Nexus Point Research Articles

Katy French

In 2007, model Katy French was arguably the most talked about and photographed woman in Ireland. Rising to prominence via tabloid scandal and reality TV, French experienced a sharply pitched fame trajectory that culminated in her death that same year, which was attributed to a drug overdose and created a national media and political furor over cocaine use. Building on the work of scholars working within British or American contexts, I scrutinize French as a tabloid and reality star in Ireland. Both lauded and castigated as an icon of the so-called “Celtic Tiger,” French, I argue, acted as nexus point for hot-button social issues related to sexuality, femininity, consumerism, multiculturalism, and national values. My examination highlights the workings of postfeminism in a neoliberal Ireland and reveals the persistence of conservative patriarchal ideologies distinctly at odds with the national self-image during a boom period of unprecedented economic growth.

Analysis And Design of Flat Slab And Grid Slab And Their Cost Comparison

The FLAT slab system of construction is one in which the beam is used in the conventional methods of construction done away with the directly rests on column and the load from the slabs is directly transferred to the columns and then to the foundation. Drops or columns are generally provided with column heads or capitals. Grid floor systems consisting of beams spaced at regular intervals in perpendicular directions, monolithic with slab. They are generally employed for architectural reasons for large rooms such as auditoriums, vestibules, theatre halls, show rooms of shops where column free space is often the main requirement. The aim of the project is to determine the most economical slab between flat slab with drop, Flat slab without drop and grid slab. The proposed construction site is Nexus point apposite to Vidhan Bhavan and beside NMC office, Nagpur. The total length of slab is 31.38 m and width is 27.22 m. total area of slab is 854.16 sqm. It is designed by using M35 Grade concrete and Fe415 steel. Analysis of the flat slab and grid slab has been done both manually by IS 456-2000 and by using software also. Flat slab and Grid slab has been analyzed by STAAD PRO. Rates have been taken according to N.M.C. C.S.R It is observed that the FLAT slab with drop is more economical than Flat slab without drop and Grid slabs.

Sukkot: The Nexus Point

Sukkot: The Nexus Point David Booth (bio) The nexus between soul and body is a key spiritual location for Judaism. Soloveitchik contrasts religious man (or homo religiosus), the person of religion as understood by Rudolf Otto,1 with halakhic man, an idealized person living in the world of Jewish law. A key element of the comparison, that which is distinctive of Judaism, is this emphasis on the necessary connection between body and soul. Soloveitchik says, Halakhic man differs both from homo religiosus, who rebels against the rule of reality and seeks refuge in a supernal world, and from cognitive man, who does not encounter any transcendence.2 The halakhic individual strives not to get into heaven but to make a heaven on earth.3 In other words, human experience, the nexus point between soul and body, is the key location in which we discover spiritual possibility. The psychotherapist Ernest Becker alerts us to the horror and the glory of this meeting place in his book The Denial of Death. He says, Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever.4 The month of Tishrei, filled with Jewish celebration, mirrors this dichotomy between body and soul that exists within Jewish theology. Sukkot in particular, with its incredibly physical and tangible mitzvot, draws attention to the role of the physical body in discovering holiness. The Torah language itself is sensual: [End Page 101] On the first day you shall take the product of lovely trees, branches of palm trees, boughs of leafy trees, and willows of the brook, and you shall rejoice before the Eternal, your God, seven days.5 Rashi comments on this verse that “fruit and wood must be equivalent.” Thus we have to find the wonderful produce of beautiful trees.6 An etrog has a wonderful aroma and strong taste. “Willows of the brook” is an unusually poetic image in the otherwise straightforward description of the holy day practices. Sukkot immerses us in the realm of beauty and nature and sensuality. Bodily, sensual commandments impel halakhic man to notice the holy around him. The rabbis illustrate this nexus, this junction point, in the following talmudic legend. A blind man and a lame man are standing guard over the orchard of the king. The lame man says to the blind man, “Look, there are some fine fruits here!” The lame man then rides on the back of the blind man to pick the fruit and they eat it. The king sees that his fruit has been eaten and has the two men brought before him. They plead for mercy. The blind man says, “How could I have robbed your orchard? I couldn’t even see the fruit to steal it!” The lame man says, “For me too, I could never have climbed the fence to even enter the orchard!” “Ah,” says the king, “I know exactly what happened. The lame man directed the blind man to the tree. He then climbed on his back to pick it, and you shared the fruit of your sin!” So it is with us, says the Talmud. God hurls the soul into the body and judges them both together. Sin is possible only when both the soul and the body work together.7 This talmudic source makes a claim startling to both the religious individual and to the cognitive. The soul is no more or less pure than the body. Further, the body may indeed lead us into temptation, but the soul does so as well. Yet for the halakhic individual, for the person who lives in the world of Jewish law, nothing could be more obvious. The body has appetite but only the soul knows desire. Sin is born out of the joining of appetite and desire. Though the Talmud puts this equation in the negative, focusing on sin, the reverse is also true. A person cannot perform good deeds without that [End Page 102] same meeting of body and soul. Mitzvot are all...

