. Videos can fall into various genres, and a single video can possess a number of characteristics. Rationale- Customized selection of the most appropriate videos for learning, teaching or research is hard to achieve. Appropriate tagging of videos for different characteristics by the uploaders for helping audience in their selection warrant meticulously designed structured format for categorizing the videos based on multiple characteristics. But no complete structured format is available for such categorization. Material & Methods: A cross-sectional analysis of 120 YouTube medical educational videos on Embryology selected through a multiphase systematic method using search terms chosen from selected focus areas of Embryology was done. This was aimed at identifying video characteristics of four functional natures: basic, academic, technical and esthetic. Using the ‘identified’ and related ‘identifiable’ characteristics, a “Proposed categorization format” was developed. Feedback on this document was obtained from five stakeholder groups i.e., anatomists, medical educationists, medical video creators, film/video/graphics experts and postgraduate students of Anatomy through a multiple-group discussion session. Results: Consensuses built on their opinions and lone voices were incorporated to develop the “Final version” of the format that possesses 38 Broad Characteristics, 179 Options, 59 Suboptions and fourteen Sub-suboptions. Conclusion: This format should be helpful in establishing a comprehensive database of medical educational videos on Embryology and with slight customization, on other anatomical subdivisions and other disciplines. But before that validation of the format by putting them into use should be justified.

Of Popes & Unicorns: Science, Christianity, and How the Conflict Thesis Fooled the World

Of Popes & Unicorns: Science, Christianity, and How the Conflict Thesis Fooled the World

Caricature and National Character: The United States at War

Caricature and National Character: The United States at War

Spain’s Lonely Voices: We trace the demise of many minority Spanish languages and look at whether others will survive

Spain’s Lonely Voices: We trace the demise of many minority Spanish languages and look at whether others will survive

Выдающийся немецкий географ и геоморфолог XIX века Карл Риттер (1779–1859)

A vast body of geographical information about different countries, its assessment and criticism and creation of a scientific method are the main achievement in geography and geomorphology of outstanding German geographer Carl Ritter. He strove to formulate the tasks of geographic science, its place in the system of other branches of knowledge, its importance as a science that had its own philosophical meaning that not only “described” but also “explained.” In an effort to put geography on a new foundation and enrich it with a new spirit he created comparative geography and gave it a new name Erdkunde, Earth Science or physical geography. It became the title of his vast (10 volumes divided into 19 parts) work that covered Africa and Asia. He was interested in nature and history hence his treatment of the Earth’s surface as something living; each of the continents being an organism with typical features of its own, with qualities expressed by unique shorelines, relief, climate, flora and fauna as well as cultural development associated with natural conditions of human types or “species.” He was the first to define relief as plastics of Earh’s surface; he suggested that in mountain ranges (or countries) we should distinguish between main ridges and foothills, between ridges and watersheds, terraces and terrace scarps. His brilliant lectures at Berlin University invariably stirred up enthusiastic response from his audience while his works were highly appreciated by a chorus of his colleagues and criticized by lonely voices of the dissatisfied.

Calibrating Capital: When Will Banks Have Enough?

Capital is controversial. Banks complain that regulators demand too much. Critics complain that banks have too little. A few lone voices contend that banks have just about enough, thanks to the regulatory reform measures taken over the past decade in the wake of the financial crisis. Who’s right? To determine the answer, we need a standard against which to measure the responses. We suggest that be the risk of deposits, for deposits are the linchpin to the bank’s being able to perform its critical economic function of making and receiving payments. There are two aspects to the risk of deposits: the possibility that the depositor (or the deposit guarantee scheme) may suffer a loss of principal, and second, the possibility that access to that principal might be suspended. This paper argues that current regulation minimises the first possibility. Provided the authorities initiate resolution in a timely manner, requirements that banks maintain a minimum total loss absorbing capacity (TLAC) – together with depositor preference – make deposits practically immune from loss of principal. However, this will not make deposits also exempt from suspension. To avoid suspension, resolution reform needs completion. Two areas are vital: valuation, so that the authorities avoid forbearance and intervene promptly; and liquidity, so that the recapitalised bank in resolution can meet demands for withdrawal when it reopens for business. Together these steps can make deposits not only immune from loss, but also exempt from suspension. If deposits meet that standard, the bank surely has enough capital.

