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'Her lion-red body, her wings of glass': iconography of the gothic body in Carter, Tennant, and Weldon

This thesis examines the varied references to the gothic genre in the work of three contemporary British women writers: Angela Carter, Emma Tennant, and Fay Weldon. It shows that the use of gothic imagery in their fiction coincides with feminist revisions of representations of the female body and that this appearance of the gothic is more complex than the scope generally allowed by the critical term "Female Gothic". Whereas most critical approaches to the gothic are grounded in a depth hermeneutics, this thesis develops Sedgwick's attention to the surfaces of gothic imagery by focusing on the iconography manifest in representations of the female body. The novels under consideration increase the possibilities of the genre through a combination of traditional and innovative tropes. Such innovation is achieved through postmodernist conventions including the use of genre fragments, intertextuality, and pastiche, as well as the self-conscious invocation of modern theories of identity. Most significant is the practice of transforming metaphor into narrative, whereby static cultural images depicting the female body are mobilised in an exposure of their inherent humour and violence, the nexus of which is characteristically gothic.In this literature three female figures may be discerned which are identifiable as gothic in their expression of entrapment both within the body and within a patriarchal system of cultural representation, and thus focus a number of feminist and poststructuralist concerns. The figure of the 'chokered' woman is read through a feminist critique of the gendered mind/body dichotomy central to Western culture. Next the presentation and subversion of the black female body is discussed as a figure of erotic alterity and the abject within colonialist discourse. The 'posthuman' body is explored as a product of the age of technological simulation, and is positioned in relation to the poetics of camp and the poststructuralist notion of the spectral presence of absence. In this fiction the female body functions as a 'screen' onto which these writers project their diverse inscriptions of the gothic

One Health in food safety and security education: Subject matter outline for a curricular framework.

Educating students in the range of subjects encompassing food safety and security as approached from a One Health perspective requires consideration of a variety of different disciplines and the interrelationships among disciplines. The Western Institute for Food Safety and Security developed a subject matter outline to accompany a previously published One Health in food safety and security curricular framework. The subject matter covered in this outline encompasses a variety of topics and disciplines related to food safety and security including effects of food production on the environment. This subject matter outline should help guide curriculum development and education in One Health in food safety and security and provides useful information for educators, researchers, students, and public policy-makers facing the inherent challenges of maintaining and/or developing safe and secure food supplies without destroying Earth's natural resources

Experimental manipulation of food bodies in Cecropia

Journal ArticleNeotropical Cecropia trees range from Mexico to Argentina and are typical of disturbed habitats. Cecropia plants provide food and housing for the ants in return for known or presumed protection from herbivores and vine cover. Glycogen-rich Mullerian bodies (MB's) are the predominant food source for ants and are produced at sites called trichilia. Working with Cecropia (prov.) "tessmannii", we continuously removed MB's from 10 of 20 plants in a common garden and left the remaining control plants unmanipulated. Control plants produced fewer MB's over the lifespan of a trichilia. Therefore, plants appear to regulate MB production so that energy is not wasted in biotic defense if appropriate ants are not present

Individual and population fitness consequences associated with large carnivore use of residential development

Large carnivores are negotiating increasingly developed landscapes, but little is known about how such behavioral plasticity influences their demographic rates and population trends. Some investigators have suggested that the ability of carnivores to behaviorally adapt to human development will enable their persistence, and yet, others have suggested that such landscapes are likely to serve as population sinks or ecological traps. To understand how plasticity in black bear (Ursus americanus) use of residential development influences their population dynamics, we conducted a 6-yr study near Durango, Colorado, USA. Using space-use data on individual bears, we examined the influence of use of residential development on annual measures of bear body fat, cub productivity, cub survival, and adult female survival, after accounting for variation in natural food availability and individual attributes (e.g., age). We then used our field-based vital rate estimates to parameterize a matrix model that simulated asymptotic population growth for bears using residential development to different degrees. We found that bear use of residential development was highly variable within and across years, with bears increasing their foraging within development when natural foods were scarce. Increased bear use of development was associated with increased body fat and cub productivity, but reduced cub and adult survival. When these effects were simultaneously incorporated into a matrix model, we found that the population was projected to decline as bear use of development increased, given that the costs of reduced survival outweighed the benefits of enhanced productivity. Our results provide a mechanistic understanding of how black bear use of residential development exerts opposing effects on different bear fitness traits and a negative effect on population growth, with the magnitude of those effects mediated by variation in environmental conditions. They also highlight the importance of monitoring bear population dynamics, particularly as shifts in bear behavior are likely to drive increases in human-bear conflicts and the perception of growing bear populations. Finally, our work emphasizes the need to consider the demographic viability of large carnivore populations when promoting the coexistence of people and carnivores on shared landscapes