Abstract 4385: PD-1 blockade enhances T-cell migration to tumor through induction of IFN-γ inducible chemokines

Abstract Adoptive cell transfer (ACT) is a promising therapeutic modality for cancer. Although tumor regression can be dramatic in some ACT-treated patients, other patients do not experience any clinical response, underscoring the need for further improvements. One limiting factor in ACT is immune suppression within the tumor microenvironment. In this study, we used a murine ACT model by treating gp100-expressing tumor-bearing mice with transgenic Pmel T-cells, which recognize gp100 in the context of H-2Db. We demonstrated that the expression of programmed death 1(PD-1) on transferred Pmel T-cells was upregulated at the tumor site, compared with transferred T cells in the spleen (48.07% vs 4.87% respectively). Given that PD-1 has been shown to attenuate T-cell mediated antitumor immune responses, we tested whether blockade of the PD-1 pathway by anti-PD-1 antibody could enhance the antitumor activity of adoptively transferred T-cells. We found that tumor-bearing mice treated with a combination of anti-PD-1 and ACT showed enhanced tumor regression compared to mice treated with ACT alone (median tumor size 11.30± 1.89 vs 43.85±7.28 mm2 on day 24 after tumor inoculation, respectively, p <0.001). We also observed increased accumulation of transferred Pmel T cells in the tumor sites of mice receiving combination therapy with ACT and anti-PD-1 using bioluminescence imaging compared to ACT alone (Median luciferase output of 6.5X106 vs 1.6X106 photons/s/cm2/sr, respectively on day 6 after T-cell transfer, p value =0.039). Although anti-PD-1 did not alter the number of immunosuppressive Treg cells and MDSCs, anti-PD-1 treatment did increase the expression of IFN-γ and the IFN-γ inducible chemokine, CXCL10, at the tumor site. Using flow cytometry to analyze the CXCL10 production in the tumor microenvironment, we found that most of the CXCL10-secreting cells were CD11b+ cells, indicating that myeloid cells are the major CXCL10-producing population. Furthermore, bone marrow chimera experiments with IFN-γR-/- mice implicated IFN-γ as a major nexus point for controlling PD-1 blockade-induced tumor infiltration by T cells. Taken together, our results imply that therapeutic blockade of the PD-1 pathway may trigger a positive feedback loop by increasing IFN-γ presence at the tumor site, which in turn induces chemokine-dependent trafficking of more immune cells to metastatic sites. Citation Format: {Authors}. {Abstract title} [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the 103rd Annual Meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research; 2012 Mar 31-Apr 4; Chicago, IL. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2012;72(8 Suppl):Abstract nr 4385. doi:1538-7445.AM2012-4385

A Manifesto of Living Self-portraiture (Identity, Transformation, and Performance)

