Imagine You Research Articles

How to Watch Television EthanThompson and JasonMittell, Editors. New York: New York University Press, 2013.

How to Watch Television Ethan Thompson and Jason Mitteil, Editors. New York: New York University Press, 2013.Imagine you've just purchased a new TV. You haul it home, open the box, set it up. You may or may not glance at the instruction manual. But once you've got the power on, chances are you never think about how to watch TV again. It just happens. Yet the way in which one watches matters deeply, both to individual viewers and to our collective culture. In their 2013 book, How to Watch Television, editors Ethan Thompson and Jason Mittell offer a new kind of guide, one that explores different ways of watching, methods for looking at or making sense of television (1). This book, unlike the manual that comes with your TV set, is utterly readable, highly engaging, and worth referring back to, long after you've switched on your favorite channel.Where other collections have considered emerging genres (Reality TV: Remaking Television Culture [2004]), the global functions of (Global Television Formats: Understanding Television Across Borders [2011]) and the changing nature of the medium in the digital era (Television After TV: Essays On a Mednetwork ium in Transition [2004]), Thompson and Mittell's collection attends to specific shows, old and new. Each of the volume's forty chapters begins with a brief summary, introducing the author, program, and a particular analytical framework. Throughout, the reader is presented with a diverse group of narrativesfrom the Disney cartoon Phineas and Ferb, to telenovelas and Monday Night Football, to contemporary dramas such as House and 24. Essays are organized into five thematic sections, which discuss form, representation, politics, industry, and practice, although many chapters skillfully weave these strands together in ways that transcend categorization.A number of the collection's contributors position the narrative and stylistic nuances of programs within a historical context. For instance, in his essay on The Wonder Years (ABC, 1988-1993), Daniel Marcus writes that the bildungsroman served as an expression of nostalgia for the countercultural 1960s during the Reagan era. Similarly, Noel Murray links MMWs (CBS, 1972-1983) depiction of the Korean War to social commentary on war writ large in the 1970s, as public dissatisfaction with US involvement in Vietnam intensified. Evelyn Alsultany's critique of the more recent 24 (FOX, 2001-2010) unpacks the show's depiction of terrorism in a post-9/ 11 landscape. …

Sneaky fish use suction for stealthy hunting

Imagine you are a small crustacean. You might be minding your own business, until suddenly you feel it: a wave of water signaling the approach of a predatory fish. Luckily, your escape response is incredibly fast. All you need is that brief warning wave to scoot away in the nick of time. Furthermore, your fishy pursuer probably uses a suction-based strike, and suction feeding requires a fish to be very close to its prey for success. Given the rapid approach of the fish, and the comparatively huge wave it must send toward the copepod, it seems remarkable that fish can catch anything at all. Yet many fish survive by suction feeding, and they are remarkably successful predators. This raises an interesting question: how can fish ever get close enough to prey for suction feeding while avoiding detection?The wave produced by the front of a swimming fish is called a bow wave, and it should provide ample stimulation to frighten away prey. And somehow, the prey doesn't escape. They hardly seem to notice the bow wave at all. Fish must have some way of sneaking up on small prey that does not elicit an escape response.Brad Gemmel and his colleagues at the University of Texas suspected that fish might be able to actively avoid detection by manipulating their own bow wave. The group of researchers filmed predatory interactions between zebrafish and copepods using tomographic particle image velocimetry, a technique to visualize fluid movement in a 3-D volume. By measuring the bow wave and fluid strain between the fish and the prey, they hoped to find some clue as to the fish's apparent stealth.Surprisingly, the researchers noticed that during predatory strikes, the fluid forces from the bow wave on the prey were much smaller than expected. However, a normally swimming fish that was not approaching prey had a much stronger bow wave. In fact, somehow, the feeding fishes were targeting the change in their bow wave. The fluid strain was weakest in the plane of the prey. But how were the fish doing it? Gemmel and colleagues decided to look for some change in behavior just before the suction strike that did not appear during normal swimming and found there was one chief difference in the fish between predatory and non-predatory swimming. When a fish approached a copepod, it opened its mouth just slightly before the actual feeding strike. During routine swimming, the fish's mouth did not open.By opening its mouth ever so slightly, the zebrafish created suction: sucking its own bow wave in to hide it from the copepod. This hydrodynamic stealth has never been observed before. It's a clever co-option of a mechanism that was already being used for feeding – and given the prevalence of suction feeding among fishes, hydrodynamic stealth may be more common than anyone expected.

