Gallop Research Articles

Subjective Evaluation of Lameness in Horses During Lungeing

IntroductionLungeing is an important part of lameness examination since the circular path is thought to accentuate low‐grade lameness. Circle dependent, compensatory movement, and pain related asymmetries make lameness evaluation complex. Subjective evaluation, by watching the horse in motion, is standard practice but studies have shown that inter‐observer variation is high when assessing lameness (straight line movement). The aim was to estimate inter‐ and intra‐rater agreement between equine practitioners evaluating lameness from videos of sound and lame horses during lungeing.MethodsEquine practitioners (n = 86), including 43 deemed as experienced, participated in a web‐based survey. Horses (n = 23, including two horses with solar‐pressure induced lameness) [defined as forelimb‐, hind limb‐lame or sound from objective kinematic straight line measurements] trotted on a circle in both directions on soft/hard ground surfaces (one condition/video). Of 104 recordings, 60 were selected of which 10 were repeated (numbers chosen to make compliance possible). The practitioners were asked to report which limb was most lame on each video. Kappa statistics were used to analyze the inter‐rater and intra‐rater agreement. The κ agreement was set to poor <0.3, acceptable 0.31–0.5, good 0.51–0.8, excellent >0.8.ResultsInter‐rater agreement kappa (n = 86) was 0.31 (0.38/0.25 for experienced/less experienced). Evaluating forelimb compared to hind limb lameness agreement increased 11%. Intra‐rater agreement kappa (percentiles) was (P10‐50‐90, 0.21, 0.57, 0.84).ConclusionsSince identification of the lame limb/limbs is a prerequisite for successful diagnosis, treatment and recovery, the high inter‐observer variation when evaluating lameness during lungeing may decrease the accuracy of lameness examinations.Ethical Animal ResearchThe experimental procedures were approved by a local Ethical Committee on Animal Experiments (Uppsala, Sweden), and there was a written consent from the horse owners. Sources of funding: Swedish‐Norwegian Foundation for Equine Research. Competing interests: none.

Analysis of the 227 bp short interspersed nuclear element (SINE) insertion of the promoter of the myostatin (MSTN) gene in different horse breeds.

The myostatin (MSTN) gene encodes a protein known to be a negative regulator of muscle mass in mammalian species. Different polymorphisms of the horse (Equus caballus) MSTN gene have been identified, including single nucleotide polymorphisms and a short interspersed nuclear element (SINE) insertion of 227 bp within the promoter of the gene. The SINE insertion has been associated with performance traits in Thoroughbred racehorses and it was proposed as a predictor of optimum racing distance. The aims of this study were to perform in silico analysis to identify putative gains or abrogation of transcription-factor binding sites (TFBSs) generated by the SINE allele of the promoter and to analyse the frequency of the SINE insertion in horses used for racing (gallop and trot) and other purposes. The SINE insertion was genotyped in 227 horses from 10 breeds belonging to different morphological types (brachimorphic, mesomorphic, meso-dolichomorphic and dolichomorphic). The presence of the insertion was confirmed in the Quarter Horse (SINE allele frequency of 0.81) and in the Thoroughbred (0.51), whereas the SINE allele did not segregate in any of the other analysed breeds. As the SINE MSTN gene polymorphism may be population or breed specific, it is not a useful marker for association studies in all breeds.

Saving Kabul Corner by N. H. Senzai (review)

Reviewed by: Saving Kabul Corner by N. H. Senzai Amy Atkinson Senzai, N. H. Saving Kabul Corner. Wiseman/Simon, 2014. [288p]. ISBN 978-1-4424-8494-8 $16.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 4-6. At twelve, Ariana can’t cook traditional Afghan meals, she moves more like a galloping horse than a dignified lady, and she inevitably makes a mess when stocking the pistachio bins at her family’s grocery store, the titular Kabul Corner. Unfortunately, her cousin Laila flips pancakes like a pro, veritably glides when she walks, and never spills anything. Worst of all, Ariana must share everything with Laila, who has recently arrived from Afghanistan: her cramped California bedroom, her sixth-grade class, and even her best friend. When a series of accidents rocks Kabul Corner and a neighboring store, Ariana suspects that someone is trying to scare away the plaza’s tenants. She finds an ally in Laila, and soon the girls and their friends are on the case to save Kabul Corner. In her second novel, Senzai ambitiously explores family dynamics and preteen preoccupations alongside immigration, Middle East politics, and even disabilities (Ariana has a mild sensory processing disorder). Though explanations of weightier issues verge on the conspicuous, the book maintains a fairly light touch when helping young readers understand Ariana and her family’s culture, keeping these details in the background and wisely allowing the mystery plot to take center stage. Thoughtfully written, with just the right amount of hint-dropping to get readers guessing, this engaging story features immigrants, minorities, and complex political issues while credibly treating the thoughts and feelings of a twelve-year old girl and the bonds of family. This is one for any preteen interested in the broader world, or just navigating the one at home. Copyright © 2014 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Driving Change, Sparking Debate: Chi Bulag and the Morin Huur in Inner Mongolia, China

