Misfits in the Breach: Between Ecology and Economy in Helen Humphreys’s Wild Dogs

This essay examines Helen Humphreys’s 2004 novel Wild Dogs, arguing that the narrative offers resistant responses to the seamless models of ecology and economy that are currently articulated by neoliberal culture. The often difficult lives of the canine and human misfits that populate the novel, alongside their sometimes unexpected actions and decisions, call attention to the inadequacy of ecological and economic narratives that would promise full and perfect, if cutthroat, functionality. The novel not only illustrates the socioeconomic and epistemic ill effects of a zero-sum neoliberal ideology of economic efficiency, but perhaps more importantly for situating neoliberalism within an ecocritical frame, the novel also interrogates the ecological dog-eat-dog story of “nature” that so often serves as the alibi for today’s spiralling and violent economic designations of biopolitical disposability. Both dogs and humans in Wild Dogs embody rankling remainders of the common-sense predator-prey binary; in the process, they initiate forms of care and relationship unaccounted for by the speculative presumptions of neoliberal biopolitics

Cooking Memories: A Sheridan College Community Cookbook

With the support of an internal SRCA Growth Grant and a team of student editors and designers, Dr. Jessica Carey, professor in the faculty of Humanities & Social Sciences (FHASS), has produced Cooking Memories: A Sheridan Community Cookbook - a collection of over forty recipes and food stories contributed by staff, faculty, and students at Sheridan College. The collection showcases the diversity of the Sheridan community in its wide range of cuisines and food experiences and presents a snapshot of the lived experience of people working and studying at Sheridan during the pandemic. The Cookbook is a unique record of contemporary collective memory, valuable to scholars and researchers in multiple fields including food studies, memory studies, and other historical and cultural disciplines. For the Sheridan community, the cookbook is both a community-building project - especially welcome during the pandemic - and a practical cooking resource.https://source.sheridancollege.ca/fhass_books/1022/thumbnail.jp

Rubber boom narratives and the development of the Amazon

This dissertation examines how race and gender inform structures of imperialism in the Amazon during a period of heightened national and international attention from the late 19th to the early 20th century. Representations of the Amazon at this crucial period both during and later depicting the rubber boom, are full of ambiguities between civilized and savage, center and periphery, nature and culture. The Amazon emerges as a distinct region, a natural paradise devoid of civilization and in need of preservation, a place of promising riches, and/or a blank screen on which to project western ideas of progress. The material I consider includes natural histories, travelogues, biography, fiction, photographs, and film. These texts represent many different genres and all aim to define, categorize, represent, or collect Amazonian territories and peoples in ways that transform territory to establish modern national societies, economies, and authorities. At the heart of this study is the project of modernization, the coming into being of modern nation states and citizens participating in global and national capitalist economies with all of the gains and losses this process implies. Modernity is built out of power and conflict and depends not only on economic and political processes, but also on ways of knowing, understanding, and being. These diverse and complex documents, the knowledge they created about landscapes and people, and the way that they inscribe relations of power and ideas about economic, cultural, and national development worked to establish the contemporary Amazon. I look at the layered discursive and visual languages that produce the Amazon as a space of conflict representative of anxieties about modernization.Spanish and Portugues

Neutrophils alter epithelial response to Porphyromonas gingivalis in a gingival crevice model.

A gingival crevice model (epithelial cell-Porphyromonas gingivalis-neutrophil) was established and used to profile gingipain, matrix metalloproteinase (MMP), MMP mediators [neutrophil gelatinase-associated lipocalin (NGAL) and tissue inhibitor of metalloproteinases 1 (TIMP-1)] and cytokine networks. Smoking is the primary environmental risk factor for periodontitis. Therefore, the influence of cigarette smoke extract (CSE) was also monitored in the same model. Porphyromonas gingivalis alone induced low levels of interleukin-1b and interleukin-8 from epithelial cells, but high levels of both cytokines were produced on the addition of neutrophils. Exposure to CSE (100 and 1000 ng mL1 nicotine equivalency) significantly compromised P. gingivalis-induced cytokine secretion (both P \u3c 0.05). P. gingivalis induced impressive secretion of NGAL (P \u3c 0.05) that was not influenced by CSE. The influence of CSE on gingipain production was strain-specific. Purified gingipains effectively and rapidly degraded both TIMP-1 and MMP-9. Induction of large amounts of NGAL, degradation of TIMP-1, and increased gingipain activity would each be expected to prolong collagen degradation and promote disease progression. However, gingipains also degrade MMP- 9. Hence, P. gingivalis exerts a complex influence on the proteolytic balance of a gingival crevice model. Exposure to CSE reduces the proinflammatory cytokine burden, which may be expected to promote P. gingivalis survival. In addition to novel findings that provide mechanistic insight into periodontal disease progression, these results are in keeping with the recognized clinical dogma of decreased inflammation/increased disease in smokers. This straightforward gingival crevice model is established as a suitable vehicle for the elucidation of mechanisms that contribute to susceptibility to periodontitis