When Land is God

When Land is God

Out into Uncertainty: The Lonely Voices of Epitacio Pais's Goan Short Stories1

Este artigo debruça-se sobre a obra do contista goês Epitácio Pais. Inicia-se por uma abordagem geral dos contos de Pais à luz da ideia defendida por Frank O’Connor de que a narrativa curta serve de veículo para uma “voz solitária.” Argumenta-se que a obra paisiana representa uma abordagem das profundas mudanças sociais, políticas e económicas ocorridas em Goa nos últimos anos da administração portuguesa e na primeira década do governo indiano. A análise que se segue enfoca cinco contos estruturados em torno do tema da viagem para o desconhecido. Os protagonistas desses contos pertencem a vários exemplos daquilo que O’Connor apelida de “grupos populacionais submergidos.” Todos estes protagonistas são representados a partir de trajetórias fracassadas sob a nova ordem política, perdendo para representantes de grupos ascendentes. Identifica-se, desse modo, uma matriz narrativa que ganha significado não só em relação ao leitorado dos contos de Pais—a antiga elite lusófona do território—mas também em relação à própria literatura goesa de língua portuguesa.

Augmenting Commercialization of New Technology Intensive Firms

Technology licensing and commercialization has increasingly been looked at as a complementary and attractive solution to gain insights into new technology innovations and market products. Stories of successful research commercialization programs from Silicon Valley have become the catalyst that encourages states to provide incentives and established structural reform in the form of state controlled agencies to accelerate and assist the commercialization of potential R&D products. Considerable debate has arisen about the effectiveness of those agencies, but asides for a few lone voices, the scholarly literature has largely neglected the views of grant recipients in commercializing of scientific research. This study hopes to shed some understanding of the impediments that grant recipients face in their endeavor to commercialize scientific research. Qualitative data examination utilizing theme analysis was performed and three main determinants were identified: human resources, market penetration, and financial constraints. We believe these three determinants have wider implication to the modern regime of commercialized scientific research.

American Canopy: Trees, Forests, and the Making of a Nation by Eric Rutkow

 OHQ vol. 114, no. 1 tion from Spain,and heroically leading his men to victory in the Battle of York during the War of 1812. He died shortly after the battle, where he was struck by flying debris. As a southern complement to Lewis and Clark’s epic journey, Pike’s critical expedition to the mountains of Colorado further defined the western boundaries of the new Louisiana Territory. As an explorer, Pike brought back a general understanding of the Arkansas River and its interplay with the Rio Grande. He correctly established the longitudinal position of the mountain spine of the continent when many believed the main chain of the Rocky Mountains was hundreds of miles farther west. There are great errors in his maps, however, particularly his positioning of the headwaters of the great western rivers — the Platte,Arkansas ,Rio Grande,and Colorado — hundreds of miles north of their proper origins in today’s Colorado. But his maps and his account of the expedition, published in 1810, were pivotal in the early understanding of the interior West. They also brought to the public eye Baron Alexander von Humboldt’s new geographical information about northern Mexico and the Southwest. Each essay in the volume relates to Pike, Wilkinson, Jefferson, and the drama of the time but emphasizes a different aspect of those elements,building to create a satisfying whole. Harris summarizes the vacillating scholarship on Pike’s reputation as hero or spy — a question historians disagree on to this day. Buckley acquaints readers with Pike’s various expeditions and describes his personality,noting that he possessed“boldness to the point of recklessness ” (p. 33). The diplomatic and trade issues of the time and the “atmosphere of intrigue, suspicion and shadowy conspiracy” among American, Spanish, and French interests are described by James Ronda (p. 71). John Allen expands on Pike’s impact on science and the nation’s image of the West. In his second essay, Buckley focuses on Jefferson’s motivations and methodologies behind several other western explorations in the first decade of the nineteenth century. Jared Orsi explains how the nation used the information from the expeditions to gain control over remote lands. Leo Oliva describes the friendship between Pike and his Spanish captor, Lt. Facundo Melgares. The controversial double agent Wilkinson, commanding general of the U.S. Army and Pike’s sponsor and mentor, weaves through many of the essays.William Foley’s concluding essay focuses on that fascinating, audacious character. The essays are well written with helpful footnotes. Editors Harris and Buckley are to be commended for a work that is both an important assemblage of useful scholarship and a thoroughly enjoyable read. Wesley A. Brown Rocky Mountain Map Society American Canopy: Trees, Forests, and the Making of a Nation by Eric Rutkow Scribner, New York, 2012. Notes, bibliography, index. 406 pages. $27.50 cloth. American Canopy posits an argument for American exceptionalism, its story centered in the expansive and spectacular woodlands that provided essential ingredients for national expansion and economic development. A vital natural resource in the Americas, the uses of wood ranged from shelter and sources of energy to the production of cellulose for use in print material. During the nineteenth century, a few lonely voices — among them Henry David Thoreau and George Perkins Marsh — argued that trees provided functions other than commercial purposes.For Thoreau, born into a family business of pencil makers, the forest provided an escape from the evils of industrial life.To Marsh,forests“were essential to the very habitability of the nation” (p. 93).  Reviews In addition to its value for building material and firewood,Marsh’s interests extended to the broader importance of woodlands. Sixteenth-century geographer and archdeacon Richard Hakluyt, who published Divers Voyages in 1582, sets the tone for Eric Rutkow’s book. The English-born Hakluyt, who bemoaned “the want of tymber in the Realme,” authored a series of travel narratives that emphasized the nation’s need for sources of naval supplies. Multiplied tenfold, those critical raw materials would prove to be important to the fledglingAmerican economy. Hakluyt serves as the organizational strategy for the volume, with successive chapters featuring important individuals or developments that shaped the...

