Warm Bed Research Articles

Fumarate reductase drives methane emissions in the genus Oryza through differential regulation of the rhizospheric ecosystem

The emergence of waterlogged Oryza species ∼15Mya (million years ago) supplied an anoxic warm bed for methane-producing microorganisms, and methane emissions have hence accompanied the entire evolutionary history of the genus Oryza. However, to date no study has addressed how methane emission has been altered during Oryza evolution. In this paper we used a diverse collection of wild and cultivated Oryza species to study the relation between Oryza evolution and methane emissions. Phylogenetic analyses and methane detection identified a co-evolutionary pattern between Oryza and methane emissions, mediated by the diversity of the rhizospheric ecosystems arising from different oxygen levels. Fumarate was identified as an oxygen substitute used to retain the electron transport/energy production in the anoxic rice root, and the contribution of fumarate reductase to Oryza evolution and methane emissions has also been assessed. We confirmed the between-species patterns using genetic dissection of the traits in a cross between a low and high methane-emitting species. Our findings provide novel insights on the evolutionary processes of rice paddy methane emissions: the evolution of wild rice produces different Oryza species with divergent rhizospheric ecosystem attributing to the different oxygen levels and fumarate reductase activities, methane emissions are comprehensively assessed by the rhizospheric environment of diversity Oryza species and result in a co-evolution pattern.

Exploring the limits to our understanding of whether fish feel pain.

Exploring the limits to our understanding of whether fish feel pain.

Retracted: Semiconductor Polymer Carbon Composite Coated Fabric for Warm Beds in Hospital

Retracted: Semiconductor Polymer Carbon Composite Coated Fabric for Warm Beds in Hospital

The Pragmatics of Media and Identity Politics

Politics of identity and social media have essential impacts on the public discourse. Analyzing the use of social media by different groups of people and how it changes people’s identity recognition and linguistic behaviour is essential for scholars to predict the future rhetoric environment of social media and the development of linguistic behaviour. To further understand social media users' self-identity and linguistic behaviour, this study used social research and digital image analysis to find the relationship between people's self-identity and factors affecting their interest perception, moral attitude, cognition, and emotional structure. Individual characters such as gender, age, education background, cultural background, and value orientation are also considered in the analysis. The study found the common social perspective on politics, culture, and public policies to be crippled or even crumbled. Under the catalysis of such division, the use of language makes itself the warm bed for the extreme evolution of confronts of identity interests and opinion contradiction. Therefore, the transformation and integration of diffident perspectives and the possibility of reshaping language communication bring new hope to public culture.

Semiconductor Polymer Carbon Composite Coated Fabric for Warm Beds in Hospital

Patients suffering from diseases that occur due to spreading of virus like fever and cold will have decrease in body temperature. They feel cold in the normal body and room temperature conditions. For the comfort of these patients, an electric under blanket is designed which warms up the patient to maintain the normal body temperature. The heated under body supports include a heater assembly and a layer of compressible support material. The heater assembly includes a flexible heating element, multiplex polyester, and a temperature sensor. The flexible heater element may include a fabric, which coated with a conductive or semiconductive polymer. The heated under body support may also include a water resistant shell, whereas it may encase the heater assembly and the compressible support material. The material used for outer shell and inner heating element has simulated in COMSOL tool for analyzing the heat transfer between them. The proto type model has simulated in PROTEUS software, which includes Arduino UNO and thermistor. This analysis will give the result whether the material can be used as the under garment for warming the patient.

ЗООТЕХНИЧЕСКИЕ ПОКАЗАТЕЛИ ПОДСТИЛОЧНОГО МАТЕРИАЛА ИЗ ХВОЙНОЙ ДРЕВЕСНОЙ СТРУЖКИ

At present, poultry farms are faced with the urgent task of choosing high-quality nesting material to provide floor birds with a soft, dry and warm bed. This is usually done by covering the floor of the house with a nesting material that changes at the end of the growing cycle or as it becomes dirty and wet. The introduction of industrial technologies for growing poultry in agriculture, characterized by a high intensity of poultry production, makes increased demands on the nesting materials functional properties. We have conducted a study and made an analysis of the main zootechnical requirements of coniferous wood chips for nesting materials: mass fraction of moisture, maximum moisture capacity, thermal conductivity coefficient, and dust formation indicators. Three samples of coniferous wood chips with dimensions of 5-40 mm, 2-5 mm, and 0.5- 1.5 mm were selected for the study at the “OOO Omega enterprise”, Mari El Republic, on the basis of which optimal samples were determined as a nesting material, both for industrial livestock and domestic animals. According to the data obtained as a result of research, coniferous wood chips will reduce unsanitary conditions of keeping animals and birds, and will also facilitate the fight against pathogens of infectious and invasive diseases.

