Coontown: Utopian Longing and Reification in Black Suburbia

In my essay I will look at the musical production of “A Trip to Coontown” through the lens of Fredric Jameson’s article “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture.” Jameson posits that all mass and popular culture contains utopian desires, yet these visions are always suppressed by dominant ideologies and class structures. While popular culture inspires utopian ideals, “its main function lies in the legitimation of the existing order.” My premise is that “A Trip to Coontown” awakened utopian desires for the black middle-class, but these visions were reified and contained by the dominant social order. Within a utopian vision there is always reification; therefore, society cannot use popular culture or a production of Coontown to arrive at utopia because all types of popular culture seek reification. I will demonstrate my thesis by first discussing the utopian visions present in the production and how Coontown inspires aspirations of upward mobility for the black middle-class. Then, I will examine how the utopian ideals get reified throughout the production and the return to the status quo at the end of Coontown.

Temporal Pleasures of Film Music

This paper will seek to revise the current cognitive theories of film music, by examining how music can inscribe its own temporality on to a film narrative. Cognitivism has repeatedly sought explanations for music’s emotional or descriptive value in film, but it currently lacks an adequate explanation for uses of music in empty moments of film narratives. In so doing, the theories additionally neglect the importance that these narrative pauses have for film in general. The key to solving this problem is to revisit the classical question of the musical analogy in film theory.

Drawing on arguments by Sigfried Kracauer, I will examine how music creates momentum that may overcome those empty moments in which the film’s narrative development threatens to come to a halt. I will argue that tather than acting merely as a conveyor of additional information or one of many “mood markers,” music also acts as a structural support to offer a continuous sense of development and movement. To bring these features to light in film theory, a new focus is needed on temporality, which has thus far been neglected by cognitive and cultural accounts alike in favor of reductions to representation and meaning.

Plague, Piety, and Portraiture: Giorgione’s "Boy with an Arrow" and the Renaissance Tradition of Saint Sebastian Iconography

In the first half of the twentieth century, the subject of Venetian painter Giorgione’s Boy with an Arrow was confidently identified as Saint Sebastian by several scholars, including Heinrich Kretschmayr and Bernard Berenson. In recent decades, however, that characterization has been increasingly dismissed in favor of an identification of the subject as Eros, Apollo, or a metaphor for the sweet pain of love. This paper calls for a rethinking of this trend. It demonstrates that a wider scope of iconographic comparisons than has hitherto been undertaken in the analysis of Boy with an Arrow offers new connections and insights that enhance the plausibility of identifying the subject as a portrait of a man as Saint Sebastian, or more likely, as Saint Sebastian himself.

Offering new comparisons of Boy with an Arrow to contemporary Renaissance portraiture, and re-analyzing comparisons from existing scholarship, this paper reveals the painting’s obscured relationship to traditions of Saint Sebastian imagery in the Renaissance. Additionally, positioning the painting within the context of an early sixteenth-century Venice traumatized by plague, it will examine the relationship of Boy with an Arrow to several types of devotional art of the period that were associated with Sebastian, the saint most frequently invoked for protection against pestilence.

Structural Depth in the First Movement of Gorecki’s 'Symfonia piesni zalosnych'

Gorecki’s 'Symfonia pieśni żałosnych' is one of the most commercially successful pieces of contemporary classical music to date. It has sold over a million copies worldwide, topping the US classical charts for 38 weeks and reaching number six on the UK pop album charts in the year 1993. While the existing academic literature attributes this success to the influence of mass media promotion and the emotional weight of extra-musical associations, this paper takes a look to the intrinsic musical virtues of the work, by offering an in-depth analysis of the canon that opens the piece. Although simple and straightforward, this canon generates a complex web of processes. Some of these processes are more clearly goal oriented than others. Most of these goal oriented processes converge at the climax of the canon, reinforcing its effect. However, one such process, the canon’s registral expansion, reaches its peak before all the others, creating a dynamic counterpoint of tensions at both micro and macro levels. In addition, each process evolves at a different pace, and the contrast between their rates of evolution as well as the contrast between the regularity of their evolutions contribute to their dramatic interplay and add to the structural and expressive depth of the canon.

At Face Value: Scientific Approaches to Ethnic Performance in the Age of Physical Acting

Reflecting the collective anxieties of a native-born American population overwhelmed by the seemingly inexhaustible deluge of immigrants into urban society, ethnic stereotypes were irrefutable staples of the nineteenth-century American stage. Contemporary theatre historians have asserted that performers relied upon a codified set of visible racial signifiers to represent, but never embody, their ethnic characters. These scholars circuitously posit that the actors' practice of physically representing but not internally inhabiting ethnic roles indicates a shared refusal to accept such characters (and their living counterparts) as anything but inferior and unworthy of further investigation.

This interpretation notably disregards the acknowledged primacy of physical acting during the same century. Prior to the explosion of Western theatrical realism in the late 1880s, actors frequently trusted physical depictions to convey their characters’ emotional circumstances, echoing the allegations of the century’s most popular scientific theories. This study will examine the valuable intersections of ethnic stereotypes in performance and the era's established acting practices. To demonstrate the considerable affect popular science had on the period's physical acting methods, I will first describe the main tenets of physiognomy and phrenology. I will then elaborate on the ever-evolving traditions of physical acting using the musings of contemporary actors, theorists, and critics. Finally, I will investigate the acting approaches of two celebrated performers of ethnic characters on the early nineteenth-century American stage: British performer Charles Mathews and famed Metamora actor Edwin Forrest. Through these case studies, I hope to partially complicate the simplistic categorization of ethnic performances as only racially prejudiced burlesques through the reintroduction of the actors' contemporary physical acting, allowing for a more nuanced reading of ethnic stereotypes on the stages of nineteenth-century America.

Science, Policy, and Politics: How distortion and bias shaped the moratorium on cloning

On August 9, 2001, President Bush announced a moratorium on the development of new stem cell lines for research. A formal meeting with Dr. Leon Kass, who was later chosen to be the chair of the President’s Council on Bioethics (PCBE), preceded the announcement. On July 10, 2002, the PCBE released a report on human cloning. A majority of the members voted for a total ban on cloning, both cloning for the production of humans and for the purpose of biomedical research, which includes research on stem cells. This paper seeks to analyze the process by which the policy recommendation was come to. Specifically, it considers the council’s report, written transcripts of their debates, and staff working papers provided to clarify and encourage discussion. The main goal is to motivate one central question: What took place in the process of deliberation to result in a (majority) consensus to ban all cloning? The answer advanced is that the biases of the council’s chair subtly skewed its discussions,and resulting policy recommendations, by obscuring known scientific facts relevant to the debate. This claim is substantiated by a careful reading of public documents along with attention to Dr. Kass’ past contributions to bioethics.

The Wise Use Movement: A Network Analysis of the Anti-Environmental Countermovement

The American Environmental Movement is arguably one of the most successful and influential social movements of the current United States political landscape. Their success prompted the mobilization of a countermovement called the Wise Use movement, which promotes property rights and free market economics, in an attempt to counter the successes of environmental protection. Though the structure of the environmental movement has been analyzed many times, few structural analyses of its countermovement have been completed. What is the organizational structure of this countermovement? Who are the “prime movers” and who are the allies of Wise Use? Utilizing social network analytic methods, I analyze the inter-organizational links of Wise Use and allied organizations. My findings show that the Wise Use movement is comprised of a multi-layered network structure, with a small subset of the overall movement being highly interconnected. This subset forms the core of the network and is also high interconnected with non-Wise Use organizations, primarily non-profit think tanks from the Free Market movement and/or the general Right Wing movement in the United States. This suggests the strength of the Wise Use movement primarily lies with this core of organizations and that this core has allied itself with the Free Market and Right Wing movements.

