Ugly Duckling Research Articles

Editorial: The accident, the ugly duckling, and the three preventions: a fable for mature health officers.

Editorial: The accident, the ugly duckling, and the three preventions: a fable for mature health officers. J A WallerCopyRight https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.64.4.409 Published Online: October 07, 2011

The ugly duckling who became one of the forty immortals

The ugly duckling who became one of the forty immortals

Animal sounds: a human vantage point

Why is it that the lexicon is often shunned and ignored by linguists, or in other words, treated with disdain and generally considered to be the Ugly Duckling of the linguistic family? 
 
 This paper is both an attempt to redress the balance and it is designed as a tentative, initial contribution to the study of verbs of sound. Here, the central focus is devoted to a small subsection of verbs of sound, namely to the verbs denoting animal sounds used with metaphorical reference to human beings. The paper also attempts to sketch possible situations and parameters which are relevant for human beings and which appear to be cross-linguistic universals. The discussion is for the most part focused on Russian but examples from other languages, such as English, German, Estonian, and so forth, are also included.

Bridging Two Disciplines

Bernard is a gambling man. Just before Christmas of his senior year at college, with his last $40 in hand, he sat down to a game of poker, won $1,000 and paid the tuition for his last semester at McGill University. That was in 1930. Since then, with his gambler's luck, a remarkable store of scientific intuition, a touch of genius-and 15 hours a day of hard work-Bernard has lead the infant discipline of pharmacology to adulthood as one of the most important and rapidly expanding fields of biomedical research. Guided by whose insights show no regard for traditional theories, drug studies evolved from an imprecise and descriptive activity to a sophisticated science. He has made his mark by supplying the two essential ingredients to fruitful scientific inquiry: ideas and manpower. Brodie intuitively knows where the interesting things are, branching out freely in any direction in pursuit of a hypothesis, and he's always had the ability to select damn good younger colleagues, according to Dr. Sidney Udenfriend whom Dr. describes as one of his more brilliant proteges. Dr. Udenfriend is one of some 300 scientists trained in Brodie's sprawling laboratory of chemical pharmacology which occupies two floors at the National Institutes of Health. There, a favorite laboratory activity is playing consequences. Having come up with a hypothesis to explain some chemical or physiological phenomenon, Dr. and co-workers gamble-following the consequences of its being true instead of looking for reasons why it cannot be true. One round-played by Dr. and two graduate students-developed the hypothesis that special enzymes in the liver metabolize drugs that simulate foreign organic compounds ingested in food and that these enzymes evolved as the need for them developed. Hence. not all species need enzymes to metabolize foreign compounds. Many fish and aquatic amphibia, for example, dispose of most foreign material by excreting them through permeable gill membranes. Land-living reptiles, however, with their impermeable skins, need and have enzymes to convert foreign substances to components their systems can handle. From reptiles, the enzymes next appeared in birds and mammals. The animals, in fact, inherited them from the reptiles. for nature usually retains a good thing, Dr. says. But consequences didn't end there. Out of these academic studies of the evolution of enzymes came a finding of considerable practical value. In trying to prove that 'ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny,' graduate student Roger Maickel and an English visitor discovered that the newborn of mammals lacked drug-metabolizing enzymes, Dr. points out. At first newborns drink their mother's milk which is free of organic substances that have to be metabolized and so they have no need of enzymes. From this it follows that drugs should be given to babies only under exceptional circumstances. For all the pharmacologists he's trained, Bernard Brodie-otherwise known as Steve because everyone named is called Steve-was not trained in his own field. His doctorate is in chemistry from New York University. He went into pharmacology afterward because, he says, he was lucky enough to have teachers who advised him while he was still young. My mentor, in organic chemistry, advised me to go into pharmacology because I was unable to remember simple structures or the Geneva nomenclature and because I was accident prone. He introduced me to Dr. George B. Wallace, that kind and gentle teacher who was willing to take into his department an ugly duckling because he foresaw that one day biochemistry and pharmacology would have to come together. From him I learned about intuition in science and the value of the working hypothesis. Later, Dr. worked under Dr. James A. Shannon, now director of