The Antibody Challenge

The Antibody Challenge

An Overlooked Peer? Role of the Managing Editor in Nursing Journals

An Overlooked Peer? Role of the Managing Editor in Nursing Journals

Stable Ships for Smooth Servicing of Offshore Wind Farms

There is a rapid increase in the number of offshore wind farms in European waters to help meet renewable energy targets. Wind turbines are being installed in progressively more exposed areas of the North Sea and the Irish Sea, with the eventual aim of placing them in the Atlantic Ocean. As offshore wind farms require regular maintenance, being able to access the wind turbines during rough sea conditions is a key issue for profitable operation. The operation involves transferring personnel from the service ship to the wind turbine. The current wave height limit for this is 1.5 m, slightly less than 5 feet, increasing this results in significant savings over the lifetime of the wind farm. Each wind farm service ship has 12 maintenance crew. Imagine you are one waiting on port for the sea and weather conditions to be right so that you can head out to the wind ...

An appointment with Dr. google: Online searching for health information in times of stress

An appointment with Dr. google: Online searching for health information in times of stress

Towards a general theory of biodiversity for the Anthropocene

Imagine a hypothetical scenario. Imagine you are traveling through space and come across Earth for the first time ... what would you be most struck by? Would it be the water that gives our planet the nickname ‘blue-marble’? I doubt it. We’ve now found water on the moon (Saal et al., 2008), on several other planets in our own solar system (Carr et al., 1998; Malin and Edgett, 2000), and a single survey of the Milky Way found >270 planets in the so-called “habitable zone,” warm enough for liquid water (Borucki et al., 2011). Would you instead be struck by the mountains, canyons and other geological features that are most visible from space? Again, it’s doubtful. Geologists tell us there are few, if any, landforms that are wholly unique to Earth (Baker, 2008; Dietrich and Perron, 2006), and you probably would have seen them all before. Based on our current understanding of the universe, the only thing a space-traveler is likely to be struck by, and the one thing that appears to be fundamentally unique to Earth, is its remarkable variety of life. Ever since the first prokaryotic cells evolved more than 3 billion years ago, the diversity of life on Earth has steadily increased, punctuated by only a handful of extinction events. Our best guess is there are perhaps 9 million forms of eukaryotic organisms on this planet (Mora et al., 2011). The number of prokaryotic organisms is largely unknown, but a single hydrothermal vent on the bottom of the ocean can harbor an astounding 37,000 unique types of microbes (Huber et al., 2007). While the great variety of life is perhaps the most striking feature of Earth, loss of this biodiversity is one of the most striking forms of environmental change in the Anthopocene. The percentage of species that have gone extinct ranges from just < 1% to 13% of described taxa depending on the group considered (Barnosky et al., 2011). But rates of extinction are occurring orders of magnitude faster than what is ‘normal’ in the fossil record. Projections suggest that if these high rates of extinction continue, biodiversity loss could equal or exceed the five prior mass extinctions (loss of 75% or more of known taxa) in 240 to 540 years (Barnosky et al., 2011). So what? What does it matter if we lose 75% of all life forms on the planet over the next few centuries? Will Earth become any less hospitable for humans? Will this planet still be able provide people with the food, water, air, and other goods and services needed to survive and prosper? Won’t evolution simply replace all of that lost diversity with life forms that are more fit for a human dominated planet? And if evolution does compensate for extinctions in the Anthropocene, what ecological roles will those newly evolved species play? These are pressing questions as we ponder what future Earth will be like. The variety of life that has evolved over 3.6-billion years is a catalog of biological resources from which we produce nearly all of the goods and services needed for humanity to prosper (Daily et al., 1997; MEA, 2005; Cardinale et al., 2012). If we are to have any hope of predicting how human domination of the planet will impact our own prosperity in an era that will have fewer biological options, we must develop a general theory of Earth’s biodiversity that can predict both the causes as well as the consequences of biological variation. Fortunately, biologists have made great strides on developing models that simultaneously explain three dimensions of biodiversity: (a) the evolutionary origin of biodiversity, (b) the ecological maintenance of biodiversity, and (c) the ecosystem-level function of biodiversity. Below I describe one set of evolutionary and ecological models that are beginning to show remarkably consistency in form. These models are by no means the only descriptions of how diversity originates, why species coexist, or how diversity influences ecosystem function. But the particular models discussed here do have a common thread that suggests biologists from different sub-disciplines are, in some instances, converging on a suite of equations, all with similar terms that collectively predict the origin, maintenance, and function of biodiversity. Domain Editor-in-Chief Donald R. Zak, University of Michigan

Taming the world of atoms and photons

Taming the world of atoms and photons

PECHAKUCHA

Imagine you are on stage. Behind you 20 slides flash by, 20 seconds each. It's six minutes and forty seconds of you and your slides in glorious real‐time bringing an idea, inspiration, thought or passion to life. It's PechaKucha. In 2013, your EPIC compatriots walk you down the path of a changing Brixton neighbourhood, wake you up from a nap in China, watch you be born and die digitally and, thankfully, get you out of jail.

