Glaring Exception Research Articles

Simulation predicts IGFBP2-HIF1α interaction drives glioblastoma growth.

Tremendous strides have been made in improving patients’ survival from cancer with one glaring exception: brain cancer. Glioblastoma is the most common, aggressive and highly malignant type of primary brain tumor. The average overall survival remains less than 1 year. Notably, cancer patients with obesity and diabetes have worse outcomes and accelerated progression of glioblastoma. The root cause of this accelerated progression has been hypothesized to involve the insulin signaling pathway. However, while the process of invasive glioblastoma progression has been extensively studied macroscopically, it has not yet been well characterized with regards to intracellular insulin signaling. In this study we connect for the first time microscale insulin signaling activity with macroscale glioblastoma growth through the use of computational modeling. Results of the model suggest a novel observation: feedback from IGFBP2 to HIF1α is integral to the sustained growth of glioblastoma. Our study suggests that downstream signaling from IGFI to HIF1α, which has been the target of many insulin signaling drugs in clinical trials, plays a smaller role in overall tumor growth. These predictions strongly suggest redirecting the focus of glioma drug candidates on controlling the feedback between IGFBP2 and HIF1α.

2013 Siglo de Oro Drama Festival, Chamizal

2013 Siglo de Oro Drama Festival, Chamizal Rosie Seagraves La vengadora de las mujeres by Lope de Vega “Mi industria comienza ahora”: these words, uttered by Lisardo of Lope de Vega’s La vengadora de las mujeres, set into motion a charming reflection on love’s transformational power in the midst of heated intellectual debate, battles of will, and an unflinching redemption of woman’s place in seventeenth-century Spain. Lisardo, actually Federico of Transylvania, has his eye on Laura, a mujer esquiva more interested in bookish learning and the vindication of women than in choosing a partner for marriage. Aware of her fierce independence, Federico poses as a secretary, luring her with new books and delaying any direct amorous pursuit. As Laura begins to fall in love with her new debate partner, she finds herself negotiating her self-imposed identity as resident vengadora de las mujeres with a newfound one as lover. The play, staged by Cambalache Teatro on Thursday, March 7, 2013, at the Chamizal Siglo de Oro Drama Festival, and directed by Francisco García Vicente, offers another ferocious female lead after last year’s staging of Antona García by the Grand Valley State University’s drama department. The trend is hardly incidental, given the rich tradition of strong female characters within Golden Age drama. Cambalache’s production featured visual vignettes, simple and true to the play’s historical origin, with period costumes and a minimal set of two benches and a set of vine and floral covered arches. Subtler aspects of their staging, nevertheless, made a gesture to the performance’s contemporary context. Between scenes, several pieces from Peter Breiner’s “Beatles Go Baroque” played, referred to as “los Beatles barroquizados” during García Vicente’s discussion of the performance earlier on Thursday at the AHCT conference. The Beatles’ invasion continued as Laura sang, instead of reciting, the verses that express her realization of her love for Lisardo to the tune of a slowed-down “Lady Madonna.” The idea came from Clara Ruíz, the actress playing Laura, as a way to demarcate Laura’s discovery of the positive aspects of romantic love. The performance’s nod to the twenty-first century came later, when the actors transformed their final dance into a sudden “Gangnam-style” tribute. These extratextual moments were brief and not terribly invasive, insofar as the major portion of the staging remained faithful to the original playtext. The introduction of modern music and dance seemed to occur for the sole purpose of added entertainment value—for the fun of it. Other changes were more practical. The company chose to reduce the play to 95% of its original verses in order to cut down on repetition and long speeches and thus better sustain the attention of a modern audience. The roles of three servants were subsumed by the character Julio, Laura’s confidant, since these roles added little and did not merit the hiring of three additional actors. The play’s king became a queen, due to the gender distribution of the company. Finally, Camablache Teatro’s version of La vengadora de las mujeres created a character, representing a referenced [End Page 170] hechicero, through brief appearances by the company’s head of dance, Antonio González. González opened the play in this role, donning an ensemble of what amounted to tattered rags, a glaring exception to the company’s otherwise graceful costuming. He appeared again later to act out the enchantment of Julio, which causes Julio to fall in love with Alejandro when he passes by. The presence of the hechicero serves to veil the open depiction of homosexual desire from the stage, making it instead a joke that the other characters can chuckle over, particularly as Julio falls out of the spell and realizes his former confusion. The performance, by turning textual reference into a whole new enacted scene, seemed to intensify, rather than diminish, any such veil in favor of added visual flair and comical sexual enredo. Julio played the scene with notable camp, earning the most laughs from the audience. Though Julio pulled off excellent physical humor befitting his character’s frequent peanut-gallery comic relief commentary to...

