Eat, Sleep, Console for Neonatal Abstinence Syndrome Babies

Neonatal Abstinence Syndrome (NAS) is a complex disorder that manifests with neurologic, gastrointestinal, and musculoskeletal disturbances and is most often associated with opioid withdrawal. In the US, 6 out of 1,000 babies are born to mothers who used opioids during their pregnancy. These babies go on to develop NAS. Androscoggin County, where Central Maine Medical Center is located, has an even higher rate of babies with NAS: 100 out of 1,000. Most institutions use the Finnegan Neonatal Abstinence Scoring System (FNASS) to guide pharmacologic treatment. This system assigns a score based on 21 clinical signs of withdrawal with a score ≥8 indicating a need for pharmacologic treatment. This system has never been validated nor has its score cutoffs been tested which may lead to over or under treatment of babies experiencing NAS. Eat, Sleep, Console is a novel approach which has shown to decrease average length of stay, pharmacologic treatment, and healthcare costs.https://scholarworks.uvm.edu/fmclerk/1503/thumbnail.jp

Book Review: Beyond Orientalism

A review of Beyond Orientalism by Fred Dallmayr

An Ethiopian-Headed Serpent in theCantigas de Santa María: Sin, Sex, and Color in Late Medieval Castile

An unconventional portrayal of the serpent of the Temptation in the Florence codex of the Cantigas de Santa María (Biblioteca nazionale centrale di Firenze, MS B.R. 20) manifests significant developments in the visual and epistemic norms of late medieval Castile. The satanic serpent’s black face and stereotyped African features link to cultural traditions well beyond Iberia, most notably the topos of the “Ethiopian,” which blended the actual and fantastical in deeply symbolic ways. Most crucial to the reading of the motif in the cantiga were the Ethiopian’s long-standing associations with sin and diabolism, rooted in early monastic Christianity but preserved in later medieval monastic and romance literature as well as in visual images found in Iberian contexts. Yet the otherwise conventional femininity of the serpent’s head must have connected still more specifically to medieval stereotypes of black women as hypersexual, distasteful, and dangerous. Iberian awareness of these stereotypes, attested by the caricatured black women of medieval Castilian exempla, poetry, and historical texts, surely facilitated recognition of the complementary binaries central to this cantiga, in that Satan’s blackness and sensuality invert Eve’s whiteness and erstwhile purity, foreshadowing her capitulation to the darkness of sin and sex as an antitype of the faultless Virgin. The innovative image thus reveals both its artist’s sensitivity to broad European cultural trends and the resonance of skin color in a region where both color and race would soon become inescapably concrete concerns

Realizing Potential: The Impact of Business Incubation upon the Absorptive Capacity of New Technology Based Firms

This article explores the potential of university technology business incubators to enhance the absorptive capacity of new technology-based firms. The research pursues three critical themes: it employs the absorptive capacity construct to analyse and evaluate the potential of incubation to strengthen the business model of new technology firms. It then explores the interaction between founders and incubator directors, mentors and business advisers to assess how this might enhance absorptive capacity. Finally, it indicates how such interactions can facilitate the transition from potential to realised absorptive capacity. The article interrogates the incubation process by using the absorptive capacity framework to evaluate how it might strengthen the business model of new technology firms. The qualitative findings suggest that where founders, advisers, mentors and incubator directors engage collaboratively to create an iterative dialogue which informs the development of a viable business model, the process by which potential absorptive capacity can be fully realised is substantially strengthened

Gaussian ellipsoid model for confined polymer systems

Polymer systems in slab geometries are studied on the basis of the recently presented Gaussian Ellipsoid Model [J. Chem. Phys. 114, 7655 (2001)].The potential of the confining walls has an exponential shape. For homogeneous systems in thermodynamic equilibrium we discuss density, orientation and deformation profiles of the polymers close to the walls. For strongly segregated mixtures of polymer components A and B equilibrium profiles are studied near a planar interface separating A and B rich regions. Spinodal decomposition processes of the mixtures in the presence of neutral walls show upon strong confinement an increase of the lateral size of A and B rich domains and a slowing down of the demixing kinetics. These findings are in agreement with predictions from time dependent Ginzburg--Landau theory. In the case, where one wall periodically favors one of the two mixture components over the other, different equilibrium structures emerge and lead to different kinetic pathways of spinodal decomposition processes in such systems.Comment: 18 pages, 16 figures, submitted to J. Chem. Phy

[Review of] Patricia Hill Collins. Fighting Words: Black Women & The Search For Justice

Collins\u27 Fighting Words builds on her previous work, Black Feminist Thought, as she explores standpoint theory and the outsider within position and their usefulness for Black feminist thought. She structures her analysis by critiquing its effectiveness as critical social theory. For Collins, Critical social theory constitutes theorizing about the social in defense of economic and social justice. Because African American women and other oppressed groups seek economic and social justice, she posits that their social theories may generate new perspectives on injustice