[Review of] Jim Zwick. Inuit Entertainers in the United States

The stories documented in this book about Inuit entertainers in the United States reveals important events and circumstances pertaining to the lived experiences of Esther Eneutseak and her daughter Columbia, the only Eskimo born in the United States, during a time period (1890s-1920s) when the indigenous peoples to North America participated in world fairs and expositions as living exhibits. Were these indigenous people as cultural performers in control of their own lives? Did they possess the power and authority to make their own decisions on their own terms? In an attempt to answer these questions, the author, Jim Zwick, makes use of primary sources, newspapers, magazines, ship manifests, and census records to piece together the lives of these two Inuit women who, according to him, were more than objects of curiosity to the people that viewed them and saw their performances. Rather, he asserts that they, as well as Inuit entertainers in general, possessed various levels of control and were neither passive nor powerless despite the fact that they experienced some of the worst conditions faced by performers in ethnic villages at world\u27s fairs and expositions (pp. 4-5)

Dispersal of Rhagoletis cerasi in commercial cherry orchards: Efficacy of soil covering nets for cherry fruit fly control

Demand for organic cherries offers producers a premium price to improve their commercial viability. Organic standards require that producers find alternatives to pesticides. Soil treatments to control the European cherry fruit fly Rhagoletis cerasi (L.)(Diptera: Tephrididae) appear to be an attractive option. However, soil treatments can only be effective if the migration of flies is low, because mature flies may migrate from near-by trees for oviposition. To examine the general potential of soil treatments and to understand the dispersal and flight behaviour of R. cerasi within orchards, experiments using netting to cover the soil were conducted in two orchards with different pest pressure during two years. The netting reduced flight activity by 77% and fruit infestation by 91%. The data showed that the flies have a dispersal of less than 5 m within orchards, which is very low. The low thresholds for tolerance for infested fruit in the fresh market creates a strong economic incentive for control, therefore, soil covering is a promising strategy for controlling R. cerasi in commercial orchards

School accountability and student performance - commentary

Education ; Missouri

GROUNDWATER PROTECTION POLICY AND AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTION: A RECURSIVE STOCHASTIC ANALYSIS

Contamination of groundwater by agricultural practices presents a dilemma between protecting a vital resource and maintaining a valuable part of the economy. Policies to balance these objectives are presented. In addition to an historical baseline, policies that ban certain pesticides, taxes and subsidies, and control cultural practices are also considered. A model is developed to reflect the current state of agriculture in Eastern Suffolk County. This model consists of a recursive programming component, which has input for it generated by a stochastic model of Colorado potato beetle pest dynamics and management strategies to control those pests. While income is reduced by banning pesticides, the reduction is small when compared with the improvement in environmental quality. Further efforts to reduce pesticide use resulted in a reduction in potato acreage and incomes, as well as yields. Analysis concludes that improvements in both farm income and environmental quality could be achieved through the adoption of subsidies for low-input conservation crops.Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

Challenges and Opportunities for Organic Research and Extension

Organic farming holds the great promise to solve some of the environmental and social problems caused by conventional agriculture. To play this role at the global level, farmers need access to essential knowledge on efficient ways, sustainable means and support structures that encourage organic practices and incentives to adopt them

The cinema within:spectacle, labour and utopia in Michael Bay’s The Island

This paper will be oriented around twin poles: the aesthetics and politics of destruction, and the problematic of genre. The Island begins as a dystopia, drawing visually on the totalized and enclosed worlds of THX1138 (1971) and Logan’s Run (1976), but also drawing on the grey-blue visual palette of The Matrix (1999) and Minority Report (2002). It is the latter film that The Island more nearly approximates, accelerating from a conventional dystopian trajectory (alienation of the protagonist leading to the revelation of the true state of the world) into the tropes and kinetic action sequences of the chase movie. These intertextual borrowings foreground the motif of the inauthentic in the narrative, with the very fabric of the film replicating the status of the ‘agnate’ clones that are central to the film: The Island makes no claim to originality, and in fact consistently sides against the authentic and ‘original’, privileging the experience of the inauthentic or ‘copy’, throughout the film. Consistent with this is a self-conscious staging, particularly in the first half of the film, and central to the conceit of ‘the island’ itself, of the massive power of imaging technologies which (through ILM) form the fabric of the cinematic spectacle of The Island as a film. This staging works to fold both imagined worlds (the underground dystopia and the near-future USA) into analogous relation to the security apparatus and biopolitical circuits of the contemporary West (and, by extension, contemporary sf films such as Code 46)

