Circadian rhythm of hot flashes and activity levels among prostate cancer patients on androgen deprivation therapy

Abstract

Background: Modifiable risk factors contribute to the pathogenesis of cardiovascular disease (CVD) and erectile dysfunction (ED). We aimed to compare the knowledge about the contribution of modifiable risk factors to the pathogenesis of CVD and ED. The impact of patients’ having modifiable risk factors on the awareness of their negative influence on the development of CVD and ED was examined.

Methods: To this multicenter cohort study, we included 417 patients with CHD who had been hospitalized in the cardiology or cardiac surgery department during the previous six weeks and underwent cardiac rehabilitation in one of the five centers. Knowledge about modifiable risk factors was collected. ED was assessed by an abridged IIEF-5 questionnaire. Comparisons between groups were conducted using the Student’s t-test, Mann–Whitney U test, and Kruskal–Wallis test. Relationships were analyzed with Spearman's rank correlation coefficient.

Results: The mean number of correctly identified risk factors for CVD was significantly higher than those for ED (3.71?±?1.87 vs. 2.00?±?1.94; p?<?.0001). Smoking was the most recognized risk factor both for CVD and ED. Dyslipidemia was least frequently identified as a risk factor for CVD. Sedentary lifestyle was the only risk factor whose incidence did not affect the level of patient knowledge.

Conclusions: Cardiac patients with ED know more about risk factors for CVD than ED. It is necessary to include information about the negative impact of modifiable risk factors on sexual health into education programs promoting healthy lifestyles in men with cardiovascular diseases.     

Truth,lies, and racial consequences in Ernest Hemingway's True at First Light: A Fictional Memoir

Abstract

This article examines Ernest Hemingway's posthumously published novel True at First Light: A Fictional Memoir, by relating the author's vision of the role of Africa in the literary imagination to issues the novel raises for postcolonial cultural and historical criticism. Analyzing the novel's narrative, which draws upon Hemingway's second safari to Kenya in 1953–4, offers insight into Hemingway's 'African American' consciousness, and the new awareness that he was able substantively to arrive at for the first time in this novel, less than 10 years before his death. This awareness inaugurated what might be called a fictional reverse migration, whereby Hemingway reconnects with the black native perspective on Africa that he encountered on his first safari in 1933–4, in order to acquire material insight into what blacks were experiencing in America at the time of his second safari. Identifying this awareness also leads to the possibility of (re)reading Hemingway's racial perspective in his earlier works with African settings.     

A New Approach to Religious Commitment

Abstract

The authors propose a new framework for studying religious commitment. Commitment is viewed as a general social process which occurs in various aspects of life (e.g., marriage, work, politics, and religion). It consists of subjective and behavioral components. Religious commitment is defined as the interaction between people's religious consciousness and religious participation. Other religious beliefs, feelings, and intellectual inclinations are considered to be parts of people's religious orientations, not aspects of commitment as other approaches have suggested. Data from members of six Christian denominations are used to explore this conceptualization and the relationships among these variables. Some determinants and consequences of commitment also are considered. The evidence yields several propositions regarding factors that affect commitment and the effects of religion on people's attitudes and behaviors. The paper's implications for future research on religious commitment in particular and commitment in general also are discussed.     

Editorial

Abstract

Two language textbooks written in 17th century New England are examined, John Eliot's The Indian Grammar Begun and Roger Williams' A Key into the Language of America. Previously unnoticed links between these texts and traditional English forms of language teaching are demonstrated, and the argument is made that both men made conscious choices about how to adapt their experience of European linguistic models to the very different grammatical structures of Native American languages. These linguistic choices demonstrate the ways in which English and New English culture of the time used language to construct and display religious, social and national identities, using the contrast between Eliot's and Williams' lives and audiences at the time of writing in order to gain insight into the connections between language and identity in the period.     

Home of the Brave,Frantz Fanon and cultural pluralism

Abstract

This article examines Mark Robson's Home of the Brave (1949, USA), a Hollywood social problem drama about anti-black racism, and the brief but vivid response to the film presented in Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks (1952). Fanon enables a rethinking of some of the film's most central assumptions and the discourses upon which the story relies. At the same time, Fanon's response conveys information about his own biography and his perspectives on cultural representation generally. The article examines the film as a document that reveals competing claims about anti-black racism and, through Fanon's commentary, revisits the relationship between cultural pluralism and racial ideologies in the mid-20th century USA. The article explores the nature of Fanon's anti-racist commentary on the film as a form of 'cultural studies' that offers transnational historical insight and simultaneously provides ways of re-examining the national specificity of race thinking.     