On a typically humid afternoon in Beijing, China, my young Mongol friend brought me to his basement studio where his ensemble, Ih Tsetsn, was preparing to rehearse for an upcoming show. The group of young urban Mongols included six players of the morin huur (horse-head fiddle, matouqin in Mandarin), an upright bassist, and a drum kit player. The group played a collection of upbeat compositions and ended its rehearsal session with the rousing morin huur classic, “Ten Thousand Horses Galloping,” by the Inner Mongol composer-performer, Chi Bulag (b. 1944; see figure 4). Playing from memory, the fiddle players grinned at one another, drew their bows energetically across their nylon-stringed instruments, and rocked their heads vigorously to the beat of the drummer.

„Argint şi soare”. Originile fotografiei prin evoluții tehnice între 1800 şi 1900 / “Silver and sunshine”. The Origins of Photography by means of Processes between 1800 and 1900

„Argint şi soare”. Originile fotografiei prin evoluții tehnice între 1800 şi 1900 / “Silver and sunshine”. The Origins of Photography by means of Processes between 1800 and 1900

The Perception of Depicted Motion

Everyone knows that you can read a galloping horse in a still image as galloping. This paper asks how it is that we perceive motion in pictures. It considers perception of real motion in point-light experiments and the perception of motion in stills via the work of various psychologists, in the course of which it raises theoretical questions about the nature of visual perception. It then offers a detailed examination of knowledge regarding neural substrates for both real and depicted motion perception. Finally, it combines psychological and neurophysiological perspectives with phenomenologically-oriented observation of pictures, discussing both frontoparallel motion and motion in depth (in particular the phenomenon of “looming”) in terms of two kinds of depictions, the “narrative” and the “performative”. Examples are drawn from all kinds of pictures, but focus is on world rock art, whose time depth is especially amenable to the universalist approach adopted by the paper.

Auditory and Cognitive Effects of Aging on Perception of Environmental Sounds in Natural Auditory Scenes

Previously, Gygi and Shafiro (2011) found that when environmental sounds are semantically incongruent with the background scene (e.g., horse galloping in a restaurant), they can be identified more accurately by young normal-hearing listeners (YNH) than sounds congruent with the scene (e.g., horse galloping at a racetrack). This study investigated how age and high-frequency audibility affect this Incongruency Advantage (IA) effect. In Experiments 1a and 1b, elderly listeners ( N = 18 for 1a; N = 10 for 1b) with age-appropriate hearing (EAH) were tested on target sounds and auditory scenes in 5 sound-to-scene ratios (So/Sc) between -3 and -18 dB. Experiment 2 tested 11 YNH on the same sound-scene pairings lowpass-filtered at 4 kHz (YNH-4k). The EAH and YNH-4k groups exhibited an almost identical pattern of significant IA effects, but both were at approximately 3.9 dB higher So/Sc than the previously tested YNH listeners. However, the psychometric functions revealed a shallower slope for EAH listeners compared with YNH listeners for the congruent stimuli only, suggesting a greater difficulty for the EAH listeners in attending to sounds expected to occur in a scene. These findings indicate that semantic relationships between environmental sounds in soundscapes are mediated by both audibility and cognitive factors and suggest a method for dissociating these factors.

Gait analysis: an introduction to its use for clinical evaluation and performance assessment of the equine athlete

Equine locomotion is complex to measure and has warranted clinical interest since early high-speed photography in the late 19th century produced the first accurate representation of a galloping horse. The advancement of gait analysis technology has produced easy to use systems that have enabled scientists and clinicians to evaluate equine gait characteristics in more detail and with increased objectivity and accurately. Goniometry, force plate, videography and optoelectric systems provide methods for subjective analysis of equine gait. A review of the literature concludes that simple objective, repeatable and user friendly assessment tools have worth in the monitoring of clinical efficacy of therapeutic interventions used in orthopaedics and rehabilitation, and to evaluate locomotor performance in combination with traditional veterinary examinations and equine training practices.

