Understanding Open Defecation in the Age of Swachh Bharat Abhiyan: Agency, Accountability, and Anger in Rural Bihar.

Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, India's flagship sanitation intervention, set out to end open defecation by October 2019. While the program improved toilet coverage nationally, large regional disparities in construction and use remain. Our study used ethnographic methods to explore perspectives on open defecation and latrine use, and the socio-economic and political reasons for these perspectives, in rural Bihar. We draw on insights from social epidemiology and political ecology to explore the structural determinants of latrine ownership and use. Though researchers have often pointed to rural residents' preference for open defecation, we found that people were aware of its many risks. We also found that (i) while sanitation research and "behavior change" campaigns often conflate the reluctance to adopt latrines with a preference for open defecation, this is an erroneous conflation; (ii) a subsidy can help (some) households to construct latrines but the amount of the subsidy and the manner of its disbursement are key to its usefulness; and (iii) widespread resentment towards what many rural residents view as a development bias against rural areas reinforces distrust towards the government overall and its Swachh Bharat Abhiyan-funded latrines in particular. These social-structural explanations for the slow uptake of sanitation in rural Bihar (and potentially elsewhere) deserve more attention in sanitation research and promotion efforts

Dead places : American horror, placelessness, and globalization.

This dissertation investigates particular American anxieties concerning cultural identity and place, particularly fears about America’s place (or lack thereof) within the global world, that can be seen throughout much of post-WWII American horror literature and film. More specifically, this project explores how an existent pattern of visual and narrative depictions of destroyed bodies and places illustrates larger tensions and fears about placelessness—the affect and effect of incomplete, partial, or inauthentic relationships with the places that provide cultural and individual identity and meaning. I argue that representations of placelessness within American horror texts become vehicles for addressing and signifying American fears about globalization and America’s place(lessness) within the global landscape. This dissertation begins with a discussion of how the methodologies of literary and cinematic theory, humanist geography, and cultural studies work together to produce an interdisciplinary examination of the intersections between American horror, placelessness, and globalization. The introduction sets up the primary concepts and key definitions central to this project’s understanding of horror, place, and identity. The overall structure of the dissertation then spirals out from the most localized of places to the most globalized of places that appear within American horror. The four main chapters of this dissertation each focus on a specific place or type of interaction with places: the home, everyday places, the American landscape/wilderness, and global tourism. Each chapter uses a particular theoretical framework that, in addition to the overarching ideas of placelessness and globalization, serves as a foundation for in-depth, close-readings of specific key horror texts. The dissertation concludes with a brief examination of adaptation theory in horror and a return to the project’s original premise: that post-WWII American horror presents specific and particular American anxieties tied to the fear that our cultural and individual identities are as fabricated and fraudulent as are our cultural and individual understandings of our places. I maintain that the ultimate source of horror in these texts is the insidious suggestion that such fears are warranted and the consequences of this horrific placelessness will be the terrible destruction and inevitable untethering of cultural and individual identities, bodies, and places

FACTORS AFFECTING SKELETAL MUSCLE PROTEIN SYNTHESIS IN THE HORSE

Skeletal muscle protein synthesis is regulated by the mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR) signaling pathway. The first objective was to optimize the methodological procedures for assessing mTOR signaling in horses. The response of mTOR signaling (P-Akt Ser473, P-S6K1 Thr389, P-rpS6 Ser235/26 & 240/244, and P-4EBP1 Thr37/46 by Western blotting techniques) to meal consumption was determined at three gluteal muscle biopsy depths (6, 8, and 10 cm), and the repeatability of the contralateral side at 8 cm during 5 days of repeated biopsies. There was no effect (P \u3e 0.05) of sampling side or biopsy depth on mTOR signaling in mature horses. During repeated biopsies there was an increase (P \u3c 0.05) in downstream (P-S6K1 Thr389, P-rpS6 Ser235/236 & 240/244 and P-4EBP1 Thr389) mTOR signaling in response to feeding. The second objective was to characterize alterations in mTOR signaling throughout the equid lifespan. Adolescent horses (yearlings and two year olds) studied in the postprandial had a lowered (P \u3c 0.05) activation of downstream mTOR signaling with aging. There was a lower (P \u3c 0.05) abundance of P-S6K1 Thr389 in aged horses (23.5 years old) than in mature horses (11 years old) during the post-absorptive state. The final objective was to assess mTOR signaling during acute and chronic inflammation. Acute inflammation occurred during 5 days of repeated biopsies, and chronic inflammation is characteristic of the aged. During acute inflammation, characterized by increased muscle mRNA expression of inflammatory cytokines, there was an increase (P \u3c 0.05) in downstream mTOR signaling. Chronic inflammation resulted in a decrease (P \u3c 0.05) in the abundance of P-S6K1 Thr389. Phenylbutazone was administered to reduce (P \u3c 0.05) acute and chronic inflammation in muscle. Phenylbutazone administration during acute inflammation reduced (P \u3c 0.05) the activation of downstream mTOR signaling and trended to increase (P = 0.09) P-S6K1 Thr389 abundance during chronic inflammation. Whole-body protein synthesis determined using isotope infusion techniques increased (P \u3c 0.05) when chronic inflammation was reduced due to phenylbutazone administration. This research provides new standards for muscle biopsy collection when examining mTOR signaling, and insight into management and feeding practices for adolescent and aging horses

Adaptive Strategies for Foraging and Their Implications for Flower Constancy, or: Do Honey Bees Multitask?

Classical experiments on honey bee time-memory showed that foragers trained to collect food at a fixed time of day return the following day with remarkable time-accuracy. Previous field experiments revealed that not all foragers return to a food source on unrewarded test days. Rather, there exist 2 subgroups: “persistent” foragers reconnoiter the source; “reticent” foragers wait in the hive for confirmation of source availability. To examine how these foragers contribute to a colony’s ability to reallocate foragers across sources with rapidly changing availabilities, foragers were trained to collect sucrose during a restricted window for several days and observed over 3 days throughout which the feeder was empty. In 2 separate trials, activity monitoring revealed a high level of activity apparently directed at other food sources. This “extracurricular” activity showed extensive temporal overlap with visits to the feeder, indicating that honey bees can manage at least 2 different overlapping time memories

Behavioral Responses to Gold Nanoparticle Exposure and H2O2-Induced Oxidative Stress in Caenorhabditis elegans

Gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) have been utilized in many biomedical disciplines, most notably cancer therapy and drug delivery. Recent research suggests that with specific peptide manipulation, AuNPs can deliver drugs across the blood-brain barrier (BBB), allowing for treatment of neurodegeneration and other neurological afflictions. Neurodegeneration has been shown to be caused by oxidative stress. The present experiment aimed to assess the effects of AuNPs on C. elegans behavior that had undergone H2O2-induced oxidative stress. It was predicted that worms exposed to both H2O2 and AuNPs would have higher survival, mechanosensation, and thrashing rates than worms only exposed to H2O2. After worms were exposed to H2O2 solution and AuNP solution, mortality, mechanosensation, and thrashing data were obtained. Nematodes who were exposed to both AuNPs and H2O2 (μ = 51.1 thrashes/min) did not experience the same decrease in locomotion as the worms only exposed to H2O2 (μ = 30.8 thrashes/min), p = 0.05. This suggests that AuNP exposure may reverse the negative effects of H2O2 on C. elegans movement. Worms exposed to AuNPs by liquid vehicle in the first experiment exhibited significantly less locomotion (μ = 46.3 thrashes/min) than worms exposed to AuNPs through their food in the second experiment (μ = 119.6 thrashes/min), p \u3c 0.001. Results from this study assert that AuNPs may help relieve symptoms of oxidative stress and neurodegeneration, especially in neuromuscular activity in C. elegans

Malaysian Shophouses: Creating Cities of Character

As a developing country, the urban landscape of Malaysia faces the same trends as many other cities worldwide: modernization at a rapid and unchecked pace. Due to the demand for new infrastructure and buildings, many vernacular building types are rapidly disappearing from the urban fabric, among them the Malaysian Shophouse. The shophouse was a common building style for over a century from 1840-1960s and is perhaps a typology of a previous era. Yet it offers many lessons on creating a city that embodies the character of the culture, the antithesis of the anonymous modern city. At its most basic program the shophouse is a multi-purpose building which is increasingly recognized as a more feasible and sustainable model than designating blocks of buildings zoned for a single program. This study proposes the shophouse as an advantageous model for future development in Malaysia by creating livable, human scale, socially sustainable cities. Examining how the shophouse developed historically, what factors lead towards its decline, and the current prevalent strategy towards shophouses is invaluable in charting the future of the Malaysian Shophouse

Finding Needles in the Right Haystack: Double Modals in Medical Consultations

In this paper we present a case study of a syntactic sociolinguistic variable that has resisted previous attempts at quantitative analysis of usage, the double modal construction of Southern United States English (e.g., You know what might could help that is losing some weight). While naturally-occurring double modals have been exceedingly rare in sociolinguistic interviews, our study represents the very first corpus investigation of double modals through a search of the right ‘haystack’: the nationwide Verilogue, Inc database of recorded and transcribed physician-patient interactions (~85 million words). As a vast source of potentially face-threatening negotiations, the Verilogue corpus provides the ideal speech situation in which to search for low frequency, non-standard syntactic features like the double modal. A quantitative analysis of the 76 tokens extracted from doctor-patient consultations in the US South revealed that double modals are favored by doctors, especially women and those with many decades of professional experience. Among patients, those not currently in employment use double modals more frequently than the employed. We interpreted these findings with reference to the literature on the pragmatics of physician-patient talk, arguing that the double modal is used to negotiate the imbalanced power dynamic of a doctor-patient consultation. In general, the greater use of double modals by doctors shows that the construction is an active part of a doctor’s repertoire for mitigating directives. Collectively, we present a complex socio-pragmatic picture of double modal use that could not be seen without a corpus of naturally-occurring speech in a potentially face-threatening speech situation

The Grizzly, August 30, 2007

Ursinus Opens the New Building on the Block • Ursinus Battles U.S. News: Interview with President Strassburger • Sex at Ursinus • Who are the New RDs? • Spotlight: Student Emergency Response Volunteers (SERV) • Fresh Faces at Ursinus • Opinions: Freeganism: The New, Gentle Face of Anarchy; Global Warming: Modern Day Witch Hunt • Dubble Vision: Football Forecast • Ready, Set, Go Bears!https://digitalcommons.ursinus.edu/grizzlynews/1740/thumbnail.jp

Auger Electron Cascades in Water and Ice

Secondary electron cascades can induce significant ionisation in condensed matter due to electron-atom collisions. This is of interest in the context of diffraction and imaging using X-rays, where radiation damage is the main limiting factor for achieving high resolution data. Here we present new results on electron-induced damage on liquid water and ice, from the simulation of Auger electron cascades. We have compared our theoretical estimations to the available experimental data on elastic and inelastic electron-molecule interactions for water and found the theoretical results for elastic cross sections to be in very good agreement with experiment. As a result of the cascade we find that the average number of secondary electrons after 100 fs in ice is about 25, slightly higher than in water, where it is about 20. The difference in damage between ice and water is discussed in the context of sample handling for biomolecular systems.Comment: 19 pages, 8 figures. Includes slight corrections to the version submitted for publicatio