1,721,134 research outputs found
1. Biosociality extended. The case of parental groups campaigning against paediatric vaccinations in Italy
No full text
Introduction
No full textIn the late twentieth century, many of people working in the social and historical sciences would orient the work with respect to the major alternatives offered by “grand theory.” The “grand theory” names remain “big” in the twenty-first century, but now people are more likely to define the research in terms of particular problems, specific lines of inquiry, and suitable concepts. Pragmatism as a philosophical tradition is most closely associated with the works of a small number of scholars writing in the United States around the turn of the twentieth century. American pragmatists share the idea that knowledge proceeds through experience. The proponents of the sociology of critique developed their approach, and oriented their research activities, in explicit contrast to the approach taken by the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu
Caring
Get PDFTraditionally, caring has not garnered a lot of attention in academia. In the rivaling theoretical schemes that dominated the social sciences in the and 1970s, daily caring activities were deemed to be of secondary importance. For example, in Marxist social theory, the feeding, sleeping, and so on, with which people sustained themselves and each other, were subsumed under the category of reproduction. The German Sorge has been employed in various ways to express an opposition between alienating and oppressive modern technologies and truly human, dedicated care. As caring is performed across networks, it is not always easy to say who or what does the caring and who or what is being cared for. Take contraception once again. The Heideggerian investment in Sorge was informed by a generalized suspicion of all things modern. Technologies were prominent among modern things but so, too, were techniques
Environmental pollution and allergy
No full textIt may be a coincidence, but it is a fact that the first clear characterization of hay fever began in England where modern industrialization started in Europe. Only at the end of the 20th century were associations of the increasing prevalence of allergy with outdoor air pollution discussed. The seminal study came from Japan from the group of T. Miyamoto linking the increase in Japanese cedar pollinosis to an increased prevalence of Diesel cars and probably exposure to Diesel exhaust in epidemiological, animal experimental and in vitro studies. In Germany first epidemiological studies were done in North Rhine-Westphalia and Bavaria in 1987 and 1988 showing a striking prevalence of allergic disease of up to 10-20% in preschool children. After German reunification the most surprising observation was a lower prevalence of hay fever in East German children compared to the West, although there was a much higher air pollution with SO2 and large particulate matter. Modern smog as found over West German cities most likely originating from traffic exhaust and consisting of fine and ultrafine particles was shown to be associated with higher incidence rates of allergy and allergic sensitization. In the 10 years after reunification there was a steep increase of allergy prevalence in East German children reaching almost the same level as in West Germany. Obviously, a multitude of lifestyle factors - beyond air pollution - may be involved in the explanation of this phenomenon. Surprisingly the skin manifestation of atopy, namely atopic eczema, was more frequent in East German children compared to the West, thus differing from airway allergy. Meanwhile in vitro studies and animal experiments have shown that a variety of air pollutants mostly from environmental tobacco smoke (indoors) and from traffic exhaust (outdoors) can stimulate immune cells inducing a Th2-dominated response besides their irritative effects. While 50 years ago in allergy textbooks a clear distinction was made between 'toxic' or 'allergic', the newly developed concept of allergotoxicology has stimulated research tremendously, meaning 'the investigation of effects of toxic substances upon the induction, elicitation and maintenance of allergic reactions'. (C) 2014 S. Karger AG, Base
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
- …
