Black Hair Research Articles

Seven Names for Light

Seven Names for Light Marc Labriola (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution A woman gives birth in a room where all the windows are covered with pages of a book to be burned. The woman inside, the women outside: all wait for the author. Luz is going to scream. She can't drag her body any closer to the bed, so it will happen where she fell. There is a sound she thinks has come from her. Down her thighs she feels something she knows is not what it feels like. Now a faint odor of semen. Her black hair is dripping. The lights shut off again. There have been rolling blackouts since the night it happened. She's covered all the windows of her third-floor apartment with pages from the book they will eventually burn. She can't let the women see her. Luz pulls off her towel. Her eyes haven't adjusted to the dark. Between her legs little drops slowly cool into glass eyes on the tiles. The blood on the floor would have been red. [End Page 14] There is a shock in her waist. Her body jumps like falling in her sleep. This is her first so Luz doesn't know what hurts when. She can't get to her phone. Her heels slip as she pushes back towards the bed. The water on the floor isn't water. Luz can't breathe anymore. They tell you to breathe. Just make it to the bed. She can't let the women hear her. Luz gropes around the dark floor for something to put in her mouth. Her apartment is half empty now. Just the things that survived. She can still see the rusted steel bars like fossilized ribs where seven months ago pieces of the concrete ceiling collapsed in the earthquake. She bites down on her lip until she can taste it. If this were a dream it would be a symbol of something. It wasn't hard for them to find her. He never should have used the real names of the streets in the novel. They won't leave her alone now they know the father is Gabriel Luria. Her apartment has already been broken into three times. Looted for charms or souvenirs. They took coins, earrings, forks and knives, her lipstick, hairbrush. Anything she touched. Even pulled the sheets off her bed. Luz doesn't want this to happen here. Those strange women waiting in the street. It's too soon. She has six days' clothes packed in the suitcase on her bed. But Luz is one week early. She shuts her eyes tight and mouths her list of baby names that mean colours. Her favourite boy's name means red. This is when Luz screams. Someone outside must have heard the voice of a woman through the wall screaming God. But she knows that at a certain distance she is not a woman screaming. She is just a sound someone thought they heard. Blamed on other things. If you're far enough away, even the worst earthquake in living memory is just a little fetal kick. She listens. No one is coming. She knocks the candle and lighter off the table with the tips of her fingers. Flicks the wheel and it lights. In the book, Gabriel says to her, with your clothes off, I count seven different colours. He says the blue blood in the veins on your legs is not really blue. It's just the behaviour of light coming and going from your skin. Of everything we don't know we mostly don't know about light. Luz bites down hard on the back of her hand. Trying to siphon the pain. Don't let them hear. Day and night they're out there with their dog-eared copies of the book, famous around the world because the day the earthquake happened was the same day the novel said it would happen. The book says a comet from the genitals of the constellation Leo entered the womb of the constellation Virgo in a celestial insemination on exactly the night of July 17, the night of...

Tearing Down the Lost Cause: The Removal of New Orleans Confederate Statues by James Gill and Howard Hunter