The developing understanding of Human Health and Fitness: 2. Early city life.

This article examines the effects upon health and fitness of a transition from a hunter-gatherer life to an agricultural and/or pastoral society. Data are considered from Simeria/Assyria/Babylonia, Egypt, Israel, India and China. In many of these regions, fertile alluvial flood plains and the development of skills in irrigation facilitated the emergence of large cities. Agricultural surpluses fostered the appearance of class structures, often with an elite ruling class, government officials, soldiers to protect and augment the new-found wealth, common labourers and slaves from subjugated territories, each with specific health and fitness needs. Occasionally the ruler was expected to demonstrate physical prowess, and the elite pursued hunting and other sports for pleasure. However, spectator sports, feasting and sedentary games brought obesity to many of the elite, with the appearance of lifestyle diseases such as atherosclerosis. Soldiers typically wore heavy clothing and carried heavy weapons, with fitness maintained by a combination of military duties and sports. Heavy occupational work was required of labourers and slaves, making it likely that they also were fit. However, this phase of history saw a gradual increase in passive transportation, and the introduction of waterpower as an early harbinger of industrial mechanization. Illness was generally attributed to offences against the gods and/or an imbalance of poorly understood body humours. Physicians emerged from the priesthood with a healing repertoire that included herbs and some forms of surgery, plus a heavy reliance on magical incantations. Only a few lone voices from this era advocated exercise for its health benefits. The Indian physician Sushruta stands out from his colleagues for recommending physical activity in the aerobic training zone.

How to Comport Ourselves in an Era of Shrinking Resources

How to Comport Ourselves in an Era of Shrinking Resources

Lone voices have an emotional content: focussing on mental health service user and carer involvement

The purpose of this paper is to describe learning gained from involving service users and carers as researchers in an action research study. The researchers aimed to introduce self-directed support in mental health services--part of the government's personalisation agenda, which requires a move from current social care commissioning, where a person is matched to available services, to one where a person self-assesses, has an agreed support plan and then with appropriate help, purchases his or her own services to lead as independent a life as possible. This development is allied closely with the mental health service recovery approach. Three service users and two carers were recruited to work alongside the lead researcher. Service users were fully involved in the steering group - part of participatory action research project. Data were collected from: debriefing meetings with co-researchers between April and December 2007; a group interview held by the lead researcher; and participants' journal comments and self-reflections. The main areas in which service users and carers found involvement difficult were: overcoming professional language barriers; emotional impact; and power imbalances between themselves and professionals. Findings suggest that considerable improvement is required by mental health professionals and managers if service users and carers are successfully involved in projects. This is a small study within a larger action research project. Findings are not generalisable owing to the small sample; however, findings are supported by the service-user involvement literature. Few studies explore participation effects on service users and carers from their perspective. This research provides insights into what needs to be addressed to improve service user and carer involvement to improve mental health services.

Promoting excellence in children’s nursing practice

The Association of Chief Children’s Nurses (ACCN) welcomes the decision by the BJN to publish regular articles of interest to children’s nurses. The ACCN is a group of senior nurses representing children’s and young people’s services across the four countries of the UK. The principle aim of the Association is to help inform decision-making with regard to children’s and young people’s nursing. In this regard, the ACCN seeks to influence national policy concerning the care of children and young people. The ACCN operates a philosophy whereby the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. It is designed, particularly, to be helpful to colleagues who may be lone voices for sick children and young people in their organization.

