Senior Recital : Megan Mitchell

Kemp Recital HallOctober 18, 2014Saturday Afternoon7:30 p.m

Human Rights, Environmental Duties: People, Planet & State

All elements of human well-being are ultimately dependent upon a natural environment which provides access to sufficient food and water, promotes both mental and physical health, and ultimately, permits life itself. In seeking the universal achievement of these goods, international human rights law must begin to require States to take strong action to meet the challenges posed by escalating environmental disintegrity. This thesis examines the extent to which the existing international human rights regime provides a means to achieve this. The role of population management as one means of meeting environmental obligations will be discussed, with the goal of demonstrating that the existing law provides a powerful tool both for the advancement of individual rights and for environmental protection. The latter half will consider how the current law incorporates explicit environmental duties, as well as the potential scope for development of these in the future. The debate surrounding the introduction of an 'environmental human right' will be outlined, with the ultimate conclusion that the law as it already exists is more than capable of adequately addressing environmental degradation – all that is required is that it be interpreted and realised in an environmentally cognisant way

Getting Unstuck: A Collaborative Approach to Getting Started with Digital Preservation

How can we collaborate across our institutions to preserve the digital objects we\u27re responsible for creating and collecting in our libraries? That’s the question five small liberal arts college libraries asked themselves that sparked a collaborative digital preservation initiative. The diversity of our institutions’ missions and collections present challenges to collaboration, particularly in the areas of records management and born-digital materials for which heightened security concerns and a greater risk of loss are paramount. Those challenges may not only prevent collaboration. They may also prevent institutions from taking action to address them on their own campuses, partially due to the relatively high cost of the more comprehensive digital preservation software solutions on the market, or the lack of technical expertise to implement and support sustainable open source solutions. Acknowledging our diversity, we discovered that while it was unlikely we would be able to collaboratively address all of our individual digital preservation challenges, we found that we could get started on developing digital preservation plans and expertise by shifting a large volume of digitized content with an inherently lower risk of permanent loss to a shared storage service and distribute the cost of hosting that content, allowing those institutions with mandates to preserve their campus’ digital legacies, manifested in personal, born-digital files, to experiment more readily with all-in-one preservation systems at a lower price point. In this session, we will describe how we came to select a shared cloud-based solution to serve as a collaborative platform on which to cut our teeth on digital preservation practices, learn from each other about best practices, and most importantly, to simply get started on developing realistic digital preservation strategies based on direct experience

Saxophone Recital: Zach Hilligoss and Megan Mitchell

Kemp Recital HallMarch 7, 2012Wednesday Evening8:30 p.m

Brain Differences in the Prefrontal Cortex, Amygdala, and Hippocampus in Youth with Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia

Context: Classical Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia (CAH) due to 21-hydroxylase deficiency results in hormone imbalances present both prenatally and postnatally that may impact the developing brain. Objective: To characterize gray matter morphology in the prefrontal cortex and subregion volumes of the amygdala and hippocampus in youth with CAH, compared to controls. Design: A cross-sectional study of 27 CAH youth (16 female; 12.6 ± 3.4 year) and 35 typically developing, healthy controls (20 female; 13.0 ± 2.8 year) with 3-T magnetic resonance imaging scans. Brain volumes of interest included bilateral prefrontal cortex, and nine amygdala and six hippocampal subregions. Between-subject effects of group (CAH vs control) and sex, and their interaction (group-by-sex) on brain volumes were studied, while controlling for intracranial volume (ICV) and group differences in body mass index and bone age. Results: CAH youth had smaller ICV and increased cerebrospinal fluid volume compared to controls. In fully-adjusted models, CAH youth had smaller bilateral, superior and caudal middle frontal volumes, and smaller left lateral orbito-frontal volumes compared to controls. Medial temporal lobe analyses revealed the left hippocampus was smaller in fully-adjusted models. CAH youth also had significantly smaller lateral nucleus of the amygdala and hippocampal subiculum and CA1 subregions. Conclusions: This study replicates previous findings of smaller medial temporal lobe volumes in CAH patients, and suggests that lateral nucleus of the amygdala, as well as subiculum and subfield CA1 of the hippocampus are particularly affected within the medial temporal lobes in CAH youth