Environmental drivers of rhodolith beds and epiphytes community along the South Western Atlantic coast

Environmental conditions shape the occurrence and abundance of habitat-building organisms at global scales. Rhodolith beds structure important hard substrate habitats for a large number of marine benthic organisms. These organisms can benefit local biodiversity levels, but also compete with rhodoliths for essential resources. Therefore, understanding the factors shaping the distribution of rhodoliths and their associated communities along entire distributional ranges is of much relevance for conservational biology, particularly in the scope of future environmental changes. Here we predict suitable habitat areas and identify the main environmental drivers of rhodoliths’ variability and of associated epiphytes along a large-scale latitudinal gradient. Occurrence and abundance data were collected throughout the South-western Atlantic coast (SWA) and modelled against high resolution environmental predictors extracted from Bio-Oracle. The main drivers for rhodolith occurrence were light availability and temperature at the bottom of the ocean, while abundance was explained by nitrate, temperature and current velocity. Tropical regions showed the highest abundance of rhodoliths. No latitudinal pattern was detected in the variability of epiphytes abundance. However, significant differences were found between sampled sites regarding the composition of predominant taxa. The predictors influencing such differences were temperature and nitrate. The Tropical region is abundant in species with warm-water affinities, decreasing toward warm temperate region. The expressive occurrence of tropical species not referred before for warm temperate beds indicate a plausible tropicalization event.

The Impact of Transport Modality on Efficiency of Simulated Neonatal Endotracheal Intubation.

Although the transport of neonates is generally safe, adverse events can occur where equipment is a contributing factor. The aims of the study were to explore how the types of neonatal intensive care unit bed in use could impact a simulated emergency endotracheal intubation and to identify future areas for training and education. The efficiency of endotracheal intubation performed during simulated neonatal transport using 3 different transport modalities (closed incubator bed, open incubator bed, and open radiant warmer bed) was assessed. Twenty participants were enrolled. Outcomes included time to intubation, intubation success, and ease of mannequin access and were compared using Wilcoxon signed-rank tests and McNemar exact tests. Median times to intubation were 59, 44, and 37 seconds with the incubator top closed, with the top open, and with the open radiant warmer bed, respectively. Intubation was slowest and subjective ease of access was most difficult with the incubator top closed. Experienced anesthesia providers had significantly greater difficulty with simulated emergency endotracheal intubation when performing neonatal transport with the incubator top closed compared with available alternative modes.

George Orwell-Anti-Imperialistic outlook and Anti-totalitarian

There are two further reasons for his down and out life not stated by Orwell, but which ought, I think, to come into the reckoning. First, Orwell's own impression of working-class life (it appears particularly strongly in Nineteen Eighty-four) as a kind of warm feather bed into which one could sink abandoning all pretensions. His own family, he seemed to feel, had only recently and with great difficulty hauled itself up into the middle classes. The enterprise of a grant parent, the fiothold gained by his father as minor official, his own suffering at school and the sacrifices made by parents and sisters to keep him there, had led only to this a police job which was more than he could stomach. Since the whole upward fight had been in vain, the sensible thing to do was to relax and go down. The resulting hardship would be well compensated by peace of kind.