How to Comport Ourselves in an Era of Shrinking Resources

A few of us lonely voices have long been warning (e.g., Wolfensberger, 1994, 1997) that the culture of modernism, as embraced by the United States and more or less all other Western societies, is not sustainable, and that collapses both are bound to occur and could be very sudden. Experts on systems theory are well aware that complex systems in particular can collapse much more quickly and drastically than simple ones and are also more difficult to restore. The recent economic crisis is the result of one such unsustainability, and happened with such startling suddenness that even the world’s leading economic experts were taken by surprise. There are several points about the current financial crisis of relevance to our discussion. 1. The current crisis has been brought about by a combination of the country living beyond its means and a systematic transfer of wealth by immoral (even if legal) means from the lower and middle classes to the uppermost—and widely unproductive, parasitic—class. There is no work that warrants someone getting paid $464 million a year, as many hedge fund managers were in 2008 (Armangue, 2009). No one creates any real new wealth like that, even in a lifetime. Strangely enough, even the economic experts of the world, and the world-class mathematicians (‘‘quants’’) who built the mathematical models for the financial market, not only failed to foresee the coming disaster but even contributed to it happening, yet they cannot fully explain it. They have not yet understood the dynamics of postprimary and postsecondary production economies like ours that produce less and less and surrender much manufacture and agriculture to other countries, from whom they then buy commodities and products by going into debt. This is said to ‘‘save money’’ when, in fact, it ruins a country over the long run. Ironically, the leading ‘‘quant’’ who was a major actor in bringing about the 2008 collapse, Daniel Xi Li, was well on his way to a Nobel Prize when his theories blew up (Philips, 2009). 2. Societal developments always find expressions in the domain of human services, and a big expression at present—and the one we are concerned with here—is a reduction, as well as feared further reduction, of public funding of human services and advocacy. Even such bodies that are privately funded are experiencing hardships because of reduction of their investment income, capital, paying clients, and/or private donations, the latter despite fairly desperate appeals. When all of society suffers hardships, service and advocacy bodies, and families of vulnerable people, should not imagine that the hardships will pass them by. 3. Economic hardships are known to have particularly severe impacts on already vulnerable people. 4. There are many authorities in economics, politics, and the media who tell us that the current crisis will be short lived, that recovery will soon (or ‘‘is bound to’’) take place, and that economic growth will continue where it left off in 2007. However, there are also some doubters, myself included, who suspect that we will never see the prosperity of 2007 again, or for very long. Also, we need to face the fact that as the lonely voices keep pointing out, an even bigger collapse of Western cultural ways is inevitable, sooner or later. Yet, a large proportion of the population does not want to hear these things. They want to be given ‘‘good news’’ and what they call ‘‘hope’’ —in other words, they want to be lied to. 5. Even if the financial markets recover somewhat, sooner or later, things must get much worse. There are at least eight reasons why it is doubtful that economic recovery will occur, or will last long if it does.

Lonely Voices

Page 27 January–February 2009 Lonely Voices Scott Elliott The Man Back There and Other Stories David Crouse Sarabande Books http://www.sarabandebooks.org 224 pages; paper, $15.95 In The Lonely Voice (1963), Frank O’Connor argues that the short story is the literary form best suited to expressing the otherwise unheard angst of submerged populations, at giving voice to the lonely misfit out of step with a more contented majority. O’Connor would likely approve of David Crouse’s second collection as it chronicles some moments of quiet desperation in the lives of unexpectedly sympathetic male misfits crying out in lonely voices from a variety of stations. As the title indicates, we encounter many of these men as present circumstances force them to acknowledge, once again, and in many cases against their wishes, that they have a history, that they carry around a former, regrettable version of themselves that may arise again at any moment. Or the characters are still on the ropes and stomaching and/or giving the blows that will lead to a break between selves, surviving the experience they will someday look back on as the marker between the men they have become and the men they used to be. These blows come in many forms: a former wife’s potentially career-shattering book, a father’s suicide, the imminent loss of a job, divorce, a son’s attempted suicide, loneliness, the disappearance of a lover, a wife’s discovery of a disturbing addiction. This is literary fiction, so more important than the blows the characters endure is the way they respond and what their reactions reveal about their character. In the complex psychological world of these stories—a world in which characters are not always good witnesses to their own motivations—a heightened awareness of past mistakes and failures does not necessarily lead to an avoidance of the same mistakes the next time around. Instead, these stories implicitly suggest, the mistakes themselves and the interesting trouble the characters get into as a result of these mistakes bring the characters (and careful readers) as close as we can come to powerful emotional truths, the raw material of character itself. Even to classify what the characters do to get themselves into trouble as “mistakes” is problematic in the world these stories forge as many things which could be classified as “mistakes”—for sound reasons based in mainstream morality—may be the best expression of a more primal being. In most cases, the men in this collection no longer enjoy the protection that a false personality, a comfortable material situation, or some other self-delusion might provide. In every case, we see these characters laid bare, and through the laying bare, come to better understand the nature of the mystery informing their actions and our own. Distance from and closeness to self and others is important in this collection. In the collection’s titular story, Sweets, a forty-four-year-old man who has just punched his girlfriend’s ex in a bar realizes how much he and this ex have in common. Crouse writes, “[Sweets] felt sorry for the man in the bar now, for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. He probably didn’t want to have a history either, right? He probably wanted that very much.” The person you damage, the person from whom you might expect you’d like to distance yourself, is likely to be the very one with whom you have the most in common. On one level, the man in the bar is the man back there; on another level, Sweets is the man back there as his present self ponders the question implicit in this phrase: “how much, if at all, have I changed?” Similarly , the very characters convention might compel a reader to condemn may be the ones closest to the reader in his or her secret moments. In addition to Sweets’s redemption through his capacity to empathize with someone he’s punched, he is further redeemed in “The Man Back There” in a quick, almost throw-away moment of aesthetic appreciation for moonlight on a river. The collection is filled with small redemptions...

