The alienated mind: the emergence of the sociology of knowledge in Germany, 1918-33

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Metropolitan Architecture and Modernity: Otto Wagner in Context

The work of Otto Wagner (1841-1918) has been examined from many standpoints hitherto, most often as the leading protagonist in the development of modern architecture in Vienna at the turn of the century, together with Josef Hoffmann, Adolf Loos and others. The present thesis has a much more modest aim, namely, to examine some aspects of the context within which Wagner was developing his conception of a modern architecture particularly in the period up to 1900. Its focus is, as the title suggests, upon metropolitan architecture and modernity as the context for Wagner's polemical call for a modem architecture that reflects modem life. The introduction provides a brief overview of Wagner's development and examines some of the problems involved in reading the city and modern life. The chapter on modernity traces the ambiguities surrounding the concept of die Moderne both as an artistic movement - modernism - and as an object of artistic endeavour - modernity. An attempt is made to substantiate the claim that, rather than view the discourse on modernity as an exclusively turn of the century phenomenon in Vienna, it may be traced back to the 1880's and earlier. Drawing upon contemporary discourses within architecture journals largely in Vienna, the chapter highlights the conceptualisation of the modem within architectural circles in Vienna and elsewhere, whilst looking briefly at the relationship between this and other discourses on modernity. The crucial site for modern architecture is, for Wagner, the modern metropolis. Hence, the second chapter on the modem metropolis focuses upon two phases in the development of a 'new' Vienna - the one associated with the Ringstrasse development from around 1860 to 1890, and the other to the so-called 'second Renaissance' in Vienna (the Ringstrasse having been the first) from the 1890's onwards, which is most commonly identified with art nouveau and Secessionism in Vienna. Rather than focus upon this particular aesthetic dimension, the chapter investigates the relationship between the development of the new discipline, Stadtebau, literally city building, and the attempts to restructure Vienna under the epithet of 'new' Vienna. In particular, attention is given to the works of Camillo Sitte and Joseph Stubben as two of the major contributors to city planning theory and practice, who, in their different ways, had a significant impact upon the development of a 'new' Vienna. Wagner's contribution to the important competition for a General Regulation Plan for Vienna is placed in this context. In the course of the chapter, a case is made for considering city planning as a crucial and often neglected dimension of metropolitan modernity. The third chapter commences with a detailed, critical analysis of Wagner's Moderne Architektur volume of 1896 which outlines the claim that a modem architecture must reflect the modem life of the metropolis. This claim is examined, in relation to the contemporary response to Wagner's claims in the light of Wagner's teaching programme and its outcomes and to some of the building types favoured by his conception of modernity. Drawing upon arguments from the earlier chapters, there follows an examination of features of 'modern life' as delineated by Wagner in his writings that highlight some of the contradictions in a project to develop a modem architecture that reflects this modem life. The conclusion draws together the contradictions in the concept of modernity and its relevance for understanding the modem metropolis and its architecture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in Vienna

Sequential stereopsis using high-pass spatial frequency filtered textures

Enright [(1995). Perception, 24 (suppl.), 32–33; (1996). Vision Research, 36, 307–312] described a simple piece of equipment for demonstrating a perceptual mechanism he called sequential stereopsis. The equipment requires an observer to set two textured targets seen behind a pair of small viewing ports to appear equi-distant. The principle upon which the apparatus depends is the use of textures whose elements cannot be resolved in peripheral vision at the eccentricity determined by the target separation. Enright used a fine sandpaper for this purpose. We have conducted two similar experiments using high bandpass filtered textures which eliminate any possibility that the low spatial frequency content of sandpaper textures could play a role. Our results corroborate Enright's general conclusions on sequential stereopsis, while at the same time showing that high-pass textures do not give wholly similar results to sandpaper

Prioritizing hearing aid service delivery models for low-income communities

Millions of individuals worldwide are affected by hearing loss, with a global estimate of 2.5 billion projected by 2050. Hearing loss has a profound effect on individuals’ overall quality of life, including communication, social interactions, education, and employment. However, hearing aid uptake is generally low. In Africa, less than 10% of individuals needing hearing aids acquire them, with some estimates as low as 3%. The global burden of hearing loss is exacerbated by the limited number of hearing health care services and the lack of trained professionals. The global shortage of hearing health care professionals, particularly in low- and middle-income settings, is a major challenge to existing service delivery models, which require specialist health care providers. Generally, low- and lower-middle-income regions have one or fewer ENT specialists or audiologists per million population. In Africa, 56% and 78% of countries have less than one ENT specialist or audiologist per million population, respectively.The National Institute of Deafness and Communication Disorders of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the NIHR Manchester Biomedical Research Centre.http://journals.lww.com/thehearingjournal/pages/default.aspx2024-05-01hj2023Speech-Language Pathology and AudiologyNon

