Perspectives From Afield and Afar:Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom From the 1790s Through the Civil War

A pocket of Promised Land Challenging antebellum assumptions Some historians have argued--or at least, assumed--that the 1830s was a turning point in Southern race relations. In that decade, the South moved from a place that thought twice about the goodness of human bondage to on...

Lee and Jackson\u27s Bloody Twelfth: The Letters of Irby Goodwin Scott, First Lieutenant, Company G, Putnam Light Infantry, Twelfth Georgia Volunteer Infantry

A Personal Look at War Lee and Jackson’s Bloody Twelfth is the third book in the University of Tennessee Press’s “Voices of the Civil War series that I have reviewed. Hopefully, it will not be the last. Once again, the press has provided researchers with another well-edited and ...

Confederate Rage, Yankee Wrath: No Quarter in the Civil War

Wartime Atrocities: The Civil War Experience Americans will mark the Civil War\u27s sesquicentennial in a few years, but the subject of wartime atrocities is a relatively new field of study. Recent books, such as Black Flag over Dixie: Racial Atrocities and Reprisals in the Civil War, ...

Marching masters: slavery, race, and the Confederate Army, 1861-1865

Many historians have examined the Civil War soldier, but few scholars have explored the racial attitudes and policies of the Confederate army. Although Southern men did not fight for slavery alone, the defense of the peculiar institution, and the racial control they believed it assured, united rebels in their support of the Confederacy and the war effort. Amid the destruction of the Civil War, slavery became more important than ever for men battling Yankee armies. The war, nevertheless, tested Confederate soldiers’ idealized view of human bondage. Federal armies wrecked havoc on masters’ farms and plantations, seized hundreds of thousands of slaves, and eventually armed African Americans. Rebel troops were not blind to the war’s negative effects on the peculiar institution. They noted black people’s many disloyal actions, and some came to believe that slavery was not worth holding onto if it would undermine the Southern war effort. But despite occasional worries about rebellious black people, Southern troops understood that slavery was vital to their cause. The Confederate military became the greatest of masters—an institution that rebels believed would assure the survival of human bondage and white supremacy. The army granted exemptions to slaveholders and overseers, invaded the Border States in order to acquire more slave territory, and impressed black workers to build fortifications and perform menial tasks. When rebels confronted black Federal troops—as at Fort Pillow and the Crater—they showed no quarter to men they believed were slaves in rebellion against their white masters. Only with the Federal government’s triumph did Southerners accept the end of slavery. After Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, former Confederate soldiers lived in a new world. They could not reinstate slavery, but they were still committed to white supremacy and looked with fondness on the Old South

Phenolic metabolites of anthocyanins modulate mechanisms of endothelial function

Anthocyanins are reported to have vascular bioactivity, however their mechanisms of action are largely unknown. Evidence suggests that anthocyanins modulate endothelial function, potentially by increasing nitric oxide (NO) synthesis, or enhancing NO bioavailability. This study compared the activity of cyanidin-3-glucoside, its degradation product protocatechuic acid, and phase II metabolite, vanillic acid. Production of NO and superoxide and expression of endothelial NO synthase (eNOS), NADPH oxidase (NOX), and heme oxygenase-1 (HO-1) were established in human vascular cell models. Nitric oxide levels were not modulated by the treatments, although eNOS was upregulated by cyanidin-3-glucoside, and superoxide production was decreased by both phenolic acids. Vanillic acid upregulated p22phox mRNA but did not alter NOX protein expression, although trends were observed for p47phox downregulation and HO-1 upregulation. Anthocyanin metabolites may therefore modulate vascular reactivity by inducing HO-1 and modulating NOX activity, resulting in reduced superoxide production and improved NO bioavailability

Connecting automatic parameter tuning, genetic programming as a hyper-heuristic and genetic improvement programming

Automatically designing algorithms has long been a dream of computer scientists. Early attempts which generate computer programs from scratch, have failed to meet this goal. However, in recent years there have been a number of different technologies with an alternative goal of taking existing programs and attempting to improvement them.  These methods form a continuum of methodologies, from the “limited” ability to change (for example only the parameters) to the “complete” ability to change the whole program. These include; automatic parameter tuning (APT), using GP as a hyper-heuristic (GPHH) to automatically design algorithms, and GI, which we will now briefly review. Part of research is building links between existing work, and the aim of this paper is to bring together these currently separate approache

