Silent Night Research Articles

Silent Night in Japanese Rice Fields? A Population Decline in the Greater Painted Snipe

Many studies have reported population declines and range contractions of bird species in agricultural landscapes around the world. However, few studies have described population trends of bird species in rice-paddy areas or identified causes of decline in these areas as opposed to other types of farmland. The Greater Painted Snipe Rostratula benghalensis is strongly dependent on rice-paddy areas for habitat. This paper uses the results of local field surveys and national survey data to document the population trends of Greater Painted Snipe in Japan. Field surveys conducted in Ibaraki Prefecture indicated a severe decline over a recent 10-year period. Data from the National Surveys on the Natural Environment also showed that the distribution of the Greater Painted Snipe has decreased nationwide from the 1970s to the 1990s. This population decline might be due to (1) the introduction of an efficient drainage system in rice fields and/or (2) a reduction in the area of flooded fallow fields with short vegetation at both breeding and wintering sites. Further work on the conservation status of this species is urgently needed.

Moonlight Makes Owls More Chatty

BackgroundLunar cycles seem to affect many of the rhythms, temporal patterns and behaviors of living things on Earth. Ambient light is known to affect visual communication in animals, with the conspicuousness of visual signals being largely determined by the light available for reflection by the sender. Although most previous studies in this context have focused on diurnal light, moonlight should not be neglected from the perspective of visual communication among nocturnal species. We recently discovered that eagle owls Bubo bubo communicate with conspecifics using a patch of white throat plumage that is repeatedly exposed during each call and is only visible during vocal displays.Methodology/Principal FindingsHere we provide evidence that this species uses moonlight to increase the conspicuousness of this visual signal during call displays. We found that call displays are directly influenced by the amount of moonlight, with silent nights being more frequent during periods with no-moonlight than moonlight. Furthermore, high numbers of calling bouts were more frequent at moonlight. Finally, call posts were located on higher positions on moonlit nights.Conclusions/SignificanceOur results support the idea that moon phase affects the visual signaling behavior of this species, and provide a starting point for examination of this method of communication by nocturnal species.

Discovery of a Potent, CNS‐Penetrant Orexin Receptor Antagonist Based on an N,N‐Disubstituted‐1,4‐diazepane Scaffold that Promotes Sleep in Rats

Silent Night: Antagonism of the orexin (or hypocretin) system has recently been identified as a novel mechanism for the treatment of insomnia. Herein, we describe discovery of a dual (OX(1)R/OX(2)R) orexin receptor antagonist featuring a 1,4-diazepane central constraint that blocks orexin signaling in vivo. In telemetry-implanted rats, oral administration of this antagonist produced a decrease in wakefulness, while increasing REM and non-REM sleep.

