Marion Mahony Griffin and The Magic of America: recovery, reaction and re-entrenchment in the discourse of architectural studies

The discourse that defines and supports the discipline of architectural studies has historically focused its attention on the study and veneration of great men and great monuments, a focus that has erased the contributions of many women in the field. By examining the secondary scholarship surrounding one such woman, architect and theorist Marion Mahony Griffin (1871--1961), this paper argues that women are invisible in the history of architecture because they are described in ways that dismiss their contributions, characterize them as essentially different from male architects, and undermine their status as real architects. A long and complex involvement of women in architectural practice has been written out of history because habits of scholarship accept and reassert the culturally received notion that men build while women decorate. This case study reveals the cultural assumptions that inform and reinforce practices of scholarship that habitually ignore women, and their architectural and theoretical work, suggesting this is not a problem that disappeared with the introduction of feminist scholarship to the discipline. In fact, after a decade of scholarly recovery of women\u27s architectural contributions, a strong backlash has swept into the area of Griffin studies, confronting not just the historical figure of Mahony Griffin, but disciplining the scholars whose speculation has attempted to open the field to a wider range of research questions

First-Year Composition and the Writing-Research Gap

Annmarie Singh’s 2005 article “A Report on Faculty Perceptions of Students’ Information Literacy Competencies in Journalism and Mass Communication Programs: The ACEJMC Survey” showed that faculty in her sample believed many of their undergraduate students did not meet ACRL’s information literacy standards. However, most of these faculty members reported improvement in their students’ research competencies following instruction. We present the results of a study that extends Singh’s work in two useful ways: 1) it isolates teacher perceptions of first-year student skills; and 2) it describes the effectiveness of employing a variety of pedagogical strategies to teach students about the research process. This project surveyed English teachers at three institutions, a private liberal arts college, a public liberal arts college, and a land grant university, concerning their perceptions of their students’ information literacy skills. While Singh’s survey focused exclusively on teacher perceptions of student skills, we also asked teachers about the variety of strategies they used to introduce and reinforce information literacy competency in their classrooms. These strategies ranged from assigning a research project with little classroom or library support, to using ten or more research-related activities to build on a project. We found that teachers who employed a variety of strategies for teaching information literacy competency were significantly more satisfied with their students’ abilities to successfully complete researched projects. In this session, we will report on the results of our study and engage our audience in a conversation about how these results might shape collaborations between librarians and first-year writing programs

Lessons Learned from Influenza A(H1N1)pdm09 Pandemic Response in Thailand

The strengths and weaknesses of this response can inform planning for pandemics and other prolonged public health emergencies

Surveillance guidelines for disease elimination: a case study of canine rabies

Surveillance is a critical component of disease control programmes but is often poorly resourced, particularly in developing countries lacking good infrastructure and especially for zoonoses which require combined veterinary and medical capacity and collaboration. Here we examine how successful control, and ultimately disease elimination, depends on effective surveillance. We estimated that detection probabilities of <0.1 are broadly typical of rabies surveillance in endemic countries and areas without a history of rabies. Using outbreak simulation techniques we investigated how the probability of detection affects outbreak spread, and outcomes of response strategies such as time to control an outbreak, probability of elimination, and the certainty of declaring freedom from disease. Assuming realistically poor surveillance (probability of detection <0.1), we show that proactive mass dog vaccination is much more effective at controlling rabies and no more costly than campaigns that vaccinate in response to case detection. Control through proactive vaccination followed by 2 years of continuous monitoring and vaccination should be sufficient to guarantee elimination from an isolated area not subject to repeat introductions. We recommend that rabies control programmes ought to be able to maintain surveillance levels that detect at least 5% (and ideally 10%) of all cases to improve their prospects of eliminating rabies, and this can be achieved through greater intersectoral collaboration. Our approach illustrates how surveillance is critical for the control and elimination of diseases such as canine rabies and can provide minimum surveillance requirements and technical guidance for elimination programmes under a broad-range of circumstances

Topological black holes in su(N) Einstein-Yang-Mills theory with a negative cosmological constant

We investigate the phase space of topological black hole solutions of su(N) Einstein-Yang-Mills theory in anti-de Sitter space with a purely magnetic gauge potential. The gauge field is described by N−1 magnetic gauge field functions ω_j, j=1,…,N−1. For su(2) gauge group, the function ω1 has no zeros. This is no longer the case when we consider a larger gauge group. The phase space of topological black holes is considerably simpler than for the corresponding spherically symmetric black holes, but for N>2 and a flat event horizon, there exist solutions where at least one of the ωj functions has one or more zeros. For most of the solutions, all the ωj functions have no zeros, and at least some of these are linearly stable

Some general properties of the renormalized stress-energy tensor for static quantum states on (n+1)-dimensional spherically symmetric black holes

We study the renormalized stress-energy tensor (RSET) for static quantum states on (n+1)-dimensional, static, spherically symmetric black holes. By solving the conservation equations, we are able to write the stress-energy tensor in terms of a single unknown function of the radial co-ordinate, plus two arbitrary constants. Conditions for the stress-energy tensor to be regular at event horizons (including the extremal and ``ultra-extremal'' cases) are then derived using generalized Kruskal-like co-ordinates. These results should be useful for future calculations of the RSET for static quantum states on spherically symmetric black hole geometries in any number of space-time dimensions.Comment: 9 pages, no figures, RevTeX4, references added, accepted for publication in General Relativity and Gravitatio

Semantic content outweighs low-level saliency in determining children's and adults' fixation of movies

To make sense of the visual world, we need to move our eyes to focus regions of interest on the high-resolution fovea. Eye movements, therefore, give us a way to infer mechanisms of visual processing and attention allocation. Here, we examined age-related differences in visual processing by recording eye movements from 37 children (aged 6–14 years) and 10 adults while viewing three 5-min dynamic video clips taken from child-friendly movies. The data were analyzed in two complementary ways: (a) gaze based and (b) content based. First, similarity of scanpaths within and across age groups was examined using three different measures of variance (dispersion, clusters, and distance from center). Second, content-based models of fixation were compared to determine which of these provided the best account of our dynamic data. We found that the variance in eye movements decreased as a function of age, suggesting common attentional orienting. Comparison of the different models revealed that a model that relies on faces generally performed better than the other models tested, even for the youngest age group (<10 years). However, the best predictor of a given participant’s eye movements was the average of all other participants’ eye movements both within the same age group and in different age groups. These findings have implications for understanding how children attend to visual information and highlight similarities in viewing strategies across development