In an era when blogging, Facebook, and Twitter are more and more becoming the ubiquitous means of expression for an entire generation, The Manifesto of Living Self-portraiture illuminates the potential and power of self-representation through the highly personal art practice of queer transsexual Nina Arsenault. Arsenault's unfolding creative work begins with the documentation of her sixty cosmetic procedures which transformed her body into a 36D-28-42 self-portrait of hyperfemininity. Her subsequent numerous nightlife appearances, photo shoots, videos, and theatrical performances chart the trajectory of her constant and perpetual transformations and by inference illuminate cultural values of beauty, sexuality, and the power of spirituality. Furthermore, Arsenault's discipline incorporates voice/breath/body training, contemporary self-help manuals, and ongoing research into art and mythology to vivify herself as living Goddess archetypes. Arsenault's life as self-portraiture, created at the nexus point of fantasy and reality, becomes a sacred drama of transfiguration in a society which seeks to minimize her passion and pathologize her identity.

Portals, Agency and the Negotiation of Liminality in A Tale of Time City and Johnny and the Bomb

This paper focuses upon the portal trope in Diana Wynne Jones's A Tale of Time City and Terry Pratchett's Johnny and the Bomb, suggesting that the portal trope is not just a practical narrative conveyance but a liminal space in which negotiation of discourse comes to the fore. In light of Bakhtin's notion of the chronotope, the portal is rendered a nexus point of time and space in which multiple discourses meet and blend. Characters, in entering a portal space, must negotiate these discourses, absorbing and appropriating them – a phenomenon that both alters the characters and the discourses themselves. From this theoretical lens, the portal trope articulates the fluidity of discourse as well as the processes of subject negotiation that characterise much of fantasy literature for children.

Negotiating alliances: Muslims, gay rights and the Christian right in a Polish‐American city (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

Muslim involvement in debates over municipal gay rights legislation became a hotly contested issue in Hamtramck, Michigan, during the summer of 2008. The article analyzes how faith‐based and other kinds of alliance building that took place in the context of these debates impacted processes of boundary formation among Muslim, Christian and secular‐humanist groups. In Hamtramck, debate over the Human Rights Ordinance served as a rich and generative nexus point for the proliferation and exchange of ideas about the incorporation of Muslim values and sentiments in the public sphere. A study of these debates offers us a window into understanding the politicization of Islam as a minority religion, the symbolic space it occupies, and its engagement with the institutionalization of secularism in the US at the current time.

