Political ecologies of wood and wax: sandalwood and beeswax as symbols and shapers of customary authority in the Oecusse enclave, Timor

The enclave of Oecusse-Ambeno, Timor Leste, was formed in part through struggles over controlling trade in sandalwood and beeswax, two forest products that continue to influence political and ritual allegiances, and the political history of Oecusse. These products are interwoven with the region's contacts with outsiders, influencing local political hierarchies and roles of kings, village heads, and ritual authorities. While wood and wax are recognized to be of Timorese origin, local myths posit that their use and value was unrecognized before the arrival of Chinese traders and Portuguese missionaries. Several narratives of the origins of trade in sandalwood, and the kings' annual beeswax candle tributes, illustrate the enduring connections among local authorities, forest resource control, religious symbolism, and ritual obligations surrounding harvests of sandalwood and beeswax. Customary practices contribute to forest conservation through local protection of beeswax-producing forests, and by circumscribing the harvest. While both beehives and sandalwood impede intensive agricultural land uses, farmers welcome beeswax as a profitable product that supports ritual. But they resent sandalwood's growth in their fields since it involves more regulation and increased labor requirements. The two products' different ecologies of disturbance and incidence contributed over time to distinct ownership norms and forms of control by customary authorities. This is the "political ecology of wood and wax" in Oecusse. Key words: Oecusse, Timor Leste/East Timor, sandalwood, beeswax, customary authority, colonialism

The development eraser: fantastical schemes, aspirational distractions and high modern mega-events in the Oecusse enclave, Timor-Leste

The array of challenges to durably improving rural peoples' lives in remote regions is so daunting that it can be tempting to erase what is there, and to seek a blank slate. This tension is being played out in the OecusseAmbeno enclave of Timor-Leste, a region long familiar with geographic and political isolation. Residents now encounter a new iteration of their unique status: rapid declaration of their region as a special economic zone (ZEESM), with a new regional governance structure and an appointed leadership. The advent of this new zone is meant to catapult Oecusse from its current state of chronic infrastructure and basic development challenges to a booming economic center and a fount of national income in short order. Early emphasis is placed on rapid, major coastal infrastructure construction deemed necessary for the November 2015 commemoration of the 500th anniversary of Portuguese arrival, with the hallmarks associated with high modernism and mega-event preparation worldwide: spatial re-ordering and regulation; a strong orientation to external inputs, resources, and services; and centralized control of rapid infrastructure change. This article investigates the ideological underpinnings of these plans, and explores the irony of how the proposals and their governance arrangement are a disjuncture with Oecusse as a historically important place. It concludes with observations on this project's place in the national development context, and the likely costs and impacts of development for the Oecusse population. Risks include further political and economic marginalization of the mountain-dwelling and rural population, local residents' loss of productive agricultural land and access to water, reduced protection through administrative exclusion from national political structures, and the opportunity costs of misdevelopment's aspirational distractions. Key words: Special Economic Zone; high modernism; mega-event; Timor-Leste; Oecusse Ambeno; economic developmen

Effectiveness of Health Education Teachers and School Nurses Teaching Sexually Transmitted Infections/ Human Immunodeficiency Virus Prevention Knowledge and Skills in High School

BACKGROUND- We examined the differential impact of a well-established human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)/sexually transmitted infections (STIs) curriculum, Be Proud! Be Responsible!, when taught by school nurses and health education classroom teachers within a high school curricula. METHODS- Group-randomized intervention study of 1357 ninth and tenth grade students in 10 schools. Twenty-seven facilitators (6 nurses, 21 teachers) provided programming; nurse-led classrooms were randomly assigned. RESULTS- Students taught by teachers were more likely to report their instructor to be prepared, comfortable with the material, and challenged them to think about their health than students taught by a school nurse. Both groups reported significant improvements in HIV/STI/condom knowledge immediately following the intervention, compared to controls. Yet, those taught by school nurses reported significant and sustained changes (up to 12 months after intervention) in attitudes, beliefs, and efficacy, whereas those taught by health education teachers reported far fewer changes, with sustained improvement in condom knowledge only. CONCLUSIONS- Both classroom teachers and school nurses are effective in conveying reproductive health information to high school students; however, teaching the technical (eg, condom use) and interpersonal (eg, negotiation) skills needed to reduce high-risk sexual behavior may require a unique set of skills and experiences that health education teachers may not typically have

