Unfamiliar Terms Research Articles

Book Review: Psychology of Touch and Blindness, Morton A. Heller and Edouard Gentaz

Psychology of Touch and Blindness, Morton A. Heller and Edouard Gentaz. New York: Psychology Press, Taylor & Francis Group, 2014,284 pp.; paperback, $59.95; hardcover, $150. Psychology of Touch and Blindness, by Morton A. Heller and Edouard Gentaz, offers a comprehensive look at the nature of touch for researchers and other professionals who seek a deep understanding of the theoretical and neurological aspects of the subject. Practitioners, however, may find the book too theoretical and lacking discussion about how the information included in the text can be applied when working with adults or children who are visually impaired (that is those who are or have low vision). Although the book does not provide strategies for the explicit application of its theories, the text includes a large amount of information on the basic science of touch and the haptic abilities of people with visual impairments. Those readers who are willing to investigate the information fully enough to make their own connections between the research being presented and practice could apply such knowledge to the education of people with visual impairments. CONFUSING TERMINOLOGY Although the book covers an incredible amount of information, the tone of the book is quite understandable. Technical terms and jargon are explained and often include examples or analogies that further illustrate the concepts or points. The authors frequently relay personal experiences and encounters with individuals who are to support points being made. Although I appreciated this approach and the attention the authors gave to explaining concepts and unfamiliar terms that might lead to confusion, I was surprised that person-first language was not used. The language used by the authors also caused confusion at times--they always used the terms people or subjects, which left me wondering if all the individuals who participated in the highlighted studies were totally blind. Another example of confusing language occurred in the chapter Picture Perception and Blind People, in which one study that was discussed reported that blind individuals did very poorly when asked to draw Surely the study was not conducted with participants who are totally blind; otherwise, the finding could not have been surprising! THOUGHT-PROVOKING RESEARCH Despite some of the confusion surrounding the subjects described in the chapter on picture perception, the information provided on the ability of individuals who are to accurately interpret pictures was quite interesting. The analysis of the research provided simple, practical strategies (such as making the tactile images larger) for improving the abilities of individuals who are visually impaired to better interpret tactile pictures. The book also provided a thorough and engaging discussion of the haptic abilities and inabilities of individuals who are blind, some of which were quite surprising. For instance, studies found participants could not only identify unknown people with great accuracy by touching the individuals' faces, but they could also tactually identify a range of facial expressions indicating a wide variety of emotions without any training. The functional implications of these skills are not obvious, but it is interesting to learn about the refined haptic abilities of those studied. Another study discussed in the book found that haptic perception of texture could be even more accurate than visual perception. Another highlight of the book was the in-depth discussion of the implications for weighing one sense against another in bimodal sensory situations, which could have interesting application for individuals with low vision. …

The role of word frequencies in detecting unfamiliar terms and their effect on response quality

Research into cognitive aspects of survey response has indicated unfamiliar terms as one of the psycholinguistic determinants of question comprehensibility problems. In this paper the estimates of wording familiarity based on text corpora for the English and Slovenian languages were used to detect potentially incomprehensible wordings in two web survey questionnaires for international exchange students at the University of Ljubljana, one for incoming (English) and the other for outgoing students (Slovenian). Two versions of the questionnaire were developed for each language, one with low-frequency (complex) and the other with high-frequency (improved) wordings, and compared in a split-ballot experiment. The results show a lower drop-out rate and a decreased subjective perception of difficulty for the improved language versions.

Survey participation and response

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Voices of Victorian England: contemporary accounts of daily life

The Victorian age was a period of transition as Britain industrialized and society underwent profound changes. Here, contemporary voices provide students with an up-close look at this pivotal time. Voices of Victorian England illuminates the character, personalities, and events of the era through excerpts from primary documents produced between 1837 and 1901. By allowing Queen Victoria's contemporaries to speak for themselves, this work brings the achievements and conflicts that occurred during the queen's long reign alive for high school and college students as well as the general public. Excerpts represent literary giants such as Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Rudyard Kipling, and Anthony Trollope. The book covers the worlds of politics, religion, economics, and science, and addresses subjects such as women's issues and the royal family. Documents include letters, poems, speeches, polemics, reviews, novels, official reports, and self-help guides, as well as descriptive narratives of people and events from England, Scotland, Ireland, and, where pertinent, America and continental Europe. Spelling has been modernized and unfamiliar terms defined, and questions and commentary provide background and context for each document. In addition, the book offers tools that will help readers effectively evaluate a document's meaning and importance. Presents and comments on 68 excerpts from primary documents of the Victorian era, 1837-1901 Details selected topics-such as Victorian Ireland, Social Darwinism, the marriage market, and homosexuality-in numerous sidebars Points readers to books and websites that can expand their understanding of a document and relate it to themes and issues in modern life Suggests methods students can use to successfully incorporate the documents into school research and reading projects Includes a chronology listing important dates and events from the birth of Princess Victoria in 1819 to the end of the Boer War in 1902

