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Chapter 7 of the book "Mind Fields: Adolescent Consciousness in a Culture of Distraction" is presented. It explores the three modes of being that people live in, namely, Umwelt or the world around us, Mitwelt or the with world, and Eigenwelt or our own world. Umwelt is said to be the world of biological determinism such as sleeping, eating and dying. Mitwelt and Eigenwelt are also discussed.

This essay complicates female bisexual identity by combining traditional academic inquiry with personal narrative. As author, I position myself both as objective researcher and as a material body which is affected by the cultural conditions which the research explores and critiques. I review contemporary literature which suggests the limitations of bisexuality as a category, which seeks to dismantle western dualisms while simultaneously reifying them. I question the hegemonic exclusion of bisexuals as a category by both the gay and straight communities. Drawing on theories of performativity, I suggest that no sexual identity is fixed, and that bisexuality is no more or less ambiguous than any other. Finally, I use the metaphor of cyborgian border identity to suggest the progressive possibilities which more inclusive understandings of sexuality promise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rapid change took place in Italian politics and in official Italian statistics in the 1870s. After Pietro Maestri, one of the main promoters of patriotic statistics and the principal architect of official statistics in the 1860s, died in 1871, he was replaced in 1872 by Luigi Bodio (Milan 1840–1910). Bodio was a protégé of the then general secretary of the Ministry of Agriculture, Industry, and Commerce, Luigi Luzzatti, himself a student of Messedaglia and representative of the so-called “Lombard–Venetian school” of political economy which traced its roots back to the teaching of Romagnosi. Bodio was also strongly convinced of the high political and scientific mission of statistics, but clearly faced new tasks and a different intellectual climate. He introduced new methodological concerns and a more technical language into the official statistics of Italy, and gained a solid international reputation as head of the International Statistical Institute. Necessarily statistics in the new Italy could no longer be the charged symbol of liberalism, of representative institutions, and of rational government that it had been in the previous period in the midst of “autocratic” regimes. It had become an established institution in the state apparatus, a discipline taught in most universities and high schools. With the annexation of Rome in 1870, the “dispersed limbs” of the national “body” had all (or almost all) been assembled together; the body was finally a whole, although its surface was still marked by wounds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]