A Selection from Alone in the Mainstream: A Deaf Woman Remembers Public School

IN HER INTRODUCTORY COMMENTS to this issue of Sign Language Studies, Brenda Jo Brueggemann refers to the notion of a crack-dwelling book. In spite of its evolution on the road to publication, my book, Alone in the Mainstream: A Deaf Woman Remembers Public School, remained a crack dweller. It is a story not just about my life but also about the lives of sixty other people who themselves were the only deaf or hard of hearing child in their K-12 schools. My book also includes a brief introduction to Deaf education and Deaf people-I considered my audience to be parents, teachers, and counselors, who may not have a clue about these subjects. audience, in my mind, would include my own brothers and sisters. I wanted to write in a language that would enable them to easily finish my book in a day or two, if they were to pick it up. So I wanted the average reader-mainstream Americans-to be able to really get a sense of what I was trying to say. Finally, I wanted to give a variety of voices to a common experience that many people shared: We thought we were alone in the mainstream, but truthfully there were and still are many of us. For this article I will share an excerpt that refers to my relationship with two very special young women who are now both students at Gallaudet University. following is from chapter 7, The Best of Both Worlds: Justin was eight and Jessica was six when I married their father, Rick, in 1992. are now adults, and I count them as dear to me. Justin and Jessica taught me much about two elements of the Deaf community. Justin, being hearing, is a CODA (child of Deaf adults), and Jessica, by virtue of her mother's line, is a DOD (Deaf of Deaf). I first met Jessica when she was not yet three years old. Her proud papa brought her over to meet me one lovely summer day. She had on the cutest little blue flowery outfit. This was probably the first time I had a deaf child in my house. Little Jessica was very personable, as she remains today. With her dark curly hair and lovely little face, she was captivating from the start. Rick and I decided to take her to a playground, and she followed me upstairs to my bedroom so I could change into more appropriate shoes. I had a pair of sneakers for each activity: racquetball, running, aerobics, walking, and gardening, and my shoes were neatly lined up on my closet floor. When Jessica looked at them, her eyes grew wider by the second. She looked up at me and signed in fluent ASL with her pudgy little hands, complete with appropriate facial expression, WHOSE SHOES ARE THOSE? I looked at her and signed MINE with a facial expression that said, But of course! Her eyes grew about as wide as humanly possible as she signed back, ALL OF THEM? with a facial expression that said, That's impossible! Her facial expression included a specific mouth movement that is well known to native ASL users. This mouth movement conveys the idea They can't possibly allll be yours! incredulous look on her face matched the mouth movement so precisely, as one might expect from a much more mature language user. I will never forget how stunned I was that she was able to appropriately use a slang sign that had a very intricate meaning and that her language was so evolved at her young age that she could convey this nuance. It would be like a hearing two-year-old saying, Oh, Mom, get real! at a culturally appropriate moment. I realized then that my knowledge of ASL was going to increase exponentially if I continued to spend time with this preschooler. Another remarkable incident occurred around Christmas just a few years later, when Jessica was four. I already knew that she loved music and loved to sign songs. We were sitting at our dining room table, singing and signing-me, Rick, Jessica, Justin, and a few other adult friends. I was plunking out the tunes on a small synthesizer, and Rick and Jessica were signing Silent Night. I hit a wrong key. …

Silent night: adaptive disappearance of a sexual signal in a parasitized population of field crickets

Sexual signals are often critical for mate attraction and reproduction, although their conspicuousness exposes them to parasites and predators. We document the near-disappearance of song, the sexual signal of crickets, and its replacement with a novel silent morph, in a population subject to strong natural selection by a deadly acoustically orienting parasitoid fly. On the Hawaiian Island of Kauai, more than 90% of male field crickets (Teleogryllus oceanicus) shifted in less than 20 generations from a normal-wing morphology to a mutated wing that renders males unable to call (flatwing). Flatwing morphology protects male crickets from the parasitoid, which uses song to find hosts, but poses obstacles for mate attraction, since females also use the males' song to locate mates. Field experiments support the hypothesis that flatwings overcome the difficulty of attracting females without song by acting as 'satellites' to the few remaining callers, showing enhanced phonotaxis to the calling song that increases female encounter rate. Thus, variation in behaviour facilitated establishment of an otherwise maladaptive morphological mutation.

Schoolroom Poets: Childhood, Performance, and the Place of American Poetry, 1865-1917 (review)