Camus's Absurd and the World of Melville's Confidence-Man

In recent years, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, a difficult work and for long an unjustly neglected one, has begun to command increasingly greater critical attention and esteem. As more than one contemporary writer has noted, the verdict of the late Richard Chase in 1949, that the novel represents Melville's “second best achievement,” has served to prompt many to undertake a second reading (or at least a first) of the book. Before this time, the novel had traditionally been the one Melville readers have shied away from—as overly discursive, too rambling altogether, on the one hand, or as an unfortunate outgrowth of the author's morbidity on the other. Elizabeth Foster, in the admirably comprehensive introduction to her valuable edition of The Confidence-Man (1954), systematically traces the history of the book's reputation and observes that even with the Melville renaissance of the twenties, the work stands as the last piece of the author's fiction to be redeemed. Only lately, she comments, has it ceased to be regarded as “the ugly duckling” of Melville's creations. But recognition does not imply agreement, and it should not be thought that in the past fifteen years critics have reached any sort of unanimity on the novel's content. Since Mr. Chase's study, which approached the puzzling work as a satire on the American spirit—or, more specifically, as an attack on the liberalism of the day—and which speculated upon the novel's controlling folk and mythic figures, other critics, by now ready to assume that the book repaid careful analysis, have read the work in a variety of ways. It has been treated, among other things, as a religious allegory, as a philosophic satire on optimism, and as a Shandian comedy. One critic has conveniently summarized the prevailing situation by remarking that “the literary, philosophical, and cultural materials in this book are fused in so enigmatic a fashion that its interpreters have differed as to what the book is really about.”

Psychiatry's Ugly Duckling

Psychiatry's Ugly Duckling

Mathetics the ugly duckling learning to fly

Mathetics the ugly duckling learning to fly

Contribution to the history of modern patent legislation in the United States and in France

Abstract The history of patent legislation is the ugly duckling of history. The political historian cannot see anything worth mentioning in this connection; the economic historian will probably confine his attention to the English Statute of Monopolies though he may discuss patents in reference to the industrial revolution of the 18th century; the legal historian regards it as a speciality hardly worthy of the time and space normally devoted to the extensive and traditional subjects of the law. And, finally, the history of engineering does not yet belong to an acknowledged branch of science in which research can be carried out on any significant scale.

Nigeria--Largest Remaining British Colony

C HANGING political and economic conditions during the past decade have brought about a revolution in the role and status of the British colonies in Tropical Africa. With the attainment of Dominion status by Indian, Pakistan, and Ceylon, and with the secession of Burma, the hitherto largely neglected African dependencies became, almost overnight, the most important colonial territories remaining in the Empire, territories whose agricultural and mineral exports are playing a vital role in the economy of the sterling area and whose strategic significance has been underlined by recent developments in the Middle East. The old fable of the Ugly Duckling comes inevitably to mind. Outstanding in this new colonial pattern is the territory of Nigeria. Its 372,000 square miles represent one quarter of the area of British Tropical Africa, its population of 25 million almost one-half of the population. Its economic potential is sufficiently indicated by the fact that alone it accounts for one-half of the world's palm oil exports, two-fifths of the groundnuts (peanuts), one-sixth of the cacao, and one-eight of the tin. It is the aim of this paper to sketch in broad outline the essential features in the human and economic geography of this largest remaining colonial dependency of Britain. ENVIRONMENTAL CONDITIONS'

The Tinker's Wedding, a Revaluation

The Tinker's Wedding is the most unattractive of the plays of J. M. Synge. This unruly little farce, the only two-act play Synge attempted, has been generally labelled an ugly duckling. But the manuscript drafts of the play tell an interesting story which, if it does not cause us to revise our estimate of the play, assigns it a proper place in the Synge canon and partly explains its deficiencies. The manuscripts show, for instance, that The Tinker's Wedding was the dramatist's first attempt to break away from the one-act form and that possibly Synge's only mistake was in publishing the results of his experiment. They afford an interesting insight into Synge's method; and they include, in an earlier version of the preface to the play an apology to the Irish clergy. They also throw light on Synge's development toward the mastery of the full, three-act play.

FOOT DISORDERS IN GENERAL PRACTICE

Only a small percentage of patients with a disorder of the foot reach the orthopedic surgeon; the rest—an overwhelming majority—are left unaided to seek relief wherever they can find it. For years they have been exploited so extensively by unqualified, nonprofessional agencies as to create a unique situation and one that has been accepted or condoned by the profession with extraordinary complacence. Why should these common ailments of the feet be so obviously the ugly duckling or unwanted stepchild of medicine? At the beginning of this century, textbooks on orthopedic surgery suggested two primary causes of foot trouble, applying them to the disorder in the longitudinal arch and also in the metatarsal region of the foot; they were (1) badly designed footwear and (2) weakened musculature. After having received broad acceptance and approval for so long a period, it might be expected that these interpretations of primary factors would by

The History of the "Ugly Duckling" Library

The History of the "Ugly Duckling" Library