Confederate Conscription and the Struggle for Southern Soldiers

Confederate Conscription and the Struggle for Southern Soldiers is thoroughly researched and carefully argued . . . Confederate Conscription and the Struggle for Southern Soldiers deserves immediate status as the standard work on Confederate conscription. It will be read with appreciation by anyone interested in Confederate identity, governance, and war-making

Potential Wolverine Habitat vs. Winter Recreation. Conflict in Colorado!

The Global list of endangered species of flora and fauna is growing, with the most highly specialized species often at ‘critically endangered’ status. Managing these populations effectively involves numerous and varied organizations, conflicting motivations, arbitrary anthropogenic boundaries and often most importantly, data compilation and management. We are seeing many more reintroductions of locally extirpated species back into habitats of historical prevalence – and as extreme a method of conservation as this is, there is still a need for more extreme methods. High profile and highly specialized endangered species are often managed in a ‘crisis’ mode, where complex behaviors and interactions are lost for the sake of simple preservation of the species (for instance the Giant Panda in China). Since many animal species depend on vegetation, which is geography-dependent, GIS has become an essential tool in the conservation process, allowing large quantitative and qualitative datasets to be analyzed / overlain and updated with ease. With the help of GIS, more theoretical feasibility studies can be done, and thus we get a much better assessment of areas with the necessary essential conditions. Wolverines once roamed throughout the Rocky Mountains, and although at time of writing Colorado has a recorded population of one (Danzinger, 2011 and others) scientists say that it has the most abundant potential wolverine habitat in the lower 48 states (12-2010 Colorado News Article). A highly territorial, solitary and aggressive animal, the wolverine is one of the last of the large mammals in North America to still require extensive study before any significant conservation attempt can be undertaken. Difficulties arise mostly due to the incredible adaptations of this mammal to some of the most inhospitable and rapidly diminishing landscapes in existence – and our inability to follow their movements and monitor their behavior with any ease

Bound For the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, Portrait of an American Hero

Let my people go The Moses of Civil War America Out of one of the few surviving photographs of Harriet Tubman, a small black woman in her eighties stares into the camera with a mesmerizing determination. In her purposeful demeanor and her resolute eyes, one can discern the weight...

Patchwork nation: sources of Confederate nationalism, 1848-1865

"Patchwork Nation" explores white southerners' conceptions of nationalism during the American Civil War era. The core impetus of Confederate nationalism was the desire to preserve slavery, but my emphasis is on the broad range of intellectual, cultural, and personal sources that white southerners drew upon as they engaged the concept of nationalism in their lives. Investigating these sources pushes our understanding of Confederate nationalism in three previously neglected directions: outward, backward, and inward. White southerners conceived of Confederate nationalism in light of what they already knew about the concept. Nationalism was then enjoying a golden age in Europe, and transatlantic intellectual currents greatly influenced ideas about nationalism in the American South. Hence our turn outward. But the nationalism with which white southerners were most familiar was antebellum American nationalism, in which most of them had been enthusiastic participants. Hence our turn backward. In defining a new nationalism, they replicated many aspects of the old, in both substantive and conceptual terms. Such replication generated a persistent problem that will concern us throughout: how could the South retain the nationalism of a country from which it had voluntarily departed? Our final turn takes us inward, into the sphere of everyday life. Confederate nationalism came to matter to individual white southerners because of the ways they connected it to their personal identities and the fabric of their daily lives. Thus they defined individual responsibility to the nation by using ideas about manhood and womanhood, morality and religious beliefs, sacrifice and daily suffering. Connections between individuals and the nation were especially intense when they involved perceptions of shared victimhood at the hands of the northern enemy. When this sense of victimhood came to encompass not just slavery and politics but personal fears as well, it became the most potent source of nationalism of all. The image of a patchwork captures the way that white southerners drew on all of these resources in conceiving of Confederate nationalism and in defining their individual connections to it. This was a nationalism crafted by many hands, using varied materials, with a pattern that emerged only in the making

Bifidobacterium breve with α-Linolenic Acid and Linoleic Acid Alters Fatty Acid Metabolism in the Maternal Separation Model of Irritable Bowel Syndrome

