Textbook journalism? Objectivity, education and the professionalization of sports reporting

In this article, we present an analysis of recent handbooks, field guides and other educative texts on sports journalism. Authored mostly by current and former journalists turned university educators, these books signal the professionalization of sports journalism amid changes and challenges to news media industries. In offering guidance on best practice sports reporting, they are also situated in tension with the long-standing denigration of sports journalism as the trivial back-page filler that props up more serious, substantive content. Through a thematic analysis of the textbooks’ contents and the epistemic, economic and educative context of their collective emergence, we address the following question in what follows: How do these textbooks advise would-be sports journalists to respond to ‘serious’ social, ethical and political matters? In doing so, we detail how established categories of objectivity and ethics are the primary points of recourse through which these books advise on reporting about the many social issues in which sport is implicated. In turn, we reflect on the virtues of - and the tensions and contradictions surrounding - these advocations. By way of conclusion, we contend that professionalization represents an opportunity for collaborations between sport media scholars and current and former journalists - in their shared roles as educators - in the pursuit of ‘excellent’ sports reporting. The notion of ‘strong objectivity’ is our conceptual guide for how such collaborations might be fostered

The Paleolithic imagination:Nature, science, and race in Anthropocene fitness cultures

The widespread uptake of the Anthropocene concept over the past two decades has seen a concomitant rise in cultural forms that trade on nostalgia for Paleolithic life. Mud running, CrossFit, and the Paleo diet exemplify this trend, with the Paleolithic hunter-gatherer at the center of their popular prescriptions for healthy living. In this article, we identify these practices as embodying the anxieties of the Anthropocene as well as its historical and racial elisions. By focusing on the oblique and subtle racializations of Anthropocene health and fitness cultures, we contribute to understandings of the cultural significance of the human body in the Anthropocene and the relationship between the biopolitics of health and geological life, arguing that the body is a key site through which the tensions and inequalities of the Anthropocene are played out. And by unraveling how the Paleolithic imagination is rooted in a distinctly capitalist, Euro-American attitude to the body in nature, we show the Anthropocene to be defined by uneven distributions of health as self-optimization, and health as environmental risk. The Paleolithic imagination demonstrates the tangled politics of race, science, and nature in the twenty-first century, in which global ecological instability, the biopolitics of health, the shadows of colonialism, and consumer capitalism converge

Molecular Marker Linkage Map for Apple

Linkage maps for two apple clones, White Angel and Rome Beauty, were constructed using isozyme and DNA polymorphisms segregating in a population produced from a Rome Beauty × White Angel cross. The linkage map for White Angel consists of 253 markers arranged in 24 linkage groups and extends over 950 cM. The Rome Beauty map contains 156 markers on 21 linkage groups. The White Angel map was taken as the standard, and we were able to identify linkage groups in Rome Beauty homologous to 13 White Angel linkage groups. The location of several genes not segregating in the Rome Beauty × White Angel population could be determined on the basis of known linkages with segregating markers. Hence, the standard map for apple now contains about 360 markers, with most linkage groups saturated at 10-15 cM. The double pseudotestcross format of the mapping population permitted the comparison of recombination frequencies in male and female parents in certain regions of the genome where appropriate markers were available. The recombination frequencies observed for the approximately 170 cM that were comparable gave no indication that a sex-related difference in recombination rate was characteristic of appl

Embodiment is ecological: the metabolic lives of whey protein powder

This article explores the metabolic lives of whey powder, the most popular form of protein supplement in what has become a multibillion-dollar industry during the past two decades. Faced with the slippery and elusive properties latent to this multiplicitous substance, our approach is to follow whey powder from its mid-twentieth century emergence as a noxious byproduct of industrial dairy production, through the human and animal bodies unevenly tasked with its processing, and out into waterways, where its nitrogen density rematerializes as a pollutant. We show how whey powder emerged as a solution to the environmental damage posed by whey pollution, how such damage is an effect of the systematic overproduction endemic to agrofood industries, and how whey’s toxicity persists through processes of metabolism and consumption, despite attempts to process and profit from its vital capacities. Throughout, we argue that whey exemplifies ecological embodiment, understood as the co-constitutive relations between bodily matter and ecological life, and their entanglement with processes of commodification

The Paleolithic imagination: nature, race, and science in Anthropocene fitness cultures

