bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
"Blacks in all Quarters of the Globe": Anti-Imperialism, Insurgent Cosmopolitanism, and International Labor in Pauline Hopkins's Literary Journalism
Authors: O'Brien Colleen C.
Published: June 2009

“‘Blacks in all Quarters of the Globe’: Anti-Imperialism, Insurgent Cosmopolitanism, and International Labor in Pauline Hopkins’s Literary Journalism” traces the genealogy of black radicalism to Hopkins’s early twentieth century writings in the Colored American Magazine . Not only do these fiction and nonfiction works address race relations in the United States, they also engage international politics by imagining a collective anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist project that connects African Americans to Haitians, Native Americans, and Filipinos. Until Booker T. Washington removed her from her editorial post in the magazine in 1904, Hopkins’s insurgent prose challenged U.S. foreign and domestic policies regarding race and economic exploitation. In historical sketches about Toussaint L’Ouverture or famous women such as Harriet Tubman as well as in Winona , an historical novel that features John Brown as a major character, Hopkins presages a proletarian revolution that will bring about her economic and political version of divine justice.
The Fielding H. Garrison Lecture: “I Am Their Physician”: Dr. Owen J. Wister of Germantown and His Too Many Patients
Authors: Peitzman Steven J.
Published: June 2009

Owen J. Wister, M.D. (1825–1896) acquired one of the busiest “outdoor” practices in nineteenth-century Philadelphia, conducted throughout the city’s large northwest district. Through letters, he described events in his daily rounds to his wife, the writer Sarah Butler Wister, when she was traveling to restore her own health. Wister’s practice was filled with the mundane details of any general doctor’s existence but also with confrontations with sudden and overpowering disease, and sometimes the grisly deaths of friends and family. Often he worked from early morning until late evening, seeing as many as thirty or forty patients scattered over a thirty-mile range. He endured as well frequent calls at night for real or imagined emergencies and maternity cases. In 1869 he collapsed from overwork and was able to resume his career only after a three-year respite. This lecture describes Wister’s practice and his emotional responses to it, as inscribed in the letters. In addition, I explore what attributes he had as a physician and as a man that accounted for his popularity and why the social environment of his practice made it virtually impossible for him to control its demands, even at the cost of his own well-being.
Truth, Trust, and Confidence in Surgery, 1890–1910: Patient Autonomy, Communication, and Consent
Authors: Wilde Sally
Published: June 2009

During the late nineteenth century, there was a dramatic rise in the number of surgical procedures that doctors were prepared to attempt. This article discusses why there was also a rise in the number of people who were prepared to submit to all of these operations. Contrary to popular assumptions, many nineteenth- century patients did not lack effective autonomy. Their consent to surgery could not be taken for granted, especially as surgery was expensive compared with many other forms of treatment. Persuading patients that surgery could help them was an active process, and patients and their friends were often provided with pertinent information, especially in cases in which the doctors themselves had doubts about an operation. Faith in the theoretical possibility of safe surgery may have been just as important in contributing to doctors’ increased willingness to operate as any improvement in practical results. A key factor in the rising popularity of surgery with both doctors and patients was not so much better surgical results as it was confidence in the possibility of better surgical results and the ways in which this confidence was communicated from doctors to patients.
Keeping Modern in Medicine: Pharmaceutical Promotion and Physician Education in Postwar America
Authors: Greene Jeremy A. , Podolsky Scott H.
Published: June 2009

Recent critiques of the role of pharmaceutical promotion in medical practice invoke a nostalgic version of 1950s and 1960s medicine as representing an uncomplicated relationship between an innovative pharmaceutical industry and an idealistic and sovereign medical profession—a relationship that was later corrupted by regulatory or business practice changes in the 1980s or 1990s. However, the escalation of innovation and promotion in the pharmaceutical industry at mid-century had already provoked a broader crisis of overflow in medical education in which physicians came to use both commercial and professional sources in an attempt to “keep modern” by incorporating emerging therapeutics into their practices. This phenomenon was simultaneously a crisis for the medical profession— playing a key role in attempts to inculcate a “rational therapeutics”—and a marketing opportunity for the pharmaceutical industry, and produced the structural foundations for contemporary debates regarding the role of pharmaceutical promotion in medical practice. Tracing the issue from the advent of the wonder drugs through today’s concerns regarding formal CME, we document how and why the pharmaceutical industry was allowed (and even encouraged) to develop and maintain the central role it now plays within postgraduate medical education and prescribing practice.
Challenging Science as Usual: Women's Participation in American Natural History Museum Work, 1870–1950
Authors: Madsen-Brooks Leslie
Published: June 2009

