Smith Says Research Articles

Queen ants from other species smell different

Communication is essential for any efficiently functioning community, and social ants are no different. ‘Division of reproductive labour – with a queen who specialises in reproduction and female workers who do not reproduce – is a defining characteristic of insect societies’, says Adrian Smith from the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences and North Carolina State University, USA. And this division of labour only works if the female workers can distinguish queens from fellow labourers. ‘This is an essential communication task that all ants have to figure out’, he says. But little is known about how most of the 14,000 ant species communicate their position in the hierarchy, although recent evidence had suggested that all social insects use the same specialised odour (pheromone) molecules. ‘The problem was, this was based on comparing single, distantly related species’, says Smith. So, he and Andrew Suarez from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA, decided to compare the aroma profiles of three species of closely related trap-jaw ants (Odontomachus) to find out whether all ant queens smell similar to each other.Having dug ant colonies out of the ground and rotten logs in south Florida and Alabama, Smith had little trouble keeping the insects happy in the lab in artificial nests built from plaster-lined Petri dishes and tubes. ‘They usually hunt live insects for food, so we gave them termites to hunt and feed to their larvae’, Smith says. Then, he began painstakingly collecting samples of the wax odours coating the ants' bodies – from queens, female workers and male drones – ready for chemistry sleuth Jocelyn Millar, from the University of California Riverside, USA, to analyse by gas chromatography–mass spectrometry.Comparing the chemical profiles of the queens' odours with those of workers of their own species, it was clear that the queens' odours differed significantly from the worker scents, although the monarchs and labourers shared some compounds. However, it was also evident that the profiles of the chemicals that contributed to the odours of the O. ruginodis, O. relcitus and O. haematodus queens were dramatically different too. Most surprisingly, O. ruginodis queens seemed to be sporting scent molecules – 2,5-dialkyltetrahydrofurans – that Smith had never seen before in a waxy ant coating; he recalls that Millar had to resort to some sophisticated chemistry to identify the molecule. However, when the duo analysed the odour profiles of the males from all three species, they found that the odours were much more similar to each other and the males all produced more pentacosadienes, pentacosenes and tricosanes to distinguish themselves from their females.Puzzled by the intriguing composition of the O. ruginodis queen's aroma, Smith wondered whether the novel dialkyltetrahydrofurans molecules communicated a regal presence. Having first confirmed that worker ants recognised a queen ant and submissively withdrew their antennae when the queen was near, Smith bathed several queen ants in a solvent to collect their odour cocktail. Then, he separated the dialkyltetrahydrofurans (and other similar compounds) from the waxy components and checked the workers' reactions to each mixture individually. This time, neither the waxes nor the dialkyltetrahydrofurans produced a submissive response. So, the workers only recognised that the dialkyltetrahydrofurans were being produced by a queen when the molecules were in the context of the other background scents.Having found that queens of different species do not use the same odour compounds to communicate their reproductive roles, Smith is keen to learn more about how the remaining 65 species of trap-jaw ants interpret scent communications to maintain their reproductive division of labour. ‘There is a whole lot left to discover’, he chuckles.

ANewfoundland Ethnicity? The Political Implications of Post‐Confederation Nationalism inNewfoundland

AbstractEthnicity is very much at the core of the individual and has been known to constitute the basis of nationalisms. Loosely speaking, an ethnic group refers to those who identify with one another through a number of shared characteristics (e.g. culture, language, or religion). Based on this, scholars would agree that most Quebeckers meet the criteria – but what about Newfoundlanders? Does calling oneself a ‘Newfoundlander’ invoke a specific set of linguistic or cultural features that are held to be common? Are Newfoundlanders an ethnic group? If a ‘Newfoundland ethnicity’ exists, could a ‘Newfoundland ethnic identity’ lead to a post‐ConfederationNewfoundland nationalism? In order to address these questions, I use a modified version of what Anthony D. Smith (1986) says constitutes the core of national identity, theethnie, and, to place the analysis in context, I briefly discuss nationalism and ethnicity. Following this, I provide an overview of the origins of aNewfoundland ethnogenesis, a review of key post‐ConfederationNewfoundland ‘nationalist’ events, as well as an analysis of each aspect ofethniefrom aNewfoundland perspective. The article concludes by arguing that while Newfoundlanders can be considered a distinct ethnic group, the likelihood of a post‐ConfederationNewfoundland nationalism emerging is low.

