John Webster and Taua Muru: The Space Between Cultures in 1840s Hokianga

Paper submitted to The Space Between: Negotiating Culture, Place, and Identity in the Pacific; based on the indigenous Oceanic concept, va, a space marked by tension and transformation and by confluences and connectionsIn 1847, a taua muru, or hostile raiding expedition, was conducted by a group of Māori on land occupied by John Webster, a British settler and trader. The purpose of the raid was to reclaim goods the party believed had been wrongly taken by three of Webster’s Māori workers. Although the taua muru was primarily between Māori participants and was carried out largely according to Māori custom, the involvement of Webster and other Pākehā in the melee created a space between, where the norms of both cultures were able to coexist. In that space, both Māori and Pākehā may have wanted their own cultural conventions to exclusively apply, but when it came to dealing with each other they were forced to accept their limitations. This article uses the taua muru as a case study to examine the emergence of new cultural forms and their impact on one British settler whose imperial identity was challenged in an environment where his and other settlers’ racial and cultural superiority could not be assumed

Corralling Conflict: The Politics of Australian Federal Heritage Legislation Since the 1970s

In August 1968, conservative National Party leader Joh Bjelke-Petersen became Premier of the state of Queensland. He referred to conservationists as these 'subversives, these friends of the dirt'. A generation later, few if any Australian politicians would have publicly attacked the environment and its supporters for fear of electoral damage. After years of major environmental battles which on occasion determined the fate of some governments, the environment had crashed through into mainstream politics. Natural and cultural heritage was firmly on local, state and federal political agendas. Heritage in Australia was also, by the 1990s, a substantial, multifaceted industry. Cultural and eco tourism generated a significant proportion of the country's gross domestic product. Along side and partially in response to industry, a heritage bureaucracy had developed. The corporatisation of heritage saw the rise in the 1980s and 1990s of a new generation of heritage professionals who attempted with varying degrees of success to place heritage assessment on a quasi-scientific footing. Perhaps their greatest achievement, in terms of cultural heritage, was gaining recognition in the 1990s for the vital importance of intangible heritage. Intangible heritage, or social value, inscribes objects and sites that cannot speak for themselves with cultural and social meanings. Since the 1980s, some more radical practitioners had been working to counteract the dominance of tangible remains of the past in determining cultural significance. This victory over empiricism, however, was in some respects to prove pyrrhic. Heritage conservation, as with some other heritage practices, was by the turn of the twenty-first century institutionally confined in its ability to represent conflict. This article charts the incorporation and corralling of heritage work at the federal level in Australia through a case study of the rise and fall of the Australian Heritage Commission

Pediatric Distraction Methods for the Perioperative Period

Abstract Most pediatric patients will experience anxiety to some degree during the perioperative period. Unrecognized and untreated anxiety can lead to complications during induction of anesthesia and may manifest as maladaptive behaviors that can last up to 6 months postoperatively. Multiple modalities are typically utilized to provide the greatest amount of anxiety relief with minimal side effects. Nonpharmacological methods of distraction have been proven effective when used in combination with pharmacological agents, as well as when used alone. The goal of this project was to create and present an educational resource tool regarding pharmacological and nonpharmacological distraction methods for pediatric patients during the perioperative period. Following a brief educational presentation, participants were asked to complete an anonymous and voluntary 10-question survey to evaluate the value and efficacy of the resource tool. Overall, participants expressed an increase in knowledge and preparation in caring for pediatric patients after the presentation. Approximately one-third of the participants were not aware of the negative effects of untreated anxiety, further demonstrating a need for education on this topic. Increasing staff education at the host facility, as well as providing a variety of recommendations for distraction techniques, will better equip anesthesia providers to tailor distraction interventions to individual patient needs, resulting in a more pleasant operative experience for the entire family unit

A role for consolidation in cross-modal category learning

The ability to categorize objects and events is a fundamental human skill that depends upon the representation of multimodal conceptual knowledge. This study investigated the acquisition and consolidation of categorical information that required participants to integrate information across visual and auditory dimensions. The impact of wake- and sleep-dependent consolidation were investigated using a paradigm in which training and testing were separated by a delay spanning either an evening of sleep or daytime wakefulness, with a paired-associate episodic memory task used as a measure of classic sleep-dependent consolidation. Participants displayed good evidence of category learning, but did not show any wake- or sleep-dependent changes in memory for category information immediately following the delay. This is in contrast to paired-associate learning, where a sleep-dependent benefit was observed in memory recall. To replicate real-world concept learning, in which knowledge is acquired across multiple distinct episodes, participants were given a second opportunity for category learning following the consolidation delay. Here we found an interaction between consolidation and learning; with greater improvements in category knowledge as a result of the second session learning for those participants who had a sleep filled delay. These results suggest a role for sleep in the consolidation of recently acquired categorical knowledge; however this benefit does not emerge as an immediate benefit in memory recall, but by enhancing the effectiveness of future learning. This study therefore provides insights into the processes responsible for the formation and development of conceptual representations

