An Examination of Gender Bias in Print Coverage of High School Athletics

This study examined the balance of newspaper coverage in regards to male and female high school athletes by way of a content analysis. Using the Messenger Post, a small daily in upstate New York, this study explored whether or not gender biases exist within the publication. 328 photographs were gathered from the 2011 spring sport season (April 1 to June 13) and analyzed with a keen eye towards placement, color, and quantity. Results proved to contradict past research. The sample shows that males have a greater prominence in the newspaper – in each of the factors discussed above – but not by a significant margin. These findings are encouraging for female athletes, as the established notion and practice of male dominance in newspapers has been prominent for many years. This is an essential field of research, because it addresses a specific group of individuals who are underreported and neglected by the media

Integrating Thermodynamics and Biology for Sustainable Product Lifecycle Design

The linkage between raw resources consumption and economic growth through product manufacture and disposal is creating an untenable pressure on the planet’s natural systems; therefore understanding and embracing the mechanics of the biology and physics of our context could lead to novel approaches in the design of human-built systems/products. Designers are, by active association, responsible for that pressure and much of the impact can be traced back to the early stages of the design process. For designers and engineers the main constraint is accessibility to knowledge of multiple and complex factors in easily digestible form when starting a project. Added to this is the possibility to transcend the realm of products and explore creative solutions throughout the entire life cycle, giving designers the opportunity to propose entire new business models and systems. This paper exposes the search for an intuitive soft modeling tool that considers some of these factors and inspires the innovation of business and systems innovation from a biophysical perspective. The aim of this tool is to enable the exploration of these factors in a playful intuitive way and relate these outcomes to the design of a business model operating within the principles of trophic levels. The first key question to the development of this approach has been: how does it work in nature? Organisms search for their food in other organisms and at the same time are the food of others; biomass and energy are transferred from one level to another, losses occur, higher qualities of energy are created and all is maintained in continuous cycles. The linear human production of goods can be rethought by taking into account this basic principle of thermodynamics and although this is not a technological problem, the relevant constrains need to be integrated for this approach to be feasible. These are from an economics origin: how to achieve a healthy business from a non-linear process? It is proposed that an analogy between natural and human systems: autotrophs = manufacturing, heterotrophs = distributors and consumers, their concentration and size, their possible combinations and their eventual business interpretations, is referred to as Trophic Economics. The envisioned tool will combine the exploration of the complex factors involved in the lifecycle of a product with the suggested Trophic Economics models. The outcome could be sketches of the possible boundaries and structures of new business and products, to be resolved later on the drawing board. In order to measure and keep track of the most relevant decisions, a designer must embrace tools like emergy accounting, MIPS and MI (Wuppertal Institute, 2002) used in related combination, plus indexes of CO2 emissions and relevant economic, social-demographic and ecosystems information about the countries involved in any give proposition of manufacture and use

Senior Recital: Kevin Daniel Rahtjen, Oboe and English Horn

Kemp Recital Hall November 30, 2018 Friday Evening 6:00p.m

Effects of cochlear implantation on binaural hearing in adults with unilateral hearing loss

A FDA clinical trial was carried out to evaluate the potential benefit of cochlear implant (CI) use for adults with unilateral moderate-to-profound sensorineural hearing loss. Subjects were 20 adults with moderate-to-profound unilateral sensorineural hearing loss and normal or near-normal hearing on the other side. A MED-EL standard electrode was implanted in the impaired ear. Outcome measures included: (a) sound localization on the horizontal plane (11 positions, −90° to 90°), (b) word recognition in quiet with the CI alone, and (c) masked sentence recognition with the target at 0° and the masker at −90°, 0°, or 90°. This battery was completed preoperatively and at 1, 3, 6, 9, and 12 months after CI activation. Normative data were also collected for 20 age-matched control subjects with normal or near-normal hearing bilaterally. The CI improved localization accuracy and reduced side bias. Word recognition with the CI alone was similar to performance of traditional CI recipients. The CI improved masked sentence recognition when the masker was presented from the front or from the side of normal or near-normal hearing. The binaural benefits observed with the CI increased between the 1- and 3-month intervals but appeared stable thereafter. In contrast to previous reports on localization and speech perception in patients with unilateral sensorineural hearing loss, CI benefits were consistently observed across individual subjects, and performance was at asymptote by the 3-month test interval. Cochlear implant settings, consistent CI use, and short duration of deafness could play a role in this result

Updated constraints on asteroid-mass primordial black holes as dark matter

Microlensing of stars places significant constraints on sub-planetary-mass compact objects, including primordial black holes, as dark matter candidates. As the lens' Einstein radius in the source plane becomes comparable to the size of the light source, however, source amplification is strongly suppressed, making it challenging to constrain lenses with a mass at or below $10^{-10}$ solar masses, i.e. asteroid-mass objects. Current constraints, using Subaru HSC observations of M31, assume a fixed source size of one solar radius. Here we point out that the actual stars in M31 bright enough to be used for microlensing are typically much larger. We correct the HSC constraints by constructing a source size distribution based on the M31 PHAT survey and on a synthetic stellar catalogue, and by correspondingly weighing the finite-size source effects. We find that the actual HSC constraints are weaker by up to almost three orders of magnitude in some cases, broadening the range of masses for which primordial black holes can be the totality of the cosmological dark matter by almost one order of magnitude

Amygdala responses to emotionally valenced stimuli in older and younger adults

ABSTRACT—As they age, adults experience less negative emotion, come to pay less attention to negative than to positive emotional stimuli, and become less likely to remember negative than positive emotional materials. This profile of findings suggests that, with age, the amygdala may show decreased reactivity to negative information while maintaining or increasing its reactivity to positive information. We used event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging to assess whether amygdala activation in response to positive and negative emotional pictures changes with age. Both older and younger adults showed greater activation in the amygdala for emotional than for neutral pictures; however, for older adults, seeing positive pictures led to greater amygdala activation than seeing negative pictures, whereas this was not the case for younger adults. Older adults experience less negative affect than younger adults in both cross-sectional and longitudinal studies (Carstensen, Pasupathi

Knockdown of Bardet-Biedl Syndrome Gene BBS9/PTHB1 Leads to Cilia Defects

Bardet-Biedl Syndrome (BBS, MIM#209900) is a genetically heterogeneous disorder with pleiotropic phenotypes that include retinopathy, mental retardation, obesity and renal abnormalities. Of the 15 genes identified so far, seven encode core proteins that form a stable complex called BBSome, which is implicated in trafficking of proteins to cilia. Though BBS9 (also known as PTHB1) is reportedly a component of BBSome, its direct function has not yet been elucidated. Using zebrafish as a model, we show that knockdown of bbs9 with specific antisense morpholinos leads to developmental abnormalities in retina and brain including hydrocephaly that are consistent with the core phenotypes observed in syndromic ciliopathies. Knockdown of bbs9 also causes reduced number and length of cilia in Kupffer's vesicle. We also demonstrate that an orthologous human BBS9 mRNA, but not one carrying a missense mutation identified in BBS patients, can rescue the bbs9 morphant phenotype. Consistent with these findings, knockdown of Bbs9 in mouse IMCD3 cells results in the absence of cilia. Our studies suggest a key conserved role of BBS9 in biogenesis and/or function of cilia in zebrafish and mammals