Role In My Life Research Articles

Drawing on medical school experiences

As a medical student, engagement with the medical humanities allowed me to express myself, reflect on experiences, and share my inner thoughts and feelings. Drawing has played a critical role in my life both casually and professionally. It has helped me study anatomy and how the human body works, connect with others, and find a collaborative community. From scrutinising over detailed Netter anatomical drawings to creating my own graphic medicine pieces, the arts and humanities bolster my medical education to become a more well-rounded and competent physician for my future patients.

Fred J Boyd Oration 2021

Fred J Boyd Oration 2021

General and Personal Reflections on Succeeding as a Woman Science Researcher

In 1991 the Parapsychology Foundation sponsored a conference on Women in Parapsychology. In my paper for that conference (Utts, 1994) I discussed research identifying multiple factors that contributed to gender inequity in research careers in science, with a focus on academia. These factors included cultural norms, institutional barriers to success for women, implicit biases, and social pressures that deterred women from entering and succeeding in careers in science. In the past three decades, progress has been made on some of these factors, but not all of them. The first part of this paper discusses the extent to which the situation has improved (or not) for seven of the factors identified in the earlier paper, citing a combination of research and personal observation. The second part of this paper discusses multiple avenues of research showing the impact of subtle influences throughout childhood and early adulthood on career success. For example, cultural norms depicting scientists as men have gradually improved over the years, but children are still more likely to draw a man than a woman if asked to draw a scientist. Role models, as well as encouraging mentors, are important factors in determining whether a woman will pursue a career in science. Many successful women in science can identify a single mentor whose encouragement was a major contributing factor to her success. A sense of meaning in ones‘ work, and a supportive community are additional factors contributing to success. The final part of the paper is autobiographical, illustrating how the factors documented by this body of research played a role in my life. In a narrative starting from childhood and continuing through my career, I identify individuals and circumstances that contributed to my success. One significant factor was the welcoming parapsychological community, and details of how I was led to work with that community are discussed. The paper provides suggestions for specific actions that individuals and communities can take to encourage more women to succeed in careers in science, including in parapsychology.

Tribute to Whitlow Au

Whitlow Au has played a large role in my life both as a friend, as editor of manuscripts I submitted to JASA and a book on bycatch of harbor porpoises, as co-authors of manuscripts we submitted together to JASA, as author of manuscripts Whit submitted to sensory system books of which I was a co-editor. Whit also proposed me as a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America. We collaborated on several research project, which were conducted in pools at the cetacean rehabilitation center of Dolfinarium Harderwijk, the Netherlands, in a large floating pen at Neeltje Jans, the Netherlands, at the Hawaii Institute for Marine Biology, Oahu, USA, in a large fish pool at Jacobahaven, and at the Netherlands and at SEAMARCO Research Institute, Wilhelminadorp, the NL. The publications in Whit and I are co-authors are used as points of departure of the talk. The studies are described in chronological order, and the gist of each study is given.

Shared Decision-Making for Juvenile Scoliosis.

Shared Decision-Making for Juvenile Scoliosis.