Book Review: Early Modern Women on the Fall: An Anthology

Early Modern Women on the Fall: An Anthology. Edited by Michelle M. Dowd and Thomas Festa. Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2012. ISBN 978-0-86698-458-4. Pp. 386. $60.00 In this anthology, Michelle M. Dowd and Thomas Festa gather a varied selection of seventeenth-century women's writing inspired by the narrative of the Fall, particularly the character of Eve. As the editors note, Imagining Eve's voice in early modern England entailed direct engagement with the most issues of identity in political and social life (1-2). The authors of these texts engage such contentious issues, from education to breastfeeding to poetry to theology, as they explore the Fall as a basis for early modern theories about gender, society, and vocation. In publishing this anthology, Dowd and Festa hope to dispel the simplistic myth that religion functioned only to disempower women in the premodern era, or that the story of Eve's fall did not have a productive as well as a counterproductive force in English society (7). Including a wide range of writings inspired by the Fall narrative, the anthology illustrates the generative power of this tale to spark discussion, debate, and imaginative writing in the early modern period. Early Modern Women on the Fall includes relatively well-known voices, such as Aemelia Lanyer (selections from Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum), Katherine Philips (To Antenor, on a Paper of Mine), and Mary Astell Serious Proposal to the Ladies) alongside texts that have never before appeared in a modern edition, including Dorothy Calthorpe's Description of the Garden of Eden and selections from Mary Roper's The Sacred History. Among the other texts are poems by Margaret Cavendish (Poets Have Most Pleasure In This Life), Lucy Hutchinson (selections from Order and Disorder), and Jane Barker (A Farewell to Poetry, With a Long Digression on Anatomy), and prose works by Bathsua Makin (An Essay to Revive the Ancient Education of Gentlewomen) and Elizabeth Clinton (The Countess of Lincolns Nursery). Along with their chronologically-ordered selection of poetry and prose, Dowd and Festa include appendices containing the first three chapters of Genesis in both the Geneva and Authorized (King James) versions of the Bible, the marriage service from the 1559 Book of Common Prayer, biographical and textual notes, and a selected bibliography for further reading. Dowd and Festa address this anthology to both student readers and the general public. To that end, they ground their editorial practices in accessibility, describing their edited texts as standardized, Americanized, and lightly modernized (15). Their notes for each work are also geared toward accessibility and comprehension; for example, their first footnote to the selections from Dorothy Leigh's The Mother's Blessing places this work in its generic context as a mother's legacy, briefly explaining the genre and directing readers to further information on both genre and work (29nl). Dowd and Festa also use their notes to define unfamiliar terms and to gloss Biblical, literary, and historical mentions of such figures as Hannah (75n10), Nicostrata (151n95), or Brutus (276n57). In addition to providing this information, Dowd and Festa deliberately include as many complete texts as possible (such as those by Astell, Clinton, and Makin) rather than shorter selections, making these texts particularly useful for comprehensive discussion and inquiry (16). Through their editorial and selection practices as well as their careful notes, Dowd and Festa successfully create an anthology suitable for initial encounters with the rich world of seventeenth-century texts. A major strength of Early Modern Women on the Fall springs from another of its goals: inviting comparison of the selected works with each other and with others from the period. Dowd and Festa stress in their introduction that their purpose is emphatically not to re-segregate women's writing, expressing the hope that readers will place these texts in conversation with other works, perhaps beginning with the Fall as narrated in Milton's Paradise Lost (17). …

Google Glass in pediatric surgery: An exploratory study

IntroductionPersonal portable information technology is advancing at a breathtaking speed. Google has recently introduced Glass, a device that is worn like conventional glasses, but that combines a computerized central processing unit, touchpad, display screen, high-definition camera, microphone, bone-conduction transducer, and wireless connectivity. We have obtained a Glass device through Google's Explorer program and have tested its applicability in our daily pediatric surgical practice and in relevant experimental settings. MethodsGlass was worn daily for 4 consecutive weeks in a University Children's Hospital. A daily log was kept, and activities with a potential applicability were identified. Performance of Glass was evaluated for such activities. In-vitro experiments were conducted where further testing was indicated. ResultsWearing Glass throughout the day for the study interval was well tolerated. Colleagues, staff, families and patients overwhelmingly had a positive response to Glass. Useful applications for Glass were hands-free photo/videodocumentation, making hands-free telephone calls, looking up billing codes, and internet searches for unfamiliar medical terms or syndromes. Drawbacks encountered with the current equipment were low battery endurance, data protection issues, poor overall audio quality, as well as long transmission latency combined with interruptions and cut-offs during internet videoconferencing. ConclusionGlass has the some clear utility in the clinical setting. However, before it can be recommended universally for physicians and surgeons, substantial improvements to the hardware are required, issues of data protection must be solved, and specialized medical applications (apps) need to be developed.

Comparing New BSN RN Self Skills Assessment to Actual Skills Demonstration

The purpose of the study was to compare the self-skills assessment with the skill competence during an actual skills demonstration of newly hired bachelor of science in nursing (BSN) registered nurse graduates. This retrospective study included 32 randomly selected BSN registered nurse graduates from January 2010 to December 31, 2010. The participants were already hired into a midwest health system. Because this was a retrospective study, no demographic data were collected, and no consent from participants was needed. This study included a clinical skills check list where the participants rated themselves on specific skills utilizing a Likert scale ranging from 1 (no knowledge) to 4 (able to perform independently). The same clinical check list was utilized by an expert registered nurse when the skill was demonstrated. This study compared the difference between the subject's self-rating of skills and the clinical demonstration of the skills. We used t tests in the analysis to demonstrate the differences between the participant's self-rating of skills and the expert evaluation of the clinical demonstration of the skills. The data were inserted into the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences 19 software program to assist in the analysis process. The study demonstrated 17 significant differences in the skills ratings between the participant and competency demonstration of new BSN graduates. These significant results (2 tailed) ranged from .000 to .048.The 17 out of 46 specific skills where differences were noted included the following: staple removal, nasal pharyngeal suctioning, urinary catheter specimen collection, site care dressing change, urinary catheter irrigation, Juzo application and measurement, 5-lead telemetry, oral airway insertion, hemovac/Jackson Pratt, oral pharyngeal suctioning, urinary catheter insertion, dry suction chest drainage, bed to cart/slider board, urinary catheter removal, antiembolism stockings, measurement and application, removal of iv and sit-and-stand alarm. Overall, the participants rated their skill levels lower in 15 out of 17 significant skills when compared with their competency assessment (t test: -3.284, df = 31, P = .003). In two skill ratings (urinary catheter specimen collection and oral pharyngeal suction), the participants rated themselves higher than the competency demonstration. Two skills that had a mean participant and expert score between 1 (no knowledge) and 2 (able to perform with 1-to-1 coaching) were oral airway insertion and dry suction chest drainage. Some possible reasons why the participants rated themselves lower could be the use of different or unfamiliar terms or uncertainty of the procedure at a different health institution. Some newly graduated BSN nurses may have not performed the skills on a regular basis or only in simulation.

Websites of note

Websites of note

Sexuality in the age of Shakespeare

This book examines the important themes of sexuality, gender, love, and marriage in stage, literary, and film treatments of Shakespeare's plays. * Includes excerpts of four English early-modern marriage manuals * A bibliography contains sources regarding Greek, Roman, medieval, and early-modern European sexuality as well as Shakespearean criticism * A glossary clarifies unfamiliar terms

Into the Crater: The Mine Attack at Petersburg (review)