This article uncovers examples of women scientists' attempts to challenge American science from within, to democratize it by making scientific knowledge accessible and its practice comprehensible to a broad audience. It posits that natural history museums are important locations for understanding both the opportunities for and the barriers to women's professional engagement with the public understanding of natural science in the United States. Using a feminist standpoint approach as an entry into these scientists' world, this article explores the work of freelance naturalist and museum founder Martha Maxwell, carcinologist Mary Jane Rathbun, agrostologist Agnes Chase, and botanist Alice Eastwood. While Maxwell's and Rathbun's lives illustrate two women's strategic and situational assimilations to scientific "best practice" and institutional bureaucracies during their particular historical periods, Chase's and Eastwood's lives provide feminists with more timeless models for crafting a democratic science.
"Selling is More of a Habit than Using": Narcotraficante Lola la Chata and Her Threat to Civilization, 1930-1960
Authors: Carey Elaine
Published: June 2009

This article uses materials of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and its predecessor, the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, and of the U.S. Department of the Treasury to document the thirty-year career of the female Mexican heroin peddler and trafficker Lola la Chata and the efforts of police, government officials, and diplomats on both sides of the border to undermine her criminal empire. By placing women within contemporary studies of drug trafficking, la Chata complicates the masculine constructions of the history of narcotics. An examination of the evidence reveals la Chata's transnational threat and her fluidity and flexibility in responding to policy shifts in Mexico, the United States, and Canada over three decades.
"I Try to Live Somewhat in Keeping with my Reputation as a Wealthy Woman": A'Lelia Walker and the Madam C. J. Walker Manufacturing Company
Authors: Dossett Kate
Published: June 2009

This article examines the marketing strategies of A'Lelia Walker, daughter and coworker of Madam C. J. Walker who manufactured beauty and hair products and built up the extremely successful Madam C. J. Walker Manufacturing Company in the early decades of the twentieth century. Whereas the mother was and still is widely admired as a hardworking "race woman," her daughter is frequently dismissed as a spoiled and frivolous heiress whose conspicuous consumption ultimately undermined the Walker brand. By placing A'Lelia's work for the company within the context of recent scholarship on black labor and consumption, this article suggests that we understand A'Lelia's consumer strategies as a savvy response to the new demands of mass marketing. Furthermore, an analysis of the changing and gendered ideas of consumption in early-twentieth century America reveals that A'Lelia's lifestyle challenged both black and white elites' gendered expectations of respectable consumption and helped to reshape the politics of black women's labor.
Once Tortured, Forever Tortured: Testimony and Autobiography in Jacob Rosenberg’s East of Time and Sunrise West
Authors: Freadman Richard
Published: June 2009

It is often assumed that Testimony and Autobiography are clearly distinct genres. On this view Testimony conveys eye-witness reports of particular tragic events, whether momentary or of longer duration (e.g. years in a concentration camp), while Autobiography is seen as more chronologically extended and more introspective. However, since many Holocaust narratives incorporate “testimony” into a larger lifenarrative which, among other things, traces the psychological effects of trauma in later years, it seems reasonable to see Testimony, at least in some instances, as an aspect of Autobiography. As always, such generic markers should be seen as heuristic indicators, not as inflexible taxonomic categories. Most serious writers agentially deploy, develop and combine generic possibilities. One such writer is Jacob G. Rosenberg, Australia's finest Jewish autobiographer and a world class figure in Holocaust writing. Born into a Bundist family in Lodz in 1922, Rosenberg is the author of two award-winning autobiographical volumes, East of Time (2005) and Sunrise West (2007), that narrate his life in the Lodz Ghetto, Auschwitz and Ebensee, and Australia. His is a hybrid art fusing scriptural and folk materials with influences from Yiddish literature and Western modernity. His signature technique -- the imaginatively charged vignette -- is equally attuned to the description of horror and of redemptive, sometimes visionary, enchantment. Though the psychological dimension of his writing owes more to Yiddish sources than to Freudian modernity, his tracing of trauma's aftermath down the years constitutes full-blown autobiographical writing which powerfully incorporates and extends the act of testimony. Rosenberg writes: “Once you have been tortured, you are forever tortured.”
Aesthetics of Unease: A Brechtian Study of Anna Deavere Smith’s Eyewitness Performance in Fires in the Mirror
Authors: Hilfrich Carola
Published: June 2009

