Transcending the Body Politic

A poem

Transcending the Body Politic

A poem

Analysis of referrals and triage patterns in a South African metropolitan adult intensive care service

Background. Intensive care unit (ICU) beds are scarce resources in low- and middle-income countries. Currently there is little literature that quantifies the extent of the demand placed on these resources or examines their allocation.Objectives. To analyse the number and nature of referrals to ICUs in the Pietermaritzburg metropolitan area, South Africa, over a 1-year period, to observe the triage process involved in selecting patients for admission.Methods. A retrospective review of the patients referred to ICUs at Grey’s and Edendale hospitals, Pietermaritzburg, was performed over a year. The spectrum of patients was evaluated with respect to various demographics, and the current triage process was observed.Results. The Pietermaritzburg Metropolitan Critical Care service (PMCCS) received 2 081 patient referrals, 53.4% (1 111/2 081) of males and 46.6% (970/2 081) of females, with a mean patient age of 32 years. The majority of referrals were of surgical patients (39.3%, 818/2 081), followed by medical (18.9%, 393/2 081), trauma (18.6%, 387/2 081) and obstetrics and gynaecology (11.7%, 244/2 081). The chief indications for referral were the need for cardiovascular and respiratory support. Of these referrals, 72.0% (1 499/2 081) were accepted and planned for admission and 28.0% (582/2 081) were refused ICU care. Of the patients accepted, 60.7% (910/1 499) experienced delays prior to admission and 37.4% (561/1 499) were never physically admitted to the units.Conclusions. The PMCCS receives a far greater number of patient referrals than it is able to accommodate, necessitating triage. Patient demographics reflect a young patient population referred with chiefly surgical pathology needing physiological support

Lost borders : haunting in and of American women’s ghost stories

This thesis explicates the trope of haunting in turn-of-the-twentieth-century American women’s short stories of the ‘Wild West’. It demonstrates haunting’s implications for the understanding of space and Otherness in the context of the literary, ontological, and epistemic changes of the time. Delineating a specific sense of time and place through an equation of Transcendentalist vision and Realist writing, the conventional account of the Wild West elides questions of gender, class and race. Understood as a discourse, however, the writing and imagination of the Wild West as an empty space viewed from the perspective of totalising and unified gaze is interrogated as a constructed position allied to a white, male occupation of space and history that elides the presence of other genders, races and cultures in the narrative of frontier settlement. Haunting, as it disturbs conventional patterns of temporal and spatial ordering, opens up singular Transcendental and Realist perspectives to heterotopic disruptions that contest distinctions between real and imagined spaces and the exclusions that these distinctions enable. As a contested, resistant mode, haunting stories alter and warp the equation of vision with thought that occurs in the literature of Transcendentalism and Realism. Haunting stories do not simply acknowledge or represent the exclusion of women who have moved outside the bounds of domesticity and the confines of New Womanhood in writing about the frontier: they are exemplary and complex texts that warp and defuse the discursive solidity of the Wild West by disclosing structural and thematic fissures in the optical unities and power of Transcendental vision and literary Realism. This thesis will consider three works in detail, Elia Peattie’s ‘The House That Was Not’, Mary Hunter Austin’s ‘The Pocket-Hunter’s Story’, and Emma Frances Dawson’s ‘An Itinerant House’. The approach taken to these stories–examining the works as points of intersection and positioning in discourse and episteme–allows for both a detailed reading of what is being represented in the work, and a complex tracing of the systems that form and inform such representation

A Guide to Properly Using and Responding to Requests for Admission under the Texas Discovery Rules.

This article’s purpose is to provide a guide for properly using and responding to requests for admission under the Texas discovery rules. Requests for admission are an extremely effective discovery tool when used and responded to properly. Their use can save litigants considerable time and expense by eliminating and narrowing the issues involved in the cause of action. Often misunderstood, requests for admission are perhaps the least used of the major discovery devices available to litigants. Even though requests for admission have the potential to eliminate unnecessary proof at trial, streamline discovery and motion practice, and reduce pretrial and trial expenses, they are used much less frequently than other discovery devices because of a perceived inability to obtain substantive concessions through their use. Requests for admission are a double-edged sword. On the one hand, they can streamline the action and reduce its costs, whereas, on the other hand, they can result in virtual ruin to the responding party. As a responding party, there are many hardships that come with a request for admission. The responding party faces virtual ruin if it fails to timely or properly respond to requests for admission. An untimely or improper response may result in an adverse judgment or may expose the responding party to evidentiary or monetary sanctions. Responding parties also face issues such as abuse by opposing parties by serving too many requests or by asking the responding party to admit clearly disputed facts underlying its claims or defenses to the cause of action

A Guide to Properly Using and Responding to Requests for Admission under the Texas Discovery Rules.

