Diverse Contexts (diverse + context)

Distribution by Scientific Domains


Selected Abstracts


HYPERTENSION MANAGEMENT: LIFESTYLE INTERVENTIONS IN A TRANSCULTURAL CONTEXT

JOURNAL OF RENAL CARE, Issue 4 2009
Tai Mooi Ho
SUMMARY Hypertension is a risk factor for cardiovascular and kidney diseases. According to estimation, the prevalence of hypertension will increase unless extensive and effective preventive measures are implemented. The diversity of languages and cultures of the hypertensive patients requiring adequate blood pressure control make communications difficult in many instances. Nursing intervention for patients to adopt a healthy lifestyle requires effective communication. But the communication problems encountered in a culturally diverse context can result in undesirable outcomes for the patients and the health-care team. This paper describes the production of a document to assist staff address the difficulty in intercultural communication, which could be used anywhere in the world. This document can facilitate nursing intervention to achieve optimal hypertension management in a transcultural context, responding to the challenge regarding preventive measures to halt increase in hypertension prevalence. [source]


Dating the Gesta martyrum: a manuscript-based approach

EARLY MEDIEVAL EUROPE, Issue 3 2000
Clare Pilsworth
The gesta martyrum are an anonymous and disparate group of texts celebrating saints venerated in early medieval Rome as having been martyred in that city. This paper investigates the problems involved in placing these texts in their early medieval contexts. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, when scholarship moved away from attempts to identify a core of authentic ancient tradition in these early medieval narratives, most work on the corpus has concentrated on dating the composition of the accounts of individual martyrs. Given the sparsity of absolute chronological markers through references or citations in other written sources, this has inevitably rested on circumstantial evidence and the reconstruction of probable contexts for the redaction of specific works. This paper argues that much new light can be shed on the development of the cult of Roman martyrs if we shift the focus of our investigation from the origin and composition of the Urtexts to the surviving manuscript witnesses , all bar one eighth century or later , and the complex process of transmission which they document. The earliest copies of gesta martyrum, in both legendaries and other manuscripts, reveal surprisingly diverse contexts of transmission. Detailed investigation of Vienna National bibliothek 357, which Dufourcq argued contains a copy of a collection of martyr-narratives available to Gregory the Great, shows that in fact this manuscript sheds light on interest in Roman martyrs north of the Alps in the late Carolingian period, and the networks of contact and communication through which information about the Roman martyrs was transmitted across time and space. [source]


,No goats in the mother city': using Symbolic Objects to help students talk about diversity and change

ENGLISH IN EDUCATION, Issue 1 2007
Dr Arlene Archer
Abstract This paper reports on a first year project in a South African engineering foundation programme which attempted to bring a cultural studies perspective to teaching academic literacy. Students identify and investigate everyday objects that have symbolic meanings in their communities. Objects are seen as catalysts for enabling student narratives to emerge, and are a way of exploring the tensions between convention and change in cultural practices. A project such as this breaks disciplinary frames, working across diverse contexts such as engineering and cultural studies. The aim is to begin to explore some of the complexities around ,development' in contexts of diversity and change, globalization and relocalization. [source]


Identifying artificially deformed crania

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF OSTEOARCHAEOLOGY, Issue 6 2007
J. L. Clark
Abstract In this paper we report on a new discriminant function for the identification of artificially deformed crania. Development of the function, based on a sample of deformed and undeformed crania from the Philippines, required visual classification of the sample into deformed and undeformed groups. Working from the observation that deformed crania display flattened frontal and occipital regions, the sample was seriated based on degree of flattening; classification was based on the results of this seriation. The discriminant function, calculated using curvature indices, required only six simple measurements: arc and chord measurements for the frontal (glabella to bregma), parietals (bregma to lambda) and occipital (lambda to opisthion). The function was designed to be conservative, in that a deformed cranium may be classified as undeformed, but the opposite should not occur. Our function classified the undeformed crania with 100% accuracy and deformed crania with 76.9% accuracy, for a total of 91.9% agreement with visual classification. In order to evaluate whether the function is applicable for samples from outside the Philippines, a double blind test was conducted with a large sample of deformed and undeformed crania from a broad geographical and temporal range. For this sample, the function agreed with visual classification in 89.7% of cases; 98.8% of undeformed crania were correctly classified, while deformed crania were identified with 73.7% accuracy. These results demonstrate the utility of the new discriminant function for the classification of artificially deformed crania from diverse contexts. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]


Museums and Mexican Indigenous Territoriality

MUSEUM ANTHROPOLOGY, Issue 2 2007
Paul M. Liffman
Huichol Indians from western Mexico have contributed on various levels to exhibits about their culture, history and territoriality in Mexico's Museo Nacional de Antropología and the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington DC. The article compares these projects and their precursors since the 1930s in terms of changing modalities of institutional power, clientelism and indigenous agency. It also links this history to revalorizations of ethnic art and changing representations of culture and territory in legal claims. As Huichols engage new regional and global publics in these diverse contexts, they rework received images of sovereignty and the national space. [source]