A Life in Proverbs: An Interview with Anand Prahlad

A Life in Proverbs:An Interview with Anand Prahlad Michael Kuelker (bio) Anand Prahlad—who was born Dennis W. Folly and today goes simply by Prahlad—is a master teacher of the proverb and of the fields of study with which proverbs are associated, including folklore, poetry, and narrative. The University of Missouri-Columbia English professor is also a poet and musician who integrates these multiple expressions into his teaching. In 2009 he received the Mizzou Alumni Association Faculty Award. My interview with Prahlad took place the morning after he had given two public presentations at St. Charles Community College in Cottleville, Missouri. His topics were "Black Folklore and Survival in the Modern Age" and "Zen, Mojos, Degrees, and Mbiras: Living a Whole Life in a Fragmented World," both of which displayed his scholarly temperament and private self. The dreadlocked professor was on his way home to Columbia, Missouri and we proceeded from Reggae Wisdom, the work of his with which I was most familiar, and then to other topics about his personal and professional life. Reggae Wisdom: Proverbs in Jamaican Music, published by the University Press of Mississippi in 2001, is a study of music and culture from the nexus point of the proverb. No study of Jamaican music has situated the pearl of thought known as the proverb in the context of reggae's ethos and history. Prahlad is also the editor of the three-volume essay anthology The Greenwood Encyclopedia of African American Folklore (Greenwood, 2006) and the author of a scholarly monograph on proverbs, African American Proverbs in Context (UP of Mississippi, 1996). Since completing the Greenwood encyclopedia, Prahlad has turned to more personal pursuits, writing poetry and a memoir (Getting Happy). In his Dennis Folly days, when he was a member of the Berkeley Poets Co-op collective, he had published Hear My Story and Other Poems (Berkeley Poets Workshop and Press, 1982). In 2008 Prahlad self-produced a CD titled Hover Near, an album of acoustic blues with elements of American folk and Caribbean musical traditions, and he has lately become a skilled practitioner of the mbira, the thumb piano of the Shona people of Zimbabwe. His home site is www.prahladspace.com. MK: How would you explain to the layman the importance of proverbs? Prahlad: Proverbs are important in a lot of ways. One way is because they are very concise, short ways of capturing a lot of philosophical, wise and ideological perspectives that a particular culture has. If you set the proverb "You reap what you sow" in the U. S. South anytime up to the middle of the twentieth century, you would be encapsulating the idea that a single person is going to reap the karma of their individual actions, but you would also be capturing the deeply held sentiment of African Americans in the South that, at some point in time, they would reap the positive benefits of the labor that they had put into the building of the United States and that those people who had enslaved and oppressed them would reap the negative consequences of what they had done. In that single proverb, it says a lot of things. It captures a lot of perspectives that African Americans might have had without saying it in any overt or elaborate way. [End Page 655] Another way that proverbs are important is because they are cultural markers. So if you go to another place, and you use a proverb that is taken from the culture where you come from, it is a way of establishing or asserting a sort of cultural identity in that new context—again in a very short and concise way, without going into elaborate explanations. MK: Your first book in that arena was African American Proverbs in Context, which was followed by Reggae Wisdom. What brought you into the Jamaican landscape? Prahlad: My love for reggae and for Rastafari culture. From the very beginning when I heard reggae, I fell in love with it. And one of the things that captivated me about reggae—and this was the era that is termed "roots reggae"—the way in which the music and the lyrics were designed to...

Altering Chemosensitivity by Modulating Translation Elongation

BackgroundThe process of translation occurs at a nexus point downstream of a number of signal pathways and developmental processes. Modeling activation of the PTEN/AKT/mTOR pathway in the Eμ-Myc mouse is a valuable tool to study tumor genotype/chemosensitivity relationships in vivo. In this model, blocking translation initiation with silvestrol, an inhibitor of the ribosome recruitment step has been showed to modulate the sensitivity of the tumors to the effect of standard chemotherapy. However, inhibitors of translation elongation have been tested as potential anti-cancer therapeutic agents in vitro, but have not been extensively tested in genetically well-defined mouse tumor models or for potential synergy with standard of care agents.Methodology/Principal FindingsHere, we chose four structurally different chemical inhibitors of translation elongation: homoharringtonine, bruceantin, didemnin B and cycloheximide, and tested their ability to alter the chemoresistance of Eμ-myc lymphomas harbouring lesions in Pten, Tsc2, Bcl-2, or eIF4E. We show that in some genetic settings, translation elongation inhibitors are able to synergize with doxorubicin by reinstating an apoptotic program in tumor cells. We attribute this effect to a reduction in levels of pro-oncogenic or pro-survival proteins having short half-lives, like Mcl-1, cyclin D1 or c-Myc. Using lymphomas cells grown ex vivo we reproduced the synergy observed in mice between chemotherapy and elongation inhibition and show that this is reversed by blocking protein degradation with a proteasome inhibitor.Conclusion/SignificanceOur results indicate that depleting short-lived pro-survival factors by inhibiting their synthesis could achieve a therapeutic response in tumors harboring PTEN/AKT/mTOR pathway mutations.

