Impossible Situation Research Articles

Why We Left: Untold Stories and Songs of America’s First Immigrants by Joanna Brooks (review)

Reviewed by: Why We Left: Untold Stories and Songs of America’s First Immigrants by Joanna Brooks Ann Ostendorf (bio) Why We Left: Untold Stories and Songs of America’s First Immigrants. By Joanna Brooks. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. Pp. 232. $22.95 cloth) Joanna Brooks takes a creative approach to entering the minds of some of the earliest colonists in North America, mostly English indentured servants, by deeply reading their balladry. Her study begins by placing these ballads into the historical context of seventeenth-century England and illuminates the depressing social realities that pushed indentured servants out of their homes, insisting that “it was not the magnetic attraction of the land of opportunity that pulled” these immigrants—pull factors she labels “anachronistic fables” invented nostalgically by later generations (p. 9). Why We Left is a story of the grim costs of modernity that left remnants in cultural artifacts. Brooks’s work has special value to historians in that she is able to suggest what a nearly universally silent, yet numerically significant, group of early colonists thought, felt, worried about, and strove for. This is quite a remarkable achievement, despite only being able to provide suggestive evidence, in that these English indentured servants were illiterate and, as dispensable peasants so common in the eyes of the English elite, they elicited very little commentary by even their literate masters. As a result, Brooks’s reading of balladry situated into the social context of enclosure, vagrancy, environmental degradation, and other catastrophes suggests “England colonized its own lands and dislocated its own indigenous peoples before colonizing abroad” (p. 19). Because balladry as a genre tends to describe “the tension of an impossible or catastrophic situation” (p. 15), ballads are the perfect source to preserve the remnants of the traumatic experiences that indentured servants endured—both those that pushed them out of [End Page 495] England and those that greeted them in their new homeland. Brooks devotes each of her four main chapters to a creative reading of a single ballad to illuminate the experiences of poor English laborers situated in their volatile seventeenth-century world. She reads the ballad “Edward” as a narrative of the English deforestation that resulted in intensified migrancy. “The Two Sisters” reveals the dislocating class realignments expressed through attaching meaning to new products in the context of the shifting Atlantic world commodities exchange. “The Golden Vanity” suggests that the migrants recognized and resented their own disposability to the imperial project. And finally “The House Carpenter” warns the English against the risks of the unknown, particularly the tempting allure of Virginia, whose opportunities can only be bought at the expense of stable traditions. This ballad, in addition to providing a gendered reading of colonization, also suggests immigration was often not worth it. The author embeds these stories within a personal perspective. Beyond her historical and literary reading, she also situates this book as a family narrative as the use of the word we in the title suggests. Although this might make this work approachable and meaningful for some, in a strange way it was slightly off-putting to this reader whose own immigrant ancestry was neither English, indentured, nor fleeing seventeenth-century European upheavals. Although I wanted to feel a personal attachment to the actors whose minds she so ably exposed, and although she did make clear in her introduction that her goal is to “underscore that the experiences of dislocation and disposability that have characterized modernity for so many people are very broadly distributed,” I was left feeling strangely and specifically outside this particular founding narrative precisely because of her choice to use the first person as a rhetorical device throughout (p. 21). Her attempt to personalize the stories of these immigrants and make all readers feel a personal relationship to their experiences, in fact, often came off as universalizing only the particular experiences of the early English poor, which was explicitly not her intention. Despite this, Why We Left is a fascinating journey through unique [End Page 496] and creative readings into the lives of the early Anglo-American poor, indentured servitude, the Atlantic world, balladry, and the personal upheavals wrought by the earliest pushes of...

El poder del testimonio, experiencias de mujeres

Este artículo está orientado a precisar las relaciones entre experiencia corporal de las mujeres y testimonio. Un largo hábito de subalternidad ha expropiado a las mujeres de la posibilidad de tomar la palabra sobre sus experiencias corporales. Es por ello la importancia que tiene la singularidad de sus testimonios, que implica tomar la palabra en una situación de imposibilidad del lenguaje; es siempre el relato de un acontecimiento traumático del que se habla, pero del que también podría no hablarse. El sujeto/a que toma la palabra da cuenta de un conocimiento que - si bien es precario - constituye un saber del que antes no se tenía registro. Es que el testimonio pone en juego la relación entre la lengua y el archivo. Exige una subjetividad que atestigüe sobre la posibilidad misma de hablar, un/a sujeto capaz de pronunciar lo "inaudito", produciendo con su palabra una intervención ética. La autoridad del testimonio depende de una relación inmemorial entre lo indecible y lo decible, produce una palabra que nombra una experiencia singular. Las palabras de las mujeres que relatan experiencias corporales nombran una dimensión fundamental de nuestra experiencia, la de la diferencia sexual produciendo un dislocamiento en la presunta neutralidad de la lengua. Se trata de una reflexión que abre la posibilidad de poner palabras a lo innombrable.

