There and Back Again ~ Odysseus and Bilbo Baggins

Sees parallels between incidents in The Odyssey and The Hobbit. Bilbo and Odysseus also share similar development as heroes during their respective journeys

Interview of Alice Notley

Alice Notley is a major American poet of our day, who has been living in Paris since the early 1990s, when she moved there with her second husband, the English poet, Doug Oliver (1937-2000), because Paris was where his professorial career was taking him. At that point Alice Notley was finding New York less amenable and was keen to go somewhere else. When he died in 2000, Alice Notley was sufficiently settled into Paris to remain there. Although she is a Parisian now, Alice Notley was also a k..

The Epicurean Parasite: Horace, Satires 1.1-3

We have learned a great deal in recent years about reading Horace\u27s satires; there is now widespread agreement that the speaker of the satires is himself a character within them, a persona. Such a persona may be most effective when it has obvious connections with its creator, but that fact does not preclude the exaggeration of reality, or even its complete inversion. For Horace the implications of this approach are exciting: instead of a poet discoursing with cheerful earnestness on morality, on poetry and on his daily life, we have a fictional character, whom we do not have to take seriously at all.The three diatribe satires present us with a character so absurd that they have been taken, I think rightly, as parodies. Although the poems were once appreciated as effective moralising sermons, even their admirers found it hard to justify the lack of intellectual coherence, to say nothing of the astonishing vulgarity of the second satire. As parodies, however, the poems are wonderfully successful. The speaker trots out a series of banalities: ‘people should be content with who they are’; ‘people should not go to extremes’; ‘people should be consistent’. But he invariably gets distracted, goes off on tangential rants, and makes a fool of himself. The moralist of the first three satires is, to put it bluntly, a jerk

Social Class

Discussion of class structure in fifth-century Athens, historical constitution of theater audiences, and the changes in the comic representation of class antagonism from Aristophanes to Menander

Strepsiades as a Comic Ixion

published or submitted for publicatio

Agricultural water conservation in the Lower Flint River Basin

Proceedings of the 2009 Georgia Water Resources Conference, April 27, 28, and 29, 2009 Athens, Georgia.The Lower Flint River Basin is one of the most ecologically rich river systems in Georgia. The Flint River Basin Program is a conservation partnership between the Flint River Soil and Water Conservation District, the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service and The Nature Conservancy. The objective of the program is to help farmers conserve water. The irrigation water management practices supported by the program include irrigation retrofits, variable rate irrigation (VRI), remote soil moisture monitoring and conservation tillage. Since 2003, these practices have conserved more than 10 billion gallons of water. In 2004, the program assisted in the deployment of 22 VRI systems in south Georgia. VRI conserves water by mapping crop acres and defining irrigation patterns according to soil type, slope and hydrology. In 2005, the program deployed an 100 square mile wireless broadband telemetry network to provide connectivity to 17 center pivot irrigation systems covering 2,467 crop acres. The network supplied each farm with Internet access to monitor pivot activity via omni–directional cameras mounted to the boom and schedule irrigation based on real–time soil moisture readings recorded by wireless sensors in the field. In 2008, the program received a Strategic Agricultural Initiative grant from US EPA to implement a new sod based rotation conservation practice on working farms. Sod based rotation incorporates rotations of perennial warm season grasses into row crop systems. The benefits of this practice include water conservation, carbon sequestration and reductions in the use of agricultural inputs such as fertilizers, pesticides and fuel.Sponsored by: Georgia Environmental Protection Division U.S. Geological Survey, Georgia Water Science Center U.S. Department of Agriculture, Natural Resources Conservation Service Georgia Institute of Technology, Georgia Water Resources Institute The University of Georgia, Water Resources FacultyThis book was published by Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources, The University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia 30602-2152. The views and statements advanced in this publication are solely those of the authors and do not represent official views or policies of The University of Georgia, the U.S. Geological Survey, the Georgia Water Research Institute as authorized by the Water Research Institutes Authorization Act of 1990 (P.L. 101-307) or the other conference sponsors

Weighing the Consequences: A Systematic Review and Quantitative Evaluation of Early Childhood Antibiotic Exposure as a Risk Factor for Obesity

The human gut microbiota encompasses a diverse ecosystem with hundreds if not thousands of microbial species, with relative proportions of different taxa varying between and within individuals over their lifetimes. Intestinal microbes interact with the central nervous system while playing important roles in host immune and metabolic function. Infants acquire their initial microbiota during delivery, with mature structures and compositions developing during the first few years of life. Early childhood therefore serves as a critical window for microbiota establishment during which the intestinal ecosystem is especially vulnerable to disruption from antibiotics. Research has thus far linked pediatric antibiotic use to chronic conditions such as obesity, metabolic syndrome, irritable bowel syndrome, and asthma. Clinical antibiotics have furthermore been shown to promote the emergence of drug-resistant microbes, compounding serious immediate and long-term consequences for individuals as well as societies. This systematic review compiles all studies available on PubMed investigating the link between early childhood antibiotic exposure and risk of overweight and obesity. Results were analyzed by exposure conditions thought to influence risk, including age, number of antibiotic courses, sex, and type of antibiotic. Earlier antibiotic administration and greater number of exposures were associated with great risk of weight gain, as were broad-spectrum relative to narrow spectrum antibiotics. Exposed boys were also more severely affected than girls. The overall increased risk of obesity associated with antibiotic exposures was estimated to be 5.7% using a weighted average calculation. A population attributable fraction of US overweight and obesity to childhood antibiotic exposure was then found to be 0.0447 using the weighted odds ratio and state-level antibiotic prescription data. Combined with existing estimates of the lifetime cost of obesity, it is projected that increased risk of overweight and obesity arising from early childhood antibiotic exposure places a total financial burden of $9,410,487,488.99 on the US healthcare system. The scale of both lifetime costs associated with pediatric obesity and the prevalence of overweight and obesity demonstrate that even a moderate increase in risk would bring about dramatic economic consequences. This thesis concludes by exploring policy and research priorities for promoting judicious antibiotic practices in clinical and public health contexts. Antibiotic stewardship will be crucial to minimizing risk to patient health as well as the development of antibiotic resistance at both individual and population levels. Finally, it examines a variety of relatively novel research areas aimed at restoring microbiota health after perturbation, including probiotics, fecal transplantation, and phage therapy, among others