Uncovering Hudson Valley Indian History

Tom Arne Midtrod. The Memory of All Ancient Customs: Native American Di- plomacy in the Colonial Hudson Valley. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012. xxxii + 297 pp. Maps, notes, and index. $35.00. The Hudson Valley may not have the same rich historiographical tradition of New England and the Chesapeake, but it is the setting for a disproportionate number of influential monographs in early American history. Over the past several decades these have included Sung Bok Kim's Landlord and Tenant in Colonial New York: Manorial Society, 1664-1775 (1978); Daniel J. Walkowitz's Worker City, Company Town: Iron and Cotton-Worker Protest in Troy and Cohoes, New York, 1855-84 (1978); Donna Merwick's Death of a Notary: Conquest and Change in Colonial New York (1999); Judith Richardson's Possessions: The His- tory and Uses of Haunting in the Hudson Valley (2005); and, most recently, John L. Brooke's celebrated Columbia Rising: Civil Life on the Upper Hudson from the Revolution to the Age of Jackson (2010). Crucially, all of these books advance broad arguments relevant beyond their geographical confines, which accounts for their appearance on oral exam lists and syllabi created by and for those with no particular interest in the Hudson Valley. Every subfield, it seems, from political to labor to literary history, has its own classic work that takes the Hudson Valley as its subject. Until very recently, one glaring exception to that rule was American Indian history. Whereas most early Americanists have read enough about, say, the Powhatans and the Iro- quois to lecture intelligently about them, far fewer can do so for the Mahican, Munsee, Esopus, and Wappinger Indians of the Hudson Valley. Three valu- able books may be changing that: Paul Otto's The Dutch-Munsee Encounter in America: The Struggle for Sovereignty in the Hudson Valley (2006); Robert Steven Grumet's The Munsee Indians: A History (2009); and the book under review here. Like the books by Otto and Grumet, Tom Arne Midtrod's monograph is deeply researched and clearly written. It poses important questions and offers persuasive, non-polemical answers. It does not, however, provide quite enough interpretive payoff to win it a place on many exam lists. Midtrod bravely tackles a subject for which written sources are scattered and frequently unrevealing: inter-Indian diplomacy. He wants to know how

Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (review)

