TRENDS IN DENTAL CARE FOR INDIVIDUALS WITH ECTODERMAL DYSPLASIA

Purpose: The specific aim of this study is to evaluate the trends in dental health care for individuals with ectodermal dysplasia. Methods: This was a cross sectional analysis of subjects recruited through the National Foundation of Ectodermal Dysplasia (NFED). From 1997 to 2000, individuals with ectodermal dysplasia or their caregiver (if the individuals were too young to selfreport) voluntarily completed questionnaires. The questionnaire consisted of 37 items consisting of demographics, ectodermal dysplasia diagnosis, access to dental care, level of dental utilization, and type of dental services received. Descriptive statistics were used in addition to ANOVA analyses to evaluate the changing trends in oral health care for individuals with ectodermal dysplasia. Results: Preliminary results indicate: 1) individuals with ectodermal dysplasia are being diagnosed earlier than in the past, 2) physicians are primary source of the initial diagnosis of ectodermal dysplasia, 3) children with ectodermal dysplasia are receiving prostheses earlier than in the past, and 4) access to care is problematic. Conclusion: Diagnosis and recognition of treatment needs are occurring at an earlier age and that an access to dental care for individuals with ectodermal dysplasia continues to be an issue

Postcolonial Travel Writing and Postcolonial Theory

First paragraph: In recent scholarship, the convergence of the words postcolonial, travel and writing has led to a series of debates that revolve around, but are not limited to, the representation of otherness, the power of speaking of and for a foreign culture, as well as the hierarchies embedded in discourses of difference. For some theorists and critics, travel writing is a genre that can never truly free itself from its colonial heritage and, from this perspective, it will always remain a neo-colonial mode that reproduces a dominant North Atlantic idea of ‘civilization’ from which travel writers continue to consolidate a privileged position by classifying, evaluating and passing judgment on other parts of the world. For other postcolonial writers and theorists, the genre of travel writing has the potential to embrace revisionist, critical and subversive narratives, political positions and innovative modes of representation. From this perspective, travel texts can convey accounts that defy colonial discourses and challenge the politics of empire by approaching the experience of travel from a postcolonial angle and embrace new ways of telling the story of travel to foreign locations. Following this narrative trajectory, some of the innovative texts produced by postcolonial travel writers enable us to re-think the nature of the genre as well as its political, aesthetic and ethical potential. This chapter examines these debates by exploring the major scholarly work on travel writing by postcolonial theorists and literary critics. But it also examines several postcolonial travel texts to reflect on how the traveller and his or her discourses have contributed to the debates in postcolonial studies

Kenneth Goldsmith’s Sports and Conceptual Baseball Writing

Much has been written about Kenneth Goldsmith's poem Sports, but scholarship on the text has completely ignored the significance of baseball. Literary critics have read the text in relation to Goldsmith’s project of conceptual poetry, his uncreative writing, banality, the poetics of erasure, poetry and information, as well as a literary meditation on consumption and production, excess and waste.[i] The eradication of baseball is particularly surprising because the text is a complete transcription of a radio broadcast of a nine inning MLB game between the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox on August 18, 2006. The critical focus on the text’s form, and the subsequent elision of its content, is partly based on Goldsmith’s poetic project: his development of conceptual writing that, for instance, includes the transcription of weather forecasts (Weather, 2005) and traffic reports (Traffic, 2007).[ii] In each of these works, Goldsmith strives to systematize the writing process by transcribing unprocessed speech into textual form and, in so doing, he underscores the obstinate logic of information abundance, embracing the overwhelming experience of massive data streams of language. However, among the plethora of sports matches broadcast each day – football, hockey, basketball, soccer, tennis, golf – Goldsmith chooses baseball for Sports. This is not a random choice. For baseball speaks to his project of creating a seemingly mundane repository of cultural discourse by receiving and textually re-transmitting the ambient signals that constantly bombard us, capturing moments in that bombardment and preserving them in the form of the literary work.

"Unspeakable crimes": Charles Brockden Brown’s Memoirs of Stephen Calvert and the Rights of the Accused

This article considers, from a contextual and poststructuralist perspective, due process in The Memoirs of Stephen Calvert by the early American novelist (and trained lawyer) Charles Brockden Brown. Brown’s writing, the article suggests, participates in the thematic and rhetorical interface between law and literature. For although his fiction is fragmentary and nightmarish, moving from gothic cities to treacherous frontiers, the narration of transgressions and the law remain constant tropes. Thus, lawyers, conmen, criminals, and doppelgangers appear and reappear in works such as Stephen Calvert. The article focuses on how Brown puts the principles of the rights of the accused on trial in this posthumously published novel, for characters are identified as criminals in clear violation of the Fifth Amendment, which requires an articulation of the charges that are brought against the accused. In this, Stephen Calvert poses considerable legal questions: How are charges articulated? How are they presented in narrative form? And what happens when crimes are said to be “unspeakable”? The interrogation of these questions is highly significant in a new nation that is said to uphold due process of law