This article’s purpose is to provide a guide for properly using and responding to requests for admission under the Texas discovery rules. Requests for admission are an extremely effective discovery tool when used and responded to properly. Their use can save litigants considerable time and expense by eliminating and narrowing the issues involved in the cause of action. Often misunderstood, requests for admission are perhaps the least used of the major discovery devices available to litigants. Even though requests for admission have the potential to eliminate unnecessary proof at trial, streamline discovery and motion practice, and reduce pretrial and trial expenses, they are used much less frequently than other discovery devices because of a perceived inability to obtain substantive concessions through their use. Requests for admission are a double-edged sword. On the one hand, they can streamline the action and reduce its costs, whereas, on the other hand, they can result in virtual ruin to the responding party. As a responding party, there are many hardships that come with a request for admission. The responding party faces virtual ruin if it fails to timely or properly respond to requests for admission. An untimely or improper response may result in an adverse judgment or may expose the responding party to evidentiary or monetary sanctions. Responding parties also face issues such as abuse by opposing parties by serving too many requests or by asking the responding party to admit clearly disputed facts underlying its claims or defenses to the cause of action

Advancing Methodology: From Mapping to Mobile Messaging Campaign

This article describes the progression of the Health Insurance Literacy (HIL) Action Team’s efforts from the initial charge by the Extension Committee on Organization and Policy (ECOP) of identifying priorities for Cooperative Extension health programming to developing and testing a national mobile messaging campaign designed to change health insurance knowledge, confidence, and behaviors of millennials. It highlights relevant empirical literature, summarizes the results of a national pulse online survey administered to Extension professionals and how they were applied to this project, reviews the Design Thinking and concept mapping process, and describes the development and testing of mobile messages. Anticipated outcomes of the mobile messaging campaign are discussed. Sources of data are the national pulse online survey along with insights gleaned from Extension professionals who participated in workshops, an eXtension Design-a-thon, and responses to a survey of millennials about experiences using health insurance, social media, and texting. This effort contributes to advancing Extension’s capacity to deliver programming related to health insurance education in innovative and effective ways

Bioenergy and the importance of land use policy in a carbon-constrained world

Policies aimed at limiting anthropogenic climate change would result in significant transformations of the energy and land-use systems. However, increasing the demand for bioenergy could have a tremendous impact on land use, and can result in land clearing and deforestation. Wise et al. (2009a,b) analyzed an idealized policy to limit the indirect land use change emissions from bioenergy. The policy, while effective, would be difficult, if not impossible, to implement in the real world. In this paper, we consider several different land use policies that deviate from this first-best, using the Joint Global Change Research Institute’s Global Change Assessment Model (GCAM). Specifically, these new frameworks are (1) a policy that focuses on just the above-ground or vegetative terrestrial carbon rather than the total carbon, (2) policies that focus exclusively on incentivizing and protecting forestland, and (3) policies that apply an economic penalty on the use of biomass as a proxy to limit indirect land use change emissions. For each policy, we examine its impact on land use, land-use change emissions, atmospheric CO2 concentrations, agricultural supply, and food prices

Functional Profiling of Transcription Factor Genes in Neurospora crassa.

Regulation of gene expression by DNA-binding transcription factors is essential for proper control of growth and development in all organisms. In this study, we annotate and characterize growth and developmental phenotypes for transcription factor genes in the model filamentous fungus Neurospora crassa We identified 312 transcription factor genes, corresponding to 3.2% of the protein coding genes in the genome. The largest class was the fungal-specific Zn2Cys6 (C6) binuclear cluster, with 135 members, followed by the highly conserved C2H2 zinc finger group, with 61 genes. Viable knockout mutants were produced for 273 genes, and complete growth and developmental phenotypic data are available for 242 strains, with 64% possessing at least one defect. The most prominent defect observed was in growth of basal hyphae (43% of mutants analyzed), followed by asexual sporulation (38%), and the various stages of sexual development (19%). Two growth or developmental defects were observed for 21% of the mutants, while 8% were defective in all three major phenotypes tested. Analysis of available mRNA expression data for a time course of sexual development revealed mutants with sexual phenotypes that correlate with transcription factor transcript abundance in wild type. Inspection of this data also implicated cryptic roles in sexual development for several cotranscribed transcription factor genes that do not produce a phenotype when mutated