Gene therapy shows potential as Usher syndrome treatment

Gene therapy shows potential as Usher syndrome treatment

Rare Fungal Illness Follows Tornado

More than 1,000 people were injured when a severe tornado ripped through Joplin, Missouri, on 22 May 2011, and 158 eventually died.1 Within a few days of the tornado, several of the injured began to suffer from a fungal infection suspected to be cutaneous necrotizing mucormycosis. Doctors scrambled to do what they could, but testing to identify the specific causal fungus lagged, treatment (including surgery and medications) was sometimes ineffective, and five people died.2 A team of U.S. researchers who investigated the outbreak now report what they say is the largest known cluster of the disease, with 13 identified patients.2,3

Dryer Vents: An Overlooked Source of Pollution?

Dryer Vents: An Overlooked Source of Pollution?

Incorporating a Client-Centered Approach to Audiologic Rehabilitation

Incorporating a Client-Centered Approach to Audiologic Rehabilitation

The Plain Style in Southern Poetry

In one of essays, W.H. Auden reminds that it Keats's urn and not Keats himself who says 'Beauty Truth, truth beauty' (Ode 210). Then, in next paragraph, Auden gainsays that pronouncement: Art, says, arises out of our desire for and truth [italics mine] and our knowledge that they are not identical (377). He goes on to establish a dichotomy between truth and in poetry, characterizing tension between two as a rivalry between Ariel and Prospero, with Ariel, The Tempest's airy spirit, whose glory and limitation that has no passions, representing beauty, and shrewd and pragmatic Prospero representing truth. Although, says Auden, good poems involve some degree of collaboration between Ariel and Prospero ... it usually possible to say of a poem and, sometimes, of whole output of a poet, that it Ariel-dominated or Prospero-dominated (338). In fact, it seems possible to make such a claim about an entire group or school of poetry--for instance, contemporary southern poets writing in plain style. No doubt poets I have in mind--Dave Smith, Andrew Hudgins, Rodney Jones, Robert Morgan, Betty Adcock, Donald Justice, and others--do not see themselves as part of a school, and it may be that they do not arrive at plain style in same way. But in writing primarily Helen Vendler refers to as first-order poems, those with a first-person, narrative base (75), and doing so in such a way as to clearly privilege Prospero- or truth-dominated mode over an Ariel-dominated one--that to say, by speaking plain--these poets assert primacy of truth and plainness over in context of contemporary art, culture, and writing in American South. Some are more adamant in their assertion of importance of truth over than others. Dave Smith more adamant than most. The first section of 1985 collection of essays, Local Assays: On Contemporary American Poetry, constitutes a sort of manifesto arguing, in effect, for importance of truth in poetry. He reiterates this idea in a number of ways, in discussion, for instance, of poetry of Rabindranath Tagore, who, Smith says, what might be called a pure and whose work describes as extremely lyrical and melodious. The pure poet an escapist, Smith tells us, all expression. Regarding Tagore's love poems, Smith remarks that he seems more in love with idea of love than with any person. He concedes that Tagore's poems are in fact beautiful, but in suggesting the of a young girl's ankle bracelets... one never quite feels it a whole, mature vision. One misses entirely girl's dirty feet, barnyard smell, even dailiness of village life. Because of Tagore does not incorporate in poem, Smith concludes, his pure music finally dismissible.... Tagore's eloquent simplicity and transparent feeling ... do not sustain us (14). Smith sums up feelings by saying that consequences of purity are limited expression, limited knowledge, limited audience, and mere beauty (14--15). Of course, nowhere does Smith argue against need for in poetry, and in fact we find in reviews of volumes such as David Huddle's Paper Boy a dismissal of that poetry which attempts to be truth and no beauty, or at least completely fails in its attempts to produce in its search for truth. Smith says Huddle's compositions... are poems primarily because they have similes and are lined. We are drawn through them not by poetry's compelling sound but by fiction's suspense. The language too inert to engender either transcendence or transformation of factual and local detail. Smith concludes by saying that Huddle is rarely a bad writer, but as a poet has no ear and mediocre. His poems are, I would say, semitough prose anecdotes (41). And Smith saying here except that poetry demands not only truth but as well--that, in fact, it not poetry unless it has latter component? …

INTERNATIONAL ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH: New MPH Program a First for India