Atlas of Transatlantic Slave Trade. By David Eltis and David Richardson. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010. Pp. 307. Cloth, $50.00.)Reviewed by Gregory E. O'MalleyIn Atlas of Transatlantic Slave Trade, David Eltis and David Richardson have produced a beautiful book on an ugly subject - forced migration of millions of African men, women, and children across ocean for sale throughout Americas. The book's 189 full-color maps present estimates and analysis of this largest coerced transoceanic migration in history in a visual format, drawing data from web site Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database (to which both authors were key contributors).1 Some maps illustrate trans-Atlantic trade as a whole, while others are more specific, tracing American destinations of captives departing a single African port or showing African regions frequented by slave traders of a particular national background. As such, Atlas offers a compendium of estimates of forced migration parsed many different ways.In that sense, Atlas provides a crucial update to Philip Curtin's pioneering The Atlantic Slave Trade-, it offers a new census, incorporating rich historiography of intervening forty years.2 (Indeed Atlas is dedicated to Curtin, crediting him with inspiring database that undergirds volume.) The Atlas differs from Curtin's census, however, by eschewing his monograph format in which estimates were explained and defended, opting to leave such discussion to online database. In exchange for this loss of explication, readers get vivid maps, covering many more routes and subjects, each captioned to highlight key trends or patterns. These maps appear in six topical sections, each with a useful introduction. Overall, Atlas synthesizes a vast body of scholarship into a handy and visually striking reference work.Although not organized around an argument, Atlas does emphasize several key patterns. First, it highlights sugarcane cultivation as the economic foundation of Atlantic slave trade (1). With arrows of varied widths proportionally representing forced migration to various American regions, primacy of sugar-producing areas (and relative insignificance of United States) is glaringly apparent in numerous maps. The Atlas also captures division of Atlantic slave trade between two fairly distinct systems. In North Atlantic, triangular voyages predominated, linking European ports of organization with African ports north of equator and American markets in Caribbean or on its littoral. The South Atlantic traffic, by contrast, was bilateral - organized from Brazilian ports that were also markets for captives. Typically these Brazilian ventures remained in Southern Hemisphere, acquiring captives in Congo-Angola region of West Central Africa.Of particular interest to historians of early republic period, Atlas presents period after 1 775 as one of flux for slave trade. The Age of Revolution and rise of abolitionism altered longstanding patterns, as Saint-Domingue ceased to be a market for slaves, as Cuban slavery expanded to fill void, and as various slave-trading powers withdrew from commerce in human beings. Just as gradual emancipation in northern United States shifted weight of slavery southward in new republic, Atlas illustrates a similar southward shift in Atlantic world as a whole. As northern European powers and United States withdrew from slave trade in early nineteenth century, northernmost regions of supply in Africa also declined in importance, and many American markets north of equator closed to slave arrivals. (Cuba offers a glaring exception to this trend of decline in northern hemisphere.) Meanwhile, Brazil increasingly dominated nineteenth-century trafile, as did its preferred regions of African supply south of equator. …

Primates

Primates

Morbidity and mortality conferences: Their educational role and why we should be there.

Background:This article examines the value of morbidity and mortality (M&M) conferences, and the multiple factors that contribute to their efficacy. Physicians’ morbidity and mortality conferences (M&MCs) focus on education by reviewing individual adverse events (AE), M&M. Alternatively, Quality Assurance (QA) conferences better examine system-wide issues (e.g., the role institutions play) in attaining or maintaining acceptable levels of patient care. Other issues examined in this review include: whether prospective vs. retrospective M&M data collection are more accurate, and how most states offer ‘nondiscovery’ of M&M proceedings.Methods:Most studies emphasize the educational role of M&MCs, and differentiate their role from QA. Studies comparing the accuracy of prospective vs. retrospective collection of M&M data were reviewed along with the medicolegal issues surrounding the protection of M&M data (‘nondiscovery’).Results:Multiple review articles emphasized that QA conferences typically identify system-wide failures (e.g., hospital policies) while M&MCs focus on physicians’ AE/morbidity/mortality. Additionally, the prospective collection of M&M data proved to be more accurate than retrospective analysis. Finally, most states protect M&M confidentiality (‘nondisclosure’); a glaring exception is Florida, ‘The Sunshine State,’ that allows ‘full disclosure.’Conclusion:This study reviews how M&MCs, differentiated from QA meetings, and educate physicians. It also documents how prospective collection of M&M data is more accurate than retrospective analysis. Additionally, it documents how in most states, medicolegal protections against discovery are in place, with Florida, the ‘Sunshine State’ remaining a glaring exception.

Momentum in Japan: The Exception that Provesthe Rule

Momentum strategies deliver positive profits in a variety of markets and asset classes with one glaring exception—Japan. The failure of momentum in Japan has led some to call into question momentum’s viability, suggesting that perhaps momentum’s success elsewhere may be the result of data mining. Asness rejects that interpretation. He argues that because value and momentum strategies are strongly negatively correlated, they need to be studied as a system. He shows that the results in Japan are perfectly consistent with value and momentum working everywhere at similar levels and are entirely within the range of statistical noise. Viewed as a system, he shows that momentum strategies are actually a success in Japan. In sum, Asness finds that the Japanese momentum results are supportive, not contrary, to the idea that momentum is a strong ex ante efficacious strategy around the world. Put differently, the Japanese momentum results are the exception that proves the rule.

