Races Of Man Research Articles

(315) The Association of Sexual Dysfunction with Race in Men and Women: A Comparative Review

Abstract Introduction Numerous studies have shown that, regardless of age, men with sexual dysfunction have a lower quality of life than men without sexual dysfunction. Sexual difficulties are also common among women and can cause significant distress and impact on mental health and quality of life. Female sexual dysfunction (FSD) is a multifaceted problem that is continuously under diagnosed and under treated. Historically in medicine, the sexual health of racial minorities who are underrepresented in medicine has been compromised due to multiple racism and discriminatory healthcare practices. These historical factors offer an unexplored context for interpreting the epidemiology of sexual health inequities among underrepresented populations today, despite significant advancements in ensuring equitable healthcare. Objective To assess the prevalence and risk of experiencing sexual dysfunction across various racial groups and examine the determinants and consequences to quality of life to women in comparison to men of the same racial group. Methods The methods for this systematic literature search have been developed according to the recommendations from the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) statements. PubMed as well as 7 key electronic databases (including MEDLINE, Ovid, and ScienceDirect), and up-to-date editions of pertinent journals and organizational websites were searched. Criteria for including studies consisted of randomized control trials, cohort studies, and studies that had relevance to criteria for erectile dysfunction, female sexual disfunction, male sexual dysfunction, healthcare inequities, and hypoactive sexual desire disorder. The studies were assessed for value, author, and how data from the included studies were obtained, investigated, evaluated, and synthesized. Results It can be concluded that there is a higher reported incidence of sexual dysfunction in women overall when compared to men (43% among adult women and 31% among adult men). Women are also at a greater risk of sexual function difficulties due to higher rates of anxiety, depression, pelvic floor pain and pain with sexual intercourse. Out of the racial groups studied, black women are least likely to seek treatment for the diagnosis of sexual dysfunction and dyspareunia. However, when screened, black women can have up to a three times as high incidence of reporting symptoms associated with FSD. Conclusions The results indicate that sexual dysfunction is an important public health concern in reference to men’s and women’s sexual health. Providing healthcare professionals with information concerning sex-related behaviors may overcome racial and ethnic barriers to treatment and improve patient management. Sexual well-being should be appreciated as one of the most important aspects of one's wellbeing and quality of life. Further research should focus on the evaluation of different interventions that would address sexual satisfaction and treatment of sexual dysfunction in patient populations that are under-diagnosed and under-treated. Disclosure No

Review of Cardiovascular Risk of Androgen Deprivation Therapy and the Influence of Race in Men with Prostate Cancer.

Androgen deprivation therapy is the cornerstone of prostate cancer therapy. Recent studies have revealed an association between androgen deprivation therapy and cardiovascular adverse effects such as myocardial infarction and stroke. This review summarizes the available research on the cardiovascular risk of men using androgen deprivation therapy. We also discuss racial disparities surrounding both prostate cancer and cardiovascular disease, emphasizing the importance of biological/molecular and socioeconomic factors in assessing baseline risk in patients beginning androgen ablation. Based on the literature, we provide recommendations for monitoring patients who are at high risk for a cardiovascular adverse event while being treated on androgen deprivation therapy. This review aims to present the current research on androgen deprivation therapy and cardiovascular toxicity with an emphasis on racial disparities and provides a framework for clinicians to decrease the cardiovascular morbidity in men that are being treated with hormone therapy.