Seeing is believing: a look inside the galloping horse

Patrick J Pollock, BVMS, CertES (Soft Tissue), DipECVS, MRCVS European and RCVS, recognized specialist in equine surgery, Weipers Centre Equine Hospital

Morphometric Traits in Gaited Breeds of Horse: Potential Future Targets for Mapping

s / Journal of Equine Veterinary Science 31 (2011) 230-356 242 [7] Poncet PA, Pfister W, Muntwyler J, Glowatzki-Mullis ML, Gaillard C. Analysis of pedigree and conformation data to explain genetic variability of the horse breed Franches-Montagnes. J Anim Breed Genet 2006;123:114-21. Morphometric Traits in Gaited Breeds of Horse: Potential Future Targets for Mapping E.A. Staiger , N.B. Sutter , R.R. Bellone , and S.A. Brooks 1 Department of Animal Science, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA, 2 Department of Clinical Sciences, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA, 3 Department of Biology, University of Tampa, Tampa, FL, USA Introduction: After initial domestication, the horse has been selected by man primarily for transportation purposes. Early uses were for war and labor; however, thanks to the industrial revolution, present day uses are for sport and recreation, resulting in divergent skeletal size, conformation, and locomotion in thehorse.Sinceancient times, the horse has shown polymorphism in gait; at intermediate speeds, the horse can perform a range of lateral and diagonal, 2-beat or 4-beat gaits [1]. These are known as the trot and pace, and the rack andrunningwalk, respectively.While therehavebeenstudies intothe mechanics of gait [2-4], there have been few studies that have investigated how morphology influences gait in horses. The aim of this study is to present preliminary findings of morphological traits that may influence gait in horses. Quantification of these morphometric traits will be valuable in future studies to identify genes associated with gait by whole genome association. Materials and Methods: The skeletal morphological assay was previously published in Brooks et al. [5]. The data gathered for that study included, in part, 34 body measurements that span the head, neck, body, and limbs collected from 1550 horses from 82 breeds, vital statistics (breed, age, sex etc) and owner reported gait information. Horses were categorized as if they were reported by their owner, or belong to a breed that exclusively performs a gait other than trot at intermediate speeds. The 34 measurements capture bone length and circumference as quantitative variables. Statistical analyses were conducted using JMP V8.0 software (SAS Institute Inc.). Results and Discussion: In our previously published study two principle components of skeletal variation in the horse were identified, PC1 (explains 62.6% of the variance) and PC2 thickness (explains 5.4% of the variance) [5]. PC3 from this study, although it accounted for a small 2.8% of the variance percentage of the total variance across all breeds, was statistically different in gaited horse (P < .0001). The top contributors to PC3 include the fore and hind pastern lengths, croup to dock length, ear length, and jaw width measures. To confirm differences in these measures specific to gait type the 34 measures were normalized by withers height and compared between the gaited (286 horses) and non-gaited categories (1264 horses) using ANOVA. Nineteen measurements were found to be statistically significant in gaited breeds. These included smaller jaw width (P < .0001), longer ear length (P < .0001), shorter dock height (P < .0001), longer croup to dock length (P < .0001), smaller heart girth (P < .0001), shorter gaskin length (P 1⁄4 .0333), smaller fore and hind cannon circumference (P < .0001), and smaller fore and hind pastern circumference (P < .0001). Conclusion: Body conformation is a critically important trait in nearly all horse breeds. It has been well documented that conformation influences movement; hip and shoulder angles influence the range of motion of the limbs, while limb segment lengths influence shock absorption and strength of the limbs. Principal components analysis of measurements from a sample of horses of different breeds has shown consistent trends in several quantified traits, including skeletal size (PC1) and shape (PC2). Studies are currently underway to map these PC-traits as QTLs in the horse using the EquineSNP50 genotyping chip (Illumina INC). Although it seems likely that gait preference is highly heritable, little previous work has documented the genetic and biomechanical components to gait. This preliminary study, therefore, has several implications regarding the relative significance of individual traits in determining a horse's quality of locomotion and predisposition towards ambling or trotting. Whether by chance, or design, gaited horses have been selected for a unique set of conformational traits. These may influence gait performance. For example, longer croup to dock lengths might indicate a horse is more predisposed to running walk than rack or pace. Additional data, particularly analysis of horses in motion, may help to shed light on how these individual components influence gait type and quality. Identification of genes responsible for gait preference and gaitspecific conformation in the horse, could inform studies of orthopedic disease susceptibility, and athletic performance, as well as provide valuable tools to breeders selecting for gait.