The widespread uptake of the Anthropocene concept over the past two decades has seen a concomitant rise in cultural forms that trade on nostalgia for Paleolithic life. Mud running, CrossFit, and the Paleo diet exemplify this trend, with the Paleolithic hunter-gatherer at the center of their popular prescriptions for healthy living. In this article, we identify these practices as embodying the anxieties of the Anthropocene as well as its historical and racial elisions. By focusing on the oblique and subtle racializations of Anthropocene health and fitness cultures, we contribute to understandings of the cultural significance of the human body in the Anthropocene and the relationship between the biopolitics of health and geological life, arguing that the body is a key site through which the tensions and inequalities of the Anthropocene are played out. And by unraveling how the Paleolithic imagination is rooted in a distinctly capitalist, Euro-American attitude to the body in nature, we show the Anthropocene to be defined by uneven distributions of health as self-optimization, and health as environmental risk. The Paleolithic imagination demonstrates the tangled politics of race, science, and nature in the twenty-first century, in which global ecological instability, the biopolitics of health, the shadows of colonialism, and consumer capitalism converge

The development of an on-site spay/neuter facility at a county animal shelter to reduce pet overpopulation as a means of rabies prevention

The goal of this paper is to address the issue of pet overpopulation as a means of preventing rabies in a community, and to describe the process of developing an onsite spay/neuter facility at a county animal shelter to reduce pet overpopulation. Additionally, it is hoped that this project will provide a blueprint for other agencies to develop their own spay/neuter facilities in their quest to reduce, or eliminate, pet overpopulation.Master of Public Healt

Nietzschean modes of gender construction in a post-feminist age

An arrogance of certainty besets discourses of gender in today’s culture, and denigrating as well as overly affirming accounts of masculinity leave theindividual man at risk of either self-loathing or self-aggrandizing. This article will look at various lay accounts of masculinity and the dynamics of itsconstruction in opposition to culturally dominant moral codes, and will interrogate the underlying philosophical positions at work through Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality. In doing so, we propose that it is helpful to see Nietzsche as an early philosopher of difference, and embrace a less fixed approach to ontologies of gender accordingly

Quantifying land surface temperature variability for two Sahelian mesoscale regions during the wet season

Land-atmosphere feedbacks play an important role in the weather and climate of many semi-arid regions. These feedbacks are strongly controlled by how the surface responds to precipitation events, which regulate the return of heat and moisture to the atmosphere. Characteristics of the surface can result in both differing amplitudes and rates of warming following rain. We used spectral analysis to quantify these surface responses to rainfall events using land surface temperature (LST) derived from Earth Observations (EO). We analysed two mesoscale regions in the Sahel and identified distinct differences in the strength of the short-term (< 5–day) spectral variance, notably a shift towards lower frequency variability in forest pixels relative to non-forest areas, and an increase in amplitude with decreasing vegetation cover. Consistent with these spectral signatures, we found that areas of forest, and to a lesser extent grassland regions, warm up more slowly than sparsely vegetated or barren pixels. We applied the same spectral analysis method to simulated LST data from the the Joint UK Land Environment Simulator (JULES) land surface model. We found a reasonable level of agreement with the EO spectral analysis, for two contrasting land surface regions. However JULES shows a significant underestimate in the magnitude of the observed response to rain compared to EO. A sensitivity analysis of the JULES model highlights an unrealistically high level of soil water availability as a key deficiency, which dampens the models response to rainfall events

Type 2 Diabetes Risk Alleles Are Associated With Reduced Size at Birth

OBJECTIVE: Low birth weight is associated with an increased risk of type 2 diabetes. The mechanisms underlying this association are unknown and may represent intrauterine programming or two phenotypes of one genotype. The fetal insulin hypothesis proposes that common genetic variants that reduce insulin secretion or action may predispose to type 2 diabetes and also reduce birth weight, since insulin is a key fetal growth factor. We tested whether common genetic variants that predispose to type 2 diabetes also reduce birth weight. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS: We genotyped single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) at five recently identified type 2 diabetes loci (CDKAL1, CDKN2A/B, HHEX-IDE, IGF2BP2, and SLC30A8) in 7,986 mothers and 19,200 offspring from four studies of white Europeans. We tested the association between maternal or fetal genotype at each locus and birth weight of the offspring. RESULTS: We found that type 2 diabetes risk alleles at the CDKAL1 and HHEX-IDE loci were associated with reduced birth weight when inherited by the fetus (21 g [95% CI 11-31], P = 2 x 10(-5), and 14 g [4-23], P = 0.004, lower birth weight per risk allele, respectively). The 4% of offspring carrying four risk alleles at these two loci were 80 g (95% CI 39-120) lighter at birth than the 8% carrying none (P(trend) = 5 x 10(-7)). There were no associations between birth weight and fetal genotypes at the three other loci or maternal genotypes at any locus. CONCLUSIONS: Our results are in keeping with the fetal insulin hypothesis and provide robust evidence that common disease-associated variants can alter size at birth directly through the fetal genotype