Endothelial Colony-Forming Cell Function Is Reduced During HIV Infection

Background: Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) may be related to cardiovascular disease through monocyte activation-associated endothelial dysfunction. Methods: Blood samples from 15 HIV-negative participants (the uninfected group), 8 HIV-positive participants who were not receiving antiretroviral therapy (ART) (the infected, untreated group), and 15 HIV-positive participants who were receiving ART (the infected, treated group) underwent flow cytometry of endothelial colony-forming cells (ECFCs) and monocyte proportions. IncuCyte live cell imaging of 8 capillary proliferative capacity parameters were obtained from cord blood ECFCs treated with participant plasma. Results: The ECFC percentage determined by flow cytometry was not different between the study groups; however, values of the majority of capillary proliferative capacity parameters (ie, cell area, network length, network branch points, number of networks, and average tube width uniformity) were significantly lower in infected, untreated participants as compared to values for uninfected participants or infected, treated participants (P < .00625 for all comparisons). CD14+CD16+ intermediate monocytes and soluble CD163 were significantly and negatively correlated with several plasma-treated, cord blood ECFC proliferative capacity parameters in the combined HIV-positive groups but not in the uninfected group. Conclusions: Cord blood ECFC proliferative capacity was significantly impaired by plasma from infected, untreated patients, compared with plasma from uninfected participants and from infected, treated participants. Several ECFC functional parameters were adversely associated with monocyte activation in the HIV-positive groups, thereby suggesting a mechanism by which HIV-related inflammation may impair vascular reparative potential and consequently increase the risk of cardiovascular disease during HIV infection

Pennsylvania Folklife Vol. 12, No. 3

• Antiques in Dutchland • Antique or Folk Art: Which? • Pennsylvania Dutch • Amish Barn Raisings • Building a Pennsylvania Barn • Water Witching • Amish Family Life: A Sociologist\u27s Analysis • Straw Hat Making Among the Old Order Amish • Bread and Apple-Butter Day • Schnitz in the Pennsylvania Folk-Culture • Dutch Country Scarecrows • The Man Who Was Buried Standing Up • Living Occult Practices in Dutch Pennsylvania • Farewell to Olliehttps://digitalcommons.ursinus.edu/pafolklifemag/1011/thumbnail.jp

A voz dos bandos: colectivos de justiça e ritos da palavra portuguesa em Timor Leste colonial

Este artigo examina as relações entre o discurso da justiça e a prática do ritual nos bandos do governo colonial português em Timor Leste, entre a segunda metade do século XIX e as primeiras décadas do século XX. Os bandos consistiam em ordens e instruções de comando emanadas pelo governador português em Díli, e comunicadas de forma cerimonial por oficiais às populações dos diversos reinos timorenses dispersos pelo país. Bandos eram um instrumento por excelência de governação colonial dos assuntos indígenas, servindo para arbitrar conflitos, punir transgressões e, em geral, instituir realidades no mundo timorense. Contudo, esta instituição assumiu igualmente uma singular expressão nos usos timorenses, servindo bandos para comunicar também as ordens de autoridades tradicionais, os liurais. O artigo acompanha as variações coloniais e indígenas que os bandos adquiriram em Timor Leste, conceptualizando-os enquanto colectivos de justiça. Ao considerar assim os bandos como colectivos – formações heterogéneas em que elementos linguísticos e não linguísticos se combinam na produção de efeitos de poder sobre as populações – o artigo propõe uma via conceptual alternativa às perspectivas linguísticas e literárias de análise do discurso colonial

Chromosomal Aberrations in Bladder Cancer: Fresh versus Formalin Fixed Paraffin Embedded Tissue and Targeted FISH versus Wide Microarray-Based CGH Analysis

Bladder carcinogenesis is believed to follow two alternative pathways driven by the loss of chromosome 9 and the gain of chromosome 7, albeit other nonrandom copy number alterations (CNAs) were identified. However, confirmation studies are needed since many aspects of this model remain unclear and considerable heterogeneity among cases has emerged. One of the purposes of this study was to evaluate the performance of a targeted test (UroVysion assay) widely used for the detection of Transitional Cell Carcinoma (TCC) of the bladder, in two different types of material derived from the same tumor. We compared the results of UroVysion test performed on Freshly Isolated interphasic Nuclei (FIN) and on Formalin Fixed Paraffin Embedded (FFPE) tissues from 22 TCCs and we didn't find substantial differences. A second goal was to assess the concordance between array-CGH profiles and the targeted chromosomal profiles of UroVysion assay on an additional set of 10 TCCs, in order to evaluate whether UroVysion is an adequately sensitive method for the identification of selected aneuploidies and nonrandom CNAs in TCCs. Our results confirmed the importance of global genomic screening methods, that is array based CGH, to comprehensively determine the genomic profiles of large series of TCCs tumors. However, this technique has yet some limitations, such as not being able to detect low level mosaicism, or not detecting any change in the number of copies for a kind of compensatory effect due to the presence of high cellular heterogeneity. Thus, it is still advisable to use complementary techniques such as array-CGH and FISH, as the former is able to detect alterations at the genome level not excluding any chromosome, but the latter is able to maintain the individual data at the level of single cells, even if it focuses on few genomic regions

Finding Our Way through Phenotypes

Despite a large and multifaceted effort to understand the vast landscape of phenotypic data, their current form inhibits productive data analysis. The lack of a community-wide, consensus-based, human- and machine-interpretable language for describing phenotypes and their genomic and environmental contexts is perhaps the most pressing scientific bottleneck to integration across many key fields in biology, including genomics, systems biology, development, medicine, evolution, ecology, and systematics. Here we survey the current phenomics landscape, including data resources and handling, and the progress that has been made to accurately capture relevant data descriptions for phenotypes. We present an example of the kind of integration across domains that computable phenotypes would enable, and we call upon the broader biology community, publishers, and relevant funding agencies to support efforts to surmount today's data barriers and facilitate analytical reproducibility

The Mass of Kepler-93b and The Composition of Terrestrial Planets

Kepler-93b is a 1.478 +/- 0.019 Earth radius planet with a 4.7 day period around a bright (V=10.2), astroseismically-characterized host star with a mass of 0.911+/-0.033 solar masses and a radius of 0.919+/-0.011 solar radii. Based on 86 radial velocity observations obtained with the HARPS-N spectrograph on the Telescopio Nazionale Galileo and 32 archival Keck/HIRES observations, we present a precise mass estimate of 4.02+/-0.68 Earth masses. The corresponding high density of 6.88+/-1.18 g/cc is consistent with a rocky composition of primarily iron and magnesium silicate. We compare Kepler-93b to other dense planets with well-constrained parameters and find that between 1-6 Earth masses, all dense planets including the Earth and Venus are well-described by the same fixed ratio of iron to magnesium silicate. There are as of yet no examples of such planets with masses > 6 Earth masses: All known planets in this mass regime have lower densities requiring significant fractions of volatiles or H/He gas. We also constrain the mass and period of the outer companion in the Kepler-93 system from the long-term radial velocity trend and archival adaptive optics images. As the sample of dense planets with well-constrained masses and radii continues to grow, we will be able to test whether the fixed compositional model found for the seven dense planets considered in this paper extends to the full population of 1-6 Earth mass planets.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures. Accepted for publication in Ap