CHA advocacy - Interventions publiques de la SHC

The federal government is moving to eliminate the mandatory Canada census long form questionnaire, replacing it with a voluntary survey. The CHA sent the follwing letter on the issue.Le gouvernement fédéral désire éliminer le formulaire détaillé du recensement obligatoire du Canada pour le remplacer par un sondage volontaire. La SHC a rédigé la lettre suivante à ce sujet

Pathways to interleukin-6 in healthy males and serious leisure male athletes: physical activity, body composition and age.

Physical activity (PA) is beneficial to overall health, in part due to physiological changes that lower risk factors for cardiovascular disease, including reduced inflammation. However, the mechanism by which PA reduces inflammation is unclear. One possible pathway is that PA improves body composition which in turn reduces inflammation. To test this hypothesis, we used structural equation modeling (SEM) to assess PA-body composition -inflammation pathways, as well as influences of age. In a sample of 72 healthy males with a range of PA profiles (age 18-65, mean ± sd = ), we measured PA as metabolic equivalent tasks (as per the International PA Questionnaire), body composition as percent body fat, lean mass, and fat mass, and inflammation as plasma interleukin-6 (IL-6). We treated body composition in the SEM analysis as a latent variable indicated by the three measures. We performed statistical corrections for missing values and one outlier. The model demonstrated significant effects of PA on IL-6 both directly and through body composition. Percent body fat, fat mass, and lean mass were significant indicators of the body composition latent variable. Additionally, age showed an indirect effect on IL-6 through body composition, but no direct effect. The findings suggest that PA does improve inflammatory profile through improving body composition, but that other pathways also exist

Sylvia Plath images of life in a poet of death

On a creative and a personal level, Sylvia Plath seems to have been fascinated by the relationship between life and death. Her work reflects an ongoing preoccupation with duality and a sense of tension between two opposing forces suffuses virtually every poem she wrote in the period from 1956 to early 1963. Because her attitude to both life and death is deeply ambivalent, Plath's poetry rests on a strong awareness of conflict and her art is characterized by a continual pull between extremes. This thesis is an examination of how she uses images of life in poems that ostensibly deal with death.While Plath draws on the events of her own life for her poetic material, she also converts her personal experiences into a universal myth. She was familiar with Robert Graves's eclectic study of the pagan nature deity, The White Goddess, and she seems to have incorporated part of his symbolism into her own code of images. In particular, she adopts Graves's triple goddess of nature as one of the dominant figures in her created world, for the White Goddess is associated with life and death alike.Plath's dichotomy of life and death works on different planes. Firstly, she frequently envisages the self as divided and the opposition between life and death takes on the dimensions of an internal psychological war. Secondly, she extends the battle between life and death to the creative sphere. Thirdly, she explores the idea of life as a journey from birth to death. The White Goddess is linked with the three natural realms of earth, sky and underworld. And Plath relies largely on seasonal, lunar and chthonic images in her poetry. Furthermore, the three colours of the goddess - white , red and black - are the dominant hues of her poetry

A Frenchwoman Writes about Indochina, 1931-1949: Andrée Viollis and Anti-colonialism