Not often does a new degree program make headline news, but then, in India there is nothing entirely comparable to the new master’s of public health (MPH) program launched 19 January 2010 at Sri Ramachandra University (SRU) in Chennai. With environmental disease constituting roughly half the country’s total disease burden, India has a dire need of the expertise the program will develop with its focus on occupational and environmental health (OEH). “This program is the first MPH [in India] with an exclusive focus on OEH,” says Kalpana Balakrishnan, a professor of biophysics and head of the Department of Environmental Health Engineering at SRU. “These graduates will be trained in recognition, evaluation, and management of OEH risks to serve industry and governmental organizations in addition to assuming roles as teachers of OEH in [this and other] MPH programs.” India faces a double whammy of traditional and modern OEH problems, including indoor air pollution (primarily due to the use of wood, dung, and other solid fuels for cooking); the microbial and chemical contamination of water; chemical, physical, ergonomic, and psychosocial hazards in the workplace; and contamination of food supplies by heavy metals, pesticides, and microbes. Over 37 million people—more than the total population of California—are affected annually by waterborne disease, according to the international nonprofit WaterAid, and the most recent data available—published by James Leigh et al. in the September 1999 issue of Epidemiology—put the number of occupation-related deaths per year at an estimated 121,000. Yet the country, with one-sixth of humanity and a space program, nevertheless has few professionals trained to tackle such problems and inadequate capacity to undertake related research. The 2-year MPH program is the fruit of a collaboration with the University of California, Berkeley, that began in 2002 with support from the International Training and Research Program in Environmental and Occupational Health (ITREOH), an initiative of the Fogarty International Center, National Institutes of Health, in collaboration with the NIEHS and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “A main objective of this collaboration has been to build the capacity of staff at SRU to deliver the MPH program and undertake research,” explains Kirk Smith, a professor of global environmental health at Berkeley and a principal investigator with ITREOH. Fogarty funds have brought 6 SRU faculty to Berkeley to take advanced courses in biostatistics, epidemiology, and other disciplines. Berkeley aims to continue to provide training support over at least the next 2 years. The new MPH program covers topics such as epidemiology, biostatistics, occupational toxicology, industrial hygiene, occupational and environmental safety, exposure assessment and control, health policy and management, behavioral sciences in health, indoor air quality, analysis of airborne chemical contaminants, occupational health clinics, environmental engineering (including the management of hazardous and biomedical waste), and the use of geographic information systems. With initial graduating classes of just 10 students, Balakrishnan says, “The intake will be expanded once a critical mass of teachers is produced from the first few batches.” She believes it could be at least a decade before much of a dent could be made in the subcontinent’s OEH problems and that to truly meet its challenge, India would need dozens more such programs. “It will be difficult in the short term to find students able to pay their own fees to attend until there are jobs available to make it seem worthwhile,” Smith says. “It’s a chicken-and-egg situation, which is one of the main reasons SRU needs to start small and build up slowly to a larger program.” Smith says other Indian universities are now considering offering new courses with OEH content, but one of the major problems they face remains the recruitment of staff capable of teaching in this area. “The production of the first ‘homegrown’ graduates who can specifically fill these positions, who have firsthand experience of India’s OEH problems, and who can begin research to find new ways of quantifying them and dealing with them will be a big step in the right direction,” he says. “Addressing India’s occupational and environmental health concerns is vital in the future of a healthy India,” remarks Sanjay Zodpey, director of the Indian Institute of Public Health and director of public health education for the Public Health Foundation of India, both in New Delhi. “The MPH program in collaboration with Berkeley will not only address the shortfall in trained manpower in occupational and environmental health, but also strengthen indigenous Indian research capacity in these areas.”

Swine CAFOs & Novel H1N1 Flu: Separating Facts from Fears

With cases documented in more than 170 countries, the global swine flu pandemic that erupted in spring 2009 remains a serious public health problem. Caused by a strain of H1N1 influenza virus, which is normally found in pigs, the flu now known as novel H1N1 has so far been less severe than regular seasonal flu in terms of deaths and hospitalizations. Yet given its remarkable capacity for human-to-human transmission and a widespread lack of immunity among potentially exposed people, it’s likely the number of cases will rise during the flu season later this fall and winter, according to many public health experts. Given that possibility, enormous resources are being mobilized to address novel H1N1, with an emphasis on vaccine development, education, and efforts to its limit its movements among human communities. Yet one potential source of the original outbreak—factory swine farming in concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs)—has received comparatively little attention by public health officials. CAFOs house animals by the thousands in crowded indoor facilities. But the same economy-of-scale efficiencies that allow CAFOs to produce affordable meat for so many consumers also facilitate the mutation of viral pathogens into novel strains that can be passed on to farm workers and veterinarians, according to Gregory Gray, director of the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases at the University of Iowa College of Public Health. “When respiratory viruses get into these confinement facilities, they have continual opportunity to replicate, mutate, reassort, and recombine into novel strains,” Gray explains. “The best surrogates we can find in the human population are prisons, military bases, ships, or schools. But respiratory viruses can run quickly through these [human] populations and then burn out, whereas in CAFOs—which often have continual introductions of [unexposed] animals—there’s a much greater potential for the viruses to spread and become endemic.” Gray says workers exposed routinely to livestock can pass these zoonotic infections—which transmit readily among humans and animals—on to the wider public. However, public health agencies that monitor risks from zoonotic infections routinely overlook CAFO workers, according to Ellen Silbergeld, a professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. And animal disease sampling data collected by the food animal industry typically are not shared publicly, according to Gray, although such data could reveal how novel pathogens evolve in CAFOs and how they might move among animals, workers, and the broader community. Experts believe that without these data, society has a diminished capacity to detect and respond to new zoonotic threats before they become more widespread.

