Mothers of Soldiers in Wartime: A National News Narrative

National news media represent mothers of US combat soldiers in the Iraq War as archetypal good mothers, that is, mothers who continue their maternal work even after their children are deployed. However, not all mothers are depicted as the archetypal patriotic mother, i.e., a good mother who is also stoic and silent about the war and her child\u27s role in it. Mothers of soldiers are portrayed as good mothers who sometimes also voice their attitudes about the war effort. The maternal attitudes ranged from complete support for the war to opposition to the war but support for the soldiers. The findings suggest a picture of wartime motherhood that is more nuanced than the historical image of the patriotic mother suggests

Assessing gender mainstreaming in the education sector: depoliticised technique or a step towards women's rights and gender equality?

In 1995 the Beijing Conference on Women identified gender mainstreaming as a key area for action. Policies to effect gender mainstreaming have since been widely adopted. This special issue of Compare looks at research on how gender mainstreaming has been used in government education departments, schools, higher education institutions, international agencies and NGOs .1 In this introduction we first provide a brief history of the emergence of gender mainstreaming and review changing definitions of the term. In the process we outline some policy initiatives that have attempted to mainstream gender and consider some difficulties with putting ideas into practice, particularly the tensions between a technical and transformative interpretations . Much of the literature about experiences with gender mainstreaming tends to look at organizational processes and not any specificities of a particular social sector. However, in our second section, we are concerned to explore whether institutional forms and particular actions associated with education give gender mainstreaming in education sites some distinctive features. In our last section we consider some of the debates about global and local negotiations in discussions of gender policy and education and the light this throws on gender mainstreaming. In so doing, we place the articles that follow in relation to contestations over ownership, political economy, the form and content of education practice and the social complexity of gender equality

Women We Loved: Paradoxes of public and private in the biographical television drama

Broadcast to critical acclaim and relatively large audiences for its niche channel, the Women We Loved season consisted of biographical dramatisations of three prominent female figures of 20th-century British culture. These dramas shared in common narratives that centre on the two aspects of ‘the public’ and ‘the private’: the tension between public career and personal life and the discrepancy between celebrity persona and private individual. Combining theoretical insights from feminist studies of biography with close textual analysis, this article analyses how performance, aesthetics and narrative express the ambivalent placement of their protagonists between public and private spheres

Automated Risk Identification of Myocardial Infarction Using Relative Frequency Band Coefficient (RFBC) Features from ECG

Various structural and functional changes associated with ischemic (myocardial infarcted) heart cause amplitude and spectral changes in signals obtained at different leads of ECG. In order to capture these changes, Relative Frequency Band Coefficient (RFBC) features from 12-lead ECG have been proposed and used for automated identification of myocardial infarction risk. RFBC features reduces the effect of subject variabilty in body composition on the amplitude dependent features. The proposed method is evaluated on ECG data from PTB diagnostic database using support vector machine as classifier. The promising result suggests that the proposed RFBC features may be used in the screening and clinical decision support system for myocardial infarction

Effect of left ventricular hypertrophy on long-term survival of patients with coronary artery disease following percutaneous coronary intervention

The impact of left ventricular hypertrophy (LVH) on survival among patients with established coronary artery disease (CAD) is not well understood. We sought to evaluate the effect of LVH on the survival of patients with CAD following percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI). Three hospitals in New York City contributed prospectively defined data on 4284 consecutive patients undergoing PCI. Allcause mortality at a mean follow-up of three years was the primary endpoint. LVH was present in 383 patients (8.9%). LVH patients had a greater prevalence of hypertension (88% vs. 68%, p<0.001), vascular disease (21% vs. 6.6%, p=0.001), and prior heart failure (10% vs. 5.5%, p<0.001). LVH patients presented less often with one-vessel disease (38% vs. 50%, p=0.040) and more often with two- (34% vs. 29%, p=0.014) or three-vessel (22% vs. 18%, p=0.044) disease. Ejection fractions and angiographic success were similar in both groups. In-hospital mortality did not differ between groups. At three-year follow-up, the survival rate for patients with LVH was 86% vs. 91% in patients without LVH (log-rank p=0.001). However, after adjustment for differences in baseline characteristics using Cox proportional hazards analysis, LVH was found not to be an independent predictor of mortality (hazard ratio, 0.93; 95% confidence interval, 0.68–1.28; p=0.67). We conclude that LVH at the time of PCI is not independently associated with an increase in the hazard of death at three years

Rethinking the Interplay of Feminism and Secularism in a Neo-Secular Age

The need to re-examine established ways of thinking about secularism and its relationship to feminism has arisen in the context of the confluence of a number of developments including: the increasing dominance of the 'clash of civilizations' thesis; the expansion of postmodern critiques of Enlightenment rationality to encompass questions of religion; and sustained critiques of the 'secularization thesis'. Conflicts between the claims of women's equality and the claims of religion are well-documented vis-à-vis all major religions and across all regions. The ongoing moral panic about the presence of Islam in Europe, marked by a preoccupation with policing Muslim women's dress, reminds us of the centrality of women and gender power relations in the interrelation of religion, culture and the state. Added to postmodern and other critiques of the secular-religious binary, most sociological research now contradicts the equation of modernization with secularization. This article focuses on the challenges that these developments pose to politically-oriented feminist thinking and practice. It argues that non-oppressive feminist responses require a new critical engagement with secularism as a normative principle in democratic, multicultural societies. To inform this process, the author maps and links discussions across different fields of feminist scholarship, in the sociology of religion and in political theory. She organizes the main philosophical traditions and fault lines that form the intellectual terrain at the intersection of feminism, religion and politics in two broad groups: feminist critiques of the Enlightenment critique of religion; and feminist scholarship at the critical edges of the Enlightenment tradition. The author argues that notwithstanding the fragmented nature of feminist debates in this area, common ground is emerging across different politically oriented approaches: all emphasize 'democracy' and the values that underpin it as the larger discursive frame in which the principle of secularism can be redefined with emancipatory intent in a neo-secular age.peer-reviewe