Molecular self-assembly of organic molecules on coinage metal surfaces

The scientific community is interested in studying matter at the nanoscale and to fabricate nanomaterials that will benefit the development of our society. Within this context, the usage of organic molecules to build one-atom thick films on metal surfaces has gained special attention in the past decade due to their outstanding electronic properties for their usage in nanoelectronic devices. These nanomaterials are formed by a process known as molecular self-assembly by which the molecules bond to each other on a surface to form different two-dimensional (2D) structures. In this PhD thesis, a variety of factors that influence the formation of different 2D nanomaterials is presented by making use of data acquired by sophisticated equipment that allows the observation of matter at the nanoscale, such as the scanning tunneling microscope (STM) that was operated under ultra-high vacuum (UHV) or conditions of extremely low pressure to ensure a well-controlled environment. Therefore, with the outstanding imaging capabilities of the STM, it is possible to observe the organic molecules (in the range of a few nanometers) that form these 2D nanomaterials. This thesis focuses on a class of 2D nanomaterials that are formed by linking organic molecules with metal-atoms on a metal surface, i.e., metal-organic coordination networks (MOCNs). The MOCNs offer promising applications in nanoelectronic devices due to the metal-atoms that are incorporated within the 2D structure of these nanomaterials. Furthermore, the influence of the number of molecules and the chemical structure of the organic molecules in the formation of the MOCNs is presented in detail in this work

To the Cheshire Station:Alan Garner and John Mackenzie’s Red Shift

In The North (and almost everything in it), Paul Morley writes: ‘Few counties owe more of their history to their geographical position and surroundings, and to the character of their natural features, than Cheshire’. Cheshire is the home of the writer Alan Garner and most of his novels are set in the county; one of the few exceptions, The Owl Service (1967), was adapted to television as a serial by HTV Wales. As with The Owl Service, Garner was involved in the screenwriting and production of the BBCtv Play For Today adaptation of his 1973 novel Red Shift, which was shot on location in 1977 around Crewe station, the South Cheshire countryside around Rudheath (in particular Mow Cop) and Barthomley Church, the site of a massacre of villagers by Royalist forces during the English Civil War. This is Garner’s territory: born in Congleton, many of his fictions are located in specific Cheshire sites, such as Alderley Edge or the radio telescopes at Jodrell Bank. Like the 1980 short tv play To Kill A King, for which Garner wrote an original screenplay, Red Shift negotiates a particular vision or representation of the Cheshire landscape while indicating the contemporary world’s embedding in networks of telecommunications (symbolised by the Jodrell Bank observatory). Red Shift, like the novel form which it is adapted, fuses three historical timelines: the ‘present’ of 1977, in which the young man Tom conducts an increasingly frayed long-distance relationship with his girlfriend Jan, which is centred on Crewe railway station; the time of the massacre at Barthomley, focalised though Thomas Rowley, one of the villagers, who has fits and visions; and the time of the 2nd century AD, in which Macey, himself subject to induced ‘berserker’ homicidal rages, and his Roman soldier companions hide out on Mow Cop after their camp is attacked by local tribes. Each is filmed, without stylistic distinctiveness, according the codes of narrative realism, but although the Tom/Jan ‘present-day’ narrative remains the primary cohering thread, the play increasingly shifts backwards and forwards between times, connecting through place, or through the emotional dislocations of the main masculine protagonists. Garner’s historicity, here as elsewhere, is mythic. While far from a sentimentalised presentation of the Cheshire landscape, Red Shift’s transitions between time periods are uncanny or visionary, articulated as a kind of recursion. John Mackenzie, whose 1979 feature film The Long Good Friday offers a critique of the nascent forces of neoliberal capitalism in genre guise (the gangster film), here presents Cheshire as a ‘place between’: between historical forces and social patterns to do with landscape and village life, and the dislocations engendered by technologies of mobility (trains, the motorway, even bicycles) and emergent social and economic formations. When Tom, in the present, stands upon Mow Cop and declares himself to be between parishes, counties, dioceses, he articulates Cheshire’s geographical and historical position as the ‘beginning’ of the North, and also the end of the 1970s as a temporal dislocation between the end of the post-war settlement and the rise of Thatcherism. Bibliography Cooke, L. (2012) A Sense of Place: Regional British Television Drama, 1956-82, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Blandford, S. (2007) Film, Drama and the Break Up of Britain, Exeter: Intellect. Hockenhull, S. (2014) Aesthetics and Neo-Romanticism in Film: Landscapes in Contemporary British Cinema, London: I. B. Tauris

Organic barley producers' desired qualities for crop improvement

Barley fits well into many different organic farming systems. It can be grown as either a winter or spring annual crop in many temperate regions. Barley can be used for food, malting, or animal feed, providing growers with diverse marketing opportunities. Despite its advantages, many organic farmers in the USA have not adopted barley as a regular crop in their rotation. Researchers surveyed organic barley producers to discover what they considered to be the main obstacles to growing barley. The primary obstacles identified were limited markets and price. Breeding and development of high-quality barley suitable for organic systems and specialty markets may be a way to expand markets and secure a better price. Farmers identified yield as the most important agronomic trait of interest, but other traits such as nutritional quality were also highly ranked. Naked (hull-less) barley bred for multi-use quality is a possible alternative that allows organic farmers to sell into multiple markets. Most respondents expressed interest in the development of such varieties suitable for organic farming conditions. The researchers conducted follow-up interviews to obtain detailed information on how barley is used in organic farming systems, production practices, costs of production, and what traits farmers would like to see breeders focus on

Improving Barley for Organic Producers: What Do Organic Producers Want?

Researchers surveyed organic barley producers in order to find out how many acres they are growing, what varieties they grow, what markets they are growing barley for, whether they receive a price premium for organic barley, whether they are growing or would be interested in growing multi-use naked barley, what production challenges they face, and what traits they would like to see improved