Making Parents: The Ontological Choreography of Reproductive Technologies (Inside Technology)

Book Description

Assisted reproductive technology (ART) makes babies and parents at once. Drawing on science and technology studies, feminist theory, and historical and ethnographic analyses of ART clinics, Charis Thompson explores the intertwining of biological reproduction with the personal, political, and technological meanings of reproduction. She analyzes the "ontological choreography" at ART clinics -- the dynamics by which technical, scientific, kinship, gender, emotional, legal, political, financial, and other matters are coordinated -- using ethnographic data to address questions usually treated in the abstract. Reproductive technologies, says Thompson, are part of the increasing tendency to turn social problems into biomedical questions and can be used as a lens through which to see the resulting changes in the relations between science and society.

After giving an account of the book's disciplinary roots in science and technology studies and in feminist scholarship on reproduction, Thompson comes to the ethnographic heart of her study. She develops her concept of ontological choreography by examining ART's normalization of "miraculous" technology (including the etiquette of technological sex); gender identity in the assigned roles of mother and father and the conservative nature of gender relations in the clinic; the naturalization of technologically assisted kinship and procreative intent; and patients' pursuit of agency through objectification and technology. Finally, Thompson explores the economies of reproductive technologies, concluding with a speculative and polemical look at the "biomedical mode of reproduction" as a predictor of future relations between science and society.

Book Description

This best-selling title both in German and English is now enhanced by a new chapter on the important topical subject of measurement uncertainty, plus a CD-ROM with interactive examples in the form of Excel-spreadsheets. These allow readers to gain an even better comprehension of the statistical procedures for quality assurance while also incorporating their own data.

Following an introduction, the text goes on to elucidate the 4-phase model of analytical quality assurance: establishing a new analytical process, preparative quality assurance, routine quality assurance and external analytical quality assurance.

Besides updating the relevant references, the authors took great care to incorporate the latest international standards in the field.

Book Description

Analytical chemical results touch everyones lives can we eat the food? do I have a disease? did the defendant leave his DNA at the crime scene? should I invest in that gold mine? When a chemist measures something how do we know that the result is appropriate? What is fit for purpose in the context of analytical chemistry? Many manufacturing and service companies have embraced traditional statistical approaches to quality assurance, and these have been adopted by analytical chemistry laboratories. However the right chemical answer is never known, so there is not a direct parallel with the manufacture of ball bearings which can be measured and assessed. The customer of the analytical services relies on the quality assurance and quality control procedures adopted by the laboratory. It is the totality of the QA effort, perhaps first brought together in this text, that gives the customer confidence in the result. QA in the Analytical Chemistry Laboratory takes the reader through all aspects of QA, from the statistical basics and quality control tools to becoming accredited to international standards. The latest understanding of concepts such as measurement uncertainty and metrological traceability are explained for a working chemist or her client. How to design experiments to optimize an analytical process is included, together with the necessary statistics to analyze the results. All numerical manipulation and examples are given as Microsoft Excel spreadsheets that can be implemented on any personal computer. Different kinds of interlaboratory studies are explained, and how a laboratory is judged in proficiency testing schemes is described. Accreditation to ISO 17025 or OECD GLP is nearly obligatory for laboratories of any pretension to quality. Here the reader will find an introduction to the requirements and philosophy of accreditation. Whether completing a degree course in chemistry or working in a busy analytical laboratory, this book is a single source for an introduction into quality assurance.

Customer Reviews:

Quality Assurance in the Analytical Chemistry Laboratory.......2007-08-26

Very good book in the field of application.It is very importance in my country(Chile, Sud America)for the use in the Accreditation of the Laboratories in Analytical Chemistry

Good Clinical, Laboratory and Manufacturing Practices:: Techniques for the QA Professional

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Good Clinical, Laboratory and Manufacturing Practices:: Techniques for the QA Professional

Manufacturer: Royal Society of Chemistry
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

Analytic | Chemistry | Science | Subjects | Books

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All Titles | Qualifying Textbooks - Fall 2007 | Stores | Books
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ASIN: 0854048340

Product Description

Written by a team of world experts the book provides practical and detailed advice for the quality assurance professional responsible for monitoring compliance with legal requirements and accepted standards of pre-clinical safety studies, clinical trials and manufacture of drugs. It provides a framework for integrating these standards with other quality management systems. Detailed examples are provided to illustrate application of the principles.

