Apparent Feminist Pedagogies Interrogating Technical Rhetorics at Illinois State University

This curriculum showcase introduces apparent feminist pedagogies and reports on their use in a technical rhetorics course at Illinois State University. I describe the exigence for apparent feminist pedagogies, which seek to recognize and make apparent to students the urgent and sometimes hidden need for feminist critique of technical texts, and I offer a theoretical rationale supporting apparent feminist pedagogies. Finally, I critically reflect on my own experience enacting one possible iteration of apparent feminist pedagogy in hopes that readers might see how such an approach can enhance the efficiency with which technical communicators (including instructors) reach diverse audiences

Collaborative Course Design in Scientific Writing: Experimentation and Productive Failure

English 3820: Scientific Writing, a writing-intensive (WI) course offered by the Department of English at East Carolina University (ECU), serves primarily science majors. According to the course catalog, it provides students with “practice in assimilation and written presentation of scientific information.� The course asks students to consider the situated nature of scientific writing and also to produce scientific writing for various audiences. Throughout the course, students examine theories, methodologies, and ideologies that undergird scientific writing with an eye to perfecting both critique and imitation of scientific styles

Statistically based chunking of nonadjacent dependencies.

How individuals learn complex regularities in the environment and generalize them to new instances is a key question in cognitive science. Although previous investigations have advocated the idea that learning and generalizing depend upon separate processes, the same basic learning mechanisms may account for both. In language learning experiments, these mechanisms have typically been studied in isolation of broader cognitive phenomena such as memory, perception, and attention. Here, we show how learning and generalization in language is embedded in these broader theories by testing learners on their ability to chunk nonadjacent dependencies—a key structure in language but a challenge to theories that posit learning through the memorization of structure. In two studies, adult participants were trained and tested on an artificial language containing nonadjacent syllable dependencies, using a novel chunking-based serial recall task involving verbal repetition of target sequences (formed from learned strings) and scrambled foils. Participants recalled significantly more syllables, bigrams, trigrams, and nonadjacent dependencies from sequences conforming to the language’s statistics (both learned and generalized sequences). They also encoded and generalized specific nonadjacent chunk information. These results suggest that participants chunk remote dependencies and rapidly generalize this information to novel structures. The results thus provide further support for learning-based approaches to language acquisition, and link statistical learning to broader cognitive mechanisms of memory

A systematic map of studies testing the relationship between temperature and animal reproduction

Funding: This work was funded by the European Society for Evolution (which funds a Special Topic Network on Evolutionary Ecology of Thermal Fertility Limits to CF, AB, RRS and TARP), the Natural Environment Research Council (NE/P002692/1 to TARP, AB and RRS, NE/X011550/1 to LRD and TARP), the Biotechnology and \Biological Sciences Research Council (BB/W016753/1 to AB, TARP and RRS) and a Heisenberg fellowship from the German Research Foundation (FR 2973/11-1 to CF).1. Exposure to extreme temperatures can negatively affect animal reproduction, by disrupting the ability of individuals to produce any offspring (fertility), or the number of offspring produced by fertile individuals (fecundity). This has important ecological consequences, because reproduction is the ultimate measure of population fitness: a reduction in reproductive output lowers the population growth rate and increases the extinction risk. Despite this importance, there have been no large‐scale summaries of the evidence for effect of temperature on reproduction. 2. We provide a systematic map of studies testing the relationship between temperature and animal reproduction. We systematically searched for published studies that statistically test for a direct link between temperature and animal reproduction, in terms of fertility, fecundity or indirect measures of reproductive potential (gamete and gonad traits). 3. Overall, we collated a large and rich evidence base, with 1654 papers that met our inclusion criteria, encompassing 1191 species. 4. The map revealed several important research gaps. Insects made up almost half of the dataset, but reptiles and amphibians were uncommon, as were non‐arthropod invertebrates. Fecundity was the most common reproductive trait examined, and relatively few studies measured fertility. It was uncommon for experimental studies to test exposure of different life stages, exposure to short‐term heat or cold shock, exposure to temperature fluctuations, or to independently assess male and female effects. Studies were most often published in journals focusing on entomology and pest control, ecology and evolution, aquaculture and fisheries science, and marine biology. Finally, while individuals were sampled from every continent, there was a strong sampling bias towards mid‐latitudes in the Northern Hemisphere, such that the tropics and polar regions are less well sampled. 5. This map reveals a rich literature of studies testing the relationship between temperature and animal reproduction, but also uncovers substantial missing treatment of taxa, traits, and thermal regimes. This database will provide a valuable resource for future quantitative meta‐analyses, and direct future studies aiming to fill identified gaps.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Quantifying sources of variability in infancy research using the infant-directed-speech preference

