Three Roses, Three Sweet Roses of Mine

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A Brief History of the USDA Motion Picture Service to 1943

A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE USDA MOTION PICTURE SERVICE TO 1943 The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) began producing films in the early 1900s and continued for decades. Millions saw these films in a wide variety of venues, including public schools, colleges and universities, civic meeting halls, libraries, church halls, and even open fields. Over the period of several decades, from the silent-movie era through the 1950s, the USDA was a significant government filmmaking organization, touting itself to be not only the first government agency to organize a filmmaking division but also the most prolific. The USDA motion picture branch was internationally respected, and the distribution of its films was high for US government institutions, particularly in the 1920s and 1930s. The USDA showed its films practically anywhere extension workers or others could gather a small group or a large crowd. The role of the films varied,..

Mad Max, Reaganism and The Road Warrior

IN 1981 THE AUSTRALIAN-MADE FILM The Road Warrior drove into the US film market.(1) The film was well received and quickly became, at that time, the most popular Australian movie ever released in the US, and since its debut has played regularly on US cable television.(2) Much has been written about the international success of this film and its predecessor, Mad Max, and the last in the trilogy Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.(3) Contributing to that body of research, this paper addresses the American success of this Australian film within the cultural/political context of the US at the time of its North American release, and discusses its resonance with Reaganism. The fundamental goal of this examination is to situate the films in the larger context of cultural hegemony. The importance of this study lies in the critique of these films as they aid us in understanding the..

Biodiversity and ecosystem function: the consumer connection

Proposed links between biodiversity and ecosystem processes have generated intense interest and controversy in recent years. With few exceptions, however, empirical studies have focused on grassland plants and laboratory aquatic microbial systems, whereas there has been little attention to how changing animal diversity may influence ecosystem processes. Meanwhile, a separate research tradition has demonstrated strong top‐down forcing in many systems, but has considered the role of diversity in these processes only tangentially. Integration of these research directions is necessary for more complete understanding in both areas. Several considerations suggest that changing diversity in multi‐level food webs can have important ecosystem effects that can be qualitatively different than those mediated by plants. First, extinctions tend to be biased by trophic level: higher‐level consumers are less diverse, less abundant, and under stronger anthropogenic pressure on average than wild plants, and thus face greater risk of extinction. Second, unlike plants, consumers often have impacts on ecosystems disproportionate to their abundance. Thus, an early consequence of declining diversity will often be skewed trophic structure, potentially reducing top‐down influence. Third, where predators remain abundant, declining diversity at lower trophic levels may change effectiveness of predation and penetrance of trophic cascades by reducing trait diversity and the potential for compensation among species within a level. The mostly indirect evidence available provides some support for this prediction. Yet effects of changing animal diversity on functional processes have rarely been tested experimentally. Evaluating impacts of biodiversity loss on ecosystem function requires expanding the scope of current experimental research to multi‐level food webs. A central challenge to doing so, and to evaluating the importance of trophic cascades specifically, is understanding the distribution of interaction strengths within natural communities and how they change with community composition. Although topology of most real food webs is extremely complex, it is not at all clear how much of this complexity translates to strong dynamic linkages that influence aggregate biomass and community composition. Finally, there is a need for more detailed data on patterns of species loss from real ecosystems (community “disassembly” rules)

Child Abuse in a Social Drama Film

RADIO FLYER: THE THERAPEUTIC RHETORIC OF CHILD ABUSE IN A SOCIAL DRAMA FILM The United States continues to experience many social problems despite its relative wealth and power. The steady rise in child abuse is one of the most frightening. As Marc Miringoff and Marque-Luisa Miringoff point out, "Since 1976, child abuse has worsened by more than 300 percent" (75). The US Department of Health and Human Services reports that from 1986 to 1993 the abuse rates almost doubled. One might hope that much of this increase could be attributed to a rise in public awareness and, hence, an increase in the reporting of child abuse. Regrettably this is not the case. The escalations are "so dramatic the researchers judged them to be a ‘true rise' in the severity of the problem" (Miringoff & Miringoff 75). The problem is fatally severe. The National Committee to Prevent Child Abuse reports..

A USDA Sound Documentary about Southern African American Farmers

This article is available in Print edition of KINEMA..

The Old Sorrow

From 1969 to 1998, the conflict known as the Troubles raged in Northern Ireland, killing 3,500 people and devastating Belfast. Many dramatic adaptations tackle the conflict, from Neil Jordan’s Oscar-winning The Crying Game to Fifty Dead Men Walking. These adaptations usually focus on combatants in the conflict, however; none, to my knowledge, full address the experience of Belfast hospital staff, from doctors to nurses to porters. Hospital staff – especially those working at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast, which lay at the edge of the Falls Road, an area keenly affected by the conflict – came from all sorts of backgrounds, both Catholic and Protestant, and had to navigate these questions of identity while trying to lives. My play, therefore, titled The Old Sorrow, explores the dramatically neglected role and experiences of these hospital staff, as well as the notion of the hospital as a microcosm or crucible for the conflict, a place where people from all sides were forced together. More broadly, however, I seek to remedy a certain failing common to popular adaptations of the Troubles, which often dilute the complexities of the Northern Irish situation in favor of a streamlined, sensationalist narrative. One of the reasons for this, perhaps, is that while Neil Jordan is Irish himself, many of those heading other adaptations are not and, therefore, are automatically distanced, emotionally and politically, from the Troubles. Acknowledging my own authorial distance within the play itself – presenting the Troubles as honestly as I can while also being honest about my own experiences – is the more conceptual tightrope I walk while writing The Old Sorrow

Swine Outlook - Future to Stress Gain, Efficiency and Quality

Many pork producers need to prepare for rapid changes coming in their industry. This article outlines some of the areas of emphasis in coming years