Ebola the Enemy: How the U.S. Media Militarized the 2014 Ebola Epidemic

The 2014 Ebola outbreak shocked the world. In western Africa, the scale of the tragedy was surprising. But equally surprising was the excessively fearful response of the international public to a disease that most public health experts agreed was unlikely to significantly impact countries with strong healthcare infrastructures. This included the United States, where the intensity of fear with which the American public responded was disproportionate to the actual threat. Because the outbreak is still recent, most research into America’s response to Ebola has focused on trying to characterize or quantify the extreme reaction that the epidemic produced, with only speculation as to what caused the fear. This paper will demonstrate that the public’s fear of Ebola had at least one specific cause: the distinctly militarized language that the media used to describe the disease. Because of the media’s use of military terms, the American people were inclined to view Ebola more as a military enemy than a medical one, and they largely reacted with three responses associated with the threat of war: fear, isolationism, and aggression. The public became reluctant to send the aid to Africa that many public health officials agreed was necessary to stop the epidemic. This paper argues that the media’s irresponsible use of military language when discussing the epidemic helped cause the unhelpful mass panic among American citizens, when a humanitarian response characterized by increased aid to the affected countries would have been more effective in controlling the Ebola outbreak and keeping America safe

Advances in breast cancer treatment and prevention: preclinical studies on aromatase inhibitors and new selective estrogen receptor modulators (SERMs).

Intensive basic and clinical research over the past 20 years has yielded crucial molecular understanding into how estrogen and the estrogen receptor act to regulate breast cancer and has led to the development of more effective, less toxic, and safer hormonal therapy agents for breast cancer management and prevention. Selective potent aromatase inhibitors are now challenging the hitherto gold standard of hormonal therapy, the selective estrogen-receptor modulator tamoxifen. Furthermore, new selective estrogen-receptor modulators such as arzoxifene, currently under clinical development, offer the possibility of selecting one with a more ideal pharmacological profile for treatment and prevention of breast cancer. Two recent studies in preclinical model systems that evaluate mechanisms of action of these new drugs and suggestions about their optimal clinical use are discussed

Doing mothering from prison: using narrative to explore the experiences of participants in a mother-child support program

Qualitative research was conducted at a Midwestern state women\u27s prison to explore how six incarcerated and formerly incarcerated women created their mothering subjectivities prior to their imprisonment. It also investigated how their mothering subjectivities were affected by their experiences in the prison\u27s intervention programs specifically with the Storybook Project of Iowa: a mother-child support program that focused on literacy. This feminist narrative research explored how prison intervention programs, when coupled with the mother-child support project, transformed the women\u27s understandings of themselves and their mothering. This transformation was aided by the women\u27s self-reflective use of narrative through a series of three interviews. The study has implications for programming in women\u27s prisons, advocating the use of intervention programs along with mother-child support literacy programs. Through their experiences with these programs the incarcerated mothers rebuilt or nurtured relationships with their children, connected with family members caring for their children, improved their literacy skills and those of their children, reconsidered their mothering identity and improved their perception of self, and through interactions with the program\u27s volunteers acknowledged the community\u27s support of them and their children. In addition this study has implications for reducing recidivism of incarcerated mothers through the women\u27s improved relationships with their children and family members

Senior Recital:Angela Chamness, Soprano

Kemp Recital Hall Monday Evening March 22, 1999 8:00p.m

The Effectiveness of Explicit Corrective Feedback in the Second Language Classroom

Despite an increasing push for standardisation in schools, where the focus is increasingly turning to testing, language classrooms in some locations around the world (e.g., North America and Japan) are moving away from grammar-emphasized teaching filled with drills, for an approach that is more communicative (see Lee & VanPatten, 2003; Omaggio Hadley, 2000; Richards, 2006). Research suggests that exposure to native-like language is not enough for learners to achieve acquisition (White, 1991). Student, instead, require opportunities to produce language, complete with errors. For language teachers, the question is how to respond to students’ errors in the classroom, in particular to consider whether error correction is effective. Although many studies have examined this problem, the results are mixed. In order to sort out these mixed results, this study presents the results of a meta-analysis on the effects of explicit oral corrective feedback in the second language classroom. The results reveal a small effect on the ability of explicit feedback to promote language learning, although whether there is a long-term effect that leads to acquisition is not yet confirmed

Explicit Demonstration of Cross-linguistic Similarities in Teaching Japanese Kanji to Malaysian University Students

This study examines the usefulness of using Malay to teach Japanese words comprising Chinese characters (“Kanji”) to 107 Malaysian, native Malay-speaking university students. Most participants had no previous knowledge of Japanese and the others were still at the novice level. The experimental group was provided a vocabulary list with written instructions in Malay and Japanese vocabulary that included 28 frequently used characters, whereas the control group was given a list with the same words but without such instructions. The 28 Japanese words were presented as 14 pairs in the list distributed to the experimental group, with each pair comprising a common Kanji component or common Malay radical that highlighted semantic similarities between Japanese and Malay. Both the experimental and control groups were given 30 minutes to learn the 28 Kanji and another 30 minutes to answer identical multiple-choice tests containing 28 questions. After the test, the average scores of the experimental and control groups were analyzed using the t-test. At a 5% confidence level, a significant difference was found between the scores of the two groups (p < .001, t = 6.893, d = 1.34). Thus, the authors concluded that providing a vocabulary list highlighting semantic similarities between Japanese and Malay with written instruction in Malay, the learners’ first language, can benefit native Malay-speaking university students in their acquisition of basic Chinese characters used in Japanese

2011 Annual Ecological Survey: Pacific Northwest National Laboratory Site

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Pacific Northwest Site Office (PNSO) oversees and manages the DOE contract for the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), a DOE Office of Science multi-program laboratory located in Richland, Washington. PNSO is responsible for ensuring that all activities conducted on the PNNL site comply with applicable laws, policies, and DOE Orders. The DOE Pacific Northwest Site Office Cultural and Biological Resources Management Plan (DOE/PNSO 2008) addresses the requirement for annual surveys and monitoring for species of concern and to identify and map invasive species. In addition to the requirement for an annual survey, proposed project activities must be reviewed to assess any potential environmental consequences of conducting the project. The assessment process requires a thorough understanding of the resources present, the potential impacts of a proposed action to those resources, and the ultimate consequences of those actions. The PNNL site is situated on the southeastern corner of the DOE Hanford Site, located at the north end of the city of Richland in south-central Washington. The site is bordered on the east by the Columbia River, on the west by Stevens Drive, and on the north by the Hanford Site 300 Area (Figure 1). The environmental setting of the PNNL site is described in Larson and Downs (2009). There are currently two facilities on the PNNL site: the William R. Wiley Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory and the Physical Sciences Facility. This report describes the annual survey of biological resources found on the undeveloped upland portions of the PNNL site. The annual survey is comprised of a series of individual field surveys conducted on various days in late May and throughout June 2011. A brief description of the methods PNNL ecologists used to conduct the baseline surveys and a summary of the results of the surveys are presented. Appendix A provides a list of plant and animal species identified in the upland areas of the PNNL site in 2011. Efforts in 2011 to control noxious weed populations (comprising plant species designated as Class B noxious weeds by the Washington State Noxious Weed Control Board) discovered in 2009 and initially treated with herbicides in 2010 are described in Appendix B