Social Class in the Writings of Mary Hallock Foote (review)

Reviewed by: Social Class in the Writings of Mary Hallock Foote James H. Maguire Social Class in the Writings of Mary Hallock Foote. By Christine Hill Smith. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2009. 248 pages, $34.95. Christine Hill Smith's preface gives a clear outline of the rest of her book: "Using terminology and concepts of class defined by historians, sociologists, political scientists, and literary critics, I analyze Foote's fiction and nonfiction, addressing how she came to think and write as she did. I compare Foote with other writers of her age, delve into her upbringing and literary tastes, and scrutinize how being a woman affected her attitudes toward class" (xii–xiii). Smith sheds light on Foote's novels, stories, letters, and children's literature and also explains how class affected frontier society in the American West. To prepare her readers for her detailed analysis of Foote's writings, Smith's introductory chapter starts with some of the key facts of Foote's life and then briefly discusses topics such as western American stratification, the realism and naturalism of the period, female and male roles, and the controversy over Wallace Stegner's use of Foote's life and writings in his novel Angle of Repose (1971). Although Smith sometimes mistakenly slips into reading Angle of Repose as nonfiction biography instead of as a novel, her comments on the controversy are otherwise fair and sensible. Then, in chapter 1, she extends the discussion of social class to explain Foote's elitist views and "the tensions between her old and new contexts" (26). Smith makes a good guess that Foote's personal insecurity probably reinforced her sense of social exclusivity to such an extent that it "ruled out interaction as peers with people of a different color" and with most people of an ethnic background different from her own (48). Chapters 2 and 3 focus, respectively, on literary allusions and gender roles in Foote's Leadville novels. These earlier novels have received somewhat more attention than Foote's later works. Nevertheless, Smith's discussion adds significantly to our understanding of social tensions in early Leadville. Foote's children's literature is the subject of the fourth chapter; and Smith's perceptive analysis shows that the treatment of social class in Foote's children's stories is very similar to how it appears in her adult fiction. The last two chapters make a major contribution to our understanding of Foote's work and her times. First, Smith says, "The term New Woman came to be used in the 1890s and early twentieth century to describe women who avoided or reinvented marriage and family life and strove to create autonomous lives for themselves working outside the home" (117). Then, by showing that an important character in The Ground-Swell (1919) is a New Woman, Smith gives a new and illuminating reading of Foote's last novel. Smith's closing chapter is about the early correspondence between Foote and her close friend Helena de Kay Gilder. Except for the letters Stegner used and often [End Page 298] altered in Angle of Repose, very little of that correspondence has been published. Smith uses her knowledge of all the letters to advance our understanding of Foote's attitudes and writings. She achieves what she set out to do, and she thereby makes possible a more informed reading of Foote's writings and of Angle of Repose. [End Page 299] James H. Maguire Boulder, Colorado Copyright © 2009 Western Literature Association

Sympathy, Beauty, and Sentiment: Adam Smith's Aesthetic Morality

One of the more striking aspects of Adam Smith's moral theory is the degree to which it depends on and appeals to aesthetic norms. By considering what Smith says about judgments of propriety – the foundational type of judgment in his system – and by tying what he says in The Theory of Moral Sentiments to certain of his other writings, I argue that Smith ultimately defends an aesthetic morality. Among the challenges that any aesthetic morality faces is that it seems to entail moral relativism. This problem is magnified by Smith's reliance on the judgments of the impartial spectator, which also seems to make his theory more vulnerable to a Euthyphro-type objection. I suggest that Smith can potentially get around these problems, given his presumption of aesthetic naturalism. While there is certainly some variation in our aesthetic judgments, Smith claims that we naturally find certain actions and sentiments odious, while others we find agreeable. The reason, he argues, is that any society that judged otherwise would not survive.

Stuart Saunders Smith's "Links No. 6 (Song Interiors)": How Can I Tell what I Think Until I See What I Sing?