Culture Klatch

My son’s middle school was having a “culture fair” recently, so he asked me for some guidance. His task was to create a display that described his Jewish heritage.“When is it due?” I asked.“Tomorrow.”“When did your teacher first assign it?”“Oh, a couple of months ago.”This answer filled me with pride. Though I had failed to provide him with a grounding in his Jewish birthright, no one could argue that I had stinted in his training as a procrastinator—a skill that my own parents had painstakingly drilled into me from an early age.“Ask your mother,” I suggested.“But she’s Japanese.”“Yes, but she makes a delicious kugel.”But my wife, a non-procrastinator, had already completed her day’s duties and was sound asleep. So instead, my son suggested that we go online to ellisisland.org and look for records of our ancestors’ arrivals. This got me excited, as I’ve always longed to know more about previous generations of my family. Especially on my father’s side, such information is scarce, since everyone has eternally been at war with everyone else: the only way bloodshed has been avoided in our American diaspora is through a negotiated fifty-state solution.Our journey to ellisisland.org was a perilous one—crammed onto a tiny laptop, riding through cyberspace along with thousands of other travelers in search of a homepage. All we had for sustenance was what we could scrounge from the fridge. After what seemed like an eternity (our Wi-Fi has been pretty wonky lately), we arrived at our destination—haggard, yes, but also grateful that Fate had allowed us to reach the promised database without contracting some fatal virus.Unfortunately, we could find no trace there of either my father’s or mother’s parents—no indication, from ship manifests or clerical logs, that any of my kin had ever debarked at Ellis Island. This raised the uncomfortable possibility that I was an android, in whom scientists had meticulously planted false “memories” of a secular Jewish childhood along with a totally fictitious ancestry in Eastern Europe. Perhaps that could finally explain the “otherness” I’d often felt among human beings, as well as my curious affinity for hardware stores.Or maybe the names had just been spelled differently by the Ellis Island functionaries.In any case, it was getting late—and my son needed answers. Fortunately for Jews like me, there are Mormons. Mormons keep genealogical records the way my family keeps grudges. It was through the Mormon-run Ancestry.com website that I finally tracked down historical records of my forebears. In 1920 in Brooklyn and in 1930 in Allentown, Pennsylvania, census workers had interviewed members of my mother’s and father’s families, respectively. Unfortunately, these interviews had apparently been quite boring and perfunctory, as the reproduced forms gave only such basic information as “number in household.” Decades later, during the McCarthy Era, the government would take a much keener interest in my communist-leaning family. (Little did the FBI realize that, with our clan’s tendency toward procrastination and internal bickering, we had zero chance of organizing a successful backyard barbecue, much less a revolution.) Sadly, though, there wasn’t enough time before my son’s culture fair for us to launch a Freedom of Information Act request for our family files.So, as usual, in the absence of hard facts I was forced to fall back on my memories. And as we sat there in the dark kitchen, our faces illuminated only by the computer screen, I was suddenly overtaken by an affecting recollection from my own childhood: sitting with my dad in the old movie theater where he would often take me to see the numerous Japanese movies featuring Zatoichi, the blind masseur and swordsman. My schoolteacher father, though not a masseur or a swordsman and only very nearsighted, identified strongly with Zatoichi. Both of them were committed to empowering the downtrodden against their corrupt oppressors, whether in nineteenth-century Japan or twentieth-century America. And when—as he inevitably did, in every installment— Zatoichi suffered, Dad suffered as well. Watching him weep as, up on the big screen, Zatoichi was dragged along rough terrain by a rope attached to a galloping horse, I learned what it meant to empathize with others on the margins: I learned what it meant to be a Jew.At the time of this writing, my son has not yet received a grade for his culture-fair display. It’s possible that his teacher may have been confused by a Jewish cultural history depicted entirely through the stories and images of a blind Japanese masseur and swordsman. Then again, we live in Berkeley, so maybe she understood. And I bet she enjoyed the tasty kugel that my wife baked in the morning.

