The past decade

Objective To increase the understanding of the characteristics in different types of internal hernia, and improve the effect of surgical treatment. Methods We retrospectively analyzed 36 cases of internal hernia in The First Affiliated Hospital of Soochow University from January 2011 to December 2016. The clinical data of onset, diagnosis and surgical treatment process were reviewed and analyzed for each case, including past abdominal operation, duration time of internal hernia, gastrointestinal dysfunction before onset, preoperative diagnosis, intestinal necrosis, pathway of internal hernia, operation time, postoperative complications and postoperative mortality. Results Patients were divided into two groups, according to the condition that whether or not they had past abdominal operation. There was no significant statistical difference between the two groups in duration time of internal hernia, gastrointestinal dysfunction before onset, preoperative diagnosis, intestinal necrosis, pathway of internal hernia, and postoperative complications. However, there was a significant statistical difference between the two groups in operation time and postoperative mortality. The average operation time was significant more in no past abdominal operation group than in with past abdominal operation group (χ2=6.236, P=0.013); and the postoperative was significant higher in no past abdominal operation group (18.2%) than in with past abdominal operation group (χ2=4.67, P=0.031). Conclusion Past abdominal operation had no effect on the disease process and postoperative complications of internal hernia. However, the operation time and postoperative mortality were higher in no past abdominal operation group than in with past abdominal operation group. This may related to that the intestinal strangulation necrosis occurred at an early stage in internal hernia patients of no past abdominal operation group. Most of the patients manifested as unexplained ileus in the early stage of internal hernia. Timely exploratory laparotomy can help to improve the treatment effectiveness and reduce the postoperative mortality for the internal hernia patients manifested as irrelievable or recurrent intestinal obstruction. Key words: Abdominal internal hernia; Past abdominal operation; Intestinal obstruction; Intestinal necrosis

Underlying the debate over affirmative action and reparations for black Americans is a dispute about the extent to which American society is responsible for present effects of past racial discrimination. Although much has been written on the subject, the scholarship too often sheds more heat than light, and tends to be dominated by extreme positions incapable of taking opposing claims seriously. This Article weighs in on this debate in a novel and constructive manner. The Article defends a societal obligation to remedy past discrimination by accepting, rather than dismissing, principles of conservatives who oppose affirmative action and reparations. Taking conservatives seriously reveals two moral principles that support a societal obligation to remedy past discrimination. The first principle is that racial discrimination is unjust. The second principle is corrective justice: that one who wrongfully harms another is obligated to make amends. Applied to affirmative action, these principles support conservative claims that a state is obligated to make amends to white victims of racial preferences. These principles, however, also support America's responsibility for past societal discrimination against blacks. To the extent society participated in wrongful discrimination, society is obligated, as a matter of corrective justice, to make amends to its black victims. A potential moral conflict thus exists between society's obligation to refrain from “reverse” discrimination and its obligation to remedy past discrimination. That is, the moral case against affirmative action also supports a moral case in its favor.The Article responds to the most serious objections to a societal obligation to remedy past discrimination. These include that America as a whole is not responsible for discrimination practiced by only some states and private actors, that it is unfair to hold current society responsible for discrimination by past society, and that blacks today ought not be viewed as victims of past discrimination, given the passage of time and the extent to which black people's choices have perpetuated their own disadvantage. This Article concludes that these objections fail to defeat America's responsibility for the consequences of her discriminatory history. America as a nation was responsible for protecting slavery and discrimination, a responsibility that belongs to the nation as a nation and therefore continues over time despite changeover in the American citizenry. American society is also responsible for black people's choices that may perpetuate their disadvantage because those choices reflect a foreseeable reaction to conditions created by societal discrimination. The moral imperative to remedy past discrimination, moreover, outweighs the risk of imprecision in doing so. Ultimately, conservative opposition to remedial policies is based on principles that counsel in favor of such policies as much as and arguably more than they counsel against them.