First Use of an Intra-aortic Balloon Pump as a Bridge Between Surgery for Critical, Symptomatic Carotid and Coronary Disease

Introduction The optimal management of concomitant, unstable atherosclerotic coronary and carotid artery disease is unclear. We present the first use of an intra-aortic balloon pump (IABP) as a bridge between carotid endarterectomy (CEA) and coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) in a high-risk patient. Report A 62-year-old man with multiple comorbidities presented with unstable disease in both coronary and carotid territories. He was unsuitable for endovascular management of either lesion. An IABP was used to safely bridge him between carotid and coronary revascularisation. Discussion We propose that where both coronary and carotid circulations are critically compromised, this approach may offer a way out of an otherwise impossible situation.

First Use of an Intra-aortic Balloon Pump as a Bridge Between Surgery for Critical, Symptomatic Carotid and Coronary Disease

Introduction: The optimal management of concomitant, unstable atherosclerotic coronary and carotid artery disease is unclear. We present the first use of an intra-aortic balloon pump (IABP) as a bridge between carotid endarterectomy (CEA) and coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) in a high-risk patient. Report: A 62-year-old man with multiple comorbidities presented with unstable disease in both coronary and carotid territories. He was unsuitable for endovascular management of either lesion. An IABP was used to safely bridge him between carotid and coronary revascularisation. Discussion: We propose that where both coronary and carotid circulations are critically compromised, this approach may offer a way out of an otherwise impossible situation. First Use of an Intra-aortic Balloon Pump as a Bridge Between Surgery for Critical, Symptomatic Carotid and Coronary DiseaseEJVES ExtraVol. 26Issue 5PreviewThe optimal management of concomitant, unstable atherosclerotic coronary and carotid artery disease is unclear. We present the first use of an intra-aortic balloon pump (IABP) as a bridge between carotid endarterectomy (CEA) and coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) in a high-risk patient. Full-Text PDF Open Access

Intraoperative findings of revision canal wall-down tympanomastoid surgery

Conclusion: Chronically discharging mastoid cavities had well-defined technical faults from previous surgery. Identifying and eliminating these errors during revision canal wall-down (CWD) tympanomastoidectomy converted troublesome mastoid cavities into safe ears in 84% of cases. Objective: To assess intraoperative findings of revision CWD tympanomastoidectomy to determine the most common causes of failure of previous surgery. The short-term results of revision surgery after a 12-month follow-up period were analyzed. Methods: The study group consisted of 50 consecutive patients, 27 males and 23 females, aged 7–63 years (mean 34 ± 17 years) undergoing revision CWD tympanomastoidectomy due to persistently discharging mastoid cavities. The outcome of revision surgery was measured semi-quantitatively using a grading system. Results: The most common causes for failure of previous surgery were persistent mastoid cells in the tegmental, sinodural angle, and the retrolabyrinthine, retrofacial, and mastoid tip regions (100%); the bony overhangs at the edges of the mastoid cavity and the high facial ridge (98%); inadequately narrow meatus (84%); recurrent or residual cholesteatoma (46%); and remaining malleus head (40%). Revision surgery included elimination of all encountered limitations followed by mastoid cavity obliteration in about two-thirds of cases. Hearing restoration was done in only 34% of ears. In the remaining cases, intact ossicular chain (6%), existing sufficient previous reconstruction (22%) or impossible situation for reconstruction (38%) was found.

Incorporation of database approach into contractual issues: Methodology and practical guide for organizations

A total avoidance of project disputes is an impossible situation. Yet, the purpose should identify the perspectives of minimizing disputes or maximizing avoidance. By referring to past experiences on the causes and the suggested solutions, this research reckons that it can assist in avoiding or resolving similar situations at the onset of the dispute occurrence. Therefore, the objectives are: (a) to propose and develop a practical database system that can be employed by organizations to manage the past experiences, particularly for contractual issues, and (b) to validate and evaluate the database system from related organizations. Two actual projects were referred prior to finalizing the database system's structure. Microsoft Office Access tool was selected due to its wide-spread availability and user-friendliness to construction related organizations. The database system was evaluated and received positive feedback. It renders an insight toward the effort in avoidance of project disputes through the database approach.

Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals, and Reagan’s Rise to Power by Seth Rosenfeld (review)

Reviewed by: Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals, and Reagan’s Rise to Power by Seth Rosenfeld Bernard F. Dick Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals, and Reagan’s Rise to Power. By Seth Rosenfeld. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2012. Subversives is a compelling and meticulously documented work of cultural history that moves with the inexorable pace of tragedy, part Greek in its concatenation of events, deceptively unrelated but propelled as if by some strange design; part Shakespearean in its mammoth cast of characters, a mix of protagonists with tragic flaws and antagonists too lacking in self knowledge to elicit pity and fear. It all seemed so simple: Free Speech. Or so the students at the University of California at Berkeley thought in 1964, when in the midst of a protest, a (then) philosophy major injected the voice of reason into what was turning into a shout-out. “My name is Mario Savio,” he declared, thus becoming a Hamlet in a tragedy-by-installments. Blazingly committed, with a crusader’s zeal, Savio only wanted students to enjoy their First Amendment Rights. His zeal set off the Free Speech Movement, which spiraled out of control and devolved into the Filthy Speech Movement. That was how the public perceived it. A notorious dance replete with drugs and sex undermined the cause even more. The students became “The Kids”; the police, “The Pigs,” and a simple plea for due process became a generational conflict. Although curricular reform was needed (e.g., an ethnic studies program), some of the demands made by counter organizations were so ludicrous that they alienated many of the original sympathizers. Rosenfeld did not have to portray Savio as a Hamlet who morphed into a Christ figure; history took care of that. Savio went through his own agony in the garden—depression, homelessness, panic attacks, a failed marriage. But still he managed to graduate summa cum laude with a degree in physics from San Francisco State, from which he later received a master’s. The years of protest took their toll. Savio died of heart problems in 1996, a mere fifty-three. Clark Kerr, Berkeley’s president, was also a tragic scapegoat, but enjoyed a longer life, dying at 92. He was a victim of both history and J. Edgar Hoover, who believed informants’ reports that Kerr was too far to the left. When the Free Speech Movement galvanized Berkeley, Kerr was faced with an impossible situation: how to keep the campus from succumbing to anarchy. When the demonstrations turned ominous, Ronald Reagan, then California governor, argued that they were Communist-instigated. Reagan became a major player in the offstage drama to have Kerr fired. Savio and Kerr could not withstand the juggernaut of the FBI and Reagan, whose [End Page 125] anti-Communist paranoia began in 1946 when he started cooperating with the FBI after becoming convinced of Communist infiltration of the movie business. Ironically, in 1938, according to Reagan’s biographer, Edmund Morris, Reagan, then a liberal with a concern for the marginalized and the dispossessed, considered joining the Communist Party (Dutch, 158). Equally ironic is that, as an undergraduate at Eureka College, Reagan advocated a student strike when programs were in jeopardy because of restructuring. But that was in 1928. One wonders how Reagan’s political career would have fared if he retained his idealism. Subversives is a monumental achievement. Read it and wonder how much talent was lost in the cataclysm that might have been averted if the need for recognition were divorced from the fear of radicalization. One erratum: Larry Parks did not win an Oscar for The Jolson Story (1946), although he was nominated. The best actor Oscar went to Frederic March for The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), which the House on Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) found questionable because it implied that WWII veterans had problems adjusting to civilian life. Such were the times. Subversives should be required reading for the social network generation, who don’t know how good they have it. Bernard F. Dick Fairleigh Dickinson University, Teaneck Campus Copyright © 2013 Mid-America American Studies Association

The Sanitized Sensorium

ABSTRACT Based on 24 months of fieldwork in Pakistan and Canada with Pakistani women who migrated for work, this article examines the politics of multiculturalism and the construction of the “sanitized body.” I found two contradictory strains of multicultural practice in Canada: on the one hand, the erasure of “difference” with regard to immigrant bodies, on the other, the simultaneous recognition of that very difference. Public discourse in Canada on multiculturalism describes a relinquishing of cultural imperialism and a celebration of “multiness” as demonstrated by cultural festivals or other public celebrations, yet I found an imposition of a dominant culture through government‐funded settlement services that institute new ideals of bodily comportment on immigrants by teaching them how to dress and act. This dual mode of interpellation puts immigrants in an impossible situation in which they must sometimes suitably display their Otherness, and at other times efface their cultural difference. [multiculturalism, immigration, labor, Toronto]

Meeting Report: European Commission’s Space‐Weather Awareness Dialogue

Meeting Report: European Commission’s Space‐Weather Awareness Dialogue

Paediatric airway management: What is new?