James Joyce: Portrait and Still Life

James Joyce: Portrait and Still Life* MARIANNE McDONALD My title plays on Joyce’s first novel, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), with its hero, Stephen Dedalus, named after the Greek artist Daedalus, who created the Labyrinth. The Greek craftsman made wings for himself and his son, Icarus, held together with wax. Icarus did not heed his father’s warnings and flew too close to the sun; the wax melted and the son drowned in the sea. He was a good symbol for the creator Joyce, who invented a new type of literature that was shot down again and again as he tried to get it published. But Dedalus also is a character in Ulysses, and this is the identity Joyce intended to be his own. Joyce in all his work is conscious of death. We think of “The Dead,” the final story in Dubliners, in which priests sleep in coffins to keep them mindful of their end. Stephen in Ulysses “sees corpses rising from their graves like vampires to deprive the living of joy.” But Joyce could be equally resistant to its fascination, as Leopold Bloom, after brooding on his dead son and father, says in Glasnevin Cemetery, “They are not going to get me this innings. Warm beds: warm full-blooded life.” Death permeates life for Joyce: bride-bed, childbed, and the bed of death, a necessary cycle, but this realization can make every day an adventure and bring gratitude and love for life out of still life. A portrait can be a still life, something unmoving. While that can be a corpse, it may also be something living—and after so many years there is still life in all of the writing by *Based on a talk given on Bloomsday, 2015, at the University of California, San Diego. arion 24.1 spring/summer 2016 James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (1882–1944), born at 41 Brighton Square, Rathgar, Dublin. In the Portrait we learn he was “educated” by the “holy fathers” and regularly beaten. Both his overloaded religious name and education almost guaranteed he would be an atheist. When after his death a Catholic priest offered a religious burial, Joyce’s wife Nora said she couldn’t do that to him. Joyce died in Zurich, having wandered Europe much as Bloom (both Jew and Irishman) wandered Dublin. The parallels between Joyce and his Bloom lie partly in the thirteenth -century legend of the wandering Jew who insulted Jesus on the cross and was cursed to walk the earth until Christ should return. Joyce, for his part, was never devout and could also be insulting about religion—especially Irish Catholicism—as well as people. As a result, most of his works were banned for many years. Wandering, then, for him was a blessing (as he soon tired of most places and most people), not a curse. Ulysses, loosely based on Homer’s Odyssey, was aptly a tale of wandering throughout Dublin, but also in the underworld (episode 6, Hades). Joyce continually resurrects the dead in his use of the Greek classics. Here I am reminded of what Bryan Friel in Translations has the schoolmaster, Hugh, say to Lieutenant Yolland, who is working on a map and renaming places from Irish into English (for the people who occupied Ireland for about 800 years): “Wordsworth? . . . no. I’m afraid we’re not familiar with your literature, Lieutenant. We feel closer to the warm Mediterranean. We tend to overlook your island.” Yes, the Irish prefer Greece and Greek Literature. The Irish have come to wear their religion lightly. In an interview with an Australian newspaper, an Irish taxi driver, asked how he felt about the same-sex marriage referendum just passed, answered with a straight face, “Oh I approve of it. After all I’ve been having same sex with the wife after thirty years.” Another variation on still life? A funeral—for another example of this sort of levity—can be “funferal,” as in the song Finnegan’s Wake, when it james joyce: portrait and still life 88 describes a hooley or donnybrook (Irish words for brawl)— which ends up reviving the dead Finnegan. Thus the correct name of...

Second Time

Second Time Chris Feudtner Moments matter to the degree we make them. I I walked from the hospital towards home in the early morning, bundled against the lingering cold of the night. I was tired beyond tired. The world surrounding me was dressed in white, a thin coat of snow having fallen in the midst of a squall that had passed through a few hours before. Mine were the only footprints on the path thus far. Not only was the grass tufted with clumps of snow, the southwestern sides of the tree trunks were also plastered white. But none of this snow would last once the sun fully rose. Likewise, the faint day moon, barely imprinted on the far western blue sky, would fade away into nothingness. Or rather, the moon would still be there somewhere, but invisible. Even the snow would transform to be endlessly reborn as new forms, solid or liquid, still or flowing, on distant landscapes or hovering above, evanescent yet eternal. [End Page 535] Then my mind turned back to the baby who had died just a few hours ago, and all that happened in those 22 minutes of life, replaying events almost second by second. Where would all of that life-time go as time moved on? II Glistening wet, hair matted, the crown of the head had emerged. The gloved fingertips of the OB, seated on a stool between the legs of the mother, guided the head, face down, sliding outward as the woman pushed. He then grasped the neck as the head rotated, and first the upper shoulder followed by the lower shoulder with increasing rapidity came out, and with a rush the rest of the torso and legs, along with an uncoiling of umbilical cord and fluid. The OB pivoted and handed the infant to the nurse, turned back, clipped the umbilical cord, and cut the baby free. With the infant partially wrapped in warmed green towels, the nurse came to the resuscitation table and placed the bundle down. The child was a boy, well developed, his eyes open, his skin already pink. Yet as I dried him under the bright lights, and I saw his limbs lying so passively on the warmer bed, the words of the attending neonatologist kept coming back to me: “So sad—their other baby died after such a difficult struggle, and now to have a second with the same condition—so sad.” III Not quite two years before, in the adjacent delivery room, the same mother had delivered another baby, the couple’s third child. That baby girl had been born without any signs of distress after an uneventful pregnancy. Not until the mother brought the baby to her breast to feed for the first time did that child’s hypotonia and weakness become apparent. The infant barely latched on, kept coming off, and was unable to draw any milk. Concerned by the baby’s seeming lethargy, the OB service summoned the NICU team. The baby, who was named Silvia, was taken to the NICU where she underwent a full septic work-up, and received an IV and empiric antibiotic therapy. Four hours after birth, Silvia had her first seizure, although no one knew at the time exactly what had happened. Instead of her body parts moving during the seizure, her body became completely motionless and she stopped breathing. Alarms went off. The seizure lasted perhaps 30 or 40 seconds. The nurse had given her breaths though the oxygen bag-and-mask, and even when she started to breathe again, the NICU team was sufficiently worried that they intubated her and took control of her breathing via the mechanical ventilator. Two hours later, Silvia seized again. So began what her parents later recalled, with grief and regret, as the siege. They were not angry with the NICU staff; quite the opposite, they were extremely grateful for the staff ’s devoted care of their daughter. Over the ensuing [End Page 536] five weeks, as Silvia had several EEG studies that revealed she was having seizures, some noticeable and others not, throughout each day, they would come to the NICU, to the side of her isolette bed, open...