The Evolution of Reproductive Barriers among Species in the Tribe Collinsieae

A critical component to understanding speciation is the knowledge of how reproductive barriers evolve among lineages. The existence and strength of reproductive barriers may also be an important factor for determining how closely related species can coexist in sympatry. Two prominent models in evolutionary biology that predict the origin and relative strength of reproductive barriers include the Dobzhansky-Muller (D-M) model of speciation and the Reinforcement model. The D-M model predicts that the strength of reproductive isolating barriers will increase with increasing divergence time among lineages. The Reinforcement model predicts that reproductive barriers will be stronger among populations of species that co-occur (sympatry) than among populations of those same species that do not co-occur (allopatry). I used an integrative biogeographic and phylogenetic approach to examine whether the presence and strength of reproductive isolating barriers among species in the tribe Collinsieae follows the predictions of the above models. Here, I present results from series of greenhouse and field experiments on 22 species of Collinsia. My data support the general prediction that isolating barriers increase with increasing divergence time. However, my data provide little evidence that supports the Reinforcement model.

Green Auctions: A study of Mechanism Design with Externalities

This paper uses a mechanism design approach to study the biodiversity improvement in a territory, where the government is the principal and the landholders are the agents. In particular, I analyze an optimal mechanism that considers a multidimensional bid which includes both the biodiversity improvement of the project and its cost. Additionally, this mechanism incorporates the externality (either positive or negative) that a biodiversity project causes in the surrounding agents who decided not to participate. Specifically, I assume that externalities enter in cost function of the nonparticipating landholders.

I show that, in the case of negative externalities, the government will implement a transfer function which is increasing in the landholder’s efficiency level on market activities. On the other hand, in the case of a positive externality, paradoxically the government may be interested in the nonparticipation of the most efficient landholders.

Why was M.S. Tswett’s Chromatographic Adsorption Analysis Initially Rejected?

Adsorption chromatography was first developed by the Russian botanist M.S. Tswett in the first decade of the twentieth century, but it was initially ignored by the vast majority of botanists and chemists and explicitly challenged by a few prominent scientists. The target paper attempts to explain this initial rejection. I argue that Tswett's chromatographic adsorption analysis was premature in that it fit neither theoretical nor practical frameworks accepted by chemists at the time. Along the way, I try to undo an unfortunate neglect of chromatography by historians of science. Hence, very little background is assumed.

Corporeal knowing: The limits of picturing and narrative in the Jewish Museum, Berlin

Martin Heidegger’s characterization of the “world picture” as the modern form of knowing provides a lens through which to evaluate traditional museum arrangement, particularly those that seek to cultivate abstractions in viewers concerning display material. However, a different form in museum design has become more prominent in recent years, building a narrative through viewer movement. This strategy of museum design has particular salience when educating audiences about the nature of human suffering. This paper focuses on the Jewish Museum Berlin as an example of a narrative museum in order to examine how it uses specific techniques of display to fulfill educational objectives regarding the tenuous relationship between German-Jewish culture. Several aspects of the museum, including the use of oblique architecture, intimate modes of display, and interactive memorial installations, cultivate a form of knowing that reinforces shared memory through bodily affect. However, this museum simultaneously highlights the limits to cultural narration. The museum asks viewers to experience the methods by which the influences of Jewish culture were expunged from Berlin and then contemplate the ethical paradox within modern world picturing that made such extermination possible.

From Global to Microscopic to ???: Positioning Visual Media on the Axis of 9/11

My paper analyzes a wide range of media imagery in an attempt to identify a post-9/11 vs. pre-9/11 cultural outlook. From turn-of-the-millennium films like "Gladiator," "Fight Club," and "Three Kings," for example, this analysis also includes: post-9/11 films ranging from 2002's "Panic Room" to the just-released "Letters from Iwo Jima"; photojournalistic images of the baby-rescuing Oklahoma City firefighter in 1995 as well as the Twin Tower rescue workers in 2001; and television fare ranging from the now-cancelled "X-Files" (1983-2002) to current hits like "C.S.I.," "Monk," "Numb3rs," "Psych," and "Ghost Whisperer." To tie together this spectrum of time frames and visual genres, my paper focuses on one overarching theme: representations of the hero. In interpreting these representations, I rely in part on "Empire" (2001), a book in which co-authors Hardt and Negri examine the emergent political order of globalization. Thus, in accordance with their premise that our political task is to reorganize Empire's forces toward a new and liberating counter-Empire, I arrive at, and respond to, this question: As media heroes turn more deeply inward for fear of turning outward, do we now conclude that 9/11 has stalled the turn-of-the-millennium movement toward counter-Empire?

Measuring the Swimming Efficiency of Bacteria Using Optical Tweezers

Bacteria swim by rotating helical propellers called flagellar filaments. Mechanical properties of swimming bacteria are very difficult to measure accurately. We use an optical tweezer to trap bacteria (E. Coli) allowing us to measure the dynamical properties of the bacteria, including the propulsive force and rotation rates of the flagella and cell body. From these measurements we obtain the propulsion efficiency, i.e., the fraction of energy input to the propeller which is utilized in swimming. The measured efficiency of ~2% is found to be consistent with theoretical predictions for a rigid helical coil.

Current Memory/Memorial Currents: Spectacle and Spectrality in the Imaged Response to September 11

Artists have generated a wide variety of responses to the attacks of September 11, 2001, but among the most compelling interventions in recent artistic practice is the work of a number of artists – among them Hans Haacke, Jenny Holzer, Josh Azzarella, and J. Meejin Yoon – who are challenging the machinations of spectacular culture and its attempt to monopolize the historical memory of the single event that is everywhere invoked to justify the shaping of world affairs. The common trend that unites their work is the insertion of specular, ghostly images into the banal and otherwise undisturbed streams of contemporary mass culture in an attempt to awaken consciousness, stimulate debate, and challenge orthodoxy.

This paper is significant to those concerned with visual culture and practices of image making for a number of reasons: art historians and art critics have been slow in accounting for artistic practice in the aftermath of September 11th, making this paper rare in the field; scholarship on the relationships between images, icons, and terrorism is underdeveloped, granting this paper a degree of urgency; and September 11 shows no signs of ceasing to become the most significant event of the 21st century, giving this paper a sense of lasting importance.

The Impact of Disasters on Social Movement Framing: Katrina & Advocates of Louisiana Public Healthcare

Natural disasters involve rapidly shifting social relationships and networks that produce ambiguities for all involved, resulting in heightened efforts at meaning construction. Social movements use framing to make sense of what is happening, hold accountable other people or forces deemed responsible for the event and mobilize contentious collective action. This paper examines the impact of hurricane Katrina on framing by Advocates for Louisiana Public Healthcare (ALPH), a New Orleans-based social movement organization in existence prior to Katrina that had to undergo major changes in structure, identity, focus and membership to remain a viable force for change in post-Katrina New Orleans. Post- Katrina framing is impacted by shifts in political opportunity, membership, and resource availability.

The Emergence of a Centralized and Hierarchical Community in Southern Ecuador

The development of supra-local hierarchically organized communities with institutionalized inequality is a central question in anthropological archaeology. It is clear that this transition in social relationships took place in a variety of ways, and at different times around the globe, but the processes and conditions of the transition remain unclear. In some places, like the Zarumilla River Valley, Ecuador, the emergence of institutionalized inequality happened late in the prehistoric sequence when compared to neighboring areas. This provides an opportunity to look at not only the processes and conditions of change, but the timing of change as well. My research at an important site on the Zarumilla River will take a community level approach to social change. This research will involve intensive and systematic testing of the site in order to obtain data on the spatial and temporal distribution of artifacts and features. These data will allow me to identify the changes that took place in the relationships between households at the site as it became increasingly centralized and hierarchical. Such an approach facilitates our understanding of how institutionalized inequality developed by tracing the emergence of a central place through time and identifying the conditions under which it emerged.

Tracing Social Change: Community Identity and Socioeconomic Interaction at He-4 Panama

Chiefdoms represent societies at the threshold of complexity, and provide important contexts for studying the origins of institutionalized inequality among humans (Gilman 1991:146). The virtual extinction of such societies in the modern world has placed the task of studying chiefdoms squarely in the realm of archaeology where attention to long-term processes of social change allows investigation of the mechanisms by which hierarchies emerged (Drennan and Uribe 1987). Recent archaeological work in the Río Parita Valley of central pacific Panama provides an important opportunity for studying social change. Investigation at the regional level (Haller 2004) has identified a hierarchical arrangement of sites indicative of political integration clustered around the chiefly center of He-4. Current and ongoing work at He-4 (Menzies 2006) has yielded evidence suggestive of large-scale production of lithic artifacts (stone axes), providing hints at the sorts of activities that defined community integration and supported a chiefly elite. This paper outlines ways of advancing our understanding of the emergence of social inequality by carrying investigations forward to a finer scale of analysis, which will permit reconstruction of patterns of social interaction and lend to a better understanding how behaviors at this scale operated within the broader social institutions they supported.

Do Institutions Matter? Estimating the Effects of Institutions on Economic Performance in China

Economic theory emphasizes that the institutions are the most critical factor for growth. However, with the lagged-behind institutions, China is the fastest growing economy. Do institutions matter in China? This paper answers the question by estimating the effects of the institution of property rights on economic performance with the cross-city data of China. Following the arguement by Hall and Jones (1999) and Acemoglu et al (2001) that institutions are endogenous, we instrument the institution of property rights with the historical enrollment in Christian missionary lower primary schools in China. We argue that China's ongoing reform belongs to the long historical transition from antiquity to modern society, which started in 1841. Learning from Western countries is a central aspect of this historical process. The influence by the West at the early stage of this transition has persisted into current reform. Employing the two-stage least squares method, we find that the institution of property rights is significant in explaining the variety of income in China’s cities. The result survives various robustness tests with additional controls. When the factors of geography and government policy are controlled, we find that institutions dominate them as the explanation of the variety of GDP among our sample.

he Importance of Foregone Options

Extensive experimental evidence supports the importance of a player's unchosen alternatives on other agent's actions. This paper examines a tractable theoretical model that introduces these unchosen alternatives into individuals' preferences. In particular, we assume that an agent's preferences may depend not only on his own payoff, but also on the distance between his payoff under the actual strategy selected by other players and his payoff under their alternative (unchosen) strategies.

We firstly analyze equilibrium predictions in a general sequential model, and then compare them with those of standard game-theoretic models. Afterwards, we apply our results to three sequential games: the ultimatum bargaining game, the labor market gift exchange game, and the voluntary contribution mechanism of public goods provision. We show that, within totally individualistic concerns, our model predicts higher levels of fairness in the resulting allocations and cooperation among the players than the standard game-theoretic models.

A Search for Genes Underlying Risks Associated with Alcoholism: Development of a Nonhuman Primate M

This paper is part of a broader study at the University of Pittsburgh Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic, investigating the genes associated with an increased likelihood of developing alcoholism, using a primate model.

Epidemiologic literature identifies low responsiveness to the motor impairing effects of alcohol as one of the risk factors for developing alcoholism. A large sample of monkeys was studied in the summers of 2004-2006. On the day of alcohol testing, the monkeys were given either an infusion of alcohol or saline. Motor function was assessed by measuring the time it took for the monkey to climb out of a plastic box, followed by the scoring of impaired behaviors exhibited during a 15 min period in a play area. Among alcohol monkeys, some showed a great deal of motor impairment while others displayed little motor impairment. Monkeys receiving alcohol took significantly more time to leave the box and showed significantly more impaired behaviors than monkeys receiving saline. These measures were significantly correlated in the monkeys receiving alcohol and both measures were significantly heritable.

Female Uniform and Cement through the Male Gaze in Contemporary Chinese Art

There are only four female artists who appear among two hundred names in the catalogue of the exhibition “Mahjong – Contemporary Chinese Art from the Sigg Collection,” the largest exhibition of contemporary Chinese art in 2005. Three of the female artists’ works categorized under the theme “Body as Medium,” in which their works are interpreted as expressing female sexuality of their bodies as their female experience, which is different to male.

I would like to apply a feminist approach to examine two artworks by two artists in this exhibition: one work Untitled (1998) by male artist Qi Zhilong and the other artwork, Ruined City (1996) by Yin Xiuzhen, the only female artist not placed within the “Body as Medium” section of the catalogue. By examining the artworks and critics’ responses in various contexts, I try to address the following questions: how are women represented in contemporary Chinese artists’ art pieces? How is the female experience “represented” through a male perspective or gaze? A prejudice against women clearly exists within both representations of women and interpretations of female artists' work of contemporary Chinese art: women as the objects providing visual pleasure for male gazers, the “female” experience as the Other that men may gaze on from a privileged perspective.

Memories of Moscow: Freudian Gender Theory  in Anton Chekhov's Three Sisters

My paper analyzes the main characters of Anton Chekhov’s play Three Sisters from the perspective of feminist gender theory, utilizing Judith Butler’s concept of melancholia, argued in The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection, as a primary basis. Butler presents the idea that power struggles imposed by societal hierarchy induce a sense of emptiness, a recurring oppression that Marvin Carlson in Theories of Performance articulates as “repetition that recalls loss, but never recuperates it.” These corresponding ideas of repetition, loss, and longing for recuperation often form the foundation of gender identity according to Butler’s theory. Ultimately, until the play’s conclusion, the sisters define themselves within the boundaries of a past order; and their continual attempts to relive this order place them within the realm of Butler’s analysis.

A Serious Education for Women in Aristotle’s Politics?

In the first book of the Politics, while sketching the development of the city-state from its natural beginnings within the household, Aristotle infamously and embarrassingly offers justification for both “natural” slavery along ethnic lines and a permanent inequality between men and women, alleging differences in their deliberative faculties. At the close of the first book, Aristotle nonetheless suggests that it is important for women as well as (male) children to be educated with an eye to the city’s constitution, if, that is, having “serious” women and children makes a difference in having a “serious” city-state. What Aristotle has in mind here, given his earlier statements, is something of a puzzle, but one not much addressed by commentators on the treatise. This is due, in part, to a tendency of translators to normalize Aristotle’s word for “serious” (spoudaios) by rendering it simply as “good” or “sound”. Aristotle himself promises to say more about these matters later, but while the treatise does return to the education of children in book eight, there is nothing answering the expected discussion of women’s education. By considering Aristotle’s chosen wording more carefully, as well as related remarks made by his predecessors, we can cast some light on Aristotle’s curious views.

“Now I Can Feel Like Myself All Month Long”: Menstrual Pain as Identity-Constituting & Preventing

This paper seeks to analyze a phenomenon that has only recently begun to receive widespread media attention: voluntary menstrual suppression. Menstruation is a particularly interesting cultural site to locate the relationship between pain and identity because it can be read as a type of predictable, ritual pain that most women experience monthly, and that some consider central to womanhood. By analyzing direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertisements utilized by pharmaceutical companies to promote drugs that combat Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder (PMDD) and limit menstruation, I argue that attempts to persuade women to that they do not need to deal with the pain and inconvenience of menstruation fall into what rhetorical scholar Maurice Charland calls a paradox of constitution. In attempting to move their audience to action, those who argue in favor of suppression of menstrual pain must utilize a constitutive rhetoric which “simultaneously presumes and asserts a fundamental collective identity for its audience, offers a narrative that demonstrates that identity, and issues a call to act and affirm that identity”.

Andronovo Culture Child Burials and Social Complexity of the Eurasian Steppe

Extant archaeological research on the Eurasian steppe focuses on warrior chiefdoms, patriarchal systems, and status. While these male oriented perspectives are worthwhile aims, they only take us part of the way in explaining social complexity in the region. Child and sub-adult burials are largely missed in both the archaeological record and accompanying literature. Kurgan (barrow) burials in Kazakhstan from the late Bronze Age indicate a high number of child and sub-adult burials. I suggest that through the analysis of Andronovo child burials the relationship between achieved and ascribed status and social complexity can be elucidated.

"Read to Win": Warfighters, Intellectuals, and the United States Marine Corps Reading Program

My paper, an examination of implied pedagogy in the literature surrounding the United States Marine Corps Reading Program, uses Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet to examine the binaries on which this pedagogy is founded, most notably the binary between what the Marines call the “warfighter” and the figure of the intellectual. The paper examines the U.S.M.C.’s Reading Program and the list of texts’ accompanying ideology, which, like many "canons" of literature, instead of fostering new critical skills and opening new possibilities for questions, intercepts such growth by asserting a purpose for each reading "a priori." Under a heading of “Read to Think…Think to Fight…Fight to Win”, reading becomes teleological, its ultimate goal being successful action. James Webb’s Fields of Fire, a much-celebrated Marine Corps selection, highlights the potential for reinterpreting the boundaries between those who “merely” think and those who act, but ultimately reinforces that very divide by citing the difference between “spacey” intellectuals and those who put their lives on the line. The paper ultimately calls for change on both sides of the divide, proposing that all readers need to question the canonical pedagogy that precedes their reading—to remain skeptical of an ideology that threatens to force a specific interpretation and/or action.

The Role of the Historical in the Ethnography of Byzantine Rite Catholicism

St. John the Baptist Carpatho-Rusyn Orthodox Greek Catholic Church in Ambridge, Pennsylvania is a parish with a history. The submission of certain Eastern Orthodox Christians to the Roman Catholic pope in the 16th and 17th centuries marked the advent of east European “Byzantine Rite” or “Greek” Catholicism—communities that retained most of their “Eastern Orthodox” liturgical customs but adopted “Roman Catholic” canonical authority and theology. Beginning in the 1880s, many of these east Europeans immigrated to America, and over the next 50 years, conflicts surrounding Vatican policies, relations with American Latin Rite Catholics and Eastern Orthodox, Americanization and nativism, internal ethnic debates, hierarchical power struggles, and imperialist and nationalist influences resulted in the formation of distinct communities exhibiting various ethnic and religious identities. This ethnographic essay, which presents the findings of three months of intensive fieldwork, concludes that St. John the Baptist Carpatho-Rusyn Orthodox Greek Catholic Church not only bears the vestiges of history in its long, unwieldy, and evocative name, but is also one of five extant ecclesial communities in Ambridge in which this past manifests tangibly in contemporary everyday religious beliefs and practices. This essay also considers theoretical and methodological points of contact between history, anthropology, and ethnography.

Rewriting the Soviet Theatre: American Newspaper Criticism in the Early Cold War

The translation theorist Susan Bassnett has argued that, rather than thinking of translation and adaptation as a binary, translation should be put into a spectrum of rewriting so that the focus is placed on the acts of writers and readers, rather than on questions of fidelity to an “original.” This paper will argue that newspaper criticism of foreign plays functions largely as a rewriting. It is analogous to translation in that the purpose of these reviews is not to help readers evaluate their entertainment options, as with reviews of local productions, but to make foreign works available to an audience who would otherwise have no access to them. I will then examine The New York Times’ criticism of Soviet theatre in the late Stalinist period (roughly 1945-1953), paying special attention to the way these reviews rewrote Soviet Drama to meet the needs of an American audience in the early days of the cold war.

Momentary Eddies: Framing Complexity in the Iron Age of the Pontic Steppe

Complexity in the archaeological record is often presented in evolutionary-developmental terms such as tribes, chiefdoms, and states. This type of linear, progressive outline, however, ignores the inherent complex ebb and flow of social identity. For groups such as the Greek-labeled 'Scythians', militant pastoralists active throughout the Iron Age of what is now modern day Ukraine, social configurations were contingent on locality, shifting normative values, intra- and inter-regional interaction such as trade and exchange as well as conflict, and shifts in settlement patterns. Consequently, studies of steppe nomadic pastoralist social groups, in conjunction with post-colonial theories, represent an opportunity to assess the appropriateness of analyzing Iron Age groups under the rubric of complexity and evolution towards a state-level system. I suggest that these adaptations - intra-regional exchange, increased sedentism, and inter-regional, regularized warfare, often regarded as factors leading to the development of complex chiefdoms and/or states- had adverse effects on Pontic Iron Age society acting as counter-agents of social action, contributing to the eventual disintegration of nomadic pastoralist hegemony and group identity in the Eastern European steppe.

Letting Something Be Said to Us: A Phenomenological Approach to Rhetoric and the Sensus Communis

The rhetorical tradition deals with doxa, that is, common belief or opinion. Many rhetorical scholars working in the tradition of Aristotle describe doxa as a material with which we compose our speeches. This paper offers another interpretation. I argue that doxa is ontological, not instrumental. It is from which our speech originates. I look first at Immanuel Kant's notion of the sensus communis, an ingredient of aesthetic judgment that evaluates an object using the communal sense of what others may think. I argue that this move, made in Kant's Critique of Judgement, then paves the way for the work of Martin Heidegger, who believes that language is "the dwelling-house of being" and that doxa highlights the openness of contingent life; that the world could be otherwise. An ontological interpretation of doxa emphasizes the origins of our speech, its relational character, and its nature of projectedness outward towards the world. It refuses to accept doxa as a second-class form of knowledge and suggests instead that doxa resides at the heart of the human experience. In short, doxa is being, rhetorical.

The Forensics of the Exquisite Corpse: Searching for the Fused Pedagogies of Creative Writing and C

“How can we use creative writing (its techniques, methods) to teach composition?” This initial question propelled us to attempt to rescue creative writing from the dark and dreary dungeon to which it was relegated by composition studies. This paper narrates our attempt to integrate a creative writing activity called the “exquisite corpse” into each of our Seminar in Composition classrooms. The paper then analyzes both the students’ reactions to and reflections on the importation of a “creative writing” activity into an “academic writing” classroom. Troubled by the uneasy place such an activity held within our classes, we then set out to consider why perhaps our writing course, centered on the teaching and writing of the essay, seemed to have such a resistance to the exquisite corpse activity; by extension, we set out to investigate what seemed like an investment on the part of many compositionists in the continued separation of creative writing and composition. Exploring the ostensible differences in the two fields and in their corresponding pedagogies and places within the English department, we end our paper by proposing a first-year writing course tentatively titled “Texting.” This course embraces a pedagogy and view of genre which fuses the pedagogies and values of creative writing and composition.

Women's Stance-taking in Interaction: The Case of (ING)

Sociolinguistics centers on the premise that there are ‘different ways of saying the same thing’, which convey social information beyond propositional meaning. For example, the utterance ‘I’m workin’’ (as opposed to ‘I’m working’) may provide information about the formality of the situation, the speaker’s social class, the participants’ relationship, etc. What drives speakers to choose one variant over another? Kiesling (2005a, 2005b) proposes that speakers shift in the stances they assume, towards other interlocutors (e.g. distant/solidary) or the topic at hand (e.g. expert/novice), prompting shifts in the use of variants.

This paper tests Kiesling’s hypothesis by examining the –in/-ing alternation (e.g. ‘talking’/ ‘talkin’) by a group of eight women. These variants correlate with the women’s participation in ‘social’ and ‘informational’ speech activities during a meeting. These speech activities evoke similar stances, as evidenced by the women’s parallel shifts in the use of –in or -ing. However, for one woman, the opposite pattern obtains. Careful examination of her speech reveals that this unexpected behavior helps her position herself as a leader in the group. Applying both quantitative and qualitative methods, I demonstrate that a stance-based approach to intraspeaker variation offers a multi-dimensional view of how speakers create social meaning in discourse.

Meaning Connections Between a Bilingual’s Two Languages: The Case of Hebrew and English

Individuals who speak two languages can comprehend words in both their languages. However, it is still debated whether each language relies on a separate semantic system, or whether the languages share a single conceptual system. A shared system implies that semantic interactions between the meanings of words in the two languages may exist. Such potential interactions were explored here, specifically, the comprehension of two different words in one language that happen to share a single translation in the other language (e.g., ‘peace’ and ‘hello’ are both translated to Hebrew as ‘shalom’). Hebrew-English bilinguals rated pairs of unrelated English words that share a translation in Hebrew (e.g. ‘map’ and ‘tablecloth’ both correspond to “mapa” in Hebrew) as being more semantically similar than English word pairs that do not share a translation. Importantly, monolingual English speakers did not differ in their rating of the two types of word pairs, suggesting that meaning interactions between the bilinguals’ two languages are the source of the observed effect. The bilingual group was further divided based on the first language learned to investigate whether the semantic influences are restricted to effects of a native language on a second language, or whether they are reciprocal in nature.

Globalization, Internal Labor Migration, and Income Inequality in China, 1993-2003

In this study, I analyze the relationship between globalization and rising income inequality within China, by focusing on internal labor migration. I decompose the effect of globalization on rising income inequality into two parts: a) divergence effects as the existing literature notes, and b) convergence effects through a potential intermediating factor – internal labor migration. My central assumption is that internal migration is negatively correlated with income inequality in China. Furthermore, I examine the role of migration in reducing inequality by decomposing the relationship between intra- and inter-provincial levels. Using longitudinal data from 1993 to 2003 for 28 provinces in China, I attempt to answer the two central questions: a) how does globalization affect internal labor migration, both intra- and inter-provincial migration? b) how does internal labor migration affect income inequality at both intra- and inter-provincial levels, controlling for the effect of globalization?

Globalization of a Symbol: The Ceremonial Use of Wedding Vases Today

A wedding is a life-crisis ritual involving a transition from one phase to another – a move from being single to being half of a married couple. A couple drinking from a wedding vase can be a defining moment of uniting – like an exchange of rings or a shared cup of wine. A wedding vase is a symbol, what Victor Turner would call a multivalent small storage unit of ritual activity. It can be a tiny sub-unit of the overall ceremony, but it also has the ability to be, as it appears to have been designed, as the liminal (transitional) moment in the ritual. But in what context? Twentieth century scholars collecting oral history gathered data on wedding vases in Pueblo marriage rituals that occurred a century ago. Ceremonies almost as old have been witnessed and recorded, but some have since proven to be fake ceremonies designed to mock outsiders. Yet what may have once been a symbol privately shared in the nuptials of a few neighboring pueblos looks likely to become a global symbol of marital unity -- spreading through pan-Indian channels and into Euro-North American and European communities. This process, its many tangential roads, and the pros and cons of globalizing a symbol will be discussed.

Regime Type and Foreign Policy: Evidence from Latin America (1950-1979)

How does regime type influence Latin American foreign policy (FP) choices? In particular, do Latin American autocracies make distinct FP choices? A better comprehension of the influence of regime on FP furthers the understanding of both the general question of the influence of regime on policy choices, and –given the sample included in this study- of the behavior of Latin American autocracies. Furthermore, it expands the knowledge about inter-Latin American relations.

My theory relies on three assumptions: 1) FP can serve both policy and political objectives. 2) Treaties are outcomes of FP choices: Reaching formal agreements is costly; therefore, I assume their cost make treaties a more significant indicator of FP choices than mere policy statements. 3) Governments’ legitimacy is associated (among other factors) both to regime institutional features and to time.

Grounded on these assumptions, I argue that the lower the level of legitimacy of a government, the higher its incentives to rely on FP to pursue the political objective of domestic legitimation. In other words, I contend that treaties perform as means of legitimation for weak governments (new democracies) or governments whose legitimacy is contested (autocracies).

The Cultural Economy of Fashion Design in China

This paper is part of an anthropological dissertation entitled, “Fashioning Change: The Cultural Economy of Clothing in Contemporary China.” It examines contemporary Chinese clothing as culturally embedded practices and processes. While economic and cultural studies treat clothing either as a business or a cultural object, my dissertation argues that cultural and capitalist logics are interwoven in the production and consumption of Chinese clothing. The dissertation contributes to a growing anthropological effort to combine the insights of interpretive approaches with those of political economy. It also contributes to anthropological critiques of “globalization” as a simple and unidirectional economic process of “westernization” or cultural homogenization.

This paper focuses specifically on Chinese fashion designers and their dilemma in designing “for art’s sake” or “for the market.” The paper situates this dilemma and surrounding debates in relation to the unique history of China’s fashion industry. Comparing and contrasting the Chinese situation and wider global patterns, this paper argues that Chinese fashion designers neither simply imitate western fashion, nor do they create a completely new or indigenous system of “fast fashion.” It reveals that local and global factors interact in complex ways, and both offer choices to and impose constraints on Chinese fashion designers.

Explosive Volcanism at Bezymianny Volcano, Russia: Satellite- and Ground-Based Observations

Bezymianny (55.98º N, 160.59º E) is a composite volcano with a summit elevation of approximately 2,900 m and is located 350 km north of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, Kamchatka Peninsula, Russia. Previously inactive for about one thousand years, Bezymianny reactivated in 1955, culminating in a cataclysmic eruption on 30 March 1956. This directed blast generated a ~2 km wide horseshoe-shaped crater opening to the east, very similar in morphology to Mount Saint Helens, USA.

Satellite data of Bezymianny have been collected from the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) sensor, with data from over ten eruptions in the last six years. These data can be used for thermal, textural, and compositional changes using a variety of products. This presentation explores thermal changes at the dome and deposits of Bezymianny, based on an international peer-reviewed publication currently in press (Carter et al., 2007, Bulletin of Volcanology). Subsequently, new data using high magnification Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) images will be presented to review the effect of surface textures on volcanic deposits. This integrated study provides a means to monitor activity at Bezymianny using limited fieldwork and extensive satellite images to safely record changes and make predictions toward future events.

Tale of Galaxy Clusters

Galaxy clusters are biggest objects known in the Universe. These objects contain hundreds of galaxies, hot gas and dark matter. Cosmic microwave radiation that we observe today passes through these clusters and scatters off of hot gas. This causes a small change in the spectrum of the radiation. By measuring this change we can infer how fast galaxy clusters are moving. Since clusters’ motion is connected to the overall expansion history of the Universe; measurement of cluster velocities will help us answer several fundamental questions related to the origin and evolution of the Universe. We show here how well velocity measurements will be able to provide us answers to such questions.

Optical Nanoantennas

Optical nano antennas are efficient tools to focus light down to dimensions much smaller than the wavelength of light. These antennas can find interesting applications in optical access of single quantum dots and performing individual quantum gate operations. We fabricated silver bowtie nanoantennas with gaps varying between 10 to 100 nanometers on ITO coated glass using electron beam lithography. A mode locked Ti:sapphire femtosecond laser pulse at center wavelength 853nm is focused onto the the antenna. The dipole antennas are seen to radiate and we observe that the antennas are highly sensitive to input polarisation. It emits maximum when the antenna axis is parallel to the input beam polarization. We will explore other interesting nonlinear effects like white light supercontinuum generation and second harmonic generation.

Sunyaev- Zel’dovich Effect From Quasars

Quasars are one of the most energetic sources in the Universe. They are powered by super-massive black holes as central engines. Within their lifetime they dump energy into the surrounding medium, which in turn, can substantially heat the gas present nearby. The knowledge of the temperature and density of this hot gas is very useful in understanding physical processes that govern the formation and lifetime of these exotic objects. They also give a handle on the properties of the black hole that powers a quasar.

One generic source for studying the nature of this hot gas is via its effect on the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation, the relic radiation from the “Big Bang”. This effect is known as the Sunyaev Ze’ldovich effect, named after the discoverers of this effect. This article explores the consequences of the interaction between the gas, heated by Quasar energy and the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation and also discusses the potential detection of this effect via high resolution experiments in the coming years.

Photophysical Study of Luminescent Lanthanide Complexes and Nanoparticles in Solution

Lanthanide luminescence offers several advantages over organic fluorophores, including high photostability, long luminescence lifetimes, and sharp, discrete emission bands. In order to obtain highly intense lanthanide luminescence in solution, the cations must be sensitized and protected by an “antenna.” Here, two types of antennae systems are investigated; a family of natural product organic chromophores (flavanoids) and semiconductor nanoparticles (CdSe, ZnS). To understand the efficiency of antennae to lanthanide energy transfer (sensitization) and protection of the lanthanide from non-radiative deactivation, a series of photophysical investigations have been done. The energy of the electronic levels of donating states (flavanoid triplet states, nanoparticle band gap levels) can be measured and compared to the accepting electronic energy levels of different lanthanides emitting in the visible and near infrared, along with the quantum yields of the different complexes. Monitoring luminescence lifetimes of the lanthanide cations gives information on the protection from non-radiative deactivation, along with the number of different coordination environments for lanthanide cations provided by an antenna system. Luminescence lifetimes of the donating energy levels will provide information on the antennae to lanthanide energy transfer mechanism, and parameters that affect it.

