Ellen H. Richards-Home Economist, Wife, Homemaker

A girl, intense-eyed and quick-witted, stood behind the miscellaneous assortment of merchandise on the counter of her father\u27s general store. She sold tobacco along with the dry goods and groceries, but she fairly hated the stuff. One day a knot of the small town loafers took their purchased tobacco and their pipes and sauntered over to the stove to smoke and gossip while they tipped back their chairs and stuck their feet up

Sally Says, Swinging Shoulders-Swirling Skirts

Ten stiff-jointed wooden mannikins displaying campus togs sat dangling their legs as I brushed by a table in one of the college shops. I stopped, I looked, I airily peered at their ridiculous yellow and red yarn hair, their droll months. And I stayed to examine the clothes they wore, brief replicas of the smart new fall things. Never in all my scoutings had I found anything so jaunty, so utterly casual. ··That was it-they had that casualness, that certain something that is behind the clothes this fall

Setting the Record Straight: Anne W. Armstrong, Regionalism, and the Social Efficacy of Fiction

Categorized by the few critics who know her work as a minor Appalachian writer, Anne Wetzell Armstrong has never enjoyed the recognition she deserves. But she produced an important body of work, including fiction, non-fiction and drama. In the 1970‘s, critic Elaine Showalter led the gynocritical effort to recover women writers and inspired the reintroduction of a number of overlooked authors. This national impulse and the positive reception of its results has driven, in turn, an interest in similar regional efforts—hence my own interest in recovering the work of Armstrong, whose work has value in both national and regional contexts. This study applies a regionalist lens to Armstrong‘s fiction, including an early short story entitled Half-Wit Mary‘s Lover (1912), and her two novels: The Seas of God (1915) and This Day and Time (1930). The project begins with Armstrong‘s biography, outlining the elements of her long and unusual life that influenced her writing. The three regionalist close readings point out the ways in which her fiction resisted hegemonic culture and offered a new perspective to early twentieth-century American readers. This project explores the ways in which Armstrong used her fiction to resist dominant culture‘s view of marginal populations, with a particular emphasis on the stereotyping of women and Southern mountaineers. Because Armstrong‘s considerable body of work focuses frequently on marginal women, the temptation exists to adhere strictly to a feminist lens in reading her work. Such an approach proves valid; however, the lens of literary regionalism—especially as defined by critics like Judith Fetterley and Marjorie Pryse and differentiated from local color by its counterhegemonic agenda—offers a broader consideration of Armstrong‘s work. As a site for feminist readings, Armstrong‘s work proves interesting but stands as one among many; as regionalism, her fiction offers important new opportunities both to support and to problematize current thinking about the definition of the term as it applies to literature and also to explore certain controversial topics arising in the theoretical discourse, the role of feminism being one of those topics

The Forced van der Pol Equation II: Canards in the reduced system

This is the second in a series of papers about the dynamics of the forced van der Pol oscillator [J. Guckenheimer, K. Hoffman, and W. Weckesser, SIAM J. Appl. Dyn. Syst., 2 (2003), pp. 1–35]. The first paper described the reduced system, a two dimensional flow with jumps that reflect fast trajectory segments in this vector field with two time scales. This paper extends the reduced system to account for canards, trajectory segments that follow the unstable portion of the slow manifold in the forced van der Pol oscillator. This extension of the reduced system serves as a template for approximating the full nonwandering set of the forced van der Pol oscillator for large sets of parameter values, including parameters for which the system is chaotic. We analyze some bifurcations in the extension of the reduced system, building upon our previous work in [J. Guckenheimer, K. Hoffman, and W. Weckesser, SIAM J. Appl. Dyn. Syst., 2 (2003), pp. 1–35]. We conclude with computations of return maps and periodic orbits in the full three dimensional flow that are compared with the computations and analysis of the reduced system. These comparisons demonstrate numerically the validity of results we derive from the study of canards in the reduced system

Nociceptor Sensitivity In Drosophila Melanogaster Larvae Is Controlled By RNA-Binding Proteins

Currently, there are significant gaps in understanding of the regulatory mechanisms involved in nociceptor sensitivity. Dysregulated nociceptor sensitivity is the likely pathogenesis in many types of chronic pain, a disease that ails over 100 million people in the United States alone. To improve current chronic pain therapies, it is essential to define the regulatory mechanisms responsible for nociception. The goal of this study was to characterize how genes classically involved in RNA processing and translation regulate nociceptor sensitivity. The model organism Drosophila melanogaster was used for this study because of their quantifiable response to noxious stimuli and the powerful tools available for genetic manipulations. My results suggest that eukaryotic initiation factors (eIFs) and components of the exon junction complex (EJC) control nociceptor sensitivity by regulating RNA processing and translation, suggesting a major role for RNA metabolism and translation in controlling nociceptor function. Nociceptor-specific knockdown of EJC factors and eIFs resulted in defective thermal and mechanical nociception. No direct link was found between nociceptor dendritic morphology and nociception defects, which indicates that nociceptor morphology does not determine nociceptor sensitivity. Thus, the major findings of this project revealed that Drosophila nociceptor sensitivity is controlled by RNA processing mechanisms from transcription to translation

Introducing longitudinal modified treatment policies: a unified framework for studying complex exposures

This tutorial discusses a recently developed methodology for causal inference based on longitudinal modified treatment policies (LMTPs). LMTPs generalize many commonly used parameters for causal inference including average treatment effects, and facilitate the mathematical formalization, identification, and estimation of many novel parameters. LMTPs apply to a wide variety of exposures, including binary, multivariate, and continuous, as well as interventions that result in violations of the positivity assumption. LMTPs can accommodate time-varying treatments and confounders, competing risks, loss-to-follow-up, as well as survival, binary, or continuous outcomes. This tutorial aims to illustrate several practical uses of the LMTP framework, including describing different estimation strategies and their corresponding advantages and disadvantages. We provide numerous examples of types of research questions which can be answered within the proposed framework. We go into more depth with one of these examples -- specifically, estimating the effect of delaying intubation on critically ill COVID-19 patients' mortality. We demonstrate the use of the open source R package lmtp to estimate the effects, and we provide code on https://github.com/kathoffman/lmtp-tutorial