Howling (and Bleeding) at the Moon: Menstruation, Monstrosity and the Double in the \u3ci\u3eGinger Snaps\u3c/i\u3e Werewolf Trilogy

In this essay, I explore the radical reframing of the traditional werewolf narrative with respect to the figure of the double and the abject female body in the Ginger Snaps werewolf trilogy. Notable theorists discussed herein include Barbara Creed, Carol Clover, Julia Kristeva, April Miller and Robin Wood. Throughout both its folkloric and cinematic history, the creature of the werewolf has been constructed almost invariably as a male monster suffering within a Jekyll and Hyde-like narrative of the double. An otherwise exemplary member of Robin Wood’s society of surplus repression, the male lycanthrope is doomed to endure a monthly transformation into monstrous, murderous beast, the Other that challenges normality through its very existence. The agony of the male werewolf, therefore, is generally believed to exist only with regard to the regret he feels for the previous night’s violent excesses. However, it is actually the male lycanthrope’s bodily alignment with the female Other that causes his distress. Forced to confront an abject body tied to a monthly lunar cycle, the male werewolf is feminized. Not only does the sufferer’s body not respect the boundary between human and animal, but the tentative boundary between male and female is also violated, and it is this transgression that accounts for the true agony of the classic male werewolf. The Ginger Snaps werewolf cycle challenges this narrative by situating lycanthropy within the lives of female teenagers Ginger and Brigitte Fitzgerald. Following the subgenre’s typical trajectory, Ginger is bitten by a werewolf, thus becoming a werewolf herself, and her younger sister, Brigitte, attempts to save her. However, by transmuting the werewolf narrative from the male to the female, the implications of the doppelganger narrative must change. By virtue of her abject female body, Ginger is already marginalized and constructed as Other in the suburban world in which she lives. There is no monstrous double for Ginger, for as a menstruating female she has always been this monster. As a result, Ginger eventually embraces her lycanthropy and in doing so also embraces her identity as a woman. She becomes the “goddamn force of nature” of her teenage dreams, and unlike the male werewolf, whose monstrosity is a nightmarish shadow of his own normality, Ginger’s monstrosity is her own reflection, an unwavering look at a fantastic self otherwise unattainable to her in the world she lives. Yet Ginger Snaps is still a doppelganger narrative. It is Brigitte who suffers under the agony of Ginger’s transformation, for in losing Ginger, Brigitte loses her identity as well. Brigitte longs for the reconciliation of her and her sister, but as the two have become two distinct persons in Ginger’s monstrosity, this is impossible. Coded as Carol Clover’s Final Girl figure, Brigitte destroys her sister, thereby coming to stand for the symbolic order she resists so enthusiastically at the start of the film. However, despite their radically different engagements with monstrosity, both Ginger and Brigitte are punished. It appears that as subversive as the Ginger Snaps films are in respect to the werewolf narrative, they also reflect a deep cultural ambivalence about female identity. It is only together that the girls can triumph, making the Ginger Snaps cycle a powerful statement on the power of relationality between females in the construction and maintenance of self

Political representation of the poor in the U.S. political system : a discussion of theory and practice

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Political Science, 2007.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 82-83).This thesis examines the nature of political representation of the American poor from both a theoretical and an empirical perspective. A normative framework, based on the major theories of representation, is used to examine the empirical mechanisms through which the poor can obtain representation. "Formal" mechanisms include voting, formal participatory activities and membership in political institutions. The primary "informal" mechanism examined is the public opinion survey. The normative framework is grounded in the notion that being poor in an affluent nation is an attached, personal interest--a substantive understanding of the interests of the poor cannot be determined through intellectual deliberation alone. Social and economic closeness (or similarity in relevant descriptive characteristics such as income and race) informs poverty advocates about the nature of poverty and the impact of anti-poverty policies. A significant amount of evidence suggests that the poor are underrepresented (relative to other groups with more economic and political resources) in formal participation mechanisms. There is less evidence about how well and to what extent the poor are represented in the primary "informal mechanism"--public opinion. Preliminary evidence suggests that the political voice of the poor and their advocates may be muted in opinion polls. This research motivates the original empirical analysis in this thesis that examines who is advocating for the poor in public opinion surveys and what those advocates are saying. The original research produces two key findings. First, over the longer term period (1980s-2002) descriptive similarity of poverty advocates declined. .(cont.) Second, in the more recent time period (mid-1990s-2002) descriptive similarity increased amongst poverty advocates in open-ended survey questions (which measure salience of opinion) yet declined amongst poverty advocates in close-ended questions (which measure direction of opinion). The disconnect between the results of the salience and directional analyses suggests that while descriptively similar survey respondents have found poverty to be a more salient issue since the mid-1990s, increased salience did not translate into preferences for expansion of existing anti-poverty programs. These findings raise questions about competence of representation of our nation's poor and have meaningful implications for the future of U.S. anti-poverty policy in an age of inequalityby Erin Flaherty Hardy.S.M

