When teleconferencing was the future: the 1970 'Medizin Interkontinental' transmission and West German medicine in the space age

In March 1970, the first ever medical teleconference connected U.S. aeromedical experts in Houston and San Antonio to an audience of 25,000 physicians in congress centres in West Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. As this article shows, the ‘Medizin Interkontinental’ transmission was a costly demonstration of the latest developments in satellite telecommunications and projection technology as well as a stage for space-age visions of the future of medicine in the aftermath of the moon landing. Audio-visual and space technology became, at one at the same time, the medium and the message of medical futurity. As I argue, the teleconference was an audio-visual techno-spectacle that marked the culmination of the German medical community’s infatuation with futurology at the end of the 1960s, but it was also contingent on the concrete interests of the parties involved, which included the German Medical Association, medical futurologists, nasa, the U.S. Air Force, and the Swiss pharmaceutical company Ciba. Decades before teleconferences and telemedicine entered day-to-day medicine, the convergence of new medical and media technology, changes in medical education, Cold War geopolitics, and pharmaceutical sponsorship created a brief glimpse of a technology-based future of medicine that fell apart once these constellations changed in the early 1970s

Treatment of Hypertension

Our ideas about the management of hypertension have changed considerably in recent years. There is now general agreement that all patients with accelerated hypertension, as manifested by high diastolic pressure and Group III and IV funduscopic changes, should have their blood pressure reduced with antihypertensive agents. Differences of opinion still exist, however, in respect to the treatment of the less rapidly advancing types of hypertension. It is apparent that the life history of untreated essential hypertension varies widely from those patients whose lives are cut short in a matter of a few years, to those who survive to old age. The problem is further complicated because antihypertensive treatment is neither simple, innocuous, or inexpensive. If we are to approach a solution to this problem we need to know the answers to two questions. The first is: Does antihypertensive treatment prevent the organic complications associated with hypertension? and the second, How can we recognize and differentiate the patient who will develop serious complications from the patient who will live out a normal span of life

Political Violence and Unemployment: Socio-Economic Strain as a Potential Source of Terrorism

Why do some people commit acts of violence which are politically or ideologically motivated? Furthermore, why does the United States see such great variation in the number of terrorist incidents from year to year? To help answer these questions, Robert Agnew\u27s (2010) General Strain Theory of Terrorism lays out a foundational model to explain what might cause terrorism. In contrast to previous strain theories, General Strain Theory of Terrorism argues that the strains most likely to result in terrorism are collective strains which are (a) high in magnitude, with civilians affected; (b) perceived as unjust; and (c) inflicted by more powerful \u27others\u27. Collective strains affect groups or entire societies, rather than specific individuals. Collective strains increase negative emotions and attitudes, radicalize groups and individuals, contribute to a collective orientation and response, and facilitate the social learning of terrorism, while also reducing social control and access to legal coping means.;To test this theory, I argue that economic strains constitute collective strains. From this point I tested a portion of GST, focusing my analysis within the US, and examining the conduit from economic strain to increasing negative emotions to domestic terrorism using a path analysis of macro-level data collected from public sources. The analysis showed moderate support for theoretical assumptions. Some macroeconomic indicators such as unemployment can lead to domestic terrorism, while others such as poverty do not. As unemployment in the US rises, so do negative emotions and attitudes, and through this, incidents of domestic terrorism. Of course, economic factors are only one possible source of strain, and negative emotions are only one mediator in Agnew\u27s model. From this we can conclude that General Strain Theory of Terrorism may be a worthwhile avenue for future research

Fear and Loathing in Post 9/11 America: Public Perceptions of Terrorism as Shaped by News Media and the Politics of Fear

The politics of fear have deeply divided the United States of America. Decades of propaganda portray Muslims as a terrorist threat to the dominant US culture and society. The War on Terror and its consequences, including the rise of ISIL and the 2015 Syrian refugee crisis, resulted in the destabilization of democracy in both the US and Europe. I argue that the US public’s fear of terrorism is not just a fear of violence but instead reflects racial tensions and anxieties in a rapidly changing world. These tensions and anxieties are fueled by media coverage leveraging a general fear and distrust of non-white foreigners. The result of this is a pervasive fear of violent victimization at the hands of minorities, shaped by mass media content, which politicians capitalize on for their own gain. In this dissertation, I study the media effects of agenda setting, framing, and reinforcing spirals on public fear of terrorism with data from the Granite State Poll (GSP), Gallup’s Most Important Problem (MIP), and a content analysis of broadcast news transcripts from NexisUni. I expand on current research by examining the fear of terrorism from the perspectives of criminological theory, critical media studies, and racial formation theory

CLINICAL PHARMACOLOGY OF BRETYLIUM TOSYLATE: PRELIMINARY OBSERVATIONS

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/73174/1/j.1749-6632.1960.tb20087.x.pd

Eine Frage der Argumentation: Eristische Strukturen in Lesekarten von TFM-Studierenden