Reviewed by: Into the Crater: The Mine Attack at Petersburg Robert Gudmestad (bio) Into the Crater: The Mine Attack at Petersburg. By Earl J. Hess. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2010. Pp. 352. Cloth, $44.95.) The Battle of the Crater is best remembered both for the massacre of African American troops and as a golden opportunity to end the war that slipped through Ulysses S. Grant’s fingers. In Into the Crater, Earl Hess examines the action at the Crater in great detail and puts to rest controversies, including persistent claims that without Ambrose Burnside’s egregious bungling, the war might have ended nearly a year before it did. Hess’s account proceeds chronologically from the first notion of detonating explosives beneath Confederate lines, when Henry Pleasants, a lieutenant colonel in the Forty-eighth Pennsylvania Infantry, persuaded his superior officers that an underground attack held more promise than an assault on the Confederate trenches, to the disposition of the site after the war. From the beginning the plan was plagued with weaknesses, from the choice of a less than ideal location—Pegram’s Salient—to a haphazard execution. But the Federals were not alone in committing costly errors of judgment, for when the Confederates dug a countermine, they aimed their shaft too high and missed an opportunity to intercept the Union soldiers. Hess discusses in great detail how the miners of the Forty-eighth Pennsylvania overcame difficulties as they tunneled beneath the Confederates lines, and the engineering involved in the process is interesting. Nonspecialists might encounter some difficulty defining unfamiliar terms, such as “gallery” (a mine shaft) and “cavalier” (a walled entrenchment), and some context surrounding the siege of Petersburg would have been useful. Once the digging was completed, Union soldiers packed four tons of gunpowder into small, hollowed-out rooms at the end of the gallery and pieced together three long fuse lines. Hess rightly blames Burnside for many of the problems with the execution of the plan, as he put an incompetent officer in charge of the attack and then evaded responsibility for its failure. Whereas Burnside originally [End Page 431] wanted African American troops to lead the attack, George Meade was reluctant, for should it fail, he would be accused of using the men as cannon fodder. As a result, Burnside cast lots to determine who would lead the attack, leaving Brigadier General James H. Ledlie, “one of the worst division commanders of the war,” in charge of leading the ambitious and unprecedented attack on Confederate lines (60). In great detail, Hess describes the debacle that became the Battle of the Crater. After a false start where the fuses fizzled out, the Union bomb detonated at about 4:44 a.m. on July 30, 1864. The problems were legion: the breach was too small for the number of Union troops, Ledlie stayed behind the lines rather than lead his men, and the cohesion of his unit broke down under the novel and confusing circumstances. As one Union officer put it after returning from the Crater, “It was as utterly impracticable to re-form a brigade in that crater as it would be to marshal bees to hold a dress parade after upsetting the hive” (96). With no division or corps commanders on sight, few Union troops ventured out of the crater to widen the breach and complete the penetration of Confederate lines. Hess notes that the United States Colored Troops made the most strenuous efforts to move forward, but they faced long odds. The Confederates quickly recovered their wits and counterattacked. Hess correctly praises Brigadier General William Mahone for understanding the situation and pressing Confederates troops into the breach. He also notes that, contrary to general knowledge about the battle, the Confederates had also established a strong artillery presence and used their cannons to pound the Union troops. It was during this phase of the fighting that Confederate troops slaughtered African American soldiers after they surrendered. Hess suggests that because the Army of Northern Virginia was first exposed to African American soldiers in blue in the smoldering crater, their response was as much an expression of shock as it was of rage. Hess has written...

Monsters in the mirror: representations of Nazism in post-war popular culture

This collection provides readers with a comprehensive overview of postwar representations of Nazism in popular culture, documenting and critiquing their enormous impact and importance. * Includes images depicting Nazi-themed comics and magazine covers * Index of key terms define unfamiliar terms for general readers

International Index to Music Periodicals Full Text (review)