Unsettling Affect

Unsettling Affect Pamela K. Gilbert (bio) Despite long-standing critiques of dominant theories of emotion, the basic structure of emotions is persistently considered by many commentators and even researchers, such as those in the social sciences and artificial intelligence, to be largely settled. Our understanding of emotion and affect is indebted to universalizing physiological theories emerging from the Enlightenment, and subsequently, from evolutionary science. Each of the authors in this forum is interested in unsettling our sense of how feelings work and signify. Alisha Walters and Zachary Samalin detail how the history of emotions depended upon nineteenth-century beliefs about embodied racial and civilizational hierarchies. Such beliefs about emotion were also undergirded by and instrumentalized in the imperial context, as Samalin, Walters, and Sukanya Banerjee show. Often they relied on definitions of modernity that imposed the burden of anteriority and primitivism on racial alterity. Sympathy was and is both centered and critiqued as a mode of community building and bridging racial divides. Rachel Ablow, Banerjee, and I each examine some of its prerequisites, opposites, and alternatives. Finally, although several of the essays here examine particular feelings, or histories or assemblages of feelings, the concept of affective potential has a history as well, as Elisha Cohn demonstrates. By exploring oppositions swirling around these terms and structures, these essays collectively invite us to consider the affordances of those histories and to question their deployment in the present. Samalin limns the history of Darwin’s research in “Affect Theory’s Colonial Sources.” Whereas Darwin’s liberal universalist project still underlies much discussion of emotion, so too do Enlightenment liberalism’s investments in racial [End Page 592] hierarchy and domination. Darwin’s sources all over the world were steeped in racial theories which, as Samalin shows, were tightly connected to “assertions of civilizational difference”; in turn, stadial theories of development tended to be organized around concepts of affect (562). Together, these two types of theories mediated the nexus between individuals and cultural groups. The study of emotion has long claimed objective universality while simultaneously relying on appeals to feeling itself as evidentiary, as Walters makes clear. In “James Hunt, Robert Knox, and the Feelings of Empirical Race Science,” Walters argues that while race science called for a future of objectivity, it depended upon a present of “unruly” feelings (555). She discusses the Celtic section of Knox’s The Races of Men (1850), in which race comes to be defined through the feelings marking the dangerously emotional Celtic body and its supposed proclivity for violence. The period mobilized such feelings in the service of an imperial modernity. Banerjee’s “Loyalty” notes the importance of that feeling in Adam Smith’s writing as a precondition for sympathy. She explores the ways in which loyalty is positioned as uneasily contractual and performative yet natural and customary, deriving from deliberate alliance on the one hand and on predefined allegiance on the other. Arguing that loyalty is fundamental to modernity’s many-layered institutions—the family, the state, the economy—Banerjee shows how this “associational attachment” must also insist upon exclusions in turn grounded in loyalty itself (qtd. in Banerjee 568). Sympathy has of course long been an important term—perhaps even the most important—in discussions of the history of emotion as well as in literature and aesthetics. Saidiya Hartman, among other current critics, has taught us to be less trusting of sympathy, which at best “fails to expand the space of the [Black] other but merely places the [white] self in its stead” (Hartman 20). Yet, as Ablow observes, the importance of sympathy as a generator of social action is still a fundamental assumption underlying present social science discussions. But the critique of sympathy’s centrality was nascent in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century thinkers; then, too, the question of what alternatives might inspire action often swirled around questions of race. Ablow shows us how the counter discourse against the effectiveness of sympathy extended into the literary world. In “Unsettling Sympathy,” Ablow shows how Martineau avoids such appeals in her novel about the Haitian revolution, emphasizing instead the “insane contradictions” created by slavery (qtd. in Ablow 576). Ablow argues that the text incites only horror in the...

19th-century medicine and The Races of Men

19th-century medicine and The Races of Men

Analysis of Circulating Immune Biomarkers by Race in Men With Metastatic Castration-Resistant Prostate Cancer Treated With Sipuleucel-T.

Among racial subgroups, Black men have the highest prostate cancer–specific death rate, yet they also exhibit prolonged overall survival compared with White men when treated with standard therapies, including sipuleucel-T. Differential immune responses may play a role in these observations. We compared circulating immune markers from 54 men (18 Black and 36 White) with metastatic castrate-resistant prostate cancer who received sipuleucel-T and were enrolled on an immune monitoring registry. Markers included longitudinal serum cytokine concentrations, humoral responses, and cellular immunity from baseline until 52 weeks after sipuleucel-T administration. Black men had statistically significantly higher median concentrations of TH2-type (interleukin [IL]-4, IL-10, and IL-13) and inflammatory cytokines (IL-2, IL-12, and IL-6) compared with prostate-specific antigen-matched White men both at baseline and 52 weeks after sipuleucel-T (2-sided P < .05). No differences by race were seen in either the antigen-specific T-cell response or the humoral responses to the immunizing antigen PA2024 and select secondary antigens.

