Janet Lewis

Janet Lewis’s writing career has spanned nearly sixty years, long enough for her to reflect, were she interested in the subject, on the disparity between excellence and fame. She has published poetry, short stories, essays, children’s books, opera libretti, and novels. She has been praised by distinguished writers and critics, including Theodore Roethke and Donald Davie. Two of her novels, The Wife of Martin Guerre and The Trial of Soren Quist, have been hailed as masterpieces. She remains little known, however, even though she has a circle of enthusiastic admirers

Informed Consent and the Research Process: Following Rules or Striking Balances?

Gaining informed consent from people being researched is central to ethical research practice. There are, however, several factors that make the issue of informed consent problematic, especially in research involving members of groups that are commonly characterised as \'vulnerable\' such as children and people with learning disabilities. This paper reports on a project funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) which was concerned to identify and disseminate best practice in relation to informed consent in research with six such groups. The context for the study is the increased attention that is being paid to the issue of informed consent in research, not least because of the broad changes taking place in research governance and regulation in the UK. The project involved the analysis of researchers\' views and experiences of informed consent. The paper focuses on two particular difficulties inherent in the processes of gaining and maintaining informed consent. The first of these is that there is no consensus amongst researchers concerning what comprises \'informed consent\'. The second is that there is no consensus about whether the same sets of principles and procedures are equally applicable to research among different groups and to research conducted within different methodological frameworks. In exploring both these difficulties we draw on our findings to highlight the nature of these issues and some of our participants\' responses to them. These issues have relevance to wider debates about the role of guidelines and regulation for ethical practice. We found that study participants were generally less in favour of guidelines that regulate the way research is conducted and more in favour of guidelines that help researchers to strike balances between the conflicting pressures that inevitably occur in research.Informed Consent; Research Ethics; Regulation of Research; Research Governance; Professional Guidelines

Not talking about sex : indirect parental communication and risky adolescent sexual behavior

The entire dissertation/thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file (which also appears in the research.pdf); a non-technical general description, or public abstract, appears in the public.pdf file.Title from title screen of research.pdf file (viewed on August 11, 2009)Thesis (M.A.) University of Missouri-Columbia 2008.The present study presents a newly adapted measure of participant reported indirect parental sexual communication. Undergraduate psychology students (N=297) were given an online survey which was utilized to investigate the relationship between participant reported indirect parental sexual communication and self-reported risky adolescent sexual behavior. This relationship was investigated to determine if it is mediated by adolescent perception of parental attitudes and whether various demographic variables act as moderators. The goal of the study was to begin to clarify the influence of participant perceived indirect parental sexual communication on risky adolescent sexual behavior so that interventions to reduce risk may be developed in the future.Includes bibliographical reference

A Comparison of Job Satisfaction among Women in Computing and a More Traditional Female Occupation

Despite the economic slowdown of the early 2000s, Information Technology (IT) workers are likely to remain in high demand in the U.S. for the next decade. One of the problems faced in meeting this demand is the gender discrepancy in choosing IT employment; men are far more likely to engage in IT careers than women. Although there are many potential reasons for this discrepancy, satisfaction in one’s job is likely to be an influence in career choice. This study compares the satisfaction of women in a professional computing career to those in a more traditionally female career—elementary school teachers

Modelling the spread of Wolbachia in spatially heterogeneous environments

The endosymbiont Wolbachia infects a large number of insect species and is capable of rapid spread when introduced into a novel host population. The bacteria spread by manipulating their hosts' reproduction, and their dynamics are influenced by the demographic structure of the host population and patterns of contact between individuals. Reaction–diffusion models of the spatial spread of Wolbachia provide a simple analytical description of their spatial dynamics but do not account for significant details of host population dynamics. We develop a metapopulation model describing the spatial dynamics of Wolbachia in an age-structured host insect population regulated by juvenile density-dependent competition. The model produces similar dynamics to the reaction–diffusion model in the limiting case where the host's habitat quality is spatially homogeneous and Wolbachia has a small effect on host fitness. When habitat quality varies spatially, Wolbachia spread is usually much slower, and the conditions necessary for local invasion are strongly affected by immigration of insects from surrounding regions. Spread is most difficult when variation in habitat quality is spatially correlated. The results show that spatial variation in the density-dependent competition experienced by juvenile host insects can strongly affect the spread of Wolbachia infections, which is important to the use of Wolbachia to control insect vectors of human disease and other pests

The Ursinus Weekly, October 12, 1914

Seniors guests of Reverend and Mrs. Yost • Our leader • Senate proceedings • First home game an Ursinus victory • Autumn leaves • Professor Rapp takes examination • Literary societies • Smoker a success • The Libraryhttps://digitalcommons.ursinus.edu/weekly/2637/thumbnail.jp

NCRM Methods Review Papers NCRM/001 Informed Consent in Social Research: A Literature Review

This paper comprises a literature review outlining the current issues and debates relating to informed consent in social research. Given the rapidly changing nature of the field it draws primarily on literature published between 1998-2004. However, it includes some papers and books published prior to this where these are viewed as having made an important contribution to issues and debates around informed consent. The paper focuses primarily on consent in relation to qualitative research comprising ‘traditional’ methods of data collection, such as interviews and observation. It does not does not engage with the many complex ethical issues relating to research using visual methods and new digital technologies nor does it engage with the issues of consent in relation to quantitative research both of which, while important, are beyond the scope of this paper. The paper explores issues of informed consent in qualitative social research in general but focuses specifically on research conducted with so called ‘vulnerable’ groups (to include children, older people and people with a range of physical and mental health problems) in that issues of consent are perceived as being particularly pertinent when conducting research with these groups. This review outlines the regulatory, ethical and legal context for consent in social research and the operationalisation of informed consent in practice. This review was conducted as part of a project funded within the ESRC Research Methods Programme 2002-2004

ForestTreeDB: a database dedicated to the mining of tree transcriptomes

ForestTreeDB is intended as a resource that centralizes large-scale expressed sequence tag (EST) sequencing results from several tree species (). It currently encompasses 344 878 quality sequences from 68 libraries, from diverse organs of conifer and hybrid poplar trees. It utilizes the Nimbus data model to provide a hosting system for multiple projects, and uses object-relational mapping APIs in Java and Perl for data accesses within an Oracle database designed to be scalable, maintainable and extendable. Transcriptome builds or unigene sets occupy the focal point of the system. Several of the five current species-specific unigenes were used to design microarrays and SNP resources. The ForestTreeDB web application provides the means for multiple combination database queries. It presents the user with a list of discrete queries to retrieve and download large EST datasets or sequences from precompiled unigene assemblies. Functional annotation assignment is not trivial in conifers which are distantly related to angiosperm model plants. Optimal annotations are achieved through database queries that integrate results from several procedures based open-source tools. ForestTreeDB aims to facilitate sequence mining of coherent annotations in multiple species to support comparative genomic approaches. We plan to continuously enrich ForestTreeDB with other resources through collaborations with other genomic projects