The Meaning of the Transition to Retirement at Midlife from Active Duty Military Service in the United States:

Thesis advisor: Jane . FlanaganPurpose: The purpose of this hermeneutic, dialectic, phenomenological qualitative study was to describe among a sample of recently retired (within the past five years) United States military veterans, the experience of the transition to retirement at midlife from active duty (AD.) The secondary aim is to describe within this sample of recently retired military veteran’s, the meaning of health to their post military lifestyle. Background: The transition to retirement from AD military service to retirement is a unique transition occurring at midlife about which little is known. Veterans serving after 9/11/2001 are more likely to have deployed and to have deployed multiple times compared to other service eras, having unique effects on relationships, physical and mental health, and meaning of health. No research has been done to examine the experience and meaning of health of career AD veterans who served during eighteen years of continuous war. Method: This study was guided by Margaret Newman’s Health as Expanding Consciousness (HEC) to explore the meaning of the transition to retirement and health among AD military veterans at midlife. Newman’s HEC guided data collection and analysis. Fourteen participants were recruited through purposive, criterion snowball sampling. Participants were individually interviewed about meaningful people and events in the military retirement and meaning of health. Rigor and trustworthiness were ensured by taking measures to support credibility, confirmability, dependability, and transferability. The researcher developed a narrative and diagram of meaningful events and relationships which was shared with each participant and reflected together on life patterning. Results: Fourteen participants consisting of men (n=10) and women (n=4) representing all branches of the military as well as officer and enlisted ranks participated in this study. The difficulty of finding a sense of purpose in retirement was common among participants. Participants also described becoming aware of health conditions after distrust of the healthcare system during their military careers. The experience of war was found to have effects on the entire family. Conclusion: Through HEC, a more complete understanding of the meaning of health and transition to retirement among active duty veterans was formed. Future research should focus on the unique populations of veterans including of combat veteran and women veterans.Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2019.Submitted to: Boston College. Connell School of Nursing.Discipline: Nursing

Seasonal Changes of Benthic Macroinvertebrate Functional Feeding Group Biomass Within Forest and Meadow Habitats of a First-order Michigan (USA) Stream

Little is known about seasonal changes in stream benthic macroinvertebrate assemblages. We determined the ash-free dry mass of macroinvertebrates within a forested and a meadow reach of Fairbanks Creek in northern Lower Michigan throughout all seasons of 2018 and 2019. The macroinvertebrate assemblage of the forested reach was dominated by invertebrates in the shredder functional feeding group (FFG), whereas the meadow reach was composed primarily of scrapers and filtering collectors. Regardless of reach, the biomass of all FFGs was low during the winter and early spring, peaked in May or June, and gradually declined throughout the summer and fall. General trends in biomass were the same for both years of the study, although 2018 had overall higher biomass despite being a slightly cooler year

Rhizomatic Forces in Sports

In 2016, Colin Kaepernick started kneeling for the national anthem before playing in NFL games. Football fans across the country repeated that this was not the correct time or place for his actions. What they failed to realize, however, was that sports are not just about the game. Many people watch sports to escape from the chaos of the modern world. However, as long as sports have been played, the societal issues aren’t hidden by sports, but instead sports magnify the problems that players and viewers are going through. From coming out as LGBT to betting scandals to protesting on the field, these rhizomatic influences practically fill the stadium and directly influence the game. All aspects of society; whether they be political, social or economic, impact all aspects of life regardless of how polarizing or politically uninclined they may seem. Sports is not an excuse to be superficial or blissfully ignorant to how these things impact society and vise-versa

Spitzer Imaging of the Nearby Rich Young Cluster, Cep OB3b

We map the full extent of a rich massive young cluster in the Cep OB3b association with the IRAC and MIPS instruments aboard the {\it Spitzer} Space Telescope and the ACIS instrument aboard the $\it{Chandra}$ X-Ray Observatory. At 700 pc, it is revealed to be the second nearest large ($>1000$ member), young ($< 5$ Myr) cluster known. In contrast to the nearest large cluster, the Orion Nebula Cluster, Cep OB3b is only lightly obscured and is mostly located in a large cavity carved out of the surrounding molecular cloud. Our infrared and X-ray datasets, as well as visible photometry from the literature, are used to take a census of the young stars in Cep OB3b. We find that the young stars within the cluster are concentrated in two sub-clusters; an eastern sub-cluster, near the Cep B molecular clump, and a western sub-cluster, near the Cep F molecular clump. Using our census of young stars, we examine the fraction of young stars with infrared excesses indicative of circumstellar disks. We create a map of the disk fraction throughout the cluster and find that it is spatially variable. Due to these spatial variations, the two sub-clusters exhibit substantially different average disk fractions from each other: $32$ and $50$. We discuss whether the discrepant disk fractions are due to the photodestruction of disks by the high mass members of the cluster or whether they result from differences in the ages of the sub-clusters. We conclude that the discrepant disk fractions are most likely due to differences in the ages.Comment: 48 Pages, 12 figures, 6 table