Eccomi pronto : implementation of a Socio-Emotional Development curriculum in a South Korean elementary school

‘Eccomi Pronto’ (EP), an elementary school socio-emotional learning curriculum that was originally developed and evaluated in Italy was translated in Korean and implemented and evaluated in 4th grade classrooms of a primary school in South Korea. Qualitative data from teachers indicated that EP improved the self-reflection and selfdirection of students, resulted in pedagogically useful insights into the psychological functioning of students, and enhanced the quality of teacher-student interaction. However, statistically significant changes in students’ engaged, academic behavior (as measured by an 8-item survey) were not noted. Teachers reported that the core of the EP curriculum was appropriate for the South Korean educational context. Teachers also recommended modifications in the follow-up learning activities to make these activities more consistent with South Korean education practices.peer-reviewe

Cardiac Monitoring in the Emergency Department

Patients present to the emergency department (ED) with a wide range of complaints and ED clinicians are responsible for identifying which conditions are life threatening. Cardiac monitoring strategies in the ED include, but are not limited to, 12-lead electrocardiography and bedside cardiac monitoring for arrhythmia and ischemia detection as well as QT-interval monitoring. ED nurses are in a unique position to incorporate cardiac monitoring into the early triage and risk stratification of patients with cardiovascular emergencies to optimize patient management and outcomes

Effect of Haptic Feedback on Static Standing Sway

Study Goal: To explore the use of proprioceptive input as a means of attenuating postural sway through the development and implementation of a hands-free device, with the ultimate goal of providing sway-reference haptic input located at the upper trunk and shoulders to determine: Does sway-referenced haptic input improve static standing stability

Testing a word is not a test of word learning

Although vocabulary acquisition requires children learn names for multiple things, many investigations of word learning mechanisms teach children the name for only one of the objects presented. This is problematic because it is unclear whether children's performance reflects recall of the correct name-object association or simply selection of the only object that was singled out by being the only object named. Children introduced to one novel name may perform at ceiling as they are not required to discriminate on the basis of the name per se, and appear to rapidly learn words following minimal exposure to a single word. We introduced children to four novel objects. For half the children, only one of the objects was named and for the other children, all four objects were named. Only children introduced to one word reliably selected the target object at test. This demonstration highlights the over-simplicity of one-word learning paradigms and the need for a shift in word learning paradigms where more than one word is taught to ensure children disambiguate objects on the basis of their names rather than their degree of salience

The proposed Caroline ESA M3 mission to a Main Belt Comet

We describe Caroline, a mission proposal submitted to the European Space Agency in 2010 in response to the Cosmic Visions M3 call for medium-sized missions. Caroline would have travelled to a Main Belt Comet (MBC), characterizing the object during a flyby, and capturing dust from its tenuous coma for return to Earth. MBCs are suspected to be transition objects straddling the traditional boundary between volatile–poor rocky asteroids and volatile–rich comets. The weak cometary activity exhibited by these objects indicates the presence of water ice, and may represent the primary type of object that delivered water to the early Earth. The Caroline mission would have employed aerogel as a medium for the capture of dust grains, as successfully used by the NASA Stardust mission to Comet 81P/Wild 2. We describe the proposed mission design, primary elements of the spacecraft, and provide an overview of the science instruments and their measurement goals. Caroline was ultimately not selected by the European Space Agency during the M3 call; we briefly reflect on the pros and cons of the mission as proposed, and how current and future mission MBC mission proposals such as Castalia could best be approached

Implementation of wearable sensing technology for movement: Pushing forward into the routine physical rehabilitation care field

While the promise of wearable sensor technology to transform physical rehabilitation has been around for a number of years, the reality is that wearable sensor technology for the measurement of human movement has remained largely confined to rehabilitation research labs with limited ventures into clinical practice. The purposes of this paper are to: (1) discuss the major barriers in clinical practice and available wearable sensing technology; (2) propose benchmarks for wearable device systems that would make it feasible to implement them in clinical practice across the world and (3) evaluate a current wearable device system against the benchmarks as an example. If we can overcome the barriers and achieve the benchmarks collectively, the field of rehabilitation will move forward towards better movement interventions that produce improved function not just in the clinic or lab, but out in peoples\u27 homes and communities