Rich County Research Articles

Spatial variations in soil selenium and residential dietary selenium intake in a selenium-rich county, Shitai, Anhui, China

Shitai, a selenium (Se)-rich county in Anhui, China, has been reported for its resident longevity in the last 20 years. A recent survey by the Anhui Bureau of Geological Survey showed that soil Se contents in the Shitai area ranged from 0.05 to 51.20 mg/kg, with an average of 0.56 mg/kg. To explore the potential relationship between longevity and natural-occurring Se contents in Shitai county, Se concentrations were determined in Shitai’s food chain (including soils and foods) and the daily Se intakes and hair Se contents were calculated for the residents. In the present study, 33 soil samples, 66 food samples and 82 hair samples were randomly collected from field sites, local food markets and male and female residents in downtown Shitai and in four nearby villages (Dashan, Xianyu, Yongfu and Yuantou). The total Se contents in all samples and the levels of water soluble, exchangeable, acid soluble, organic bound and residual Se in soil samples were determined with hydride generation - atomic fluorescence spectrometry. The total Se contents in soils ranged from 227 to 2603 μg/kg, with the averages of 1607 ± 242 μg/kg in Dashan, 1149 ± 118 μg/kg in Xianyu, 521 ± 157 μg/kg in Yongfu, and 363 ± 140 μg/kg in Yuantou. The soil bioavailable Se content (soluble and exchangeable Se) in Dashan was highest (14.98%), followed by Xianyu (13.69%), Yongfu (13.18%) and Yuantou (9.38%). For food samples, the highest Se concentration of grains was 468.5 μg/kg in Dashan, while lowest was observed in downtown (41.7 μg/kg). The estimated daily Se intake of residents in Dashan reached 298.4 μg/d/adult, which is about 5 times higher than the recommend nutrient intake in China (60 μg/d/adult), and 6–10 times higher than the levels observed in Xianyu (47.6 μg/d/adult), Yuantou (46.1 μg/d/adult), Yongfu (40.0 μg/d/adult), and downtown (30.0 μg/d/adult). Although hair Se contents in Dashan (male: 709.2 μg/kg; female: 589.2 μg/kg) were significantly higher than those at the other study sites, no significant relationships between daily Se intakes and hair Se contents were observed. The present study demonstrated that Se levels in soils, foods, resident dietary intake and human hairs in Shitai County varied significantly; therefore, the region could be a unique field site to study the direct relationship between Se and human health.

The Concept of Folklore: An Overview of the Psychoanalytic Reading of Folklores

Stories have always found a special place in every society and a story teller has had listeners hung on to his or her every word breathlessly for ages . These stories were of myriad quality ranging from comic to heroic, from fables featuring animal as anthropomorphic to fantasy with goblins and fairies. The term folk lore or folk tale is used in English to refer to fairy tales in English such as Cinderella or snow White ,Folk Tales in the broader sense of the term includes all forms of prose narrative , written or oral which are handed down through generations. The modern story telling differs from the traditional folk tale in one important aspect. The modern storyteller emphasizes on the originality of the material. Whereas the teller of the folk tale prides on the fact that he 0r she can pass down the folklores almost verbatim. The folk teller can also uses their own embellishment in the tale in order to mesmerize their audience .It is therefore difficult to separate the oral from the written in folk tale because it travels mostly orally and no folk tale can be traced back to any one writer. Which is to say that maybe the oral stories need not have been always oral . But once the story teller or the raconteur recites it in the public, it becomes more of something to tell to the listener and not something to be read. Historically these public spaces where raconteur and poets recited the popular tales, been the major source of entertainment for the general public. Ancient Greek performed popular plays for the public and there was a stress on the oral recitation and the concept of catharsis or the purgation of the feelings of pity and fear. This art of story telling is not bound by any segment of the society or civilization but is ubiquitously present . It is older than history itself and it travels orally through continents and through space and time. It may differ from place to place but it exists to fulfill one social function and an important human need, which is entertainment. There also exist a curiosity about history or the legends. The oral recitation of heroic tales and legends lend an almost pride like quality among the listeners. The legends of the heros are mostly about their tribes or society and they represent the ideals of honour, pride and virtue for the entire tribe. India as a diverse and culturally rich county has written literature going thousands of years back before Homer .