Islands and beers: Toasting a discriminatory approach to small island manufacturing

AbstractThis paper explores the relationship between beers and island development, using a global sweep but with a special reference to the insular Pacific. It adopts a discriminatory approach, touching upon the role and impact that niche and bouquet beer manufacturing can have on the socioeconomic development of small islands. It departs from a personal observation: many small island jurisdictions have their own brewery. Indeed, the brewery could also be the island territory's largest indigenous manufacturing concern. While small islands are associated with low manufacturing capacity and diseconomies of scale, nevertheless ‘a local brewery’ comes across, in many cases, as a profitable and glaring exception that speaks to the attractions and virtues of locality branding.

The Ottoman Army 1914-1918: Disease and Death on the Battlefield

The First World War has long been regarded as the turning-point in the medical history of warfare. It was the first major conflict in which the armed forces of most combatant nations suffered fewer deaths from disease than from injuries inflicted in battle, demonstrating the protection conferred by close attention to hygiene and sanitation, coupled with the latest preventive and therapeutic technologies. In view of this, the record of the Ottoman Army stands as a glaring exception. True, its operations were confined to some of the least healthy theatres of war, but it appears to have fared worse than the armies of its opponents. In the absence of precise figures, it is impossible to calculate the true extent of the burden of disease on the Ottoman forces, but according to Hikmet Özdemir, the army suffered staggering losses from disease, ‘beyond comparison’ with other armies fighting in the First World War (p. 202). In the Ottoman Army, the number of deaths from disease dwarfed those attributed to wounds and injuries. Disease claimed the lives of at least 240,000 soldiers, while 85,000 died from wounds, excluding deaths amongst prisoners of war (p. 119). Case fatality rates from all diseases and injuries were also markedly higher in the Ottoman forces than in other armies. The chances of a German soldier surviving either wounding or disease were in the order of 90 per cent, whereas around 50 per cent of Ottoman military patients died (p. 110).

The Columbia History of Jews and Judaism in America (review)

Reviewed by: The Columbia History of Jews and Judaism in America Marjorie N. Feld The Columbia History of Jews and Judaism in America. Edited by Marc Lee Raphael. New York: Columbia University Press. 2008. Lee Raphael has ambitious goals for this collection. He aims to capture the tension between religious and secular identities in the Jewish community (5), as well as the Marc centrality of the relationships among Jewishness, Judaism, and Americanness for Jewish individuals (6). Is the history of American Jews to be told as a narrative of assimilation and declining religiosity? Of diminishing anti-Semitism and rapid social mobility? Of political consensus or increasing internal division? Raphael's contributors engage each of these themes. Because the book is organized first by chronology (the book's first six essays) and then by topic (the final twelve essays), it attempts to avoid one of the most troubling tendencies of U.S. Jewish history: to provide a singular narrative arc to the American Jewish experience that follows religious Jewish life and Zionism while marginalizing all other expressions of Jewishness. The chronological essays offer useful synthetic introductions. Brief biographies of leaders and laypeople alike appear in these pages, along with discussions of suburbanization, the Nazi Holocaust, synagogue and Jewish organizational growth and decline. Even for well-read scholars of this history, there are surprise facts: Eli Faber, for example, tells us that despite much anti-Semitic exclusion, Jews could be city constables in eighteenth-century New York City (36). There are also missed opportunities where the collection does not break out of the paradigm of a singular narrative arc, presenting a narrow reading of Jewishness. Riv-Ellen Prell, for example, proposes that the attacks on Israel in 1967 brought about a "new American [End Page 146] Jewish consensus... that placed Israel and Jerusalem at the center of American Jewish life" (137). Though there is ample material here on Jewish contributions to American Communism and other radical movements, Prell fails to mention Jewish anti-Zionism as existing outside of this so-called "consensus." This is a glaring omission, especially since the work of Michael Staub (some of which thankfully appears here as a topical essay) has carefully documented crucial "dissenting perspectives" in the cold war era (325). A few pages later Stephen Whitfield discusses the topic of postwar anti-Semitism among African Americans, calling it the "only—and most glaring—exception to the trend (of declining American anti-Semitism)" (144). Again, the glaring absence is of a richer contextual discussion: of Jewish racism and contributions to white supremacist oppression, and too the impact of Third World Solidarity with Palestinians among African Americans. These omissions carry with them their own conservative agenda: in reading back into history a consensus on complicated issues, one stemming from a religious and Zionist brand of Jewishness, those forwarding this agenda see only one set of Jewish values and identity worth perpetuating in contemporary American Jewish life. The invisibility of dissenting perspectives continues to shape a false sense of consensus among American Jews. In documenting some of the internal debates of American Jews, the topical essays—especially Staub's—offer other narratives and perspectives. Melissa Klapper writes of the vociferous postwar debates over the Orthodox Jewish day school movement and offers an interesting window onto internal divisions among American Jews: non-Orthodox Jews pledged loyalty to public education while "indictments of ghettoization and assimilation" were offered by both sides (209). William Toll and Mark Bauman provide two welcome essays that depart the East Coast and look at varieties of Jewish life along the Pacific and in the American South. American Studies scholars may lament the general lack of material on American Jews' interactions with other cultural groups, and also on cultural representations of Jewishness. Jeffrey Shandler's promising title "What is American Jewish Culture?" yields a brief, disappointing study of how this culture has been studied. Linda Raphael's concluding essay is the only one dedicated to analyzing representations of Jewishness, yet she offers only a recitation of well-trod readings of the conservative canon of American Jewish literature: Cahan, Yezierska, Roth and Ozick. Ultimately, despite its ambitious title and introduction, Raphael's collection rarely strays from the old...

