Engineering Modernity: The Aswan Low Dam and Modernizing the Nile

The completion of the Aswan Low Dam in 1902 was trumpeted by British policymakers and engineers as a great engineering feat and triumph over the forces of the Nile River. The Dam symbolized a break from traditional irrigation methods that had sustained people in the Nile River Valley for millennia and symbolized a new era of international relations for Egypt. Successors of the Aswan Low Dam have included a number of alterations to the original and the construction of the Aswan High Dam seven km upriver in the 1960s. The Aswan High Dam has garnered much attention from critics of modernization theory, environmentalists and proponents of the Dam alike. However, much of the social and environmental issues that are debated in the historical discourse surrounding the Aswan High Dam were present throughout the history of its antecedent. Understanding the social and environmental issues involved with the construction of the first Aswan Dam provides an example of the potential impacts of large-scale environmental programs on the people who inhabit the areas where they are pursued. Ultimately, the construction of the Aswan Low Dam was the product of British colonial administrators, informed by Orientalist and modernist biases, whose predilections of the value of damming the Nile left them overlooking the social and environmental impacts of this engineering project, which would be repeated sixty years later and continue to have implications for the people who inhabit the Nile River Valley and surrounding bioregion

In Adults with Gastroesophageal Reflux Disease, what is the efficacy of Surgical Versus Pharmacotherapy in reducing symptoms?

The purpose of this systematic review is to explore the efficacy of pharmacotherapeutics and surgical interventions for the treatment of gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD). In this systematic review, five electronic databases were used including AccessMedicine, PubMed, Cochrane library, Dynamed, and Clinical Key. Research criteria included work after 2010, peer reviewed, and only randomized control trials, systematic reviews, and meta-analyses were considered. Studies that were excluded included any that were before 2010, poor study design, and those that looked at other conditions or treatments outside of the research question in study. A total of 9 studies were selected for this systematic review. The research clearly shows benefits for both pharmacotherapy and surgical intervention for the treatment of GERD. The studies have shown a mixture of results when it comes to which treatment is more efficacious. Although both treatments have been shown to be effective, more research needs to be done to clearly identify risks and benefits of the different types of GERD treatments

Stalin, Party of One? : A Look at Domestic Political Resistance to Stalin’s Collectivization Policies

Joseph Stalin embodies the idea of a totalitarian dictator influenced by few and challenged by none. This view of Stalin’s role in Soviet history has proven incorrect in many respects since the fall of the Soviet Union and the opening up of Soviet archives to scholars around the world. The event that most demonstrated the lack of homogeneity within the Soviet government and the persistence of resistance to Stalin’s complete authority is the forced collectivization of agriculture. Soviet collectivization was an ambitious plan and for Stalin one of the most controversial policy initiatives he would pursue. Ultimately, the documentary record reveals that the agricultural policies that Stalin endorsed, which led to full scale collectivization, were not the product of a monolithic government ran by Stalin, but rather were contested at nearly every stage of development from 1928 through 1934

Patriarchy, Paternity and Paternalism in Early Twentieth Century Chilean Labor History

This study compares labor histories of Chile, pointing out that some stress the importance, mining, others urban work, and still others, the role of women. It also looks at the problem of illegitimacy and the problems for children born out of wedlock to establish paternity under the Civil Code of 1854. Both secular and Catholic orphanages prepared children for domestic work. Importantly as well, the study examines the roll of women in the Chilean labor movement

Reflections on the Impact of a Library-based Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) Service

Objective: The purpose of this study is to determine if a librarybased personal digital assistant (PDA) service is a significant factor in the clinical use of PDAs at an academic medical center. Methods: Health sciences students, faculty, staff, and residents at an academic medical center were the participants. The library has serviced several thousand PDAs. This population was used as the basis for the study group. The study design is a cross-sectional study using survey methodology. The analysis was done based on age, college affiliation, and gender, and answered questions such as frequency of PDA use, usefulness of library’s PDA service, and usefulness of programs the library installed on users’ PDAs. Results: One hundred and eight people responded. Seventy-five percent of the respondents would still be PDA users, even if the library did not assist or promote the service. Almost 90% were daily PDA users. Seventy-five percent stated that they would not feel confident that they could install the software without the library’s help. Conclusions: The survey results reenforced the library’s feeling that the service fills a crucial need in the community it serves. The survey also provided information on the databases it buys, which gives the library information for future collection development