Attitudinal and Behavioral Factors Associated with Extramarital Sex Among Nigerian Men: Findings from a National Survey

ABSTRACT

Using couple data from a national survey, this article examines couple's characteristics associated with extramarital sex among Nigerian men. We found 15.4% of married men had extramarital sex in the past 12 months. Extramarital sex was significantly associated with men's attitude toward extramarital sex (OR = 1.7 [1.4–3.0]), early sexual debut (OR = 1.9 [1.6–2.3]), alcohol use (OR = 1.7 [1.4–2.1]), and intimate partner violence against wife (IPV) (OR = 1.4 [1.2–1.7]). Increased wife's education was associated with decreased husband's extramarital sex. Men living in rural areas and in the Central and Southern regions were also more likely to have extramarital sex. The findings suggest useful implications for HIV prevention programs in Nigeria. Interventions should focus on influencing social norms around protective behaviors for men to avoid risks associated with extramarital sex and IPV, helping men to change attitudes toward extramarital sex and IPV, and promoting delay in age at first sex among young men.     

Parental Love and Gender Affirmation Leads a New Transgender Movement

The development of the pill

On the Pill: A Social History of Oral Contraceptives, 1950–1970. By Elizabeth Siegel Watkins. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998, 183 pages. Cloth, $25.95.

Hermaphrodites then and now

Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex. By Alice Domurat Dreger. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998, 266 pages. Cloth, $35.00.

Coming home to our sexual selves

Women's Sexuality Across the Life Span: Challenging Myths, Creating Meanings. By Judith C. Daniluk. New York: The Guilford Press, 1998, 416 pages. Cloth, $36.95.

Behavioral Strategies in the Prevention of HIV Infection, STDs, and Unintended Pregnancy

High‐Risk Sexual Behavior: Interventions With Vulnerable Populations. By Evvie Becker, Elizabeth Rankin, and Annette U. Rickel. New York: Plenum Press, 1998, 168 pages. Cloth, $39.50.

Sexual health expertise and the primary care provider

Sexual Medicine in Primary Care. By William L. Maurice. St. Louis, MO: Mosby, 1999, 366 pages. Paper, $39.95.     

'Totalitarianism', Treason and Containment in Catch-22 (and 1984)

Abstract

Critical writing on Catch-22 has often centred (quite naturally and understandably, it must be said) on concepts such as paradox, black humour and the absurdity of the human condition. Although these approaches have certainly not been without profit and have produced interesting readings, they have also tended to obscure, under the generic nature of such frameworks, the novel's patent political concerns — concerns which, moreover, are not at all unrelated to the usual critical preoccupations. In a similar way, although Catch-22 criticism has often relied heavily on the detection of literary allusions and influences at work in the text, a most obvious source of influence seems to have been generally ignored. This essay attempts to offer a different reading of Catch-22 based on the assertion that what the novel is really about is 'totalitarianism'. Its starting point is, therefore, a parallel reading bringing together Heller's best-known book with one of the central literary texts on 'totalitarianism' — George Orwell's 1984. Focusing initially on the similar way(s) in which the two novels construct what is called a 'totalitarian' atmosphere, the essay proceeds to briefly demonstrate the bearing of the 'totalitarian' problematic on another important '60s novel, E. L. Doctorow's Welcome to Hard Times, and to offer a fuller reading of Catch-22, including a summary excursion into the difficult question of how the student of '60s American fictions should approach the concept of 'totalitarianism'.     

Assessing God Locus of Control as a Factor in College Students’ Alcohol Use and Sexual Behavior

Abstract. Objectives: This study explored God locus of control beliefs (ie, God's control over behavior) regarding their influence on alcohol use and sexual behavior as an alternative religiosity measure to religious behaviors, which does not capture perceived influence of religiosity. Additionally, demographic differences in religious beliefs were explored. Methods: College students aged 18–24 (N = 324) completed a survey between April 2012 and March 2013. Principal components and multivariate analyses were conducted. Results: Findings suggest that measures provide reliable, valid data from college students. God locus of control is linked to not consuming alcohol or engaging in sex. There were differences regarding relationship status and religious denomination. Conclusions: God locus of control beliefs are an appropriate construct for collecting data about college students’ religiosity. Furthermore, health educators at faith-based institutions could incorporate this construct into their programming, encouraging abstinence but also behaving responsibly for those who do drink and are sexually experienced.     

