Jolly Fellows

“Jolly fellows,” a term that gained currency in the nineteenth century, referred to those men whose more colorful antics included brawling, heavy drinking, gambling, and playing pranks. Reforms, especially the temperance movement, stigmatized such behavior, but pockets of jolly fellowship continued to flourish throughout the country. Richard Stott scrutinizes and analyzes this behavior to appreciate its origins and meaning. Stott finds that male behavior could be strikingly similar in diverse locales, from taverns and boardinghouses to college campuses and sporting events. He explores the permissive attitudes that thrived in such male domains as the streets of New York City, California during the gold rush, and the Pennsylvania oil fields, arguing that such places had an important influence on American society and culture. Stott recounts how the cattle and mining towns of the American West emerged as centers of resistance to Victorian propriety. It was here that unrestrained male behavior lasted the longest, before being replaced with a new convention that equated manliness with sobriety and self-control.Even as the number of jolly fellows dwindled, jolly themes flowed into American popular culture through minstrelsy, dime novels, and comic strips. Jolly Fellows proposes a new interpretation of nineteenth-century American culture and society and will inform future work on masculinity during this period

Testing theories of labour market matching

This paper estimates a model of two-sided search using micro-level data for a well-defined labour market. It examines the assumption of random matching and contrasts it with the stock-flow (or non-random) matching model of Coles and collaborators. Given a dataset of contacts, matches, and complete labour-market histories for both sides of the market, we estimate hazard functions for both (unemployed) job-seekers and vacancies. For job-seekers, the tests adds the stock of new vacancies to a standard job-seeker hazard which itself depends on the stocks of vacancies and unemployed. Our tentative results find very weak evidence of stock-flow matching.two-sided search, random matching, hazards

Common European birds are declining rapidly while less abundant species' numbers are rising

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from the publisher via the DOI in this record.Biodiversity is undergoing unprecedented global decline. Efforts to slow this rate have focused foremost on rarer species, which are at most risk of extinction. Less interest has been paid to more common species, despite their greater importance in terms of ecosystem function and service provision. How rates of decline are partitioned between common and less abundant species remains unclear. Using a 30-year data set of 144 bird species, we examined Europe-wide trends in avian abundance and biomass. Overall, avian abundance and biomass are both declining with most of this decline being attributed to more common species, while less abundant species showed an overall increase in both abundance and biomass. If overall avian declines are mainly due to reductions in a small number of common species, conservation efforts targeted at rarer species must be better matched with efforts to increase overall bird numbers, if ecological impacts of birds are to be maintained.RSPBEuropean Commissio

Correlation of Tire Intensity Levels and Passby Sound Pressure Levels

The object of the work reported here was to relate the acoustic intensity level measured near the contact patch of a driven tire on a passenger vehicle with the passby noise levels measured at a sideline microphone during coast and cruise conditions. Based on those measurements it was then possible to estimate the tire noise contribution to the passby level measured when the vehicle under test was accelerating. As part of this testing program, data was collected using five vehicles at fourteen passby sites in the United States: in excess of 800 data sets were obtained

Microbial carbon mineralization in tropical lowland and montane forest soils of Peru

Climate change is affecting the amount and complexity of plant inputs to tropical forest soils. This is likely to influence the carbon (C) balance of these ecosystems by altering decomposition processes e.g., "positive priming effects" that accelerate soil organic matter mineralization. However, the mechanisms determining the magnitude of priming effects are poorly understood. We investigated potential mechanisms by adding (13)C labeled substrates, as surrogates of plant inputs, to soils from an elevation gradient of tropical lowland and montane forests. We hypothesized that priming effects would increase with elevation due to increasing microbial nitrogen limitation, and that microbial community composition would strongly influence the magnitude of priming effects. Quantifying the sources of respired C (substrate or soil organic matter) in response to substrate addition revealed no consistent patterns in priming effects with elevation. Instead we found that substrate quality (complexity and nitrogen content) was the dominant factor controlling priming effects. For example a nitrogenous substrate induced a large increase in soil organic matter mineralization whilst a complex C substrate caused negligible change. Differences in the functional capacity of specific microbial groups, rather than microbial community composition per se, were responsible for these substrate-driven differences in priming effects. Our findings suggest that the microbial pathways by which plant inputs and soil organic matter are mineralized are determined primarily by the quality of plant inputs and the functional capacity of microbial taxa, rather than the abiotic properties of the soil. Changes in the complexity and stoichiometry of plant inputs to soil in response to climate change may therefore be important in regulating soil C dynamics in tropical forest soils.This study was financed by the UK Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) grant NE/G018278/1 and is a product of the Andes Biodiversity and Ecosystem Research Group consortium (www.andesconservation.org); Patrick Meir was also supported by ARC FT110100457

Epigenetic stability of repressed states involving the histone variant macroH2A revealed by nuclear transfer to Xenopus oocytes

How various epigenetic mechanisms restrict chromatin plasticity to determine the stability of repressed genes is poorly understood. Nuclear transfer to Xenopus oocytes induces the transcriptional reactivation of previously silenced genes. Recent work suggests that it can be used to analyze the epigenetic stability of repressed states. The notion that the epigenetic state of genes is an important determinant of the efficiency of nuclear reprogramming is supported by the differential reprogramming of given genes from different starting epigenetic configurations. After nuclear transfer, transcription from the inactive X chromosome of post-implantation-derived epiblast stem cells is reactivated. However, the same chromosome is resistant to reactivation when embryonic fibroblasts are used. Here, we discuss different kinds of evidence that link the histone variant macroH2A to the increased stability of repressed states. We focus on developmentally regulated X chromosome inactivation and repression of autosomal pluripotency genes, where macroH2A may help maintain the long-term stability of the differentiated state of somatic cells

CO2 Release from Pockmarks on the Chatham Rise‐Bounty Trough at the Glacial Termination

Seafloor pockmarks of varying size occur over an area of 50,000 km2 on the Chatham Rise, Canterbury Shelf and Inner Bounty Trough, New Zealand. The pockmarks are concentrated above the flat‐subducted Hikurangi Plateau. Echosounder data identifies recurrent episodes of pockmark formation at ~100,000yr frequency coinciding with Pleistocene glacial terminations. Here we show that there are structural conduits beneath the larger pockmarks through which fluids flowed upward toward the seafloor. Large negative Δ14C excursions are documented in marine sediments deposited next to these subseafloor conduits and pockmarks at the last glacial termination. Modern pore waters contain no methane and there is no negative δ13C excursion at the glacial termination that would be indicative of methane or mantle‐derived carbon at the time the Δ14C excursion and pockmarks were produced. An ocean general circulation model equipped with isotope tracers is unable to simulate these large Δ14C excursions on the Chatham Rise by transport of hydrothermal carbon released from the East Pacific Rise as previous studies suggested. Here we attribute the Δ14C anomalies and pockmarks to release of 14C‐dead CO2 and carbon‐rich fluids from subsurface reservoirs, the most likely being dissociated Mesozoic carbonates that subducted beneath the Rise during the Late Cretaceous. Because of the large number of pockmarks and duration of the Δ14C anomaly, the pockmarks may collectively represent an important source of 14C‐dead carbon to the ocean during glacial terminations