Effect of Rock Cover on Small Mammal Abundance in a Montana Grassland

We examined the influence of rock cover, as an indicator of presumable retreat site availability on the abundance of deer mice (Peromyscus maniculatus) and prevalence of Sin Nombre virus (SNV) using long-term live trapping and habitat data from three live trapping grids and a shortterm (three month), spatially replicated study across three slopes in Cascade County, Montana. In our long-term study, we found that deer mice were more abundant at a live-trapping grid with greater rock cover, than two grids with less rock cover. There was a non-significant trend (P = 0.053) for deer mice to be more abundant in rocky sites in the short term study. In the long-term study, average SNV antibody prevalence among deer mice was slightly greater (5.0 vs. 3.5 % on average) at the live trapping grid with more rock cover, than the grid with less rock cover. We were unable to demonstrate differences in SNV antibody prevalence among treatments in the short-term study. Further studies are needed to elucidate the multiple determinants of deer mouse abundance and SNV prevalence in grassland ecosystem and other habitat types

International Coercion, Emulation and Policy Diffusion: Market-Oriented Infrastructure Reforms, 1977-1999

Why do some countries adopt market-oriented reforms such as deregulation, privatization and liberalization of competition in their infrastructure industries while others do not? Why did the pace of adoption accelerate in the 1990s? Building on neo-institutional theory in sociology, we argue that the domestic adoption of market-oriented reforms is strongly influenced by international pressures of coercion and emulation. We find robust support for these arguments with an event-history analysis of the determinants of reform in the telecommunications and electricity sectors of as many as 205 countries and territories between 1977 and 1999. Our results also suggest that the coercive effect of multilateral lending from the IMF, the World Bank or Regional Development Banks is increasing over time, a finding that is consistent with anecdotal evidence that multilateral organizations have broadened the scope of the “conditionality” terms specifying market-oriented reforms imposed on borrowing countries. We discuss the possibility that, by pressuring countries into policy reform, cross-national coercion and emulation may not produce ideal outcomes.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/40099/3/wp713.pd

Tick-, mosquito-, and rodent-borne parasite sampling designs for the National Ecological Observatory Network

Parasites and pathogens are increasingly recognized as significant drivers of ecological and evolutionary change in natural ecosystems. Concurrently, transmission of infectious agents among human, livestock, and wildlife populations represents a growing threat to veterinary and human health. In light of these trends and the scarcity of long-term time series data on infection rates among vectors and reservoirs, the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) will collect measurements and samples of a suite of tick-, mosquito-, and rodent-borne parasites through a continental-scale surveillance program. Here, we describe the sampling designs for these efforts, highlighting sampling priorities, field and analytical methods, and the data as well as archived samples to be made available to the research community. Insights generated by this sampling will advance current understanding of and ability to predict changes in infection and disease dynamics in novel, interdisciplinary, and collaborative ways. (Résumé d'auteur

Tick-, Mosquito-, and Rodent-Borne Parasite Sampling Designs for the National Ecological Observatory Network [Special Feature: NEON Design]

Parasites and pathogens are increasingly recognized as significant drivers of ecological and evolutionary change in natural ecosystems. Concurrently, transmission of infectious agents among human, livestock, and wildlife populations represents a growing threat to veterinary and human health. In light of these trends and the scarcity of long-term time series data on infection rates among vectors and reservoirs, the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) will collect measurements and samples of a suite of tick-, mosquito-, and rodent-borne parasites through a continental-scale surveillance program. Here, we describe the sampling designs for these efforts, highlighting sampling priorities, field and analytical methods, and the data as well as archived samples to be made available to the research community. Insights generated by this sampling will advance current understanding of and ability to predict changes in infection and disease dynamics in novel, interdisciplinary, and collaborative ways

Prefacing the poetess: Gender and textual presentation in seventeenth-century England.