This paper discusses the aesthetic and social implications of enacted eyewitness accounts. For Brecht, the principles of eyewitness performance served as a “basic model” for contemporary epic theater as a performed critique of social life, with the “Street Scene” (1940) and a camp scene (1939/40) as the paradigmatic sites of eyewitness acts. With Brecht and Smith, who superimposes these sites in her multi-media work on the Brooklyn Crown Heights Race Riots in 1991 (1992-94), the theatricality of eyewitness accounts, their “uneasy” aesthetics and acting technique, becomes crucial to understanding the present moment in culture. Concomitantly, enacted eyewitness accounts politicize and de-psychologize our understanding of their scenes. They are not about identity – what we are – but about personhood, about how we are as social creatures, in legal, aesthetic, and material terms.
The Illiterate Reader: Aphasia after Auschwitz
Authors: Liu Sarah
Published: June 2009

On the bases of discussions of Art Spiegelman's Maus and Claude Lanzmann's Shoah , as well as of Charlotte Delbo's, Jean Améry's, and Primo Levy's memoirs, Fred Wander's The Seventh Well , John Felstiner's translation of Celan's Todesfuge , and Bernhard Schlink's novel The Reader , this paper presents a model for reading the Holocaust structured around the ideas of “illiteracy” and “aphasia,” the opportunity to transform linguistic disability into a means of access to what seems “beyond the word.” Rather than precluding insight, verbal insufficiency serves as a form of “negative capability,” the potential to dwell in a space with no complete answers, no security, respecting the terms upon which victims of the event had to read their own experience. Using specifically language-related terms emphasizes the difference between knowing about an event through representation and knowledge from direct personal exposure, not to detract from the limits of understanding outlined by trauma theory but to decouple the experience of trauma itself from reading about it. Our belatedness, reading “after Auschwitz,” carries the ethical obligation to recognize the distinction between then and now, between illiteracy as inability to derive meaning from an event without context and a willful blindness that chooses to deny, between aphasia from immediate injury and aphasia from posthumous grief. The Nazi genocide of the Jews leaves a legacy of semantic abuse, yet the voice of the witness also persists, allowing us to turn linguistic breakdown into insight. To read with insightful illiteracy, to recognize our aphasic limitations, is not merely a strategy for coming to terms with the Holocaust but an ethical necessity.
Scholars, Eyewitnesses, and Flesh-Witnesses of War: A Tense Relationship
Authors: Harari Yuval Noah
Published: June 2009

The article explores the complex relations between scholars and witnesses of war, taking as a test-case Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front . The article defines two types of witnesses, which lay claim to two distinct types of authority: eyewitnesses, who lay claim to the factual authority gained from the objective observation of events; and flesh-witnesses, who lay claim to the experiential authority gained from having personally undergone certain experiences.

Eyewitnesses are a valuable and relatively docile source of scholarly information, providing scholars with data about war without challenging the scholars' ability to process this data. The authority of eyewitnesses thereby backs up the authority of scholars. In contrast, flesh-witnesses often challenge the ability of scholars to understand the experience of war. They thereby undermine the authority of scholars, and set themselves up as an alternative and superior authority on war.
Swearing-in Ceremony: The Police in the Kovno Ghetto, November 1, 1942
Authors: Ofer Dalia
Published: June 2009

The leaders of the Jewish police in the Kovno ghetto, a controversial public institution, initiated a project of writing the history of the Jewish police. Their purpose was to leave testimonies and records of the police in the ghetto, and to convey their perspective on the events. The writers were aware of their limitations – their subjectivity and closeness to the events. However, they had an urge to present a narrative describing their organization -- not as memoirs or diaries of individual policemen but as a Geschichte of their unit for future generations.

The paper offers an analysis of one episode in this “History” – viz. of the text and the contexts of the unusual swearing-in ceremony that was held at a relative late point in the history of the ghetto police and that in the “History” is not presented in the chronologically appropriate place – commenting both on the possible meaning of the event and on the manner of its representation.
Primo Levi, Robert Antelme, and the Body of the Muselmann
Authors: Consonni Manuela
Published: June 2009