The problem of women in Hobbes's Leviathan

Hobbes is sometimes interpreted as a proto-feminist, in that men and women are seemingly equal in the state of nature. A few scholars have argued that men and women are equally likely to establish political society. Carole Pateman denies this latter claim and maintains that despite their equal natural abilities, women become men's servants. She argues that women are weakened by their attempts to protect their children and thus, are easily conquered by men. Against Pateman, I argue that her interpretation violates psychological egoism, an essential feature of Hobbes's understanding of human nature. I advance a weak equality reading, in which men and women are equal in prudence but men are generally stronger. Eventually, men are able to conquer women and establish male dominion through contracts. Hobbes is a proto-feminist because the subordination of women is not justified by women's natural weakness, but through contracts to which women must consent

Implicit Bias, Colorblindness and Institutional Racism

This dissertation concerns the nature and extent of institutional racism. It consists of three articles, each of which draws upon the history of and current conditions facing black Americans to establish more general conclusions about institutional racism. In the first article, I observe that striking inequalities in education, income, incarceration rates and employment have persisted between black and white Americans despite a decline in explicit anti-black racism among whites and a rise in legislation intended to prevent many of the most virulent forms of discrimination. I ask, "Are these pervasive inequalities the result of institutional racism?" I notice that for some social scientists (I call them "structuralists") the answer to this question is trivial. They hold that racism is a system wherein advantages are divided along racial lines. Consequently, institutions that create or support racial inequalities are, simply in virtue of that fact, racist. I maintain that the question is meaningful and the answer important. Against the structuralists, I defend the view that institutions are only racist insofar as they perpetuate the racism of agents. So, if current racial inequalities are the result of institutional racism, then it must be the case that the institutions that cause them were created or are currently sustained by racist individuals, who, consciously or unconsciously, express their racist beliefs and attitudes through the policies, practices, and organizational structures they adopt or maintain. However, if part of the motivation behind presenting a theory of institutional racism is, as I think it should be, to aid in its eradication, one might worry that this more restrictive theory will fail to yield any targets for political action. The increasingly covert and unconscious nature of much agential racism could make it very difficult to prove that any specific institutional actions are racist. I assuage this worry by demonstrating in the second article that the pervasive phenomenon of implicit racial bias is an instance of institutional racism. In the third and final article, I argue that colorblind policies and rational racial profiling, when perpetuated against black Americans by the state, are racist.Doctor of Philosoph

Structure of the T109S mutant of Escherichia coli dihydroorotase complexed with the inhibitor 5-­fluoroorotate: catalytic activity is reflected by the crystal form

A single-point mutant (T109S) of E. coli dihydroorotase initially crystallizes so that the two monomers of the dimer are related by a crystallographic twofold axis. In the presence of substrate, conversion to the previously observed asymmetric dimer with substrate bound in one subunit and product in the other is observed

Definition of whole person care in general practice in the English language literature: A systematic review

Objectives: The importance of ‘whole person’ or ‘holistic’ care is widely recognised, particularly with an increasing prevalence of chronic multimorbidity internationally. This approach to care is a defining feature of general practice. However, its precise meaning remains ambiguous. We aimed to determine how the term ‘whole person’ care is understood by general practitioners (GPs), and whether it is synonymous with ‘[w]holistic’ and ‘biopsychosocial’ care. Design: Systematic literature review. Methods: MEDLINE, PubMed, EMBASE, CINAHL, PsycINFO, Web of Science, Proquest Dissertations and Theses, Science. gov (Health and Medicine database), Google Scholar and included studies’ reference lists were searched with an unlimited date range. Systematic or literature reviews, original research, theoretical articles or books/book chapters; specific to general practice; relevant to the research question; and published in English were included. Included literature was critically appraised, and data were extracted and analysed using thematic synthesis. Results: Fifty publications were included from 4297 non-duplicate records retrieved. Six themes were identified: a multidimensional, integrated approach; the importance of the therapeutic relationship; acknowledging doctors’ humanity; recognising patients’ individual personhood; viewing health as more than absence of disease; and employing a range of treatment modalities. Whole person, biopsychosocial and holistic terminology were often used interchangeably, but were not synonymous. Conclusions: Whole person, holistic and biopsychosocial terminology are primarily characterised by a multidimensional approach to care and incorporate additional elements described above. Whole person care probably represents the closest representation of the basis for general practice. Health systems aiming to provide whole person care need to address the challenge of integrating the care of other health professionals, and maintaining the patient–doctor relationship central to the themes identified. Further research is required to clarify the representativeness of the findings, and the relative importance GPs’ assign to each theme. PROSPERO registration number: CRD42017058824