Airway management plays a pivotal role in Paediatric Anaesthesia. Over the last two decades many improvements in this area have helped us to overcome this final frontier. From an era where intubation with a conventional laryngoscope or blind nasal intubation was the only tool for airway management, we have come a long way. Today supraglottic airway devices have pride of place in the Operating Room and are becoming important airway devices used in routine procedures. Direct and indirect fibreoptic laryngoscopes and transtracheal devices help us overcome difficult and previously impossible airway situations. These developments mean that we need to update our knowledge on these devices. Also much of our basic understanding of the physiology and anatomy of the paediatric airway has changed. This article attempts to shed light on some of the most important advances/opinions in paediatric airway management like, cuffed endotracheal tubes, supraglottic airway devices, video laryngoscopes, rapid sequence intubation, the newly proposed algorithm for difficult airway management and the role of Ex Utero Intrapartum Treatment (EXIT) procedure in the management of the neonatal airway.

Suspicious Images: Iconophobia and the Ethical Gaze

Suspicious Images: Iconophobia and the Ethical Gaze

How corporate leaders can use the Positive Deviance approach to stimulate radical change

PurposeThis paper aims to present an interview with management guru Richard Pascale, author of The Power of Positive Deviance, outlining the basic steps executives should follow to successfully implement positive deviance, an unconventional change methodology.Design/methodology/approachThe interview examines the positive deviance approach, which derives from a deceptively simple idea. Faced with a seemingly intractable or impossible problem or situation, a few people having the same resources as their peers manage to succeed against all odds.FindingsThe PD process entails identifying these unusually effective individuals – the positive deviants – and adopting their practices.Practical implicationsThe author explains that only when the community takes ownership of the problem and validates the need to change will “something else happen different from what has already happened.”Originality/valueRichard Pascale explains how a technique that was invented to solve intractable social problems can work in a corporate setting.

‘Ne in talibus perturbetur lector’: the Ars lectoria, the Ars metrica and the Word Accent

AbstractThe placement of accent marks was not always an open-and-shut case for the authors of the medieval artes lectoriae. More than once, their common sources, metrical poetry and grammatical textbooks from Antiquity, confronted them with conflicting accenting practices that did not trouble metrical poets, but caused impossible situations to the reader-aloud and chorister, and accordingly to the scribe and corrector who were responsible for the correct placement of the stress mark. The artes lectoriae had to provide them with an unambiguous decision.

スライディングモード制御によるハイブリッドブレーキ制御

Anti-lock brake system and brake-by-wire are proposed in the vehicle control using a brake, and the braking power is expected to be improved more than ever. The researches such as an application to the ABS of Siliding mode control which considered a actuator dynamics and a hybrid control of the brake using model reference adaptive control are done so far. However, in the former case, speed following that becomes a target exists physically impossible situation by saturation of tire frictional force because only speed following is done. In the latter, the model error is caused because the simulation model and the controller design model are different. Therefore, there is a problem that an accurate follow cannot be done. In this paper, the braking control is performed using the sliding mode control which has high robustness for disturbance that fulfils matching conditions. In so doing, it aims at the achievement of optimal braking control to switch wheel speed following to slip ratio following.

Estimating sub-pixel temperatures using the triangle algorithm

In water-deficient areas, water resource management requires evapotranspiration at high spatiotemporal resolution – an impossible situation given the trade-off between spatial and temporal resolutions in space-borne systems. Some researchers have suggested sharpening the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) land-surface temperature product with a resolution from 1 km to 250 m and a functional relationship between surface temperature (T r) and normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI). Evapotranspiration at 250 m resolution can be obtained once every few days using this technique. Based on the interpretation of the triangular T r–NDVI space and assuming uniform soil moisture conditions in a coarse pixel, this paper suggests an alternative algorithm – the triangle algorithm – for sharpening. The triangle algorithm was tested using Landsat 7 Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+) data from an arid zone. Sharpened surface temperatures and reference temperatures were compared at 60 m and 240 m resolutions. Root mean square errors with the triangle algorithm are smaller than those with a functional relationship between T r and NDVI. This paper will also discuss the impact of soil moisture variations in the coarse pixel on the triangle algorithm. Finally we should mention that the triangle algorithm only applies to regions with non-stressed vegetation canopies.

From policing the garbage can to garbage can policing

Policing in most Latin American countries meets with enormous challenges. Most of them are due to unsolved political and social problems. In a number of studies these challenges and the way the police meet them are analysed. The notion of ‘garbage can decision-making’ is used to seek an explanation for the disappointing results of the reform efforts reported in most studies and to analyse the way police deal with the impossible situation they find themselves in. The tendency to become part of the garbage can and start acting in their own interest and to do that in a criminal way is the almost unavoidable consequence of the dead end street they are in.