Reviewed by: Tearing Down the Lost Cause: The Removal of New Orleans Confederate Statues by James Gill and Howard Hunter Shae Smith Cox Tearing Down the Lost Cause: The Removal of New Orleans Confederate Statues. By James Gill and Howard Hunter. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2021. Pp. viii, 225. $25.00, ISBN 978-1-4968-3332-7.) James Gill and Howard Hunter's timely Tearing Down the Lost Cause: The Removal of New Orleans Confederate Statues focuses on the creation of, the debates around, and the eventual removal of four New Orleans monuments: Robert E. Lee, P. G. T. Beauregard, Jefferson Davis, and Liberty Place. The first three chapters describe New Orleans as historically and culturally complex [End Page 429] from the antebellum period through the Civil War. Chapters 4 through 6 discuss why and how Confederate leanings took hold in such a culturally diverse city during the beginnings of Jim Crow. Throughout, the authors discuss the reasons for memorializing the person or event in stone and the process of commemoration. The authors do well in describing the story of the Robert Charles riots by making the connection that the monuments, specifically Lee's, were a meeting place for working-class white men who "proceeded on a rampage through the city, killing three Blacks and seriously wounding six" (p. 107). Meeting at a figure known for perpetuating the subjugation of Black people and then enacting violence on those people spoke volumes. In the last few chapters, the authors detail the public conversation from the 1990s to the late 2010s on the push to desegregate the Mardi Gras krewes led by Dorothy Mae Taylor, moving through interviews conducted without significant analysis and the legal challenges of removing monuments. The book has a sprinkling of primary source gems such as the story of the "mimicry of war," a "Civil War–style reenactment to raise money for a Confederate Soldiers' Home in the Crescent City" (p. 9). Such detail shows that the authors could have crafted a well-sourced microhistory of a city that removed its controversial Confederate and white supremacist monuments. The book's core ideas—the history of the monuments and the cultural climate, law, and politics of their removal—are fascinating, but the result is problematic. To begin with the simplest issue, the scant use of endnotes is troubling, specifically because of the emphasis on secondary source material; more credit is due to the authors of the works used. More crucially, Gill and Hunter seem to determine a woman's value by discussing the men in her life. The authors would have benefited greatly from digging further into the papers and actions of the women who aided in erecting the monuments to demonstrate these white women's abilities to raise funds and perpetuate their narrative. Contrary to what Gill and Hunter state and the source from which they found the following quotation, the post–Civil War period was not the first time women were thrust into new roles or "'forced to solve their own familial problems or to earn their own livelihood'" (p. 166). Women had been doing those things long before the Civil War. Gill and Hunter's description of Michael Quess Moore as a "dreadlocked teacher at a local charter school who fancied himself a poet" feels a bit pointed (p. 13). Is that really the best way to describe Moore, especially when white people have policed Black hair since their abduction from Africa into enslavement? Also, the authors do not describe the white participants by their appearance in that way. They use insensitive racial terms such as "uppity Negroes" and "Negro rule" without quotation marks or any indication that they are citing a source (pp. 60, 68). Gill and Hunter concluded their epilogue with the thought that "[Mayor Mitch] Landrieu's speech offered a rite of purification, to make the city whole by washing away the past. But history cannot be willed or washed away. And if New Orleans has always contained a multitude of voices, what about the descendants of the vanquished, both Union and Confederate?" (pp. 168–69). But the United States was not vanquished, and the voices of Confederate descendants trumpeting the Lost...

Colored Point Cloud Completion for a Head Using Adversarial Rendered Image Loss.

Recent advances in depth measurement and its utilization have made point cloud processing more critical. Additionally, the human head is essential for communication, and its three-dimensional data are expected to be utilized in this regard. However, a single RGB-Depth (RGBD) camera is prone to occlusion and depth measurement failure for dark hair colors such as black hair. Recently, point cloud completion, where an entire point cloud is estimated and generated from a partial point cloud, has been studied, but only the shape is learned, rather than the completion of colored point clouds. Thus, this paper proposes a machine learning-based completion method for colored point clouds with XYZ location information and the International Commission on Illumination (CIE) LAB () color information. The proposed method uses the color difference between point clouds based on the Chamfer Distance (CD) or Earth Mover’s Distance (EMD) of point cloud shape evaluation as a color loss. In addition, an adversarial loss to images rendered from the output point cloud can improve the visual quality. The experiments examined networks trained using a colored point cloud dataset created by combining two 3D datasets: hairstyles and faces. Experimental results show that using the adversarial loss with the colored point cloud renderer in the proposed method improves the image domain’s evaluation.

Working with style: Black women, black hair, and professionalism

AbstractFocusing on Black women, this study considers hair as an element of professionalism. As with other elements of Black life, White culture and beauty norms influence the professional expectations placed on Black hair. Within this context, this study features responses from 22 Black women related to hairstyling when job searching, the influence that hair has on their work experiences, attempts by others to control their hair, and their efforts to wear the hairstyles of their choice in the workplace. Responses indicate that hair is an ever‐present issue for Black women as they look for and perform their assigned duties at work. Fear of negative professional outcomes and constant microagressions lead Black women to consider and even adopt hairstyles that emulate White beauty norms and professional expectations.

Validation of a high-throughput method for simultaneous determination of areca nut and tobacco biomarkers in hair using microwave-assisted extraction and isotope dilution liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry

For people with habits of chewing betel nuts and smoking, the probability of suffering from oral cancer is ten to a hundred times higher than others. Due to the serious health consequences of areca nut and tobacco, a reliable cessation program is needed. Hair is the best option to document long-term exposure. Unfortunately, the research on betel nut in hair did not attract much attention. In this study, a high-throughput method based on microwave-assisted extraction (MAE) and isotope dilution liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) was developed to measure the four biomarkers of betel nuts and cigarettes, including areca alkaloids (arecoline), tobacco alkaloids (nicotine), and their metabolites (arecaidine and cotinine). The hair sample was washed, cut, weighed, and incubated for 3 min MAE with methanol/trifluoroacetic acid, then evaporated and reconstituted for LC-MS/MS analysis. The total experiment time was 50 min. The lower limits of quantification (LOQ) were 5–10 pg/mg. The intra-day and inter-day precision were 2.2–7.6%. Intra-day and inter-day accuracy were − 6.1–8.2%. The method showed good linearity (r2 > 0.995) over LOQ - 1000 pg/mg concentration ranges. It was successfully applied to analyze 11 subjects of regular areca nut chewers, also smokers. Eight samples were black hair; three samples were naturally black hair with partially gray hair. Measured concentrations in black hair were in the range 56.9 pg/mg to 3.2 ng/mg for arecoline, 12.8 pg/mg to 222.2 pg/mg for arecaidine, 3.8 ng/mg to 33.4 ng/mg for nicotine and 1.1 ng/mg to 6.1 ng/mg for cotinine. The results showed lower levels in gray hair. This method was utilized successfully to analyze pg/mg levels of arecoline, arecaidine, nicotine, and cotinine, and good recoveries were obtained. The mean concentration of arecaidine and cotinine in hair was 15% and 20% of arecoline and nicotine, respectively. A good positive correlation was found between the concentrations of these compounds and self-report. This method improved extraction speed, concentration, and analysis of samples and is useful for monitoring betel nut and smoking cessation programs.

The Soldier's Dilemma

Int. Fort Leavenworth Prison Cell, Nighttime.A man lays sleeping in bed, by his lonesome. The man in bed is Private Francis Orestes. He is in his early 20s, tall with a medium build, dark blond hair, and hazel eyes. His generally handsome features have been dampened by rather severe bruises and cuts. Parts of his torso are clearly bandaged. He tosses violently in his sleep, dreaming of quiet horror.The clanking of pipes audibly rustles.Int. Prison Psychiatrist's Office, Daytime, Orestes and Euterpe Sit Across from One Another.Francis Orestes sits in a room reminiscent of a high school guidance counselor's office, with the additional features of a prison.Orestes sits with both his arms and legs crossed, even though he is chained to the floor, making the position uncomfortable.Across a cluttered desk sits Doctor Valentina Euterpe. She is thin with brown hair and poses average height. She wears a pastel buttoned jacket and matching skirt, like the style of Jackie Kennedy, as well as white oval glasses. She possesses a somewhat timeless beauty and elegance, so her age could range from late 40s to early 60s.Int. Prison Meeting Room, DayOrestes sits at a metal table, handcuffed in place. He wears his usual prison garb and bears a grim look as he waits.Enter Corrections Specialist Curtin, followed shortly by an officer.The officer, Captain Jaxon Boedromi, in full uniform. He has dark black hair, cut short, and dark brown eyes. He is of average height, but of an exceedingly good build. There is a casual coolness to his stride, but he walks with a barely noticeable limp.Int. Daytime, Prison Visitors’ Center. Orestes Is Seated.Francis Orestes sits alone, nervously tapping his foot. He has a twisted look of distress on his face. He looks toward the door, waiting for someone to enter.Monique Orestes enters. She is of average height, with a small frame, blonde hair, and brown eyes. She is wearing a blue floral pattern dress cinched at the waist by a belt. She looks solemnly upon the crowd of faces, finds her son, and makes her way to him.Int. Prison Psychiatrist's Office, Bright Daytime, Orestes and Euterpe Sit Across from One Another.Orestes sits chained to the ground, glumly looking toward the floor. Doctor Euterpe sits across from him and attempts to get his attention by clearing her throat, though his stare remains blank.Int. Courtroom, Daytime, Boedromi and Orestes Sit at a Table Facing an Empty BenchOrestes and Boedromi orient themselves at their desk, both dressed in formal fatigues. Behind them sits many military onlookers. Enter Potineish and the Judge Advocates (they sit at the opposite table of Orestes).Int. Daytime, Prison Visitors Center. Francis Is Seated Across from His Two Parents.Francis sits facing his two parents. They all look nervously at one another. Orestes taps his foot absently until his mother places her hand on top of his.

Gene Expression of CD70 and CD27 Is Increased in Alopecia Areata Lesions and Associated with Disease Severity and Activity.

