Becoming Wild: Living the Primitive Life on a West Coast Island by Nikki Van Schyndel

Maureen Scott Harris reviews Becoming Wild: Living the Primitive Life on a West Coast Island, by Nikki Van Schyndel

Ornithologies of Desire: Ecocritical Essays, Avian Poetics, and Don McKay by Travis V. Mason

Review of Ornithologies of Desire: Ecocritical Essays, Avian Poetics, and Don McKay by Travis V. Mason

Fluorescence visualization of a convective instability which modulates the spreading of volatile surface films

The spontaneous spreading of a thin liquid film along the surface of a deep liquid layer of higher surface tension is a ubiquitous process which provides rapid and efficient surface transport of organic or biological material. For a source of constant concentration, the leading edge of a nonvolatile, immiscible film driven to spread by gradients in surface tension is known to advance as t^3/4 in time. Recent experiments using laser shadowgraphy to detect the advancing front of spreading films indicate, however, that immiscible but volatile sources of constant concentration spread with a reduced exponent according to t^1/2. Using a novel technique whereby fluorescent lines are inscribed in water, we have detected the evolution of a thermal instability beneath the leading edge of volatile films which strongly resembles a Rayleigh-Bénard roll. We propose that the increased dissipation from this rotational flow structure is likely responsible for the reduction in spreading exponent. This observation suggests a conceptual framework for coupling the effects of evaporation to the dynamics of spreading

Political Beings: Sociopolitical Influence on Federal District Court Judges\u27 Criminal Sentencing Behavior

Judicial scholars have long debated what factors influence judges\u27 decision-making. Several competing theories have offered relatively parsimonious explanations for the motivations of appellate judges, but sources of influence for trial judges are relatively understudied. One area ripe for testing potential determinants of trial court behavior is the criminal sentencing behavior of federal district court judges. Recent empirical research has examined federal district court sentencing, but this research has often focused solely on the effects of legal policy change and judges\u27 personal partisanship. These efforts are informative but ignore other potentially important contextual determinants of sentencing behavior, such as sentiment in the legal/judicial community, sentiment among the public, and pertinent objective conditions, such as crime rates and incarceration rates. Using a variety of methods in three different research designs, each emphasizing the change in judicial behavior over time, I test the extent to which district judges\u27 sentencing decisions are impacted by broader social and political concerns. Results from the dissertation are decidedly mixed, but they do suggest that contextual influences are clearly an important component of sentencing behavior for many district judges. Future research efforts should pay heed to the potential impact of contextual factors on trial judge decision-making and seek to identify conditions under which social or political characteristics are most likely to affect judges

Artapanus and Greek Colonial Poetics

The fragments of Artapanus have proven to be enigmatic for most scholars over the years and as such have not been treated in significant detail. Most scholarship has been restricted to two separate lines of enquiry: genre and ethnicity. I suggest that the resonance between Greek colonial poetics sheds new light on Artapanus\u27s literary agenda: namely, that Artapanus is constructing and representing the memory of Jewish cultural and political foundations using broader Greek poetics which were used to describe the civic, cultic and geographic foundation of a colony. In this way, Artapanus is no longer an outlier within the Hellenistic Jewish literature, but another example of Hellenistic Jewish authors appropriating particular Greek literary techniques to meet their own needs. Layered onto this inquiry about Artapanus\u27s literary agenda is the question of the influence ethnic relations had on Artapanus as well as the impact on ethnic relations that his work was intended to have. Artapanus is writing at the intersection of Jewish, Egyptian and Greek cultures and this must be accounted for, as well. In this sense, the question I am asking builds on genre and ethnicity wherein genre provides a structure to narrate ethnic identity and ethnic identity provides the materials to emplot within a given genre. By addressing the resonance with a poetics of colonization, I am adding an additional, third coordinate to triangulate Artapanus’s perception of Jewish history and ethnicity in Hellenistic Egypt

A Modular Low-clearance Wrist Orthosis for Improving Wrist Motion in Children with Cerebral Palsy

Children with Cerebral Palsy (CP) often exhibit impairments in the coordination of the grip and lift phases of arm movements that directly impact their ability to perform activities of daily living (ADLs). The application of assistive robotic therapy to children with spastic hemiplegic CP has shown that augmented movement training can lead to improved functional outcomes and improved arm kinematics. Assistive robotic therapy of the wrist has been shown to help improve motor skills in stroke patients, but the devices employed are often large and obtrusive, focusing on a repeated motion rather than a task-based itinerary. Here, we propose a lightweight low clearance wrist orthosis for use in children with Cerebral Palsy that actuates pronation/supination and flexion/extension of the wrist

Using self-categorization theory to uncover the framing of the 2015 Rugby World Cup: a cross-cultural comparison of three nations’ newspapers

Research into the framing of sporting events has been extensively studied to uncover newspaper bias in the coverage of global sporting events. Through discourse, the media attempt to capture, build, and maintain audiences for the duration of sporting events through the use of multiple narratives and/or storylines. Little research has looked at the ways in which the same event is reported across different nations, and media representations of the Rugby World Cup have rarely featured in discussions of the framing of sport events. The present study highlights the different ways in which rugby union is portrayed across the three leading Southern Hemisphere nations in the sport. It also shows the prominence of nationalistic discourse across those nations and importance of self-categorizations in newspaper narratives.</jats:p

Three Poems

Poetry by Maureen Scott Harri