Public Opinion and Democratic Legitimacy

This paper examines on a global scale how important it is for young democracies to deliver economic welfare to win the hearts of their citizens. A decoupling of popular support for democratic form of government from economic performance is believed to be conducive to the consolidation of young democracies. We found an encouraging global pattern that clearly shows evaluations of economic condition are relatively unimportant in explaining level of popular support for democracy. However, high-income East Asian countries register a glaring exception to this global generalization, suggesting that their distinctive trajectory of regime transition has imposed on democratic regimes an additional burden of sustaining a record of miraculous economic growth of the past.

Justice Brennan's Accommodating Approach toward Religion

the absurd polarization of American political culture, many have come to treat religion as a partisan matter. It is easy for liberals to point at religious right events, like Sunday, but there are equally divisive counterparts on the left. Many people on the left side of the political spectrum seem to think that religiously grounded political conservatism is not only wrong, but somehow illegitimate-an affront to public reason and the secular state. Furthermore, the political left often asserts that long-standing protections for the independence of religious institutions, such as tax exemptions and regulatory accommodations, are unwarranted special privileges. A recent four part New York Times series, In God's Name: Favors for the Faithful, even compared religious accommodations enacted by Congress to special-interest appropriations earmarks. 1 Against this backdrop, re-reading Justice Brennan's religion decisions brings a breath of fresh air. striking contrast to the partisans of today, Justice Brennan did not view a vigorous and publicly active religious sector as a threat to democratic values. His interpretation of the separation of church and state did not pit the religious against the secular nor favor secular ideologies over their religious counterparts. Instead, Justice Brennan sought to protect the freedom of both, and ultimately the freedom of the American people to make their own decisions about what worldviews are most persuasive. Indeed, with one glaring exception, Justice Brennan's jurisprudence was highly protective of religious freedom and hence, in many applications, of religion.

Complete Unaccompanied Madrigals (review)