Background Alopecia areata (AA) is an acquired hair loss disorder induced by a cell-mediated autoimmune attack against anagen hair follicles. CD27-CD70 is a receptor-ligand complex which enhances T helper and cytotoxic T cell activation, survival, and proliferation. The overstimulation of this complex can lead to a lack of tolerance and the development of autoimmunity. Objectives This study aimed to assess the gene expression of CD27 and CD70 in patients with AA. Methods CD70 and CD27 mRNA expressions were evaluated by a quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction in scalp biopsies from 40 AA patients (both AA lesions and non-lesional areas) and 40 healthy controls (HCs). The Severity of Alopecia Tool (SALT) score was used to assess AA severity. Patients were evaluated for signs of AA activity, including a positive hair pull test and dermoscopic features of black dots, broken hairs, and tapering hairs. Results The gene expression of CD70 and CD27 was significantly higher in AA lesions than in non-lesional areas (p < 0.001 for both) and HCs (p=0.004, p=0.014, respectively). There were significant positive correlations between AA severity and gene expression of CD70 (p < 0.001) and CD27 (p=0.030) in AA lesions. Significant associations were detected between signs of AA activity and lesional gene expression of CD70 and CD27. Additionally, CD70 and CD27 gene expression was significantly lower in non-lesional biopsies compared to HCs (p < 0.001). Conclusion Gene expression of CD70 and CD27 was increased in AA lesions and was associated with disease severity and activity. Thus, both molecules can be a predictor of AA severity and activity. Furthermore, the expression was reduced in non-lesional scalp areas. Thus, a lack of CD27 and CD70 expression may initially predispose to immunological dysregulation and the development of AA.

Hair phenotype diversity across Indriidae lemurs

AbstractObjectivesHair (i.e., pelage/fur) is a salient feature of primate (including human) diversity and evolution—serving functions tied to thermoregulation, protection, camouflage, and signaling—but wild primate pelage evolution remains relatively understudied. Specifically, assessing multiple hypotheses across distinct phylogenetic scales is essential but is rarely conducted. We examine whole body hair color and density variation across Indriidae (Avahi, Indri, Propithecus)—a lineage that, like humans, exhibits vertical posture (i.e., their whole bodies are vertical to the sun).Materials and methodsOur analyses consider multiple phylogenetic scales (family‐level, genus‐level) and hypotheses (e.g., Gloger's rule, the body cooling hypotheses). We obtain hair color and density from museum and/or wild animals, opsin genotypes from wild animals, and climate data from WorldClim. To analyze our data, we use phylogenetic generalized linear mixed models (PGLMM) using Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms.ResultsOur results show that across the Indriidae family, darker hair is typical in wetter regions. However, within Propithecus, dark black hair is common in colder forest regions. Results also show pelage redness increases in populations exhibiting enhanced color vision. Lastly, we find follicle density on the crown and limbs increases in dry and open environments.DiscussionThis study highlights how different selective pressures across distinct phylogenetic scales have likely acted on primate hair evolution. Specifically, our data across Propithecus may implicate thermoregulation and is the first empirical evidence of Bogert's rule in mammals. Our study also provides rare empirical evidence supporting an early hypothesis on hominin hair evolution.

Tenderness

Tenderness Mary Milstead (bio) I return to the image of her bare feet—they are small and white, and I am drawn to her softness, which is familiar to me. Telling my mother's story requires this sort of time travel. I know her well, from her silver-white hair down to her painted toenails, but I didn't know her when it happened. It would be another four years before I was born. On a recent summer visit to my home in Portland, my very Texan mother and I sat on my back porch in the afternoon sun. I offered her a foot rub and she accepted, sliding off her flip-flops. She loves the heat, and is always cold when she visits, but we were lucky enough that August visit to be bathed in sunshine—finally, it was warm enough. It was our last afternoon before she flew back home, so we were savoring our time together. She reached down and showed me with her fingers where the pressure point was for her lungs, just below the bone at the ball of her foot. ________ That night, before anything happened, she had been sitting on a low wall looking out at the city lights. Legs crossed, flip-flops dangling from her toes. Her hair was long and black, wavy and parted in the middle. It was mid-January, but a warm night. 1972. She was a nineteen-year-old out on a date with her boyfriend, and she doesn't remember what they were talking about. They hadn't been there long, and it was nice out. [End Page 59] Earlier they'd been at a potluck with a group of friends, and when they'd left, Michael suggested they stop for a while at Mt. Bonnell, a popular overlook with a view of Lake Austin and the city lights in the distance. They'd never been there together before. My mother told me that when he first suggested it, she felt nervous. She was clear that it wasn't any kind of premonition—she never sensed the impending tragedy until it was upon them—just a general sense that it was getting dark. And of course good girls avoided places that might be dangerous at night. But she was with Michael, and he was a great guy: she was safe. She thought, really, that just being with a man meant being safe. It usually did. She and Michael were newly dating, but they'd known each other for a while. He worked as a manager at a natural health food store and was part of her tight circle of friends—mostly young, mostly college students, people interested in spiritual growth and love and peace. She and Michael had talked about marriage, and she thought she might spend the rest of her life with him. So she had a momentary twinge of fear, but it didn't last, and by the time she was walking up the stone steps toward the top of Mt. Bonnell, she was mostly calm and happy, enjoying the night. They sat and talked on a low stone wall with a perfect view. It was just the two of them up there that night, at least as far as they could tell. There was a parked VW Bug in the clearing, but no other people. And so, when one of her flip-flops fell into the dirt just below, she didn't reach down to get it. She heard it land with a soft thud and figured she'd just grab it when they left. Instead, they were soon interrupted by a voice in the dark behind them. "Turn around, and don't make any trouble." Two men, a gun. My mother was not the type of girl to make trouble. And she knew instantly that this was not a joke, not some kind of prank or mistake, no matter how surreal it felt. She would do everything they told her to do. Within a few minutes, one of the men was holding her off to the side of the clearing by her long black hair. The other man was standing by the parked...

