Political action is frequently conceptualised as starting from the ground up. Plausible as this point may be, it pays insufficient attention to well‐established arguments that we inhabit ...administrative society, implicitly contrasted against political society, with technocrats operating the requisite power/knowledge grid away from the street. Like Foucault's ‘specific intellectuals’, technocrats work in pivotal positions in apparatuses of population regulation, but nevertheless can potentially recognise the plight of the marginalised ‘masses’ as they themselves are also alienated subject‐objects of population regulation. This article draws on a range of ethnographic encounters with technocrats working in diverse areas of migration management in the European Union to prompt an examination of the historical and social conditions that impede, and often render unthinkable, direct engagement between technocrats and the migrants whom they are paid to regulate. The article draws explicitly on Hannah Arendt's work on the vita activa, compassion, thinking, judging and revolution (1) to explain how the apparatus's systemic isolation of both its policy experts and policy targets impedes political action and (2) to identify a form of ethnographic engagement that might help to overcome it.
Rumination to negative affect has been linked to the onset and maintenance of mood disorders in adults as well as children. Responses to positive affect have received far less attention thus far. A ...few recent studies in adults suggest that responses to positive affect are involved in the development of both depressive and hypomanic symptoms, but thus far no study has investigated their role in childhood mood problems. The purpose of the present study was to validate a child version of the Responses to Positive Affect questionnaire and examine the extent to which responses to positive affect prospectively predict mood symptoms over a 3-month interval. The Responses to Positive Affect questionnaire for Children was found to assess two types of responses to positive affect: Positive Rumination and Dampening. Both subscales showed sufficient internal consistency and moderate stability over a 3-month interval. Low levels of positive rumination and high levels of dampening were concurrently associated with depressive symptoms, over and above responses to negative affect. Importantly, low levels of positive rumination also predicted increases in depressive symptoms over a 3-month interval over and above baseline symptoms in children reporting high levels of stress. Both positive rumination and dampening were positively related to concurrent hypomanic symptoms and high levels of positive rumination predicted increases in hypomanic symptoms over a 3-month interval over and above baseline symptoms in children reporting high levels of stress. The results underscore the added value of assessing responses to positive affect in addition to responses to negative affect.
While the complexity of flexible bronchoscopy has increased, standard options for moderate sedation medications have not changed in three decades. There is a need to improve moderate sedation while ...maintaining safety. Remimazolam was developed to address shortcomings of current sedation strategies.
A prospective, double-blind, randomized, multicenter, parallel group trial was performed at 30 US sites. The efficacy and safety of remimazolam for sedation during flexible bronchoscopy were compared with placebo and open-label midazolam.
The success rates were 80.6% in the remimazolam arm, 4.8% in the placebo arm (P < .0001), and 32.9% in the midazolam arm. Bronchoscopy was started sooner in the remimazolam arm (mean, 6.4 ± 5.82 min) compared with placebo (17.2 ± 4.15 min; P < .0001) and midazolam (16.3 ± 8.60 min). Time to full alertness after the end of bronchoscopy was significantly shorter in patients treated with remimazolam (median, 6.0 min; 95% CI, 5.2-7.1) compared with those treated with placebo (13.6 min; 95% CI, 8.1-24.0; P = .0001) and midazolam (12.0 min; 95% CI, 5.0-15.0). Remimazolam registered superior restoration of neuropsychiatric function compared with placebo and midazolam. Safety was comparable among all three arms, and 5.6% of the patients in the remimazolam group had serious treatment-emergent adverse events as compared with 6.8% in the placebo group.
Remimazolam administered under the supervision of a pulmonologist was effective and safe for moderate sedation during flexible bronchoscopy. In an exploratory analysis, it demonstrated a shorter onset of action and faster neuropsychiatric recovery than midazolam.
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•Thermal decomposition of DIMP vapors serves to quantify decomposition of sarin, a chemical agent.•In air heated to 200–350 °C, DIMP decomposes much faster than in nitrogen.•Despite ...measured thermal decomposition of DIMP, FTIR does not detect expected gas products.
Diisopropyl methylphosphonate (DIMP) is a chemical weapon agent surrogate. Quantifying the rates of thermal decomposition of such compounds is important to enable predictions of spread of respective toxic vapors in different scenarios. An experimental setup is designed and built to quantify the rate of decomposition of DIMP at temperatures of 200–350 °C. Liquid DIMP is fed from a brass evaporator heated to 140 °C and vented with argon. It is mixed with a pre-heated carrier gas (air or nitrogen) in a steel flow reactor. The gas is sampled from the reactor after a certain residence time and sent to a Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) analyzer. Under 350 °C, the thermal decomposition of DIMP in air occurs much faster than in nitrogen. In air, the decomposition of DIMP can be described as the first order reaction with the rate constant kTs-1=107.4±2.5·exp-21.4±6.6kcal/molRT. Despite measuring substantial reduction in the DIMP concentration due to its thermal decomposition, present measurements could not detect the presence of propene and other decomposition products.
Comments on Dace Dzenovska's 'Bordering encounters, sociality and distribution of the ability to live a normal life' (same journal issue). Adapted from the source document.
Reply to commentaries Feldman, Gregory
Social anthropology,
05/2013, Letnik:
21, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Responds to Michael Lambek, Nigel Rapport and Steven C. Caton's comments on Feldman's "The specific intellectual's pivotal position: action, compassion and thinking in administrative society, an ...Arendtian view" (same journal issue). Adapted from the source document.
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