The book is targeted primarily at all those subjected to internal and external inspection and audit for compliance with the requirements of good clinical, good laboratory, and good manufacturing practices. It will be of value to chemists, clinicians, ecotoxicologists, operation managers, pharmaceutical process managers, quality assurance officers, technicians, and toxicologists. The section on harmonisation of quality systems is also of value to safety, health, and environment advisors.

It is a source of authoritative reference and training material on research and manufacturing quality for the chemical, cosmetic, and pharmaceutical industries, and in contract research organisations, universities and government establishments.

Handbook Of Quality Assurance For The Analytical Chemical Laboratory

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Quality Assurance in Testing Laboratory

Handbook Of Quality Assurance For The Analytical Chemical Laboratory
J. Dux
Manufacturer: Springer
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

Analytic | Chemistry | Science | Subjects | Books

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Customer Reviews:

Quality Assurance in Testing Laboratory.......2000-01-28

Statistical Method and Quality Management according to ISO 1702

Quality Assurance in Analytical Chemistry (Analytical Techniques in the Sciences (AnTs) *)

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Quality Assurance in Analytical Chemistry (Analytical Techniques in the Sciences (AnTs) *)
Elizabeth Prichard , and Victoria Barwick
Manufacturer: Wiley-Interscience
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Book Description

The issue of quality assurance in the analytical chemistry laboratory has become of great importance in recent years.

Book Description

This advanced EURACHEM textbook is designed for training, teaching and continuing studies providing an in-depth coverage of current teaching and training issues in the field of Quality Assurance in Chemical Measurement. The CD-ROM accompanying the book contains course materials of 15 experienced lecturers on more than 300 overheads (graphics and text) as ready-to-use Powerpoint R documents. The book will serve as a reference text and source of course materials for lecturers and as an advanced textbook for analytical chemistry students and professionals in industry and service labs.

Quality Assurance and Total Quality Management for Analytical Laboratories (Special Publication)

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Quality Assurance and Total Quality Management for Analytical Laboratories (Special Publication)
M. Parkany
Manufacturer: Royal Society of Chemistry
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Handbook of Quality Assurance for the Analytical Chemistry Laboratory

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Handbook of Quality Assurance for the Analytical Chemistry Laboratory
James P. Dux
Manufacturer: John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000KYC59A

1989 Quality assurance report, NADP/NTN deposition monitoring: Laboratory Operations, Central Analytical Laboratory, January 1989 through December 1989

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1989 Quality assurance report, NADP/NTN deposition monitoring: Laboratory Operations, Central Analytical Laboratory, January 1989 through December 1989
Kenni O. W James
Manufacturer: Office of Atmospheric Chemistry, Illinois State Water Survey
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding

Natural History | Nature & Ecology | Science | Subjects | Books

Book Description

Approaches to project scheduling under resource constraints are discussed in this book. After an overview of different models, it deals with exact and heuristic scheduling algorithms. The focus is on the development of new algorithms. Computational experiments demonstrate the efficiency of the new heuristics. Finally, it is shown how the models and methods discussed here can be applied to projects in research and development as well as market research.

Amazon.com

The title of William Ian Miller's book is a play on Robert Burton's 17th-century classic The Anatomy of Melancholy, an examination of human emotion. In his modern Anatomy, Miller narrows the focus to the function of disgust in human life. Disgust, Miller posits, is a kind of protection; just as fear causes us to flee danger or loyalty prompts us to support one another, disgust draws boundaries and insulates the individual from outside incursions--anything from the unhygienic hair in our soup to the frightening explosion of homelessness in our cities. Among his theories is one that democracy depends on the even distribution of disgust across class lines.