What We Understand

What We Understand Gloria L. Huang (bio) When the rooms were empty and the halls were dark, the lights on the machines still flickered like silent Morse codes communicating together. She was present when the noise transformed from loud chatter to muffled quiet, she was there when bags were slung over shoulders and phones were picked up for the long journey home. Unseen and invisible, she was the sentinel who watched over the change from day to night. During work hours, the offices were alive with color and purpose. Posters plastered across the walls encouraged the reader to take risks, move fast, break things. She could never understand this urge to stir the water, to cause waves. This craving to break things and start anew. The vast office spaces were filled with chairs that existed in different shapes, some of them soft amorphous blobs, others upside-down tops that rotated dizzily. The people who came to work reminded her of children playing dress-up. Arriving on bicycles and scooters, backpacks strapped over both shoulders, they were young and fresh-faced. They spoke to computer screens while walking nowhere on treadmills, holding expensive cups of coffees in their hands. One time, she unlocked a door to discover that the floor was a pit filled with plastic balls. On her good days, the place reminded her of the night markets from her youth. The same bustle and color, the same business frenzy unfolding around her. Yet the vendors at the night markets had a hunger in their eyes they couldn't hide, no matter how casually they pretended they didn't need the sale. The children in these offices – they were well-fed and soft, had known nothing of true hardship or struggle. Every evening, Rose – the name she placed on her job applications in brackets to appear more "American" – arrived to clean up after these working children. She would swipe through the turnstile with the identity card attached to her waistband. Though her identity card was meant to provide proof of her membership, she couldn't help feeling that it repeatedly failed at its task. She did not belong to this place, this life. Pushing her janitorial cart from space to space, Rose's mind would wander as she emptied plastic trash containers tucked under desks. Sometimes she would marvel at how much food was thrown away as she wiped counters in kitchens dotted around the offices, her mouth watering at the selection of organic snacks but knowing the treats were not for her. Sometimes she would glance at the computer screens, the ones that hadn't turned black. The screens were often filled with letters and numbers that made no sense to her, as though a child had mashed the buttons on the keyboard until the screen filled up. The fact that these combinations of symbols meant something, created something – it astonished her. Most of the time, she thought about Julia. Rose would move silently between the desks, leaving a trail of cleanliness in her wake like a tornado in reverse. Occasionally someone would look up from [End Page 44] packing away their belongings and flash a smile in Rose's direction. She would nod silently, avoiding direct eye contact unless they looked like Julia. So many of these young girls looked like Julia, with their silky black hair tied into ponytails, their tilted eyes magnified behind thick glasses. She often thought of Julia's childhood, when she was round-cheeked and still adoring of everything Rose did. "Mommy, look at me!" "Mommy, watch this!" Her childish voice repeated requests for attention until the sweetness became grating, a sugary treat that became sickly. Rose regretted her feelings of annoyance now, wished she could go back and kneel before Julia, giving her all the attention she craved. Sometimes she remembered Julia as a teenager, and the cold feeling that descended between them as Julia grew distant and scornful. Rose could never figure out how to reach her, didn't know how to traverse the choppy seas of age and language to bring her sarcastic American daughter back to shore. So she did the only thing she could think of to keep...