Dieser Fachartikel thematisiert eristische Strukturen in der Textsorte Lesekarte. Dabei werden die Inhalte der Eristik und der Lesekarte theoretisch besprochen, bevor die Analyse der Lesekarten folgt. Hierzu wurden zehn Lesekarte von insgesamt fünf TFM-Studierenden nach den Analysekriterien von Graefen und Moll (2011) untersucht. Jeweils zwei Lesekarten von den fünf Untersuchungspersonen sollen zeigen, wie sich die Verwendung eristischer Sprachmuster im Laufe des Studiums verändert. Die Analysekriterien beinhalten nicht nur grammatische Fügungen, sondern decken auch die Kategorie des persönlichen Kommentars ab. Hauptergebnis der Untersuchung ist, dass sich die Anzahl der argumentativen Muster im Laufe des Schreibens steigert und bestimmte Kategorien, gegenüber anderen, deutlich bevorzugt werden

Integrativer Ansatz zur Identifizierung neuer, prognostisch relevanter Metagene mittels Clusteranalyse

In Germany, breast cancer is the most common leading cause of cancer deaths in women. To gain insight into the processes related to the course of the disease, human genetic data can be used to identify associations between gene expression and prognosis. In the course of the several clinical studies and numerous microarray experiments, the enormous data volume is constantly generated. Its dimensionality reduction of thousands of genes to a smaller number is the aim of the so-called metagenes that aggregate the expression data of groups of genes with similar expression patterns and may be used for investigating complex diseases like breast cancer. Here, a cluster analytic approach for identification of potentially relevant metagenes is introduced. In a first step of the approach, gene expression patterns over time of receptor tyrosine kinase ErbB2 breast cancer MCF7 cell lines to obtain promising sets of genes for a metagene calculation were used. Three independent batches of MCF7/NeuT cells were exposed to doxycycline for periods of 0, 6, 12 and 24 hours as well as for 3 and 14 days in independent experiments, due to association of the oncogenic variant of ErbB2 overexpression in breast cancer with worse prognosis. With cluster analytic approaches DIB-C (difference-based clustering algorithm) and STEM (short time-series expression miner) as well as with the finite and infinite mixture models gene clusters with similar expression patterns were identified. Two non-model-based algorithms – k-means and PFP (penalized frame potential) – as well as the model-based procedure DIRECT were applied for the method comparisons. Potentially relevant gene groups were selected by promoter and Gene Ontology (GO) analysis. The verification of the applied methods was carried out with another short time-series data set. In the second step of the approach, this gene clusters were used to calculate metagenes of the gene expression data of 766 breast cancer patients from three breast cancer studies and Cox models were applied to determine the effect of the detected metagenes on the prognosis. Using this strategy, new metagenes associated with metastasis-free survival patients were identified.In Deutschland ist Brustkrebs die häufigste Krebserkrankung bei Frauen. Durch zahlreiche klinische Studien auf diesem Gebiet konnte festgestellt werden, dass die veränderten Gene zwar nicht zwangsläufig zum Ausbruch der Krankheit führen, deren Expressionen jedoch näher analysiert werden sollten, um das Karzinom rechtzeitig zu erkennen und dadurch bessere Therapien zu ermöglichen. Hierbei wird durch die Microarray-Experimente ein enormes Datenvolumen generiert, deren Dimensionsreduktion von mehreren Tausend Genen zu einer deutlich kleineren Anzahl angestrebt wird. Eine Möglichkeit bieten die sogenannten Metagene, zu denen Gene mit ähnlichen Expressionen zusammengefasst werden können und die sich als prognostische Faktoren für das Überleben der Patienten erwiesen haben. In der vorliegenden Arbeit wird ein neuer integrativer Ansatz zur Clusterung kurzer Expressionszeitreihen zur Identifizierung prognostisch relevanter Metagene vorgestellt. Der erste Teil des Ansatzes beruht auf der Analyse humaner Mammakarzinom-Zelllinien MCF7. Die onkogene Variante der Rezeptortyrosinkinase ErbB2, deren Überexpression mit einer schlechteren Prognose assoziiert ist, wurde in diesen MCF7-Zelllinien induziert und zu den Zeitpunkten 0, 6, 12 und 24 Stunden sowie und 3 und 14 Tagen nach der Induktion beobachtet. Mit den Clusteranalyseansätzen DIB-C (difference-based clustering algorithm) und STEM (short time-series expression miner) sowie mit den finiten und den infiniten Mischungsmodellen werden hier Gengruppen mit ähnlichen Expressionsverläufen identifiziert. Als Vergleichsmethoden werden die nicht-modellbasierten Algorithmen k-means und PFP (penalized frame potential) und das in R implementierte Tool DIRECT als modellbasierter Vergleich zur Analyse herangezogen. Mit der Gene Ontology (GO) - bzw. Promoteranalyse werden die biologisch interessantesten Cluster ermittelt. Zur Verifizierung der hier angewendeten Methoden wird ein weiterer Datensatz mit Expressionswerten kurzer Zeitreihen erfolgreich herangezogen. Im zweiten Teil des Ansatzes werden für diese Gruppen Metagene gebildet und auf ihre prognostische Relevanz in den Brustkrebsdaten von 766 Patientinnen mittels Überlebenszeitanalyse untersucht und so neue biologisch relevante Cluster aufgedeckt