Mr. Miller is not afraid to explore the darker side of disgust as well--the fact that we may feel it in conjunction with contempt toward people, objects, or concepts that do not warrant it. Nevertheless, disgust serves an important role in humanity's complex emotional and social makeup, and The Anatomy of Disgust is novel in its approach to uncovering just what that role might be.

Book Description

William Miller embarks on an alluring journey into the world of disgust, showing how it brings order and meaning to our lives even as it horrifies and revolts us. Our notion of the self, intimately dependent as it is on our response to the excretions and secretions of our bodies, depends on it. Cultural identities have frequent recourse to its boundary-policing powers. Love depends on overcoming it, while the pleasure of sex comes in large measure from the titillating violation of disgust prohibitions. Imagine aesthetics without disgust for tastelessness and vulgarity; imagine morality without disgust for evil, hypocrisy, stupidity, and cruelty.

Miller details our anxious relation to basic life processes: eating, excreting, fornicating, decaying, and dying. But disgust pushes beyond the flesh to vivify the larger social order with the idiom it commandeers from the sights, smells, tastes, feels, and sounds of fleshly physicality. Disgust and contempt, Miller argues, play crucial political roles in creating and maintaining social hierarchy. Democracy depends less on respect for persons than on an equal distribution of contempt. Disgust, however, signals dangerous division. The high's belief that the low actually smell bad, or are sources of pollution, seriously threatens democracy.

Miller argues that disgust is deeply grounded in our ambivalence to life: it distresses us that the fair is so fragile, so easily reduced to foulness, and that the foul may seem more than passing fair in certain slants of light. When we are disgusted, we are attempting to set bounds, to keep chaos at bay. Of course we fail. But, as Miller points out, our failure is hardly an occasion for despair, for disgust also helps to animate the world, and to make it a dangerous, magical, and exciting place.

Customer Reviews:

A valuable study of the concept of disgust.......2006-01-31

The author starts by pointing out that linguistically the word "disgust" in English is linked to the word "taste" ("gustus" in Latin). It describes actions or things which are repulsive, revolting or abhorrent principally because they become polluting by being out of place. Freud's theories are efforts to overcome a deep disgust with sex which is often the cause for anxiety, neurosis and psychosis. Disgust is also a psychic need to avoid reminders of our animal origins and it is accompanied by ideas of some sort of danger like pollution, contamination or defilement. It has the function of protecting our organism from dangerous matter. And disgust is culturally and socially determined.
The author argues that disgust has powerful image-generating capacities and that it plays a part in organising and internalising many of our attitudes toward the moral, social and political domains. He also demonstrates how the conceptualisation of disgust varies by virtue of the sense doing the perceiving: touch, smell, taste or vision. The body's orifices and wastes are not forgotten either: mouth, anus, genitals, nose, ears and skin. Moving away from the visceral, Mr Miller takes up the delicate issue of the relationships of disgust to desire and desire to prohibition. He also discusses the changing styles of disgust and the disgusting through time and then moves to the issue that disgust is a moral sentiment. Finally he concentrates on disgust in the political and social realms where it confronts democracy and the idea of equality.
A fascinating study with plenty of references to famous writers like Orwell, Shakespeare, Sartre or Darwin. There is also an exhaustive bibliography which will help readers find related studies to the concept of disgust.

A Fascinating Look at an Oft-Overlooked Emotion.......2005-07-17

Do not be mistaken, this book reads almost as a literature review. He covers very little Psychology of disgust; what he mentions of Paul Rozin and Jon Haidt, two of the primary "Psychology of disgust" researchers, he tends to disagree somewhat with their assessments. Most of his "Psychological" queries reflect Freud and the Psychoanalytic tradition; this makes sense because he assesses disgust more as a Philosophical issue than an experimental issue, and Freud reads better as a Philosopher than as a Psychologist. As an undergraduate (and soon to be graduate) spending a great deal of time researching disgust, I had to take this into consideration when perusing the different chapters.

