Joanna Hone Mathews and Julia Anthon Mathews: Sisterhood and Sunday School Books

A number of women who authored children’s series came from writing families, with parents, siblings, cousins, or other relatives also publishing in some fashion. Another group had connections to the clergy, with fathers or husbands (or both) serving as ministers or teaching religious studies. One small subset of this population was sisters who wrote girls’ or children’s series and who had ministers as fathers. The earliest such pair were Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1815-1852) and Sarah Stuart Robbins (1817-1910), daughters of Andover theologian Moses Stuart (1780-1852). The most successful – in terms of series fiction ‑- were probably the Mathews sisters, who specialized in religiously themed series and devoted most of their writing careers to works for children

Everything is Relative: Frances Elizabeth Mease Barrow (Aunt Fanny) and Sarah Leaming Barrow Holly (Aunt Fanny\u27s Daughter)

For more than forty years Frances Elizabeth Mease Barrow\u27s name – or, rather, that of her pseudonym, Aunt Fanny – remained before the public. In the 1850s and 1860s, she published five quirkily-titled series combining humor, moral instruction, and social awareness. By the 1870s and 1880s, her name was associated with children\u27s charities and with club activities and literary salons. When she died in 1894, one obituary characterized her both as an author whose children\u27s books delighted the grandfathers and grandmothers of the present day and as a social star, known to everybody as \u27Aunt Fanny.\u27 Yet even though her name appeared often in newspapers and periodicals (and still surfaces in accounts of her nephew, Stanford White) and her own family figured in some of her stories, much of Frances Elizabeth Mease Barrow\u27s history remains shadowy or contradictory, a situation compounded by repeated errors in reference sources. The biographical fragments that remain, combined with Fanny\u27s writings, make it possible to piece together a more detailed and accurate picture than has been previously assembled. The portrait that emerges is that of a talented woman filled with a love of -- and ready sympathy for -- children (her own and others\u27), who managed to parlay her writing skills and build social networks to overcome personal losses and economic challenges and to help others in need

She had ceased to offer her stories for publication : Louise M. Thurston and the Unfinished Charley Roberts Series

One of the unsolved mysteries of series fiction is that of Louise M. Thurston, a promising author who wrote part of a series about siblings for Lee & Shepard -- then, apparently, just stopped writing. Thurston\u27s brief career covers the four years between 1868-1872 and intersects with two significant trends in 19th-century children\u27s publishing, the growth of Sunday-school libraries and the practice of issuing children\u27s books in series. Her career illustrates in microcosm the markets for beginning writers, and its early termination raises questions about some of the problems they might have encountered. Entwined with Louise\u27s history is that of her own sibling, Clara W. T. Fry, who also wrote for children -- even more briefly than did Louise -- and whose fiction, like Louise\u27s, displays autobiographical elements (albeit of a different nature than her sister\u27s). Adding to the mystery surrounding Louise Thurston is the paucity of information about her later years, leaving her biography, like her series, incomplete

The Shape of LITTLE THINGS Dwarf Galaxies DDO 46 and DDO 168: Understanding the stellar and gas kinematics

We present the stellar and gas kinematics of DDO 46 and DDO 168 from the LITTLE THINGS survey and determine their respective Vmax/sigma_z,0 values. We used the KPNO's 4-meter telescope with the Echelle spectrograph as a long-slit spectrograph. We acquired spectra of DDO 168 along four position angles by placing the slit over the morphological major and minor axes and two intermediate position angles. However, due to poor weather conditions during our observing run for DDO 46, we were able to extract only one useful data point from the morphological major axis. We determined a central stellar velocity dispersion perpendicular to the disk, sigma_z,0, of 13.5+/-8 km/s for DDO 46 and of 10.7+/-2.9 km/s for DDO 168. We then derived the maximum rotation speed in both galaxies using the LITTLE THINGS HI data. We separated bulk motions from non-circular motions using a double Gaussian decomposition technique and applied a tilted-ring model to the bulk velocity field. We corrected the observed HI rotation speeds for asymmetric drift and found a maximum velocity, Vmax, of 77.4 +/- 3.7 and 67.4 +/- 4.0 km/s for DDO 46 and DDO 168, respectively. Thus, we derived a kinematic measure, Vmax/sigma_z,0, of 5.7 +/- 0.6 for DDO 46 and 6.3 +/- 0.3 for DDO 168. Comparing these values to ones determined for spiral galaxies, we find that DDO 46 and DDO 168 have Vmax/sigma_z,0 values indicative of thin disks, which is in contrast to minor-to-major axis ratio studies

The New Face of Data Accessibility

Management of medical and research data at NASA's Johnson Space Center has been addressed with two separate, independent systems: the Lifetime Surveillance of Astronaut Health (formerly, The Longitudinal Study of Astronaut Health) (LSAH) and the Life Sciences Data Archive (LSDA). Project management for these has been autonomous with little or no cross-over of goals, objectives or strategy. The result has been limited debate and discussion regarding how contents from one repository might impact or guide the direction of the other. It is decidedly more efficient to use existing data and information than to re-generate them. Ensuring that both clinical and research data / information are accessible for review is a central concept to the decision to unify these repositories. In the past, research data from flight and ground analogs has been held in the LSDA and medical data held in the Electronic Medical Record or in console flight surgeon logs and records. There was little cross-pollination between medical and research findings and, as a result, applicable research was not being fully incorporated into clinical, in-flight practice. Conversely, findings by the console surgeon were not being picked up by the research community. The desired life cycle for risk mitigation was not being fully realized. The goal of unifying these repositories and processes is to provide a closely knit approach to handling medical and research data, which will not only engender discussion and debate but will also ensure that both categories of data and information are used to enhance the use of medical and research data to reduce risk and promote the understanding of space physiology, countermeasures and other mitigation strategie