Reviewed by Gary D. Schmidt Calvin College Sorby, Angela. Schoolroom Poets: Childhood, Performance, and the Place of American Poetry, 1865–1917. Durham, NH: University of New Hampshire P, 2005. In the introduction to his most recent collection, Good Poems for Hard Times (2005), Garrison Keillor laments the loss of what he defines as a national culture that can link the national experience of one individual to another through a common core of reference and understanding. "The common life is precarious," he writes. "I fear a future in which America becomes a loose aggregate of marauding tribes—no binding traditions, no songs that we all know, not even 'The Star-Spangled Banner' or 'Silent Night,' no common heroes, no American literature. . . .The last singer recognizable to everyone was Frank Sinatra; the last poet known far and wide was Robert Frost. There are no replacements in sight" (xx). What Keillor laments is what teachers observe daily: that there is no longer a common set of reference points that mark American culture, points that most Americans can turn to and be assured that the person sitting beside them at the library table, or standing on the subway, or waiting in line at the high school cafeteria, or legislating in Washington, or ministering in a New York City soup kitchen, will recognize. Keillor's own volume of poems—together with the first in the series, Good Poems (2002)—is an attempt to address this, as are the many "One Book, One County," or "One Book, One City," or "One Book, One School" programs that are flourishing at the beginning of this troubled century. All of which makes Angela Sorby's fascinating study, Schoolroom Poets, particularly timely—though the book is not addressed specifically to the cultural fragmentation in North America. It is an examination, however, of a time when those cultural reference points were in place, and they were poetry. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, poets like John Greenleaf Whittier, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Robert Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and James Whitcomb Riley were culturally linked as the "Fireside Poets," evoking a time when families would read to each other close by the fire—the need for heat and light creating a community in which poetry itself became an equal necessity. For Sorby, however, a more apt metaphor is the "Schoolroom Poet," for in the schoolroom these poets found canonization—both for their work and for their lives, which grew into mythic tales—and popularization through anthologies, in which they became standard fare. Through the effects of their repetition in McGuffey's Readers, through publication in culturally affirmed children's journals such as Mary Mapes Dodge's St. Nicholas, and through school performances and social recitals, the work of the "Schoolroom Poets" became binding cultural ties that linked American culture in a great web of acknowledgement and familiarity. Sorby writes of a time when it seemed, [End Page 410] at least, as if there was a common American culture expressed through its poetry, and she attempts to historicize that cultural phenomenon—now so utterly vanished—and explore its effects upon the poetry itself as it was crafted, as it was understood by its adult and child audiences, and as it was contextualized through performance and publication. The point of popular poetry, Sorby claims, "is not to engage with literary history but rather to make social history by forming communities" (xxvi). What Sorby does so well in this book is to explore the interactions of the texts and the social communities that received them, focusing here on two generations of poets whose evolutions in terms of reception would lead to the development of modern poetry for children. Writing of Eugene Field's enormous popularity, Sorby notes that the "question becomes one that demands as much cultural spadework as literary analysis" (127). It is an observation that readily applies to her entire study, and speaks to her strength in it: her cultural spadework and...

Silent nights: overcoming sleep problems in babies and children. Brian Symon. Oxford University Press: Oxford, 1998. pp. 200. Price: £10.99; $24.95. ISBN 0195506073

Infant and Child DevelopmentVolume 15, Issue 5 p. 557-559 Book ReviewFree Access Silent nights: overcoming sleep problems in babies and children. Brian Symon. Oxford University Press: Oxford, 1998. pp. 200. Price: £10.99; $24.95. ISBN 0195506073 Jackie Gittins, Jackie Gittins University of Glasgow, UKSearch for more papers by this author Jackie Gittins, Jackie Gittins University of Glasgow, UKSearch for more papers by this author First published: 09 October 2006 https://doi.org/10.1002/icd.488AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume15, Issue5September/October 2006Pages 557-559 RelatedInformation

Effect of Facemask Use on Respiratory Patterns of Women in Speech and Singing

Research into respiratory behavior during singing and speech makes extensive use of standard respiratory and vented pneumotachograph facemasks. This study investigated whether the use of such facemasks would affect respiratory behavior in terms of lung volume (excursion, at initiation and at termination) or duration (of inspiration and of expiration) during speech or singing. The respiratory patterns of 6 females were recorded using uniaxial surface magnetometry during 4 tasks: quiet breathing, a /pa/ syllabic train, reading ("The Rainbow Passage"), and singing a Christmas carol ("Silent night"). Each task was performed in 4 facemask conditions: wearing no facemask, wearing a facemask rim only, wearing a standard respiratory facemask, and wearing a vented pneumotachograph facemask. No significant effect was found for any of the facemask conditions on lung volume or duration measures during any tasks. The results confirm earlier studies that the vented pneumotachograph facemask does not affect breathing behavior in speech research studies and extends the finding to the study of breathing behavior in singing and to the use of a standard respiratory facemask.