However, as part Literature review, part Anthropological study, part Philosophical question, part Psychological reflection, and part Anatomy lesson, this book makes for a very fascinating read. Even though he writes for more of an academic audience, his prose flows very smoothly; someone with an advanced degree would enjoy the discussion as much as someone who doesn't have any degree. He ties his sources together very well (many of which he's spent a great deal of academic time writing about) and puts forth various positions on issues that could be used for future academic research. Most importantly, he elicits many of the emotions he talks about just through his descriptions. When he illustrated the sensational results of disgust, I had visceral reactions; nothing makes a point better than identifying with that point through emotion or sentiment.

Innovative and Insightful.......2003-05-28

The unique genius of Professor Miller's work lies not in his ability to give new information to the reader. Indeed, most of his observations are instantly recognized by any perceptive reader as being things he or she already knew about the world. The genius of The Anatomy of Disgust, as with his other works, is his ability to recognize fundamental truths that most people never think about at all, or would prefer not to, and to organize these truths into a coherent system by which human behavior can be analyze and understood.
I strongly recommend this book!

All about the difference between YUCK and YUM.......2001-05-23

One more "I loved it!" review? Yes, and here's goes. Mr. Miller does a marvelous job, writing in laid back but eminently readable prose that is also judiciously scholarly, describing, explaining, or just tossing up speculations about a culturally modified body of reaction that provokes the "Ee~oo,gross!". The subject has been handled before, obviously, judging by all the references he makes to the various studies, some recondite, some classic, including Mary Douglas' and Freud's. The book reads like an intimate seminar, with the author citing immediate examples from his own life, and casually but appropriately pointing out things done by his own children. Miller makes it clear from the get go that his study is necessarily restricted to the study of the phenomenon as shaped and defined by the culture and class to which he belongs: WASP with a roundedly informed grasp of his own tradition and values. In that sense, the book makes no claim to be universal, a disclaimer that stands out as an act of virtue in contrast to much of disgustingly pompous academic sweepers out there. Nonetheless, the author does manage to bowl pretty well, getting a strike here and there in terms of observation concerning the qualities that, for all practical purposes, are universally recognized to be those of the disgusting. I use the term 'universal' as it applies today, what with globalization and all. Yes, coprophagy (eating of feces) is indulged in by some for thrills, but I doubt anyone practices drooling saliva into a cup and then drinking it back up. The author suggests that it may not be too much to credit the invisible structure of human social evolution to the distancing of two points, YUCK and YUM. The culturo-environmental determination of the length between those two points may very well contain much of what it takes to delimit a culture's potential for art, science, and language as well. The book contains what everyone already knows (too well!) but never bothered to articulate for him/herself. There is much here to delight the inner pre-pubescent in us all, but it is a serious book, nevertheless. After all, in the grown-up world, it is not the gooey, slimy stuff so much as the ethical defect in the form of gooey, slimy character and corresponding actions that make us think,"EE~oo! Gross!" A nice companion to Sloterdijk's The Critique of Cynical Reason.

Exceptionlessly outstanding........2000-05-22

I can think of no greater praise to confer upon such a wonderfully erudite, wryly penetrating, and rigorously eloquent book than that Nietzsche's approval of it as a genuine contribution to the genealogy of morality can be readily imagined. Indeed, like his previous, and comparably trenchant, work, "Humiliation," his "Anatomy" deploys etymology, anthropology, social- and individual psychology, history, and inspired scrutiny of 'heroic' literature in order to, as Nietzsche characterized the task in 1887, "decipher" from "what has been documented, what is really ascertainable, what has really existed... the whole long hieroglyphic text... of humanity's moral past."

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