Anthropometric Resources vs. Civilian Needs

1978 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 600-600
Author(s):  
John T. McConville

For several decades after World War II, the only comprehensive source of body size data was that of large-scale anthropometric surveys of military personnel. While the range of most dimensions measured on military populations, both male and female, are comparable to those found in the overall U.S. population, self-selection or body size criteria dictated by particular jobs often result in considerable physical variability among occupational groups, a phenomenon which has been amply borne out by surveys of such diverse populations as law enforcement officers and airline stewardess trainees. It has become clear in the civilian sector that “all-purpose” body size data are often misleading and inadequate and that designers of clothing, equipment and workspaces are increasingly faced with the need for a wide assortment of differentiated data to meet many specialized needs. Resources will be explored and solutions suggested.

2009 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 211-230 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonah Rockoff

A vast majority of adults believe that class size reductions are a good way to improve the quality of public schools. Reviews of the research literature, on the other hand, have provided mixed messages on the degree to which class size matters for student achievement. Here I will discuss a substantial, but overlooked, body of experimental work on class size that developed prior to World War II. These field experiments did not have the benefit of modern econometrics, and only a few were done on a reasonably large scale. However, they often used careful empirical designs, and the collective magnitude of this body of work is considerable. Moreover, this research produced little evidence to suggest that students learn more in smaller classes, which stands in contrast to some, though not all, of the most recent work by economists. In this essay, I provide an overview of the scope and breadth of the field experiments in class size conducted prior to World War II, the motivations behind them, and how their experimental designs were crafted to deal with perceived sources of bias. I discuss how one might interpret the findings of these early experimental results alongside more recent research.


PEDIATRICS ◽  
1977 ◽  
Vol 59 (6) ◽  
pp. 952-952
Author(s):  
John E. Wennberg

For half a century, the tonsil has been the target of a large-scale, uncontrolled surgical experiment-tonsillectomy. In the fourth and fifth decades of this century, well over 50% of children appear to have undergone the procedure; since World War II, opinion has swung away from mass use and by 1973 about 25% of children appear to have been affected. Pediatricians have been the weathermen in the change of clinical climate, pressing for reduction in use of tonsillectomy in their journal articles. Among a sample of California physicians, the offspring of pediatricians underwent fewer tonsillectomies than the children of other types of physicians.


Author(s):  
Daishiro Nomiya

High modernity claims that the modernity project gave rise to institutional organs of modern nation states, culminating in an emergence of ultra-military states with wartime economy in the early twentieth century. It also argues that the same developmental pattern continued to dominate in the post-World War II period. This chapter examines this high-modernity thesis, employing Japan and Hiroshima as cases to be analyzed. Against the high-modernity thesis, many believe that Japan had a historical disjuncture in 1945, being ultramilitary before the end of World War II and a peaceful nation after. Examinations show that, while the modernity project controlled a large-scale historical process in Japan, it met vehement resistance, and became stranded in Hiroshima.


2020 ◽  
pp. 85-100
Author(s):  
Akizumi Tsutsumi

Since the end of World War II, the Japanese economy has experienced two types of ‘dual structure’ issues among occupational groups. The period before the war until 1950 consisted of large-scale companies stemming from zaibatsu (financial cliques) and indigenous domestic industries. The health disparities across occupational groups, often observed in the West, increased between the pre-war period and the 1950s but declined in the subsequent high economic growth period. The decline in health disparities was aided by economic democratization policies, active labour union functions, and post-war economic growth. Near-total employment was achieved, at least among male workers, in the late 1960s to early 1970s. Later, recession in the wake of the bursting bubble economy after 1991, and the subsequent economy-first policy, brought another dual structure: regular employees versus lower-paid ‘precarious’ employees. The latter group includes many women. Stressful working conditions including long working hours among specific occupational groups may cause unique patterns of health disparity among Japanese workers.


1996 ◽  
Vol 72 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tricia L. Wurtz ◽  
Anthony F. Gasbarro

The Native peoples of Alaska used wood for fuel, for the construction of shelters, and for a variety of implements. Explorers, fur traders, gold miners, and settlers also relied on Alaska's forest resource. The early 20th century saw the creation of the Tongass and Chugach National Forests in coastal Alaska, where large-scale harvesting began shortly after World War II. By 1955, two 50-year contracts had been signed, committing 13 billion board feet of sawlogs and pulpwood. The commercial forest land base in Alaska has been dramatically reduced by a variety of legislative acts, including the Statehood Act of 1959 and the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act of 1980. Key words: forest history, Alaska, aboriginal use of forests, fuelwood, stemwheeled riverboats, gold mining, land classification, National Forests, Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act


2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (30) ◽  
pp. eabc0927
Author(s):  
Lewi Stone ◽  
Daihai He ◽  
Stephan Lehnstaedt ◽  
Yael Artzy-Randrup

