Socio-demographic, Clinical, and Genetic Determinants of Quality of Life in Lung Cancer Patients.

Patient reported health-related quality of life (QOL) is a major component of the overall well-being of cancer patients, with links to prognosis. In 6,420 lung cancer patients, we identified patient characteristics and genetic determinants of QOL. Patient responses from the SF-12 questionnaire was used to calculate normalized Physical Component Summary (PCS) and Mental Component Summary (MCS) scores. Further, we analyzed 218 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in the p38 MAPK signaling pathway, a key mediator of response to cellular and environmental stress, as genetic determinants of QOL in a subset of the study population (N = 641). Trends among demographic factors for mean PCS and MCS included smoking status (PCS Ptrend < 0.001, MCS Ptrend < 0.001) and education (PCS Ptrend < 0.001, MCS Ptrend < 0.001). Similar relationships were seen for MCS. The homozygous rare genotype of MEF2B: rs2040562 showed an increased risk of a poor MCS (OR: 3.06, 95% CI: 1.05-8.92, P = 0.041). Finally, survival analysis showed that a low PCS or a MCS was associated with increased risks of five-year mortality (HR = 1.63, 95% CI: 1.51-1.77, HR = 1.23, 95% CI: 1.16-1.32, respectively) and there was a significant reduction in median survival time (Plog-rank < 0.001). These findings suggest that multiple factors contribute to QOL in lung cancer patients, and baseline QOL can impact survival

Rethinking King Cotton: George W. Lee, Zora Neale Hurston, and Global/Local Revisions of the South and the Nation

In the 1930s and 1940s, Zora Neale Hurston and George W. Lee tell compelling and competing stories of the "Negro" in agriculture. To be sure, each narrates "impressive achievements" as well as "great misery and need." Lee's River George (1937) describes the record-setting cotton crop that protagonist Aaron George produces when he returns to his late father's shares, for example, while Hurston's novels and stories present black communities that, despite the racist and classist pogrom of early twentieth-century agriculture, affirm and sustain its members. At the same time, each narrates "great misery and need": River George ends in Aaron's graphic lynching, while Hurston's work tends toward wholesale African American rejection of American agriculture: as she asks in Dust Tracks on a Road (1942), "Why must I chop cotton at all?" (345). What's more, their works defy the relegation of "the status of the Negro farmer" within a regional or national circuit, for they contest American agriculture as solely national or local and instead acknowledge its global dimensions. While Aaron does not recognize that he is victim of the plantation, a transnational system far greater than he and fundamental in refusing him agency or equity, Hurston's works embrace global consciousness, repudiating emplacement in and fealty to a world order that denies her characters autonomy and equity

Book Review: A. J. Tomlinson: Plainfolk Modernist, by R. G. Robins

According to the reviewer, “Robins does an excellent job of placing Tomlinson into a proper historical context, weaving together the social, political, religious, and economic aspects of his narrative. He aptly proves that Tomlinson was a masterful religious entrepreneur who effectively marketed his wares to a target audience, learned from his mistakes, and built his legacy by building institutions.

Book Review: Spirit Cure: A History of Pentecostal Healing

The article reviews the book Spirit Cure: A History of Pentecostal Healing, by Joseph W. Williams. According to the reviewer, Joseph W. Williams offers a refreshing interpretation of pentecostals’ belief in divine healing in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Arguing for continuity over change, he contends that pentecostalism had always been part of “a broad-based metaphysical tradition within U.S. religion.

Book Review: Tamelyn N. Tucker-Worgs, The Black Megachurch: Theology, Gender, and the Politics of Public Engagement

The article reviews the book "The Black Megachurch: Theology, Gender, and the Politics of Public Engagement," by Tamelyn N. Tucker-Worgs

W. E. B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, and Richard Wright: Toward an Ecocriticism of Color

Scholars working in the field of ecocriticism in American literary studies have come to see that their most important task in the coming years is to take up and engage the cultural productions of peoples of color, especially African Americans. Such a transformation entails exploring and theorizing not just African American fictionaland nonfictional narratives, but also African American critical and theoretical works that undergird and explicate other forms of cultural production. Currently, the forebearers of ecocriticism—“the study of literature as if the environment mattered”(Mazel 1)—seem to be an unassailable who’s who of American nature writing: Henry David Thoreau, Aldo Leopold, John Muir, and Rachel Carson. To this pantheon I herewould like to add a couple unlikely characters—W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington. For as Kathleen Wallace and Karla Armbruster rightly point out, it now behooves literary critics to “question . . . why so few African American voices are recognized as part of nature writing and ecocriticism” (2)

LOWERING THE BARRIER TO DEVELOPMENT AND ADOPTION OF PARTICIPATORY SENSING APPLICATIONS

Participatory sensing has the potential to support human-driven sensing and data collection at an unprecedented scale. In this emerging class of software systems, participants use an application on their mobile phone to collect digital samples of the surrounding world using on-board sensors (e.g., camera, GPS, accelerometer). Such an approach can supplement data from special-purpose sensors, or even replace their use, providing data from a fine-grained, human perspective and potentially reducing the costs of large-scale data collection efforts. While many potential participatory sensing campaign organizers have extensive domain knowledge that drives the need for large-scale data collection and analysis, they do not necessarily have the skills required to develop robust software for partic- ipatory sensing. To address this challenge, I present Mobile Campaign Designer, a toolkit which lowers the barrier for the development of participatory sensing applica- tions. Using Mobile Campaign Designer, a campaign organizer can provide a simple, descriptive specification of the requirements of their participatory sensing campaign, and the toolkit generates the source code and an executable for a tailored mobile application that embodies the current best practices in participatory sensing. Since participatory sensing applications typically are used to study physical phenomena, the toolkit includes an algorithm that considers spatiotemporal requirements for the crowdsourced data set and recruits volunteers that can help to satisfy those requirements. Furthermore, this work lowers the barrier for the creation of participatory sens- ing applications for a diverse group through the Mobile Application Development for Science program, an outreach and educational initiative aimed at engaging middle school students with science and technology and increasing their interest in careers in science and technology. Using the Mobile Campaign Designer toolkit, along with other mobile application development tools, students will design and conduct a participatory sensing data collection campaign. The students define their campaign, create their mobile application, collect samples, and analyze the results of their data. In addition to lowering the barrier for participatory sensing application development, the program is intended to serve as an intervention that will impact attitudes and perceptions towards science and computing, thus broadening participation of under- represented groups in science and technology

Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres (1991) and Archival Reimaginations of Eco-Cosmopolitanism

This article blurs the boundaries of literature, agriculture, public history, grassroots political activism, and public policymaking in order to problematize the current eco-cosmopolitan trajectory of ecocritical theory, a trajectory promulgated by Ursula K. Heise in important essays and books. Foregrounding the voices of grassroots environmentalists as well as the public-relations campaigns of multinational agribusiness trade groups, materials collected in the special collections of Iowa State University, the article resituates Smiley’s prizewinning novel and offers a complication of current conceptualizations of eco-cosmopolitanism. The article aims to show the struggles of rural people to embrace a planetary consciousness—a global awareness that can paradoxically foreground as well as participate in the continued ecological devastation of the landscapes these activists hold dear. These local voices underscore the challenges human subjects face in articulating and narrating environmental relationships—even despite their intimate proximity to these landscapes. Just as Thousand Acres’s mastery of a complex environmentalist voice is hard won, so too is that of dozens of rural people across the world. The challenges they face demand the close attention of the environmental humanities, not only to deeply engage appropriate texts, but to engage them with a framework that expands the orchestra and zeros in on the critical problems of global agriculture, planetary health, and human rights

Differences in the effects of carbohydrate food form on endurance performance to exhaustion

High carbohydrate intake is essential to maintaining prolonged endurance performance (Coyle et al., 1986). The form in which carbohydrate food is ingested alters the glycemic response to that food (Crapo and Henry, 1988. Therefore, the purpose of this investigation was to examine the metabolic and performance effects of ingesting solid compared to slurried carbohydrate food (bananas) between two prolonged exhaustive exercise bouts. Eight highly trained male triathletes participated in this study. Subjects mean (±S.E.M.) age, weight, percent body fat, running V02max, and cycling V02max were 25.7±1.1 years, 68.3±3.0 kilograms, 9.8+1.5 %, 68.1±1.9 and 67.1±2.6 ml/kg/min, respectively. Subjects performed three exhaustive endurance tests (ET), each separated by at least two weeks. Each ET consisted of a 90 minute run followed by 90 minutes of cycling, both at 70% V02max. Workloads were then gradually increased on the cycle, such that by 15 minutes the total increase in work equaled 200 kpm. Subjects continued to cycle until exhausted

Black on Earth: African American Ecoliterary Traditions

The article reviews the book "Black on Earth: African American Ecoliterary Traditions" by Kimberly N. Ruffin