Miriam: Friend, Mentor, Scholar, and Teacher

MiriamFriend, Mentor, Scholar, and Teacher Sarita Rai (bio) I met Miriam at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa in 1995 when she was appointed as the faculty resident director for the London study abroad program. Later, when she was the honors director in 1998, we collaborated to implement a joint student recruitment program to persuade Hawai‘i high school seniors (public and private) to attend UH Mānoa and to make it their “choice” university. This way, as freshmen they could take specialized classes in the honors program and also go abroad. I write about her personal statement for the London resident directorship because it resonates with the same type of mentorship and friendship she gave me. She states, “a semester abroad will be successful if its participants ‘take part in’ and are ‘engaged in’ all things the program can offer. But it will be an experience that participants will cherish for the rest of their lives, if ‘cooperating’ and ‘lending a hand’ lead them to form a learning and experiential community that involves partnership.” Within this partnership she saw herself as “cooperating, lending a hand, and engaging” her students so they would excel in learning and experiencing their term abroad. To demonstrate the outcome, I take the liberty of quoting some of her students’ writings. These are samples of tributes to Miriam Fuchs: “thanks for being such a great teacher . . . my writing has improved,” “you opened my eyes to literature in a whole new way,” and “dear Dr. Fuchs, I will always remember my time in London. You are an inseparable part of that memory. You gave us all guidance and support, asking nothing in return. Thank you.” This was the nature of her mentorship that I experienced as well, and I cherish her role in my life. She asked for nothing in return. Somehow, we transitioned from the beginnings of a professional relationship to one of deep and enduring friendship. She was a mentor to me in every step of my life. Miriam insisted on reviewing my promotion application dossier, and acquired a deep knowledge and understanding of the study abroad programs and my job responsibilities. She would always remark that I “had the worst job as a faculty member of the University of Hawai‘i.” On another note, with her urging, we embarked on a journey to coedit Study Abroad: Traditions and New Directions (2019). When she had writer’s block she would have tantrums, and I would just sit, listen, and watch her. This is why she would always call me an “easy friend.” I, on the [End Page 151] other hand, would stop working on the book for long periods of time—and she would guilt me into going back to the project. She was resilient and never gave up on me. Together we wrote and published, and we complemented one another in the relationship that formed. She would listen to one of my ideas and go off on a tangent that had no bearing on the original thought. She spent a great deal of time reading on study abroad topics and somehow had the patience in writing and rewriting, over and over again, till the piece was just perfect. As a political scientist, I had radical views and opinions, but she had the wisdom to know that to get published I needed to be neutral and noncontroversial. She, of course, was correct, so I always agreed with her in the end. I had said “let’s have lunch,” and never followed up. Three months later, I found out that she had her cancer surgery and treatment, and I had missed it all. It taught me to never put off anything if you want to do something. I still hear her saying, “I don’t want to talk about it,” when she didn’t want to update me about her health. We also ignored each other and hardly talked on the phone when in Hawai‘i. She knew she could count on me, so she never worried when I was not traveling. However, she would worry and stress whenever I was out of the country, and even made sure that we talked...

Architecture between heteronomy and self-generation

Architecture between heteronomy and self-generation

Discussing copulas with Sergey Aivazian: A memoir

Sergey Aivazian was the head of my department at the Moscow School of Economics, but he was much more than that. He played an important role in my life, and he contributed to my studies devoted to copula modelling. This small memoir reports how this amazingly polite and smart scientist helped me to develop my academic skills and to further stimulate my interest in multivariate modelling and risk management. Some open questions related to multivariate discrete models that were among the last topics I discussed with Sergey are reported, hoping they can be of interest to young researchers for further studies.

Discussing Copulas with Sergey Aivazian: A Memoir

Sergey Aivazian was the head of my department at the Moscow School of Economics, but he was much more than that. He played an important role in my life, and he contributed to my studies devoted to copula modelling. This small memoir reports how this amazingly polite and smart scientist helped me to develop my academic skills and to further stimulate my interest in multivariate modelling and risk management. Some open questions related to multivariate discrete models that were among the last topics I discussed with Sergey are reported, hoping they can be of interest to young researchers for further studies.