The Role of Consolidation in Conceptual Memory

Concepts allow us to bring meaning to the world; they require the integration of information from across multiple episodes and events, and the abstraction of statistical patterns and regularities from both new and existing knowledge. Processes during consolidation have been shown to benefit the extraction of gist, the detection of hidden rules and the integration of memory elements into coherent representations. Consolidation may therefore play an important role in the development of conceptual memory. To explore this, we used a range of consolidation delay manipulations and two paradigms that assessed the development of concept-based representations. In Chapter 2 and 3 we used an abstract cross-modal information-integration categorisation task, which allowed us to investigate the integration of information from across modalities (visual and auditory) and the extraction of an underlying category structure. In these experiments we did not find any immediate consolidation benefits on categorisation performance. However, post-consolidation improvements in category learning were observed, if participants had a sleep-filled delay; suggesting that processes during sleep may enhance the effectiveness of future concept-based learning. In Chapters 4 and 5, we used an associative memory task that allowed us to dissociate the impact of consolidation on generalised concept-based representations from trained item knowledge. In this task we found sleep-associated improvements in memory; however, these were specific to trained-item knowledge, with no sleep-associated benefits in measures of memory generalisation. An investigation into intrinsic brain connectivity in Chapter 5 suggests that general variations in functional connectivity can in part explain individual differences in long-term memory performance; with decoupling between heteromodal and sensory-motor brain regions supporting memory generalisation and the formation of concepts. Our results provide new insights into the role of consolidation in the development of conceptual memory and highlight important directions for future research

Delayed-Onset Malignant Hyperthermia in Association with Rocuronium Use

Purpose Two cases of malignant hyperthermia suspected to be related to the use of a nondepolarizing neuromuscular blocker are reported. Summary A pharmacogenetic disorder that may occur in as many as 1 in 3000 anesthesia procedures, malignant hyperthermia has been linked to the use of certain anesthetic gases and depolarizing neuromuscular blocking agents (e.g., succinylcholine). Although nondepolarizing neuromuscular blockers were cited as contributing to the development of malignant hyperthermia in a small number of published reports, the agents are generally considered safe for use in at-risk patients. Here investigators report two cases in which the nondepolarizing agent rocuronium is thought to have triggered malignant hyperthermia in patients with no known history of the disorder. In one case, a critically ill 27-year-old man undergoing an induced-hypothermia protocol developed a fever about 4 days after receiving rocuronium infusions, with temperatures rising over 11 days to a maximum of 105.2 °F. In the other case, a 63-year-old man being treated for serious complications of elective surgery developed extreme fever (maximum temperature of 107.1 °F) about 4 days after receiving two bolus doses and a continuous infusion of rocuronium. In both cases, the discontinuation of rocuronium therapy was followed by the rapid diminution of fever over 12–36 hours. After consultations with medical staff and consideration of other potential causal and contributory factors (e.g., neurologic injury, antimicrobial-induced fever), rocuronium was deemed the most likely trigger of the severe febrile response experienced by these two patients. Conclusion A 27-year-old man and a 63-year-old man received rocuronium and subsequently developed delayed-onset malignant hyperthermia, which resolved after the rocuronium was discontinued

Re-envisioning Teacher Education: Using DisCrit Perspectives to Disrupt Deficit Thinking

This paper suggests that teacher educators engage in research that investigates practices and curriculum to consider how they might best confront issues of equity and deficit thinking in individual courses and disciplines. Rooted in the tenets of culturally responsive teaching and culturally sustaining pedagogy, the authors explore how DisCrit theory further informs understandings of hegemonic schooling practices, imploring faculty to upset the implicitly biased narratives that are so often reproduced in teacher education

Losing Control : Sleep Deprivation Impairs the Suppression of Unwanted Thoughts

Unwanted memories often enter conscious awareness when we confront reminders. People vary widely in their talents at suppressing such memory intrusions; however, the factors that govern suppression ability are poorly understood. We tested the hypothesis that successful memory control requires sleep. Following overnight sleep or total sleep deprivation, participants attempted to suppress intrusions of emotionally negative and neutral scenes when confronted with reminders. The sleep-deprived group experienced significantly more intrusions (unsuccessful suppressions) than the sleep group. Deficient control over intrusive thoughts had consequences: whereas in rested participants suppression reduced behavioural and psychophysiological indices of negative affect for aversive memories, it had no such salutary effect for sleep-deprived participants. Our findings raise the possibility that sleep deprivation disrupts prefrontal control over medial temporal lobe structures that support memory and emotion. These data point to an important role of sleep disturbance in maintaining and exacerbating psychiatric conditions characterised by persistent, unwanted thoughts

Sleep Deprivation Induces Fragmented Memory Loss

Sleep deprivation increases rates of forgetting in episodic memory. Yet, whether an extended lack of sleep alters the qualitative nature of forgetting is unknown. We compared forgetting of episodic memories across intervals of overnight sleep, daytime wakefulness and overnight sleep deprivation. Item-level forgetting was amplified across daytime wakefulness and overnight sleep deprivation, as compared to sleep. Importantly, however, overnight sleep deprivation led to a further deficit in associative memory that was not observed after daytime wakefulness. These findings suggest that sleep deprivation induces fragmentation among item memories and their associations, altering the qualitative nature of episodic forgetting

Rocuronium and Malignant Hyperthermia

Authors response to a comment on: Beggs A, McCann J, Powers J. “Delayed-onset malignant hyperthermia in association with rocuronium use ” Am J Health-Syst Pharm 2012; 69:1128-34