Stories In Volume Research Articles

Telecoms Deflators: A Story of Volume and Revenue Weights

Fast-changing technology products present inherent measurement challenges in relation to ensuring that deflators adequately adjust for quality change to allow a like-for-like comparison of volumes of output. Telecommunications services present significant challenges in this area not just because of rapid changes in prices and volumes, but also because the different services provided (text, voice, data) are displaying increasing substitutability. This paper builds on previous work by the authors to provide improved alternatives for telecoms services deflators, calculated for the UK, focussing on whether using revenue-weights or whether using volume weights for fixed components of contract bundles delivers more reasonable results. Our new options deliver declines in the deflator series of between 58% and 84% between 2010 and 2017. These are far faster declines than the deflator calculated by the existing method but considerably reduce the range calculated in earlier work.

Hachikazuki: Revealing Kannon’s Crowning Compassion in Muromachi Fiction

The corpus of late-medieval Japanese fiction contains various stories about the benefits and favors obtained through devotion to the bodhisattva Kannon. One of these stories is Hachikazuki, which features a young heroine who, following her parents' prayers, is conceived through the divine intervention of Kannon. The girl loses her mother at an early age, is stigmatized by a bowl that her mother has placed inverted upon her head, and undergoes a series of hardships and sufferings. Eventually, the bowl miraculously falls off, and the story culminates in the heroine's happy marriage and the universal recognition of her virtues. I discuss the significance of the bowl as a narrative trope in Hachikazuki in order to illuminate its function as a physical symbol of Kannon's active compassion and divine protection. Kannon seems to be largely absent throughout the narrative, especially in the episodes where the heroine overcomes her suffering thanks to the saving power of the bowl. I argue that the bowl indicates Kannon's benevolent presence throughout the entire story. Therefore, the bowl not only serves as a regenerative space where Hachikazuki can overcome the trauma of her early childhood loss, but it also bridges the gap between orthodox doctrinal and popular vernacular representations of Kannon. KEYWORDS: otogizoshi-Hachikazuki-mamako mono-setsuwa-Kannon-bowl- compassion-divine protection (ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.) The story Hachikazuki ... (The bowl bearer) is the tale of a young girl who suffers various hardships because she is stigmatized by a bowl that has become firmly attached to her head.1 In the end, however, it is through the bowl that she achieves fame, fortune, and aristocratic status. Hachikazuki is one of some four hundred works of short Muromachi fiction that together constitute the literary genre known today as otogizoshi ..., or companion booklets.2 According to Ichiko Teiji's classification of otogizoshi by subject matter and theme, Hachikazuki falls into the category of kuge mono ... (aristocratic tales) under the subdivision of mamako mono ... (step-child tales), because the narrative deals with the ill fortune, suffering, and happy ending in the life of a stepchild (Ichiko 1968, 17). This subject has a long tradition which dates back to thirteenth-century collections of setsuwa ... such as Uji shui monogatari ... (Collection of tales of Uji), and to late tenthcentury romances such as Ochikubo monogatari ... (Tale of the sunken room), Utsuho monogatari ... (Tale of the hollow tree), and Sumiyoshi monogatari ... (Tale of Sumiyoshi). In these stories, a stepmother torments the stepdaughter out of jealousy and expels her from home. As a result, the stepdaughter experiences hardship and suffering, but in the end, through the divine intervention of a deity, she marries a noble suitor and lives happily ever after. In addition, Hachikazuki is also classified under shomin mono ... (tales of commoners) because it resembles many of the success stories in volume sixteen of the twelfth-century setsuwa collection Konjaku monogatari shu ... (Collection of tales of times now past), particularly those associated with the mercy of the bodhisattva Kannon (Kanda and Nishizawa 2002, 865).3 Konjaku monogatari shu is believed to have been compiled by a Buddhist lay monk of aristocratic rank who was familiar with the classic literary tradition and the life of commoners. Although we do not know much about the size, type, or location of the audience for these tales, the reappearance of themes from Konjaku monogatari shu in collections from subsequent eras- such as the miracle tales of the Hasedera Kannon'in. Muromachi-period otogizoshi like Hachikazuki-attests to their popularity and transmission to later generations (Shimura 1974, 42). Hachikazuki begins by introducing the heroine's parents,who, after ardent prayers to the Hasedera Kannon, miraculously conceive a daughter. …

Acute kidney injury in burns: a story of volume and inflammation

Acute kidney injury occurs in approximately one-quarter to one-third of patients with major burn injury. Apart from the usual suspects – such as older age, severity of burn injury, sepsis and multiple organ dysfunction – volume overload probably has an important role in the pathogenesis of acute kidney injury.

