The Federal Republic of Germany's security dilemma: Ostpolitik within US-Soviet detente

Detente has created dissension within NATO, dissension centered on the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). The FRG contribution to detente - Ostpolitik - has made it bot h a focus of controversy within the Alliance and a prime target of Soviet pressure. Since Germany is vital to a stable European order, the German question has had high priority on the detente agenda. This thesis analyzes the unresolved German question, and the resulting West German security dilemma, in terms of the conflict and incompatibility between American, Soviet and West German designs for a future European security order. It suggests that inconsistent and vacillating American detente policies have helped to encourage the FRG to seek its own divergent accommodation with the USSR. The FRG's Ostpolitik will probably continue to be vulnerable to Soviet manipulation. Further discord in the US-West German alliance is therefore likely.http://archive.org/details/federalrepublico00gurnLieutenant, United States Naval ReserveApproved for public release; distribution is unlimited

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

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Pieces of Molly: An ordinary life

Pieces of Molly is a memoir with a difference. Told in the first and third person, it offers a perspective on the self not often found in autobiographies. Molly can be seen as everychild - the author and the reader too - showing the everyday pains and difficulties encountered in all our lives. Molly s journey starts as everyone s does, in the womb. In most memoirs the first ten years are swiftly passed over, but here Judith shows us development from conception onwards as Molly begins to grow up in a tiny village on the east coast of England, which we see through her eyes; the eyes of a child born at the end of the Second World War. Pieces of Molly is a map of one small girl s mind, as the barely subdued ordinary terrors of childhood lurk around her world, a girl surrounded by the vibrant life of a working farm at a time when rapid developments are forcing that world to change. Molly is a curious little detective, keen to find out more about life and love. For her, the shadows behind the doors only make sense in hindsight, and buried family secrets come to light as she struggles with the problem of how and who to be in the world

Prevalence of the metabolic syndrome in relation to self-reported cancer history

PURPOSE: To estimate the prevalence of metabolic syndrome in persons with a history of cancer from a population-based sample of adults, and compare that prevalence to persons without a history of cancer. METHODS: Data from the Third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey were analyzed to compare prevalence and prevalence differences of the metabolic syndrome, as defined by Adult Treatment Panel III criteria, between 486 persons with a reported history of cancer and 12,526 persons with no reported history of cancer. RESULTS: The prevalence of metabolic syndrome was 258/1000 persons for those with a cancer history and 184/1000 persons among those without, resulting in a prevalence difference of 74/1000 persons (95% CI, 38-110). Prevalence differences varied substantially by age at interview. The prevalence difference was highest among those aged 40 to 49 years (112/1000 persons) and 50 to 59 years (73/1000 persons), while those in younger (18-39 years) and older (: 60 years) age groups had a moderately higher prevalence among those without a cancer history. CONCLUSION: These results add to the emerging concern that metabolic syndrome and associated risks for cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes may be an adverse late effect of cancer and/or its treatment. © 2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved

Peripheral neuropathy in survivors of childhood acute lymphoblastic leukemia

Acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) is the most common form of cancer in children. Recent advances in treatment have led to dramatically improved survival rates. Standard ALL treatment includes multiple administrations of the chemotherapeutic drug vincristine, which is a known neurotoxic agent. Although peripheral neuropathy is a well-known toxicity among children receiving vincristine acutely, the long-term effects on the peripheral nervous system in these children are not clear. The objective of this study was to determine the prevalence of neuropathy and its impact on motor function and quality of life (QOL) among children who survived ALL. Thirty-seven survivors of childhood ALL aged 8-18 underwent evaluation for neuropathy through self-reported symptoms, standardized examinations, and nerve conduction studies (NCS). Functional impact of neuropathy was assessed using the Bruininks-Oseretsky test of Motor Proficiency (BOT-2). QOL was assessed using the PedsQL. Nerve conduction study abnormalities were seen in 29.7% of children who were longer than 2 years off therapy for ALL. Most children with an abnormal examination or NCS did not have subjective symptoms. Although overall motor function was below population norms on the BOT-2, presence of neuropathy did not significantly correlate with motor functional status or QOL. © 2009 Peripheral Nerve Society

Long-term survival probabilities for childhood rhabdomyosarcoma: A population-based evaluation

BACKGROUND. Evidence from clinical trials has documented improvements in event-free survival from childhood rhabdomyosarcoma (RMS) since the 1970s; however, the survival experience of children enrolled on cancer clinical trials may not reflect the full range of patients treated in community settings. The current study evaluated 5-year survival and 10-year conditional survival for RMS from U.S. population-based cancer registry data. METHODS. Public-use data from the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) program were used in life table and Cox regression analyses to evaluate RMS survival by patient age at diagnosis, gender, tumor histology, tumor site and stage, and major treatment eras among 848 children who were age \u3c 20 years at the time of diagnosis, were a resident of 1 of 9 geographic reporting regions, and were diagnosed between 1973 and 2000. RESULTS. The 5-year survival probabilities were found to be highest for younger-age children (ages 1-4 years: 77%), patients with localized disease (83%), those whose tumors had an embryonal histology (67%), and patients with orbital (86%) and genitourinary (80%) tumor sites. Poor prognosis was associated with diagnosis during infancy (47%) and adolescence (48%); metastatic disease at the time of presentation (31%); alveolar histology (49%); and tumors of the extremities (50%), retroperitoneum (52%), and trunk (52%). Conditional 10-year survival probabilities among those who survived a 5 years were 85% or higher. The probability of survival by stage at the time of diagnosis increased with each successive treatment era, suggesting a stage shift phenomenon over time. CONCLUSIONS. Large variations in 5-year survival were evident depending on patient age and tumor characteristics. However, children who survived the first 5 years after diagnosis were found to have an excellent long-term prognosis. The patterns in RMS survival noted from the current population-based evaluation did not appear to differ substantially from those previously reported by major clinical trials. © 2005 American Cancer Society

Physical impairment and social adaptation in adult survivors of childhood and adolescent rhabdomyosarcoma: A report from the Childhood Survivors Study

Background: Despite interest in the well-being of adult survivors of childhood rhabdomyosarcoma (RMS), few studies have examined their health-related quality of life (HRQOL). This study evaluated physical and social aspects of HRQOL among long-term childhood RMS survivors relative to a sibling comparison group, and assessed whether physical impairment among RMS survivors adversely affected their ability to achieve adult life goals. Methods: Using baseline data from the Childhood Cancer Survivor Study, we evaluated self-reported physical impairment and social adaptation among 417 survivors of childhood RMS and 2685 siblings ≥ 18 years of age at survey completion. Results: Survivors were more likely than siblings to report physical impairment, characterized by: at least one medically diagnosed condition, limitations in the performance of routine activities, a health-related inability to work or attend school, cancer-related pain. Survivors were less likely than siblings to have completed high school, ever worked a job, or ever been married. The odds of completing high school were lower among survivors with performance limitations, a health-related inability to work or attend school, or moderate to high levels of cancer-related pain. Survivors who reported cancer-related pain had an increased likelihood of ever being married. Conclusions: The majority of adult survivors of pediatric RMS are successful in attaining adult life goals despite higher reported occurrence of physical impairment than their sibling counterparts. Additional studies are needed to advance our understanding of other aspects of HRQOL in this population of pediatric cancer survivors. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd