Gender in Black and White: Examining Interracial Relationships in ShondaLand

Shonda Rhimes has been credited for crafting progressive television dramas that attract millions of viewers. Scholars have found that through the use of tactics like colorblind casting, Rhimes unintentionally creates problematic relationships between characters. Focusing on production techniques and dialogue, this paper examines episodes from two of her most popular shows, How To Get Away With Murder and Scandal. This paper argues that while the shows pursue progressive material, the shows present African-American female characters that require partners. Further, both white male characters negatively influence the women s independence. Through media representations, Shonda Rhimes shows reinforce inequality of race and gender through media

Testing cognitive theories with multivariate pattern analysis of neuroimaging data

The development of non-invasive neuroimaging techniques to measure brain activity while human participants engage in cognitive tasks has driven thousands of investigations over recent decades. This has been paralleled by advances in experimental design and analysis, including the family of approaches known as multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA). For many researchers, the increased sensitivity provided by applying MVPA to functional MRI, EEG or MEG data made it possible to address theories that describe cognition at the functional level. Here, we review a selection of studies that used MVPA to test cognitive theories from a range of domains, including perception, attention, memory, navigation, emotion, social cognition, and motor control. This broad view reveals properties of MVPA that make it suitable for understanding the ‘how’ of human cognition, such as the ability to test predictions expressed at the item or event level. It also reveals limitations and points to future directions

Category selectivity in human visual cortex:beyond visual object recognition

Item does not contain fulltextHuman ventral temporal cortex shows a categorical organization, with regions responding selectively to faces, bodies, tools, scenes, words, and other categories. Why is this? Traditional accounts explain category selectivity as arising within a hierarchical system dedicated to visual object recognition. For example, it has been proposed that category selectivity reflects the clustering of category-associated visual feature representations, or that it reflects category-specific computational algorithms needed to achieve view invariance. This visual object recognition framework has gained renewed interest with the success of deep neural network models trained to "recognize" objects: these hierarchical feed-forward networks show similarities to human visual cortex, including categorical separability. We argue that the object recognition framework is unlikely to fully account for category selectivity in visual cortex. Instead, we consider category selectivity in the context of other functions such as navigation, social cognition, tool use, and reading. Category-selective regions are activated during such tasks even in the absence of visual input and even in individuals with no prior visual experience. Further, they are engaged in close connections with broader domain-specific networks. Considering the diverse functions of these networks, category-selective regions likely encode their preferred stimuli in highly idiosyncratic formats; representations that are useful for navigation, social cognition, or reading are unlikely to be meaningfully similar to each other and to varying degrees may not be entirely visual. The demand for specific types of representations to support category-associated tasks may best account for category selectivity in visual cortex. This broader view invites new experimental and computational approaches.7 p

The Sight of Others' Pain Modulates Motor Processing in Human Cingulate Cortex

Neuroimaging evidence has shown that a network including cingulate cortex and bilateral insula responds to both felt and seen pain. Of these, dorsal anterior cingulate and midcingulate areas are involved in preparing context-appropriate motor responses to painful situations, but it is unclear whether the same holds for observed pain. Participants in this functional magnetic resonance imaging study viewed short animations depicting a noxious implement (e.g., a sharp knife) or an innocuous implement (e.g., a butter knife) striking a person's hand. Participants were required to execute or suppress button-press responses depending on whether the implements hit or missed the hand. The combination of the implement's noxiousness and whether it contacted the hand strongly affected reaction times, with the fastest responses to noxious-hit trials. Blood oxygen level-dependent signal changes mirrored this behavioral interaction with increased activation during noxious-hit trials only in midcingulate, dorsal anterior, and dorsal posterior cingulate regions. Crucially, the activation in these cingulate regions also depended on whether the subject made an overt motor response to the event, linking their role in pain observation to their role in motor processing. This study also suggests a functional topography in medial premotor regions implicated in "pain empathy,” with adjacent activations relating to pain-selective and motor-selective components, and their interactio

Pedaling and Public Health: Evaluating a Proposed Bike-Share Program in Philadelphia From a Public Health Perspective

As bike-share programs have gained prominence in Europe and in the United States, their advocates have often cited the health benefits associated with biking for active transportation. This has been the case in Philadelphia as well as many countries throughout the United States. In 2010, the Philadelphia Bikeshare Concept Study provided a proposal for a specific program to be implemented in Philadelphia. Although improvements to public health were cited as motivations for this program, the study did not include in-depth analysis of the program's potential effects on public health. This thesis investigates whether the proposed program can indeed be considered a public health initiative, and if so, what the implications of framing it as a public health initiative may be for the overall design of the program. A statistical analysis of the distribution of the health conditions that could be prevented through active transportation highlights spatial and sociodemographic inequalities, suggesting that in order to effectively promote public health, Philadelphia's bike-share program must take active steps to target the city's most vulnerable communities

List of insects and mites attacking tree fruits in the interior of British Columbia

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Electrostatic and Functional Analysis of the Seven-Bladed WD β-Propellers

β-propeller domains composed of WD repeats are highly ubiquitous and typically used as multi-site docking platforms to coordinate and integrate the activities of groups of proteins. Here, we have used extensive homology modelling of the WD40-repeat family of seven-bladed β-propellers coupled with subsequent structural classification and clustering of these models to define subfamilies of β-propellers with common structural, and probable, functional characteristics. We show that it is possible to assign seven-bladed WD β-propeller proteins into functionally different groups based on the information gained from homology modelling. We examine general structural diversity within the WD40-repeat family of seven-bladed β-propellers and demonstrate that seven-bladed β-propellers composed of WD-repeats are structurally distinct from other seven-bladed β-propellers. We further provide some insights into the multifunctional diversity of the seven-bladed WD β-propeller surfaces. This report once again reinforces the importance of structural data and the usefulness of homology models in functional classification