Resurrecting the Anonymous: An Introduction To Mary Steele, the Author of Danebury and The Power of Friendship, A Tale with Two Odes by a Young Lady

Published anonymously in 1779 Danebury, or the Power of Friendship, a Tale with Two Odes, has retained its anonymity for over two centuries. Evidence found in the Reeves and Steele Collections housed at Angus Library; Regents Park College, Oxford identifies the author as Mary Steele, a provincial young woman with a Nonconformist background who was an active participant in a literary coterie that included other published authors such as Mary Scott, Anne Steele, and Hannah More. Drawing upon the work of Marjorie Reeves as well as the original manuscripts contained in the Reeves and Steele collections, this thesis provides the first in depth discussion of Mary Steeles published work and the role her literary circle of friends and acquaintances and her Nonconformist background played in shaping her poetry

Gender non-conformity in the appearance of political candidates and its effect on voters

In this time of political uncertainty and shifting cultural norms, it has become challenging to rely upon our preconceived notions of what makes a good political candidate. This research was conducted for the purpose of deepening our understanding of the relationship between politics and the nonverbal communication of gender norms, and to shed light on how a candidate\u27s gender presentation influences voters. Through examining the ways in which political candidates conform to or deviate from gender norms in their physical appearance, we begin to discover the impact of non-conformity on voters’ evaluations of candidates. In this study, respondents were shown one of four variants of a hypothetical candidate—one conforming and one non-conforming male and female—and evaluated the candidate in a number of areas. Results show that masculinity tends to be favored over femininity, while conformity is not always favored over nonconformity. These results, in total, carry implications for public tolerance in both politics and society at large, and build upon our understanding of the ways in which voters make political decisions, as well as provide insight into how conforming to or deviating from social norms affect the thought processes of the average person when it comes to evaluating political candidates

Red, white and blue highways: British travel writing and the American road trip in the late twentieth century

This study locates late-twentieth-century roadlogues (nonfiction, prose accounts of American road trips) by British writers within the tradition of the postwar American highway narrative in travel writing, novels, and film. It exposes the discursive structures and textual constraints underlying seven case studies published in the 1990s by comparing them to texts from various genres in diachronic and synchronic contexts. It contributes to scholarship on the American highway narrative, which largely overlooks British texts. It complements research on British travel writing, which tends to be biased towards pre-twentieth-century texts by travellers whose culture is in a dominant relation to that of travellees. It adds to postcolonial studies through analysis of representations of the other where otherness is reduced and complicated by a history of cultural exchange. The methodology combines several approaches including discourse theory, discourse analysis, narrative theory, feminist criticism, and theories of tourism. Three main areas are considered: identity, in relation to nationality and gender; the road writer's gaze, with regard to vehicles and roads; and intertextuality, on the margins (in maps) and inside roadlogues (in direct and indirect allusions). The study concludes that contemporary British roadlogues are in what is almost a subordinate relation to American highway narratives, evidenced by extensive influence of American texts. However, this subordination is qualified by joint ownership of western and New World myths, vestiges of imperial superiority, and selective deference by British writers. The latter is demonstrated through a consumer approach to American culture afforded by the episodic structure of the road trip and encouraged by the niche-oriented nature of the current market for travel writing. While American writers regard roadscapes with imperial eyes and experience the road trip as a rite of passage, contemporary Britons generally engage in superficial role play and remain untransformed by American highways

Interpretive Habit Is Strengthened by Cognitive Bias Modification

We investigated the nature of the memory mechanisms underlying cognitive bias modification by applying Jacoby’s (1991) process-dissociation procedure to responses during the transfer task. In the two training conditions (negative and benign), students imagined themselves in 100 ambiguous scenarios, most with potentially negative resolutions; the ambiguity was resolved in a consistently negative or benign direction by completing the fragment of a final word. Control participants completed nonambiguous, nonemotional scenarios. Next, all participants responded on a final training block, where half of the scenarios were completed negatively and half benignly. Transfer was assessed by examining choices in the completion of test scenarios when participants were instructed to respond in the same way as they had to a final-block training scenario that was situationally similar. Benign training facilitated correct responding to benign analogs and impaired correct responding to negative analogs. Performance in the negative-training and control conditions was similar. Process-dissociation procedures revealed that this newly established habit and not controlled recollection provided the basis for transfer

Academic Advising Predicting Student Persistence at Historically Black Colleges and Universities