The Bear in the Book (review)

Reviewed by: The Bear in the Book Jeannette Hulick Banks, Kate. The Bear in the Book; illus. by Georg Hallensleben. Foster/Farrar, 2012. [40p]. ISBN 978-0-374-30591-8 $16.99 Reviewed from galleys R 4–6 yrs. A boy falls asleep listening to his mother read aloud his favorite book about a hibernating black bear in this somnolent and cozy meta-narrative. The leisurely pace suits the story’s bedtime setting, as does the quiet voice of the narrative. Banks also ably captures the physical pleasures—touching the edges and pages of a favorite book, looking for hidden details in illustrations, leaning against one’s mother while she reads aloud—of sharing a beloved book together before bed: “The boy held the book. He listened to the sound the pages made when he turned them back and forth. ‘Shh,’ he said to the sleeping bear.” This story may have more resonance for the adult reading it aloud than the child listening to it, but many kids will relate to the familiar delight of hearing a favorite book read to them again and again. Hallensleben’s paintings add further substance and warmth, with their heavy brushstrokes of burnished gold, red, and brown set off by icy blue and white tones that emphasize the cold of the hibernating bear’s story. The snug depiction of the almost stuffed-animal-like black bear asleep in his den and the contrast between the bear’s cold winter and the boy’s warm bed will engage viewers just as it clearly does the protagonist. This would of course make a fine bedtime story; it might also be interesting to use as a catalyst for discussion about the love of books and reading. Jeannette Hulick Reviewer Copyright © 2012 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

When filling the glass only leaves it half empty!– Insight into the cardiovascular physiology of haemorrhage under heat stress

When filling the glass only leaves it half empty!– Insight into the cardiovascular physiology of haemorrhage under heat stress

Back to the Virtual Farm: Gleaning the Agriculture-Management Game

It is a cold and dreary winter morning, and raindrops are pattering away at the windows. But I drag myself out of a warm bed because I know I have wheat and onions to harvest, crops that will wither and die if I yield to the temptation to sleep a few more hours. Pausing only to slide my feet into slippers, I shuffle to my office, settle down at my desk, and press the button to start my computer. Just another day on the farm. Like millions of others across the globe, I have become a dedicated digital farmer in my spare minutes and hours. FarmVille, the game that eventually loads before me, has been touted as the most popular game in the world by the developers at Zynga and Facebook, and still it is far from the only example of virtual agricultural play. Beyond the dozens of “social” farm games like Farm Town, myFarm, Happy Farm, and Sunshine Ranch, there are also hosts of downloadable “casual” games like Farm Mania, Farm Craft, Farm Simulator, and Farmer Jane, and console-based farm games like the extremely popular Harvest Moon series for Nintendo and PlayStation platforms. A website like Big Fish Games hosts over 40 games just with the word “farm” in their titles, and that does not even count the less obvious but still clearly related productions like Country Harvest and Plant Tycoon.