Broken Novels, Ruptured Worlds: A Conversation with Michelle de Kretser

Broken Novels, Ruptured Worlds A Conversation with Michelle de Kretser by Roberta Trapè Q&A A ustralian novelist Michelle de Kretser was born in Sri Lanka and immigrated to Australia when she was fourteen. She worked for many years as an editor at Lonely Planet and was responsible for setting up their French series as well as a travel literature series, Journeys. The author of several award-winning novels, de Kretser published her most recent, The Life to Come, in 2017. It won the 2018 Miles Franklin Literary Award and the 2019 Christina Stead Prize for Fiction. A short monograph, On Shirley Hazzard, was published in 2019. De Kretser lives in Sydney, where she is an honorary associate of the English Department at the University of Sydney. Her fiction is both vividly grounded in place and transnational. Her settings include Australia, Ceylon/Sri Lanka, France, Italy, and India. A. S. Byatt has described de Kretser as “a master storyteller who writes quickly and lightly of wonderful and terrible things.” Neel Mukherjee called her “preternaturally attuned to the patient rage of history,” while Hilary Mantel notes de Kretser’s “formidable technique.” In this conversation, de Kretser and Roberta Trapè discuss tourism as privilege, casual racism, Australian politics, Shirley Hazzard, and the role of clothes in fiction. 28 WLT SUMMER 2020 DE KRETSER PHOTO: MAYU KANAMORI I’m interested in complexity. Travel is a large phenomenon, and some of its facets are directly contradictory. Roberta Trapè: Your writing is deeply connected with the idea of movement, translation from one place to another, often migration. And with history, I would say. Are there particular reasons for these interests? Michelle de Kretser: The twentieth century saw mass movements of people in unprecedented numbers: tourists , refugees, guest workers, migrants, students, troops deployed in war and peace. These movements continue apace today. I’m interested in exploring this phenomenon because as a novelist I’m interested in how the world works and trying to figure out how we have ended up here. On a personal level, travel of various kinds has played a significant role in my life. I migrated from Sri Lanka to Australia; I spent several years studying and later working in France; I worked for a publisher of travel guides for many years; I moved from Melbourne to Sydney; and I continue to travel for both pleasure and work. My family left Sri Lanka because of language politics occasioned by the rise of nationalism in the aftermath of empire. Consequently, I had a sense from early on of the enormous impact that large, historical events can have on small, individual lives. So yes, I’m definitely interested in history, in the intersection of the self and the historical moment. Trapè: Your fourth novel is titled Questions of Travel after Elizabeth Bishop’s poem of the same name, which you quote as one of two epigraphs, the second being from E. M. Forster’s Howards End. The epigraphs question each other. The Forster quote, which comes first, is: “Under cosmopolitanism, if it comes, we shall receive no help from the earth. Trees and meadows and mountains will only be a spectacle.” The lines you used from the Bishop poem are: “But surely it would have been a pity / not to have seen the trees along this road / really exaggerated in their beauty.” Why did you choose them? de Kretser: I’m interested in complexity. Travel is a large phenomenon, and some of its facets are directly contradictory. I chose the epigraphs to suggest the sense of drift, the loss of historical and emotional connection that can come with travel, as well as the joyful revelations that it can bring. Trapè: Questions of Travel charts two very different lives, separated by time and space—Laura, born in Australia in the 1960s, and Ravi, born in Sri Lanka, first seen as a child in the 1970s. Laura travels the world before returning to Sydney; Ravi dreams of being a tourist until he is forced to leave his country. Laura and Ravi each have near-alternating chapters through forty years of separate travels, restlessness, and movement. The counterpointing of Laura’s story with Ravi’s throws a particular critical light...

The joy of the periodic table, by Sir Martyn Poliakoff

I cannot remember when I first saw a periodic table. I guess it was on my classroom wall at school when I was 14, a typical age for British schoolchildren to start studying chemistry in those days. But it has played an unexpectedly large role in my life. Surprisingly, my first inorganic chemistry textbook, published in 1961, did not include a periodic table at all—presumably it was not considered important. So I persuaded my parents to buy me one. Actually, they bought two: a magnificent blue one, which I hung on the wall of my bedroom and have long since lost, and a second, letter-sized copy, which still hangs in my office more than 50 years on. I suppose that part of the appeal to me has always been that it combines chemistry and Russia. My father was Russian and had decided that I would be a scientist long before