Japanese Science Fiction: A View of a Changing Society , and: Rationalizing Genius: Ideological Strategies in the Classic American Science Fiction Short Story (review)

Reviewed by: Japanese Science Fiction: A View of a Changing Society, and: Rationalizing Genius: Ideological Strategies in the Classic American Science Fiction Short Story Donald M. Hassler Robert Matthew . Japanese Science Fiction: A View of a Changing Society. New York: Routledge, 1989. 266 pp. $57.95. John Huntington . Rationalizing Genius: Ideological Strategies in the Classic American Science Fiction Short Story. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1989. 216 pp. $37.00 cloth; pb. $15.00. There is an uncanny similarity between these two studies of science fiction, and between them they represent interesting errors of methodology at opposite ends of a spectrum. One would wish literary work somewhere in the middle. But the relatively new field of science fiction studies has yet to discover its best way, and both Robert Matthew and John Huntington have much to teach us even in their errors. The common ground they share derives, apparently, from the popular roots of science fiction itself—both in Japan at the end of the last century and in America just before and during the Great Depression. (A wonderful discovery in the Matthew book is that pulp magazines flourished in Japan at about the same time that Amazing Stories and Astounding were evolving here.) Both studies, then, are dedicated to finding a way to analyze this popular literature as an expression of society and, most particularly in Huntington's work, as a political force. Because little has yet been written about Japanese science fiction, Matthew has found a true science-fictional subject matter. Almost like an imaginary voyage itself, the origins and the themes associated with what Matthew calls "the only technology-conscious, forward-looking, and future-oriented literature that stands outside the western framework" mirror many of their counterparts in our culture. For example, adventure story telling for the Japanese was traditionally considered [End Page 313] "base and humble" according to Matthew's research, what we would call Grub Street work. His goal, then, is to go to these base roots for significant messages about Japanese society. He does this by summarizing over 170 fictions arranged by theme. The reader can identify and follow important writers by using the index and by reading carefully; but the vast amount of summary material on individual stories might have been arranged more efficiently as a reference book, much like E. F. Bleiler's summaries of supernatural and fantasy fictions. In addition to this summary material of fictions that few in the West have read, Matthew's other contribution of labeling and discussing the sociological knowledge we can glean from the literature is most valuable. I am not sure the two objectives meld well, but the sociological conclusions are fascinating if brief, given the amount of space devoted to summary. Also writing with the jargon of the social scientist and even the futurologist (his earlier fine book on H. G. Wells foreshadows his "politics of prediction" here), Huntington expends even more effort to suggest a methodology of proper sampling and hence "scientific" validity. Although his rationale becomes too tortured to describe briefly, he ends up with the twenty-six stories in Volume I of Robert Silverberg's Science Fiction Hall of Fame (1971) as his sample; and then, rather than summarize as Matthew does with his much larger sample, Huntington executes a New Critical close reading of the short stories in order to generalize about the hidden agendas of the literature represented by this anthology that ranges from the early thirties to Silverberg's final statement in the collection itself. So Huntington's method is at the other extreme from Matthew's summaries. Further, Huntington much more than Matthew seems to want not only to draw sociological conclusions from the literature about what he labels our "technocracy" but also to insist on the need for an overt discussion in the literature of what he calls "politics." Oddly, then, although the strength of Huntington is his close readings, the bias towards "politics" in his work seems to hobble the attention to the literature itself. Again, the bias seems to grow out of the starting assumption that this is a popular literature and so must speak efficiently to the people about their concerns or politics. The...