Mayors and the health of cities

Mayors and the Health of Cities sheds light on how US mayors perceive and prioritize the health of their cities in the context of existing urban health data. The report also highlights promising city-led initiatives targeting four priority health areas: the obesity epidemic, the opioid crisis, traffic fatalities, and gun violence. Findings included in the report are based on analyses from several datasets and sources, including a nationally representative survey of American mayors, the City Health Dashboard 500 Cities, and supplemental information from federal sources.Supported by Citi and The Rockefeller Foundatio

Migration and Ethnobotanical Practices: The Case of Tifey Among Haitian Immigrants in Cuba

Ethnobotanical knowledge and practices are dynamic and they change as they are transferred and appropriated by people who are adapting to new surroundings and changing environments. Using tifey, a multispecies drink, as a case study, we discuss the changes that emigration brought about related to tifey, and the processes that determined these changes. Tifey is a Haitian drink prepared by soaking Artemisia absinthium and other plants in rum or aguardiente. It probably had its origin in the adoption of the absinthe-based liquor used by French settlers and troops during the colonial period. Haitians progressively added culturally relevant flavorings and medicinal plants to this drink, and differentiated its production and use for medicinal, medicinal food, ritual ( religious and social), and economic purposes. When Haitians migrated to Cuba, they brought tifey with them, but over the course of the twentieth century its use declined and its composition changed due to sociocultural factors such as the dissolution of Haitian settlements, and to ecological factors such as difficulty in cultivation and/or procurement of A. absinthium in the new environment

Violent Reflections: Bloody Mary in 1990s Pop Culture

The final decade of the 20th century transformed the folk figure of Bloody Mary into a recognizable character on television screens through media like the 1992 film Candyman and the X-Files episode “Syzygy.” This paper explores the extent to which the Bloody Mary character provided a narrative tool to discuss U.S. state violence and brutality. The first section summarizes early academic writing on Bloody Mary to understand how this legend took hold in the United States. The second section traces the contours of the Bloody Mary figure to understand her narrative utility, as well as consider the history and anxieties around children’s divination games in the age of Satanic Panic. The third section looks at the dual nature of 1990s state violence through an increase in militarized police forces alongside disinvestment in social support systems. In the conclusion, this paper analyzes Candyman alongside “Syzygy” to understand how the two approach a fear of vengeance from different ideological attachments to police authority. Throughout the course of this paper, these sections demonstrate how mainstream anxieties about police violence and potentially violent retribution are presented through the familiar and fantastical folk figure of Bloody Mary

SHU Mandatory Weekly Testing

News article by Citlalli Godinez for the February 17, 2021 issue of The Spectrum

Quantifying Variability in Oculomotor and Manual Choice Response Times

Response times (RTs) of various motor systems have traditionally been used to characterize aspects of human performance (e.g., fatigue, disease states). However, the properties and sensitivity of different motor systems to detect changes in neural states across multiple timescales remain an open question. In this thesis, we attempt to characterize the difference in sensitivity of the pursuit, saccadic, and manual systems to detect changes in stimulus strength. In Experiment 1, we used a modified Yes-No task to test the effects of contrast (5, 10, 20, 40, 80, 100%) on three pursuit, saccadic, and manual RT’s for three observers. In Experiment 2, we used a 2-AFC task to test the effects of luminance (0-10 d\u27 above background noise) on saccadic and manual RT for five observers. We observed: 1) saccadic RT are better correlated with changes in stimulus strength, 2) manual responses are more variable, 3) trial-by-trial variability is greater than variability across sessions, and 4) each pair of motor systems shows significant shared variability. We conclude that oculomotor and manual responses have different signal processing and RT characteristics, and may have different levels of utility to detect physiological factors that affect performance (e.g., Dinges & Powell, 1985), with the saccadic system being more sensitive to changes in stimulus strength and less variable in the timing of the response