Student retention has been a problem for historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) for many years. Academic advising has been used to improve retention. This quantitative correlational study addressed the lack of research on the relationship between academic advising modalities, academic advising, self-assessed academic learning outcomes, and student persistence at two HBCUs. Tinto’s student retention theory framed the examination of academic advising, self-assessed academic advising learning outcomes, and student persistence. Ajzen’s theory of planned behavior framed the relationship between a student’s intention to persist, predicting the student’s actual persistence to the next term. Research Question 1 examined academic advising modalities, academic advising, and self-assessed academic advising learning outcomes predicting student persistence. Research Question 2 examined the relationship of students’ persistence intentions to students’ actual persistence to the next term at two HBCUs. Logistic regression was used to understand how self-assessed academic advising learning outcomes predict student persistence. The predictive discriminant analysis compared the prediction intent to persist to actual persistence. Results suggest that self-assessed academic advising learning outcomes predict a student’s intention to persist to the next term. Findings could be used to improve communications between advisors and students and improve student persistence by increasing their knowledge of academic systems. Study findings may have a positive social change by increasing the student persistence rate at HBCUs, thereby strengthening the financial position of HBCUs and increasing the number of college graduates in African American communities

Propane to Acrylic Acid

Acrylic acid is an essential polymer raw material for many industrial and consumer products. Currently, acrylic acid is manufactured from propylene, which is created as a by- product from fossil fuels manufacture and industrial cracking of heavy hydrocarbons. However, the discovery of new natural gas reserves presents new opportunities for the production of acrylic acid. A design feasibility study is presented to analyze the economics behind producing acrylic acid from the selective oxidation of propane to propylene over a mixed metal oxide catalyst, Mo1V0.30Te0.23Nb0.125Ox. The proposed plant is located in the U.S. Gulf Coast and produces 200MM lb/yr acrylic acid. Since the catalytic oxidation process has low propane conversion per pass, the process recycles unconverted propane and propylene back to the reactor to increase overall conversion. The acrylic acid is then separated and purified to the glacial-grade industrial standard for polymer raw material of 99.7% acrylic acid by mass. A major challenge of the separation process is the non-ideal behavior of the components, which produces three different azeotropes: water with acrylic acid, water with acetic acid, and acetic acid with acrylic acid. The separation process utilizes four distillation towers to navigate around the azeotropes. After a thorough economic analysis, the proposed process is found to be economically viable. It has an estimated IRR of 84.9% and NPV of $384,963,400 at a 15$1.75/lb. The process is predicted to become profitable in year 3. If the product price decreases by 45% to $1.20/lb (the current market price of acrylic acid), the estimated IRR will be 45$114,552,700 at a 15% discount rate. The process will then become profitable in year 4

Shifting Patterns of Nitrogen Excretion and Amino Acid Catabolism Capacity during the Life Cycle of the Sea Lamprey (\u3cem\u3ePetromyzon mariunus\u3c/em\u3e)

The jawless fish, the sea lamprey (Petromyzon marinus), spends part of its life as a burrow-dwelling, suspension-feeding larva (ammocoete) before undergoing a metamorphosis into a free swimming, parasitic juvenile that feeds on the blood of fishes. We predicted that animals in this juvenile, parasitic stage have a great capacity for catabolizing amino acids when large quantities of protein-rich blood are ingested. The sixfold to 20-fold greater ammonia excretion rates (JAmm) in postmetamorphic (nonfeeding) and parasitic lampreys compared with ammocoetes suggested that basal rates of amino acid catabolism increased following metamorphosis. This was likely due to a greater basal amino acid catabolizing capacity in which there was a sixfold higher hepatic glutamate dehydrogenase (GDH) activity in parasitic lampreys compared with ammocoetes. Immunoblotting also revealed that GDH quantity was 10-fold and threefold greater in parasitic lampreys than in ammocoetes and upstream migrant lampreys, respectively. Higher hepatic alanine and aspartate aminotransferase activities in the parasitic lampreys also suggested an enhanced amino acid catabolizing capacity in this life stage. In contrast to parasitic lampreys, the twofold larger free amino acid pool in the muscle of upstream migrant lampreys confirmed that this period of natural starvation is accompanied by a prominent proteolysis. Carbamoyl phosphate synthetase III was detected at low levels in the liver of parasitic and upstream migrant lampreys, but there was no evidence of extrahepatic (muscle, intestine) urea production via the ornithine urea cycle. However, detection of arginase activity and high concentrations of arginine in the liver at all life stages examined infers that arginine hydrolysis is an important source of urea. We conclude that metamorphosis is accompanied by a metabolic reorganization that increases the capacity of parasitic sea lampreys to catabolize intermittently large amino acid loads arising from the ingestion of protein rich blood from their prey/hosts. The subsequent generation of energy-rich carbon skeletons can then be oxidized or retained for glycogen and fatty acid synthesis, which are essential fuels for the upstream migratory and spawning phases of the sea lamprey’s life cycle