Psychological scientists have become increasingly concerned with issues related to methodology and replicability, and infancy researchers in particular face specific challenges related to replicability: For example, high-powered studies are difficult to conduct, testing conditions vary across labs, and different labs have access to different infant populations. Addressing these concerns, we report on a large-scale, multisite study aimed at (a) assessing the overall replicability of a single theoretically important phenomenon and (b) examining methodological, cultural, and developmental moderators. We focus on infants’ preference for infant-directed speech (IDS) over adult-directed speech (ADS). Stimuli of mothers speaking to their infants and to an adult in North American English were created using seminaturalistic laboratory-based audio recordings. Infants’ relative preference for IDS and ADS was assessed across 67 laboratories in North America, Europe, Australia, and Asia using the three common methods for measuring infants’ discrimination (head-turn preference, central fixation, and eye tracking). The overall meta-analytic effect size (Cohen’s d) was 0.35, 95% confidence interval = [0.29, 0.42], which was reliably above zero but smaller than the meta-analytic mean computed from previous literature (0.67). The IDS preference was significantly stronger in older children, in those children for whom the stimuli matched their native language and dialect, and in data from labs using the head-turn preference procedure. Together, these findings replicate the IDS preference but suggest that its magnitude is modulated by development, native-language experience, and testing procedure. (This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 798658.

The James Webb Space Telescope Mission

Twenty-six years ago a small committee report, building on earlier studies, expounded a compelling and poetic vision for the future of astronomy, calling for an infrared-optimized space telescope with an aperture of at least $4m$. With the support of their governments in the US, Europe, and Canada, 20,000 people realized that vision as the $6.5m$ James Webb Space Telescope. A generation of astronomers will celebrate their accomplishments for the life of the mission, potentially as long as 20 years, and beyond. This report and the scientific discoveries that follow are extended thank-you notes to the 20,000 team members. The telescope is working perfectly, with much better image quality than expected. In this and accompanying papers, we give a brief history, describe the observatory, outline its objectives and current observing program, and discuss the inventions and people who made it possible. We cite detailed reports on the design and the measured performance on orbit.Comment: Accepted by PASP for the special issue on The James Webb Space Telescope Overview, 29 pages, 4 figure

New genetic loci link adipose and insulin biology to body fat distribution.

Body fat distribution is a heritable trait and a well-established predictor of adverse metabolic outcomes, independent of overall adiposity. To increase our understanding of the genetic basis of body fat distribution and its molecular links to cardiometabolic traits, here we conduct genome-wide association meta-analyses of traits related to waist and hip circumferences in up to 224,459 individuals. We identify 49 loci (33 new) associated with waist-to-hip ratio adjusted for body mass index (BMI), and an additional 19 loci newly associated with related waist and hip circumference measures (P < 5 × 10(-8)). In total, 20 of the 49 waist-to-hip ratio adjusted for BMI loci show significant sexual dimorphism, 19 of which display a stronger effect in women. The identified loci were enriched for genes expressed in adipose tissue and for putative regulatory elements in adipocytes. Pathway analyses implicated adipogenesis, angiogenesis, transcriptional regulation and insulin resistance as processes affecting fat distribution, providing insight into potential pathophysiological mechanisms