Stuart Saunders Smith's Links No. 6 (Song Interiors): How Can ITell what I Think Until I See What I Sing? 1 Ron Hess The instinct of the ear ismusic.?Stuart Saunders Smith1 I. Background: "So much music is based on our capacity to remember"2 Over the last three decades Stuart Saunders Smith has composed prolifically for percussion, with his vibraphone compositions receiv ing particular international acclaim.3 Smith wrote one of them, Links No. 6 (Song Interiors), in 1989 as part of a series of eleven vibraphone compositions composed between 1974 and 1994. He describes Links No. 6 as an essay about popular song and jazz music from the 1930s 21 2 PerspectivesofNew Music through the 1950s?music that he both loves and feels ambivalent about.4 Using over fortypre-existing popular/jazz tunes and fragments as a melodic basis, Smith wrote Links No. 6 as ifhe were making a diary entry that chronicles and critiques the past: varying and transmogrifying the old tunes and mixing themwith newly composed ones based on the ethos of the old.5 For Smith, this recycling of'found' melodies is a way to make discarded art no longer something squandered, but rather to revive it and expand its value.6 As Smith puts it, he is a traditionalist who seeks to build on the past to build the future.7 II. The Composer's Process: "Only by listening can one tell which way to go"8 Even though Smith says that Links No. 6 draws on the past, he set out to "make a piece that continues to develop without looking back, without regard for pre-conceived form, but rather with form emerging on its own from the details" as in very considered improvisation.9 Here, intuition?rather than analysis and planning, adherence to formula, or application of a transformational process?was central to Smith's hearing, varying, and connecting his source material. This manner of composing, which he refers to as dead-reckoning, is analogous to "compass-less navigation." When composing this way, a composer relies exclusively on the ear, sound itself, and the knowledge of how sound works (nurtured in the inner ear) to map patterns made by sound's demand to take its own shape.10 With Links No. 6, Smith did just this: joining and eliding fragments of (and variations on) jazz standards until his composition was fullyformed. Intuition was also essential in guiding Smith's use of silences. Like Austin Phelps, who wrote that no great work in literature or in science was ever wrought by a man who did not love solitude, Smith sees a profound connection between silence and the spiritual.11 For Smith, Links No. 6 embraces silence so that something spiritual can happen.12 He stresses that silence is important in this regard, because when we listen to silence we inevitably get to the soul?to the fundamental vibration of its substructures.13 Smith writes: Stuart Saunders Smith's Links No. 6 213 A rest isnot a wait but a summing-up, an anticipation in silence. A rest isnot a break either. A rest isa hole. The depth ofa rest isdetermined bywhat comes beforeand after. 14 III. The Listener's Process: "Hearing an absolute given in an intuition"15 Smith teaches that there are three kinds of thinking involved inwriting music: fast thinking that is non-verbal, intuitive thinking used to leap great conceptual distances between ideas; slow thinking that is, verbal logical, linear, rational thought inwhich one thought follows another, in a line, single-file; and taste thinking that relies on the intelligence of the senses to see ifan idea is sensuously compelling.16 Three types of listening were used in studying Links No. 6 (Song Interiors): fast listening, that is casual listening drawn on to become 214 PerspectivesofNew Music familiar with a work, to allow the inner ear to develop a sense for the piece; slow listening, that is deliberate and meticulous, employing thought and analysis to make sense of what the ear hears; and taste listening inwhich the inner ear anticipates and relisheswhat it loves. WHAT FAST LISTENING REVEALED At first, Imisinterpreted Links No. 6 as an amorphous wash of...