History's a Mystery

History's a Mystery Bruce Kuklick (bio) Robin Le Poidevin, The Images of Time: An Essay on Temporal Representation (Oxford University Press, 2007). When the editor of Historically Speaking asked me to report on this book, I jumped at the chance, for I have a long-standing interest in the philosophy of history. But as an advisory editor of the magazine, I also told Don Yerxa that a review might not serve him well. I don't believe that the philosophy of history gives much help to historians in the trenches, and I have found that the opaque subject does not much appeal to them. Don mildly persisted, and I have spent some time chewing on this short but thickly written monograph. Have an aid to digestion handy. Poidevin elucidates the various ways in which we conceive of time and its passing. He wants, for instance, to inquire how memory works because memory fundamentally acknowledges that time has gone by. But the author also looks at how visual artists depict time. While I have a limited knowledge of painting, I take in Poidevin's analysis of Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Stair Case. Eadweard Muybridge's successive photographs of a galloping horse capture this notion even better for me. You look at a series of pictures, and see temporal change. If you consider film a visual art, watch the Robert Redford-Barbra Streisand movie, The Way We Were or the beginning of Saving Private Ryan. Poidevin scrutinizes how drama and fiction show such change. Take J.B. Priestley's play, Time and the Conways. In Act I we meet the young and hopeful Conways. In Act II we see them disappointed and disillusioned twenty years later. In Act III we return to the time of Act I. Although Acts I and III display the Conways in the same light, in Act III the same hopeful Conways lose a bit of their hope. We note that they are somehow headed for what they will be like in the future, because we know what will happen in the future. In these and other illustrations Poidevin delves into what he calls the representation of time. He wants to learn about how we envision or imagine the transformations that time brings. But Poidevin is also looking for a bigger fish. The University of Leeds has titled him a professor of metaphysics, that is, the study of the ultimate nature of reality. Thus he inspects how we represent changing time as a way of figuring out the nature of time itself. How we understand time should shed light on its reality. And if we think about what time really is, we can perhaps puzzle out why it comes across the way it does in our representations. We separate what we know about something and what it is in itself, and then reason that getting a handle on the one will tell us something about the other. Here we have to chomp on some even denser material to get a purchase on Poidevin's investigation. Once upon a time we had a group of philosophers called the Anglo Hegelians. Although not all English, this prepossessing bunch wrote in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They were most committed to making clear the historical dimensions of life about which the German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel speculated. One of the most formidable of these Anglo Hegelians was John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart. In 1908 McTaggart published an essay called "The Unreality of Time." McTaggart distinguished between two ways of meditating over time. We can contemplate events as past, present, and future. In this A-series we have real change, the experience of time passing. Or we can think of time as ordered events, each one before or after another. Here we have an earlier or a later, but no idea of a now that was once coming and will soon be receding. This is the B-series. If the B-series reflects the true nature of things, we have no change. A crucial arrangement exists to the series but no future that turns into the present only to become past. Anglo Hegelians like McTaggart loved to...

High speed field kinematics of foot contact in elite galloping horses in training

Mechanical characterisation of the high speed gallop has significant importance for animal welfare and basic biology. Kinematic parameters such as the velocity of each foot at contact can inform theories of why animals gallop, and supplant epidemiological investigation into the mechanisms of musculoskeletal injury. To determine the velocity at which the fore and hind hooves of elite galloping horses impact the surface. High speed videography was used to measure the horizontal and vertical velocity of the hoof immediately prior to impact, and the subsequent sink (vertical) and slip (horizontal) distances travelled by the hoof into the surface. Horse speed ranged from 11-19 m/s. In total 170 forelimb and 168 hindlimb foot falls from 89 horses were analysed. Horizontal and vertical hoof velocity increased with speed (P<0.001). Horizontal hoof velocity was significantly greater in the hindlimbs compared to the forelimbs (P<0.001) and was greater in the nonlead limbs compared to the lead limbs (P<0.001). Vertical hoof velocity was significantly greater in the lead limb than the nonlead limb (P<0.001). Overall, forelimbs contacted the ground with a more acute velocity vector angle than hindlimbs (P<0.001). Lead limbs contacted the ground at more acute angles than nonlead limbs (P<0.001). Vertical and horizontal velocities were highly correlated to sink and slip distance. Hindlimbs impact the surface at higher velocity than forelimbs, which is likely to result in higher peak impact forces in the hindlimbs. This runs counter to the finding of lower incidence of injury in hindlimbs. Explanations consistent with these findings include the hindlimbs more effectively dampening peak impact forces, or that other injury mechanisms, such as limb vibration and limb load at mid stance, play an important role in injury.

The Physiological Circus: Knowing, Representing, and Training Horses in Motion in Nineteenth-Century France

The late nineteenth-century debates about forms of dressage and the correct representations of horses, using the circus as the major arena for testing and observation, provided a fertile ground for the development of Etienne-Jules Marey's physiology of locomotion. Marey claimed to revolutionize the field of locomotion studies with mechanically produced representations, yet, as this essay shows, his mechanical reform of the study of bodies in motion was countered by the persistence of older forms of animal observation and superseded by new anthropologies and psychologies of seeing.