A.B.'s Covent Garden Drollery (1672) is important to the history of the anthologized preface. The prologues and epilogues in the drollery participate in the discourse of the professional woman in theatre, representing women (particularly Restoration actresses) in a way that runs counter to the unsympathetic representation of women in other contemporary drolleries. In this century, several scholars have attributed the drollery to Aphra Behn, and a similar attention to women in the theatre is also evident in her pretexts, which argue for the woman artist' s ability to impersonate across gender lines.The commendatory poem offered little space for the woman poet. Katherine Philips assumes her politics as the criteria for her right to trade commendatory verse and creates her own discourse of commendation, one which praises those who make restoration and eternal life their cause. Philips appropriates the restorative mode by combining it with the prefatory discourse of the amateur, which images the surreptitiously printed text as an innocent girl who has been deflowered and defaced. "Restoration" is a prominent theme in commendatory verses by Philips, and it recurs in the prefatory materials to the 1667 edition of her Poems.Prefaces by early modern women writers are often regarded as quasi-autobiographies or as a record of the writer's gender politics. Women's pretexts also need to be read as pieces of literature, rhetoric, and critical thought. The most appropriate methodological approach to women's pretexts is one that combines the strengths of bibliographic studies and feminist criticism. Katherine Philips, Margaret Cavendish, and Aphra Behn inherited both the prefatory conventions of Renaissance men as well as the strategies of Renaissance women writers like Aemilia Lanyer for circumventing the gender bias of the patronymic preface.Prefaces by Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, are deliberately crafted devices for establishing her public identity as England's first self-crowned female laureate. The prefatory discourse of the self-crowned laureate, which values male commendation and establishes the poet as separate and morally superior, occasionally comes into sharp conflict with those sentiments in Cavendish's prefaces which have been identified as feminist, namely her arguments for women's education and female community

Sampling Frequency Differentially Influences Interpretation of Zoonotic Pathogen and Host Dynamics: Sin Nombre Virus and Deer Mice

Reports of novel emerging and resurging wildlife and zoonotic diseases have increased. Consequently, integration of pathogen sampling into wildlife monitoring programs has grown. Sampling frequency influences interpretations of coupled host–pathogen dynamics, with direct implication to human exposure risk, but has received little empirical attention. To address this, a 15-year study, based on monthly sampling, of deer mouse (Peromyscus maniculatus) populations and Sin Nombre virus (SNV; a virulent disease in humans) dynamics was evaluated. Estimates of deer mouse abundance, number infected with SNV, and SNV prevalence from sampling less frequently than each month (achieved by deletion of months and recalculation of these parameters) were compared to monthly sampling frequencies. Deer mouse abundance was underestimated (10%–20%), SNV prevalence was overestimated when prevalence was high (>15%), and fewer annual extremes of abundance and infection were detected when sampling frequency was less than monthly. Effort necessary to detect temporal dynamics of SNV differed from effort to detect demographic patterns in deer mouse abundance. Findings here are applicable to sampling strategies for other host–pathogen dynamics and have direct implications for allocation of public health resources and intervention programs

Margaret Cavendish’s Female Fairground Performers

The vast majority of the documents – visual as well as textual – on which we base our knowledge of early modern performers, were produced by men, and most concentrate squarely on male performers. Exceptionally, the 195th of the Sociable Letters of Margaret Cavendish contains a substantial description of professional performers neither written by a man, nor sidelining the contribution of women to early modern performance culture. Having noted that typical fairground performances involve: ‘Dancers on the Ropes, Tumblers, Jugglers, Private Stage-Players, Mountebanks, Monsters, and several Beasts’, Cavendish focuses on two ‘Sights and Shews’ in which female performers take centre stage. In these, Cavendish (c.1623-73), natural philosopher, poet and playwright, draws on eye-witness experiences gathered during her mid-seventeenth-century years of royalist exile, when she overcame the restrictions inhibiting those of her class and gender from joining spectators at public stages by hiring rooms for private views of her favourite acts at Antwerp’s fairgrounds. Drawing on my ongoing archival and cultural researches into performing monsters, mountebanks, quacks and itinerant commedia dell’arte troupes, my chapter analyses and contextualizes Cavendish’s description of female fairground performers which, despite its essentially literary character, contains considerable documentary value for an understanding of early modern women on stage