“A Frenchwoman Writes about Indochina, 1931-1949: Andrée Viollis and Anti-colonialism” examines investigative reporter Andrée Viollis’ journalistic career, especially her articles and books on French and other European colonies between 1922 and 1935, in order to challenge recent postcolonial critiques of her 1935 book, Indochine S.O.S, as immured in colonial ideology and rhetoric, including a kind of patriarchal feminism, despite being an exposé of colonial abuses and sympathetic to indigenous rebels against the colonial regime. Following the lines of recent critiques of postcolonial cultural approaches for inattention to the material conditions of colonialism, and feminist transnational scholars who attempt to link labour conditions in the “First World” to those in the “Third World,” The article establishes Viollis’ credentials as a liberal, not a maternal or patriarchal feminist, analyses her journalistic style, especially her use of indirect suggestion as a reporter in the popular daily press, and describes the interest in the colonies in the French public and press. Next the article describes Viollis’ colonial reporting and publications from the 1920s through 1935, with special attention to her exposés of economic exploitation in British and French colonies. Third, the article examines the evidence cited in postcolonial critiques of Viollis’ advocacy of equality between colonizers and colonized as mere equality between people of the same social class, her portrayal of indigenous Vietnamese as degraded, her belief that the French or French women should be moral tutors of the uncivilized natives, and finally her portrayal of indigenous peoples as degraded and animalistic, in light of a full analysis of her career and book. After a detailed analysis of her position on equality, morality, and the condition of peasants and workers up to and in the book, the articles rejects the evidence as partial and decontextualized, and the interpretation as unfamiliar with Viollis’ style.A Frenchwoman Writes about Indochina, 1931-1949: Andrée Viollis and Anti-colonialism examine la carrière d’Andrée Viollis à titre de journaliste d’investigation, en particulier ses articles et ses livres sur les colonies françaises et d’autres colonies européennes de 1922 à 1935, dans le but de remettre en question les récentes critiques postcoloniales de son ouvrage, Indochine S.O.S, qui le qualifient d’emmuré dans l’idéologie et la rhétorique coloniales et de sorte de féminisme patriarcal, en dépit de la dénonciation des abus coloniaux et de la sympathie démontrée envers les indigènes opposés au régime colonial. Calqué sur les récentes critiques des approches culturelles postcoloniales qui font fie des conditions matérielles du colonialisme et sur les études menées sur le féminisme transnational, qui tentent d’établir un lien entre les conditions de travail dans les « pays industrialisés » et celles dans le « tiers monde », l’article établit d’abord la réputation de Viollis en tant que féministe libérale, non pas comme féministe matriarcale ou patriarcale; il analyse son style journaliste, en particulier l’utilisation qu’elle fait de la suggestion indirecte comme investigatrice dans la presse populaire quotidienne et il décrit l’intérêt des colonies pour la presse et le public français. Deuxièmement, l’article décrit les reportages et les publications de Viollis sur les colonies des années 1920 jusqu’en 1935, en portant une attention particulière à sa dénonciation de l’exploitation économique des colonies britanniques et françaises. Troisièmement, l’article examine la perspective des critiques postcoloniales à l’égard du point de vue de Viollis quant à l’égalité entre les colonisateurs et les colonisés, soit la simple égalité entre des personnes de même classe sociale, du portrait qu’elle brosse des Vietnamiens indigènes comme étant des personnes dégradées, et de la conviction que les Français ou les femmes françaises devraient être les tuteurs moraux des autochtones non civilisés, et finalement de sa représentation des autochtones comme celle de personnes avilies et habitées d’un instinct animal, à la lumière d’une analyse complète de sa carrière et de son livre. Après une analyse détaillée de son point de vue sur l’égalité, la moralité et la condition des paysans et des travailleurs jusqu’à la parution de son livre et dans son livre, l’article rejette l’argument le considérant comme partial et hors contexte, et l’interprétation comme se situant loin du style de Viollis

Effects of the Culture in Two Schools on the Progress and Outcomes of Staff Development

This is the publisher's version, also found at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1002088Research suggests that traditional staff development programs that neglect the context of the school and the classroom have not been successful. Failure to recognize participants' beliefs and understandings and the influence of school context can strongly affect the results of a staff development program. In this article we examine a staff development program implemented in 2 elementary schools that focused on the beliefs and understandings about reading comprehension instruction of 12 teachers in grades 4-6. This staff development program attempted to shift responsibility from the staff developers to the teachers and incorporate teachers' beliefs, practices, and concerns into the program content. We describe interactions in the group-level staff development process. Additionally, we explore whether there were differences in the processes in the 2 schools and whether these differences could be attributed to differences in school culture. Results suggested that group collaboration and empowerment were strongly affected by the interaction of school culture and the staff development process involved. The effectiveness of a staff development program may be related to the social norms within a school that encourage teachers to discuss their beliefs and practices. Finally, we consider the need for an alternative approach to staff development

Dressing Modern Frenchwomen

At a glance, high fashion and feminism seem unlikely partners. Between the First and Second World Wars, however, these forces combined femininity and modernity to create the new, modern French woman. In this engaging study, Mary Lynn Stewart reveals the fashion industry as an integral part of women's transition into modernity. Analyzing what female columnists in fashion magazines and popular women novelists wrote about the "new silhouette," Stewart shows how bourgeois women feminized the more severe, masculine images that elite designers promoted to create a hybrid form of modern that both emancipated women and celebrated their femininity. She delves into the intricacies of marketing the new clothes and the new image to middle-class women and examines the nuts and bolts of a changing industry—including textile production, relationships between suppliers and department stores, and privacy and intellectual property issues surrounding ready-to-wear couture designs. Dressing Modern Frenchwomen draws from thousands of magazine covers, advertisements, fashion columns, and features to uncover and untangle the fascinating relationships among the fashion industry, the development of modern marketing techniques, and the evolution of the modern woman as active, mobile, and liberated