Erwin R. Steinberg

Revising Medical Consent Forms: An Empirical Model and Test

R e c ent years have brought increasing pressure from the public and the courts for truly informed patient consents to medical treatment and surgical procedures.’ Many courts have recognized that a patient’s signature on a consent form is no assurance that the patient has received sufficient information, much less that he or she truly understood the information.z A Pennsylvania court articulated this principle this way:

The Stream-of-Consciousness Technique in the Novel: Simulating a Stream of Concurrencies

The stream of consciousness gives the effect of flowing in three dimensions of space through time, of containing not only language, but also a variety of images and orientations, and of functioning at several levels of abstraction. The stream-of-consciousness novelist, however, has available only language, which is additive and linear. Recent developments in computer science suggest that one may soon be better able to simulate the psychological stream of consciousness in the computer than on the printed page.

D. H. Lawrence: Mythographer

Commenting on D.H. Lawrence’s clear preference for Edward B. Tylor’s Primitive Culture over James Frazer’s The Golden Bough (Letters, II, pp. 593, 690), John B. Vickery says, “The length of Frazer’s work, its almost endless multiplication of examples, its reticence about providing a theoretic framework of analytic categories, and its looser organization probably all contributed to Lawrence’s attitude, which more often than we are accustomed to recognizing aligned itself with one form or another of orthodoxy.” Herbert Asquith, however, who knew Lawrence, argues to the contrary that Lawrence felt “that his free fl ame could not be artifi cially confi ned in an ancient form, but must weave its own patterns, moving without restraint at its own will” and that “his acutely individual genius was not the child of any ‘movement.’” I think that Asquith’s evaluation is the more valid: Lawrence’s pattern was not to accept any one else’s models, paradigms, or orthodoxies, traditional or revolutionary, but rather to take from anywhere and everywhere factual details from the real world, bits and pieces of theories, superstitions, aspects of the personalities of people whom he knew, to support his own theories, some of which he held constant over a lifetime, others of which he developed to meet his personal needs as those needs changed, sometimes from month to month. And he used those jerry-built theories in his novels and in his personal life. As Lawrence himself wrote in “The Novel”:

Are Our Courses Working? Measuring Student Learning.

This article describes an assessment carried out in collaboration with the administrators of a large freshman English course. The assessment team worked with instructors to identify course goals and to design tasks that the instructors felt would fairly assess the extent to which the students achieved the goals. Students who did and did not take the course were both pre- and posttested on five central goals: critical reading, argument identification, differentiation of summary and paraphrase, understanding of key terms used in the course, and practical strategies for writing academic papers. Results of the assessment failed to indicate any substantial improvement on any of the five course goals for students who took the course. These results contrasted with positive outcomes obtained by the same assessment team with introductory history and statistics courses. The article concludes with reflections on why instructors may fail to recognize that their courses are not working.

Mythological Complexities inUlysses

There is a great temptation to see Molly Bloom as an archetypal image of the Great Mother, for at the end of “Ithaca,” Joyce has her “reclined semilaterally, left, left hand under head, right leg extended in a straight line and resting on left leg, fl exed, in the attitude of Gea-Tellus, “fulfi lled, recumbent big with seed” (U 17.2313). Gea, or Gaea, or Ge emerged from Chaos, “At the beginning of all things,” Graves says. He calls her Mother Earth. Tellus is Gea’s Roman counterpart. I fi nd Molly to be Gea-Tellus, however, only in the same sense that she can be seen as a faithful Penelope. The epithets applied to Gea and Tellus are “all-producing and all-nourishing mother, nourisher of children, receiver and nourisher of seeds, sanctuary of the dead, prophetess.” I see none of these qualities in Molly. For example, she has given birth to only two children, one of whom died at age eleven days (U 14.267, 17.2281). There is no indication that she wants more children; and she offers no objection to Bloom’s sending their daughter away so as to facilitate her affair with Boylan (U 18.1008). Although it may not be her fault that she has not received any of Bloom’s seed since Rudy’s death, she takes care not to receive any of Boylan’s either (U 18.155); and she sneers at the Purefoys, who have “a child or twins once a year as regular as a clock” (U 18.161).

Chapter 8 : Developing an Online Writing Tutor to Improve Technical-Writing Skills in Engineering and Science Students

Presents a linguistic definition of professional documents, describing their different types and genres. This title focuses on the mental mechanisms involved in written production in the workplace.