Luzzasco Luzzaschi. Complete Unaccompanied Madrigals. Edited by Anthony Newcomb. Middleton, WI: A-R Editions, Inc., c2003-4. (Recent Researches in the Music of the Renaissance, 136, 139.) [Pt. 1, Quinta libra de' madrigali a cinque voci (Ferrara, 1595); Sesto libro de' madrigali a cinque voci (Ferrara, 1596); Settimo libra de madngali a cinque voci (Venice, 1604): Abbrevs. and sigla, p. viii; acknowledgments, p. ix; introd., p. xi-xxii; texts, trans., and commentary, p. xxiii-lviii; 7 plates; score (including transcriptions and trans. of dedications), 136 p.; crit. report, p. 137-45; appendix, p. 147-84. ISBN 0-89579-535-3. $93. Pt. 2, Il quarto libro de' madrigali a cinque voci (Ferrara, 1594) and Madrigals Published Only in Anthologies, 1583-1604: Abbrevs. and sigla, p. vii; acknowledgments, p. viii; introd., p. ix-xviii; texts, trans., and commentary, p. xix-xli; 4 plates; score (including transcription and trans. of dedication), 116 p.; crit. report, p. 117-23; appendix, p. 125-63. ISBN 0-89579-558-2. $76.] Appendix to pt. 1 includes settings of Ecco, o dolce, o gradita (by Alessandro Striggio, Pomponio Nenna) ; Se parti to mom (by Giuseppe Palazzotto e Tagliavia); Puo ben fortuna (by Paolo Bellasio); O sei geloso Amante (by Antonio Il Verso); Sorge la vagh'aurora (by Scipione Lacorcia); Cor mio, benche lontana (by Ruggiero Giovannelli); and Questa vostra pietate (by Giovanni de Macque, Giovanni Del Turco). Appendix to pt. 2 includes settings of Tra le dokezze (by Scipione Lacorcia); Mentre la notte (by Paolo Virchi, Filippo di Monte); lo v'amo [t'amo], anima mia (by Bernardino Bertolotti, Scipione Lacorcia); and Dolorosi martir (by Alessandro Striggio, Giovanni Maria Nanino, Francesco Soriano). In the half century since the publication of Alfred Einstein's The Italian Madrigal (3 vols., trans. by Alexander H. Krappe, Roger H. Sessions, and Oliver Strunk [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949; reprint 1971]), the complete works of most of the principal madrigal composers of the late sixteenth century have become available in modern editions. Luzzasco Luzzaschi (1544/5-1607) has until now been a glaring exception. When finished, Anthony Newcomb's edition of Luzzaschi's complete unaccompanied madrigals for the series Recent Researches in the Music of the Renaissance will fill a major lacuna in the field and make available for the first time a body of works that played a crucial role in the musical culture of their time. Luzzaschi is best known today for his Madrigali. . . per cantare et sonore a uno, e doi, e Ire soprani (Rome: Simone Verovio, 1601), which has been available in modern edition since 1965 (ed. Adriano Cavicchi, Monument! di musica italiana, ser. 2: Polifonia, vol. 2 [Brescia: L'Organo]), but the bulk of his surviving output consists of unaccompanied madrigals: seven books for five voices (1571-1604) and an additional six pieces for four to six voices that appeared only in anthologies. Part 1 of this edition, published in 2003, contains books 5-7, and part 2 includes book 4 and the pieces from the anthologies. A-R Editions has not yet published volumes 3 and 4 devoted to books 1-3. Luzzaschi was a figure of central importance in the late-sixteenth-century madrigal. A student of Cipriano de Rore (1515/ 6-1565), mentor of Carlo Gesualdo (ca. 1561-1613, who was said to have feared competition from no one else), celebrated organist, and teacher of Girolamo Frescobaldi (1583-1643), he served as director of music under the music-loving Duke Alfonso II at the court of Ferrara, one of the most prestigious musical centers of the time. He was widely admired by his contemporaries; Claudio Monteverdi (as related by his brother Ciulio Cesare Monteverdi in his 1607 edition of Claudio's Scherzi musical: a tre voci) included him among such luminaries as Rore, Marc'Antonio Ingegneri (1535/6-1592), Giaches de Wert (1535-1596), and Luca Marenzio (1553/4-1599) as a pioneer of the seconda prattica (Explanation of the Letter Printed in the Fifth Book of Madrigals, in Source Readings in Music History, ed. …

Critical Condition: How Health Care in America Became Big Business and Bad Medicine • The Big Fix: How the Pharmaceutical Industry Rips Off American Consumers

Critical Condition: How Health Care in America Became Big Business and Bad Medicine • The Big Fix: How the Pharmaceutical Industry Rips Off American Consumers