The Practice of Defining Markets a Comment on Charles W. Smith

Charles Smith in the Market It is with great pleasure that I take this opportunity write a short comment based on Charles Smith's article, Markets as Definitional Practices (2007). This is also an opportunity present and discuss how markets can be understood. Smith, as is known, has written many interesting texts (e.g., Smith 1981; 1989) that deal with markets, and the current one is no exception. Them are many things that I like with Smith's work. I agree that the market is the most central institution of the economy, that the larger aim of economic sociology is develop a theory of markets, and that ethnography is an indispensable strategy in this undertaking. He should also be praised for addressing markets in relation money, which is all too rare in economic sociology. Moreover, Smith has, in a way that resembles Weber, combined hands on knowledge of financial markets with an analytic outlook. Max Weber wrote two pamphlets (Weber [1893-98] 1999) for the Library of Workers in Gottingen on Die Borse (the stock exchange), which show many sociological insights, but as he grew older, Weber further developed his sociological thinking (cf. Swedberg 2000). Smith's view on markets, if I may, has also become more sociological time. However, my comment is not, and should not be, merely a celebration of Smith's work; that would be demean it, as well as the important issue being researched. The issue at stake, as I see it, is markets. I want point out some issues of disagreement, or where I think one should go further or, in some cases, in a different direction. Before I discuss Smith's contribution I make a short summary of how I understand his arguments. Summary of the Arguments Today few economic sociologists disagree with the central statement of Smith, that markets are part of society. Put in the parlance of economic sociology, markets are embedded, not only in other markets (White 2002), but in the environment at large. This almost self-evident insight must be seen in the light of the differentiation of subsystem, in the words of Luhmann, or spheres, in the words of Nietzsche, Simmel, or Weber. These changes took place in the 17th and 18th century (cf. Luhmann [1984] 1995:461). Regardless of the concepts used, it is clear that the economy has become more independent. Thus, though the economy has always been embedded, it has time become less embedded. The theoretical framework Smith develops aims to, frame markets as evolving in a wide range of more encompassing practices (2007:4). In Smith's text, markets are presented as units, in which actors define themselves and their activities by generating shared meaning as a result of actors taking on each others' roles. This co-activity of market actors generates narratives of markets. A point made by Smith that he shares with Simmel, Weber, and Habermas, is that market activities, as Smith says, over other parts of life. What is meant hereby is not only the idea of market externalities, which economists as well as, more recently, Michel Callon (e.g. 1998) have addressed, but what is called marketization, or the logic of the market. This idea is common in economic sociology, and I do not think it is wrong, but it must be put in perspective. One should remember that also non-market activities spill in markets. Markets, it has been shown, may also become more ethical (Aspers 2006). The literature suggests flows in both directions (Hirschman 1986:105-141), i.e., to and the market economy. What is a Market? This is a straightforward question, and though I agree with much of what is said in Smith's text on markets, I fail see a definition or a description, which sets markets apart from other social practices. I therefore propose the following definition of a market: a structure for exchange of rights, which enables people, firms and products be evaluated and priced. …

Solving the Puzzle How to Cut Costs and Improve Service

Solving the Puzzle How to Cut Costs and Improve Service

A Changing Climate of Litigation

Frustrated by perceived federal reticence to act on the growing scientific evidence of climate change, state governments and environmentalists are increasingly turning their attention to the courts. Broad consensus has developed about the reality and seriousness of global warming, but neither the Bush administration nor Congress has yet responded with meaningful action. The result is a situation that is ripe for litigation. Plaintiffs have emerged, suing corporations on the grounds that their greenhouse gas emissions are causing undue harm and suing governments for failing to regulate the corporations. In addition, industry has responded with countersuits of its own.

Policy: Chrysotile on Ice

Parties to the Rotterdam Convention, a group of more than 100 countries that have agreed to share information about hazardous chemicals, elected in October 2006 not to add chrysotile asbestos to the list of hazardous chemicals subject to right-to-know export controls. The 1998 Rotterdam Convention currently requires prior informed consent (PIC) for more than 30 chemicals, meaning an exporting nation must ensure that the substances do not leave its territory without the informed consent of recipient countries. This is the second time the Convention has declined to list chrysotile, a track record that raises serious concerns about the future of the agreement, according to Carl Smith, vice president of the nonprofit Foundation for Advancements in Science and Education. “Listing isn’t a ban,” he says. “It’s just an agreement to share information.” He adds, “Chrysotile would be on the PIC list already if the member countries would just follow through on the agreement they made when they joined the convention. If parties are going to start ignoring the Convention text, the train is off the tracks.” Chrysotile fulfills all the requirements for listing, Smith says, but unlike many of the other chemicals on the list—such as polychlorinated biphenyls, lindane, and all other types of asbestos—chrysotile is still economically important. Use of asbestos in Western countries has declined due to health concerns, but chrysotile-based products such as pipes and roof shingles are still widely used in the developing world. Trade in chrysotile is worth $600 million a year, according to a 7 November 2005 Wall Street Journal estimate. Prior to the October meeting, a panel of 31 experts on the convention’s Chemical Review Committee determined that chrysotile met the criteria for listing. Most of the meeting participants supported the proposal to list chrysotile. But Canada, Ukraine, Russia, Kyrgyzstan, India, Iran, and Peru objected and blocked action, citing either scientific uncertainty about chrysotile’s health effects or the material’s usefulness. The Chrysotile Institute, a nonprofit organization funded by the Canadian government, maintains that chrysotile is not as toxic as amphibole asbestos. Institute president Clement Godbout says the high rates of respiratory disease and cancer associated with asbestos stem from exposure to the amphibole form and to high exposures from dangerous past practices such as blowing asbestos mixtures onto walls for insulation and fireproofing. Used properly, chrysotile is a cost-effective ingredient for the cement that is often used in water pipes in underdeveloped countries, he contends. But many groups say that the concept of controlled use, particularly in developing countries, is a fallacy. Chrysotile is classified as a human carcinogen by the WHO, the Collegium Ramazzini, the World Trade Organization, and other groups. In the meantime, the parties to the Convention have deferred further consideration of the issue until their next meeting in 2008.

