Public Tolerance of Deer in a Suburban Environment: Implications for Management and Control

A mail survey of residents in suburban northern Westchester County, New York was conducted to determine the nature and extent of deer damage in the county, the importance of deer damage relative to other deer-human interactions, and residents\u27 perceptions of costs and benefits associated with the deer herd. The estimated cost of damage to plantings was quite high, $6.4 million to$9.5 million (depending on the type of assumptions concerning nonrespondents). Most respondents used some form of deer damage control (estimated to cost $1.2 to$1.8. million/year), but few people reported their problems to officials. Although these costs were high, health and safety risks were of greater concern to county residents than damage to plantings. Deer have many positive values, but a rough economic cost/benefit analysis showed that currently the perceived costs (risk of Lyme disease or vehicular accidents, cost of damage) outweigh the benefits. Educational-communications programs which address concerns such as deer-vehicle collisions or Lyme disease would be most beneficial in improving attitudes toward deer

White screen, black masks : Othello and the performativity of race on stage and screen

This thesis attempts to expose stereotypologies of black African skin as performed on the Shakespearean stage and before the Shakespearean camera. My research engages with a number of Tudor/Stuart travel narratives and plays containing imperialistic denigrations of Negritude. To accompany these early revelations of the 'unknown' black Other, I effect a close performative and historical consideration of Shakespeare's Othello (1602). By critiquing the repetitive containment of the character of Othello, the Moor, by successive theatrical ideologies, I work towards a full analysis of his twentieth-century representation on film. Here, through positioning myself within contextual, postcolonial, and methodological discourses surrounding representations of Othello by Orson Welles (1952), Stuart Burge (1965), and five other directors from 1981 to the present day, I confirm and analyse the politicisation of both genuine and masked blackness. In asserting that Welles's ninety-minute statement is powerfully emancipated from white ideological constraint, I nonetheless conclude that the Elizabethan and Jacobean tropes employed in dramatic formulations of black skin retain powerful visual significance within the contemporary film industries that interpret Shakespeare's Moor of Venice

Marginalization and the White Working Class: an Ethnographic Study of NEET Young Men in a Northern Inner City

This research is an ethnographic examination of 13 white working-class NEET young men aged between 16-24, located in a particular urban space. A Bourdieusian theoretical framework was deployed to conceptualize the lives of these young men. The key findings were that the young men’s identity and culture disadvantaged them in achieving in education, and gaining employment, subsequently, resulting in NEET status. This was primarily due to the young men not prepared to sacrifice their cultural identity – which was an embodiment of class and race - despite a concerted attack by neoliberal discourse. Consequently, they became marginalized, and thereafter, engaged in the local value system of their community to create counternarratives to middle-class culture and constitute themselves as subjects of value. The young men however, still maintained key values and dispositions associated with employment, family and home life as they all projected mainstream attitudes. However, the practices that actualize their local identities, contribute to keeping them NEET within a process of ‘advanced marginalization’

Dynamic saturation in semiconductor optical amplifiers: accurate model, role of carrier density, and slow light

We developed an improved model in order to predict the RF behavior and the slow light properties of the SOA valid for any experimental conditions. It takes into account the dynamic saturation of the SOA, which can be fully characterized by a simple measurement, and only relies on material fitting parameters, independent of the optical intensity and the injected current. The present model is validated by showing a good agreement with experiments for small and large modulation indices.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figure

Complementary and Alternative Medical Therapies for Chronic Low Back Pain: What Treatments are Patients Willing to Try?

Background: Although back pain is the most common reason patients use complementary and alternative medical (CAM) therapies, little is known about the willingness of primary care back pain patients to try these therapies. As part of an effort to refine recruitment strategies for clinical trials, we sought to determine if back pain patients are willing to try acupuncture, chiropractic, massage, meditation, and t'ai chi and to learn about their knowledge of, experience with, and perceptions about each of these therapies. Methods: We identified English-speaking patients with diagnoses consistent with chronic low back pain using automated visit data from one health care organization in Boston and another in Seattle. We were able to confirm the eligibility status (i.e., current low back pain that had lasted at least 3 months) of 70% of the patients with such diagnoses and all eligible respondents were interviewed. Results: Except for chiropractic, knowledge about these therapies was low. Chiropractic and massage had been used by the largest fractions of respondents (54% and 38%, respectively), mostly for back pain (45% and 24%, respectively). Among prior users of specific CAM therapies for back pain, massage was rated most helpful. Users of chiropractic reported treatment-related "significant discomfort, pain or harm" more often (23%) than users of other therapies (5–16%). Respondents expected massage would be most helpful (median of 7 on a 0 to 10 scale) and meditation least helpful (median of 3) in relieving their current pain. Most respondents indicated they would be "very likely" to try acupuncture, massage, or chiropractic for their back pain if they did not have to pay out of pocket and their physician thought it was a reasonable treatment option. Conclusions: Most patients with chronic back pain in our sample were interested in trying therapeutic options that lie outside the conventional medical spectrum. This highlights the need for additional studies evaluating their effectiveness and suggests that researchers conducting clinical trials of these therapies may not have difficulties recruiting patients