Development and Validation of Prediction Equation of "Athens Authentic Marathon" Men's Race Speed.

AimDespite the increasing popularity of outdoor endurance running races of different distances, little information exists about the role of training and physiological characteristics of recreational runners. The aim of the present study was (a) to examine the role of training and physiological characteristics on the performance of recreational marathon runners and (b) to develop a prediction equation of men’s race time in the “Athens Authentic Marathon.”MethodsRecreational male marathon runners (n = 130, age 44.1 ± 8.6 years)—who finished the “Athens Authentic Marathon” 2017—performed a series of anthropometry and physical fitness tests including body mass index (BMI), body fat percentage (BF), maximal oxygen uptake (VO2max), anaerobic power, squat, and countermovement jump. The variation of these characteristics was examined by quintiles (i.e., five groups consisting of 26 participants in each) of the race speed. An experimental group (EXP, n = 65) was used to develop a prediction equation of the race time, which was verified in a control group (CON, n = 65).ResultsIn the overall sample, a one-way ANOVA showed a main effect of quintiles on race speed on weekly training days and distance, age, body weight, BMI, BF, and VO2max (p ≤ 0.003, η2 ≥ 0.121), where the faster groups outscored the slower groups. Running speed during the race correlated moderately with age (r = −0.36, p < 0.001) and largely with the number of weekly training days (r = 0.52, p < 0.001) and weekly running distance (r = 0.58, p < 0.001), but not with the number of previously finished marathons (r = 0.08, p = 0.369). With regard to physiological characteristics, running speed correlated largely with body mass (r = −0.52, p < 0.001), BMI (r = −0.60, p < 0.001), BF (r = −0.65, p < 0.001), VO2max (r = 0.67, p < 0.001), moderately with isometric muscle strength (r = 0.42, p < 0.001), and small with anaerobic muscle power (r = 0.20, p = 0.021). In EXP, race speed could be predicted (R2 = 0.61, standard error of the estimate = 1.19) using the formula “8.804 + 0.111 × VO2max + 0.029 × weekly training distance in km −0.218 × BMI.” Applying this equation in CON, no bias was observed (difference between observed and predicted value 0.12 ± 1.09 km/h, 95% confidence intervals −0.15, 0.40, p = 0.122).ConclusionThese findings highlighted the role of aerobic capacity, training, and body mass status for the performance of recreational male runners in a marathon race. The findings would be of great practical importance for coaches and trainers to predict the average marathon race time in a specific group of runners.

Intensity and Load Characteristics of Professional Road Cycling: Differences Between Men's and Women's Races.

To provide a retrospective analysis of a large competition database describing the intensity and load demands of professional road-cycling races, highlighting the differences between men's and women's races. In total, 20 male and 10 female professional cyclists participated in this study. During 4 consecutive years, heart rate, rating of perceived exertion, and power-output data were collected during both men's (n = 3024) and women's (n = 667) professional races. Intensity distribution in 5 heart-rate zones was quantified. Competition load was calculated using different metrics, including Training Stress Score (TSS), training impulse (TRIMP), and session rating of perceived exertion. Standardized effect size is reported as Cohen d. Large to very large higher values (d = 1.36-2.86) were observed for distance, duration, total work (in kilojoules), and mean power output in men's races. Time spent in high-intensity heart-rate zones (ie,zones 4 and 5) was largely higher in women's races (d = 1.38-1.55) than in men's races. Small higher loads were observed in men's races quantified using TSS (d = 0.53) and TRIMP (d = 0.23). However, load metrics expressed per kilometer were large to very largely higher in women's races for TSS·km-1 (d = 1.50) and TRIMP·km-1 (d = 2.31). Volume and absolute load are higher in men's races, whereas intensity and time spent in high-intensity zones is higher in women's races. Coaches and practitioners should consider these differences in demands in the preparation of professional road cyclists.

