Fatal decompression sickness following therapeutic hyperbaric environment (author's transl)

In Hannover/Germany in 1976 a so called "Society for Regenerative Hyperbaric Therapy" (Gesellschaft für Regenerative Uberdruck-Therapie) subjected 20 patients within two coupled multi-place chambers to a simulated hyperbaric environment, equivalent to a maximum of 4 ata, followed usually by gradual reductions of the pressure. The patients were of an average age of 67.2 years and were afflicted by various disorders. During one of the "dives" a patient developed air embolism of the central nervous system. During ensuing confusion of the chamber was opened suddenly, with resultant explosive reduction of the high pressure. This resulted in five letal accidents of decompression sickness. Post mortem examination revealed diffuse distribution of gas bubbles throughout the entire body. By elecronmicroscopy each bubble was covered by an osmiophilic coat. Post mortem findings are discussed and correlated with well-known and new clinical symptomes. These observations present for the first time fatal accidents of decompression sickness in humans, associated with hyperbaric air-therapy.     

Experiments in filtering political opinions

Changes in the wording of core measures of political attitudes in the American National Election Studies have generated a good deal of controversy about artifactual sources of change in the U.S. electorate. This research, based on several field experiments and replications, investigates the effects of using or not using various types of opinion filter questions that have appeared in the SRC/CPS series over the years. The analysis shows that the use of a filter interacts significantly with a respondent's level of education and interest in politics, particularly the latter, in determining whether a respondent will offer an opinion on a given public policy issue. But the study also demonstrates that such an interaction occurs primarily when the question about interest in politics is askedafter, rather thanbefore, a set of political issue items. In interpreting these order-and-context effects the authors develop a self-perception model of how respondents infer their interest in politics from information that isavailable in memory about their own behavior in the survey interview.     

Reviews

Vojtech Mastny, Russia's Road to the Cold War: Diplomacy, Warfare, and the Politics of Communism, 1941–1945. New York: Columbia University Press, 1979. xix + 409 pp. $16.95.

Hugh Seton‐Watson, The Imperialist Revolutionaries: Trends in World Communism in the 1960s and 1970s. Stanford, California: Hoover Institution Press, 1979. x + 157 pp. $6.95.

Egbert Jahn (ed.), Soviet Foreign Policy: Its Social and Economic Conditions. London: Allison and Busby, 1978. 160 pp. £6.50.

Stephen White, Political Culture and Soviet Politics, London: Macmillan, 1979. xi + 234 pp. £10.00 and £4.95.

Donald R. Kelley (ed.) Soviet Politics in the Brezhnev Era, New York: Praeger Publishers, 1980, vii + 269 pp. £14.25.

Morton Kaplan (ed.), The Many Faces of Communism, New York: The Free Press, 1978. x + 366 pp. $14.95.

David H. Howard, The Disequilibrium Model in a Controlled Economy, Farnborough: Lexington Books, 1980. x + 112 pp. £9.50/$20.50.

Felicity Ann O'Dell, Socialisation through children's literature: The Soviet example, Cambridge: Cambride University Press, 1978, x + 277 pp. £14.00.

Martin McCauley, Marxism‐Leninism in the German Democratic Republic. The Socialist Unity Party (SED), London: Macmillan, 1979. xix + 267 pp. £12.00.

R. W. Makepeace, Marxist Ideology and Soviet Criminal Law, Croom Helm, Barnes & Noble, 1980. 319 pp. £13.95.

Jan Tomasz Gross, Polish Society under German Occupation: The General‐gouvernement, 1939–1944, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1979. xviii + 343 pp. £11.00