Silent Night, Holy Night: A Song for the World (review)

Reviewed by: Silent Night, Holy Night: A Song for the World Elizabeth Bush Thuswaldner, Werner Silent Night, Holy Night: A Song for the World; by Werner Thuswaldner and Patricia Crampton; illus. by Robert Ingpen. Minedition/Penguin, 200540p ISBN 0-698-40032-1$16.99 M 7-10 yrs A broken church organ, a simple composition sung to guitar accompaniment at midnight Mass, soldiers who call their own unauthorized Christmas truce under the influence of a beloved Christmas song—many children are familiar with the stories that surround the famous carol. Thuswaldner overembellishes the basics with a poorly integrated look at the beleaguered population of nineteenth century Oberndorf, Austria, and with heavy, florid prose exacerbated by what would appear to be the puzzling consequence of a missing line of text: "Millions of people know the melody, some know the verses, but very few are aware of more than a grace and blessed consolation of beyond the carol." There's a bit about seasonal flooding and an unnamed war, a tad about Joseph Mohr and Franz Gruber, and abundant breathless musing on the salutary effect of the hymn on its listeners and singers. Ingpen provides illustrations of war, misery, and romanticized village life in hazy paintings, often obscured by snow, that unfortunately recall cheap greeting [End Page 203] cards as well as Old Masters. Extensive Christmas collections could justify inclusion of this title, but Margaret Hodges' Silent Night (BCCB 12/97) remains the selection of choice. Copyright © 2005 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Silent Nights: Overcoming Sleep Problems in Babies and ChildrenSilent Nights: Overcoming Sleep Problems in Babies and Children Brian Symon Publisher Oxford University Press208£10.9901955178650195517865

Silent Nights: Overcoming Sleep Problems in Babies and ChildrenSilent Nights: Overcoming Sleep Problems in Babies and Children Brian Symon Publisher Oxford University Press208£10.9901955178650195517865

The Legacy of the Tank: The Violence of Peace

In 1997, after weeks of watching skirmishes between soldiers and Kamajoh militia, and weeks of being startled during my fieldwork by dead bodies appearing on Kenema's streets, a Guinea n tank rolled through town. You could hear it minutes before it arrived-its engines were roaring and thunderous; it seemed everyone stopped whatever they were doing and watched it roll by, speechless. tank never stopped, continuing right through the middle of town, but its passing sent a clear message to all of us: ECOMOG had arrived. In fact, foreign troops had been involved in Sierra Leone since the beginning of the conflict. In 7997, mercenaries came from neighboring countries like Liberia and Burkina Faso to fight with the rebels. More soon arrived from Southern Africa and Europe. Some of these provided logistical support for the United Nations and humanitarian groups; some assisted the state and state militias with military support; others provided security for diamond mining operations (Reno 1997, Wilkinson 2000). Many more foreign troops, especially from Nigeria, entered Sierra Leone under ECOMOG auspices in 7997, reinstalled the President, took back the capital from rebel control, and paved the way for UN peacekeepers. By 1999, the UN began setting up a peacekeeping mission (UNAMSIL) of several thousand; by January 2002, this mission had swelled to 17,500 troops, including peacekeepers, military observers, and civilian police from 38 different countries around the world. UNAMSIL has since begun downsizing, though as of spring 2004 maintain a force of 11,527. UN Security Council, concerned that gaps remain in the peace process, has voted to extend UNAMSIL's mandate for another six months into 2005. It's now just before Christmas, 2003. I'm sitting at a beach bar in Sierra Leone's capital talking with Estelle, a Liberian sex worker. Christmas lights are twinkling all around, and the sound of Silent Night threaded through a reggae mix pulsates on the sound system, competing with the noise of a Premier league soccer match on the TV. Sitting all around us at the bar are Estelle's reason for being here-UN peacekeepers, the legacy of the Guinean tank I'd seen pass through Kenema years before, are crowded in elbow to elbow. Some are silently nursing whiskeys; others are raucously pouring down beers, slapping their friends high fives with one hand while pinching the arm of an accompanying sex worker with the other. Estelle seems unsure of what to make of me, and skeptical of how much time to investafter all, I'm not obviously a peacekeeper, and I keep switching the conversation to unexpected things like her home life, her living situation, and what she thinks about all the soldiers milling about. On the first two items she's initially reluctant to talk; on the last, she's an enthusiastic conversationalist. They are, after all, her bread and butter. Suddenly, I remember a news brief I'd seen on Freetown's TV station the night before. Randall Tobias, the Bush administration's Global AIDS Coordinator, just returning to the U.S. from a week-long, five-nation trip to Africa, wasn't coming to Sierra Leone. trip, with an 80 member delegation of business leaders, lawmakers, and AIDS policy-makers, was called a historic undertaking by the administration, a photo op by its critics. Delegates visited Zambia, Rwanda, Kenya, Uganda, and Cameroon. In Kenya, the delegation launched a joint program of 9 multinational businesses to provide anti-retroviral (ARV) drugs to people living with AIDS. The magnitude of the challenge we face is almost unimaginable, said Tobias. The people of the United States are honored to be a partner with public-private partnerships, faith-based and community-based organizations, universities, foundations, international organizations, other donor governments, and many others to battle the AIDS epidemic in Zambia and elsewhere. I stop to listen, and begin pondering the nexus event that didn't happen: Tobias wasn't coming to Sierra Leone, With confusion and disagreement about Sierra Leone's real national HIV infection rate, Sierra Leone didn't make the cut of 12 African nations to be supported under the Global AIDS Initiative's distribution of medicine plan. …