How race is made: slavery, segregation, and the senses

This title shows how the five senses shaped southern racial stereotypes.For at least two centuries, argues Mark Smith, southerners used all of their senses - not just their eyes - to construct racial difference and define race. His provocative analysis, extending from the colonial period to the mid-twentieth century, shows how whites of all classes used the artificial binary of black and white to justify slavery and erect the political, legal, and social structure of segregation.Based on painstaking research, How Race Is Made is a highly original, always frank, and often disturbing book. Sensory racial stereotypes were invented and irrational, but at every turn, Smith shows, these constructions of race, immune to logic, signified difference and perpetuated inequality. In order to come to terms with the South's past and present, Smith says, we must explore the sensory dynamics underpinning the deeply emotional construction of race. How Race Is Made takes a bold step toward that understanding.

Charles Darwin and Victorian Visual Culture (review)

Reviewed by: Charles Darwin and Victorian Visual Culture Patricia Fara (bio) Jonathan Smith , Charles Darwin and Victorian Visual Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), xxiii + 349 pages, illustrated, hardback, £60 (ISBN 0 521 85690 6). When he attacked Charles Darwin, John Ruskin was not above flippancy. In an Oxford lecture, Ruskin imagined attaching a hair-brush to a millwheel so that its bristles would be blown flat like birds' feathers after aeons of flight; and in Proserpina, he speculated about an alternative direction for evolution, wondering what the human race would be like if blushing young maidens had held a baboon-like predilection for blue noses when selecting their male partners. Ruskin's was just one amongst the many critical voices that have been obliterated from conventional Darwinian eulogies, which were narrated retrospectively by victors in the prolonged debates about natural selection. But dramatic tales of instantaneous conversion are now being replaced by scenes of bitter conflict: although 2009 will be celebrated world-wide as the 150th anniversary of On the Origin of Species, historians (unlike fund-raisers) no longer depict 1859 as a definitive turning-point when progressive science dealt a death-blow to reactionary religion. In his latest absorbing book, Charles Darwin and Victorian Visual Culture, Jonathan Smith provides a valuable addition to the substantial literature of Darwinian reappraisal by imaginatively deploying imagery to provide novel and illuminating analyses of Darwin's background, reception and influence. Inspired by the theoretical approach of W.J.T. Mitchell, Smith does not focus exclusively on Darwinian images, but instead analyses how they interact with texts. As he puts it, Darwin's 'pictures could only be worth a thousand words through his spending thousands more in elucidating [End Page 128] them' (16). In some ways parallelling Gillian Beer's exploration of Darwin's verbal metaphors, Smith examines how Darwin's visual choices affected and also responded to Victorian life and society by considering a wide diversity of imagery – caricatures, photographs and oil paintings as well as diagrams and illustrations in scholarly publications. As Darwin strove to persuade his readers that his innovatory ideas were valid, he combined rather than supplemented words with pictures, a rhetorical strategy that obliged him to make important decisions about style and colour, about size and orientation, about captions and textual references, about engravers and photographers. Smith's contents page immediately reveals a surprising omission –On the Origin of Species. Darwin's most famous book contains only one illustration, a diagram he designed to explain how distinct species can evolve from a single common ancestor over many many generations. Presented by Smith as a thought-experiment, this assembly of dashed and solid lines, of letters and numbers, is probably the clearest example of how Darwin integrated visual and verbal arguments. Nevertheless, Smith devotes the bulk of his book to a convincing demonstration that Darwin exerted similarly strong control over his apparently more straightforward representations, although he concentrates on analysing the published image, not on the behind-the-scenes discussions between Darwin and his collaborators, such as engravers and photographers. Smith's book itself exemplifies the reciprocal bonding of verbal and visual arguments that he is exposing; regrettably, Smith says little about the restrictions imposed by publishers on Darwin's ambitions, yet his own analyses would have been articulated more powerfully if colour had not been restricted to the dust-jacket. Disappointingly, although this book claims to subvert triumphalist accounts of Darwin, its structure is dictated by Darwin's personal preoccupations rather than by broader aspects of Victorian culture. To cope with Darwin's voluminous output, Smith has marshalled his own copious information into five of Darwin's interests – his barnacles, birds, plants, faces and worms. Within each of these topics, Smith starts by examining Darwin's work, and then explores its connections both with a larger Victorian theme (including the seaside and sexual selection, but concentrating on aesthetics) and also with another author (often Ruskin, but sometimes Philip Gosse, John Gould or Charles Bell). Like Ruskin and other Victorian authors, Darwin devoted great effort to making his texts and illustrations mutually reinforcing, yet Smith is particularly concerned with breakdowns in such symbiotic relationships, which – like all clashes – are...