The power law model applied to the marathon world record

In September 2013 the world record in the marathon men's race was broken. The aim of this study is to apply to the 2013 Berlin Marathon a mathematical model based on the power law that analyses the marks distribution and checks its connection. The results show that the correlations obtained in all the different categories have been very significant, with a result of ( r ≥ 0.978; p < 0.000) and a linear determination coefficient of ( R 2 ≥ 0.969). As a conclusion it could be said that the power law application to the 2013 Berlin Marathon Men's race has been an useful and feasible study, and the connection between the data and the mathematical model has been so accurate.

Relation between Result and Size of Training Loads in 400-Metre Hurdle Race of Men

Four-hundred-metre hurdle race is a very complex competition event, and besides classical motor abilities, such as speed, strength and endurance, the important components of it are rhythm, flexibility, coordination and jumping ability. The best competitors cover this distance in less than 50 seconds. The efforts of the hurdlers are connected with very high intensity work and with remarkable increase of acidity in working muscles, that is why four-hundred-metre hurdle race is thought to be one of the most difficult track and field competitions. Contemporary sport is characterized by the intense specialization, and thus training optimization is necessary. The aim of this research was to establish means of training which are essential to achieve high results in 400-metre hurdle race of men. The research included the data characterizing a one-year training cycle of 25 Polish high sport level 400 m hurdlers (average result 51.25 s). For the analysis TreOb 4.0 computer programme was used and the identified training means groups in 400-metre hurdle race (Iskra, 1995). For six groups of exercises, a positive relation with the sport results was found in all periods when they were applied. Exercises of racing power (including multi-jumps) over 40 metres were in this group as other exercises as Medium interval special endurance, Interval rhythm and Long rhythm endurance. Similar research performed by J. Iskra (2001) shows common elements which prove that some of the training means have influence on the sports results. In each of the stages, a high correlation was ascribed to the means developing special endurance. High correlation was characteristic of the race of sub-maximum intensity, rhythm long endurance (8 and more hurdles). Significant relation with the result was also found in the racing endurance. The results also demonstrate the significance and importance of the interval racing training means. Undoubtedly, analysing data we must have in mind the different reaction of competitors to applied training loads which are essential for high results in the 400-metre hurdle race. Such training prepares competitors for a high intensity work load under the conditions of increasing fatigue and muscle acidity. After taking the individualization of the training process into consideration, the data collected can become the model of training for 400 m H runners representing high sport level.Keywords: athletics, training loads, 400-metre hurdle race of men.

'James Hunt on the Quest for Awakening Robert Knox’S Ideas and Reterritorialization of His Racial Theories into the Mainstream Scientific Discourse in Mid-Victorian Britain.'

