126 research outputs found

    The 1920s Texas Ku Klux Klan Revisited: White Supremacy and Structural Power in a Rural County

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    The second Ku Klux Klan made its first public appearance in Texas at a United Confederate Veterans parade in October 1920, then quickly expanded across the state. Founder William J. Simmons created this organization as an exclusive, secretive fraternal group that both celebrated the original Ku Klux Klan (KKK) and responded to contemporary societal concerns of white native-born men and women in post-World- War-I America. Using a propaganda campaign, the organization preached the supremacy of a racialized Anglo-Saxon American identity, defined in terms of contemporary pseudo-scientific racial ideology as white, Protestant, native-born, and anti-radical, to recruit millions of members from across the nation within a few short years. Based on membership rolls and minutes of a Texas Klan chapter, this dissertation argues that, behind a façade of moral law and order, the Ku Klux Klan in rural Texas was a 1920s manifestation of a long-held racist ideology that utilized traditional practices of control through kinship, violence, and structural power to assert and protect white supremacy. It uses a localized case study approach to re-examine the second Ku Klux Klan in Texas, one of the largest and most powerful Klan organizations in the country, and challenge previous claims that the Texas KKK functioned more as a force for moral law and order and less as a white supremacy group. This particular Klan chapter, worked within the KKK’s Houston Provence, operated out of a rural county most noted for its plantation past and relatively recent end to Reconstruction, which firmly entrenched white structural control in the local economy, government, and social affairs. Based on an analysis of this Klan chapter’s individual members, their targets, and regional events, the Texas Klan used organizational power and vigilante violence to protect Anglo-Saxon white supremacy and maintain its centrality to the American identity. They conceptualized their nativistic and religious tenets through the lens of pseudo-scientific concepts of race that excluded Mexican and Japanese communities from whiteness. Furthermore, they utilized their members’ access to privileged structural power to plan and implement targeted attacks, coordinated between several chapters, on black and white individuals whose behavior they saw as threatening to the race, or for personal gain. They protected the organization’s extralegal violence through controlled police investigations and newspapers’ published narratives that surrounded the violence. When this failed, they utilized traditional white southern tools of white collective economic power and white respectability to undermine due process

    Is number sense impaired in chronic pain patients?

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    BACKGROUND: Recent advances in imaging have improved our understanding of the role of the brain in painful conditions. Discoveries of morphological changes have been made in patients with chronic pain, with little known about the functional consequences when they occur in areas associated with ‘number-sense’; thus, it can be hypothesized that chronic pain impairs this sense. METHODS: First, an audit of the use of numbers in gold-standard pain assessment tools in patients with acute and chronic pain was undertaken. Secondly, experiments were conducted with patients with acute and chronic pain and healthy controls. Participants marked positions of numbers on lines (number marking), before naming numbers on pre-marked lines (number naming). Finally, subjects bisected lines flanked with ‘2’ and ‘9’. Deviations from expected responses were determined for each experiment. RESULTS: Four hundred and ninety-four patients were audited; numeric scores in the ‘moderate’ and ‘severe’ pain categories were significantly higher in chronic compared with acute pain patients. In experiments (n=150), more than one-third of chronic pain patients compared with 1/10th of controls showed greater deviations from the expected in number marking and naming indicating impaired number sense. Line bisection experiments suggest prefrontal and parietal cortical dysfunction as cause of this impairment. CONCLUSIONS: Audit data suggest patients with chronic pain interpret numbers differently from acute pain sufferers. Support is gained by experiments indicating impaired number sense in one-third of chronic pain patients. These results cast doubts on the appropriateness of the use of visual analogue and numeric rating scales in chronic pain in clinics and research

    Modelling the future of the Hawaiian honeycreeper : an ecological and epidemiological problem

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    The Hawaiian honeycreeper (Drepanididae) faces the threat of extinction; this is believed to be due primarily to predation from alien animals, endemic avian malaria (Plasmodium relictum) and climate change. A deterministic SI modelling approach is developed, incorporating these three factors and a metapopulation approach in conjunction with a quasi-equilibrium assumption to simplify the vector populations. This enables the qualitative study of the behaviour of the system. Numerical results suggest that although (partial) resistance to avian malaria may be advantageous for individual birds, allowing them to survive infection, this allows them to become carriers of infection and hence greatly increases the spread of this disease. Predation obviously reduces the life-expectancy of honeycreepers, but in turn this reduces the spread of infection from resistant carriers; therefore the population-level impact of predation is reduced. Various control strategies proposed in the literature are also considered and it is shown that predation control could either help or hinter, depending upon resistance of the honeycreeper species. Captive propagation or habitat restoration may be the best feasible solution to the loss of both heterogeneity within the population and the loss of the species as a whole

    Contactless microwave sensors and their application in biological single use

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    In bioprocess technology, highly-sensitive robust sensors are required for operation in single use bioreactors (SUB) without direct contact to the fluid under analysis. Measuring the change of dielectric properties (permittivity and conductivity) at microwave frequencies allows the investigation of biological and chemical matter and processes, e.g., cell growth, cell metabolism and the concentration of large aqueous based molecules. This contribution describes a high frequency sensor that combines detection in macro- or microfluidic networks with quick and precise analysis. These kinds of sensors can be installed directly to the outer surface of the culture device (Figure 1) or can be clamped onto tubing (Figure 2). A clamped on sensor consists of a fluidic channel placed between a micro-strip line waveguide combined with resonant properties. Please click Additional Files below to see the full abstract

    Measurement of direct photon production at Tevatron fixed target energies

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    Measurements of the production of high transverse momentum direct photons by a 515 GeV/c piminus beam and 530 and 800 GeV/c proton beams in interactions with beryllium and hydrogen targets are presented. The data span the kinematic ranges of 3.5 < p_T < 12 GeV/c in transverse momentum and 1.5 units in rapidity. The inclusive direct-photon cross sections are compared with next-to-leading-order perturbative QCD calculations and expectations based on a phenomenological parton-k_T model.Comment: RevTeX4, 23 pages, 32 figures, submitted to Phys. Rev.

    Evidence for Parton kT Effects in High pT Particle Production

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    Inclusive pizero and direct-photon cross sections in the kinematic range 3.5 < pT < 12 GeV/c with central rapidities are presented for 530 and 800 GeV/c proton beams and a 515 GeV/c pi- beam incident on beryllium targets. Current Next-to-Leading-Order perturbative QCD calculations fail to adequately describe the data for conventional choices of scales. Kinematic distributions from these hard scattering events provide evidence that the interacting partons carry significant initial-state parton transverse momentum (kT). Incorporating these kT effects phenomenologically greatly improves the agreement between calculations and the measured cross sections.Comment: 11 pages including 6 pages of figures with caption

    Production of pizero and eta mesons at large transverse momenta in pi-p and pi-Be interactions at 515 GeV/c

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    We present results on the production of high transverse momentum pizero and eta mesons in pi-p and pi-Be interactions at 515 GeV/c. The data span the kinematic ranges 1 < p_T < 11 GeV/c in transverse momentum and -0.75 < y < 0.75 in rapidity. The inclusive pizero cross sections are compared with next-to-leading order QCD calculations and to expectations based on a phenomenological parton-k_T model.Comment: RevTeX4, 15 pages, 15 figures, to be submitted to Phys. Rev.
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