Burn

Burn Henriette Rostrup (bio) Translated by Thom Satterlee (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution A girl executes her escape plan, with one unexpected twist at the end. [End Page 28] She walks through the house. It’s quiet now; everyone’s sleeping. Behind the bedroom door she can hear her father’s deep, relaxed breathing: hiss when he inhales, snort when he exhales. She stands waiting, waiting to hear if maybe this next time he doesn’t exhale. But he does, he always does. The bed creaks as he rolls over. Or maybe it’s her mother, turning away from him. The way she’s always turning away from him. Her heart beats faster. She tries to take deep breaths, from all the way down in the pit of her stomach, so she can watch it happen. Then breathe out slowly, without a sound. She mustn’t be scared. She can be scared later. She closes her eyes for a moment before moving on. A floorboard creaks. She stops, listens. Did they hear her? But the only sound in the house is people sleeping. Their breathing, the bed creaking. If you didn’t know better you’d think this was one of those houses where everyone slept through the night, peaceful and calm. Down the stairs and into the living room, with the remains of last night’s party still scattered on the tables. Empty beer cans and liquor bottles, half-empty bowls of stale chips, and overflowing ashtrays that give the living room a sour, ashy smell. On the dining table there are several half-full glasses of what’s probably rum and Coke. She takes one and gulps it down. The sweet, lukewarm liquid burns her throat; she coughs as quietly as she can, holding her hand over her mouth. There’s a creak from the leather sofa, and she turns. One of the men from the party is lying there. She doesn’t recognize him, but now and then they all look the same. She walks up to him. His shirt’s come untucked and the soft flesh of his belly spills over the waistline of his pants. There’s a strip of black hair running down under his belt. She feels queasy. The aftertaste of rum and Coke fills her mouth. And something sour. He grunts a little in his sleep, smacks his lips contentedly, and turns partway round on the sofa as if she didn’t exist. From the coffee table she takes an empty bottle, the one with a pirate captain on its label, and lifts it over his head. Stands with both arms raised ready to bring it down with full force if he wakes up. He makes a little whimper, a sigh, and she can see his eyes darting back and forth under his eyelids. But he doesn’t wake up. Just settling back down. She returns the bottle to its place . . . quiet, quiet. She tries not to make any sound at all as she passes from the living room to the kitchen. She moves as quickly and purposefully as she can but at the same time painstakingly slow, not wanting to make any noise. In her mind, night after night, she has rehearsed her movements through this house. The door between the kitchen and garage sticks; it hasn’t been used in so long. She’s at the point of giving up when it finally gives way with a jerk. She loses her balance and has to reach out behind her. The garbage bag that always hangs on the door falls off and spills its contents on the kitchen floor, which was already dirty. She stands there in an awkward posture holding her breath, listening, but she doesn’t hear anything from the living room or upstairs. Then she kicks the bag aside, straightens up, and steps over the garbage and out into the garage. It’s been a long time since a car was parked here. The space is crammed with junk, old moving boxes her father keeps with odds and ends he thinks he’ll need someday: canned goods, mildewed books, a broken record player. An...

Changing our Roots: How Having Black Hair Shapes Student Perspectives on Pursuing Careers in Broadcast Journalism

Despite more acceptance for natural Black hair in the workplace nationwide, highly-skilled students of color hoping to enter broadcast journalism-related fields are often still deterred from pursuing their dream careers. This is due to concerns about the perception of their natural hair. Many broadcast journalism students report seeing mostly straight hair on TV - and that can be a discouragement to those whose looks don't conform. As students learn about the challenges Black women working in local TV news face, particularly when it comes to strict regulations on their hairstyles and hair textures, it can affect their enthusiasm for pursuing such careers. Focus groups conducted at the University of the District of Columbia and American University with broadcast journalism students highlight the importance of continuing to foster conversations and create policies that help to end hair-based discrimination, particularly in the field of broadcast journalism.

Full vs. Empty

Full vs. Empty

Identifikasi Sifat-Sifat Kualitatif Warna Bulu, Bentuk Tanduk, dan Bentuk Ekor pada Domba Priangan Betina di SP3TDK Tambak Mekar Kabupaten Subang