This paper aims to explore James Hunt's role in the rehabilitation of Dr Robert Knox's diminished reputation by a careful choice of Knox's original theories from his Races of Men (1860) to establish an ideological underpinning for political agenda of Anthropological Society of London (1863-1871). Yet, at the same time, Hunt had become empowered with the reliable tool to oppose Thomas Huxley, and his fellow Darwinists' efforts to homogenise mid-Victorian Anthropology under the banner of Darwinism. That said, Hunt had to pay the steep price for such accomplishment since he had to de-radicalise core elements of Knox's racialist vision. In doing so, Hunt's orchestrated resurrection of a modified version of Knox's writings helped him to smuggle a cunningly significant number of both Knox's original and recontextualised racialist elements into a discipline of Social Darwinism. Hence, the legacy of James Hunt should not be underestimated and dismissed as a marginal contribution to further development of racism in following two decades after his death. Additionally, the purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how James Hunt managed to disseminate and bring into the foreground the racial theories pioneered by Robert Knox. The central goal of this paper is to analyse the process of Hunt’s intentional manipulation with original ideas developed by Robert Knox to shape them for Hunt's political purposes and consequent popularisation of an expanded corpus of racialist theory. We shall begin with a brief introduction to Robert Knox, who indeed inspired James Hunt to popularise racist views in mid-Victorian society, though Hunt later modified Knoxian racial doctrine rather unfaithfully to the original theory. In this way, this work analyses Hunt’s transition from Knox’s admirer to a populariser of broader racist doctrine including not only Knox's views but elements of racial theories of Paul Broca, George Gliddon, Samuel Morton and Josiah Nott as well. In this context, the final part of the paper follows Hunt's shift from the populariser of virulent racist ideas to a wily political manipulator, who shaped his condensed racist beliefs and methods in accordance with tightening British colonial policy to pass down an ultimate racist underpinning for an emerging wave of a new ideology characterised by an uncompromising imperialism.

On Book Borrowing: Forming Part of a Literary History Seen Through the Perspective of a Book from Charles Lamb’s Library

shall die soon, my dear Charles Lamb! and then you--will be vexed that I had bescribbled your Books. --Samuel Taylor Coleridge, May 2, 1811 COLERIDGE WROTE THESE WORDS ON THE BACK FLYLEAF OF A COPY OF John Donne's Poems owned by Charles Lamb. (1) It would be the first book he returned to his friend with predictions of imminent death or marginalia destined to outlive both men. A few months later, in Lamb's folio of the plays of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, Coleridge prophesied: shall be long here, Charles! I gone, you will mind my having spoiled a book in order to leave a Relic. (2) In reality, Coleridge was nowhere near death, and while he may have known that, he certainly did know that he was spoiling Lamb's book. Spite of Appearances, he wrote on Lamb's 1669 edition of Donne, Copy is the better for the Mss. Notes. Annotator himself says so. (3) Lest there should be any doubt about the annotator, he signed the note (as he did others) S.T.C. Coleridge was a master of that scattered genre, marginalia, a term he himself coined. He was voluminous in his marginal commentary, so much so that Princeton University Press had to devote no less than six hefty volumes--one of them over twelve hundred pages--in his Collected Works to it. In Lamb's essay The Two Races of Men, Lamb spoke teasingly of the manuscript notes Coleridge left in his books as vying with the originals only in quality, but also not unfrequently in terms of quantity. (4) Indeed, Coleridge was above commenting on his own comments. N.B. Tho' I have scribbled in he wrote in Lamb's copy of Donne, is & was Mr Charles Lamb's Book, who is likewise the Possessor & (I believe) lawful Proprietor of all the Volumes of the 'Old Plays' excepting one. (5) He was referring to the third volume of Lamb's twelve-volume set of Robert Dodsley's Select Collection of Old Plays, which he had lost. volume included a revenge tragedy, a history, and three Jacobean comedies (John Webster's White Devil, Jasper Fisher's Fuimos Troes, Robert Tailor's Hog Hath Lost his Pearl, John Cooke's Greene's Tu Quoque, and Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton's Honest Whore), and for Lamb, it was perhaps the most valuable volume of them all. (6) Coleridge had borrowed it along with Lamb's copies of Samuel Daniel's Poems and Philip Sidney's Arcadia. Pray, if you can, Lamb pleaded, remember what you did with it, or where you took it out with you a walking perhaps; for, to use the old plea, it spoils a set. (7) But Coleridge could remember, and, on this occasion, having loaned his books to Coleridge, Lamb wound up with an unsightly gap in his bookshelves and two books made valuable only because Lamb owned them but, more importantly, because he and Coleridge wrote in them. These two races of men--lenders and borrowers, Lamb and Coleridge-were connected through what is called, in the book trade, the association copy, and also, more generally, through what we might call the principle of association. Lamb's library was a living nexus of association. nodes of that network included books as well as readers, annotators, owners, booksellers, and a multitude of bookish encounters and events. To follow patterns of association between books, or between people who have been involved in the life of a book, is to build so many paths to, and through, a lost world of letters. Embracing the associational principle as a literary critical technique--belletristic and book historical, biographical and bibliographical--this essay will explore literary history from the perspective of the book. story it contains will be transatlantic, spanning the gap from Lamb's bookshelves to Greenwich Street in lower Manhattan, and our primary means of conveyance will be that same octavo edition bearing the marks of Lamb, Coleridge, and various other hands since the seventeenth century: Poems, &c. …