Sea-Cards for the Impetuous Muse: A Reading of Shaftesbury\u27s Characteristicks

Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, by Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, marks an important dissent from the general trend of early modern philosophy. This dissertation argues that Shaftesbury\u27s book undertakes a restoration of the classical understanding of philosophy in contradistinction to the understanding presented by the writings of Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, and other modern thin0kers. According to Shaftesbury, modern philosophy introduces a method of radical skepticism in order to combat the moral and political effects of Christianity. This methodical skepticism, however, turns out to be at least as corrosive to moral and political life as the worldview it hopes to undermine. Shaftesbury proposes as an alternative the restoration of the classical critique of religion, which made possible the coexistence of philosophy and religion and was accompanied by political toleration of a variety of religious practices. To this end Shaftesbury distinguishes a noble form of enthusiasm akin to Platonic eros, which in his account is the source of all higher human aspirations, including philosophy. Shaftesbury\u27s primary concern is to preserve and defend the distinctly human things as they come to light in the writings of the ancients. This concern informs both the substance and the presentation of his defense of the noble and beautiful

Perspectives in a young century : an honors thesis (HONRS 499)

As the title "Perspectives in a Young Century" implies, my concept for this creative project was to write short stories that illustrated the lives of different types of people living in this postmodern society. I also wanted to include some poetry that might offer the reader some insight into my personal feelings about love, politics, and the struggle to cope with this fast paced, technological world that we have come to know. By doing this, my hope is that certain readers might identify with a particular character or a specific line of poetry and feel like they actually have something in common with others in a world that seems continually divided and distant. In this abstract, I have attempted to summarize the major themes of my short stories so that my intentions are understood more clearly and with the hope that a reader might look at the story differently after seeing exactly what messages I was trying to convey in it.My first story is titled "Sacrifice." With this story, I tried to examine the life of a high-profile sports figure and all of the stress that comes with being famous. I was particularly interested in boxing because of its gruesome nature and the fact that billions of dollars are generated by this barbaric sport still to this day. Although our society is supposedly concerned with things such as ridding the media of violent images and striving toward a more peaceful world, millions of people still won't hesitate to spend money watching two people bash each other's heads in. Not only did I try to allude to this point throughout the story, but I also focused on the media scrutiny that follows around sports figures like the main character Cedric. Now that the media is so pervasive and allencompassing, the smallest details of an athlete's life are often put on display for the world, and no matter how strong-willed that particular athlete is, the burden has to weigh them down sometimes. With Cedric, I also made a point to make him an African-American athlete, because I am intrigued with the way that these people are treated in our culture. There seems to be a double standard, where our society claims to want African-Americans and other minorities to succeed, but when they do so in excess such as a boxer like Cedric or an entertainer, the media and others constantly try to pick them apart and find flaws in their character. All of these pressures compounded for Cedric, and throughout the story the reader can see his mental state become more and more fragile. I thought that contrasting Cedric's fragile persona with his muscular figure would also be interesting, and I hope that the reader might come away from the story actually feeling some sympathy for someone like Cedric who may be a multi-millionaire, but is still a regular person inside with conflicted thoughts and emotions.With my second story, "Station Fever," I took a much more light-hearted approach and tried to make the story comical and fun to read. I first got the idea in a journalism class where we had an assignment to take a regular news story and try to make a humorous column out of it. I selected a news clip about a team of Russian cosmonauts heading up to the space station, and after I started to develop ideas for the column, I saw an opportunity to stretch it into a short story. For the most part, the story speaks for itself. A group of three cosmonauts take a trip to the space station to do experiments with growing food in low-gravity conditions. Before they went on the mission, the three were good friends who hung out together even outside of the workplace. However, because they know each other so well, after they are isolated up in the station for a little while, they start to pick at each other's faults and the situation becomes childish. Basically, I thought it would be a funny idea to have a group of learned, rational scientists degenerate into a couple of bickering roommates, much like the ones you find on college campuses. After I had completed the story, the tragedy with the U.S. space shuttle made me think twice about including the story in this project since it showed space exploration in such a trivial way. However, I came to the conclusion that the story was not meant to be taken seriously anyway, and a story about space that wasn't filled with technological jargon and science-fiction cliches just might be refreshing to readers."Taking It" is the title of my third short story, and it is the first one to focus on a main character that is simply an average, middle-aged U.S. citizen. This main character's name is Samuel, and he is the quintessential "momma's boy." In a society that has gradually become more feminized over the years, these people whose mothers continue to rule their life even after they are supposedly independent intrigue me. The Oedipal complex idea relates to this very much, and although I didn't specifically allude to it in the story, the concept was in the back of my mind as I wrote the story. The main character Samuel is in his mid-thirties, and although his mother has been dead for a few years, her incessant guidelines on how to live the proper life still dominate Samuel's decisions. He wishes to break free from her grasp, and he decides that he wants to do something rebellious that she would not have approved of had she been alive. He considers several options, but many of them are illegal, and although he desires to do something rebellious, he still follows the rules strictly and always strives to be the perfect law-abiding citizen. Therefore, he decides to go with a psychic reading, because his mother's religious beliefs firmly condemned superstition and sorcery, but it is not illegal to visit a psychic. He goes to a side of town that he rarely frequents so that there is less of a chance of someone recognizing him, because his conscience still haunts him and he still feels the need to hide from his mother's all-seeing eye. After visiting the psychic, Samuel becomes uncomfortable with how accurate the psychic is about his life, and he becomes flustered and leaves. As he gets ready to drive home, he sees a woman outside of the car parked in front of him who has a flat tire, and he decides to help her. A conversation ensues, and the woman eventually asks Samuel out on a date. This obviously makes him extremely nervous, but he decides that this is the perfect chance to turn a new page in his life, and he takes it.My final short story is basically an autobiographical piece about my relationship with my grandfather on my mother's side of the family. His wife died when I was very young, so I never came to know my grandmother, and after her death my grandfather fell into a deep state of depression, leaving him detached and completely non-influential in my development as a young man. I know this fact always bothered my mother, and it caused the subject to be a touchy one in my house for several years. I got the idea to write a story about it after I took a trip to see my grandfather in his assisted living facility while I was home one summer during college. I had never really had an in-depth conversation with him before this day, and after I visited him and was amazed by how philosophical and intelligent he was being, I decided to write a story about it. I also wanted to write a story in first person, and although I realize that this point of view proves to be extremely hard for many young writers, I felt comfortable writing this particular story in first person. In addition, I think that rather than my emotions getting in the way of the story, they actuallymade it a more heart-felt story that perhaps other young people like me with relatives in nursing homes might relate to. The story also contains a deeper theme about life and the fast pace at which it goes by, and this was my attempt to bring a more universal truth to this personal and emotional story.As for my poetry, for the most part I like to let it speak for itself. As I stated earlier, my main purpose for including the poetry was to give the reader some insight into my personal thoughts and emotions that influence my writing, both poetry and prose. Many of the poems contain social commentary and my political views, and others simply try to create a scene, describe someone, or speak of love, the strongest of human emotions. In general, I like to play with the English language and create inner rhymes, odd meters, and hidden meanings in my poetry. This might cause some people to think that the poetry is too abstract and they might not pick up on all of the meanings that I intended to convey, but if they are captivated by just one line of a poem, I feel like my writings have been a success. I think the beauty of poetry is that it can be interpreted in different ways by different people, and although the author may have had a specific theme in mind, if a reader can take away an entirely different meaning, that just makes the poem more special. Like the short stories that I have included, I hope that my poetry illustrates various perspectives from different types of people living in this new century, and if the reader can feel like he or she shares a common bond with a particular character in my story or a concept in my poetry, I feel like I have touched them in some way and contributed something meaningful to this increasingly meaningless world.Honors CollegeThesis (B.?.