Army rolls through Indianapolis: Fieldwork at the Virtual Army Experience

This essay takes an ethnographic look at the individuals and institutions associated with the development, production, and implementation of the Virtual Army Experience (VAE), a mobile mission simulator that travels across the United States to venues such as state fairs and air shows. As an explicit aid to Army recruitment and interaction with the public, the VAE is an interesting nexus point that often channels public anxieties surrounding the medium of the video game and its role in the militarization of society. Here, I present my own experience of doing ethnography at this site, describing how it is received by visitors and interpreted by its employees. By means of the example of the VAE, I argue that polarizing media reports and academic criticisms that pit the processes of militarization against critical reflection of those processes are counterproductive and result in silencing more nuanced and thoughtful critical reflection that is already present at sites such as the VAE.

Laughter in Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel: Utopia as Extra-Textual Place

Gargantua and Pantagruel exists at the nexus point of four subtypes of utopia: the medieval utopia of abundance, such as The Land of Cockayne and Chaucer’s Former Age; the Renaissance utopia of the pastoral found in New World chronicles by conquistadors; the Renaissance utopia of escape such as Campanella’s City of the Sun; and the by Columbus of the utopia he found during his voyages to the New World. Because Gargantua and Pantagruel simultaneously occupies multiple utopian spaces without ever being comfortably classified as a single type of utopia, we can look outside the text for utopian satisfaction. In the persona of Master Alcofribas, Rabelais tells the reader that the boundary of his utopia was laughter brought forward by the act of reading his book. In taking Alcofribas’s advice to look outside the text for utopia, we discover that the utopia of Gargantua and Pantagruel is extra-textual, found in the act of reading and in the Bakhtinian grotesque realism of laughter.

The impact of ICT on work–life experiences among university Teaching Assistants

Email is now commonplace in the university environment, but little research has addressed the impact of this technology on the work–life experiences of Teaching Assistants (TAs). These workers are of interest as they are typically responsible for most day-to-day, routine interaction with undergraduates, for ensuring students understand lectures and other course materials, and for assessing student work. In the summer of 2006, we undertook a web-based survey of Teaching Assistants at a major Canadian university. We wanted to examine the impact of and experience with information and communication technologies (ICTs) – in this case, the ubiquitous email. We found that these academic workers made extensive use of email, and that their experiences and attitudes were mixed. While relatively few expressed a desire to completely eliminate email use in their practice, problems such as feeling ‘overburdened’ by student email were common. Respondents who had set in-person office hours were twice as likely to assert that email increased their workload, that they felt overburdened by student email, and that they preferred not to communicate with students over email. There were also unexpected differences among TAs in the arts/social sciences compared to those in the math/science disciplines. Our data calls into question the largely optimistic orientation common in research reporting at the nexus point of education and ICTs, and suggests that an approach that is both critical and constructive is warranted when thinking about technology and academic work–life.

Compressibility and Rarefaction Effects on Drag of a Spherical Particle

A review of compressibility and rarefaction effects on spherical particle drag was conducted based on existing experimental data, theoretical limits, and direct simulation Monte Carlo method results. The data indicated a nexus point with respect to effects of Mach number and Knudsen number. In particular, it was found that a single drag coefficient (of about 1.63) is obtained for all particle conditions when the particle Reynolds number is about 45, and is independent of compressibility or rarefaction effects. At lower Reynolds numbers, the drag is dominated by rarefaction, and at higher Reynolds numbers, it is dominated by compressibility. The nexus, therefore, allows construction of two separate models for these two regimes. The compression-dominated regime is obtained using a modification of the Clift-Gauvin model to specifically incorporate Mach number effects. The resulting model was based on a wide range of experimental data and showed superior prediction robustness compared with previous models. For the rarefaction-dominated regime, the present model was constructed to directly integrate the theoretical creeping flow limits, including the incompressible continuum flow limit (Stokes drag), the incompressible weak rarefaction limit (Basset-Knudsen correction), and the incompressible free-molecular flow limit (Epstein theory). Empirical correlations are used to extend this model to finite particle Reynolds numbers within the rarefaction-dominated regime.