Melodies Familiar to the Australian Population Across a Range of Hearing Abilities

This study aimed to identify a small set of melodies that were judged as most familiar by the Australian adult population. Responses were obtained from a questionnaire completed by 88 men and women (49 with normal hearing or mild hearing losses, 14 hearing-aid users and 25 cochlear implant users). The questionnaire listed 57 potentially familiar melodies. For each melody, respondents were asked to indicate if they could recognise the name of the tune, recognise the tune if it were played to them, or sing that tune in their head. After analysis of the responses, short lists of familiar melodies were compiled for each of the three participant groups, as well as for all respondents. The results showed that Happy Birthday, Jingle Bells, Silent Night, Twinkle Little Star, Waltzing Matilda and Old MacDonald were consistently judged the most familiar melodies, both within each of the three participant groups and overall. Further analysis revealed that the cochlear implant users reported being able to sing tunes in their head more than they could recognise them aurally, whereas the results of the normal hearing or mild hearing-loss group showed the opposite pattern.

HABITUATION OF SLEEP TO ROAD TRAFFIC NOISE AS DETERMINED BY POLYSOMNOGRAPHY AND AN ACCELEROMETER

The habituation of human sleep to a noisy environment was investigated by polysomnography (PSG), a wrist activity device (Actiwatch®), subjective evaluation and a performance test on the following morning. Eleven young male students slept for 17 nights in a sleep laboratory. PSG on the first, fourth, fifth, ninth, 14th, and 17th nights was judged visually. Four of the subjects were continuously monitored by the wrist activity device. From the fifth to 14th nights, there was exposure to road traffic noise all-night long, and consecutive experiments were conducted from the fifth to 17th nights. Agreement of sleep/wake assessment for Actiwatch®and PSG was 88·4%, on average, based on the data for 24 nights. Pearson's correlation coefficient of TST for Actiwatch®and sleep PSG was 0·848. Habituation to noise by wrist movement, sleep latency by PSG, and activity of mental muscles was not recognized. The association between wrist activity and mental muscle activity was significant for three subjects out of four (r=0·56, 0·81, 0·71, respectively). Percentages of positive wrist movement in each sleep stage, such as the 3+4 stages, REM stage and stage MT, were compared with those in other stages. Wrist activity in Stage REM was significantly more frequent than that in other stages for the three subjects. Wrist movement in Stage MT was significantly more frequent than in other stages for the three subjects. REM latency, REM cycle, and five factors of subjective sleep, from the Oguri–Shirakawa–Azumi questionnaire (SQ), showed significant differences by analysis of variance for repeated measurements. When change from the 4th night was checked, sleepiness, worry, integrated sleep feeling and sleep initiation by SQ showed habituation of sleep to noise. Namely, sleep quality recovered to the level on a silent night by the fifth noisy night during the experiment. There is thus a habituation of sleep to noise when a subjective evaluation of sleep, such as the SQ, is used.