Writing with an Ear to the Ground: The Armenian Genocide's "Stubborn Murmur"

Writing with an Ear to the Ground: The Armenian Genocide's "Stubborn Murmur"

Chimps play fair in the ultimatum game

Imagine you are given $100.00. You have to propose how to share the money with another person, who can accept, in which case both earn as you have proposed, or reject your offer, in which case neither player gets anything. If both are rational maximizers, the proposer offers one cent, which the responder accepts; one cent is more than nothing and Homo economicus goes for it. This so-called Ultimatum Game (UG) (1) played with humans in many societies (2) usually reveals unexpected fairness. Proposers offer about 40% and responders reject offers below about 20%. A study with chimpanzees, our closest relatives, found them to be pure rational maximizers (3). Proposer chimps offered the smallest amount and responders accepted almost all offers. Is human fairness in the UG unique? In PNAS, Proctor et al. (4) show that both chimpanzees and young children playing the UG split rewards equally. However, in a dictator game (DG), where the partner has no say and simply gets what the proposer proposes, both chimps and children preferred to be selfish. Are chimpanzees fair or selfish?

BiotecVisions 2012, November

BiotecVisions 2012, November

Representations of interobject spatial relations in long-term memory

A growing body of evidence has indicated that human spatial memory is organized in terms of a small number of reference directions and that interobject spatial relations are represented in terms of these directions (e.g., McNamara, 2003). The goal of the present experiments was to investigate whether the selection of reference directions also affects the fidelity with which interobject spatial relations are represented in memory. In two experiments, participants memorized a layout of nine objects and then performed judgments of relative direction (e.g., "Imagine you are standing at the clock, facing the book. Point to the phone.") at a remote location. Imagined heading (e.g., at the clock, facing the book) and allocentric target direction (e.g., the direction from clock to phone in the allocentric frame of reference used to define imagined heading) were manipulated independently. The results of both experiments showed that the same directions that were benefited in imagined headings were also benefited in allocentric target directions. These findings indicate that interobject spatial relations are preferentially represented when they coincide with a reference direction.

Financial Distress and Depressive Symptoms among African American Women: Identifying Financial Priorities and Needs and why it Matters for Mental Health

Prior research found that financial hardship or distress is one of the most important underlying factors for depression/depressive symptoms, yet factors that contribute to financial distress remain unexplored or unaddressed. Given this, the goals of the present study were (1) to examine the relationship between perceived financial distress and depressive symptoms, and (2) to identify financial priorities and needs that may contribute to financial distress. Surveys from 111 African American women, ages 18-44, who reside in Allegheny County, PA, were used to gather demographic information and measures of depressive symptoms and financial distress/financial well-being. Correlation and regression analyses revealed that perceived financial distress was significantly associated with levels of depressive symptoms. To assess financial priorities and needs, responses to two open-ended questions were analyzed and coded for common themes: "Imagine you won a $10,000 prize in a local lottery. What would you do with this money?" and "What kinds of programs or other help would be beneficial to you during times of financial difficulties?" The highest five priorities identified by the participants were paying bills and debt, saving, purchasing a home or making home repairs, and/or helping others. The participant's perceived needs during times of financial difficulty included tangible assistance and/or financial education. The findings from this study can be used to create new and/or enhance existing programs, services, and/or interventions that focus on the identified financial priorities and needs. Collaborative efforts among professionals in different disciplines are also needed, as ways to manage and alleviate financial distress should be considered and discussed when addressing the mental health of African American women.

Psychology’s Recovery of its Proper Projects and Methods

The contrast between a psychological and a biological study of a superficially similar phenomenon can be illustrated with the ‘cough’. The word is used generically for an explosive expulsion of air that clears the pulmonary passages. But this common meaning is set into two radically different conceptual and empirical frameworks. Imagine you are at a concert – Yo Yo Ma is approaching one the most delicate passages in the Elgar Cello concerto and you become aware of a mounting discomfort in the chest and a well nigh irresistible pressure to cough – eventually you cannot control it any more. This is the 'cough' in a biological framework of mechanisms and concepts. Consider this case – you are at the open door of colleague’s study and you see that she is earnestly advising an undergraduate. Rather than barge in you cough discretely to attract her attention. In the first case you, the person, have lost control of a biological mechanism, while in the second case you, the person, used a biological mechanism for a psychologically intelligible purpose. In the first case the cough has no meaning. In the second case its meaning is or ought to be clear. Note too, that different cultures may have different uses for the cough, just as different cultures have different uses for the smile.