Constitutively activated FLT3 phosphorylates BAD partially through Pim‐1

Constitutively activating internal tandem duplication (ITD) mutations of the receptor tyrosine kinase FLT3 (Fms-like tyrosine kinase 3) play an important role in leukaemogenesis and their presence is associated with a poor prognosis in acute myeloid leukaemia (AML). Examining the anti- and proapoptotic proteins in constitutively activated FLT3 signalling in BaF3/ITD and MV4-11 cells, we found that the level of Bcl-2 antagonist of cell death (BAD) phosphorylation was greatly decreased in response to FLT3 inhibition. Both Ser-112 and Ser-136 of BAD are rapidly dephosphorylated after treatment with the FLT3 inhibitor CEP-701 in BaF3/ITD and MV4-11 cells. In confirmation of the cell line data, BAD was highly phosphorylated in both constitutively activated wild-type and mutant FLT3 primary AML samples, and rapidly dephosphorylated after treatment of the primary samples with CEP-701. Upstream proteins known to phosphorylate BAD include Akt, extracellular signal-regulated kinase/mitogen-activated protein kinase (Erk/ MAPK), Pim-1 and Pim-2. We and other groups have shown that constitutively activated FLT3 induces multiple signalling pathways, including phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase (PI3K)/Akt, Erk/MAPK and Janus kinase/signal transducers and activators of transcription (Jak/STAT). Thus, BAD may be a nexus point upon which these multiple signalling pathways converge in FLT3-mediated cell survival. In support of this, siRNA knockdown of BAD expression in MV4-11 cells conferred resistance to CEP-701-mediated apoptosis. Our data suggests that Pim-1 is one of the principal kinases mediating the anti-apoptotic function of FLT3/ITD signalling via the phosphorylation of BAD.

Incentive Implementation in Physician Practices: A Qualitative Study of Practice Executive Perspectives on Pay for Performance

Pay-for-performance (P4P) programs offer health care providers financial incentives to achieve predefined quality targets. Practice executives sit at a key nexus point for determining how P4P programs are implemented in physician practices. Using a qualitative interview design, this article examines the role practice executives play in the implementation of P4P programs and how their perspectives and decisions can influence the success of these programs. The authors identified five key findings related to practice executives' views on P4P: quality incentives are better than utilization incentives, quality incentives are bonus rewards, quality incentives are agents for change, providers do not feel they have control over attaining quality targets, and the ways in which quality is measured are problematic. The authors discuss five different ways in which practice executives distribute rewards to physicians. These findings may help payers more effectively design and implement financial rewards for quality.

Membrane Phospholipids and Cytokine Interaction in Schizophrenia

Although the potential key role that lipids may have in schizophrenia is not fully understood, multiple lines of evidence to date implicate the lipid environment in the behavior of neurotransmitter systems. Decreased phospholipid polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs) have been demonstrated in both brain and peripheral membranes in schizophrenia, which is consistent with the hypothesis of myelin-related dysfunction in schizophrenia. Membrane defects, such as those induced by decreased PUFAs in phospholipids, can significantly alter a broad range of membrane functions and ipso facto behavior through multiple "downstream" effects. A number of putative mechanisms have been identified to explain the decreased PUFAs in schizophrenia, notably the increased turnover of phospholipids and decreased incorporation of arachidonic acid (AA) in membranes. In addition to increased oxidative stress, altered immune function may also be responsible for increased phospholipase activities. This association is particularly relevant in relation to phospholipids/PUFA, as AA can be converted to a variety of biologically active compounds, such as eicosanoids, which serve as potent messengers in regulating the inflammatory response, as well as endocannabinoids, which may affect schizophrenic psychopathology. Direct evidence of immune changes in some patients with schizophrenia have come to light, particularly in the activities of several cytokines known to be altered in autoimmune dysfunction. Given the diverse physiological function of AA, the specific behavioral symptomatology of schizophrenia is related mostly to the effect of AA changes that regulates neurodevelopment, neurotransmitter homeostasis, phosphatidylinositol signaling, and neuromodulatory actions of endocannabinoids in schizophrenia. Hence, in the current conceptualization, AA may be at a nexus point in the cascade leading to the syndrome of schizophrenia and represents a common biochemical pathway leading to the varied symptomatology of this disorder.