Trophic Ecology of Meso- and Bathypelagic Predatory Fishes in the Gulf of Mexico

The trophic ecology of eight circumglobal meso- and bathypelagic fishes (Anoplogaster cornuta, Chauliodus sloani, Coccorella atlantica, Gigantura chuni, G. indica, Omosudis lowii, Photostomias guernei, and Stomias affinis) with contrasting vertical migration habits (vertical migrators vs. non-migrators) were examined using stable isotope analysis (SIA). Mean δ13C values of these predators were similar among species, ranging from –18.17 to –18.99 ‰, suggesting that all species are supported by a similar carbon source. This finding was supported by mixing-model analysis; all of these deep-living predators received the majority (\u3e73%) of their carbon from epipelagic food resources. Mean δ15N values of the predators ranged from 9.18 to 11.13 ‰, resulting in trophic position estimates between the third and fourth trophic level, although significant shifts in δ15N with increasing body size suggest that some of these species undergo ontogenetic shifts in trophic position. Bayesian standard ellipses, used to estimate isotopic niche areas, differed in size among species, with those occupying the highest relative trophic positions possessing the largest isotopic niches. These results, which provide the first trophic descriptions using dietary tracers for several of these species, offer insight into the trophic structure of deep-sea ecosystems and will help inform the construction of ecosystem-based models