Margaret Thatcher, Dilma Rousseff, & Angela Merkel: The Impact of Female World Leaders through Collaborative Negotiation

This paper seeks to address the question, “How do women negotiate international crisis and what are their outcomes?” To do this, I derive hypothesis from both the realist and feminist theories to test in three case studies of prominent women leaders in the 20th-21st centuries. I analyze qualitative case studies on Margaret Thatcher, Dilma Rousseff, and Angela Merkel, in which I test variation in negotiation style affecting outcomes. In addition to assessing their early influences and overall negotiating styles, I look at the specific cases of The Falkland Islands Crisis, the NSA Surveillance Crisis, and the Ukraine Crisis negotiations. I find that Merkel and Rousseff embraced collaborative approaches, while Thatcher consistently used a confrontational approach. I also find that collaborative approaches tend to result in better outcomes for all parties, while a confrontational approach creates winners and losers. Overall, this offers more support for feminist theory than realist theory

A Scientist’s Guide for Engaging in Policy in the United States

Scientific research and expertise play a critical role in informing legislative decisions and guiding effective policy. However, significant communication gaps persist between scientists and policymakers. While interest in science policy among researchers has substantially increased in recent decades, traditional academic and research careers rarely provide formal training or exposure to the inner workings of government, public policy, or communicating scientific findings to broad audiences. Here, we offer 10 practical steps for scientists who want to engage in science policy efforts, with a focus on state and federal policy in the United States. We first include a primer to government structure and tailoring science communication for a policymaker audience. We then provide action-oriented steps that focus on arranging and successfully navigating meetings with government officials. Finally, we suggest structural steps in academia that would provide resources and support for students, researchers, and faculty who are interested in policy. We offer our perspective, as early-career marine scientists who have participated in policy discussions at state and federal levels and through the American Geophysical Union’s “Voices for Science” program. This guide offers potential pathways for engagement in science policy, and provides researchers with tangible actions to effectively reach stakeholders. Lastly, we hope to activate further conversations on best practices for policy engagement, particularly for researchers interested in careers at the science policy interface

Sulfur isotope analysis of cysteine and methionine via preparatory liquid chromatography and elemental analyzer isotope ratio mass spectrometry

Rationale: Sulfur isotope analysis of organic sulfur‐containing molecules has previously been hindered by challenging preparatory chemistry and analytical requirements for large sample sizes. The natural‐abundance sulfur isotopic compositions of the sulfur‐containing amino acids, cysteine and methionine, have therefore not yet been investigated despite potential utility in biomedicine, ecology, oceanography, biogeochemistry, and other fields. Methods: Cysteine and methionine were subjected to hot acid hydrolysis followed by quantitative oxidation in performic acid to yield cysteic acid and methionine sulfone. These stable, oxidized products were then separated by reversed‐phase high‐performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) and verified via offline liquid chromatography/mass spectrometry (LC/MS). The sulfur isotope ratios (δ³⁴S values) of purified analytes were then measured via combustion elemental analyzer coupled to isotope ratio mass spectrometry (EA/IRMS). The EA was equipped with a temperature‐ramped chromatographic column and programmable helium carrier flow rates. Results: On‐column focusing of SO2 in the EA/IRMS system, combined with reduced He carrier flow during elution, greatly improved sensitivity, allowing precise (0.1–0.3‰ 1 s.d.) δ³⁴S measurements of 1 to 10 μg sulfur. We validated that our method for purification of cysteine and methionine was negligibly fractionating using amino acid and protein standards. Proof‐of‐concept measurements of fish muscle tissue and bacteria demonstrated differences up to 4‰ between the δ³⁴S values of cysteine and methionine that can be connected to biosynthetic pathways. Conclusions: We have developed a sensitive, precise method for measuring the natural‐abundance sulfur isotopic compositions of cysteine and methionine isolated from biological samples. This capability opens up diverse applications of sulfur isotopes in amino acids and proteins, from use as a tracer in organisms and the environment, to fundamental aspects of metabolism and biosynthesis

Replaying the Tape of Academia: Fourteen Alternative Practices for the Physical Sciences

