Benign neonatal sleep myoclonus: a review of the literature

OBJECTIVE: Neurologically normal term infants sometimes present with repetitive, rhythmic myoclonic jerks that occur during sleep. The condition, which is traditionally resolved by 3 months of age with no sequelae, is termed benign neonatal sleep myoclonus. The goal of this review was to synthesize the published literature on benign neonatal sleep myoclonus. METHODS: The US National Library of Medicine database and the Web-based search engine Google, through June 2009, were used as data sources. All articles published after the seminal description in 1982 as full-length articles or letters were collected. Reports that were published in languages other than English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, or Spanish were not considered. RESULTS: We included 24 reports in which 164 term-born (96%) or near-term-born (4%) infants were described. Neonatal sleep myoclonus occurred in all sleep stages, disappeared after arousal, and was induced by rocking the infant or repetitive sound stimuli. Furthermore, in affected infants, jerks stopped or even worsened by holding the limbs or on medication with antiepileptic drugs. Finally, benign neonatal sleep myoclonus did not resolve by 3 months of age in one-third of the infants. CONCLUSIONS: This review provides new insights into the clinical features and natural course of benign neonatal sleep myoclonus. The most significant limitation of the review comes from the small number of reported cases.

Self-Reported Capabilities Among Young Male Adults in Switzerland: Translation and Psychometric Evaluation of a German, French and Italian Version of a Closed Survey Instrument

There is a shortage of empirical applications of the capability approach that employ closed survey instruments to assess self-reported capabilities. However, for those few instruments that have been designed and administered through surveys until now, no psychometric properties (reliability, validity, and factor structure) were reported. The purpose of this study is the assessment of the psychometric properties of three new language versions (German, French, and Italian) of an established (English) set of eight self-reported capability items. The set of items is taken from a previously published British study by Anand and van Hees (J Soc Econ 35(2):268–284, 2006). Our sample consists of 17,152 young male adults aged 18–25 years from the three major language regions in Switzerland. The results indicate good reliability of the three language versions. The results from the exploratory factor analyses suggest a one-dimensional factor structure for seven domain specific items. Furthermore, the results from multiple regression analyses suggest that a global summary item on overall capabilities represents a measurement alternative to the set of seven domain specific capability items. Finally, the results confirm the applicability of the closed capability instrument in a large scale survey questionnaire and represent the first attempt to measure self-reported capabilities in Switzerland.

A Word. Palaver and Its Transferal Residues

The word 'palaver' is colloquially associated with useless verbiage and the nuisance of a tediously long, aimless and superfluous debate. At the same time, it insinuates an uncivilized culture of discourse beyond reason. Thus it appears to be of vaguely exotic origin but still firmly set in the European lexicon. Yet behind this contemporary meaning there lies a long history of linguistic and cultural transfers which is encased in a context of different usages of language and their intersections. By tracing the usage and semantics of 'palaver' in various encyclopaedias, glossaries and dictionaries of English, French, German, Portuguese and Spanish, the following article explores the rich history of this word. Moreover, it also regards the travelling semantics of the term 'palaver' as a process of cultural transfer that can be likened to the microcellular workings of a (retro)virus. Viral reproduction and evolution work through processes of transfer that enable the alteration of the host to adjust it to the replication and reproduction of the virus. In some cases, these processes also allow for the mutation or modification of the virus, making it suitable for transfer from one host to another. The virus is thus offered here as a vital model for cultural transfer: It not only encompasses the necessary adoption and adaption of contents or objects of cultural transfer in different contexts. It contributes to a conceptual understanding of the transferal residue that the transferred content is endowed with by its diversifying contexts. This model thereby surpasses an understanding of cultural transfer as literal translation or transmission: it conceptualizes cultural transfer as an agent of evolutionary processes, allowing for mutational effects of transfer as endowment.