Closing Windows During Covid-19: How New Brunswick Media Framed a Pandemic

The New Brunswick English-language news media’s coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic from March 2020 through May 2021 is examined utilizing a frame analysis. The media provided significant essential information but frequently did not address social, political, and economic factors that exacerbated the health crisis. New Brunswick’s experience of the pandemic was conditioned by structural factors, which opened a policy window for a transition away from neoliberal austerity to a stronger health and social safety. The news media played a role in closing these policy windows by failing to investigate and elucidate the policy causes and solutions at play during the pandemic.La couverture de la pandémie de COVID-19 par les médias de langue anglaise du Nouveau-Brunswick de mars 2020 à mai 2021 est examinée dans cet article à l’aide d’une analyse de mots-clés et d’encadrement. Les médias ont fourni des informations essentielles importantes mais n’ont souvent pas abordé les facteurs sociaux, politiques et économiques qui ont exacerbé la crise sanitaire. L’expérience de la pandémie au Nouveau-Brunswick a été conditionnée par des facteurs structurels, lesquels ont ouvert une fenêtre d’opportunité en matière de politiques pour une transition de l’austérité néolibérale vers une sécurité sanitaire et sociale accrue. Les médias ont joué un rôle dans la fermeture de ces fenêtres d’opportunité en omettant d’enquêter et d’élucider les causes et les solutions des politiques en jeu pendant la pandémie

Adam’s Body: Playing with Bulimia and body image with a trauma-informed, critical race feminist drama therapy lens

This paper presents an in­depth case review exploring the use of drama therapy with Adam; an adult in his early twenties who identified himself as a male person, a gay person, a person with Down syndrome, a racialized person, a “fat” person who has experienced fatphobia and a person with trauma and mental health issues including what appeared to be undiagnosed, mild Bulimia Nervosa. Fundamental to evaluating Adam’s case was an understanding of intersectionality, Michel Foucault’s theory of the deviant body, as well as the relationship between trauma and systemic violence. When Adam revealed that he had Bulimic behaviours and thought patterns as well as a negative body image, a thorough exploration of how Adam viewed his body and why was necessary before choosing a particular drama therapy intervention for Adam’s treatment. It became clear that because of Adam’s experience of multiple, overlapping marginalized identities, Adam had been exposed, long­term, to the punitive societal gaze, which was often embodied and enacted by important figures in his life. Adam seemed to have internalized this punitive gaze that translated to him regarding his body as defective, disgusting, tainted, and even morally wrong. It was by adopting a critical race feminist drama therapy frame that I was able to engage with Adam effectively. Through the drama therapy intervention of Developmental Transformations, I was able to play with Adam in the playspace and by doing so, engage him with his body and transform his traumatic material. Keywords: Drama Therapy, Bulimia Nervosa, Intersectionality, the Deviant body, Developmental Transformation

A systematic review of how homeopathy is represented in conventional and CAM peer reviewed journals

BACKGROUND: Growing popularity of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) in the public sector is reflected in the scientific community by an increased number of research articles assessing its therapeutic effects. Some suggest that publication biases occur in mainstream medicine, and may also occur in CAM. Homeopathy is one of the most widespread and most controversial forms of CAM. The purpose of this study was to compare the representation of homeopathic clinical trials published in traditional science and CAM journals. METHODS: Literature searches were performed using Medline (PubMed), AMED and Embase computer databases. Search terms included "homeo-pathy, -path, and -pathic" and "clinical" and "trial". All articles published in English over the past 10 years were included. Our search yielded 251 articles overall, of which 46 systematically examined the efficacy of homeopathic treatment. We categorized the overall results of each paper as having either "positive" or "negative" outcomes depending upon the reported effects of homeopathy. We also examined and compared 15 meta-analyses and review articles on homeopathy to ensure our collection of clinical trials was reasonably comprehensive. These articles were found by inserting the term "review" instead of "clinical" and "trial". RESULTS: Forty-six peer-reviewed articles published in a total of 23 different journals were compared (26 in CAM journals and 20 in conventional journals). Of those in conventional journals, 69% reported negative findings compared to only 30% in CAM journals. Very few articles were found to be presented in a "negative" tone, and most were presented using "neutral" or unbiased language. CONCLUSION: A considerable difference exists between the number of clinical trials showing positive results published in CAM journals compared with traditional journals. We found only 30% of those articles published in CAM journals presented negative findings, whereas over twice that amount were published in traditional journals. These results suggest a publication bias against homeopathy exists in mainstream journals. Conversely, the same type of publication bias does not appear to exist between review and meta-analysis articles published in the two types of journals

How Palestinian students invoke the category ‘human’ to challenge negative treatment and media representations