The evolution of modern academic practices, analogous to the evolution of biological systems, reflects the influence of both contingency and determinism. From a theoretical perspective, how then could academic practices differ from those that were inherited? Would any alternative outcomes be more just, equitable, diverse, or inclusive? Here we present 14 alternative academic practices that might be attained upon replaying the tape of academia and evaluate their benefits and drawbacks. Oriented primarily around the physical sciences within the United States, these alternative practices reconsider common activities within the broad categories of the graduate student experience, faculty careers, evaluation methods, peer review and publication, and conference norms. Consideration of these alternative practices can guide within-system change and large-scale restructuring of academia to address the myriad challenges facing researchers and students. Conversely, alternative practices may introduce new issues or exacerbate existing problems. These alternative practices are meant to be imaginative, not prescriptive, and we hope their underlying ideas spur reflection and conversation on the existing practices embedded within academic culture. Readers are encouraged to complete a brief survey regarding their impressions of the alternative practices, available at the following link: rebrand.ly/AlternativePractices2024

Sulfur Cycling in the Water Columns of Lakes and Oceans

Sulfur is a critical bioelement central to many of Earth’s biogeochemical cycles. Studies of sulfur have overwhelmingly focused on sediments, where transformations between organic and inorganic sulfur phases drive short-term biological reactions and long-term climate cycles. However, sulfur cycling in the water column is just as dynamic and exerts similar controls over biogeochemical cycles in lakes and oceans – although the exact dynamics are only beginning to be understood. This thesis provides new understanding of sulfur cycling in aquatic environments through three chapters that span laboratory developments and field observations. Chapter 1 presents a time-series in enigmatic Mono Lake, CA, where the temporal dynamics of sulfur cycling microbes was investigated. This study, published in Geobiology, highlights the dependency of sulfate reduction and oxidation on lake chemistry and the need for studies to move beyond “snapshots” of microbial diversity. Chapter 2, published in Rapid Communications in Mass Spectrometry, presents development of a highly sensitive (1-10 µg S) mass spectrometry technique that allows, for the first time, sulfur isotope measurements of amino acids. These new measurements permitted discovery of new connections between metabolism and sulfur isotope signatures. Chapter 3 further applies these novel methods, making the first sulfur isotope measurements of marine dissolved organic matter. The data indicated that marine organic sulfur is entirely produced by phytoplankton and implied that heterotrophic bacteria rapidly and efficiently recycle reduced sulfur compounds, even in the water column. Taken together, these three chapters significantly advanced available tools for studying sulfur in the environment and expanded our understanding of modern aquatic sulfur cycling. The final chapter represents a departure from oceans, lakes, mass spectrometry, and sulfur. Here, I evaluate the success and impacts of my outreach project, the popular Women Doing Science Instagram, in portraying diverse, international women scientists, noting the powerful potential for social media to bolster STEM identity for graduate students.</p

On deconvolution problems: numerical aspects

An optimal algorithm is described for solving the deconvolution problem of the form ${\bf k}u:=\int_0^tk(t-s)u(s)ds=f(t)$ given the noisy data $f_\delta$, $||f-f_\delta||\leq \delta.$ The idea of the method consists of the representation ${\bf k}=A(I+S)$, where $S$ is a compact operator, $I+S$ is injective, $I$ is the identity operator, $A$ is not boundedly invertible, and an optimal regularizer is constructed for $A$. The optimal regularizer is constructed using the results of the paper MR 40#5130.Comment: 7 figure

In the wake of Conrad: ships and sailors in early twentieth-century maritime fiction

The aim of this thesis is to explore the changing representation of ships and sailors in English maritime fiction in the early twentieth century, as sailing ships were being replaced by steamships. It begins with a critical review examining the reception of Joseph Conrad’s maritime fiction and subsequently presents new readings of five of his sea novels and their response to the transition between sail and steam: The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ (1897), Lord Jim (1900), Romance (1903), Chance (1913) and The Shadow-Line (1917). Arguing that Conrad’s work is not the culmination of the maritime fiction genre, the third chapter examines sea stories that retreated back to the past in pirate adventure narratives. It begins with a contextual review of pirate fiction, followed by analyses of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s pirate short stories (1897 and 1911), F. Tennyson Jesse’s Moonraker (1927), and Richard Hughes’s A High Wind in Jamaica (1929). In the same period, other maritime texts turned away from the pirate romance to embrace the harsh realities of the brave new mechanised maritime world and the changing role of the sailor on modern vessels; chapter four examines the impact of war on maritime fiction through an analysis of Erskine Childers’s The Riddle of the Sands (1903), which responded to and exacerbated national fears about invasion, while chapter five considers the impact of industrialisation on maritime fiction in James Hanley’s Boy (1931) and Malcolm Lowry’s Ultramarine (1933). The sixth chapter considers the role of fact and fiction in Richard Hughes’s In Hazard (1938) and examines the ways in which this text looks back to Conrad’s work. Ultimately, the texts discussed prompt a reconsideration of the maritime fiction genre, while the conclusion suggests how it enables further experimentation with the sea story throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century