Qualitative trait is one of indicators of selection that can be used as a phenotypic character of a breed. There are many traits that are usually observed to include hair color, horn shape, and tail shape. The research about “Identification of Qualitative Traits of Hair Color, Horn Shape, and Tail Shape of Priangan Ewes in SP3TDK Tambak Mekar Subang Regency” was conducted to determine the qualitive traits of Priangan Ewes in SP3TDK Tambak Mekar Subang Regency. The research conducted for ten days from January 6 st 2020 to January 17 st 2020. The method used in this research was survey and data collections were conducted by census method to look at the parameters of hair color, horn shape, and tail shape of Priangan Ewe in SP3TDK Tambak Mekar Subang Regency. The results showed that Priangan Ewes in SP3TDK Tambak Mekar Subang Regency were dominated by white hair color (81,82%), combination hair color (13,64%), black hair color (4,54%), and brown Priangan Ewe was not found (0%). The horn shapes of Priangan Ewe in SP3TDK Tambak Mekar Subang Regency were dominated by unhorn (68,18%), muser (27,27%), and small horn (4,54%). The tail shapes of Priangan Ewe in SP3TDK Tambak Mekar Subang Regency were dominated by tail shape ngabuntut beurit (86,36%) and ngabuntut bagong (13,64%). In conclusion, SP3TDK Tambak Mekar Subang Regency has Priangan Ewes with the majority qualitative traits of white hair color, unhorn, and ngabuntut beurit .

Hairy black resonators and the AdS4 superradiant instability

The superradiant instability of Kerr-AdS black holes is studied by numerically solving the full 3+1 dimensional Einstein equations. We find that the superradiant instability results in a two stage process with distinct initial and secondary instabilities. At the end of the secondary instability the geometry oscillates at several distinct fundamental frequencies -- a multi-oscillating black hole. The multi-oscillating black hole is remarkably close to a black resonator, albeit with a bit of gravitational hair. During the hairy black resonator epoch, the evolution of the horizon area is consistent with the exponential approach to a constant. By employing different seed perturbations in the initial Kerr-AdS geometry, we also demonstrate that the black resonator's hair is not unique. In the dual quantum field theory description, rotation invariance is spontaneously broken and the energy density is negative in some regions, signaling an exotic state of matter which does not relax to a stationary configuration.

Black hair follicular, follicle, dysplasia in cattle

This datasheet on black hair follicular, follicle, dysplasia in cattle covers Identity, Hosts/Species Affected, Diagnosis.

Identification of Theileria spp. and investigation of hematological profiles of their infections in goats in Hainan Island, China.

Theileria spp. are a group of parasites primarily transmitted by ticks and can pose a significant threat to domestic and wild animals globally. The main objective of this study was to understand the epidemiology of Theileria spp. in goats of Hainan Island/province, which is the only tropical region of China, and to study their hematological profiles in naturally infected goats. A total of 464 blood samples were collected from randomly selected local adult goats (Capra hircus, local domestic breed with black hair), from six cities and eight counties of Hainan, from November 2017 to October 2020. Blood smear microscopy of the sample and a nested polymerase chain reaction (nPCR) targeting the 18S rRNA gene combined with DNA sequencing were used to detect piroplasm infections in goats. Data analysis of the obtained sequences revealed that all the sequences were highly similar to the Theileria luwenshuni 18S rRNA gene sequence from the database. This result is consistent with the microscopic examination. In the hematological test, hematocrit, mean corpuscular volume, and mean corpuscular hemoglobin of the goats naturally infected with T. luwenshuni significantly increased, while mean corpuscular hemoglobin concentration and red blood cell distribution width (RDW) were significantly decreased. Results showed that T. luwenshuni could cause macrocytic, hypochromic anemia in goats. This study provides reliable and comprehensive information about the epidemiology of the parasite infections and hematological profile of the infected goats in Hainan, which encourages further investigations to develop practical control strategies for Theileria spp. infections in tropical areas.

Morphological determination of the larval instars of Eupeodes americanus (Diptera: Syrphidae)

In North America, the potential of the American hoverfly Eupeodes americanus (Wiedemann, 1830) (Diptera: Syrphidae) as a biocontrol agent has been demonstrated, particularly against the foxglove aphid Aulacorthum solani Kaltenbach, 1843 (Hemiptera: Aphididae). Since no information is available to distinguish the larval instars of this species, the present study used the semi-continuous observation (time-lapse photography and stereo microscope) of the three larval stages to build a table of morphological traits and a dichotomic key for discriminating the larval instars by observation under stereo microscope. Discriminating traits are black hairs at first instar and fused posterior breathing tubes at third instar.

