Lower limb replantation

Advances in microsurgery have made possible replantation of severed body parts. Lower limb replantation has been successfully attempted and reported in the literature. Despite many similarities with replantation of the upper limb, the same degree of outcome has not been attained in lower limb replantation. This is due to the strong forces required to result in lower limb amputation and relatively less potential of recovery. In selected cases when distal amputations were caused by sharp injuries, favourable outcomes were reported. Similarities and differences between upper and lower limb replantations are outlined in this chapter with special reference to indications, assessment, operative management, and results.

Unified Charge Vectors (UCV) Theory

A grand unification of electroweak and strong forces is presented based on a new idea called Unified Charged Vectors. Using this new concept, it is shown that: The electroweak and strong forces can be unified into a single electro-weak-strong force. The various charges and coupling constants of fermions (like the electroweak mixing angle) can be predicted, rather than presupposed. The Lagrangian symmetries can be predicted rather than presupposed. The standard model Lagrangian can be cast into a simple unified form.

Does custody visiting achieve anything?

This chapter assesses the effectiveness of the work of custody visiting, and sets out how it can be measured: it is examined according to five criteria of its regulatory function, to assess principally whether the work made any difference to police behaviour. Custody visiting is found to be largely ineffective: in particular, detainees do not trust the visitors, finding the meetings as being of no benefit to them. Custody visiting is measured against the United Nations standards for monitoring detainees, including the need for expertise, and the chapter finds that the United Kingdom is in breach of these international obligations. The chapter looks at the claims made for custody visiting in the scheme’s official literature, including the claim that custody visiting offers reassurance to the public: this is found to be impossible to assess, but probably false, since so few people have heard of the scheme. The chapter concludes that the comprehensive regulatory failure is likely to be the result of deliberate policy, driven by the strong forces of crime control ideology and the power of the police.

PANDA Muon System Prototype

The PANDA Experiment will be one of the key experiments at the Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research (FAIR) which is under construction now in the territory of the GSI Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research in Darmstadt, Germany. PANDA is aimed to study hadron spectroscopy and various topics of the weak and strong forces. Muon System is chosen as the most suitable technology for detecting the muons. The Prototype of the PANDA Muon System is installed on the test beam line T9 at the Proton Synchrotron (PS) at CERN. Status of the PANDA Muon System prototype is presented with few preliminary results.

Reply to Abedinifard

The incessant telling of political jokes hostile to the regime over decades had no impact on the strength of the Soviet Union. If under these most propitious of circumstances jokes had no effect then Davies concludes that jokes never do have any macro-consequences. Abedinifard disagrees claiming, using Iranian jokes about the homosexuals of the town Qazvin as his example, that jokes can have consequences where they reinforce a growing local sentiment in this case Iranian homophobia. Davies’ reply is that in Iran as in the Soviet case jokes are a puny, unimportant and ambiguous force in a world of strong unambiguous forces, in this case punitive and lethal Islamic homophobia. Davies further points out that the Qazvin jokes are the same as the ones told in Pashto in Afghanistan about the city of Kandahar and refer not to gay men in the Western sense but to macho warriors who assert their dominance by penetrating young boys who are expected to submit to them. The rigorist Islamic Taliban used capital punishment to repress these pederastic same sex practices but failed. The Afghan jokes are very funny but utterly unimportant in such a world of strong forces.

Saul, David, and Music’s Ideal Body

The religious model of disability holds that disabilities are corruptions of a divine prototype (the ideal body of God or of Adam before the Fall), which has often been metaphorized as a musical body. Dissonances and syncopations, like bodily imperfections, might occasionally diverge from the consonant, metrical ideal, but the strong forces of musical resolution can safely contain their destabilizing potential. The ideal musical body also possesses healing powers, restoring order to sonic dysfunction. The exemplary performer of this therapeutic music was David, and his most notorious patient was Saul. In exegetical accounts, these two biblical figures are often framed as antitheses: David’s consonant health as an emblem of divine strength (an ideal body) versus Saul’s dissonant disease as a symptom of divine disfavor (an imperfect body). Musical representations by Johann Kuhnau and G. F. Handel participate in this tradition; so too might Ludwig van Beethoven’s “Harp” Quartet.

Collected Essays: v. 1

This book reflects the author's lifelong interest in the history of halakhah. What stimulated change, and why? What happened when strong forces impinged on halakhic observance and communities had to adapt to new circumstances? The book opens with a brief description of the dramatis personae who figure throughout the essays: Rashi and the Tosafists. Further chapters discuss halakhic commentaries and their authors; usury, moneylending, and pawnbroking; Gentile wine; and the self-image of the Ashkenazic community. Throughout, the book shows that the line between adaptation and deviance is a fine one, and that where a society draws that line is revelatory of its values and its self-perception. Many of the chapters presented here are already well known in the field; two are completely new. Most of those previously published have been updated, and the major chapter on pawnbroking has been significantly expanded.