Evaluation of energy expenditure in athletes practising horseback riding

The aim of this work was to evaluate the energy expenditure in healthy subjects practising horseback riding. The records were obtained using the “Actiheart” which is a metabolic Holter. The Actiheart clips onto a single standard ECG electrode with a short ECG lead to another electrode that picks up the ECG signal. It is normally worn on the upper or lower chest, this device allows physical activity to be correlated with heart rate (HR) and energy expenditure (MET) to be calculated from both [1-2]. We analysed 14 subjects of both sexes. Subjects were divided into two groups: “adults” with an age ranging from 21 to 55 years and “children” ranging from 15 to 16 years. We consider, for each subject, a training session of about one hour in which were practised “step” “trot” and “gallop”. Results allowed us to evaluate the energy expenditure resulting from the practice of this sport by young or older subjects. Collected data were also compared with similar data reported in the literature [3-4].

Lyric Anger and the Victrola in the Attic: An Interview with Stephen Kuusisto

I sat down with celebrated author Stephen Kuusisto in fall of 2008 in Iowa City, Iowa where he lives. I had read his first book of poems, Only Bread, Only Light, and his two memoirs, hugely popular Planet of Blind and recently released Eavesdropping: A Memoir of Blindness and Listening. I had also read his completed new manuscript of poems, Mornings with Borges, forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in 2010. Having already met Steve when I invited him to give a reading and workshop at Grinnell College, I was familiar with his old guide dog, Vidal, who had just retired, but not his new dog, Nira, who seemed a paragon of affectionate placidity and navagational competence. Over several cups of coffee, we spoke about a great many things but kept circling back to questions of lyric mode and its usefulness to project of disability studies. Steve is a wildly energetic man, learned, unbelievably funny-a kind of walking surrealist. Think Johnny Carson meets Andre Breton meets entire library at University of Iowa, where he teaches in graduate nonfiction program and eye clinic at medical college. He is also a passionate activist working on behalf of those with disabilities. A truly public intellectual, he has appeared on countless national and regional TV and radio programs, including The Oprah Winfrey Show, Dateline NBC, and NPR's Talk of Nation. R. S. At one point in Planet of Blind, while birding with a friend, you pretend to see a goldfinch hopping up and down-jumping, you write, a penny on a railroad track. The scene underscores your proclivity as a young man to try to pass as sighted, but it also points to an aesthetic philosophy. Not wanting your outing together to become an exercise in description, where your friend reveals in exacting detail what his retinas take in, you decide to fake it with binoculars, gloating over imaginary blue jays. It seems to me that Planet of Blind inverts this outing while shouldering a similar worry. The reader is out birding with you, blind author, and is thankfully spared an exercise in description. Meticulous verisimilitude is thrown to wind, and analogy (what might be called practice of blurred distinctions) takes over, paradoxically allowing us to see world more clearly than mere sight allows. You say this explicitly when you remark about your early writing, Exploring what words can do when placed side by side, I'm starting to build instrument that will turn my blindness into a manner of And you come back to this very situation of blind and sighted in title poem of your forthcoming collection, Mornings with Borges. The mother of a friend used to walk with great poet and relate what was before them. Then, you write, the poet would tell her what he was seeing. Wingless angels with glass eyes; a book lying open from which a sequence of numbers arose and walked like those pocket-sized dogs favored by wealthy. Borges is said to provide solutions to incitement that is blindness. Is your own solution to this problem something like a counter-imaginative incitement? S. K. It's interesting to me that college English departments are talking these days about visual literacy as though optho-centrism, or photographic metaphor for seeing, offers in effect an unquestionable and dominant script for cognition and imagination. Poetry is often concerned with things we cannot see as Federico Garcia Lorca or Dylan Thomas will tell you. Association in surrealism means putting things side by side that don't belong together logically- the sewing machine on operating table or a horse galloping across face of a tomato-to borrow from Breton; poetry raises this quality of illogical to a higher level by insisting that there are states of mind, of perception really, that can't be represented by stable, figurative imagery. In one of his poems, Robert Bly describes people trapped in poverty by saying, They live in casket of sun. …

Colour M-mode Doppler pattern of severe functional mitral regurgitation in the presence of high left ventricular filling pressures: The sign of the galloping coloured horse