Part of the project of reweaving the threads of the history of the Third Reich, the essay discusses the complex relation between the testimony of the victims and their body as an epistemic source of the witnessing. On a theoretical bases constructed with the help of Shoah memoirs – by Primo Levi, Jean Améry, Jorge Sempun, Robert Antelme, and others, the paper challenges the notion of the witness as a speaker, a narrator; instead, it treats the kind of victim that since Auschwitz has been known as “a Muselmann” as an integral witness. It is the body of the survivor that constitutes integral testimony; it fills a testimonial lacuna. The presence of the Muselmann is testifiable, and it can replace the memoir by the body as the repository of the event. When the body translates into the corpus of writing, survivor testimony is perceived as incomplete so long as the Muselmann is perceived as the other. The lacuna in survivor narratives is testimony from inside the experience of the Muselmann.
Narrative Tensions: The Archive and the Eyewitness
Authors: Wallen Jeffrey
Published: June 2009

There is a basic tension between eyewitness narratives and archival records (which have attracted the attention for many artists and intellectuals in the last decade or two). Archival material bears the imprint of the bureaucratic, of that which has been institutionally preserved. It gives us traces of the dead, evidence of the past that has been recorded but not (yet) processed; it exists as a mnemonic device, as that which awaits the coming of the researcher to be brought back to life. The eyewitness narrative, on the other hand, is intensely personal, even if also collective. The opposition between these two modes of representation and of memory itself has a long history. In “Plato's Pharmacy” Jacques Derrida stages and deconstructs the opposition between memory and re- and com-memoration, between the living truth and the archive. More recently, Giorgio Agamben, writing about the new Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, analyzes the differences between the “unforgettable” and that which can be recalled to memory and archived.

This paper examines the ways in which the dynamic relations between the living and the dead, the private and the public, the fragment and the whole, the personal and the institutional, and the autobiographical and the historical, inform and complicate -- in different ways -- both the eyewitness narrative and the archive. The discussion will focus on the Memorial at Hohenschönhausen to the East German victims of the Stasi (at the site of the former interrogation center and prison, where the tours are all conducted by former inmates), and the Stasi Museum at the site of the former Stasi headquarters, with its miles of archival files.
Symmetric Numerical Semigroups Generated by Fibonacci and Lucas Triples
Authors: Fel Leonid G.
Published: June 2009

The symmetric numerical semigroups S(
On Newman's Conjecture and Prime Trees
Authors: Robertson Leanne , Small Ben
Published: June 2009

In 1980, Carl Pomerance and J. L. Selfridge proved D. J. Newman's coprime mapping conjecture:
The Dying Rabbit Problem Revisited
Authors: Oller-Marcén Antonio M.
Published: June 2009

In this paper we study a generalization of the Fibonacci sequence in which rabbits are mortal and take more that two months to become mature. In particular we give a general recurrence relation for these sequences (improving the work in [Hoggat and Lind, Fibonacci Quart. 7: 482–487, 1969]) and we calculate explicitly their general term (extending the work in [Miles, Amer. Math. Monthly 67: 745–752, 1960]). In passing, and as a technical requirement, we also study the behavior of the positive real roots of the characteristic polynomial of the considered sequences.
A Note on the q-Binomial Rational Root Theorem
Authors: Lin Ying-Jie
Published: June 2009

We show that a theorem obtained by K. R. Slavin can be easily deduced from the
The Number of Relatively Prime Subsets of {1, 2, . . . , n}
Authors: Ayad Mohamed , Kihel Omar
Published: June 2009

A nonempty subset
Generalized Levinson–Durbin Sequences and Binomial Coefficients
Authors: Shaman Paul
Published: June 2009

The Levinson–Durbin recursion is used to construct the coefficients which define the minimum mean square error predictor of a new observation for a discrete time, second-order stationary stochastic process. As the sample size varies, the coefficients determine what is called a Levinson–Durbin sequence. A generalized Levinson–Durbin sequence is also defined, and we note that binomial coefficients constitute a special case of such a sequence. Generalized Levinson–Durbin sequences obey formulas which generalize relations satisfied by binomial coefficients. Some of these results are extended to vector stationary processes.
Some Arithmetic Properties of Overpartition k-Tuples
Authors: Keister Derrick M. , Sellers James A. , Vary Robert G.
Published: June 2009

Recently, Lovejoy introduced the construct of overpartition pairs which are a natural generalization of overpartitions. Here we generalize that idea to overpartition

where
Characterizations of Midy's Property
Authors: García-Pulgarín Gilberto , Giraldo Hernán
Published: June 2009

In 1836 E. Midy published in France an article where he showed that if
Contaminated Sediment Management by Capping and Deep Water Confined Aquatic Disposal in the Harbor of Oslo
Authors: Breedveld Gijs D. , Pettersen Arne , Oen Amy M. P. , Eek Espen , Cornelissen Gerard , Kibsgaard Anne , Hauge Audun , Jørgensen Torild , Jensen Kjetil Lønborg
Published: June 2009