Teaching peers to talk to peers

Scientists should learn to communicate effectively with their colleagues through long-term, sustained training instead of ad hoc, one-off "interventions" that may or may not occur during graduate school or postdoctoral work. Since such training may place unreasonable demands on research advisors, institutions should create career opportunities for "peer-peer communication teachers."

The Relationship Between Response Time and Diagnostic Accuracy

Psychologists theorize that cognitive reasoning involves two distinct processes: System 1, which is rapid, unconscious, and contextual, and System 2, which is slow, logical, and rational. According to the literature, diagnostic errors arise primarily from System 1 reasoning, and therefore they are associated with rapid diagnosis. This study tested whether accuracy is associated with shorter or longer times to diagnosis. Immediately after the 2010 administration of the Medical Council of Canada Qualifying Examination (MCCQE) Part II at three test centers, the authors recruited participants, who read and diagnosed a series of 25 written cases of varying difficulty. The authors computed accuracy and response time (RT) for each case. Seventy-five Canadian medical graduates (of 95 potential participants) participated. The overall correlation between RT and accuracy was -0.54; accuracy, then, was strongly associated with more rapid RT. This negative relationship with RT held for 23 of 25 cases individually and overall when the authors controlled for participants' knowledge, as judged by their MCCQE Part I and II scores. For 19 of 25 cases, accuracy on each case was positively related to experience with that specific diagnosis. A participant's performance on the test overall was significantly correlated with his or her performance on both the MCCQE Part I and II. These results are inconsistent with clinical reasoning models that presume that System 1 reasoning is necessarily more error prone than System 2. These results suggest instead that rapid diagnosis is accurate and relates to other measures of competence.

Highlight--Tracking Adaptation's Role: Do Larger Populations Evolve Faster?

Highlight--Tracking Adaptation's Role: Do Larger Populations Evolve Faster?

Child Safety, Absolute Risk, and the Prevention Paradox

AbstractImagine you fly home from vacation with your one‐and‐a‐half‐year‐old son who is traveling for free as a “lap child.” In the airport parking lot, you put him into his forward‐facing car seat, where he sits much more contentedly than he did in the rear‐facing one that was mandatory until his first birthday. After he falls asleep on the way home, you transfer him to his crib without waking him, lowering the side rail so you can lift him in more easily.Many parts of this idyllic parenting picture are deemed unacceptably risky according to recent child safety proposals. While these proposals all aim to improve child safety, their possible impact is unclear because there has been little discussion of the absolute risk and risk reduction involved in each. And while precise figures are lacking, rough estimates indicate that the magnitudes are quite small. I will argue that this risk and benefit data raises important questions about the proposals, including whether parents might reasonably believe that the small absolute risk reduction offered by the proposed changes does not justify the attendant burdens. This possibility—termed the “prevention paradox” in other contexts—highlights ethical and theoretical challenges in this area of public health.

A call for inspiration

What inspires you? What was the moment that turned your mind to medicine? Whose influence cast a spell that set your future course? Perhaps it's hard to pinpoint an event or an experience that galvanized you? Medicine is a career of variety and unexpected paths, and this month I'll be speaking to sixth form and GCSE students in the hope of offering some inspiration as they consider a life of doctoring. JRSM readers with children of that age will know that preparations begin early in these competitive times. Gone are the days of a last minute impulse on a university application form. Today's students mount a four-year campaign to gain a place at medical school, armed with entry criteria, exam preparation, interview training, and work experience. When sixth form principals advise sagely on the difficulties of students winning an Oxbridge place, their one consolation is: “It could be worse, you could be applying for medical school.” What most medical students don't realise is that they are entering a career of infinity possibilities. Medicine's multi-specialty nature means that there is a medical career to suit all personalities. Your degree is merely the key to an Aladdin's cave of opportunity, a blessing that is hard to appreciate on a thankless night on call or in the middle of a disastrous ward round. Many doctors are fortunate to experience a variety of specialities as they find the one that they were destined for. Nor is variety confined to medicine. The broad experiences of a doctor's life help many people turn to second careers as managers, business people, writers, performers, politicians, and revolutionaries. Add in foreign travel and the international nature of many specialties, and medical school becomes more than a passport to a career. But how can you know that when you fill in your university application? How do you know what it takes to be a cardiologist, an orthopaedic surgeon, a microbiologist, a clinical director, or even a journal editor? How do you know that medicine, a career that might seem glamorous from the way the media portrays doctors, is the right career for you? For amid the myriad of exciting opportunities lie as many avenues of misery, hurt, and disillusionment. Imagine you are sitting in front of a hall full of sixth form students or young doctors on graduation day. What would you say to them about what inspires you? What was the moment that transformed your career? Share that inspiration and that moment with JRSM readers by sending in a submission for our Podium section. In these days of demoralization, a little inspiration is a welcome pleasure.