Dehumanization of opponents in conflict has been shown to be a common and damaging feature in the media. What is not understood is how this dehumanization is challenged which is the novel contribution that this research will make. Drawing on focus groups (four focus groups each with four-six participants) conducted in the West Bank in 2015 that discussed media coverage of international conflict, this article demonstrates the ways in which young Palestinian participants attempt to rehumanize themselves in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Discursive analysis demonstrates how this was achieved in a number of ways: categorizing Palestinians as ‘human being’; by directly and explicitly challenging the suggestion that Palestinians are less than human; by drawing the enemy into the category ‘human’; and by embodying the ‘human’. These findings, the first to address the talk of young Palestinians about the reporting of violent conflicts around the world, demonstrate the importance of categorization and how, in this case, the specifics of the use of the (human) category work to rehumanize Palestinians in the face of (claims of) dehumanization

Quantitative Dissection of Clone-Specific Growth Rates in Cultured Malaria Parasites

Measurement of parasite proliferation in cultured red blood cells underpins many facets of malaria research, from drug sensitivity assays to assessing the impact of experimentally altered genes on parasite growth, virulence, and fitness. Pioneering efforts to grow Plasmodium falciparum in cultured red blood cells revolutionized malaria research and spurred the development of semi-high throughput growth assays using radio-labeled hypoxanthine, an essential nucleic acid precursor, as a reporter of whole-cycle proliferation (Trager and Jensen, 1976; Desjardins et al., 1979). Use of hypoxanthine (Hx) and other surrogate readouts of whole-cycle proliferation remains the dominant choice in malaria research. While amenable to high-throughput inference of bulk proliferation rates, these assays are blind to the underlying developmental and cellular steps of growth in human red blood cells. Modern whole-genome methods promise to reveal much about basic parasite biology, but progress is hindered by limitations of our ability to precisely quantify the specific development and growth events within the erythrocytic cycle. Here we build on standard visual and Hx-incorporation measures of growth by quantifying sub-phenotypes of a rapid proliferator, the multi-drug resistant clone Dd2, from a standard wild type clone, HB3. These data illustrate differences in cycle duration, merozoite production, and invasion rate and efficiency that underpin Dd2’s average 2-fold proliferation advantage over HB3 per erythrocytic cycle. The ability to measure refined growth phenotypes can inform the development of high-throughput methods to isolate molecular and developmental determinants of differential parasite growth rates

Unpacking cyberterrorism discourse: Specificity, status, and scale in news media constructions of threat

This article explores original empirical findings from a research project investigating representations of cyberterrorism in the international news media. Drawing on a sample of 535 items published by 31 outlets between 2008 and 2013, it focuses on four questions. First, how individuated a presence is cyberterrorism given within news media coverage? Second, how significant a threat is cyberterrorism deemed to pose? Third, how is the identity of ‘cyberterrorists’ portrayed? And, fourth, who or what is identified as the referent – that which is threatened – within this coverage? The article argues that constructions of specificity, status and scale play an important, yet hitherto under-explored, role within articulations of concern about the threat posed by cyberterrorism. Moreover, unpacking news coverage of cyberterrorism in this way leads to a more variegated picture than that of the vague and hyperbolic media discourse often identified by critics. The article concludes by pointing to several promising future research agendas to build on this work

Identifying novel phenotypes of elevated left ventricular end diastolic pressure using hierarchical clustering of features derived from electromechanical waveform data

Introduction Elevated left ventricular end diastolic pressure (LVEDP) is a consequence of compromised left ventricular compliance and an important measure of myocardial dysfunction. An algorithm was developed to predict elevated LVEDP utilizing electro-mechanical (EM) waveform features. We examined the hierarchical clustering of selected features developed from these EM waveforms in order to identify important patient subgroups and assess their possible prognostic significance. Materials and methods Patients presenting with cardiovascular symptoms (N = 396) underwent EM data collection and direct LVEDP measurement by left heart catheterization. LVEDP was classified as non-elevated ( ≤ 12 mmHg) or elevated (≥25 mmHg). The 30 most contributive features to the algorithm output were extracted from EM data and input to an unsupervised hierarchical clustering algorithm. The resultant dendrogram was divided into five clusters, and patient metadata overlaid. Results The cluster with highest LVEDP (cluster 1) was most dissimilar from the lowest LVEDP cluster (cluster 5) in both clustering and with respect to clinical characteristics. In contrast to the cluster demonstrating the highest percentage of elevated LVEDP patients, the lowest was predominantly non-elevated LVEDP, younger, lower BMI, and males with a higher rate of significant coronary artery disease (CAD). The next adjacent cluster (cluster 2) to that of the highest LVEDP (cluster 1) had the second lowest LVEDP of all clusters. Cluster 2 differed from Cluster 1 primarily based on features extracted from the electrical data, and those that quantified predictability and variability of the signal. There was a low predictability and high variability in the highest LVEDP cluster 1, and the opposite in adjacent cluster 2. Conclusion This analysis identified subgroups of patients with varying degrees of LVEDP elevation based on waveform features. An approach to stratify movement between clusters and possible progression of myocardial dysfunction may include changes in features that differentiate clusters; specifically, reductions in electrical signal predictability and increases in variability. Identification of phenotypes of myocardial dysfunction evidenced by elevated LVEDP and knowledge of factors promoting transition to clusters with higher levels of left ventricular filling pressures could permit early risk stratification and improve patient selection for novel therapeutic interventions