Observer variation in spirometry.
The intra-observer and inter-observer variation associated with clinical spirometry was statistically analyzed. The technical errors for the MEFR and MMF measurements were large enough to question their clinical reliability, especially in borderline instances. Measurement differences between two observers, as in this study, are statistically significant. This observation has special meaning for groups engaged in epidemiologic studies. Significant inter-individual variation will diminish the quality of pooled results.
Daily spirometric variability: normal subjects and subjects with chronic bronchitis with and without airflow obstruction.
To determine the daily variability of spirometry, we performed spirometry on five consecutive days on 15 normal subjects and on 24 patients with chronic bronchitis. The patients with chronic bronchitis were divided into the following two groups: 13 with chronic airflow obstruction (forced expiratory volume in 1 s [FEV1] 80%, FEV1/forced vital capacity [FVC] ratio less than 75%) and 11 without airflow obstruction (FEV1 and FVC greater than 80%0. We attempted to control most of the factors known to affect spirometric variability. Our results indicate that the day-to-day FEV1 has to change by 17% and the FCV by 15% in patients with airflow obstruction before the change should be considered significant. In patients with nonobstructive chronic bronchitis or in normal subjects, a greater than 5% change should occur in FEV1 and FVC before considering the change to be significant.
Pedagogy of the “Not”: Negation, Exodus, and Postdigital Temporal Regimes
Postdigital capitalist time is an incessant acceleration that acts to homogenize time and wed us to the present, to which we have to constantly catch up. While the impulse of this is no doubt economic (the realization of value), it is crucially undergirded by a pedagogical logic wherein we have to perpetually learn and re-learn the latest apps, social media configurations, operating systems, and so on. Political strategies of resistance thus need to be bolstered by an alternative mode of educational life, and I propose a pedagogy of the “not” as one possibility. Such a pedagogy is an act of suspension that sustains a detachment from the present, clearing out oppositions and thereby exposing us to a radical indeterminacy and potentiality that is always untimely. Suspension is the praxis of negation, which means that negation operates by keeping sense indeterminate to meaning and signification. Rather than suppressing, disavowing, or annihilating the stated content, negation retains even that which is negated. While this would appear as a form of exopedagogy, which withdraws from the dialectic of the private/public, I instead argue that it redefines the terms of any dialectic, redefining the very categories exopedagogy withdraws from. Before concluding, I spend some time with Sandy Grande’s important critiques of Eurocentrism and progress in Western critical education, demonstrating how negation as suspension circumvents these errors through its accommodation of—or, better, insistence on—variegated temporalities and forms of life.