International Index to Music Periodicals Full Text. ProQuest LLC, 2010. http://iimpft.chadwyck.com (Accessed August 2009 to March 2010). [Requires a Web browser, an Internet connection, Adobe Reader plug-in to view PDF files, Adobe Flash plug-in to view animated content, and Apple Quick Time Player or Windows Media Player to listen to audio content. Pricing: dependent on the type of library and the size of its user population.] International Index to Music Periodicals (IIMP) joined the field of music periodical in late 1996 as a competitor to Music Index and RILM Abstracts. IIMP has always been an electronic product and was never available in print. Alter a couple of mergers, the publisher, Chadwyck-Healey, is now part of ProQuest. The database claims to provide indexing and abstracts for more than 440 international music periodicals, plus full text for 130 journals (from the product description at http://www.proquest.com/en-US/catalogs/databases/detail/iimp_ft.shtml). CONTENT The database essentially contains two separate groups of records: records--which generally include abstracts and subject descriptors--from 1996 on, and retrospective records from before 1996, which do not include abstracts or subject headings. In the early days of the product, the two sets were separate files, but they have long since been merged into a single database. So what is the breakdown between retrospective and current? Is the database more useful for newer records or older ones? Fortunately, the ability to do blank searches (with no search terms but with a range of dates), makes these questions fairly easy to answer. In February 2010, 622,968 (74 percent) of the 840,200 total citations were current records from 1996 on. In contrast, breaking the pre-1996 records down into live-year periods shows that coverage from 1991 to 1995 contains 57,963 citations. The number decreases for each preceding five-year span, as results sets drop below 20,000 hits for 1981-85 and below 10,000 hits for 1951-55. These numbers can be contrasted with the span 2001-05, which indexes 228,557 articles. So clearly, the bulk of the citations are within the last fifteen years. On the one hand, the value of the retrospective citations is diminished by the absence of subject headings and abstracts, yet that deficiency is counterbalanced by the presence of full text for some of the records (providing one subscribes to the full-text version). Coverage in IIMP overlaps substantially with Music Index and RILM, but there is also a fair amount of divergence in titles indexed. For details on overlap and on currency of indexing, see Alan Green's article Keeping Up With the Times: Evaluating Currency of Indexing, Language Coverage and Subject Area Coverage in the Three Music Periodical Index Databases (Music Reference Services Quarterly 8, no. 1 [January 2001]: 53). The basic database content of IIMP is also supplemented by an assortment of resources under the heading Reference. These adjuncts are currently all taken from Naxos Music Library (NML), and they include a glossary, a collection of opera synopses, music fundamental terms, and a pronunciation guide. These rudimentary resources may be helpful to a user confronted by unfamiliar terms or concepts, particularly while outside the library; they are not, however, a substitute for the many quality resources found in music libraries (or elsewhere online). IIMP also includes links from subject headings for composers to the corresponding composer pages in Naxos Music Library. This rather broad approach may be helpful, but the user will have to do some digging to find specific works. INDEXING IIMP can be searched through a quick search function that offers only the ability to enter keyword terms into a single search box, but most users (and most searches) will benefit from the use of the Search Articles page. This search option offers the ability to restrict a search to particular indexes (author, title, journal, broad subject and narrow subject) as well as limiting by date, language, publication type, and other criteria. …

Radiology Report Clarity: A Cohort Study of Structured Reporting Compared With Conventional Dictation

The aim of this study was to determine if radiology residents who use a structured reporting system (SRS) produce reports of greater clarity than residents who use free-text dictation to report cranial MR imaging in patients with clinical suspicion of stroke. This double-cohort study included residents creating reports for 25 cranial MR imaging studies using an SRS in the intervention group and free text in the control group (report n = 1,685). Attending physicians from multiple subspecialties were surveyed seeking clarity ratings of randomly selected reports. Two neuroradiology fellows rated the clarity of 180 of the reports. Clarity ratings were analyzed by using Wilcoxon's signed-rank test for paired data and the Mann-Whitney U test for unpaired data. Forty-three of 95 surveyed physicians returned completed surveys, with mean clarity ratings for SRS (4.9) and free-text (5.1) reports that did not differ significantly. Respondents' comments most often referred to confusing syntax, unfamiliar terms, or format preferences. Fellow raters rated the clarity of SRS reports lower than that of free-text reports (P < .001). The use of an SRS to create MRI reports did not seem to improve or worsen attending physicians' perceptions of report clarity. Experience level may affect clarity-related report preferences. Future SRS should probably include definitions of key terms and be formatted to minimize syntactical errors.

The Engineering Project: Its Nature, Ethics, and Promise (review)