Temporal Separation of Insulin-stimulated GLUT4/IRAP Vesicle Plasma Membrane Docking and Fusion in 3T3L1 Adipocytes

Examination of the time and temperature dependence of insulin-stimulated GLUT4/IRAP-containing vesicle trafficking demonstrated an approximate 7-fold increase in the half-time for plasma membrane translocation at 23 degrees C (t((1)/(2)) = approximately 30 min) compared with 37 degrees C (t((1)/(2)) = approximately 4 min) without a significant change in the extent of either GLUT4 or IRAP translocation. Localization of the endogenous GLUT4 and expressed GLUT4-enhanced green fluorescent protein fusion protein in intact 3T3L1 adipocytes demonstrated that at 23 degrees C there was a time-dependent accumulation of discrete GLUT4-containing vesicles adjacent to the inner face of the cell surface membrane but that was not contiguous and/or physically incorporated into the plasma membrane. Together, these data demonstrate that the temperature-dependent decrease in the rate of GLUT4 and IRAP translocation results from a reduction in GLUT4/IRAP-containing vesicle fusion and not trafficking or docking to the plasma membrane.

Half-life of truth in surgical literature

The hypothetico-deductive model of Karl Popper contends that “An assertion is true if it corresponds to, or agrees with, the facts”. Because “the facts” change over time, truth is relative. In this view of events, science progresses via a series of theories (paradigms) that are held to be true until they are replaced by a better approximation of reality. It follows that some “truths” will last longer than others. We decided to estimate the half-life of dogma relating to the practice of surgery. The journal Surgery Gynecology and Obstetrics had a section entitled International Surgical Abstracts that concluded at the end of 1994. We obtained copies of all of the abstracts for the even numbered months for each fifth year after 1935. The first 20 abstracts about general surgery from each of the 13 review periods were selected for study. The one sentence from each abstract that best summarised the conclusion was copied to a database. Editing of these sentences was restricted to the rephrasing of outdated terminology and the elimination of redundant words. The form, which contained the 260 selected sentences in a random order, was assessed by seven general surgeons. They were asked to mark each question as being either true or false. We explored the relation between time and the number of positive responses from the questionnaire using scatter plots and regression analyses. The linear model detailed in the figure was found to be most appropriate (R=0·86, p<0·001). It suggests that the rate of loss of truth is 0·75% per year and that the estimated half-life of truth for clinical statements in the surgical literature is 45 years. This seems appropriate; 45 years ago it was suggested that: prefrontal lobotomy usefully altered patients’ reactions so that “no anxiety, fear, or concern over their impending death from cancer was manifest”; “in primary malignant hypertension the malignant phase may disappear” after lumbodorsal sympathectomy; and, the detection of a gastric ulcer was “a strong indication for immediate operation”. Extrapolation of the regression line can be used to hypothesise that the current era of surgery extends between 1904 and 2038. From an historical perspective, 1904 is a reasonable estimate of the commencement of the era of “open” surgery. Gauze masks and rubber gloves had just been introduced into operating theatres and abdominal surgery gained public respectability in the UK in 1902 when Edward VII’s coronation was delayed by the need to drain his appendiceal abscess. More contentious is extrapolation of the regression line to predict the future. However, a nexus point for the present era of surgery in the second quartile of the next century is consistent with the current trend towards the ascendancy of minimally invasive procedures and medical treatments over open surgery.

Legion post 189: Continuity and change in a rural community

This essay examines the changing social and cultural dynamics of everyday life in a rural farm community. It simultaneously draws attention to the process of constructing a photographic ethnography, attempting to situate the presence of the photo‐ethnography within the research effort. The American Legion Post is viewed as a nexus point, providing a site for the comparison of community orientation and world‐view among different generations of farm families.