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Like many plastic surgeons, and as my aesthetic practice has grown, I prefer to perform most surgeries in my accredited, office-based operating room. By operating in my office, I have access to my own highly qualified team members who are accustomed to working together. In this way, we can create an experience for the patient that is more private, safe, efficient, cost-effective, and highly likely to produce optimal results.

The post How safe are office-based surgical facilities? appeared first on OUPblog.

Dogs have historically performed many roles for humans, such as herding, protection, assisting police, companionship, and aiding the handicapped. The tale of "man’s best friend" is a lengthy and intimate history that has lasted for thousands of years, and transcends modern cultural boundaries. Canines appear as poignant characters with symbolic meaning in mythological stories, famous works of art, and religious texts.

The post Fascinating facts about man’s best friend appeared first on OUPblog.

Every summer since 1895, the Henry Wood Promenade Concert (commonly known as the BBC Proms) presents an eight-week orchestral classical music festival at the Royal Albert Hall in central London. This year’s Proms put a special focus on cellos.

The post 10 interesting facts about the cello appeared first on OUPblog.

Cats are among some of the most popular pets in the world, and they’ve been so for thousands of years. In fact, there are more than two million cat videos on YouTube. In appreciation of our feline friends for World Cat Day on 8 August, we’ve put together a list of 12 little-known cat facts.

The post 12 little-known facts about cats appeared first on OUPblog.

On supermarket shelves, we are given a mind-numbing array of choices to select from. Shall we have some peppercorns on our macaroni, some cinnamon for baking, or a bit of rosemary with roast pork? Five hundred years ago, however, cooking with herbs and spices was a much simpler choice.

The post Around the world in spices and herbs appeared first on OUPblog.

Dinosaurs, literally meaning 'terrible lizards', were first recognized by science, and named by Sir Richard Owen (who preferred the translation ‘fearfully great’), in the 1840's. In the intervening 170 years our knowledge of dinosaurs, including whether they all really died out 65 million years ago, has changed dramatically. Take a crash course on the history of the dinosaurs with our infographic.

The post A timeline of the dinosaurs [infographic] appeared first on OUPblog.

"What a good thing Adam had. When he said a good thing he knew nobody had said it before." Mark Twain put his finger on one of the minor problems for a relatively new nation: making an impact in the world of famous quotations. All the good lines seem to have already been used somewhere else, by somebody else.

The post How well do you know your quotes from Down Under? appeared first on OUPblog.

Arachnophobia, an irrational fear of spiders, affects millions of people around the world. This is not helped by popular culture portraying them as scary, deadly creatures who could creep up on you, and bite you, when you least expect it. They also do look pretty creepy... We've found the following ten facts about these misunderstood creatures.

The post 10 surprising facts about spiders appeared first on OUPblog.

Neologisms (from Greek néo-, meaning ‘new’ and logos, meaning ‘speech, utterance’) – can do all sorts of jobs. But most straightforwardly new words describe new things. As such they indicate areas of change, perhaps of innovation. They present us with a map, one that can redefine what we know as well as revealing newly explored areas; new words for new worlds.

The post Business and society: new words for new worlds appeared first on OUPblog.

Did you know that in the United States, February is National Snack Food month? In 1989 a need was seen to increase the sales of snack food in the usually slow month of February, and so National Snack Food month was born. To celebrate we’ve collected together 10 surprising facts about snack foods from around the world, all taken from The Oxford Companion to Food.

The post Ten facts about snack foods from around the world appeared first on OUPblog.

The magic of fairy tales doesn’t just lie in their romantic landscapes and timeless themes of good against evil. The best fairy tales are always populated with compelling and memorable characters – like the rags-to-riches princess, the gallant prince on horseback set to save the day, or the jealous and lonely evil king or queen. Which famous fairy tale character do you think you’re most like?

The post Which fairy tale character are you? [quiz] appeared first on OUPblog.

Every winter the child inside us hopes for snow. It brings with it the potential for days off work and school, the chance to make snowmen, create snow angels, and have snowball fights with anyone that might happen to walk past. But as the snow falls have you ever wondered how it is formed? What goes on in the clouds high above our heads to make these snowflakes come to life?