Legacy effects of no‐analogue disturbances alter plant community diversity and composition in semi‐arid sagebrush steppe

AbstractQuestions(i) What role does the type of managed disturbance play in structuring sagebrush steppe plant communities? (ii) How does the composition of post‐disturbance plant communities change with time since disturbance? (iii) Does plant community diversity change over time following managed disturbance?LocationField study within the sagebrush steppe ecosystem. Rich County, Utah, USA.MethodsWe developed a chronosequence spanning up to 50 yrs post‐treatment to study sagebrush steppe vegetation dynamics. Direct ordination was used to examine plant community composition by managed disturbance type and time since disturbance, and factorial analysis of covariance was used to examine diversity dynamics following disturbance. Indicator species values were calculated in order to identify characteristic species for each disturbance type.ResultsPlant communities experienced a shift toward distinct community composition for each of the three managed disturbance types, and gave no indication of returning to untreated community composition or diversity. Small post‐disturbance increases in the number of non‐native grass species were observed in the treatments relative to reference, with native forb species making the largest contribution to altered composition. On fire‐ and chemically‐treated sites the proportional native forb species richness increased over time since disturbance, while the proportional contribution of non‐native forbs to total species richness decreased. For all three treatment types, native grasses contributed less on average to total richness than on reference sites, while non‐native grasses made up a higher proportion of total richness.ConclusionsCommon shrubland management techniques have legacy effects on the composition and diversity of sagebrush steppe plant communities, and no‐analogue disturbances, such as chemical or mechanical treatments, have more pronounced legacy effects than treatments similar to natural disturbance regimes (fire). This study informs a broader understanding of how management actions affect natural systems by highlighting the importance of long‐term management legacies as drivers of plant community structure and function.

Gypsy stories: Narrative as a teaching stratagem

This paper discusses the performance of narratives as adaptive cultural beha­viors among Gypsies in Macva county, western Serbia. Storytelling is a universal activity and may well be oldest of the arts. It has always provided a vehicle for the expression of ideas, particularly in societies relying on oral tradition. Gypsies are present in Serbia since the Middle Ages, living within a larger Serbian culture as a minority group. Macva, an agriculturally rich county in western Serbia, is a place where local Gypsy traditions are still alive and which help distinguish between Gypsy subgroups and the larger Serbian society. The stories analyzed are part of a collec­tion made from several different Gypsy groups exhibiting varying degrees of influence from Serbian culture. Gypsies in Serbia have no written literature, but possess a rich and varied storytelling tradition delivered by word of mouth through the generations. Their stories bear testimony to the evolutionarily important mecha­nisms employed by Gypsies to make their way in the world. Gypsy stories concern many aspects of the relationship between themselves and other social groups, both in the past and the present. At the same time, the stories deal with universal adaptive problems, such as origin/ethnicity, kinship and mate acquisition. By applying the concepts and folk knowledge from their own culture, Gypsies have managed to provide for themselves the guidelines to overcome these problems within a par­ticular environment. Thus it is that these stories reflect both human universals and cultural peculiarities - by utilization of localized cultural solutions to adaptive problems. The success Gypsies have achieved in surviving harassment, and their ability to sustain themselves and their cultures despite social rejection can be attributed, in part, to the power of the traditional stories to influence the behavior of those who hear them. For the Gypsies, telling and listening to the stories could be considered adaptive behavior: disseminating traits that were presumably successful in the past. These stories replicate and describe the environment in which the Gypsy ancestors struggled to survive. As a consequence, the narratives and the Gypsy real world are compatible in many constant and predictable ways, and many Gypsies are hence able to use narrative information/knowledge as a model for proper behavior which helps them to negotiate their social environment in their efforts to survive and reproduce.

OBITUARY: MICHAEL ROBERT HOUSE (1930–2002)

Michael House's unexpected death in Weymouth on 6th August 2002 at the age of 71 came as a great shock to his family and his many friends. Born in Blandford Forum in 1930 and going to school in Weymouth in a geologically rich county he became fascinated by ammonites. As a schoolboy he amassed a superb collection from the Jurassic rocks. This laid the foundations of the palaeontologist we knew together with a burning passion for geology coupled with a deep love of Dorset which remained with him throughout his life. Following National Service, he went up to Cambridge to read geology under Professor W. B. R. King in a department which also contained W. J. Arkell, the eminent Jurassic stratigrapher and ammonite specialist. Clearly set for first class honours, even before graduation he was appointed to a lectureship in the University of Durham. It was always assumed that he would do his research on the Jurassic System but King and Arkell perceptively steered him on to the Devonian Ammonoidea, at that time a rich and relatively unworked field. It proved a pivotal point in his life. He spent 1958–1959 in the United States as a Commonwealth Fund Fellow …