Magnetic White Dwarfs from the SDSS. II. The Second and Third Data Releases

Fifty-two magnetic white dwarfs have been identified in spectroscopic observations from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) obtained between mid-2002 and the end of 2004, including Data Releases 2 and 3. Though not as numerous nor as diverse as the discoveries from the first Data Release, the collection exhibits polar field strengths ranging from 1.5MG to ~1000MG, and includes two new unusual atomic DQA examples, a molecular DQ, and five stars that show hydrogen in fields above 500MG. The highest-field example, SDSSJ2346+3853, may be the most strongly magnetic white dwarf yet discovered. Analysis of the photometric data indicates that the magnetic sample spans the same temperature range as for nonmagnetic white dwarfs from the SDSS, and support is found for previous claims that magnetic white dwarfs tend to have larger masses than their nonmagnetic counterparts. A glaring exception to this trend is the apparently low-gravity object SDSSJ0933+1022, which may have a history involving a close binary companion.

Myco-heterotroph-fungus marriages - is fidelity over-rated?

Myco-heterotroph-fungus marriages - is fidelity over-rated?

George W. Bush and the Environmental Protection Agency: A Midterm Appraisal

During the first 2 years of his presidential term, George W. Bush matured as a political leader and neutralized many of his harshest critics. A glaring exception to this characterization is the area of environmental policy. The Bush administration adamantly refused to advance a meaningful strategy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to commit the United States to the Kyoto Protocol. At the same time, a number of highly public disputes compromised the legitimacy of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). This appraisal reviews the Bush administration's performance midway through its first term across three pivotal environmental concerns: air pollution, climate change, and toxics remediation. Though environmental proponents denounced the U.S. EPA's provocative policy positions, there are no indications that this criticism has had much political impact. The assessment concludes with an examination of the politics behind the Bush administration's growing anti-environmentalism and some speculation regarding its future electoral implications.

The Origins of the Historical Society: A Personal View

June 2003 · Historically Speaking47 1980 and 1992 El Salvador, with U.S. aid provided under the Reagan Doctrine, defeated the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN). In all these instances the U.S. strategy called for carrots and sticks—aggressive militaryoperations againstthe rebels combined with liberalizing reforms to win over the uncommitted populace. And in all these cases the U.S. and its allies were successful. The glaring exception is Vietnam, where the U.S. pursued a similar strategy with a notable lack of success. America's failure was due to manyfactors, includingaham-handed military campaign that ignored successful counterinsurgencytechniquesofthepast But theultimate problemwas thatthe communist forcesoperatingin SouthVietnamhad a"deep rear" in North Vietnam, the Soviet Union, and China. The U.S. was loath to take decisive military action against any ofthese states for fear ofwidening the war. As a result, the insurgents alwayshad asafebase ofoperations across theborderandsteadysupplylines along the Ho ChiMinh trail. Even so, theVietcong didnotwin thewar. Theymerelysoftenedup the enemy for the conventional invasion that North Vietnam mounted in 1975. The question today is: does Iraq more closely resemble Vietnam or, on the other hand, thenumerous placeswhere U.S. counterinsurgency strategies prevailed? The answer is the latter. In the first place, Vietnam 's topography—lots ofjungles and mountains —was much more favorable to guerrilla operations thanthe deserts andtowns ofIraq. And, unlike in Vietnam, it is doubtful that any neighboring country will want to give long-termsupportto a Baathistguerrilla campaign againstcoalition forces. While neither Syria norIran,whichshare longborderswith Iraq, is friendlyto the U.S., theydo nothave particularlywarm feelings for Saddam Hussein either. In any case, neither state enjoys superpower patronage, so they would be at the mercy ofU.S. forces ifthey fomented a wave ofterrorist attacks against the occupation authorities. But simply because a guerrilla campaign against the U.S. is unlikely to succeed does not mean the occupation itselfwill be a success . Thatwill require a concerted campaign of"nation building" similar to those the U.S. has previouslyundertakenin countries ranging from Germany to Haiti. The lesson of those campaigns is clear: where U.S. troops stay the course for the long term (Germany, Italy,Japan, Philippines, Bosnia, Kosovo) they can change life for the better. Where they pull out too quickly (Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Somalia) things can go to hell in a handbasket pretty quickly. That's apointworthrememberingas PresidentBush vows to draw down U.S. forces in Iraq. Only ifthe U.S. militaryisprepared fora long, long stay will the Bush administration have any hope ofcarryingoutitsvowto turnIraqinto a nascent democracy. Max Boot is Olrn SeniorFellow at the Council onForeignRelationsandauthorqfThe SavageWars ofPeace: SmallWars and the Rise ofAmerican Power (BasicBooks, 2002). The Origins of the Historical Society: A Personal View Marc Trachtenberg What exactlyhappened in the American historical profession in the late 20th century? I can talk at length abouthowthings changed duringthe period I've been in the profession—thatis, the years since I started graduate school in 1966. 1 can talkaboutthe sources ofmyown discontent. I can talk about the things that led me personallyto playa certain role in the establishmentofthe Historical Societyfiveyears ago. I can, andwill, talkaboutall these things, but I still don'treallyunderstand whathappened. But I do know how those developments affected me personally. I'm a diplomatichistorian. The termitself is terriblyold-fashioned and, certainlybythe 1980s ifnot earlier, the whole field ofdiplomatic history had come to be viewed as old hat. That field, I think it's fair to say, was pushed to the margins ofthe profession. For that reason, diplomatic historians like me came to be particularly sensitive to whatwas going on within the profession. I certainly became quite disaffected. Whatwas so disturbingaboutwhatIsaw goingon around me? Two things really. First, I could not believe some ofthe things people were studying. I could not believe what was oftenheldup as "cuttingedge" historical work. (I wondered when I heard thatphrase: cutting through what? And was "cutting edge" simply a euphemism for "trendy"?) In any event, those topics struck me, increasingly , as absolutelytrivial. Itwas hard to imagine that people—indeed, apparently the majority of the profession—could actually viewthe kind ofworkthatwas beingheld up in thatwayas important. But the factis thatit was considered important, and thatjudgment 48Historically Speaking · June 2003 went hand in...