The post How is snow formed? [infographic] appeared first on OUPblog.

Two hundred years ago last Friday the owner of the London Times, John Walter II, is said to have surprised a room full of printers who were preparing hand presses for the production of that day’s paper. He showed them an already completed copy of the paper and announced, “The Times is already printed – by steam.” The paper had been printed the night before on a steam-driven press, and without their labor. Walter anticipated and tried to mediate the shock and unrest with which this news was met by the now-idled printers. It was one of many scenes of change and conflict in early industrialization where the hand was replaced by the machine. Similar scenes of hand labor versus steam entered into cultural memory from Romantic poetry about framebreaking Luddites to John Henry’s hand-hammering race against the steam drill.

There were many reasons to celebrate the advent of the steam press in 1814, as well as reasons to worry about it. Steam printing brought the cost of printing down, increased the number of possible impressions per day by four times, and, in a way, we might say that it helped “democratize” access to information. That day, the Times proclaimed that the introduction of steam was the “greatest improvement” to printing since its very invention. Further down that page, which itself was “taken off last night by a mechanical apparatus,” we read why the hand press printers might have been concerned: “after the letters are placed by the compositors… little more remains for man to do, than to attend upon, and watch this unconscious agent in its operations.”

Moments of technological change do indeed put people out of work. My father, who worked at the Buffalo News for nearly his entire career, often told me about layoffs or fears of layoffs coming with the development of new computerized presses, print processes, and dwindling markets for print. But the narrative of the hand versus the machine, or of the movement from the hand to the machine, obscures a truth about labor, especially information labor. Forms of human labor are replaced (and often quantifiably reduced), but they are also rearranged, creating new forms of work and social relations around them. We would do well to avoid the assumption that no one worked the steam press once hand presses went mostly idle. As information, production, and circulation becomes more technologically abstracted from the hands of workers, there is an increased tendency to assume that no labor is behind it.

Two hundred years after the morning when the promise of faster, cheaper, and more accessible print created uncertainty among the workers who produced it, I am writing to you using an Apple Computer made by workers in Shenzhen, China with metals mined all over the global South. The software I am using to accomplish this task was likely written and maintained by programmers in India managed by consultants in the United States. You are likely reading this on a similar device. Information has been transmitted between us via networks of wires, servers, cable lines, and wireless routers, all with their own histories of people who labor. If you clicked over here from Facebook, a worker in a cubicle in Manilla may have glanced over this link among thousands of others while trying to filter out content that violates the social network’s terms of service. Technical laborers, paid highly or almost nothing at all, and working under a range of conditions, are silently mediating this moment of exchange between us. Though they may no longer be hand-pressed, the surfaces on which we read and write are never too distant from the hands of information workers.

Like research in book history and print culture studies, the common appearance of a worker’s hand in Google Books reminds us that, despite radical changes in technology over centuries, texts are material objects and are negotiated by numerous people for diverse purposes, only some of which we would call “reading” proper. The hand pulling the lever of a hand press and the hand turning pages in scanner may be representative of two poles on a two-century timeline, but, for me, they suggest many more continuities between early print and contemporary digital cultures than ruptures. John Walter II’s proclamation on 28 November 1814 was not a turn away from a Romantic past of artisanal labor toward a bleak and mechanized future. Rather, it was an early moment in an ongoing struggle to create and circulate words and images to ever more people while also sustaining the lives of those who produce them. Instead of assuming, two hundred years on, that we have been on a trajectory away from the hand, we must continue looking for and asking about the conditions of the hand in the machine.

Headline image credit: Hand of Google, by Unknown CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

The post The hand and the machine appeared first on OUPblog.

        

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This is lenghty, but please read. This is my pathetic plead for sympathy as well as my adoration of how God brings things full-circle.

Have you checked out Critter's adventures on Beth's blog?!!!!! Seriously, I can't use enough exclamation points to express my excitement. Critter is going to Korea!!!! When I started this "Critter in Blogland" thing, I had small hopes that Critter would go international. Honestly, the furthest I imagined was Canada, possibly Europe. But Korea! That's Friggin' cool beyond words.