Costs of Illness in the 1993 Waterborne Cryptosporidium Outbreak, Milwaukee, Wisconsin

To assess the total medical costs and productivity losses associated with the 1993 waterborne outbreak of cryptosporidiosis in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, including the average cost per person with mild, moderate, and severe illness, we conducted a retrospective cost-of-illness analysis using data from 11 hospitals in the greater Milwaukee area and epidemiologic data collected during the outbreak. The total cost of outbreak-associated illness was $96.2 million:$31.7 million in medical costs and $64.6 million in productivity losses. The average total costs for persons with mild, moderate, and severe illness were$116, $475, and$7,808, respectively. The potentially high cost of waterborne disease outbreaks should be considered in economic decisions regarding the safety of public drinking water supplies

The effect of amblyopia treatment on stereoacuity

Purpose: To explore how stereoacuity changes in patients while they are being treated for amblyopia. Methods: The Monitored Occlusion Treatment for Amblyopia Study (MOTAS) comprised 3 distinct phases. In the first phase, baseline, assessments of visual function were made to confirm the initial visual and binocular visual deficit. The second phase, refractive adaptation, now commonly termed “optical treatment,” was an 18-week period of spectacle wear with measurements of logMAR visual acuity and stereoacuity with the Frisby test at weeks 0, 6, 12, and 18. In the third phase, occlusion, participants were prescribed 6 hours of patching per day. Results: A total of 85 children were enrolled (mean age, 5.1 ± 1.5 years). In 21 children amblyopia was associated with anisometropia; in 29, with strabismus; and in 35, with both. At study entry, poor stereoacuity was associated with poor visual acuity (P < 0.001) in the amblyopic eye and greater angle of strabismus (P < 0.001). Of 66 participants, 25 (38%) who received refractive adaptation and 19 (29%) who received occlusion improved by at least one octave in stereoacuity, exceeding test–retest variability. Overall, 38 (45%) improved one or more octaves across both treatment phases. Unmeasureable stereoacuity was observed in 56 participants (66%) at study entry and in 37 (43%) at study exit. Conclusions: Stereoacuity improved for almost one half of the study participants. Improvement was observed in both treatment phases. Factors associated with poor or nil stereoacuity at study entry and exit were poor visual acuity of the amblyopic eye and large-angle strabismus

Stereopsis from contrast envelopes

We report two experiments concerning the site of the principal nonlinearity in second-order stereopsis. The first exploits the asymmetry in perceiving transparency with second-order stimuli found by Langley et al. (1998) (Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B, 265, 1837-1845) i.e. the product of a positive-valued contrast envelope and a mean-zero carrier grating can be seen transparently only when the disparities are consistent with the envelope appearing in front of the carrier. We measured the energy at the envelope frequencies that must be added in order to negate this asymmetry. We report that this amplitude can be predicted from the envelope sidebands and not from the magnitude of compressive pre-cortical nonlinearities measured by other researchers. In the second experiment, contrast threshold elevations were measured for the discrimination of envelope disparities following adaptation to sinusoidal gratings. It is reported that perception of the envelope's depth was affected most when the adapting grating was similar (in orientation and frequency) to the carrier, rather than to the contrast envelope. These results suggest that the principal nonlinearity in second-order stereopsis is cortical, occurring after orientation- and frequency-selective linear filtering

Garotas de loja, história social e teoria social [Shop Girls, Social History and Social Theory]

Shop workers, most of them women, have made up a significant proportion of Britain’s labour force since the 1850s but we still know relatively little about their history. This article argues that there has been a systematic neglect of one of the largest sectors of female employment by historians and investigates why this might be. It suggests that this neglect is connected to framings of work that have overlooked the service sector as a whole as well as to a continuing unease with the consumer society’s transformation of social life. One element of that transformation was the rise of new forms of aesthetic, emotional and sexualised labour. Certain kinds of ‘shop girls’ embodied these in spectacular fashion. As a result, they became enduring icons of mass consumption, simultaneously dismissed as passive cultural dupes or punished as powerful agents of cultural destruction. This article interweaves the social history of everyday shop workers with shifting representations of the ‘shop girl’, from Victorian music hall parodies, through modernist social theory, to the bizarre bombing of the Biba boutique in London by the Angry Brigade on May Day 1971. It concludes that progressive historians have much to gain by reclaiming these workers and the service economy that they helped create