“A Bold and Hardy Race of Men”: The Lives and Literature of American Whalemen Writing the Seaman's Tale in Law and Literature: Dana, Melville, and Justice Story

“A Bold and Hardy Race of Men”: The Lives and Literature of American Whalemen Writing the Seaman's Tale in Law and Literature: Dana, Melville, and Justice Story

Dickens and Race by Laura Peters (review)

Laura Peters. Dickens and Race. Manchester and New York: Manchester UP, 2013. Pp. xii + 170. $100; 63 [pounds sterling]. There is a question that at some point all Dickens students, scholars and enthusiasts are forced to ask themselves: how we reconcile Dickens, the champion of the London poor, the fighter for social justice, with the Dickens who advocated that the race should be raze[d] off the face of the Earth (110) and who published an article arguing that executing Indian mutineers by blowing them from the mouths of cannons was not painful enough? Do we simply put it down to Victorian hypocrisy? Was Dickens the emblematic man of his times in this regard, as in so many other ways, or were there more fundamental reasons for his apparently contradictory attitude towards race and class? During the 2012 bicentenary celebrations, many of which were organized by the British Council, this question loomed large but remained largely unarticulated. If Dickens were writing today, it was proclaimed more than once, he would not be writing of London but of Delhi or Mumbai, Lagos or Rio de Janeiro. But what would the man who stated that if he were Commander in Chief of India he would do [his] utmost to exterminate the have made of such a claim (109)? In her new book Dickens and Race, Laura Peters provides some tentative answers to these questions and some much needed contextualization. As Peters points out, critics have tended to shy away from acknowledging the full measure of Dickens's objectionable views on racial difference and the extent to which they influenced his work. There has been a widespread desire to read journalistic efforts like his 1833 article Noble Savage and his reaction to the Indian Mutiny of 1857 as aberrant and exceptional. But, as Peters adeptly proves, this was not the case. Rather such reactions were part of a larger pattern of thinking about science, fancy and race. Starting in the 1840s with Dombey and Son and an early review piece for The Examiner, Peters traces the development of Dickens's thinking about race in the 1840s through the controversial fifties and then onto the post-Darwin era. Emphasizing the influence of life-long interests in travel literature and the exotic on the one hand, and racial science on the other, Peters charts how contemporary debates on science, empire and social justice coalesced with the ideas of childhood, fancy and the exotic in Dickens's mind. In Peters's conception, race is a powerful signifier for Dickens, representing something both profoundly personal and politically significant. The first two chapters map out the different trends in thinking about race in mid-nineteenth century Britain and Dickens's relation to them. At the beginning of Peters's period, Dickens's racial thinking, as with most of his contemporaries, is based on ideas of civilization and class. Race is cultural rather than biological. Dickens is a polygeist and views the different races as all fundamentally belonging to the same species. Differences were viewed as the result of differing levels of civilization. But, as Peters shows, with the publication of Robert Knox's The Races of Men (1850) and the ascendency in contemporary scientific culture of the notion of race as biologically determined, the idea of a shared humanity gave way to one of a hierarchy of races. Race, in other words, was not simply a matter of difference, or of environment, but of innate biological difference that reflected a supposed deficiency in the non-white races. At mid-century, to be African or to be Oriental was to be less human. …

