Informing, teaching or propagandising? Combining Environmental and Science Studies for undergraduates

This article discusses experiences in the integrated teaching of Environmental Studies and Science Studies in a generalist curriculum at a university campus in Scotland. At the University of Glasgow Crichton Campus, a mixed curriculum has been developed to combine coherently Environmental and Science Studies, perhaps the first such curriculum in the UK and equally uncommon in America. The Crichton curricum is intentionally multi-disciplinary, drawing closely on the successful nineteenth-century Scottish model exported to America. This generalist approach, emphasising broad philosophical principles, informs the courses and their inter-relationships

American languages: Indians, ethnology, and the empire for liberty

American Languages: Indians, Ethnology, and the Empire for Liberty is a study of knowledge and power, as it relates to Indian affairs, in the early republic. It details the interactions, exchanges, and networks through which linguistic and racial ideas were produced and it examines the effect of those ideas on Indian administration. First etymology, then philology, guided the study of human descent, migrations, and physical and mental traits, then called ethnology. It would answer questions of Indian origins and the possibility of Indian incorporation into the United States. It was crucial to white Americans seeking to define their polity and prove their cultivation by contributing to the republic of letters.;The study of Indian languages was both part of the ongoing ideological construction of the empire for liberty and it could serve practical ends for the extension and consolidation of imperial relations with the native groups within and on the borders of the United States. Administrators of Indian affairs simultaneously asserted continental mastery and implicitly admitted that it was yet incomplete. Language could be used to illustrate Indian civilization and Indian savagery, the openness of the U.S. nation and its exclusivity, Indian affinities to Anglo-Saxons and their utter difference. Language was a race science frequently opposed to understandings of race defined through the body alone.;The War Department repeatedly sought linguistic information that it could use as the basis of policy, but philology was not a discourse of scientific control imposed upon helpless Indians. On the contrary, Indians lay at the heart of almost all that was known of Indian languages. This was especially true once European scientific interest shifted from the study isolated words to grammatical forms, which happened to coincide with debates over Indian removal in the United States. This meant that Indians were in an unprecedented position to shape the most authoritative scientific knowledge of the Indian at the moment that U.S. Indian policy was most uncertain. Native tutoring, often mediated through white missionaries, led Peter S. Du Ponceau to refute the notion, shared alike by apologists for removal (e.g. Lewis Cass) and European philosophers (e.g. Wilhelm von Humboldt) that the American languages indicated Indian savagery. ;Yet in attempting to prove that Native American languages were not savage, Du Ponceau defined Indian grammatical forms as unchanging plans of ideas that all Indians, and only Indians, possessed. Henry R. Schoolcraft, Indian agent, protege of Cass, and husband to the Ojibwa-Irish Jane Johnston, extended this line of thought and defined a rigid Indian mind that refused civilization. Such conclusions suggested that Indians possessed fixed mental traits. This conclusion largely agreed with those that ethnologists of the American school would advance years later, but those scientists argued that language could offer no information on physical race. The rapid (but brief) rise of the American school undermined the ethnological authority of the philological knowledge that Indians, such as David Brown (Cherokee) and Eleazer Williams (Mohawk) had produced in the preceding decades.;After decades of debate over Indian plans of ideas, patterns of thought, and whether Indian languages were a suitable medium for teaching the concepts of Christianity and republican government---debates intensified by the invention of the Cherokee alphabet and the understanding that Sequoyah, its author, intended it to insulate Cherokee society from white interference---the federal government began moving toward a policy of English-only instruction. Even after the strident opposition of the American school, language remained a key marker of civilization and nationhood

Noncommutative Field Theory and Lorentz Violation

The role of Lorentz symmetry in noncommutative field theory is considered. Any realistic noncommutative theory is found to be physically equivalent to a subset of a general Lorentz-violating standard-model extension involving ordinary fields. Some theoretical consequences are discussed. Existing experiments bound the scale of the noncommutativity parameter to (10 TeV)^{-2}.Comment: 4 page

Do stiffness and asymmetries predict change of direction performance?

Change of direction speed (CODS) underpins performance in a wide range of sports but little is known about how stiffness and asymmetries affect CODS. Eighteen healthy males performed unilateral drop jumps to determine vertical, ankle, knee and hip stiffness, and a CODS test to evaluate left and right leg cutting performance during which ground reaction force data were sampled. A step-wise regression analysis was performed to ascertain the determinants of CODS time. A two-variable regression model explained 63% (R-2 = 0.63; P = 0.001) of CODS performance. The model included the mean vertical stiffness and jump height asymmetry determined during the drop jump. Faster athletes (n = 9) exhibited greater vertical stiffness (F = 12.40; P = 0.001) and less asymmetry in drop jump height (F = 6.02; P = 0.026) than slower athletes (n = 9); effect sizes were both "large" in magnitude. Results suggest that overall vertical stiffness and drop jump height asymmetry are the strongest predictors of CODS in a healthy, non-athletic population

Interleukin-10 (IL-10) but not Lipopolysaccharide (LPS) produces increased motor activity and abnormal exploratory patterns while impairing spatial learning in Balb/c mice

Lipopolysaccharide (LPS) is a potent endotoxin, which produces âsickness behavioursâ including loss of weight, loss of interest in food and decreased exploration. LPS has also been shown in some studies to cause deficits in various learning and memory abilities, while in others these LPS-induced learning impairments have been attributed to performance-related deficits rather than learning deficits per se. Here, we use the novelty-preference paradigm, a task that minimises performance-related factors such as motivation, in an attempt to extract and examine the effects of LPS on spatial learning. In addition, some studies have indicated that the anti-inflammatory cytokine Interleukin-10 (IL-10) can alleviate some of the symptoms induced by LPS. Here, we also examine the effect of IL-10 on feeding, motor and learning behaviours. We demonstrate that a single injection of LPS does produce a lack of interest in food and weight loss; LPS, however, does not impair habituation in the noveltypreference paradigm. Furthermore, co-injection of IL-10 with LPS does not attenuate the LPS-induced effects of weight loss and lack of food intake. Interestingly, a single injection of IL-10 produces abnormal patterns of exploration, a general increase in activity and abnormal patterns of habituation

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