This study investigates the cross-national institutionalization of English as a regular school subject over the past century and discusses how the rise of English as a global language in today's curricular policy models around the world reflects an expansive conception of supranational citizenship. Our extensive comparative and historical data suggest that substantive societal characteristics of individual countries have played fairly insignificant roles in the rapid diffusion of English language education, especially in the past half century. This result sheds light on the institutionalist perspective in which the worldwide spread of English language education is understood to reflect universalistic nation-state purposes and principles of education that emphasize the empowerment of the individual in global society.

Compression of morbidity is a reduction over time in the total lifetime days of chronic disability, reflecting a balance between (1) morbidity incidence rates and (2) case-continuance rates, generated by case-fatality and case-recovery rates. Chronic disability includes limitations in activities of daily living and cognitive impairment, which can be covered by long-term-care insurance. Morbidity improvement can lead to a compression of morbidity if the reductions in age-specific prevalence rates are sufficiently large to overcome the increases in lifetime disability due to concurrent mortality improvements and progressively higher disability prevalence rates with increasing age. Compression of mortality is a reduction over time in the variance of age at death. Such reductions are generally accompanied by increases in the mean age at death; otherwise, for the variances to decrease, the death rates above the mean age at death would need to increase, and this has rarely been the case. Mortality improvement is a reduction over time in the age-specific death rates and a corresponding increase in the cumulative survival probabilities and age-specific residual life expectancies. Mortality improvement does not necessarily imply concurrent compression of mortality. This article reviews these concepts, describes how they are related, shows how they apply to changes in mortality over the past century and to changes in morbidity over the past 30 years, and discusses their implications for future changes in the United States. The major findings of the empirical analyses are the substantial slowdowns in the degree of mortality compression over the past half century and the unexpectedly large degree of morbidity compression that occurred over the morbidity/disability study period 1984–2004; evidence from other published sources suggests that morbidity compression may be continuing.

Reviewed by: John Neal and Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture ed. by Edward Watts and David J. Carlson Paul Gilmore (bio) John Neal and Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture. Edited by Edward Watts and David J. Carlson. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2012. 319 pp. Why do we recover a forgotten author? Much of the expansion of the nineteenth-century canon over the past half century has occurred in response to social and political transformations and through the desire to recover the silenced voices of the underrepresented and oppressed, whether due to gender, class, race, sexuality, region, or religion. But what of writers who don't represent a social position distinct from mainstream canonical literature? In other words, what of those other dead white men? Edward Watts and David Carlson, coeditors of the important and largely impressive collection John Neal and Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture, begin to raise this issue in their introduction. It's a question that, in some ways, haunts the volume. At times, they and some of the contributors follow the political bent of other recovery efforts—Neal is important because of his progressive political commitments to women's rights and against American imperialism. However, at other times they emphasize, as did the few scholars who wrote on Neal in the past century, that Neal was an important influence on more canonical authors and a prominent voice in at least the early years of his career. Nathaniel Hawthorne's comment in the sketch "P's Correspondence" about "that wild fellow, John Neal, who almost turned my boyish brain with his romances" has long served as a keynote for those arguing for Neal's significance and potential influence. Yet the editors begin their introduction by noting that in 1845 Hawthorne suggested that Neal, who lived until 1876, must be dead because he hadn't heard of him in so long. And the concluding essay by Kevin Hayes on Neal's 1860 autobiography quotes a reviewer who noted [End Page 237] that "'a very considerable proportion of our readers do not know who John Neal is'" (qtd. on 275). Because many of my readers may be in the same position, I'll provide a quick overview of his career. In 1793, Neal was born into a Quaker family of Falmouth (now Portland) in what was then the Maine district of Massachusetts. After a series of failed attempts at making a living, including becoming a lawyer, he published his first novel, Keep Cool, in 1817 while living in Baltimore. Over the next few years he produced a number of critical essays (especially on Byron, one of his most important influences) and a volume combining his poem The Battle of Niagara with his drama Goldau. Then, in just over four months in 1821 and 1822, he wrote four two-volume novels: Logan, Seventy-Six, Randolph, and Errata (published 1822-23). He spent the mid-1 820s in London, where he served as Jeremy Bentham's personal secretary. There he also produced a series of sketches on American writing and art for Blackwood's magazine (for which he is probably best known) and published his longest novel, Brother Jonathan (1825). Returning to the United States, he settled in Portland, writing Rachel Dyer (1828)—a historic romance of the Salem Witch Trials—the self-referential Authorship (1830), and The Down-Easters (1833). Over the next four decades, he would edit a series of journals; publish a number of orations, sketches, critical essays, and short stories; and create a minor stir through his lectures in favor of women's rights (relatedly publishing his novel True Womanhood [1859]). In the 1860s, he published two dime novels with Beadle and Company before the release of his autobiography, Wandering Recollections of a Somewhat Busy Life, in 1869. Overall, the essays in this volume focus on the works of the 1820s, as has most previous criticism. This emphasis has led to Neal being best known for his advocacy of a distinctive American literature, and many of the essays in the volume return to the question of his literary nationalism. The more compelling essays, however, either complicate his relationship to American nationalism (through his aesthetic...