Racial Assumptions in Global Labor Recruitment and Supply

Randolph B. Persaud (*) Capitalism has generally found laborers when and where it needed them, and migratory movements have carried labor power to market all across the globe. --Eric Wolf, Europe and the People Without History These days, hate crimes occur with alarming frequency. In between these violent outbursts, I receive ominous missives launched with vitriol and resentments against the usual targeted groups, but especially the reviled alien. --Austin Gurza, Los Angeles Times Wherever a Western flag is flying, there's a crowd out there, waiting. Just waiting. --Jean Raspail, Camp of the Saints On January 26, 2001, the Virginia Senate passed Bill 925. It was for all practical purposes a routine act. The strategic objective of the legislation, however, was anything but ordinary. For here, in one of the richest counties in the United States, and thus one of the wealthiest localities of the world, the staggering contradictions between citizen and alien, between assumptions of the civilized and the lesser hordes of the world, between the rhetoric of individual freedom and the practices of racialized exclusion, came to the fore. Accompanying Bill 925, were images that have for so long been inscribed on the bodies of the foreigner. The contents of the bill are quite simple. It states that spaces such as kitchens, living rooms, dining rooms and family rooms shall not be occupied for sleeping purposes, and permits Fairfax County to take appropriate remedial action. (1) Bill 925 was not the first of its kind: previous legislation in this rich county had made it illegal to have more than four unrelated persons living in the same house. This development in northern Virginia is hardly local, or for that matter regional or even national. On the contrary, it is merely a particular instantiation of a set of interconnected but contradictory global developments. The most important of these developments are: (1) the rapid transformation of modes of social relations that have been accompanying the movement toward ideas-based value production and, more broadly, the consolidation of service-oriented economies in the Western industrialized states and Japan; (2) the simultaneous immigrantization, racialization, and feminization of the processes of labor-market segmentation, which themselves have been deepening since the onset of global monetarism; (3) the production of a new hegemonized common sense about the proper place of diasporic populations in advanced countries; and (4) the extent to which these latter phenomena, when combined, form the basis for a new global culture founded on racio-cultural and marketized notions of worth, value, and identity . An understanding of these phenomena might be fruitfully pursued through analysis of what is clearly an emerging regime of global labor supply. This article demonstrates the ways in which this emerging regime is built upon historically embedded racialized practices of labor exploitation. Specific attention is paid to the forces governing the movement of immigrant labor. The argument advanced here is that the rise of immigrant labor has as much to do with questions of control of the labor process, as with problems of labor shortage or price (in the form of wages). The labor-control thesis, however, cannot be divorced from the assumption (or probability) that foreign labor of certain national, racial, ethnic, or cultural background are either more accepting, susceptible, or vulnerable to outrageous exploitation. This is a special kind of exploitation, different from the technical definition of extraction of surplus outlined by Marx. It involves extreme economic exploitation and conditions of work that involve forms of dehumanization, near or complete industrial and political disenfranchisement, and racio-cultural quarantine. Quarantine implies a complex of practices that involve the spatial regulation of foreign laborers, as well as debarment from any claims to the privileges of citizenship. …

Use of Remote Sensing Methods in Modelling Sage Grouse Winter Habitat

Populations of Rich County, Utah sage grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus) have been declining in recent years. Because loss of winter habitat is a suspected factor, we used Landsat Thematic Mapper data to model structural and compositional attributes of sage grouse winter habitat over a 2,548-km 2 area in Rich County, 1989-90. Of the 7 shrub and 1 no-shrub classes delineated from the Thematic Mapper, sage grouse preferred 3, avoided 3, and demonstrated no preference for the remaining 2. To determine if the model could be extrapolated to other unsampled areas, we tested model validity with 2 independent data sets from the northern and southern ends of the county

The Relationship between Land Ownership and Range Condition in Rich County, Utah

A study was conducted in Rich County, Utah, to determine the relationship between land ownership and range condition. Anrlysis of variance and paired-plot t-tests were used to compare range condition ratings on Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management (BLM), state, and private lands. Forest Service land was in the highest range condition, BLM and private land had comparable intermediate condition ratings, and state-owned rangeland was in the lowest condition. Per acre grazing program expenditures in Utah by various hmd management agencies show an apparent correlation between expenditures and range condition. Thus, range condition may reflect management effort rather than the structure of public land property rights.

A Rare Week in a Rich County

A Rare Week in a Rich County

XIX. Remarks on the Military History of Bristol in the Seventeenth Century, with a Sketch of the Outworks, by Edmund Turnor, Esq. F. R. S. and F. S. A.

The great importance of Bristol, as the second city in the kingdom,—its situation commanding at once the rich county of Somerset, and the chief entrance into Wales, rendered the conquest of it of the utmost consequence to both king and parliament, whose spirits, during their unhappy contests, were alternately elated or depressed as either party succeeded in the siege, or failed in the defence of the town. But the great extension of commerce, and the consequent increase of population, have so much enlarged the circuit of Bristol, that what was only an inconsiderable suburb in the time of Charles the first, is now become a new town, extending over, and in a great measure defacing, the lines of fortification which formed the outworks of the city. An attempt, however, to preserve some idea of the remaining military vestiges, as exhibited by letters patent under the great seal of England, and sign manual of Charles the First, conferring the office of treasurer of the garrison on an ancestor of the author of this communication, may not be foreign to the views of the Society.