peer-reviewedThe aim of this study was to compare the impact of dietary supplementation with a Bifidobacterium breve strain together with linoleic acid & α-linolenic acid, for 7 weeks, on colonic sensitivity and fatty acid metabolism in rats. Maternally separated and non-maternally separated Sprague Dawley rats (n = 15) were orally gavaged with either B. breve DPC6330 (109 microorganisms/day) alone or in combination with 0.5% (w/w) linoleic acid & 0.5% (w/w) α-linolenic acid, daily for 7 weeks and compared with trehalose and bovine serum albumin. Tissue fatty acid composition was assessed by gas-liquid chromatography and visceral hypersensitivity was assessed by colorectal distension. Significant differences in the fatty acid profiles of the non-separated controls and maternally separated controls were observed for α-linolenic acid and arachidonic acid in the liver, oleic acid and eicosenoic acid (c11) in adipose tissue, and for palmitoleic acid and docosahexaenoic acid in serum (p<0.05). Administration of B. breve DPC6330 to MS rats significantly increased palmitoleic acid, arachidonic acid and docosahexaenoic acid in the liver, eicosenoic acid (c11) in adipose tissue and palmitoleic acid in the prefrontal cortex (p<0.05), whereas feeding B. breve DPC6330 to non separated rats significantly increased eicosapentaenoic acid and docosapentaenoic acid in serum (p<0.05) compared with the NS un-supplemented controls. Administration of B. breve DPC6330 in combination with linoleic acid and α-linolenic acid to maternally separated rats significantly increased docosapentaenoic acid in the serum (p<0.01) and α-linolenic acid in adipose tissue (p<0.001), whereas feeding B. breve DPC6330 with fatty acid supplementation to non-separated rats significantly increased liver and serum docosapentaenoic acid (p<0.05), and α-linolenic acid in adipose tissue (p<0.001). B. breve DPC6330 influenced host fatty acid metabolism. Administration of B. breve DPC6330 to maternally separated rats significantly modified the palmitoleic acid, arachidonic acid and docosahexaenoic acid contents in tissues. The effect was not observed in non-separated animals.This work was supported by the Science Foundation of Ireland – funded Centre for Science, Engineering and Technology, the Alimentary Pharmabiotic Centre

Preventing disease and saving resources:the potential contribution of increasing breastfeeding rates in the UK

Two challenges stand out as we contemplate the future of health services in the United Kingdom. The first is the state of the public finances and therefore the pressure in real terms on health services funding. The second is the recurring and vexing problem of health inequalities. The state of health inequalities in Britain has been commented on by many, but we have seen precious little real change in the disproportionate burden of early death and illness among the most disadvantaged and indeed across the whole health gradient in recent years.This work was funded by UNICEF UK

A face recognition system for assistive robots

Assistive robots collaborating with people demand strong Human-Robot interaction capabilities. In this way, recognizing the person the robot has to interact with is paramount to provide a personalized service and reach a satisfactory end-user experience. To this end, face recognition: a non-intrusive, automatic mechanism of identification using biometric identifiers from an user's face, has gained relevance in the recent years, as the advances in machine learning and the creation of huge public datasets have considerably improved the state-of-the-art performance. In this work we study different open-source implementations of the typical components of state-of-the-art face recognition pipelines, including face detection, feature extraction and classification, and propose a recognition system integrating the most suitable methods for their utilization in assistant robots. Concretely, for face detection we have considered MTCNN, OpenCV's DNN, and OpenPose, while for feature extraction we have analyzed InsightFace and Facenet. We have made public an implementation of the proposed recognition framework, ready to be used by any robot running the Robot Operating System (ROS). The methods in the spotlight have been compared in terms of accuracy and performance in common benchmark datasets, namely FDDB and LFW, to aid the choice of the final system implementation, which has been tested in a real robotic platform.This work is supported by the Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech, the research projects WISER ([DPI2017-84827-R]),funded by the Spanish Government, and financed by European RegionalDevelopment’s funds (FEDER), and MoveCare ([ICT-26-2016b-GA-732158]), funded by the European H2020 program, and by a postdoc contract from the I-PPIT-UMA program financed by the University of Málaga

Provider and service-user perspectives of volunteer health-worker service provision in Ayeyarwady Region, Myanmar: a qualitative study.

OBJECTIVES: To explore perspectives and reported experiences of service users, community providers and policymakers related to volunteer health-worker services provision in a rural area of Myanmar. METHODS: A qualitative interview study was conducted in rural communities with 54 service users and 17 community providers in Ayeyarwady Region, Myanmar, and with 14 national managers and policymakers in Yangon Myanmar. Topics included reasons for seeking health services, views and experiences, and comparison with experiences of other services. Data were analysed thematically using deductive and inductive coding. RESULTS: Accessibility and affordability were important to all participants. Service users described the particular relevance of trust, familiarity and acceptability in choosing a provider. Perceived quality and effectiveness were necessary for trust to develop. Perceived value of volunteers was a cross-cutting dimension, which was interpreted differently by different participants. CONCLUSIONS: Results suggest that volunteers are appropriate and valued, and support 'availability', 'accessibility' and 'acceptability' as dimensions of health services access in this setting. However, social complexities should be considered to ensure effective service delivery. Further research into trust-building, developing quality perceptions and resulting service-user choices would be useful to inform effective policy and planning