Reviewed by: The Engineering Project: Its Nature, Ethics, and Promise Henry Petroski (bio) The Engineering Project: Its Nature, Ethics, and Promise. By Gene Moriarty. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008. Pp. viii+216. $55. This book proved to be quite different from what I expected it to be. Perhaps this was because my academic home is in a civil engineering department and Gene Moriarty's is in an electrical engineering department. To me, the term "engineering project" evokes Boston's Big Dig. It also immediately brings to mind other such large-scale endeavors as the Manhattan and Apollo projects. In fact, none of these appears explicitly in Moriarty's index, and the Challenger accident gets only a single paragraph. The Engineering Project is mainly a book on the ethics of the engineer, engineering, and the engineered thing. The word project is used to connote just about any object or result of engineering. Furthermore, Moriarty divides the history and future of the world of engineering into three parts: premodern, modern, and, ideally, the now and forever after. The premodern "engineer" is linked closely with the craft and apprentice traditions, the modern with engineering science, the rest with a heightened sensitivity to culture, context, and caring. The structure of the book, like that of its subtitle, is tripartite. It is also symmetrical. Thus, part 1, "The Modern Engineering Enterprise," has three chapters, on process, process ethics, and colonization, by which is meant essentially the influence of technology on culture. Part 2, "The Premodern [End Page 540] Engineering Endeavor," has chapters on "person," virtue ethics, and contextualization. Part 3,"The Focal Engineering Venture," discusses product,material ethics, and balance. Seldom does the table of contents of any book reveal its structure so boldly, but no explanation is given as to why the pre-modern is considered after the modern. Moriarty likes to introduce unfamiliar terms for familiar concepts. Thus, "focal engineering" is that which contributes to a balance between technology's promise of "disburdenment" from everyday chores and "an engagement that enriches life and elevates the spirit" (p. 1). It is to this end that the whole book tends, with the final chapter being largely a case for engineers maintaining balance by "acting in the service of the Good" (p. 211), which Moriarty takes to be a "focal fulcrum." According to Moriarty, "it is for the sake of the Good that the focal engineer engineers the focally engineered product" (p. 206). The principal foundations for Moriarty's arguments are taken from works of philosophy and ethics. There are relatively few references to the literature of the history of engineering or technology. Some of the examples he offers in support of his calls for ethical behavior can appear to be forced. Thus, as an example of balance in the focal engineering venture, he asks the reader to "assume in my human-oriented company we are assigned the task of coming up with a proposal for engineering a movable walkway for a new airport in a developing third world country." The company's proposal beats out that of a "nonfocal competitor" by harmonizing "with the hustle and bustle of the airport ambiance." He and his colleagues even "contemplated applying the principles of feng shui to make the movable walkway more resonant with the world of the airport." They consider how they might "make the experience memorable" for users of the walkway. Such considerations represent "focalizations" of the engineering practice (p. 199). The Engineering Project is a handsome book, with an attractive dust jacket whose illustration is repeated as the book's frontispiece. Clearly, some thought was given to the book's design. However, as with any design, things can be carried too far. One aspect of the design that distracted me throughout was the placement of a simple centered rule device beneath the running heads. It is located far enough below the heads to look like it belongs to the text and thereby seemed to signal a break in the text. To me, this attempt to distinguish the book's layout from the ordinary created an unnecessary distraction. The book appears to have been poorly copy-edited and proofread. Thus we read "the junkman...

Cognitive Bias and Planning Error: Nullification of Evidence-Based Medicine in the Nursing Home

Medical error is common, and has a large impact on our national healthcare budget. The elderly and chronically ill are among the largest consumers of the Medicare budget fueling interest in avoiding unnecessary hospitalizations among nursing home residents. In addition to preventive measures involving care coordination and better implementation of advanced directives, this article argues that many nursing home residents have a greatly inflated risk of hospitalization and would benefit from more intensive medical management. Reflective practice is used to analyze why nullification error (inappropriately omitting evidence-based treatments) regularly occurred among nursing home residents over an 8-year period. The study frames the root causes of clinical inertia and nullification error using terms from cognitive psychology and contemporary philosophy. Unrecognized biases and cognitive pitfalls are the basis for why competent physicians reject evidence-based medicine (EBM) in the nursing home. Six common recurring nullification errors are discussed with the proposed root causes. A glossary of unfamiliar terms is included. The uncertainty over the appropriateness of EBM for the nursing home patient has led to a widespread bias toward undertreatment that has reached alarming proportions. It is true that most elderly patients do not wish to extend their life expectancy, but most do wish to avoid medical complications and unnecessary hospitalizations. Rejecting treatments that extend life expectancy often results in rejection of the very treatments that would improve the probability of achieving their wish to retain fair health. Practitioners do not reject meaningful treatments because of lack of knowledge or lack of concern. They do so because of an incomplete education regarding the biases and cognitive pitfalls that are encountered when planning care for the elderly.