A 75-year-old patient presented with symptoms and signs of heart failure (including a ventricular gallop rhythm) and ventricular bigeminy with retrograde P waves on an electrocardiogram. Echocardiography revealed severe functional mitral regurgitation (MR). The regurgitant flow showed a quadriphasic temporal pattern, characterized by early systolic, end-systolic, post-extrasystolic and diastolic components (Figures 1 and ​and2).2). Curiously, colour M-mode Doppler imaging of transmitral flows depicted the image of a galloping horse (Figure 2). Higher grades of MR severity and increasing left ventricular filling pressures associated with diastolic dysfunction yield progressive changes in transmitral flow dynamics (1,2). These modifications concur to resemble a horse-like image in the colour M-mode Doppler transmitral pattern, and this can be favoured by retrograde atrial activation after premature ventricular beats (3). This sign may be indicative of MR severity and advanced diastolic impairment, configuring an intriguing visual correlate of the auscultatory gallop rhythm. Figure 1) Echocardiography revealing severe functional mitral regurgitation. The regurgitant flow showed a quadriphasic temporal pattern, characterized by early systolic (A), end-systolic (B), post-extrasystolic (C) and diastolic components (D) Figure 2) Colour M-mode Doppler image of transmitral flows, depicting the image of a galloping horse (top). Echocardiography revealed severe functional mitral regurgitation, which showed a quadriphasic temporal pattern, characterized by early systolic, end-systolic, ...

STUDIES CONCERNING THE ASSESSMENT OF WELFARE HORSES DURING TRAINING

Horse training may be regarded as stressful under certain circumstances thus leading to a depreciation of their welfare depending on the exercises taken, training intensity and animals’ physical condition. Research monitored the induced response of some physiological welfare indicators in sport horses during training. We assessed the stress intensity during training by measuring the variations of heart rate, lactic acid, cortisol levels. The 48 horses of different breeds and aged, were divided into two groups: A1 untrained horses and A2 trained horses. All horses were subjected to the same light (walk), moderate (trot), and intense (canter) training programme. We monitored the indicators after one hour of training/day, over six months. We measured the heart rate by means of a non-invasive method, using a Polar type of cardio-monitor. The plasmatic cortisol levels were obtained by radioimunoassey RIA, the lactic acid levels by chemical analysis with commercial reagents in a biochemical analyser. The recorded heart rate during training shows a significant increase in untrained horses in the first month of their training as compared to the ones used to exercise (165 bpm). This increase is present also in the third month of their training depending on the intensity of their exercise. In trained horses, the heart rate decreases in the third month of training, which indicates the fact that the animals are getting used to the exercise. Repetitive training may be considered a chronic stress factor for trained horses. Heart rate may be an efficient method to monitor horse training and it may also be suggested as marker of horse welfare during training. The plasma cortisol levels measured during training shows a concentration increase in untrained horses (10,7 nmol/l), as opposed to trained horses; its values are different according to the exercise intensity. This aspect is due especially to the horses’ effort to adapt to training (9,9 mmol/l). Plasmatic lactate shows a decrease in trained horses compared to untrained horses, probably due to exercises thus testifying for a good athletic condition.

The Age of (John Quincy) Adams

The Age of (John Quincy) Adams Scott E. Casper (bio) Daniel Walker Howe. What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. 928 pp. Maps, notes, bibliographical essay, and index. $35.00. Grand narrative synthesis is a thankless task.1 Reviewers and fellow scholars will quibble with interpretations and omissions. Because presidential administrations, wars, and treaties offer the most straightforward chronology, social and cultural historians will challenge the organizational subordination of developments that followed no similarly definable timeline—or that occurred at different moments in different places. Herein lies the paradox of Daniel Walker Howe’s undertaking. Traditional political developments drive the narrative, but the “Transformation of America” is not the political democratization that scholars from Arthur Schlesinger Jr. to Sean Wilentz have foregrounded.2 Rather, the significant transformations in Howe’s story are the burgeoning technologies and networks of infrastructure and communication that conducted messages of religious revival, social reform, and party politics, as well as goods and people, ever more rapidly across an expanding country. That story begins at the Battle of New Orleans, the memory and reality of which foreshadowed the great transformations and the essential political clash of the next thirty-three years. Thanks to the ancient communications system that still prevailed in 1815—“Neither Alexander the Great nor Benjamin Franklin . . . two thousand years later knew anything faster than a galloping horse” (p. 1)—Americans cheered Jackson’s victory at New Orleans (mistakenly) as the triumph that brought Great Britain to the peace table; three decades later, the telegraph would revolutionize the transmission of information. In popular lore, the Hunters of Kentucky, an individualistic band of white marksmen who also settled the West, won America’s second war for independence at New Orleans. In microcosm, as Howe explains, they also represented the nascent ideology of Jacksonian Democrats. So did Andrew Jackson’s broken promise to secure land claims for the black soldiers who aided in the victory. Conversely, he writes, the battle was in fact won by the artillery and by a multi-ethnic, multi-racial, professional soldier corps—harbingers of another American future, the Whig vision of a diversified economy, its industrial growth symbolized [End Page 334] more aptly by large cannon than by marksmen’s rifles. To call this period the age of Jacksonian democracy, Howe suggests, is to accept the Hunters of Kentucky myth as truth. To put it another way: What Hath God Wrought offers a Whiggish (the political party, not the historical theory) interpretation of what historians and textbook writers once reflexively called “Jacksonian America.” This view becomes evident from Howe’s dedication of the book “To the Memory of John Quincy Adams.” Jacksonians, ostensibly the nation’s political modernizers, represented merely the territorial extension of the national present, their democratic professions rooted in white supremacy. Adams’s star represented the truer beacon to American modernity in the years Andrew Jackson bestrode America’s politics. National Republicans and Whigs, moral and social reformers, evangelical leaders: “The Improvers,” as Howe calls them collectively, sought to forge a United States different from and better than its origins. Whigs, not Democrats, “facilitated the transformation of the United States from a collection of parochial agricultural communities into a cosmopolitan nation integrated by commerce, industry, information, and voluntary associations as well as by political ties” (p. 612). Echoing Major Wilson’s 1974 argument about the conflict between Democratic “expansion across space” and Whig “improvement over time,” as well as Alexander Saxton’s depiction of racial ideologies in the early republic, Howe forcefully advances an interpretation, even if he claims in the end that “This book tells a story; it does not argue a thesis” (p. 849).3 Following a first chapter that surveys the societies and peoples of North America in 1815 (and that begins ingeniously in Mexico City, where the story will return three decades later), What Hath God Wrought unfolds primarily through the political narrative of presidencies and wars, with intervening sections devoted to social, economic, and cultural developments. So, for example, the second and third chapters tell the political and diplomatic events of the Madison and early Monroe years (roughly 1812–1819), followed by a chapter...