Governmental Investment in Low TRL in the United States: Funding Innovative Companies from Concepts to Systems

Within fifteen years of the creation of the state of Jordan, the first histories of the new country began to appear. Over the past century, three distinct phases of history writing can be discerned: subjective histories, written by British and Jordanian participants in the mandate state-building project; objective histories, written by researchers who were independent of the Anglo-Jordanian founders of the state; and revisionist historians who based their work on archival sources to challenge and extend the scope of earlier histories. Over the past quarter century, revisionist historians have come increasingly to rely on archival resources and previous research work in Jordan.

Trends in Chesapeake Bay sedimentation rates during the late Holocene

Studies on the 20th century climate change in China have revealed that under the background of global warming over the past century, climate in China has also experienced significant change with mean annual temperature increased by about 0.5 °C. More reliable results for the latter part of the 20th century indicate that the largest warming occurred in Northwest China, North China and Northeast China, and the warming in winter is most significant. Although no obvious increase or decrease trends were detected for mean precipitation over China in the past half century, regional differences are very distinct. In the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River, precipitation increased, while that in the Yellow River Basin markedly decreased. Studies suggest that climate change in China seems to be related not only with the internal factors such as ENSO, PDO, and the others, but also with the anthropogenic effects such as greenhouse gas emissions, and land use. The future climate change studies in China seem to be important in narrowing understanding the nature of China’s climate change and its main causes, since it is significant for projection and for impact assessment of climate change in the future.

During the past century, fossil fuels--petroleum liquids, natural gas and coal--were the dominant source of world energy production. From 1950 to 2005, fossil fuels provided 85-93% of all energy production. All fossil fuels grew substantially during this period, their combined growth exceeding the increase in world population. This growth, however, was irregular, providing for rapidly growing per capita production from 1950 to 1980, stable per capita production from 1980 to 2000 and rising per capita production again after 2000. During the past half century, growth in fossil fuel production was essentially limited by energy demand. During the next half century, fossil fuel production will be limited primarily by the amount and characteristics of remaining fossil fuel resources. Three possible scenarios--low, medium and high--are developed for the production of each of the fossil fuels to 2050. These scenarios differ primarily by the amount of ultimate resources estimated for each fossil fuel. Total fossil fuel production will continue to grow, but only slowly for the next 15-30 years. The subsequent peak plateau will last for 10-15 years. These production peaks are robust; none of the fossil fuels, even with highly optimistic resource estimates, is projected to keep growing beyond 2050. World fossil fuel production per capita will thus begin an irreversible decline between 2020 and 2030.