The impact of School Sport Partnerships on primary schools: An in-depth evaluation

In the five years to 2008, the Labour Government invested over £1.5 billion in physical education. School Sport Partnerships (SSPs) have been at the heart of this unprecedented investment in the subject. Introduced in 2000, the SSP initiative underwent a phased process of nationwide implementation. All state maintained schools are now attached to a SSP. Consisting of a small staff force, SSPs work with groups of primary and secondary schools to increase the quality and quantity of physical education and school sport, and to promote healthy lifestyles. There have been several national, largely quantitative evaluations of SSPs, which report encouraging findings; the initiative has fulfilled and even surpassed many of its core goals. Whilst such findings are positive, little independent and/or qualitative research has been conducted into the impact of SSPs. This research aims to fill the lacuna by providing an in-depth evaluation of the impact the initiative has had in three primary schools in the north east of England. This evaluation focuses specifically on the views of teaching staff vis-à-vis the implementation of the initiative. The empirical research consists of semi-structured interviews with teaching staff (n=36) and senior county council and Youth Sport Trust staff. Observation of PE lessons and analysis of schools’ physical education documentation was also conducted. Building on the realistic evaluation method outlined by Pawson and Tilley (1997), the thesis examines the different Contexts, Mechanisms, and Outcomes (CMO) in each of the case-study schools. The CMO configurations are critically explored to assess the different impacts that SSPs have in the schools. The small sample size allows for an in-depth analysis of each school. The findings suggest that, whilst each school has been affected by their SSP, not all schools benefit from the initiative. In particular, there have been several detrimental outcomes in small rural schools. The goals of SSPs often run contrary to the needs of such schools, with SSP-organised events being inappropriate for schools with small pupil numbers. However, the impact on one of the case study schools – located in a deprived urban area – has been ‘invaluable’. The findings suggest that further qualitative research should be conducted into the impact of SSPs. Many of the issues raised in the thesis have not been identified in past evaluations, and thus demand further exploration

Eerie Technologies and Gothic Acoustemology

First paragraph: In Canto XIII of Dante’s Inferno, the poet and his guide, Virgil, enter the second ring of hell. Here, the poet is taken aback by eerie sounds: ‘I heard cries coming from every direction / And yet saw nobody who could be crying; / I became so bewildered that I stopped’. Upon hearing these disembodied cries, the poet is so disoriented in this dark forest of strange trees that he stops in his tracks. As the voices continue to emerge from the tree-stumps, Virgil encourages the poet to ‘break off / A little twig from one of these plants’. He follows his guide’s suggestion and picks a little branch from a great thorn. As he does, the trunk cries out in pain: ‘Why are you tearing me? […] Why are you dismembering me? Have you no compassion?’ (98). The poet hears the plant’s pain as these words emerge from the wound on the plant’s stem. Virgil explains that, while he regrets the suffering inflicted upon the plant, his friend would never have believed it unless he had heard the cries from the plant itself. Hearing is believing

Reading the Signs: Chad Harbach’s Art of Fielding, Baseball, and the Graphic Imagination

Although not a graphic novel, graphics are integrated into the fabric of Chad Harbach’s The Art Of Fielding (2011). By graphics, I mean the juxtaposing and mixing of alphabetical and pictographic designs, and I argue that the novel engages with the graphic imagination by including graphic dynamics to convey complex meanings through the conjunction of difference and identity in inscription and visual form. In a keyboard character or a letter there are, for instance, complicated dimensions in the relationship between the printed letter and its meaning, thus revealing a rhetoric whose graphic and textual nature allows meaning to emerge in ways that move beyond the utterances of speech and reflect the visual baseball sign system

Zombie Terrorism in an Age of Global Gothic

With reference to films such as The Terror Experiment (2010) and Osombie (2012), this paper explores the figure of the zombie terrorist, a collectively othered group that is visually identifiable as ‘not us' and can be slaughtered with impunity. In cinematic treatments, the zombie terrorist operates within a collectivity of zombies, erasing the possibility of individuality when the transformation from human to zombie takes place. The zombie terrorist signifies otherness in relation to selfhood, and is characterised by a mind/body split. Emerging from the grave in the archetypal zombie primal scene, this reanimated corpse is undead in its animate corporeality coupled with a loss of all mental faculties. The erasure of individual identity and memory along with broader human characteristics such as empathy or willpower coincides with the zombie terrorist's physical movement and action