Frank O'Hara in New York Race relations,poetic situations,postcolonial space

Abstract

Frank O'Hara's 1958 poem 'Ode: Salute to the French Negro Poets' cites 'race' as 'the poetic ground on which we rear our smiles', a phrase that points to both domestic and international contexts for reading this New York poet. At the same time, 'race' has a history of specific valences in O'Hara's work – as a focus of exoticized images of desire, aesthetic fulfillment, and social energy. Further, race, inflected through various colonial screens, becomes the central avenue leading toward O'Hara's project of rewriting the parameters of social space in poetry, a radical aestheticization not just of landscape but of social relations, with a consequent socialization of the act of writing. This article explores O'Hara's spatial poetics through the terms of Situationist theory, in which the techniques of dérive and détournement are applied to a reading of the poet's active suspension of the 'rules' of a gridded and hierarchical social order.     

College Women's Sexual Decision Making: Cognitive Mediation of Alcohol Expectancy Effects

Abstract

Objective: Alcohol has been linked to a variety of risky sexual practices, including inconsistent condom use. Due to the high rates of alcohol consumption among underage college women, greater understanding of the role of alcohol in young women's sexual decision making is warranted. Participants and Methods: Female underage (18- to 20-year-old) social drinkers (N = 94) participated in an experiment in which they projected themselves into a written hypothetical sexual situation with a new partner. One half of the situations portrayed alcohol consumption; one half did not involve alcohol consumption. Their appraisals of the situation's sexual potential, impelling and inhibiting cognitions, and sexual behavior intentions were assessed. Results: Results revealed that alcohol's expectancy effects on young women's unprotected sexual intentions were mediated by their cognitive appraisals of the situation. Conclusions: These findings indicate that alcohol expectancies and their influence on women's sexual decisions should be incorporated into sexual risk reduction efforts.     

Women's Status and Social Capital in the United States

SUMMARY

Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone found that social capital is closely associated with a variety of important indicators of community health, and women benefit from many of these resources as members of their communities. But is there anything distinct about how women experience social capital? Is there a relationship between social capital and women's status overall? Using data on social capital from Bowling Alone and data collected by the Institute for Women's Policy Research for its Status of Women in the States project, we assess trends across the states on both dimensions. Overall, the findings suggest that there is a strong relationship between the two.     

A Cesspool of Intrigue: Les' Kurbas,Oleksandr Dovzhenko,and the Film Industry in 1920s Soviet Ukraine

Abstract

In the 1920s, theatre innovator Oleksandr “Les'” Kurbas (1887–1937) made three short films for the Vseukrains'ke Foto-Kino Upravlinnia [All-Ukrainian Photo-Cinema Administration] or VUFKU. His film career was short-lived, however. Lambasting the VUFKU as a “cesspool of intrigue,” Kurbas left film for good to focus exclusively on theatre. His films never gained wide release, and have since been lost. Kurbas’s brief foray into cinema could therefore be considered a non-moment, yet because Kurbas objected not to the medium itself, but to the institutions creating film, his encounter with the VUFKU illuminates the larger process of the formation of the Soviet film industry. Kurbas’s departure from film occurred simultaneously with the arrival of Oleksandr Dovzhenko (1894–1956), and their crossed paths show how the structure of the Soviet film industry shaped artistic possibilities. The institutional transformation of VUFKU into Ukrainfilm, the regional affiliate of the all-Union film monopoly Soiuzkino, signalled a cultural shift: from a film industry in Soviet Ukraine, to a Soviet Ukrainian film industry, one both part of wider Soviet cinema production and slotted specifically into a Ukrainian niche. Ultimately, this article argues that this process of consolidation and centralization in the film industry complicated the development of culture in the Soviet regions.     

Compensatory Weight Control Behaviors of Women in Emerging Adulthood: Associations Between Childhood Abuse Experiences and Adult Relationship Avoidance

Abstract

Objective: To examine correlates of compensatory weight control behaviors among women in transition between adolescence and adulthood. Participants: The authors recruited a sample of undergraduate women (N = 759) at a large northwestern university during the 2009–2010 academic year. Methods: Logistic regression was used to assess relations among childhood abuse, psychosocial functioning, adult dating relationship factors, and women's endorsement of compensatory weight control behaviors. Results: The final model reliably distinguished between participants who endorsed versus denied use of compensatory behaviors (χ²[5, N = 747] = 36.37, p < .001), with global psychosocial functioning and relationship avoidance accounting for the most variance. Conclusions: These findings illustrate the importance of considering childhood abuse histories and adult relationships while assessing young women's compensatory weight control behaviors.     