Plus, can I be honest here? I am the Mayor of Funky town. Just between you and me? I've been in a writing funk, AKA, "rut" (or writing Hellasaurus, for those who are religious). Physically and emotionally; health and life in general, has made it hard to write. . . not to mention, it's been hard to believe that what I write could ever interest anyone outside of my family. I've had some writing "highs" in the past years and I've been working on my skills, but this year . . . can you say "FRUSTRAION" or more gramatically friendly (not really, but for the sake of wordinesss) . . . "FRUSTRATED" . . . .

I know, I know . . .whine, whine whine. Tell this to the authors to took 15 years to get published. Cry to the authors who worked dilgently for 35 years to get published. ~sigh~ We all have problems. We all have to deal with life. I give them all due credit. Rejection, or dedicated work with no results is difficult. Period. And that's what I'm facing, along with health issues and common life issues. I haven't been a good blogger lately or a good writer because of "life." Sometimes I think, "Why am I blogging about writing when I really don't know anything about it?" I haven't been blogging because I don't care. I'm just trying to figure out my place here. I realize that writing is part skill and part luck. Many talented people have skill, but not the luck to find the righ editor or the right agent for their store. You see, I don't have the "win the lottery" type of luck. I have the, "I didn't die when I was hit by the car," type of luck. Trust me. Boths of those types of luck are tuely tucky, but in dffernt types of ways. Don't belive me? Let me ask you this. Would you chose opton A: I want to be lucky because I enter contests and win many of them. Or . . . . B: I frequently face death and end up living anyway.

OK, so answer B my be more zenfastic!, lets' face it. Answer A, is way more fun and much more livable in the face of a mortal lifetime.

Sure, I make observations and talk about things that inspire me, but who I am to have a voice about it?

Anywhoo . . . to make a long story short, Critter has been a big help to me. I've always wanted to take martial arts (I know this sounds like a long shot, but stick with me. This goes round circle. I promise.) And in early October my middle child had her B-day party at a martial Arts studio becaus she's been wanting to take Martial arts for about a year now. Since she's been persistant, I scheduled her B-day party at a local Martial Arts studio and it was a big hit!!! As a result, I sighned her and her sisters up for Tae-kwon=do lessons.

As I watched them take their lessons, I saw parents taking lessons with their children. My past desires to take martial arts sufaced and guess what? That very same week I signed up for lessons and began lessons as well.

This isn't just about my desire to take lessons and wanting to so soemthing with my kids, although both of these things were important in my decision. I'm also determined to not let my physical conditon turn me into a couch potatoe. I have graves disease. It alters my physical stamina, decreases my muscular strength and makes it difficult to lose weight. (yes, I know, some people w/ graves disease lose weight, but that is not the case in all circumstances. Most definately, not in mince.)

Anyway, I'm learning self defense, not just against human attackers, but the attack against my own body. I'm fighting. I want to write, but currently, I'm fighting for my own health.

I don't want to forget about my friends in Blogland. I need to visit you more often and I need to blog, no matter how I feel. In some weird way, Critter is helping me through. When I started this Critter thing, I wasn't in this desparate of a state. But now that he's out and traveling, He's helping through this rutt. First he went ot PJ (who is an author that I totally adore.) and then he went to Beth, who is also in NC and lives in the beautifula and magestic scenery of Ashville, and now, the very same week that I stare Tae-kwon-do (that, did I mention, originated in Korea and I have to learn some of the Korean language and most of my instructors are fresh from Korea; like 4 months or less AND I have a cousin that I deeply respect who lives and works in Korea, and that very, very, very same week that I start lessons and feel that maybe, jost maybe I can fight my own ailments by studying an art that originaged in Korea, Critter finds out that he'll be sent to Korea.

I'm so
stoked. God has showed me so many times in my life that He is in total control over both the mundane and the spectacular. That's kind of how I feel about Critter and my life struggles. To me, Critter is traveling and "living" like I never have. But, at the same time, the silly faom board creature is a symbol of waht is to come.

Who says foam board can't be loved and exciting? Who says that a woman pushing 40 can't learn Tae-kwon-do and beat the publishing odds?

Isn't it better to live, try and stick your neck out . . . . than to not?

Gam-sa Ham-nee-da