Policy versus practice: the role of the home language in learning mathematics and science in English-medium classrooms

The focus of this paper is on the effects of the use of the home language (i.e. isiZulu) on teachers' and learners' understanding and use of core concepts in mathematics and science at the senior phase, in contexts where the language of instruction is English. It reports on a national, collaborative, multilingual research project which attempts to address the challenge posed by the National Language Policy of South Africa, namely, that learners have a right to learn through their home language where feasible. The project involved four South African universities and four languages: isiZulu, isiXhosa, Afrikaans and English. The first phase of the research was the identification and translation of core concepts in the science and mathematics curriculum, which culminated in the development of a multilingual resource book. The second phase involved the evaluation of the book with in-service teachers by means of questionnaires, workshops and focus-group interviews for purposes of triangulation. These data were the basis on which teachers for the tracer study were selected. This part of the study involved classroom observation of mathematics and science lessons at intervals over a two-month period. Findings from the KwaZulu-Natal regional data revealed various complexities regarding the use of the home language for communicating scientific and mathematical knowledge. These included unfamiliar terms leading to the question of standardisation and an initial preference for the use of terminology in English with explanations in the home language.

‘It's easy to learn when you using your home language but with English you need to start learning language before you get to the concept’: bilingual concept development in an English medium university in South Africa

This article describes a multilingual glossary project in the economics department at the University of Cape Town which gave multilingual students learning economics through the medium of English, opportunities to discuss new economic concepts in their home languages in order to broaden and enrich understanding of these new concepts. The findings from this project illustrate how important it is that students use a range of languages and discourses to negotiate meaning of unfamiliar terms. The article responds to Mesthrie's (2008) caution regarding the development of multilingual glossaries, dictionaries and textbooks at higher education level in South Africa. It argues that translation of terminology happens inevitably both inside and outside our university classrooms as multilingual university students, in peer learning groups, codeswitch from English to their primary languages in order to better understand new concepts and this could be used as an important resource for building academic registers in African languages.

The Tropical World of Samuel Taylor Darling: Parasites, Pathology and Philanthropy (review)

Reviewed by: The Tropical World of Samuel Taylor Darling: Parasites, Pathology and Philanthropy José G. Rigau-Pérez E. Chaves-Carballo . The Tropical World of Samuel Taylor Darling: Parasites, Pathology and Philanthropy. Eastbourne, U.K.: Sussex Academic Press, 2007. xx + 260 pp. Ill. $75.00 (ISBN-10: 1-84519-183-8, ISBN-13: 978-1-84519-183-2). Samuel T. Darling is remembered as the pathologist who first described histoplasmosis. At the Ancón (later Gorgas) Hospital during the decade of the Panama Canal's construction, he applied the latest microbiologic knowledge and technology to patient treatments and autopsies, which helped define not only histoplasmosis but also amebiasis and New World leishmaniasis. His interests and accomplishments eventually extended beyond human pathology and laboratory research into medical zoology and entomology. Darling came to medicine relatively late, graduating at age thirty-one in 1903, and died at age 53 in 1925, after a motor car accident. His first decade of professional activity was spent in Panama; the second, as a Rockefeller Foundation official, spanned the globe. His research on hookworm disease (uncinariasis) in Malaysia, Indonesia, and Fiji from 1915 to 1917 led him to conclude that in high-risk locations, just as infection was nearly universal, treatment should be universally applied, without wasting resources on individual fecal examination. From 1917 to 1920 he directed the Institute of Hygiene in São Paulo, Brazil, where in addition to the training of medical students and public health officers, he continued his research on hookworm and malaria. From 1923 to 1925, he was director of a field station for studies (and training) on malaria in Leesburg, Georgia, until he left on an ill-fated tour of Mediterranean locations with endemic malaria. Chaves-Carballo recovers Darling's personality from the recollections of descendants, from second-hand stories, and especially from institutional reports, as few personal letters seem to have survived. He uses contemporary sources to produce [End Page 223] vivid descriptions of events Darling surely witnessed, such as a train ride from the Atlantic to the Pacific coast of Panama, without ever presuming to know Darling's thoughts. The pathologist seems to have "loved to work in complete isolation" (p. 65), but at the same time was glad to have been "dragged out" of his "shell" by marriage (p. 123). To one of his first assistants in Panama, Darling seemed "a critical, merciless task-master," whose "devotion to his work and his ability to improvise and meet all problems never failed him" (p. 65), but a trainee at the field station in Georgia also remembered him as a patient, attentive teacher (p. 152). The book would have benefited from a more extensive exploration of the impact on Darling's life and career of the Spanish-American and First World wars (barely mentioned), the explanation of unfamiliar terms (such as autopsy diener, misspelled as "deaner," p. 62; punkah, p. 94; mosquito bars, p. 132), and names mentioned without reference to the person's position (e.g., O'Connor, p. 128; Abercrombie, p. 132; and Boyce, p. 135). The author is too quick to attribute Darling's "dogged persistence" (p. 64) and support of a "proper" barrier against miscegenation (p. 97) to a New England upbringing. A more lamentable abridgment is the occasional presentation of Darling's investigations only by the results, without further exploration of the researcher's ability to frame hypotheses and devise methods to prove his conclusions, for example, the identification of Anopheles albimanus as the vector of malaria in the Canal Zone (p. 70). Darling's work on the utility of spleen enlargement prevalence (the "splenic index") as a rapid, low-cost indicator of malaria activity in a community is not explained (pp. 114 and 139). These suggestions that the book is, perhaps, too short also indicate that the text is interesting, a pleasure to read, and a very useful tool, not just for researchers interested in Darling's work but for anyone investigating the development of scientific knowledge and prevention programs about infectious diseases in tropical areas. José G. Rigau-Pérez Universidad de Puerto Rico Copyright © 2009 The Johns Hopkins University Press