Modulating Inflammation Using Nonlinear Model Predictive Control

Immunomodulation has become a focal point in the treatment of critically ill patients, as clinicians seek to manage the delicate balance between the necessity and potential hazards of inflammation in infection containment and healing. Modeling of inflammation is emerging as a desirable approach in designing effective immunomodulatory strategies, with most computational work focused on modeling molecular and systemic mechanisms of inflammation with increasing biological fidelity. Yet, there is still much to be done in the area of identifying successful strategies to combat excessive and pervasive inflammation.

To this end, we investigate a prospective tool known as nonlinear model predictive control (NMPC), which may help determine suitable dose regimens in complex clinical settings. The advantage of this approach over other control algorithms is that it combines both a prediction of the future state of the system from a mathematical model and feedback from real time data measurements to successively update a sequence of control moves that will help to optimize the desired outcome for a specific scenario. Nonlinear model predictive control could be used to suggest, in real time, optimal data sampling rates and dosing profiles of an immunomodulatory therapy for the critically ill.

Community Formation and Specialization of a Tairona Coastal Village, Colombia

Specialized production and the development of a regional economy may have been key factors in the consolidation of the Tairona political economy. This study focuses on the community of Chengue, in a cove of the northern coast of Colombia, where there are few options for agriculture and the reliance on the exchange of salt and a few marine products with neighboring villages was crucial in the process of socio-political change. The earliest identifiable occupation of the cove starts at about 200 BC, and ends at around 1650 AD, when the Tairona were destroyed by colonialism. In this 1700 years the village went through multiple phases of development with changes in its economy, subsistence, social structure, and political dynamics, population density and distribution.

Testing the Limits of Power and Latency Reductions by Predictive Data Grouping

Data retrieval latencies are considered a major bottleneck, and with increased storage needs it is growing in significance. While reducing latencies in storage subsystems is often considered contradictory with efforts to reduce disk energy consumption, we demonstrate that predictive data grouping can potentially work towards these goals simultaneously. Predictive data grouping can be performed opportunistically, and thereby avoids serious performance penalties incurred by prior applications of access prediction. Predictive data grouping with effective replication also results in reduction of overall mechanical movement required to retrieve data. We have collected detailed measurements of disk power consumption, and have estimated the energy expended for its mechanical components, including energy needed to move the disk arm. We have further compared three models of predictive grouping of on-disk data, including an ideal algorithm that offers an optimal arrangement guaranteed to minimize disk arm movement. This ideal utilizes an oracle and offers a strict upper bound on performance gains achievable with predictive layout optimization. These experiments have allowed us to measure the limits of performance improvement achievable with optimal data grouping and replication strategies on a single device, and have further allowed us to demonstrate the potential to reduce energy consumption up to 70%.

The Development of Categorization in Individuals with Autism: Do Individuals With Autism Process Categories Differently?

Categorization is a critical cognitive ability that has received little attention in the autism literature. Studies suggest that individuals with autism form categories but do so differently. One unexplored issue is the role of typicality. Typicality plays an important role in categorization from early in life, and reaction times are faster for typical items in verification tasks. The present study used a cross-sectional design to examine the development of category knowledge. High functioning adults, adolescents and children with autism and matched controls were tested in a category verification task with common categories (cats, dogs, couches, and chairs) varying in typicality from typical to atypical. Reaction time was measured. The autism groups differed from the controls in the way that they categorized objects. By adolescence, individuals with autism processed typical and somewhat typical category exemplars as efficiently as controls. However, they experienced difficulty categorizing atypical stimuli across the lifespan. This study shows that individuals with autism have difficulty categorizing atypical exemplars of categories and do not develop typical adult levels of expertise. This may relate to differences in processing global information and highlights the need to consider the role that non social cognitive processes may play in autism.

A Dynamical Model of Influenza A Virus Infection with Its Clinical and Epidemiological Relevance

We present a simplified, biologically justified, mathematical model of the dynamics of IAV infection and the human immune response to such an infection. Three arms of immune response are represented in our model: innate, cellular, and humoral.

Our main objectives are constructing a simplified model of the dynamics of influenza infection and immune response as a set of ordinary differential equations, exploring the effect of initial viral load on the severity and duration of the disease, performing sensitivity analysis and characterizing the parameters that influence the onset, duration and severity of infection and investigating how the course of the disease depends on the evolution of antigenic distance. Our main goal is to uncover the relative roles played by each arm of the immune response during the course of the disease to have a better understanding of what drives the intensity of symptoms, infectivity of the virus and the host and duration of the disease. We present the clinical implications of our model such as reactions to treatment by antiviral drugs and anti-inflammatories. When we consider a naïve host with no adaptive immunity, its failure to develop compatible antibodies results in recurrence of the disease and transition to a chronic state.

What Forces Drive DNA Bending?

Many regulatory and catalytic DNA-binding proteins deform their target DNA, often by bending. In most cases the DNA distortion is required for biological function. One mechanism proposed for DNA bending is that protein neutralization of negatively charged phosphates on one face of the DNA produces a collapse of the DNA toward the neutralized surface. We have manipulated the energy required for achieving the 50° axial DNA bend in the EcoRV endonuclease-DNA complex by either removing cationic protein side chains that contact phosphate groups and/or replacing the charged phosphate with an uncharged methyl phosphonate. We present evidence that neutralization of particular phosphates, positioned on the concave face of the bound DNA, can contribute favorably not only to the formation of the EcoRV-recognition complex but also to cleavage of the GATATC site. In addition, synergistic effects are observed when particular combinations of phosphates are neutralized. Our results support the model that asymmetric phosphate neutralization by a site-specific protein promotes DNA bending.

The Implication of Milgrom's Relation for the Dark Matter Haloes

In our current understanding of the spiral galaxies, we can not predict the rotation curves of the spiral galaxies without the dark matter which is presumably distributed spherically around the galaxies. However, with just one assumption that the gravitational accerelation goes like 1/r instead of Newton's law, 1/r^2, when the acceleration is smaller than the values 10^(-10)m/sec^2, it is well known that Milgrom's relation can give a better description of the rotation curves for spiral galaxies. In this research we treat the relationship as a phenomenological observation which the real galaxies must satisfy and find out that galaxies occupy a two-dimensional region in the three-dimensional parameter space of the disk mass, the mass of the dark matter halo and the halo concentration. In addition, from the relation we find that the stellar mass to the halo mass is lower than the primordial ratio which is about 16% of the dark matter, and it is consistent with what we generally expect today.

Super-Resolving THEMIS Data for Improved Temperature, Composition, and Spatial Resolution

Super-Resolution is the process of obtaining a spatial resolution greater than that of the original (or native) resolution of a data source. This can be done through the fusion of original data with an additional source that has the desired resolution. There are a variety of techniques that can be used to fuse data sources; however, a tradeoff has been noted between techniques that are the most visually appealing and those that are most radiometrically accurate. The technique for super-resolution presented here is a modification of an algorithm that was tested successfully using multi-resolution data from the Earth orbiting Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) instrument. The spatial and spectral resolution of this instrument is broadly similar to the Mars orbiting Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS) instrument. The current study investigates the applicability of this technique to the fusion of THEMIS visible and thermal infrared (TIR) data. Successful super-resolution of the 100 m/pixel THEMIS TIR bands would allow for improved spatial resolution (18-36 m/pixel) in order to enhance image interpretation and aid in the search for sub-pixel scale temperature and/or compositional anomalies. This poster will present Mars and/or Earth images created as part of this investigation.

Neurophenomenology: Is it New and Does it Work?

Neurophenomenology is hailed as a new and possibly insightful movement in the scientific study of consciousness, (e.g. Gallagher, Varela, van Gelder, Dreyfus); this claim is questioned. Phenomenology as the study of the structure of experience is said to be integral in answering the 'hard problem' of consciousness, i.e. how do conscious experiences arise from matter. It does this by suggesting experimental frameworks/designs and rigorous introspective techniques that map experiences onto neural events. Different types of neurophenomenology will be reviewed, and it will be shown that none of them a) offer anything new in terms of experimental method, and, more importantly, b) that none of them go towards answering the hard problem.