For My Teacher, Stanley Cavell

I AM HONORED TO BE HERE, with members of the Cavell family, with friends and with colleagues, to celebrate the life and work of Stanley Cavell, to whom I owe inestimably large debts of gratitude and whom I remember with the greatest affection and admiration.
 Cavell’s role in my life was that of a philosophical parent. He is well known to have held that “philosophy is the education of grownups,” and the sort of parenting I am talking about involved opening the door of philosophy for my young adult self. This was not a matter of induction into a theoretical research program of the type that then already dominated academic philosophy. Cavell’s way was to prompt students to confront and interrogate our own intellectual responses, leading us to ask “why we do what we do, judge as we judge,” and positioning us to think for ourselves. This is a demanding pedagogical enterprise, and Cavell devoted singular amounts of time and energy to supporting the young thinkers around him. What I am going to recount is the story of two extraordinary things that he did as my teacher, circumstances all the more arresting in that I was not officially his student.

The Second Birth

The Second Birth Monica Boothe (bio) From the day I was born, my parents wanted me to ask Jesus into my heart. It was their number one dream for me. The only thing they ever really wanted for my life. Dreams are funny things. So I slept in a crib under a framed cross stitch, "As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord," and I was given a pink Baby's First Bible and then later The Bible for Little Ones which had colorful pictures, and my mom read to me every night little fantastic stories, brief and simplified, stripped of all real theology. And at church every Sunday and Wednesday, I sat in classrooms with little plastic chairs just my size and watched the Bible unfold in felt cartoons and sang songs with King James words that sounded like a foreign language. But when I was five I did it: I asked Jesus into my heart. At least that's what I was taught to call it. But that doesn't really describe what happened at all. It sounds too domestic. Like I was a suburban two-story home with a tire swing in the backyard, and He moved in some Ikea furniture and settled in for a comfortable middle class life. But really Jesus was more of a forest fire, the kind that spreads through a cracked skeleton of a forest after years of relentless summer drought, where the trees are mostly dead, and the fire flashes through them in seconds, leaving the whole place flat, with nothing but ash. But then there's room for real life again, not just old dying trees, and little blades of grass pierce the ashes one by one, and they're all tiny and frail, but they're alive and new. So the next Sunday at church, when they were passing around the body and blood of Jesus, I tried to take my share, assuring my mom that I had asked Jesus into my heart. But she wouldn't let me, and she didn't believe me. I kept asking for weeks, and finally she relented. So I began to eat and drink Jesus every week with a ravenous appetite that unnerved my parents in spite of all they had hoped for. The very thing they craved for me was the one thing that could take me from them, the one thing that usurped their role in my life as primary authority and caretaker. [End Page 71] Pretty soon I was asking to be baptized, and that was where they drew the line. "Not until you're old enough," they said. But there was already a new wilderness growing inside me that could not be trimmed and mowed and weeded into something clean and manageable. And then the conflicts really began. When I tried to purge the house of secular music because it was only holding us back. When I tried to stay home from school some days saying I just wanted a day with God. When I planned a trip to Arizona to spend forty days fasting in the desert because Jesus had done it and it must be invigorating. When I insisted that we should sell our house and give the money to the poor because that was what Jesus had said to do. When I kept talking about Jesus on the playground at school until the teacher told me to stop and I wouldn't and she called my parents and my parents demanded that I keep my mouth shut and respect everyone's religious privacy. I wanted to scream at them "You're not my real dad!" but I didn't because I knew it would only hurt them even though it was true and it was what they had always wanted. Dreams are funny things. So when I was eleven and the church announced a baptismal Sunday coming up, I asked again if I could be baptized. They agonized over the question as they did every time I asked saying that it was a "sweet thought" and that they were "touched" that I was thinking about these things but talked about it being...

Mentorship in the 21st Century: Celebrating Uptake or Lamenting Lost Meaning?

Mentorship in the 21st Century: Celebrating Uptake or Lamenting Lost Meaning?

‘Could It Just Possibly Be?’