How Animals Work

Molecular biology and advanced techniques informed by chemistry and physics have changed biological research and teaching. Today's students take for granted that as they study the life sciences, they will hear a lot about genes and molecules. Sir William Harvey would be profoundly disorientated and then gratified by a visit to the Harvey Society's website (www.harveysociety.org). The man who accurately described the functional anatomy of the circulatory system would appreciate the extent to which his evidence-based approach to animal physiology has won the day. Indeed, understanding life processes at a molecular level is immensely satisfying. Three cheers for reductionism (Figure 1). Figure 1. The i heart guts website sells plush toys based on most of your favorite internal organs. It can be difficult, however, to fully appreciate the beauty of molecular details if the larger functions they serve are poorly understood. After all, it is the anatomical genius of the circulatory system that ensures that every cell of the body benefits from the marvel of hemoglobin. The steadily growing body of biological information makes it more challenging to preserve places in the curriculum to provide organismal and physiological context for students, and to cultivate deep thinking about how complex biological systems function through emergent properties of molecular mechanics. We are all interested in how our bodies work and are obsessed, if not enthralled, by our innards, or as one website (http://iheartguts.com/) would put it, “we heart guts.” My main goal for this review is to uncover websites that can be used to infuse the biology curriculum with systems and organismal context. Because a human anatomy and physiology (A&P) sequence is still part of most life science curricula, websites that support the teaching of A&P vastly outnumber websites concerned with general physiological principles or comparative physiology and anatomy. I highlight websites that emphasize fundamental principles and a comparative approach, but I also point to several excellent sites devoted to human A&P (Figure 2). Figure 2. The University of Utah Medical Library has a number of outstanding educational resources and tutorials on its Knowledge Weavers website, including an excellent animation of the circulation through the heart. To honor Harvey, let's begin by looking at a website that does an outstanding job of showing how our hearts work. The Knowledge Weavers website (http://library.med.utah.edu/kw/) from the University of Utah medical library offers many excellent resources. Their Flash-animated heart (http://library.med.utah.edu/kw/resources.html#animations) is one of the best of many available on the Web. The action of the heart is linked to dynamic graphs of blood pressure/volume, electrocardiogram, and heart sounds. The progress of the heart cycle is tracked by systole and diastole, in turn subdivided into relevant phases, and controls are available to run the animation fast, slow, or in step-through mode. The Flash console conveniently locates links to tutorials. The tutorials, by dissecting the animation step by step, should help students consolidate their learning based on the animation. It would be an interesting assessment to have students make their own tutorials and then see how they measure up to those made by the website authors. In addition to the cardiology information, the site also has an interesting concept for presenting a functional neural pathway. The Osteointeractive section (http://library.med.utah.edu/kw/osteo/index2.html) is noteworthy in presenting topics such as forensic anthropology and paleopathology, including the use of bones for human rights work. They've also developed tools to help faculty make multimedia and Web-based quizzes.