The Rb binding domain of HPV31 E7 is required to maintain high levels of DNA repair factors in infected cells

Human papillomaviruses (HPV) exhibit constitutive activation of ATM and ATR DNA damage response (DDR) pathways, which are required for productive viral replication. Expression of HPV31 E7 alone is sufficient to activate the DDR through an unknown mechanism. Here, we demonstrate that the E7 Rb binding domain is required to increase levels of many DDR proteins, including ATM, Chk2, Chk1, the MRN components MRE11, Rad50, and NBS1, as well as the homologous recombination repair proteins BRCA1 and Rad51. Interestingly, we have found that the increase in these DNA repair proteins does not occur solely at the level of transcription, but that E7 broadly increases the half-life of these DDR factors, a phenotype that is lost in the E7 Rb binding mutant. These data suggest that HPV-31 upregulates DNA repair factors necessary for replication by increasing protein half-life in a manner requiring the E7 Rb binding domain

From soliciting answers to eliciting reasoning: Questioning our questions in digital math tasks

How can classroom teachers and task designers pose questions to promote students’ reasoning? The authors share a Toy Car task, developed in Desmos, then provide three design principles guiding task questions

Distinguishing schemes and tasks in children's development of multiplicative reasoning

We present a synthesis of findings from constructivist teaching experiments regarding six schemes children construct for reasoning multiplicatively and tasks to promote them. We provide a task-generating platform game, depictions of each scheme, and supporting tasks. Tasks must be distinguished from children’s thinking, and learning situations must be organized to (a) build on children’s available schemes, (b) promote the next scheme in the sequence, and (c) link to intended mathematical concepts

Ethics at the airport border: flowing, dwelling, atomising

This article contributes to the burgeoning literature on airports, addressing a current gap between literature that focuses on the cosmopolitical experience of the airport and that which focuses on the potentially dehumanising impacts of a technologized, securitised border by investigating the ethos of the space. We do not present an account of how the airport ought to work; rather, we consider what ethical relations and subjectivities are constructed, encouraged and made (im)possible in the airport space. We argue that the airport border assembles a variety of commercial, security and spatial technologies in areas of both ‘flow’ and ‘dwell’ which generate and privilege a particular type of ethical subject – the temporarily suspended, atomised individual. We begin with an understanding of space as produced through plurality and movement, and analyse how atomisation is produced and sustained before reflecting on the potentially dangerous implications of such processes

Assessing Ecological and Social Outcomes of a Bear-Proofing Experiment

Human-black bear conflicts within urban environments have been increasing throughout North America, becoming a high priority management issue. The main factor influencing these conflicts is black bears foraging on anthropogenic foods within areas of human development, primarily on residential garbage. Wildlife professionals have advocated for increased bear-proofing measures to decrease the accessibility of garbage to bears, but little research has been conducted to empirically test the effectiveness of this approach for reducing conflicts. Between 2011 and 2016, we conducted a before-after-control-impact experiment in Durango, Colorado where we distributed 1,110 bear-resistant trash containers, enhanced education, and increased enforcement to residents in 2 treatment areas, and monitored 2 paired control areas. We examined the ecological and social outcomes of this experiment, assessing whether bear-resistant containers were effective at reducing conflicts; the level of public compliance (i.e., properly locking away garbage) needed to reduce conflicts; whether the effectiveness of bear-resistant containers increased over time; and if the distribution of bear-resistant containers changed residents’ attitudes about bear management, support for ordinances that require bear-proofing, or perceptions of their future risk of garbage-related conflicts. After the bear-resistant containers were deployed, trash-related conflicts (i.e., observations of strewn trash) were 60% lower in treatment areas than control areas, resident compliance with local wildlife ordinances (properly locking away trash) was 39% higher in treatment areas than control areas, and the effectiveness of the new containers was immediate. Conflicts declined as resident compliance with wildlife ordinances increased to approximately 60% (by using a bear-resistant container or locking trash in a secure location), with minor additional declines in conflicts at higher levels of compliance. In addition to these ecological benefits, public mail surveys demonstrated that the deployment of bear-resistant containers was associated with increases in the perceived quality of bear management and support for ordinances that require bear-proofing, and declines in the perceived risk of future trash-related conflicts. Our results validate efforts by wildlife professionals and municipalities to reduce black bear access to human foods, and should encourage other entities of the merits of bear-proofing efforts for reducing human-bear conflicts and improving public attitudes about bears and their management