‘Could it just possibly be?’ Revel, Riot and Rebellion at Thirty Susan D. Amussen Has it been thirty years? I ask this because my relationship to David Underdown’s Revel Riot and Rebellion is more than academic. 1 When I entered graduate school at Brown University in 1976 he was finishing ‘The Chalk and the Cheese’ – so the questions and theories about allegiance and regional cultures that were at the center of the book were always part of my experience of him. 2 As my own work developed, and particularly as I was doing research for my dissertation, we shared ideas and interpretations as we both sought to understand early modern communities. These were rich exchanges, by letter or in person. There were a number of times when we were both working in the old P.R.O. on Chancery Lane, and spent lunches, or teas at the Institute of Historical Research making sense of Star Chamber cases he was reading, or Assize cases I was reading. He noted that conversation in the acknowledgments, as well as in the dedication of the book. What he did not say was that the book and the ideas in it were the intellectual soundtrack of our courtship; it was published soon after we were married. So the book itself played an important role in my life, intellectually and personally. Re-reading the book after thirty years to reflect on its ongoing impact, I am struck by three things. First, it was an idiosyncratic project, going against the tide of then fashionable historiography. Underdown was following his nose, the internal logic of his research and reading. The early 1980s were the heyday of Revisionism, which not only rejected the notion that there were long term causes of the Civil War and Revolution – something Underdown offers as a governing assumption on p. x – but also focused on elite politics, primarily at Court or sometimes in Parliament. When he reviewed the book in the London Review of Books alongside a book by David Starkey, Conrad Russell was plainly bemused that while, ‘If Dr Starkey wishes

The Power of Mu Xiang to Treat Inflammatory Bowel Disease

Submit Manuscript | http://medcraveonline.com Int J Complement Alt Med 2015, 1(2): 00009 I have gained back the 30 pounds. I have been fortunate enough to have learned acupuncture and Chinese Medicine and have been able to utilize the vast knowledge of the past centuries in order to keep myself out of a “flare” for over two years. I would like to take this time to shed some light on an herb that has played an important role in my life and in my patients with digestive issues as well.

My Language Autobiography and Critical Reflections

Language has always played a critical role in my life. In fact, if I were to select one way to tell my personal story, it would be through the influence of language and culture on my life. If one were to break my life into several distinct stages so far, then language has played an important role in every stage.

Sport and Life

I am not (nor, sadly, ever have been) an exponent of any sport at a level above the barely competent, unlike some other writers in this collection. Moreover, I have long since abandoned efforts at engaging in sport and now merely watch it, again with no special powers of analysis or understanding. But one's level of competence and understanding do not, fortunately, determine the importance in one's life of things, and sport has played a large, and I think largely enhancing, role in my life. So I am writing as someone with a lifelong interest in it with the aim of examining this thing, sport, trying to articulate what it is that I have been engaged with, and what it has given me. I am assuming that my own attitudes towards sport are not eccentric or unusual and so these reflections growing out of my own experiences will resonate with others. In effect I am engaging here in what is normally thought of as central philosophical task, that of trying to live an examined life – a life in which one of its components is to reflect hard on the nature and value of some of its other components. It would be, of course, a terrible mistake to think, as some philosophers are supposed to do, that an unexamined life is not worth living, an attitude which consigns the vast majority of lives to worthlessness, but we are, probably, committed to thinking that the reflective examination of our lives represents something good.

Life, Luck, and How I Became a Historian

Before I begin, I want to thank the Conference on Latin American History [CLAH] and the Distinguished Service Award Committee for giving me this signal honor. This organization has always been important to me, and it's really nice to know tiiat it thinks I've been important to it.The last talk I gave to CLAH was in Atlanta five years ago. I told the story of one man, Santiago de Liniers, and his good and bad fortune. Just as for Liniers, luck has played a huge role in my life.

Life, Luck, and How I Became a Historian

Before I begin, I want to thank the Conference on Latin American History [CLAH] and the Distinguished Service Award Committee for giving me this signal honor. This organization has always been important to me, and it's really nice to know tiiat it thinks I've been important to it. The last talk I gave to CLAH was in Atlanta five years ago. I told the story of one man, Santiago de Liniers, and his good and bad fortune. Just as for Liniers, luck has played a huge role in my life.