Design and Analysis of Biomass Drying unit with Waste Heat Recovery and Storage

Moisture content in the biomass causes reduction in efficiency of the power generation in biomass power plant. Removal of this moisture is been biggest challenge during monsoon and winter. This paper deals with method of reduction of moisture in minimum time by using waste heat recovery. Warm bed with PCM material is continuously heated by exhaust flue gas, this warm bed used as moisture removal system. Analysis of system with various PCM materials were carried by creating geometry using Gambit and simulated results obtained using Fluent.

Scabies: A Review of Diagnosis and Management Based on Mite Biology

Scabies is a contagious parasitic dermatitis that is a significant cause of morbidity, especially outside of the United States. Scabies is diagnosed most often by correlating clinical suspicion with the identification of a burrow. Although scabies should be on the differential for any patient who presents with a pruritic dermatosis, clinicians must consider a wide range of diagnostic possibilities. This approach will help make scabies simultaneously less over- and underdiagnosed by clinicians in the community. Atypical or otherwise complex presentations may necessitate the use of more definitive diagnostic modalities, such as microscopic examination of KOH prepared skin scrapings, high-resolution digital photography, dermoscopy, or biopsy. Scabies therapy involves making the correct diagnosis, recognizing the correct clinical context to guide treatment of contacts and fomites, choosing the most effective medication, understanding how to use the agent properly, and following a rational basis for when to use and reuse that agent. Although the development of new therapeutic agents is always welcome, tried and true treatments are still effective today. Permethrin is the gold standard therapy, with malathion being an excellent topical alternative. Ivermectin is an effective oral alternative that is especially useful in crusted scabies, patients who are bed ridden, and in institutional outbreaks. Despite the availability of effective therapeutics, treatment failures still occur, mostly secondary to application error (ie, failure to treat the face and scalp or close contacts, failure to reapply medication) or failure to decontaminate fomites. Because increasing resistance to scabies treatments may be on the horizon, we propose that standard of care for scabies treatment should involve routine treatment of the scalp and face and re-treating patients at day 4 on the basis of the scabies life cycle to ensure more efficient mite eradication. Practitioners should attempt to treat all close contacts simultaneously with the source patient. To eradicate mites, all fomites should be placed in a dryer for 10 minutes on a high setting, furniture and carpets vacuumed, and nonlaunderables isolated for a minimum of 2 days, or, for those who wish to be rigorous, 3 weeks.

Do Not Look Around

Do Not Look Around Daniel Greyber (bio) My toes are curled over the lip of another pool on another early morning. I like to visit places by swimming there. I swim, in part, as a strange form of tourism: a glacier-fed lake in Yosemite’s high country, the arctic-fed ocean water off the coast of Oregon, the local pool. Some people sample food of a new locale; I encounter a place through its water. I swim, too, out of necessity. My back is a chronic problem and, stubbornly, I refuse dozens of people who have recommended to me yoga and pilates (forms of exercise sweeping the land) and stick to what I know, and what also is good for me: swimming. For purposes of health and tourism, I awake at 5:25 a.m., put on an undershirt, turtleneck, sweatshirt, and overcoat to protect my thin Los Angeles blood, and dutifully follow the woman’s instructions on my GPS from the Hampton Inn in Chicopee, Massachusetts to the Springfield JCC across town. I hang my many layers in the locker, pull on a suit and goggles, and, by 5:55 a.m., I am standing at the edge of another local pool. This one is typical of most JCC pools built in the 1960s and 70s, decorated in earth tones and small tiles. Standing at the water’s edge, I face the same small fear that I faced hundreds of mornings in my teens and early twenties: diving into water so much colder than the warm bed I got out of just minutes before. I see a woman in the next lane but the pool is quite empty. I am happy I will have a lane to myself, that I am not in her lane. She is slow. Really slow, like to the point where, for a moment I, quite obnoxiously, think to myself, “My God, she’s doing breaststroke and going backwards!” With that unnecessarily smug and boastful thought having passed through my mind, I dive into the water and begin swimming. [End Page 102] I read a book a few months ago: The Way of the Peaceful Warrior by Dan Milman. A book influenced by various schools of Eastern philosophy, one of its main lessons is to teach you to focus on where you are and what you are doing. Not trying to be aware, but being aware of what you are doing and where you are. The book argues that the mind, which we treasure and think of as a gift, can also be a distraction from reality, a stumbling block to experiencing the present. The mind makes us anxious about the unknown future; it also makes us feel nostalgic for, or guilty about, the past. Memories of another place or another sensation are a gift but can be a hindrance too because rather than being where you are and doing what you’re doing, memories bring you, well, somewhere else. Since reading the book, my swimming has become a dance between contemplation and meditation. Contemplation Sometimes when I swim, I write in my head. Sermons. Articles. Sometimes, I think about my career, or my relationships with my wife and children. I value the pool as a space to think about things I care about—rather than thinking about the e-mails and distractions that consume so many of my thoughts. I swim, but, while I swim, I observe my day and develop insights about my life. When I swim, I also pass the time by thinking about swimming. For example, to keep track of how many lengths I’ve swum this morning, I swim my first 300 meters (it is a 25-meter pool, so 300 meters is 12 lengths; swimmers don’t measure their workout distances in number of times up and down a pool—you can tell whether someone was [or wasn’t] a competitive swimmer if they tell you they swam 80 lengths rather than 2,000 meters) by breathing once every three strokes for my first fifty meters, then once every five strokes for the next fifty, and then repeating the pattern through three times (3 × [50 + 50] = 300). Strange...