Silent night: lasers provide breakthrough in treatment of snoring.

Journal of Clinical Laser Medicine & SurgeryVol. 12, No. 3 Silent Night: Lasers Provide Breakthrough in Treatment of SnoringMAXINE KARPENMAXINE KARPENSearch for more papers by this authorPublished Online:29 Apr 2009https://doi.org/10.1089/clm.1994.12.175AboutSectionsPDF/EPUB Permissions & CitationsPermissionsDownload CitationsTrack CitationsAdd to favorites Back To Publication ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmail "Silent Night: Lasers Provide Breakthrough in Treatment of Snoring." , 12(3), pp. 175–176FiguresReferencesRelatedDetails Volume 12Issue 3Jun 1994 To cite this article:MAXINE KARPEN.Silent Night: Lasers Provide Breakthrough in Treatment of Snoring.Journal of Clinical Laser Medicine & Surgery.Jun 1994.175-176.http://doi.org/10.1089/clm.1994.12.175Published in Volume: 12 Issue 3: April 29, 2009PDF download

Nicholas Breton and Two Songs by Dowland

In the process of editing the poems from the songbooks of the lutenist and composer, John Dowland, I have found that Nicholas Breton is the author of at least one of these poems and may have written another. Both songs were printed in A Pilgrimes Solace (1612). ‘From silent night’ (No. 10) is dedicated ‘To my louing Country-man Mr. John Forster the younger, Merchant of Dublin in Ireland.’ ‘Thou mighty God’ is a single poem divided into three parts (Nos. 14-16). Both are among Dowland's finest songs, remarkable for their emotional intensity and melodic and harmonic boldness. E. H. Fellowes, editor of English Madrigal Verse, lists no author for either poem.

German Hymns in American Hymnals

AT A TIME when speculation is rife as to the religious outlook in conquered Germany it is interesting to consider the rich contributions that German authors have made to American hymnody of the past. Even a casual perusal of the index of authors and composers in our hymn books of all Protestant denominations reveals a large proportion of German names. If the average person were asked to name the German hymns which most readily suggest themselves as being familiar through their English versions, the answer would in most cases probably be: Silent Night and A Mighty Fortress Is Our God. For these hymns the literature is so abundant1 that any adequate treatment of them would be quite beyond the scope of this article which aims to present both in the original and the English versions some of the other German hymns that have found fairly wide acceptance in American hymnals,2 and to discuss the merits of the English translations or adaptations. Of the English writers who have most faithfully transplanted Germany's best hymns and made them bloom with fresh beauty, Miss Catherine Winkworth has been the foremost in rank and popularity. In fact, many hymnals cite her as the author without acknowledging the original composer. Other writers whose translations have found much favor are Mrs. Sarah Findlater and her sister, Miss Jane Borthwick, Dr. John Kelly, and Dr. J. Guthrie. For purposes of convenience the treatment will follow the alphabetical order of the names of the German authors.

Book Review: VI. Miscellaneous: Silent Night. A Song of Christmas

Book Review: VI. Miscellaneous: Silent Night. A Song of Christmas

In Silent Night. German Folk-Song

In Silent Night. German Folk-Song

The Nightingale in Silent Night. Four-Part Song

The Nightingale in Silent Night. Four-Part Song

Silent Night. Four-Part Song

Silent Night. Four-Part Song