The Social Value of Using Biodiversity in New Pharmaceutical Product Research

Biologists and conservation advocates have expressed grave concern over perceived threats to biological diversity. "Biodiversity prospecting"—the search among naturally occurring organisms for new products of agricultural, industrial, and, particularly, pharmaceutical value—has been advanced as both a mechanism and a motive for conserving biological diversity. Economists and others have attempted to estimate the value of biodiversity for use in new pharmaceutical project research. Most of these existing approaches are incomplete, however, as they have not yet considered full social welfare, i.e., both consumer surplus and profit. This paper addresses social welfare by calibrating a model of competition between differentiated products with data from the pharmaceutical industry. We find that the magnitude of losses from even catastrophic declines in biodiversity are negligible in comparison to the value of world production. While social values of biodiversity prospecting might motivate habitat conservation in some areas, these values are likely to be small relative to land value in other uses in even some of the more biologically rich regions of the world.

Gender Representation In American Made English Language Learning Textbooks: A Multi-Modal Study

Using Critical Discourse Analysis and computational linguistics in the present study, I investigated the discursive representations of gender in two series of English Language Development textbooks in the largest markets in the USA Texas and California. In addition, I examined the pictorial gender representations within images of these two series adhering to Critical Image Analysis. I also engaged in previously unnavigated realms of learning material study by examining the linguistic and pictorial gendering of non-human characters as well as examining types and tokens of gendered language. I also investigated the roles genre played in gendered messaging in both series. Finally, I investigated how diversity, design, and access give power to some and not to others in these two series, employing Janks Interdependent Theory of Critical Literacy as my framework. The results indicate that while overt sexism has been removed from current US texts, more subtle forms of bias exist linguistically and pictorially that place males in positions of supremacy and suppress the accomplishments of females. These texts promote traditional gender and family roles while overrepresenting males and underrepresenting females when compared to US Census Data. Stories place males in adventurous, aggressive, and competitive environments that are not open to female agents. Female agents are most often seen at home or going home and appear confident within domestic spheres. Females are materialist while males are pragmatic. Through an investigation of non-humans, I found that females are small, underestimated, and unintelligent while males are big, cunning, and drawn as the norm. Female non-humans often are othered pictorially through adornment, facial features, and coloring.In addition, these texts lack genuine diversity or design, giving power and supremacy to white males while suppressing the voices of females. The texts do present multiple hybrid identities which allow males and females to access several varieties of discourse. Implications at the school, institutional, and societal level are discussed, and recommendations for challenging gender bias in teacher training and classroom discourse are given as well as a discussion of future research

Fragments of times and spaces : collage in the theatre of Vs. E. Meyerhold, 1906-1926

The (re)discovery of collage by the Cubists and futurists was one of the most significant artistic developments of the last century. Collage practice was embraced by artists and intellectuals as more than a formal process involving the combination of image fragments using glue. From Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, through the Dadaists, the surrealists, and on into the era of post-modernity, collage has become a metaphysical expression of a world in flux, characterised by relativity and uncertainty.Often working in close personal contact with the avant-garde artists, theatre director Vsevolod Emilevich Meyerhold was intimately involved with the political, social and cultural upheavals of the early twentieth century. This thesis argues that Meyerhold's work with the artists of the avant-garde has been under-investigated in English language scholarship, and that the influence of artistic developments on his aesthetic extends beyond the well-documented instances of causal cross-over (for example, in stage design). Seeing the lack of scholarship relating Meyerhold's work directly to the collage device as an oversight, this thesis constructs a collage-based model through which the director's theatre can be read.Collage in Meyerhold's theatre is initially identified in the construction of the mise-en- scene. By 1926, the device emerges as the organizational principle underlying the performance as a whole, shedding light on the form and function of the director's aesthetic. Particularly significantly, through collage, Meyerhold's theatre is seen to engage with the questions of subjectivity and objectivity in the audience experience, and, in line with anti-positivist developments in philosophy, radically deconstructs the objective as a category. In addition, through collage, Meyerhold's theatre finds vital points of contact with today's performance practice which often engages with the multiplication of spatial and temporal frameworks through the use of multi-media techniques

MOVING EXPERIENCES: WOMEN AND MOBILITY IN LATE NINETEENTH AND EARLY TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICAN LITERATURE

This project recovers and revises late nineteenth and early twentieth-century narratives of mobility which invoke female protagonists who move from stifling, patriarchal domestic settings in the rural and suburban United States to the more symbolically emancipated settings of New York City and even Europe to reveal both the limitations and possibilities for women’s lives in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. By challenging popular American fiction’s preoccupation with urban white slavery myths and the lingering proscriptive standards for women’s behavior of the Victorian era, the Introduction argues the selected works of this dissertation mark a significant, but perhaps fleeting moment in American history when women were on the verge of profound gains toward equality. Chapter Two reads Gertrude Atherton’s late nineteenth-century interrogation of intimate and professional mobility in Patience Sparhawk as a significant precursor, if not prototype, of the recently recognized middlebrow moderns of the 1920s. Chapter Three examines Edith Wharton’s competing views of mobility and motherhood in The House of Mirth, The Custom of the Country, and Summer. Chapter Four aims to recover David Graham Phillips’ posthumously published novel, Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise, as a complicated engagement with unconventional views of mobility and prostitution in early twentieth-century America, and Chapter Five argues that Jessie Redmon Fauset’s oft-maligned, sentimental novel, Plum Bun, warrants more critical attention for its revolutionary efforts to imagine an alternative cultural aesthetic whereby young, aspiring African-American women can acquire intimate and professional fulfillment through an empowering transnational mobility. Recognizing how stories of fallen womanhood in American literature traditionally overemphasized and criminalized a woman’s desire for intimacy, while stories of New Womanhood often scripted characters ultimately devoid of desire and companionship, I argue Atherton, Wharton, Phillips and Fauset examine and challenge these categories of womanhood in important, often overlooked, depictions of mobility. Too often dismissed or excused for their conservativism, these authors warrant more attention from modern literary scholars for their shared, varied, and intentionally “moving” experiences for women in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century America

Evaluation of Modified Asphalt Mixtures

The primary objective of this study was to conduct a comparative analysis on various modified asphalt mixture systems in order to determine their suitability for conditions that are commonly encountered in Kentucky. Several modified asphalt mixture systems were selected for laboratory and field testing (one-mile long field test section on KY 80, Pulaski County). These systems included the following asphalt mixtures: Control, Vestoplast, Polypropylene Fiber, Gilsonite, PMAC #1, Polyester Fiber, and PMAC #2. Laboratory testing included: Marshall stability and flow, mixture air voids and density, indirect tensile strength, moisture damage susceptibility, freeze-thaw damage susceptibility, resilient modulus, and repeated load permanent deformation. Statistically based comparative analyses were conducted in order to determine any significant relative differences in the performance potential of different modified systems. All statistical analyses were conducted at 90% level of significance (i.e., alpha error rate = 10%)