Live Baiting of DDoS Attackers in the Internet

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) remains a challenging problem in the Internet. In a DDoS attack, a large number of attackers request service from victim servers at a high aggregate rate, hogging up server resources and denying access to legitimate clients. The DDoS problem is notoriously hard due in part to the difficulty of identifying attackers, who individually send their requests at a normal rate.

This work contributes a novel attacker detection algorithm, which we call live baiting, to accurately identify DDoS attackers. We employ a novel leverage of group-testing theory, which aims at identifying defective members in a population using the minimum number of tests. We analyze the coverage, effectiveness, in terms of false positive and false negative probabilities, and efficiency, in terms of memory and message overhead and computational complexity, of the proposed algorithm. Particularly, we show that one million DDoS attackers can all be detected within a minute with a few false positives and with manageable storage and computational complexities.

Orientation of Calvaria Trabeculae in Perinatal Rabbits with Familial Coronal Suture Synostosis

Calvarial deformities and trabeculae orientation parallel to the synostosed sutures have been seen in individuals with premature suture fusion (craniosynostosis). It is unclear whether the trabeculae orientation is a primary deformity in bone regulation causing familial synostosis or a secondary, functional response. Preserved calvaria were obtained from 111 New Zealand White Rabbits, ranging in age from 21 to 41 days post-conception. Samples included: 1) wild-type normal controls (n=26); 2) in-colony normal controls (n=62); 3) delayed-onset synostosis (n=65), and; 4) early-onset synostosis (n=69). The calvaria were examined under a stereomicroscope and five angles of trabecular divergence were measured on the digital images. Results revealed that rabbits with EOS had trabeculae running parallel to the coronal suture (mean angle=30.42°) compared to more perpendicular-running trabeculae for WTC (mean angle=73.42°), ICC (mean angle=70.39°) and DOS rabbits (mean angle=66.90°). ANOVA revealed that EOS had significantly (F=113.10; p=0.00) smaller angles than the other three groups, and no significant differences (p>0.05) were seen between WTC and ICC. No significant (p>0.05) correlations were noted among trabecular angles and age. These results demonstrate abnormal trabecular patterns may play a primary role in the etiopathogenesis of premature suture fusion in this model, although early functional factors may still influence orientation.

Molecular Dynamics simulations of Vortex Matter in high-T_c Superconductors with Columnar Defects

Since the discovery in 1986, high-temperature superconductors have been investigated extensively and are still been studied nowadays. Unlike conventional superconductors, they can be penetrated by external magnetic field in the form of flux lines, each with a quantum of magnetic flux, called vortices. At low temperatures, the vortices form an ordered hexagonal lattice, called Abrikosov lattice. The lattice melts into vortex liquid at higher temperatures. The melting is closely related with the superconductivity of the materials. The introduction of columnar defects in superconductors rises the melting temperature and introduces new phases. We use London Langevin molecular dynamics simulations to investigate the phase transitions in the superconducting material BSCCO in the presence of low concentration of columnar defects. Both the effect of vertical columnar defects and that of tilted columnar defects are studies. The results are helpful both in understanding the physics of vortex matter and in manufacturing new kinds of superconducting materials.

One dimensional elastic continuum model of epidermal wound healing

Diseases of necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC) results after an injury to the mucosal lining of the intestine, leading to translocation of bacteria and endotoxin. Intestinal mucosal defects are repaired by the process of intestinal restitution, during which enterocytes migrate from healthy areas to sites of injury.

In this paper, we developed a mathematical model for the migration and proliferation of enterocytes occuring in the necrotizing enterocolitis disease. The model is based on a novel assumption of elastic deformation of the cell layer and incorporates the following three components (i) motility promoting force due to lamellipod formation, (ii) motility impeding friction due to the adhesion to the cell matrix and (iii) enterocyte proliferation. Our model successfully reproduces the behavior observed for enterocyte migration on glass coverslips, namely the dependence of migration speed on the distance from the wound edge and the finite propagation distance in the absence of proliferation which results in an occasional failure to close the wound.

The model can be used to describe the dynamics of closure of a wound with a linear edge and can be used to predict the effect of chemical agents on the three main individual components of wound healing: mobility (force applied by lamellipods), friction (strength of adhesion to the cell matrix), and proliferation.

Do Anger, Anxiety, and Social Relationships Predict Central Adiposity in Adolescents Over Time?

Central body fat distribution, also known as central adiposity, is a risk factor for coronary heart disease, stroke, hypertension and diabetes mellitus, independent of overall obesity. Preliminary evidence suggests that anxiety, hostility, and depression are associated with central adiposity in adulthood, although little is known about associations during adolescence. Our objective was to examine the role of hostility, anxiety, and social relationships in the development of central adiposity, as measured by waist-to-hip ratio (WHR), in a sample of White and Black adolescents. Participants consisted of 159 boys and girls (50% Black, 52% male). There were two data collection periods (T1 and T2) approximately 3.5 years apart. Linear regression analyses were used to evaluate the association between T1 psychosocial variables and T2 WHR, controlling for T1 WHR, T1 age, gender, race, and T2 body mass index. Results showed significant main effects of trait anger, hostile affect, and relationship support, and trends for attachment anxiety and trait anxiety. Analyses conducted separately in boys and girls found that hostility was associated with WHR in boys and attachment anxiety was associated with WHR in girls. This study provides preliminary support that psychosocial variables may be important in the development of central adiposity in adolescents.

Sex Differences Along the Continuum of Exhibitionism

This study examines differences in men’s and women’s attitudes about behaviors related to sexual exhibitionism. This study seeks to expand the study of exhibitionism to examine the behaviors among people within the normal population across a range of behaviors that expand upon the legally-defined exhibitionist behaviors, including lower levels of exhibitionism-related behaviors such as dressing provocatively. For the purposes of this study, a scale was created to assess legally-defined exhibitionism as well as other exhibitionism-related behaviors. The hypotheses are (1) that men will endorse these behaviors more favorably than women and (2) there will be an interaction effect between sex and level exhibitionist behavior, where men will rate the higher level behaviors much more favorably. The new scale was administered to a sample of 236 university students. The scale demonstrated good reliability and validity providing support that lower levels of exhibitionism-related behavior and higher levels of exhibitionism-related behavior may exist within the same construct. Factor analysis demonstrated the possibility of three levels of exhibitionism within this scale. There were significant differences for sex on both the moderate, F(1, 220) = 18.6, p < .01, and high subscales for exhibitionism, F(1, 220) = 31.49, p .01, where men endorsed exhibitionist behaviors more favorably than women, as predicted.

An Osteological Analysis of Human Cranial Remains from the Atlantic Watershed Region of Costa Rica

This paper presents an analysis of human cranial remains from the Stone Cist Period in the Atlantic Watershed Region of Costa Rica. The collection was likely obtained by Carl V. Hartman, Curator of Ethnography and Archaeology at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, in 1903 during his seven month field expedition to Costa Rica. Aside from the geotemporal context, little is known about the sample since it was not excavated through systematic archaeology. In addition, bioarchaeology in Costa Rica is restricted due to the poor preservation of biological material and the large scale looting of archaeological sites which has been an unfortunate part of Costa Rican history. Therefore, this analysis provides information and contributes to the limited corpus of comparative Costa Rican skeletal data that can be utilized for future research.

Ten crania were analyzed for demographic, metric, nonmetric, and pathological conditions. Substantial dental disease was present in the sample. All individuals exhibited periodontitis and many demonstrated calculus, antemortem tooth loss, abcessing and carious lesions. Porotic hyperostosis was recorded with varying levels of severity in six of the adult individuals and the juvenile, in whom cribra orbitalia was also noted. In addition, interesting nonmetric traits were unveiled demonstrating group variation.

Coalitions Under Presidentialism: An Institutional Explanation

Which are the institutional settings that make coalitions more likely? This is the question that I will address in this paper. Coalitions are important. They are the key element of cooperation between the executive and legislative branches of government. Traditionally, presidentialism was considered a worse system because it did not encourage these type of cooperation strategies. However, coalitions do take place under presidentialism. My objective in the paper is to explore the conditions under which coalitions do take place under this system.