The co-operation of united liver and spleen resection and disconnection

Objective To summary the characteristics of united liver and spleen resection combined with disconnection, so as to provide experience for these operations. Methods 20 patients were included, personnel and articles were prepared before operations. Sustainning valid blood volume, executing aseptic technic and count-ing system strictly, controlling institution of in and out, keepping warm and preventting bed sore intra -opera-tion. Results 20 operations had gained satisfactory effects. No one happened hypothermia in operation and infec-tion and bed sore after operation. Conclusions Keeping warm, preventing bed sore, keeping iv drip smooth, executing three inspections and seven verifications strictly are the key points of these operations. Executing a-septic technic strictly, controlling in and out numbers axe the key measures of preventing infection of perioperation period. Key words: Liver resection; Spleen resection; Co -operation

Riding Toward Everywhere (review)

Reviewed by: Riding Toward Everywhere Michael Hemmingson (bio) Riding Toward Everywhere. By William T. Vollmann. Ecco, 2008. 288 pages, cloth, $26.95. The image of the hobo, riding trains and boxcars cross-country, conjures another time and place in America when destitute people hitched free rides and wandered the nation for work and a place to call home. Riding Toward Everywhere is William T. Vollmann’s portrait of the contemporary hobo, a subculture of men and women who have dropped out of mainstream life and travel the nation by freight cars. Not all the train-hoppers are necessarily poor or homeless; some do it for the thrill, and some, like Vollmann, do it for experience and research. What is the attraction of train-hopping? Is it the excitement of getting away with it, of “slumming,” of capturing what it must have been like in America’s past? Vollmann’s guide—a somewhat lackluster Virgil to his Dante—is a man named Steve, who has a home and wife and has been traveling the rails since he was a young man, collecting magnificent experiences and gazing on the beauty of the national landscape from the boxcar, gratis. He tells Vollmann that in general, the conductors and other employees (such as railroad “bulls”) did not hassle him or his friends when they train-hopped, because they understood the call for the voyage. [End Page 162] Riding Toward Everywhere has a calmer feel, more assuredness, than any previous Vollmann book. Gone are the frenetic run-on sentences; the long, poetic paragraphs; and the grand philosophizing on politics and morality. Vollmann finds a Zen-like joy in the simplicity of the “pouring rain, then birds and frogs, fresh yellow-green wetness of fields.” After sleeping outside and in boxcars, he appreciates the comfort of a warm bed more than he ever has before. “Whenever I injure or tire myself on the rails,” he admits, “I can rest, whether at home or in a flophouse.” He has a choice to walk away from the hardships of hobo life, whereas others do not. Comparison to On the Road is inevitable. He cites The Dharma Bums more, though; like Kerouac, he is traveling for the sake of experience, to see America and explore its soul. He writes: “As for me, where was I going and where was here? That was as mysterious to me as the shine of spittle on the track of an old bridge. As Kerouac’s guru Dean Moriarty says: We give and take and go in the incredible complicated sweetness zigzagging every side.” Vollmann feels a kinship with Kerouac because he starts his travels from the Bay Area, as Kerouac did, and visits many of the same areas found in On the Road—among the Southern California migrant workers, among the hipsters of Denver, across the flat plains of Montana and Wyoming. He also cites Jack London, Thomas Wolfe, Mark Twain, and John Steinbeck—their literature of wandering and escapade—making Riding resemble a work of quasi-literary criticism, especially when he muses about Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories as the trains he rides go through Idaho and Michigan. Is this book about riding the rails, or is it a quirky discourse on twentieth-century American fiction similar to D. H. Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature? References to Hemingway, London, Twain, etc., are fitting. Vollmann goes from state to state in his boxcar journeys; his gaze reminds him of the literature associated with different places in America, whether it be the Northwest or the Southeast. Mississippi conjures up Samuel Clemens, and Colorado is Kerouac. Vollmann is a writer, after all, acknowledging the masters who came before him, like “many of Hemingway’s protagonists . . . [who] can look at a landscape they have never seen before and suspect that it will be good shooting country.” Where are all these train-hoppers going? What is the end goal? Vollmann hears references to a place called Big Rock Candy Mountain, which he determines is either a giant crack-cocaine metaphor or the label for a personal paradise, a Shangri-la, an ideal and truly democratic America that embraces all freedom and equality. Vollmann calls this...