Hair Colour Stereotypes in Croatian Language Corpora

The paper shows how hair colour stereotypes are reflected in two Croatian language corpora: the Croatian Language Corpus hrWaC and the Croatian Language Repository. Both were searched with the Sketch Engine corpus tool, utilizing the word sketches function, which shows the information on the most common collocations in which a lemma occurs. Synonymous words denoting female and male persons with fair, brown, black, ginger, or red hair were explored. The following hypotheses were confirmed or partially confirmed: women are more often defined by hair colour than men; more synonyms denote a female person of a particular hair colour than a male person; some synonyms appear in contexts suggesting stereotypes more often than others; in the formation of words especially denoting female persons of particular hair colour, some word-formation models are used to form pejorative and depreciative words and (by onymisation) animal names; and the adjectives pravi (‘real’), jedan (‘one’), and običan (‘ordinary’) serve as focus markers and suggest expressions reflecting stereotypes. Based on the conducted collocation and word-formation analysis, it is concluded that the collocations and word-formation models associated with hair colour words suggest various extralinguistic data, including the social status of women.

Pontianak Trouble: Gender and Postcolonial Identities in the Malay Vampire Film

Pontianak Trouble:Gender and Postcolonial Identities in the Malay Vampire Film Rosalind Galt (bio) The pontianak is one of the most popular supernatural creatures in Malay cinema: a female vampire who has died as a result of male violence or childbirth and who returns to haunt patriarchy. She first came to cinematic prominence in the late colonial studio cinema of Singapore. This article argues that the pontianak is a complexly expressive figure: a female vampire or ghost who troubles both normativities of gender and presiding narratives of postcolonial and global identity in Malaysia and Singapore. The pontianak is one of the most popular supernatural creatures in Malay cultures and is featured in a number of films, but she does not easily travel the world in the manner of Chinese, Japanese, or Korean ghosts. Instead, there's something stickily local about her, and in getting at the specifics of the pontianak, I want to think about how the popular mediates globality in this particular cultural context. Malaysia and Singapore as nations have been distinctively constituted in relation to the global flows of colonialism and capitalism, with highly racialized social structures, and folkloric horror films stage at once a desire for the local and the transnational circuits of its undoing. In the pontianak film, gender becomes the central term with which to negotiate what kinds of identity and social power are possible, and I argue that the pontianak disrupts both traditional and global forms of being. To begin, then, what is a pontianak? In Malay folklore, she is one of many hantu, or ghosts, and is a childbirth spirit. Walter Skeat, the British colonial civil servant who wrote the first major Anglophone account of Malay folklore, writes of [End Page 40] the spirits which are believed to attack both women and children at childbirth. . . . the Langsuir, which takes the form of an owl with long claws, which sits and hoots upon the roof-tree, the pontianak which is also a night-owl and is supposed to be the child of the langsuir. (325) Colonial anthropologists were not always entirely accurate, and the pontianak is more usually viewed as the spirit of a woman who dies in childbirth, rather than the child. Moreover, in transition from folk mythology to cinema, the pontianak has been revised: although she is sometimes still represented as an owl and can often be found in trees, she is more often represented as a beautiful woman with flowing black hair. Andrew Hock Soon Ng complains that characteristics such as fangs and rising from the grave are drawn from Western vampire stories (2009, 217), and we might equally link her to other international figures of female vampirism and undead vengeance, such as the Thai Mae Nak and the Indian churel. The pathways of these generic influences are complex, but as a distinctly Malay figure, the pontianak has become a mainstay of Malaysian popular cinema. We first see the pontianak in a series of hugely popular films in late colonial Singapore. Cathay Keris studio made five pontianak films: Pontianak (B. N. Rao, 1957), Dendam Pontianak/Pontianak's Revenge (B. N. Rao, 1957), Sumpah Pontianak/Curse of the Pontianak (B. N. Rao, 1958), Pontianak Kembali/Pontianak Returns (Ramon Estella, 1963), and Pontianak Gua Musang (B. N. Rao, 1964). In an effort to copy the success of the series, rival studio Shaw Brothers made their own series, with Anak Pontianak/Son of Pontianak (Ramon A. Estella, 1958), Gergasi (Dhiresh Ghosh, 1958), and Pusaka Pontianak/Pontianak Legacy (1965). After the studio system crashes in the wake of Malaysian and Singaporean independence, there were almost no pontianak films for decades. In 1975, an Australian filmmaker, Roger Sutton, made a low-budget film titled simply Pontianak in Singapore. Twenty-five years later, Djinn's Voodoo Nightmare: Return to Pontianak (2001) attempted a modern revision of the genre, more influenced by The Blair Witch Project (Sánchez and Myrick, 1998) than by Malay hantu films. The pontianak really returns in Malaysia after 2002, when the government relaxed censorship rules that had banned horror films and supernatural themes, and the second horror film to be made was Pontianak Harum Sundal Malam/Fragrant Night Vampire (Shuhaimi Baba, 2004). Since...