Purpose: The aim of the study was to evaluate the efficacy of a theoretically motivated explicit intervention approach to improve regular past tense marking for early school-age children with developmental language disorder (DLD).Method: Twenty-one children with DLD (ages 5;9–6;9 [years;months]) were included in a crossover randomized controlled trial (intervention, n = 10; waiting control, n = 11). Intervention included once-weekly sessions over 10 weeks using the SHAPE CODING system, in combination with a systematic cueing hierarchy to teach past tense marking. Once the first group completed intervention, the waiting control group crossed over to the intervention condition. The primary outcome was criterion-referenced measures of past tense marking with standardized measures of expressive and receptive grammar as the secondary outcome. Ancillary analyses on extension and behavioral control measures of morphosyntax were also conducted.Results: There was a significant Time × Group interaction (p < .001) with a significant difference in pre–post intervention improvement in favor of the intervention group (p < .001, d = 3.03). Further analysis once both groups had received the intervention revealed no improvement for either group on past tense production during the 5-week pre-intervention period, significant improvement pre–post intervention (p < .001, d = 1.22), with gains maintained for 5 weeks postintervention. No significant differences were found on pre- to postintervention standardized measures of grammar, or on extension or control measures.Conclusions: The efficacy of the theoretically motivated explicit grammar intervention was demonstrated. Results contribute to the evidence base supporting this intervention to improve past tense production in early school-age children with DLD, suggesting it is a viable option for clinicians to select when treating morphosyntactic difficulties for this population.Supplemental Material S1. 2010 checklist of information to include when reporting a randomised trial (Schulz, Altman, & Moher, 2010).Supplemental Material S2. CONSORT 2010 flow diagram. Supplemental Material S3. Intervention session plan and fidelity checklist (adapted from Calder, Claessen, Ebbels, & Leitao, 2020).Supplemental Material S4. Session-by-session summary of intervention targets and materials.Supplemental Material S5. Explicit intervention to improve past tense marking for early school-aged children with DLD template for intervention and description and replication (TIDieR; Hoffman et al., 2014) checklist.Calder, S. D., Claessen, M., Ebbels, S., & Leitao, S. (2020). The efficacy of an explicit intervention approach to improve past tense marking for early school-age children with developmental language disorder. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 64(1), 91-104. https://doi.org/10.1044/2020_JSLHR-20-00132

The article deals with peculiarities of the transformation of historical conscious­ness in the context of modern ethnic groups. The ethnic identity of a person is in­extricably linked to his or her historical consciousness. This connection is not lim­ited only to the knowledge of historical events, but suggests a way of organizing such knowledge of the ethnos’ past in the space of personal meanings and values. The past has a special being status in a person’s consciousness: it is that which was, which fatally determines the present and the future. The authors emphasize that processes of globalization and the associated culture of mass consumption transform historical consciousness of modern people, in which the existential con­nection of times breaks down. The events of the past lose their existential status, and turn into a set of information items, material for the hermeneutic framing of history. At the same time, globalization leads to the formation of a multicultural society in which the past is used as a symbolic resource of group consolidation. In such a society, historical consciousness assumes quasi-traditional forms based on the framing of simplified and unambiguous mythologies of the historical past, in which the present and the future dissolve. The specificity of historical truth, which combines the verification of facts about the events of the past, the uncover of the value-semantic integrity of the historical process and its ideological and moral grounds, is investigated. The importance of historical truth in the formation of ethno-cultural identity is substantiated

This book was funded by the EU 7th Framework Programme (7FP), DIGIFACT 625637 Project (http://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/187953_ en.html) and ADS3DV 625636 Project (http://cordis.europa.eu/project/ rcn/187952_en.html). The book will be Open Access, thanks to FP7 post-grant Open Access (https://www.openaire.eu/postgrantoapilot).