How the American Dialect Society Chooses its Words of the Year

How the American Dialect Society Chooses its Words of the Year o; Wayne Glowka Reinhardt College I? aJanuary morning when the temperature in the North Georgia mountains was down to around 10 degrees Fahrenheit, I stood in a dark parking lot at Reinhardt College and searched up and down GA route 140, looking for a limousine. The car was to be sent fifty miles to Waleska, GA to pick me up at 6:00 am for a live interview at 7:45 am in Atlanta on Fox Business News. The subject of the interview was to be the word subprime, the American Dialect Society 's Word of the Year (ADS WOTY) for 2007.1 The limousine was late because the New York television producer had insisted on a street address for the pick up. But a description of the flag plaza in front of the administration building two hundred yards on the right past the only blinking red light in Waleska would have been a more efficient way of finding me. As I stood shivering in the dark, I worried that I would miss my interview, and I longed for the warm bed I had left nearly two hours earlier . I also wondered if I was putting myself out to be on television once more to discuss die word of the year with reporters who were going to offer me to their millions of viewers as some kind of bizarre specimen from academe. Soon enough, however, the black Lincoln Continental with very comfortable leather seats arrived to deliver me to Atlanta. One can see the complete list of WOTYs on the website of the ADS: . Dictionaries:Journal oftheDictionary Society ofNorth America 29 (2008), 23-34. 24Wayne Glowka In the intervals among exchanges of small talk with the driver, I practiced the sound-bite answers the producer had instructed me to develop after a practice interview on the telephone on the day before. The hardest answer to reduce to television-appropriate size had to do with how the ADS chooses its WOTYs. I had explained on the telephone that I and others collected terms throughout the year that we think might make good candidates for words of the year; that we did research on the words to see how old they were and how widely they were used; that we circulated these words among ourselves and members of the press before the annual meeting, where words of the year are chosen; that we held a meeting to review lists of possible nominations , decided on categories for the nomination, and then placed the nominations in categories; that we then prepared a slate of nominees for distribution; that we met in a larger setting and allowed members of the audience to make speeches about the words on the slate and to nominate others; that we determined the winners by a show of hands; and that we then took nominations for the WOTY from winners or losers in the categories and also entertained nominations that had not succeeded in being included in the list. The producer bluntly told me that such an answer was acceptable for National Public Radio, but it certainly would not do for television. He needed a short and direct answer to the question. I told him that I would work on such an answer. As I was perched in the Atlanta television studio under hot lights on a stool in front of a shelf of books meant to give my answers authority, I practiced that answer until the interview began with the lively morning crew of Fox Business News. When I was asked about the process of choosing the words of the year, I answered with all the succinctness I could muster: "Well, I and others collect new words throughout the year. We present our nominees to a committee at our annual meeting. We prepare a slate of candidates in categories like 'Most Likely to Succeed' or 'Most Outrageous.' At a larger meeting the next day, we allow audience members to make funny speeches in support of words, and then we vote by a show of hands. The word of the year comes from a list of nominees taken from...