Confronting a Climate of Raucous and Carnival Invasion : The AAUW Takes On the Johns Committee

What happens to the pursuit of truth and the advancement of learning in such an atmosphere as the heresy hunters and thought controllers have created in parts of the South can only be conjectured, 1 historian C. Vann Woodward wondered in his essay on The Unreported Crisis in the Southern Colleges, published in 1962-the same year that members of the Florida Legislative Investigation Committee (FLIC) descended on the University of South Florida (USF). The Committee had come to Tampa to investigate reports of communism, homosexuality, obscenity in course materials, and professors\u27 alleged attacks on students\u27 religious beliefs. This emboldened advance carried the Committee into territory far removed from its legislative mandate, and exposed it to new criticisms. Thus far the Committee\u27s actions against civil rights activists, and then gay and lesbian educators-however egregious-had fallen within the boundaries of the dominant ideology in the region, in fact, the nation. Indeed, the Committee\u27s very existence came about as part of the State\u27s effort to preserve segregation in the wake of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. When the NAACP entangled, and finally defeated the Committee in the court system, it sustained its legislative life by taking on the so-called problem of homosexuality in the school system. In the 1950s and 1960s homosexuality was an issue that no court, indeed no public voice, would yet defend. When State Senator Charley Johns and his Committee launched its USF investigation in 1962, it had been frustrated by the NAACP maneuvers but still remained relatively unchecked

Diversity and Host Interaction of Phthorimaea operculella granulovirus

Phthorimaea operculella granulovirus (PhopGV, Baculoviridae) has the potential to serve as biological control agent against Phthorimaea operculella (Zeller) and Tecia solanivora (Povolny) in the potato production cycle and Tuta absoluta (Meyrick) in tomato production under greenhouse conditions. These three pest insect species are closely related and belong all to the Gelechiidae family of Lepidoptera. Due to the climate change and global trade these pest insects have the potential to spread worldwide. PhopGV has already successfully been used as biocontrol agent in Latin America and North Africa mainly against P. operculella in potato field and storehouses. Research on the diversity of PhopGV isolates and their interaction with the host is strongly needed, to gain knowledge which allows optimizing the use of PhopGV as active ingredient of biocontrol agents of these pest insects in food production. This study focused on PhopGV isolates and P. operculella as host system. It embraces the interaction of PhopGV isolates in case of co-infections and the interaction of PhopGV and a microsporidium when infecting the same host individual. A number of nine PhopGV isolates were tested on their biological activity against P. operculella. Median lethal concentration (LC50) and median lethal time (LT50) were determined as comparable measures of isolates´ virulence. PhopGV is a slow-killing virus which is able to inhibit pupation of infected host species. Virulence of different PhopGV isolates seems to be not only virus but also host dependent. Twelve complete genome sequences of PhopGV isolates from passages of virus isolates collected from four different continents (Africa, South America, Asia and Europe) were analysed after Illumina Next Generation Sequencing (NGS). These geographic isolates of PhopGV are genetically highly similar but were rarely genetically homogeneous and appeared in most cases as mixtures of multiple genotypes. A new grouping system (1-4) could be developed based on single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) as well as insertions and deletions (Indels) spread over the PhopGV genome. Further, a highly variable gene of the superoxide dismutase (sod, ORF 54) was identified. Previously, only variability of ecdysteroid UDP–glucosyltransferase (egt, ORF 129) alone was used as a grouping system for PhopGV isolates. Virus infections of insects can easily stay undetected, without showing typically signs of a disease and do not need to be lethal. A virus named PhopGV-R could be isolated from a laboratory population of P. operculella. Crowding of larvae did not cause overt outbreak of the covert virus. An infection with a second homologue virus (PhopGV-CR3) activated the internal virus. Whereas a third isolate, namely PhopGV-GR1, was able to suppress the internal virus and showed superinfection exclusion. This research shows that stable virus infections seem to be common for insect populations and have an impact on population dynamics. It revealed that PhopGV isolates can either tolerate or block each other. A potentially new Nosema species (Nosema sp. Phop) was purified from microsporidian infected individuals of P. operculella. It was found that an infection of P. operculella larvae with Nosema sp. can reduce PhopGV-caused mortality and thus showed an antagonistic effect against PhopGV. These findings of virus-virus and virus-microsporidium interaction can help to predict the mode of action if PhopGV is applied against P. operculella field populations, where other PhopGV isolates or microsporidia can naturally occur

Pareto Heuristic For Product Family-Oriented Product-Workstation Allocation Planning With Restricted Capacities

A prerequisite for value stream design is the segmentation of products into families. This means that all products of a family are assigned to the same group of workstations so that the resulting material flows are separated as good as possible, and a higher degree of transparency is reached on the shop floor. However, since the number of workstations as well as their capacity is limited, shared resources cannot always be avoided in practice. Furthermore, the objective of product family orientation may compete with the objective of fulfilling product-workstation preferences. These preferences result, for example, from required equipment like specific tooling or from capability requirements. An optimization heuristic for this productworkstation allocation problem is presented within this article. First, the mathematical problem is formally described, then the heuristic is introduced and the required data for its application is outlined. For the evaluation, an extensive test set is generated, comparison heuristics are implemented, and solutions are made comparable through problem-specific bounds for both objectives. The results show that the solution quality of the pareto heuristic for both objective functions achieves almost the level of the comparison heuristics, which optimize only one of the objectives in isolation