An Affinity for Philosophy: The Absurdoid Theatre of Géza Páskándi

Géza Páskándi (1933–5) coined the term “absurdoid” in order to distinguish his plays from the absurd plays of the west. “In the absurdoid the human being is not simply a blind tool of the impossible situation but … himself is its accomplice,” he argued (Esszék 99). His four plays discussed here, Todogar Jaur Kvárna, No Conductor, The Line, and The Avenger, The Gatekeeper, or It Is Requested That You Wipe Your Feet combine the fantastic with linguistic invention, emotional appeal, and clear moral standards. Through his unique form of absurd theatre, Páskándi courageously attacks the baneful living conditions, omnipresent double-think, and widespread complicity occasioned by brutal dictatorships, especially that of Nicolae Ceauşescu, which he experienced first-hand in his native Transylvania, now part of Romania.

On Islands, Insularity, and Opium Poppies: Australia's Secret Pharmacy

Islands embody a contradictory geography. Although insularity has negative connotations, the related aspects of uniqueness, smallness, secrecy, security, isolation, and remoteness all have strategic roles in situating Australia's production of licit narcotics as an international success with poppy cultivation confined to the island state of Tasmania. Through the boundaries and dualisms inscribed in the discourses of islandness and drug rhetoric, the state's ultramodern manufacture of pharmaceuticals is contrasted with others elsewhere, including opium and illegal drug production. Their representations simplify the more intricate and challenging geopolitical realities that link this industry to transnational corporations, state and federal governments, their agencies, and various UN organisations. In a poststructural reading, the secrets of islands and drugs are suggested to comprise what Derrida terms aporia or impossible situations: Tasmania and its poppy industry are isolated from a global otherness yet entwine different peoples and places in connecting complex material practices both licit and illicit at multiple scales all around the world. However, these aporia also present new political and ethical openings with significance for island studies as well as for narcotics production and its regulation.

Theorizing a republican poetics: P.B. Shelley and Alfieri

In A Defence of Poetry, written in Tuscany in early 1821, Shelley considered the role of poetry in effecting freedom at a time when monarchies in Europe were in crisis. This essay speculates that his Italian situation speaks to Della tirannide, Del principe e delle lettere and Vita, amongst the most esteemed of Alfieri’s works. An outline is offered first of Shelley’s recorded engagement with Alfieri’s writings, including their distinct conceptions of tragedy, then of the treatment of Alfieri in reviews between 1800 and 1825. Consideration is also given to representations of Alfieri by Foscolo, Byron and Staël. The latter are not unsympathetic towards Alfieri’s view that the artist’s principal function is as a patriot since it is a fitting response to the impossible political situation of Italy. Like Alfieri’s prose, Shelley’s Defence and A Philosophical View of Reform align poetry against monarchy and set the writer apart from the state. His interests therefore correspond with the cosmopolitan, transnational reach of Alfieri’s writings, not only the uses made of them for nationalist ends by others. Finally, it is noticed that Shelley discovered in Italy what Alfieri found in England, a critical vantage‐point that enabled the expression of cosmopolitan republican values.

Generic Preemption: Applying Conflict Preemption after Wyeth v. Levine

Despite the much-awaited Supreme Court decision in Wyeth v. Levine, preemption for generic pharmaceuticals still exists. Levine addressed conflict preemption of state failure-to-warn claims. After reviewing the federal law governing pharmaceutical warning labels, the Court found that pharmaceutical companies could modify their branded drug warning labels to meet obligations presented by state law. Consequently, conflict preemption does not apply. In contrast, generic drugs must adopt the identical label employed by their branded counterparts. The FDA does not allow the generic drug label to deviate from the branded competitor’s at any point during the approval process or thereafter. As a result, the generic manufacturer is not at liberty to make changes to its product’s warning label. State tort failure-to-warn claims pose an impossible situation – the generic manufacturer cannot comply with both the federal requirements to mirror the branded drug’s label and a state obligation to enhance or modify the label. Further, Congress eliminated much of the clinical testing requirements for generic drugs as a measure to ensure that they remain low cost options for consumers. Exposing generic drugs to tort liability under state law might serve to push generic manufacturers to conduct or support safety and efficacy testing. Conducting this type of research would certainly increase costs and drug prices, frustrating the purpose of Congress to promote generic drugs. Conflict preemption applies when it is impossible to comply with both state and federal duties under law or when state law stands as an obstacle to accomplishing the purposes of Congress. Conflict preemption applies to generic manufacturers sued under state failure-to-warn claims, but a change in the law is needed to ensure generic warning labels are adequate and that consumers injured by generic drugs are not left without any compensation for their pain, suffering, and medical bills.