Choosing Scientific Material for Integration

Integration has long been stressed in K-12 education. Integrating science lessons with lessons in other content areas can be an efficient use of limited time, but not every activity can be integrated. How are decisions made about which lessons to integrate? There are several factors to consider when answering this question. I would like to highlight the importance of the scientific content at the core of an investigation as a crucial factor in deciding whether or not to integrate it. Highlighting the investigations that deliver the most robust scientific content by continuing to learn about them in other content areas maximizes the time investment by familiarizing students with systems that they will continue to encounter throughout their educational experience and throughout their lives. In this poster I offer model systems and big ideas as candidates for integration with other content areas. The choice of model systems and big ideas helps to ensure that the focus of the integration will be on rich scientific content, enabling a meaningful learning experience for students.

Emotion Recognition in Children and Adults with Autism: Does Proficiency Increase With Age?

Research suggests that individuals with autism exhibit a deficit in emotion recognition abilities. Although numerous studies have examined this deficit, few have attempted to elucidate the developmental trajectory of these emotion recognition difficulties. The present study utilized a cross-sectional design to explore this issue.

High functioning adults and children with autism and age and IQ matched controls were tested on an emotion recognition task. Six basic emotional expressions were presented dynamically, each at four different levels of subtlety. As a group, individuals with autism performed significantly worse than controls. Also, results demonstrated that for controls, performance on the task improved in the higher age group. However, this was not true for individuals with autism. The performance of the adults with autism was in fact poorer than that of the younger individuals with autism.

Contrary to expectation and in contrast to control participants, adults with autism were worse at identifying facial expression than were younger individuals with autism. One possible explanation for this cohort effect is that many of the younger individuals with autism in our sample may have been exposed to interventions incorporating emotion recognition components. This and other possibilities will be discussed.

Observation of New Symmetry States on Alkali-Adsorbed Metal Surfaces by Photoemission

Photoemission spectroscopy is the most effective method to study the electronic structure of solid surfaces. We combine angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES), which provides information on the electronic band dispersions, with two-photon photoemission (2PPE), where a pump pulse excites electrons from an initial state to an unoccupied intermediate state and the probe pulse lifts electrons to the final state. The energy distribution of photoelectrons reveals the energetic position and the lifetime of the intermediate state.

We employ angle-resolved two-photon photoemission (AR-2PPE) to study the px and py states of alkali atoms on noble metals. At low coverage, the unoccupied anti-bonding resonance state (AR) appears roughly midway through the band gap and serves as an intermediate state. Resonant excitations through AR have been studied extensively. By careful measurements of the surface electronic structure, we observe a new state located slightly above AR. Recent investigations of the electronic states of alkali atoms on metals suggest px and py AR. The new state has maximum intensity for 15o-20o off-normal emission, expected for m=1 symmetry. This characteristic dependence of 2PPE intensity on angle excludes other known states. Observation of the previously unknown m=1 states provides new insight regarding the chemisorption of alkali atoms on metals.

Online Temporal Clustering for Outbreak Detection

We present Cluster Onset Detection (COD), a novel algorithm to aid in the detection of epidemic outbreaks. COD employs unsupervised learning techniques in an online setting to partition the population into subgroups that are susceptible to different attack types. Focusing on more homogeneous subgroups prevents the dilution of the epidemic symptoms in a large population. Statistically, COD attempts to detect a cluster made up primarily of infected hosts. We argue that this technique is largely complementary to the existing methods for outbreak detection and can generally be combined with one or more of them. We give empirical results applying COD to the problem of detecting a worm attack on a system of networked computers, and show that this method results in approximately 40% lower infection rate than the best previously reported results on this data set achieved using a model customized for the worm outbreak detection task. The algorithm operates at low false positive rates: the improvement is reported at a very practical 1 false alarm per week. High realism of experimental verification is achieved by using actual captured network traffic.

Conestoga Town: Continuity and Change in a Native American Colonial Period Refugee Community

The Susquehanna River Valley in south-central Pennsylvania was a culturally dynamic setting in the early 18th Century. After decades of warfare, disease, and displacement, members of the Susquehannock population and the Seneca nation settled a tract of land that came to be known as Conestoga Town. This settlement was a popular meeting place for the negotiation of treaties, land purchases, missionary work, and other interactions between Euro-American colonists and Native American groups, including the the Piscataway, Leni Lennape, Nanticoke, and Shawnee. Historical documentation from the period describes many events which took place at Conestoga and issues regarding colonial interactions with the people at Conestoga. Despite these records, the impact of colonial dynamics and cultural interactions on the everyday lives of Conestoga Town inhabitants, however, remains poorly understood. This research investigates cultural changes and continuities among the Susquehannock and Seneca populations at Conestoga Town through the analysis of household and mortuary data obtained through archaeological excavations at the site.

Caffeine Use and Sleep in Children and Adolescents

Caffeine is the most widely consumed psychoactive drug in the U.S. Not only adults, but also many children and adolescents consume caffeine on a daily basis. Caffeine, a stimulant, can disturb sleep, including difficulty falling asleep and more nighttime waking. Yet, there is very little data on the effects of caffeine use on child sleep behaviors. Participants aged 7-17 included 28 healthy controls and 37 diagnosed with an affective such as major depressive disorder (MDD) or anxiety disorder. Participants reported caffeine use in their naturalistic environment through a cell-pone based Ecological Momentary Assessment Protocol (EMA). MDD children reported greater use of caffeine and more subjective sleep problems relative to healthy controls. Interestingly, MDD children’s caffeine use decreased and subjective sleep ratings increased across treatment. As previous research has suggested, the use of caffeine in children had a negative impact on perceived sleep quality in this study. Perhaps caffeine use exacerbates the sleep problems already faced by the group. It may be that in pre-treatment, caffeine is consumed to counter symptoms of the affective disorder (such as daytime fatigue or lethargy). As children’s’ mood and motivation improve during the course of treatment, caffeine use may diminish.

Ultrafast Dynamics of Vertical-Cavity Surface-Emitting Lasers

Vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSEL's) are important devices for optical communication and sensing. Many applications require single-mode operation, which can be achieved by suppressing multiple lateral modes with emission apertures of 10 micrometers or less and by restricting emission to one polarization by reduction of symmetry. Such single-mode lasers still can produce multi-mode emission when subject to high pump currents or high-frequency modulation.

Here we will discuss the emission dynamics of single-mode VCSEL's after resonant optical injection of femtosecond pulses from a mode-locked Ti-sapphire laser. The VCSEL's emission is time and polarization resolved by cross correlation on a nonlinear optical crystal. This all-optical technique gives access to the VCSEL's dynamics without limitation from electronics. Our measurements show dynamics in the 10 GHz range stemming from ordinary and from polarization relaxation oscillations. Interference beats above 100 GHz show the importance of dynamic multi-mode behavior. The decay of these beats gives direct information on the roundtrip gain of the dynamically excited modes. Polarization resolved measurements show the feasibility of polarization switching on a subpicosecond time scale.

In Search of Photostable Near Infrared Emitting Luminescent Reporters: Lanthanide Complexes

In vivo near infrared (NIR: wavelength from 800-1500 nm) fluorescence imaging is an emerging research area for bioimaging due to their higher sensitivity in comparison to magnetic techniques (Magnetic Resonance Imaging). Biological tissues have low absorbance and scattering in NIR domain. This allows near infrared light to penetrate deeply in tissue and allow higher image resolution. Organic dyes are the fluorescent probes currently used, but they have severe drawbacks including rapid photobleaching (fluorescence intensity decreases very rapidly due to the molecule decomposition). Lanthanide complexes have NIR luminescence properties which can overcome the current limitations of organic molecules: they have long luminescence lifetimes and sharp emission bands (allowing discrimination from background fluorescence) and the emission bands energy are independent from experimental conditions. More importantly, they are resistant to photobleaching. Nevertheless, to date, no NIR lanthanide complexes have been developed for practical applications in physiological conditions. In this work, tropolone has been used as a sensitizer to sensitize several NIR emitting lanthanide cations. To optimize the luminescence efficiency, derivatives of tropolone, and their corresponding lanthanide complexes were synthesized. The structures and the photophysical properties of these complexes have been investigated. These results can be used to rationalize the luminescence properties of the lanthanide complexes and improve the design of future complexes.