'The Germans are Hydrophobes': Germany and the Germans in the Shaping of French Identity

This article addresses issues of national identity and nationalism in the age of the French Revolution by looking at French attitudes towards the Germans. It engages with theories of nationalism while presenting empirical evidence gleaned from archival research. This material, sometimes grimly, sometimes rather amusingly, reveals much about French ideas and prejudices about the Germans and how it reflected back on the revolutionary and Napoleonic sense of what it meant to be French

On the Generalizability of Experimental Results

The age-old question of the generalizability of the results of experiments that are conducted in artificial laboratory settings to more realistic inferential and decision making situations is considered in this paper. Conservatism in probability revision provides an example of a result that 1) has received wide attention, including attention in terms of implications for real-world decision making, on the basis of experiments conducted in artificial settings and 2) is now apparently thought by many to be highly situational and not at all a ubiquitous phenomenon, in which case its implications for real-world decision making are not as extensive as originally claimed. In this paper we consider the questions of generalizations from the laboratory to the real world in some detail, both within the context of the experiments regarding conservatism and within a more general context. In addition, we discuss some of the difficulties inherent in experimentation in realistic settings, suggest possible procedures for avoiding or at least alleviating such difficulties, and make a plea for more realistic experiments

Impact of operative time and surgeon satisfaction on the long-term outcome of hernia repair

The aim of this study was to assess the impact of the degree of difficulty and quality of hernia repair, as perceived by the surgeon, and operative time on the reoperation rate. All hernia repairs performed during the period 1994-1995 at the Department of Surgery, University Hospital of Lund, Sweden, were recorded prospectively. The degree of difficulty and the degree of difficulty in relation to the preoperative expectation of the surgeon were graded on a three-degree scale, the final outcome graded as optimal or suboptimal, and the time required to perform the hernia repair was recorded. Recurrence repairs prior to 1998 were traced in a retrospective review of the patient notes. The Swedish Hernia Register was checked for reoperations from 1998 and later. Altogether, 184 hernia repairs were recorded during the study period, including 14 repairs on women. The mean age of the patients was 58 years and the standard deviation was 15 years. Subsequent reoperation for recurrence was identified in 21 (11.4%) of these patients. The operative time correlated significantly with the surgeon's perception of the degree of difficulty (P < 0.05). Operative time less than 20 min (n = 4) was significantly associated with increased risk for reoperation (P < 0.05). The degree of difficulty, the degree of difficulty in relation to preoperative expectation, and the assessment of the final outcome were not associated with the risk for reoperation. Although neither the grade of difficulty nor the surgeon's perception of the quality of repair significantly predicted the final outcome, the risk for reoperation increased if the repair was performed rapidly