Boris Eikhenbaum's Response to the Crisis of the Novel in the 1920s

Abstract

Focusing on the Russian literary scholar Boris Eikhenbaum (1886–1959), the present article considers the interrelationship of autobiographical, scholarly and fictional modes of writing. In 1925 Eikhenbaum wrote in a letter of his 'longing for acts, longing for biography'. This article views the scholar's acute sense of diminished agency in the context of the crisis of the novel in the 1920s and discusses how Eikhenbaum's own generic experimentation becomes a means of finding an answer to the question he posed to himself and his age of 'how to be a writer'. The discussion is primarily based on Eikhenbaum's autobiographical sketches in Moi vremennik (My Periodical, 1929) and his scholarly monograph, Lev Tolstoi. Piatidesiatye gody (Lev Tolstoi: The Fifties, 1928), and attention is drawn to the generic, rhetorical and narrative strategies used across these hybrid scholarly texts, which in turn become invested with a certain emotional and ethical charge. In the end, the article shows how, above all, Eikhenbaum's empathetic engagement with Tolstoi marks for him the restoration of 'biography' and the solution to the entwined epochal and personal crises of genre and authorship.     

Using smartphones to collect daily sexual behavior data from college students

ABSTRACT

Objective: Our objectives were to measure reporting differences between sexual behavior data from daily diary and retrospective estimates and to assess the utility of using smartphones to collect sexual behavior data from a college student population. Participants: Eighty-six participants (68 women, 18 men) completed the study. Methods: For 30 days during the Spring 2017 semester, participants received prompts to participate in daily diaries about their previous day's sexual behavior on their smartphones. Participants then retrospectively reported their past 30 days of sexual behavior and provided feedback on the process of receiving daily diaries on their smartphones. Results: We found that college students overreported their sexual behavior on the retrospective survey compared to their daily diary reports (ps < .001; Cohen's ds ≥ 1.51). Participants provided positive and constructive feedback. Conclusions: Using smartphones to administer daily diaries is a promising technique for obtaining reliable sexual behavior data from college students.     

FSU students making contact and establishing links: London 2000 postgraduate student conference in Jewish studies

Shifting Czech Jewish identities. Hillel J. Kieval, Languages of Community: The Jewish Experience in the Czech Lands. Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press, 2000. XIV + 311pp. ISBN 0–520–21410–2

The First Zionist Congress: The East European perspective. Heiko Haumann (ed.), Der Traum von Israel. Die Ursprünge des modernen Zionismus. Weinheim: Beltz Athenäum, 1998. 329pp. ISBN: 3–89547–115–1

Comfortable lies and deceptions. Andrei Oisteanu, Imagined evreului în cultura român. Studiu de imagologie în context est‐central european (The Image of the Jew in Romanian Culture: A Study of Imagology in the East‐Central European Context). Bucharest: Humanitas Publishing House, 2001. 470pp. Illustrations

Pavel Florensky's ‘dark side’. Michael Hagemeister and Torsten Metelka (eds.), Appendix 2. Materialien zu Pavel Florenskij. Berlin and Zepernick: KONTEXTverlag, 2001. 216pp. 18 euro. ISBN 3–931337–35–9     

Freshmen Women and the “Freshman 15”: Perspectives on Prevalence and Causes of College Weight Gain

Abstract

Objective: Freshman weight gain has been assessed using quantitative inquiry, but this qualitative study allowed for an in-depth exploration of freshmen women's experiences surrounding body image, nutrition, and exercise. The purpose of this study was to better understand the impact and explanations for the “Freshman 15.” Participants: Freshmen college women, aged 18 to 19 years. Methods: Participants (N = 235) were initially surveyed about body dissatisfaction. Thirty participants were selected for semistructured interviews (conducted in March 2008) using a criterion-based, multilevel stratified random sampling. Results: Freshmen women reported intense fears about gaining weight. Women most commonly attributed freshman weight gain to newly found food independence, social comparison with peers, and the influence of friends and family. Women frequently cited eating habit changes to explain college weight gain. Conclusions: Comparison among females was framed using Festinger's social comparison theory. Despite being cautious about food, females described freshman weight gain as inevitable.