DHODH modulates transcriptional elongation in the neural crest and melanoma

Melanoma is a tumour of transformed melanocytes, which are originally derived from the embryonic neural crest. It is unknown to what extent the programs that regulate neural crest development interact with mutations in the BRAF oncogene, which is the most commonly mutated gene in human melanoma1. We have used zebrafish embryos to identify the initiating transcriptional events that occur on activation of human BRAF(V600E) (which encodes an amino acid substitution mutant of BRAF) in the neural crest lineage. Zebrafish embryos that are transgenic for mitfa:BRAF(V600E) and lack p53 (also known as tp53) have a gene signature that is enriched for markers of multipotent neural crest cells, and neural crest progenitors from these embryos fail to terminally differentiate. To determine whether these early transcriptional events are important for melanoma pathogenesis, we performed a chemical genetic screen to identify small-molecule suppressors of the neural crest lineage, which were then tested for their effects on melanoma. One class of compound, inhibitors of dihydroorotate dehydrogenase (DHODH), for example leflunomide, led to an almost complete abrogation of neural crest development in zebrafish and to a reduction in the self-renewal of mammalian neural crest stem cells. Leflunomide exerts these effects by inhibiting the transcriptional elongation of genes that are required for neural crest development and melanoma growth. When used alone or in combination with a specific inhibitor of the BRAF(V600E) oncogene, DHODH inhibition led to a marked decrease in melanoma growth both in vitro and in mouse xenograft studies. Taken together, these studies highlight developmental pathways in neural crest cells that have a direct bearing on melanoma formation

Potentially Missed Diagnosis of Ischemic Stroke in the Emergency Department in the Greater Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky Stroke Study

Missed diagnoses of acute ischemic stroke (AIS) in the ED may result in lost opportunities to treat AIS. Our objectives were to describe the rate and clinical characteristics of missed AIS in the ED, to determine clinical predictors of missed AIS, and to report tissue plasminogen (tPA) eligibility among those with missed strokes

SNAPSHOT USA 2019 : a coordinated national camera trap survey of the United States

This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.With the accelerating pace of global change, it is imperative that we obtain rapid inventories of the status and distribution of wildlife for ecological inferences and conservation planning. To address this challenge, we launched the SNAPSHOT USA project, a collaborative survey of terrestrial wildlife populations using camera traps across the United States. For our first annual survey, we compiled data across all 50 states during a 14-week period (17 August - 24 November of 2019). We sampled wildlife at 1509 camera trap sites from 110 camera trap arrays covering 12 different ecoregions across four development zones. This effort resulted in 166,036 unique detections of 83 species of mammals and 17 species of birds. All images were processed through the Smithsonian's eMammal camera trap data repository and included an expert review phase to ensure taxonomic accuracy of data, resulting in each picture being reviewed at least twice. The results represent a timely and standardized camera trap survey of the USA. All of the 2019 survey data are made available herein. We are currently repeating surveys in fall 2020, opening up the opportunity to other institutions and cooperators to expand coverage of all the urban-wild gradients and ecophysiographic regions of the country. Future data will be available as the database is updated at eMammal.si.edu/snapshot-usa, as well as future data paper submissions. These data will be useful for local and macroecological research including the examination of community assembly, effects of environmental and anthropogenic landscape variables, effects of fragmentation and extinction debt dynamics, as well as species-specific population dynamics and conservation action plans. There are no copyright restrictions; please cite this paper when using the data for publication.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Mammal responses to global changes in human activity vary by trophic group and landscape

Wildlife must adapt to human presence to survive in the Anthropocene, so it is critical to understand species responses to humans in different contexts. We used camera trapping as a lens to view mammal responses to changes in human activity during the COVID-19 pandemic. Across 163 species sampled in 102 projects around the world, changes in the amount and timing of animal activity varied widely. Under higher human activity, mammals were less active in undeveloped areas but unexpectedly more active in developed areas while exhibiting greater nocturnality. Carnivores were most sensitive, showing the strongest decreases in activity and greatest increases in nocturnality. Wildlife managers must consider how habituation and uneven sensitivity across species may cause fundamental differences in human–wildlife interactions along gradients of human influence.Peer reviewe