The highly dependent interplay of disease, famine, war, and society is examined based on an extreme period during World War II. Using mathematical modeling, we reassess events during the Holocaust that led to the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto (1941–1942), with the eventual goal of deliberately killing ~450,000, mostly Jewish residents, many through widespread starvation and a large-scale typhus epidemic. The Nazis justified genocide supposedly to control the spread of disease. This exemplifies humanity’s ability to turn upon itself, based on racially guided epidemiological principles, merely because of the appearance of a bacterium. Deadly disease and starvation dynamics are explored using modeling and the maths of food ration cards. Strangely, the epidemic was curtailed and was brought to a sudden halt before winter, when typhus normally accelerates. A far more massive epidemic outbreak was prevented through the antiepidemic efforts by the often considered incompetent and corrupt ghetto leadership and the Herculean efforts of ghetto doctors.


Urban History ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Simon Briercliffe

Abstract The recreation of urban historical space in museums is inevitably a complex, large-scale endeavour bridging the worlds of academic and public history. BCLM: Forging Ahead at the Black Country Living Museum is a £23m project recreating a typical Black Country town post-World War II. This article uses case-studies of three buildings – a Civic Restaurant, a record shop and a pub – to argue that urban-historical research methodology and community engagement can both create a vivid sense of the past, and challenge pervasive prejudices. It also argues that such a collaborative and public project reveals much about the urban and regional nature of industrial areas like the Black Country in this pivotal historical moment.


1999 ◽  
Vol 24 (04) ◽  
pp. 777-806 ◽  
Author(s):  
Risa L. Goluboff

During World War II, young African Americans from southern cities left their homes for what appeared to be patriotic job opportunities harvesting sugar cane in Florida. When returning workers described peonage and slavery instead, parents worried about their children's safety. After attempting to contact their children directly, the parents appealed to the federal government. Their decision to mobilize the federal government and the strategies they used to do so reveal important aspects of wartime African American protest that historians have previously overlooked. This article focuses on families instead of atomized individuals, revealing the importance of families, neighborhoods, and communities to the emergence of rights consciousness. It also complicates the historiographical dichotomy between rights consciousness and patronage relationships. Patrons served as liaisons with law enforcement agencies and provided links to a law-centered rights consciousness. For many historians, until protest exits the realm of patronage ties, it is not really protest, and once interactions with government themselves become bureaucratized they cease to be protest any longer. The efforts of the peons' families challenge both ends of this narrow category of protest; they both used patronage relations to lodge their protests and also forged rights consciousness within the legal process itself.


1995 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carl-Henry Geschwind

The establishment of the Carnegie Institution of Washington's Geophysical Laboratory in 1905 and the pathbreaking work conducted there by Norman L. Bowen in the 1910s and 1920s are commonly considered to have rendered igneous petrology an experimental science. A closer examination of the work of American igneous petrologists outside the Laboratory reveals, however, that consideration of experimental data did not become an integral part of petrological practice until after World War II. To be sure, igneous petrologists celebrated the Geophysical Laboratory and its experimental approach in speeches and historical reviews throughout the interwar period. In their actual research, though, most igneous petrologists ignored the large body of experimental results gathered by the Geophysical Laboratory and treated Bowen's theory of differentiation as merely another speculative petrogenetic hypothesis to be tested against field data. These petrologists, many of whom were engaged in mapping for state and federal surveys, regarded laboratory data on simple anhydrous systems as simply inapplicable to real rocks. Not until after World War II, when the Geophysical Laboratory began large-scale experimentation on hydrous systems and natural rocks, did field petrologists generally accept the relevance of experimental data. At the same time, the institutional framework of igneous petrology changed in the late 1940s and 1950s as a number of experimental petrologists took advantage both of support from new government agencies, and of the rapidly increasing prestige of geochemistry within the discipline, to establish numerous new experimental laboratories. This change in the structure of the discipline, coupled with the greater reliance on hydrous systems and natural rocks in experimental work, finally led to the general incorporation of experimentation into petrological practice.


2015 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 259-284 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jens Lachmund

ArgumentIn this paper I study the engagement of German ornithologists with the Collared Dove, a bird species of Asian origin that spread massively throughout Central Europe in the 1940s and 1950s. Never before had the spread of a single species attracted so much attention from European ornithologists. Ornithologists were not only fascinated by the exotic origin of the bird, but even more so by the unprecedented rapidity of its expansion. As it is argued in the paper, the advent of the bird created an outstanding opportunity for ornithologists to study the process of biogeographic range expansion. The paper traces how knowledge on the dove's expansion took shape in the social, discursive, and material practices of a large-scale observation campaign of German ornithologists (both amateurs and academics). The paper also argues that ornithologists’ observation practices have contributed to the construction of a benevolent cultural image of the Collared Dove. This sets the case of the Collared Dove apart from many recent debates in which newly arriving species have been framed as a threat to biodiversity. The paper contributes both to a historical understanding of scientific fieldwork as well as of the role of scientific knowledge in the shaping of cultural meanings of animals.


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