Stress Management: A Study on Employees of Banking Sector of Odisha

Stress is often termed as 20th century syndrome born out of man's race toward modern progress and its ensuring complexities. Banking, like other services, has become one of the highly competitive sectors in India. The banking organisations, since the beginning of this decade, have been facing greater challenges in terms of technological revolution, service diversification and global banking. Stress is unavoidable on the part of the employees as the systems, procedures; techniques are getting complicated with the use of advance technology. Every employee cannot cope with such rapid changes taking place in the jobs. This will lead to arising of stress among employees. An attempt has been made through this research paper to know the reasons of stress among the bank employees and the ways used by employees to cope with the stress generated at workplace. In this paper, Cronbach's Alpha has been used to test the reliability of the questionnaire undertaken for the study and z-test has used to test the hypothesis.

Lost in the categorical shuffle: evidence for the social non-prototypicality of black women.

The white male norm hypothesis (Zárate & Smith, 1990) posits that White men's race and gender go overlooked as a result of their prototypical social statuses. In contrast, the intersectional invisibility hypothesis (Purdie-Vaughns & Eibach, 2008) posits that people with membership in multiple subordinate social groups experience social invisibility as a result of their non-prototypical social statuses. The present research reconciles these contradictory theories and provides empirical support for the core assumption of the intersectional invisibility hypothesis-that intersectional targets are non-prototypical within their race and gender ingroups. In a speeded categorization task, participants were slower to associate Black women versus Black men with the category "Black" and slower to associate Black women versus White women with the category "woman." We discuss the implications of this work for social categorical theory development and future intersectionality research.

Mathematical Modeling Approach to Predict Athletic Time, Performance

As we know that the sporting achievement is always interesting fascinating to human. The major of performance to improve the record and broken as with time, keeping the importance of the subject we have decided to study the problem as suggested by D.Edward & M.Hamson (1). In this communication we have collected the data for 200m men/ women race athlete time for all three medalists (Gold, silver & bronze) in Olympics from last 60 years i. e. from 1948 to 2008. All the data have been presented in tabular form. It have been observed that the steady fall in winning times for the men's race indicates that no limiting time for runner at all, which seems unreasonable. We may conclude that the linear model is only valid for a limited range of the years (It may be less than 60 years of the span). Obviously a different model would seem more

The clash of the sexes in Hesiod'sWorks and Days

Hesiod'sWorks and Daysis self-consciously a poem of the Iron Age. It is addressed to Iron Age men about how to manage the Iron Age human condition. The narrative ventures out of the Iron Age only to explain how we got here and how the present age compares to those which came before. The Iron Age audience is addressed by a narrator who situates himself explicitly (and discontentedly) as a contemporary:μηκέτ᾽ ἔπɛιτ᾽ ὤϕɛλλον ἐγὼ πέμπτοισι μɛτɛῖναιἀνδράσιν, ἀλλ᾽ ἢ πρόσθɛ θανɛῖν ἢ ἔπɛιτα γɛνέσθαι.νῦν γὰρ δὴ γένος ἐστὶ σιδήρɛον·Would then that I was no longer among the fifth race ofmen, but either died earlier or was born later.For now indeed it is a race of iron.(Works and Days, 174–6)

How does race get “under the skin”?: Inflammation, weathering, and metabolic problems in late life

Using nationally representative data from the 2005–2006 U.S. National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project, this study queries the mechanisms underlying worse metabolic outcomes—blood-sugar control and cardiovascular health—among black than white men ages 57–85. Results indicate that contrary to much of the academic literature as well as media accounts—implicitly rooted in a “culture of irresponsibility” model—older black men's social isolation, poor health behaviors, or obesity may not play a major role in their worse metabolic problems. Instead, these outcomes seem to derive more consistently from a factor almost unexamined in the literature—chronic inflammation, arguably a biological “weathering” mechanism induced by these men's cumulative and multi-dimensional stress. These findings highlight the necessity of focusing attention not simply on proximal behavioral interventions, but on broader stress-inducing social inequalities, to reduce men's race disparities in health.