Monitoring Environmental Exposures: Now It’s Personal

Most diseases are thought to arise from the combined effects of genes and the environment. While great strides have been made in our understanding of human genetics, the contribution of environmental exposures to disease remains poorly understood. This lack of understanding impedes real progress in identifying genetically susceptible people whose responses to environmental agents are severe or unique relative to the general population. If identified, targeted prevention and treatment strategies might be applied to these groups, with potentially lifesaving results. Without more personal exposure information, however, scientists have a limited ability to identify pollution-susceptibility genes that elevate disease risk. This mismatch between exposure and genetic research slows the identification of environmental factors that—if altered or removed—could even prevent some diseases from occurring in the first place. “Genes aren’t modifiable,” explains Frederica Perera, a professor of environmental health sciences at the Mailman School of Public Health of Columbia University. “So, these environmental components in diet, food, water, and air are the only ones we can act on for disease prevention.” Exposure is, at a core level, the instance of environmental stimuli such as chemicals, infectious agents, diet, and lifestyle factors interacting with the human body. But studying human exposures poses difficult challenges. Scientists studying the effects of chemical pollutants can’t ethically dose people, so they often base their dose–response estimates on animal models. Further, they base their estimates of human exposure on indirect measures taken from a person’s home or work environment, along with assumptions about individual behaviors that influence the risk of coming into contact with a given pollutant. In a typical study, epidemiologists might use census figures, questionnaires, and general environmental monitoring data (such as samples of water from a household tap or soil in a schoolyard) to estimate how much of a given chemical an individual has come into contact with, and for how long. But while these studies approximate population-level exposures, they provide little information about real exposures to individual people. And because of this, scientists know little about how specific pollutants—particularly in combination with each other, with diet, and with physical activity—affect any individual’s response to the pollutant. With a clear need for progress, exposure assessment has recently come under the spotlight. This year, the NIEHS launched the Exposure Biology Program (EBP), a four-year effort with two overarching goals: to improve exposure assessment technology, and to identify biomarkers for common pathogenic mechanisms that reflect the human response to environmental agents. Such biomarkers could include changes in metabolites, proteins, or DNA that reflect the individual’s genetic susceptibility to environmental harm. “Right now we don’t really understand how exposure levels translate to human health risk, so our goal is to fill that gap,” says EBP coordinator Brenda Weis, a senior scientific advisor at NIEHS. “We need to get a better measure of exposure at the point of human contact, and we need to integrate those measures with biological response measures derived from samples taken directly from exposed people. So, this is a more ‘medical’ approach to exposure assessment—in the sense that measures are taken on a personal level—rather than the broader, ecological approaches we’ve been using so far.”

Simplicity and Why the Universe Exists: A Reply to Quentin Smith

In a recent Discussion in this journal, Quentin Smith seeks to advance the debate between theistic and atheistic accounts of a universal big-bang singularity (BBS) by suggesting a novel hypothesis that explains why the Universe began with a singularity. The hypothesis he proposes is a ‘new law of nature’, which he calls ‘the Law of the Simplest Beginning’ (LSB) and which says that ‘the simplest possible thing [SPT] comes into being in the simplest possible way’ (128; Smith's italics). To make his case, Smith argues that a BBS is the simplest possible thing and that it did come into being in the simplest possible way. (He also argues (129) that a BBS, as the SPT, is unique; but, since I shall not be concerned here with that claim, I use an indefinite article to refer to a BBS.) A BBS is the simplest possible thing, Smith avers, because it has no positive, essential properties (apart from being the simplest possible thing): It has no spatial extension (a BBS is a geometrical point), no temporal duration, no mass, and is governed by no laws (apart from LSB) (128-9). Moreover, Smith says, a BBS comes into existence in the simplest possible way because ‘it has no positive relations to any grounds for coming into existence’ (129): ‘The simplest possible way [for the Universe] to come into existence is to come to exist from nothing (from no previously existing material, no material cause), to come to exist by nothing (by no efficient cause) and to come to exist for nothing (for no purpose or final cause)’ (129).