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By Edwards Steven D., editor. Radcliffe Publishing Ltd; , 2005. , PB £24.95 , 156 pp. , ISBN 1‐85775‐700‐9

Since the late 1970s, the recognition that disability is a matter of politics rather than simply a ‘problem’ of medicine has gained much ground. Similarly, the idea that technology is a political rather than a neutral tool also grew over much the same period (Pinch and Bijker, 1984; Winner, 1980). Yet, despite both engaging with important questions about patterns of power, authority and the human experience, these two fields of study have largely remained separate. In an endeavour to bring them together, this chapter, based on two projects from the IHT Programme, will draw an analogy between wheelchairs and Internet technologies to explore issues of access, control and the autonomy of disabled people. While these are two very different technologies, and the authors bring two very different styles of analysis to bear on the problems, the common thread that ties the two together is that both Internet and wheelchair technologies are sites of political conflict.

The papers explore the background to British academic and political debates over the social model, and argue that the time has come to move beyond this position. Three central criticisms of the British social model are presented, focusing on: the issue of impairment; the impairment/disability dualism; and the issue of identity. It is suggested that an embodied ontology offers the best starting point for disability studies, and some signposts on the way to a more adequate social theory of disability are provided.

[FIRST PARAGRAPH] For millions of disabled people around the world one of the most important sites of technological innovation over the last hundred years was the wheelchair. During the twentieth century wheelchairs were transformed from cumbersome machines designed principally to transport a "patient" from one place to another (usually within the confines of an institution, be it hospital or residence) into powerful tools of personal mobility. Indeed, the wheelchair's diffusion throughout the industrialized world, though far from complete, has rendered it almost universally recognizable and institutionalized it as a cultural symbol representing all disabled people. At the same time, the move toward greater social inclusion of disabled people, an outcome of their struggles for independence, has changed the meaning of disability and its consequences for individual lives. Yet both historians and sociologists have remained relatively silent on this technology, offering little analysis of it or of the relations between these two important currents of social and technological change.

Whilst William Shakespeare defined seven ages of man, for the purposes of this chapter we will concentrate on five life stages of a disabled person. By adopting a life course approach and reconceptualizing the impaired foetus, the impaired child, the impaired adult, the impaired parent and the impaired older person, we will be able to adopt both a horizontal and a vertical analysis, highlighting two dimensions of the disabled experience which are often neglected in the literature. In addition, we will be able to highlight a major area of neglect in research into families, namely that of disability. Disabled people are often researched as if they are not part of a family or they are seen as being part of ‘special families’. This is despite the fact that disability is a significant area of state intervention into families. We write from the perspectives of sociologists, disability theorists and activists, and draw on a range of empirical and theoretical work to construct our argument about societal oppression of disabled people and the role of the state within this.

edited by Kathleen Lynch, John Baker and Maureen Lyons, Basingstoke, UK, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, 289 pp., £19.99 (paperback), ISBN 978‐0‐230‐22719‐4 The authors in this edited collection take as ...

The first ten years of the twenty-first century has seen the British Government introduce radical change to its equality policy. These changes have included the creation of a single equalities body, the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC); the expansion of the equality terrain to include age, sexuality and sexual orientation and faith and belief in addition to gender, race and disability as protected grounds; the decision to coalesce human rights and equality legislation under the direction the EHRC; the development of an Equalities Framework; the promulgation of a new Equality Act (2009) with the aim of creating a single legal framework to cover all equality legislation together with the development of specific Equality Duties for the public sector around the areas of gender, race and disability with the aim of ‘mainstreaming’ equality. Barbara Roche, the then Minister responsible for equality co-ordination across the UK Government described these changes as ‘the most significant review of equality in over a quarter of a century’.

Summary Advocates of private health care believe that it could solve many of the financial problems faced by central and eastern European health ministries. But, says Nick Watson, restrictive and confusing regulation means the benefits of private finance are not yet being realised.

Auditory filter shapes were derived from notched-noise masking data at center frequencies of 8 kHz (for three spectrum levels, N0 = 20, 35, and 50 dB) and 10 kHz (N0 = 50 dB). In order to minimize variability due to earphone placement, insert earphones (Etymotic Research ER2) were used and individual earmolds were made for each subject. These earphones were designed to give a flat frequency response at the eardrum for frequencies up to 14 kHz. The filter shapes were derived under the assumption that a frequency-dependent attenuation was applied to all stimuli before reaching the filter; this attenuation function was estimated from the variation of absolute threshold with frequency for the three youngest normally hearing subjects in our experiments. At 8 kHz, the mean equivalent rectangular bandwidths (ERBs) of the filters derived from the individual data for three subjects were 677, 637, and 1011 Hz for N0 = 20, 35, and 50 dB, respectively. The filters at N0 = 50 dB were roughly symmetrical, while, at the lower spectrum levels, the low-frequency skirt was steeper than the high-frequency skirt. The mean ERB at 10 kHz was 957 Hz. At this frequency, the filters for two subjects were steeper on the high-frequency side than the low-frequency side, while the third subject showed a slight asymmetry in the opposite direction.

Pectus Excavatum is the most common congenital chest wall deformity (90%) and the documented incidence ranges between 0.1% - 0.3%. Patients with Pectus Excavatum can suffer with body image and psychological issues. Indications for surgical correction remains controversial although a decrease in exercise tolerance is frequently overlooked. A general consensus persists that Pectus Excavatum is a cosmetic defect with no physiological consequences.