The Contract Research Organization and the Commercialization of Scientific Research

The early 1980s constituted a watershed in science, mainly concerning the extent and nature of globalization and commercialization of scientific research, and its impact upon the university. Considerable debate has arisen about the sources of this transition, but aside from a few lone voices, the scholarly literature has neglected the concurrent rise of the contract research organization (CRO) and its role int he commercialization of scientific research. The CRO warrants wider attention as a modern paradigm of privatized science in the biopharmaceutical sector. In discussing the CRO's technologies, the purposes they pursue, and the legal and policy initiatives that have fostered their rapid rise, we confront the wider implications of the modern regime of commercialized science for the future conduct of scientific research. We identify five areas of innovation: treatment of human subjects, control of disclosure, subjection of research tools to commercialization, redefinition of authorship, and re-engineering the goals of research.

Standing on My Sisters' Shoulders. Prod. by Joan Sadoff, Robert Sadoff, and Laura J. Lipson, 2002. 60 mins. (Women Make Movies, 462 Broadway, Suite 500WS, New York, NY 10013; 212-925-0606, ext. 317; orders@wmm.com orders@wmm.com [Sept. 13, 2004

Standing on My Sisters' Shoulders is an important sixty-minute documentary on the civil rights movement in Mississippi and the female leaders and rank-and-file activists who constituted its “grass-roots foundation.” Standing highlights those “black sisters who lent their shoulders for us to stand on.” The film argues that women rose to prominence in Mississippi's freedom struggle in part because “it was less risky” for black women than for black men “to be in positions of high profile.” In addition, women were most of the “doers and organizers” in the black church, the backbone of the movement, and so it was unsurprising that they rose to prominence. White southern female liberals provided another source of support, from lone journalistic voices to students who joined the 1963 sit-in at the Woolworth's in Jackson, Mississippi. Such women faced the loss of jobs and firebombings of their houses as well as beatings and shootings to ensure that all Americans enjoy the right to public education and the vote.

Benjamin Keen (1913-2002)

Benjamin Keen (1913-2002)

Voices from the Valleys: Researching lone mothers talk

This paper focuses upon an interdisciplinary research project the authors are currently engaged in, specifically designed to address the inattention paid so far to lone mothers voices in the Rhondda Valleys in Mid Glamorgan, South Wales. This is an area characterised by high unemployment, community restructuring and fragmenting kinship patterns and, according to analysis of the 1991 Census data, Mid Glamorgan ranks ninth highest in the UK in terms of the incidence of lone parents as a percentage of total households with dependent children. Given the political sensitivity of the issue of lone parenting, and the attempts of dominant discourses to pathologise lone mothers in particular, this paper explores some of the issues involved in responsibly accessing situated accounts of lone mothers subjectivities. The particular representations of self and status that these women offer in their own accounts, and how they articulate those representations in different contexts, is bound up with complex political, ethical and methodological concerns. In addressing these concerns, this paper seeks to interrogate some of the tensions at play in research on marginaliseď groups living in communities which have been defined as spatially isolated and economically deprived. The paper thus centres for discussion the problems and possibilities that inevitably surface when undertaking research of this kind. We conclude that research which reveals talk which manages, disrupts and reworks contested representations of otherness needs to be carefully and self-reflexively accessed, collected and disseminated, even and perhaps especially when such research is supposedly informed by critical feminist awareness.