The lips of the dead and the "kiss of life": the contemporary deathbed and the aesthetic of CPR

Over the last four decades, cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) has become the medical, legal and media standard for behaviour in the face of sudden death. The key therapeutic techniques of CPR: mouth–to–mouth ventilation, external–cardiac–compressions and defibrillation – with their origins in the eighteenth century, strange peregrinations in the nineteenth, and consolidation in the twentieth – are central to what may be seen as a newly dominant form of deathbed ritual.     

Machine gaming in Sydney clubs: characteristics of the supporting resident populations

This research provided background for surveys and interviews in later stages of a 3 part project. It aimed to identify, from secondary research, sociodemographic characteristics which tend to support registered clubs and their machine gaming activities in the Sydney Statistical Division. Using multiple methods including Pearson's Product Moment correlation, Principal Components factor analysis, and stepwise regression, the study profiled Sydney populations which spend highly on gaming machines. The most important sociodemographic predictors of Sydney statistical local areas where per capita gaming machine expenditure is high are large proportions of the adult resident population who were born in Malta, Greece, Lebanon, China, Italy, Vietnam, Yugoslavia, India or the Philippines; have no vocational or tertiary qualifications; or are unemployed.     

The relationship of trauma exposure to sex offending behavior among male juvenile offenders

The most common type of adult and juvenile sex offender treatment utilizes a Relapse Prevention (RP) model. In RP clients learn about their offense cycle with an emphasis on recognizing high-risk situations and negative emotional states that can be precursors or triggers to offending behavior. This study identifies ways that traumatic experiences and trauma-associated feelings can be offense triggers for juvenile sex offenders. Researchers interviewed the treating clinicians of 40 male juvenile sex offenders who received at least six months of RP sex offender treatment. Results showed that 95% of the youths had experienced a Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) Criterion A traumatic event and that 65% met criteria for PTSD based on clinician judgments. Overall, clinicians identified prior trauma exposure as being related to the offense triggers in 85% of offenders. Specifically, the following trauma-related feelings were identified as offense triggers: intense fear in 37.5% of sex offenders, helplessness in 55%, and horror in 20%. Implications for sex offender treatment programs are discussed.     

Cancer and aging: yin, yang, and p53

The author discusses a recent paper published in Nature that shows that a hyperactive allele of the tumor suppressor p53 leads to the development of some premature aging phenotypes in mice. This new discovery is discussed in light of previous findings related to mechanisms of aging.     

Setting a trap for aging-related genes in Drosophila

In the October 2002 issue of Aging Cell, Seroude et al. used an enhancer trap technique to identify Drosophila genes whose expression changes with age. In this Perspective, the author discusses the implications of these results, including the possibility of using the enhancer trap lines to identify biomarkers of aging.     

Hematopoietic stem cells and aging

Hematopoiesis is a process by which a single cell--called a hematopoietic stem cell (HSC)--has the proliferative potential to give rise to all of the major lineages of blood and immune cells. Stem cells can undergo both symmetric division, which results in two copies of the parent stem cell, and asymmetric division, which results in self-renewal of the parent stem cell as well as production of a daughter cell that is capable of differentiating along a specific lineage. A number of different elements of HSC replication change with age, even though these transformations do not appear to result in hematopoietic deficiencies under normal circumstances. In this Perspective, the author discusses these age-related alterations.     

Semiparametric Inference Methods for General Time Scale Models

In this paper we consider semiparametric inference methods for the time scale parameters in general time scale models (Oakes, 1995, Duchesne and Lawless, 2000). We use the results of Robins and Tsiatis (1992) and Lin and Ying (1995) to derive a rank-based estimator that is more efficient and robust than the traditional minimum coefficient of variation (min CV) estimator of Kordonsky and Gerstbakh (1993) for many underlying models. Moreover, our estimator can readily handle censored samples, which is not the case with the min CV method.     

"I Am the Man!" Performing gender and other incongruities

The following essay details the genesis of the performance "I Am the Man" for the First International Drag King Extravaganza. In it the authors explain both their autobiographical performances and the relationship between their drag performances and transgender theory by linking Shakespeare to queer theory and by overlapping their personal narratives.     

The effects of early maternal employment on child cognitive development

We investigated the effects of early maternal employment on children's cognitive outcomes, using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth on 1,872 children who can be followed from birth to age 7 or 8. We found some persistent adverse effects of first-year maternal employment and some positive effects of second- and third-year maternal employment on cognitive outcomes for non-Hispanic white children, but not for African American or Hispanic children. These effects are present even after we controlled for a range of individual and family characteristics that affect child development, including those that are likely to be correlated with maternal employment, such as breast-feeding and the use of nonmaternal child care. Controlling for family fixed effects reduces the effects of early maternal employment on some cognitive outcomes but not on others.