Abstract Art as Alternative to Multiculturalist Education

Art as Alternative to Multiculturalist Education 218 P H I L O S O P H Y O F E D U C A T I O N 2 0 0 9 unfairly. Multiculturalism resists this trend by promoting an appreciation of how our society may be enhanced by the contributions of increasingly diverse, equal, peacefully coexisting, and communicating cultures. This movement is fundamentally educational, as well as political, and has been changing how we approach the humanities. For those of us who teach in this field, one of our chief aims is to help students cultivate their self-knowledge. Traditionally, we encourage them to reflect on their experiences and views in the light of texts that employ unfamiliar terms of understanding. We hope that by learning the language of such texts, they will broaden, deepen, and refine how they understand themselves. If we are multiculturalists, then, we will want them to develop a clearer and stronger sense of their cultural identities and their relationships to other cultures. The two of course go hand in hand: one’s cultural identity is one’s involvement in the historical interaction between one’s culture or cultures and others’; that interaction in turn can only be interpreted from the perspective of a specific cultural identity. Reflecting on this dimension of their experiences and views should bring home to students the good of participating in constructive intercultural exchanges and the injustice of supporting destructive ones. The best guides to such reflection would accordingly be texts that understand the world in ways that belong to distinct cultures, texts that exemplify cultural understanding, explicitly or implicitly, emphatically or unconsciously. This would seem to cover humanistic work in general, since all of it is rooted in some cultural context — including abstract art. Take Norman Lewis’s Phantasy II. Sure, the painting appears to be simply an arrangement of vertical and diagonal planes sometimes bounding, and sometimes floating free of, blotches of red, yellow, green, and other colors in a shallow, ambiguous space. But is not the fact that Lewis was an African-American man from a proletarian background, trying to prove himself in New York at the end of the nineteen-forties, key for understanding why and how the painting was produced? Fueling the rise of multiculturalism has been the development of historicist analysis like this. Historicism provides the movement with a supporting method of inquiry, criticism, and education. Virtually everyone now accepts that humanistic and artistic works stand to reveal and be revealed by their historical origins in a conjuncture of cultural forces, thus illuminating our own cultural identities. It must be admitted, though, that a painting like Phantasy II is less useful for a multiculturalist teacher than one that pictures the world more recognizably. Because Lewis’s work does not show us much about the Harlem society around him, its cultural understanding has to be reconstructed using sources of information about the painter and his world that are external to the painting. In fact, if we are primarily interested in cultural understanding as such, it makes sense in general to favor the study of other kinds of works. Historical documents and scientific, philosophical, critical, and artistic works that comment directly on cultural history are more valuable for this multiculturalist teacher and her students. True, in order to master the historicist mode of inquiry, it is a good idea for students to practice it on texts

A nurses’ guide to the critical reading of research

Objective: A sound theoretical foundation to guide practice is enhanced by the ability of nurses to critique research. This article provides a structured route to questioning the methodology of nursing research. Primary Argument: Nurses may find critiquing a research paper a particularly daunting experience when faced with their first paper. Knowing what questions the nurse should be asking is perhaps difficult to determine when there may be unfamiliar research terms to grasp. Nurses may benefit from a structured approach which helps them understand the sequence of the text and the subsequent value of a research paper. Conclusion: A framework is provided within this article to assist in the analysis of a research paper in a systematic, logical order. The questions presented in the framework may lead the nurse to conclusions about the strengths and weaknesses of the research methods presented in a research article. The framework does not intend to separate quantitative or qualitative paradigms but to assist the nurse in making broad observations about the nature of the research.