Inferring erosional resistance of bedrock units in the east Tennessee mountains from digital elevation data

Measures of local relief, regional relief, and slope were calculated from digital elevation models (DEMs) for 50 bedrock units in the Ridge and Valley and Blue Ridge provinces of Tennessee. Each of these measures was normalized and the three were then averaged to produce the erosional resistance index (ERI). Bedrock units with higher ERI values include coarse clastics, intermediate clastics, and metaplutonics. Units with lower values include shales, limestones, limestones plus dolostones, and carbonates plus fine clastics. Dolostones tend to have intermediate values. The calculated ERI values were compared with subjective ratings by a geologist with decades of field experience in east Tennessee. Generally, the agreement between the two ratings was good, the most glaring exception being several shales with improbably high ERI values. These turned out to be thin units cropping out beneath very hard sandstones, allowing them to stand higher and steeper than would otherwise be possible. A systematic method for detecting such erroneously high ERI values is suggested. Inspection of a drainage map superimposed on the geology map shows that in a given area, streams tend to flow on rock units with the lowest ERI values. In addition, statistical analysis shows that bedrock units with the lowest ERI values are, on average, almost three times closer to the nearest stream and six times as likely to have streams flowing on them than are units with highest values. Further, the effect of ERI on stream location is strongest for streams with drainage areas between 1 and 30 km 2. Thus, small streams appear to be subject to greater lithologic control than are larger streams.

Explaining the Northern Ireland Agreement: The Sources of an Unlikely Constitutional Consensus

Advocates of one or another set of institutions for new democracies have typically neglected the question of adoptability. The omission is especially evident in institutional prescriptions for the reduction of ethnic conflict in severely divided societies. These have been advanced with little regard for obstacles likely to be encountered in the process of adoption. Yet adoption is problematic. Processes of negotiation and exchange open the possibility of mixed outcomes reflecting the asymmetric preferences of majorities and minorities. The Northern Ireland Agreement of 1998, however, is a glaring exception, for it produced institutions that are intended to be clearly and consistently consociational. An examination of the process by which the agreement was produced suggests that the coherent outcome in Northern Ireland was the result of some very special conditions conducive to a consensus on institutions that spanned party lines. These conditions are unlikely to be widely replicable, and the fact of consensus does not imply that the agreed institutions are apt for the divided society whose problems they are intended to ameliorate.