To explore possible interrelationships among resistance to peer pressure, risky decision-making and health risk behaviors among young adolescents. Based on the cluster sampling method, the participants who were recruited from 5 junior middle schools in Guangzhou and 3 junior middle schools in Shenyang city on October, 2010, were administered to complete the questionnaire concerned with their experiences with drinking and smoking during the past 30 days preceding the survey, and the hours using computer daily both in weekdays and in weekend. The level of resistance to peer influence and risky decision-making were assessed by Resistance to peer influence scale (RPIS) and Youth decision-making questionnaire (YDMQ). Logistic regression was used to explore possible interrelationships among resistance to peer influence, risky decision-making and health risk behaviors among young adolescents. A total of 1985 questionnaires were valid, including 1001(50.4%) boys and 984 (49.6%) girls. About 27.1% (537/1985) junior middle school students reported having health risk behaviors, boys' (30.7%, 307/1001) was higher than girls' (23.4%, 230/984) with significant gender difference (P < 0.05). The prevalence of smoking, drinking during the past 30 days before the survey and using computer over 3 hours daily in weekdays and in weekend were 5.1% (102/1985), 14.3% (284/1985), 3.5% (70/1985) and 13.7% (272/1985), respectively. The rate of drinking, using computer over 3 hours daily in weekdays and in weekend were higher in males (16.4% (164/1001), 4.5% (45/1001), 16.2% (162/1001)) than those in females (12.2% (120/984), 2.5% (25/984), 11.2% (110/984)) (P < 0.05). The scores of RPIS and YDMQ of the two cities adolescents were 2.82 ± 0.39 and 1.68 ± 0.62. The students reported smoking, drinking during the past 30 days before the survey and using computer over 3 hours daily in weekend gained lower RPIS scores (2.43 ± 0.40, 2.61 ± 0.41, 2.77 ± 0.40) than their counterparts who didn't report these kind of health risk behaviors (2.84 ± 0.38, 2.85 ± 0.38, 2.82 ± 0.39)(P < 0.05). And those reported smoking, drinking during the past 30 days before the survey and using computer over 3 hours daily in weekdays and in weekend gained higher YDMQ scores (2.38 ± 0.66, 2.06 ± 0.66, 1.97 ± 0.72, 1.84 ± 0.64, respectively) than their counterparts who didn't report these kind of health risk behaviors (1.64 ± 0.38, 1.61 ± 0.58, 1.67 ± 0.61, 1.65 ± 0.61, respectively) (P < 0.05). After adjusting gender, area, parental education degree, self-reported family economic condition, multi-variant logistic regression analysis indicated that the low and middle level of resistance to peer influence (low and middle level vs high level, had odds ratios of 2.97 (1.96 - 4.50) and 1.51 (1.05 - 2.16)), and also the middle and high level of risky decision-making (middle and high level vs low level, had odds ratios of 1.62 (1.19 - 2.22) and 3.43 (2.39 - 4.90)) were all the risk factors of adolescent health risk behaviors. Adolescents with poor ability of resistance to peer pressure and high risky decision-making were both the risk factors of adolescent health risk behaviors.

Objective To investigate the ultrasound features of gouty joints during acute and past attacks. Methods Clinical data and ultrasound features of joints during the acute and past attacks of gouty patients who were experiencing an acute attack were collected. The differences of ultrasound features between two episodes, as well as the relationship with clinical characteristics were analyzed. Results Sixty-four patients were enrolled with 21(33%) patients at their first attack. The first metatarsophalangeal (MTP1) joints were most frequently involved, meanwhile, 9.4% patients had two or more joints attacked during one episode. The most prevalent feature was synovitis at the acute phase, followed by double contour (DC) sign (18 cases, 28%), bone erosion (12 cases, 19%) and tophi (10 cases, 16%), while 23 patients had two or more pathological changes. Whereas, the DC sign was found most in previously attacked joints (10 cases, 33%), followed by tophi (8 cases, 27%), bone erosion (7 cases, 23%) and synovitis (4 cases, 13.3%). No positive pathological changes were found in asymptomatic joints. Synovitis was more common in joints during their acute attacks (80% vs 13%, χ2=20.475, P<0.01), however, DC sign and tophi were more common in previous attacked joints (10% vs 33% and 0 vs 27%, χ2=3.892, 6.642, P<0.05, respectively). Both the DC sign and tophi were positively correlated with the disease duration. Conclusion Synovitis is the most prevalent feature in gouty joints during acute episodes; even bone erosion can be found at the first attack. The DC sign, tophi and bone erosion are common in past attacked joints. The prevalence of both DC sign and tophi are increased along with disease durations. Subclinical synovitis can be detected in a small past of joints which are not at acute attack. Key words: Gouty arthritis; Musculoskeletal Ultrasound; Acute attack; Previously attacked joints.