“There was a Holy Race of Men on Lundy”: A Speculative Literature Search for the Otherworld Island

This paper explores the ancient names which have been associated with Lundy Island. They all describe traditions which belong to the magical realm of the “Otherworld.” The objective has been to bring together for the first time the many disparate and, at times, perhaps tenuous links with Lundy in literature. Consideration is also given to aspects of the island's past which may have contributed toward this mythological status.

Suits vs. Skins: Immigration and Race in Men in Black

Suits vs. Skins:Immigration and Race in Men in Black Heather J. Hicks (bio) While the political aftermath of the events of September 11, 2001, has triggered a national debate about the rights of immigrants, the U.S. Patriot Act is only the latest of a series of state and federal measures reflecting growing suspicion toward immigrants in the U.S. during the past decade. Certainly the Patriot Act has had the most sweeping impact, requiring immigrants from many countries to register with the INS and permitting arrests and detentions without warrants, filing criminal charges, or providing access to an attorney. Yet as early as 1994, Proposition 187 was passed in California, barring illegal immigrants from receiving basic social services; and in 1996, following the Oklahoma City Bombing, two federal laws were passed that facilitated deportation and expanded the latitude of law enforcement to investigate immigrants' activities in cases of suspected terrorism.1 Although these government actions reveal the anti-immigration disposition of powerful American lawmakers and their constituents, they do not tell the whole story of the place immigrants occupy in the contemporary U.S social formation. Indeed, the apparent distrust toward "aliens" that such legislation implies requires those of us who study contemporary culture to look to various cultural forms as a means of understanding more deeply the complex ways notions of ethnic and racial difference are being constructed by (and, inevitably, will construct) current events within America's borders. In his examination of the "place of the alien in science fiction" (27), Michael Beehler suggests a deep affinity between narratives concerning aliens from other worlds and those from other nations. "The story of the [End Page 109] alien," he argues, "is always the story of borders and of the institutional forces that try to neutralize and control those borders in the name of a certain political economy" (26). It is from this vantage point that I want to examine the 1997 blockbuster Men in Black, reading it not just as the story of an American agency that controls the flow of space aliens on and off planet Earth, but also as an expression of a contemporary American political economy in which the status of immigrants is ideologically linked to the management of African American racial difference. Men in Black articulates its anxiety about immigrants' effects on American society through its depiction of a fierce invading "bug" bent on destroying humankind. Yet it is equally preoccupied with a second, non-immigrant "alien"—a young black man, played by Will Smith, whose foreignness to the old white male guard at the center of the film is repeatedly underscored. While superficially celebrating immigrants' place in American culture, Men in Black offers its audience a cynical fantasy in which agents of white privilege use their control of knowledge and information to manipulate these two different sorts of "aliens" against one another in order to preserve the borders of their own hegemony. Underpinning this narrative of race and ethnicity is a second, economic one, in which immigrants misguidedly put themselves in the skin of the erstwhile working class, while African Americans bank on the empty promise that the economic prestige of whiteness has been outsourced from skin to suit. Catching the Bug Inevitably, an objection to thinking about Men in Black, a film about an undercover agency that "monitors and controls alien activity on the planet earth," in relation to such serious and urgent questions would be its manifest status as a light summer action-comedy. Film critic Peter Travers effectively articulates one representative view of the film, simultaneously applauding its outstanding craftsmanship and stating categorically that "Men in Black is not out to change your life" (128). As Travers's comment suggests, the pace and special effects-laden surface of the film might well place it in the category of the "post-classical," in which sheer spectacle prevails over coherent plot or deeper meaning. Critics such as Elsaesser and Buckland, however, have effectively challenged this reductive treatment of recent Hollywood films. Using the action film Die Hard as a case study, they argue: "even assuming there is [End Page 110] a new kind of emphasis on spectacle in contemporary Hollywood, . . . it...