Evals is not enough: why we should report wall-clock time

Have you ever noticed that your car never achieves the fuel economy claimed by the manufacturer? Does this seem unfair? Unscientific? Would you like the same situation to occur in Genetic Improvement? Comparison will always be difficult [9], however, guidelines have been discussed [3, 5, 4]. With two GP [8] approaches, comparing the number of evaluations of the fitness function is reasonably fair. This means you are comparing the GP systems, and not how well they are implemented, how fast the language is. However, the situation with GI [6, 1] is unique. With GI we will typically compare systems which are applied to the same application written in the same language (i.e. a GI systems targeted at Java, may not even be applied to C). Thus, wall-clock time becomes more relevant. Thus, this paper asks if reporting number of evaluations is enough, or if wall-clock time is also important, particularly in the context of GI. It argues that reporting time is even more important when doing GI when compared to traditional GP

GP vs GI: if you can't beat them, join them

Genetic Programming (GP) has been criticized for targeting irrelevant problems [12], and is also true of the wider machine learning community [11]. which has become detached from the source of the data it is using to drive the field forward. However, recently GI provides a fresh perspective on automated programming. In contrast to GP, GI begins with existing software, and therefore immediately has the aim of tackling real software. As evolution is the main approach to GI to manipulating programs, this connection with real software should persuade the GP community to confront the issues around what it originally set out to tackle i.e. evolving real software

Assessment of the relationships between myocardial contractility and infarct tissue revealed by serial magnetic resonance imaging in patients with acute myocardial infarction

Imaging changes in left ventricular (LV) volumes during the cardiac cycle and LV ejection fraction do not provide information on regional contractility. Displacement ENcoding with Stimulated Echoes (DENSE) is a strain-encoded cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) technique that measures strain directly. We investigated the relationships between strain revealed by DENSE and the presence and extent of infarction in patients with recent myocardial infarction (MI). 50 male subjects were invited to undergo serial CMR within 7 days of MI (baseline) and after 6 months (follow-up; n = 47). DENSE and late gadolinium enhancement (LGE) images were acquired to enable localised regional quantification of peak circumferential strain (Ecc) and the extent of infarction, respectively. We assessed: (1) receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis for the classification of LGE, (2) strain differences according to LGE status (remote, adjacent, infarcted) and (3) changes in strain revealed between baseline and follow-up. 300 and 258 myocardial segments were available for analysis at baseline and follow-up respectively. LGE was present in 130/300 (43 %) and 97/258 (38 %) segments, respectively. ROC analysis revealed moderately high values for peak Ecc at baseline [threshold 12.8 %; area-under-curve (AUC) 0.88, sensitivity 84 %, specificity 78 %] and at follow-up (threshold 15.8 %; AUC 0.76, sensitivity 85 %, specificity 64 %). Differences were observed between remote, adjacent and infarcted segments. Between baseline and follow-up, increases in peak Ecc were observed in infarcted segments (median difference of 5.6 %) and in adjacent segments (1.5 %). Peak Ecc at baseline was indicative of the change in LGE status between baseline and follow-up. Strain-encoded CMR with DENSE has the potential to provide clinically useful information on contractility and its recovery over time in patients with MI

Ecophysiological traits of grasses: resolving the effects of photosynthetic pathway and phylogeny

C4 photosynthesis is an important example of convergent evolution in plants, having arisen in eudicots, monocots and diatoms. Comparisons between such diverse groups are confounded by phylogenetic and ecological differences, so that only broad generalisations can be made about the role of C4 photosynthesis in
determining ecophysiological traits. However, 60% of C4 species occur in the grasses (Poaceae) and molecular phylogenetic techniques confirm that there are between 8 and 17 independent origins of C4 photosynthesis in the Poaceae. In a screening experiment, we compared leaf physiology and growth traits across several major
independent C3 & C4 groups within the Poaceae, asking 1) which traits differ consistently between photosynthetic
types and 2) which traits differ consistently between clades within each photosynthetic type