Dredging has been prohibited in the harbor of Oslo in the past 15 years as a result of serious sediment contamination. Through a joint effort of the Oslo Harbor Authorities, the Norwegian Road Administration, and the Norwegian Pollution Control Authorities, a remediation plan for the redevelopment of the old harbor of Oslo has been implemented. The plan, which will be completed in 2009, includes dredging of the shallow parts of the harbor down to 15 m of water depth (approximately 450,000 m3), capping of the deeper parts of the harbor (1,000,000 m2), as well as construction of a deep water confined aquatic disposal facility for the dredged material at 70-m depth in the inner Oslofjord. To prevent uncontrolled contaminant transport, an on-line monitoring system is operated that consists of buoys with turbidity loggers and a water current velocity meter. Passive samplers are used for time-integrated sampling of organic contaminants. In addition, periodic sampling and analysis of water and suspended solid samples are carried out. To document the environmental benefit from the remediation, contaminant transport is quantified before, during, and after remediation using flux measurements based on in situ diffusion chambers. Monitoring results show that remobilization of contaminants has been very limited and do not exceed the amounts defined in the environmental permit from the pollution control authorities (environmental budget). Capping resulted in more than 90 % reduction in contaminant flux.
Predictors of Multiple Suicide Attempts among Suicidal Black Adolescents
Authors: Merchant Christopher , Kramer Anne , Joe Sean , Venkataraman Sanjeev , King Cheryl A.
Published: June 2009

Psychopathology, social support, and interpersonal orientation were studied in relation to suicide attempt status in acutely suicidal, psychiatrically hospitalized Black adolescents and a matched sample of White adolescents. In the total sample, multiple attempters were differentiated by lower perceived support. Within the Black youth subsample, social comparison and positive stimulation from others differentiated multiple attempters from single attempters/ideators. Only suicidal ideation predicted multiple attempts among White youth and only higher interpersonal orientation predicted multiple suicide attempts within Black adolescents.
Prognosis after Adolescent Suicide Attempt: Mental Health, Psychiatric Treatment, and Suicide Attempts in a Nine‐Year Follow‐up Study
Authors: Groholt Berit , Ekeberg ØIvind
Published: June 2009

The prevalence of mental health and suicidal behavior was examined 8 to 10 years after an adolescent suicide attempt. Of 71 persons, 79% had at least one psychiatric disorder (mean 1.7) at follow‐up, most commonly depression (46%), personality disorder (46%), and anxiety disorder (42%). The stability of diagnoses was moderate. The suicide attempters had received a substantial amount of treatment. One third had received inpatient treatment, and 78% psychiatric treatment, despite low compliance shortly after the index suicide attempt. At follow‐up, repeated suicide attempts were found in 44% of the sample, and half of those had an affective or personality disorder.
The Impact of Parental Suicide on Child and Adolescent Offspring
Authors: Kuramoto S. Janet , Brent David A. , Wilcox Holly C.
Published: June 2009

Child and adolescent survivors of parental suicide experience two stressful events simultaneously: (1) the loss of a primary caregiver, and (2) suicidal death of a significant person. These youths are thought to be at increased risk for mental health problems, but a systematic review of studies on these survivors has not yet been conducted. A comprehensive search for published literature identified nine studies. The existent studies provided modest yet inconsistent evidence on the impact of parental suicide on offspring psychiatric and psychosocial outcomes. More methodologically rigorous research is needed to inform and guide postvention efforts for these survivors.
Risk for Suicide among Medicaid Beneficiaries
Authors: Becker Marion , Brown Lisa , Ochshorn Ezra , Diamond Ronald
Published: June 2009

Demographic, diagnostic, and service expenditure characteristics of Florida Medicaid enrollees who died by suicide were investigated. Among persons receiving Medicaid and Supplemental Security Income (SSI), findings indicate the most powerful predictors of suicide were involuntary psychiatric examination, mental health hospitalization, and high mental health service use. Among Medicaid enrollees not receiving SSI, strongest suicide predictors were mental health hospitalization, high expenditures for physical health medications, and involuntary psychiatric examination. Findings suggest reducing involuntary psychiatric examinations and mental health hospitalizations while improving physical health may reduce suicide in the Medicaid population. Comprehensive hospital discharge planning, adherence monitoring with follow‐up care, training mental health providers in assessing suicide lethality, and providing adequate assessment time are all crucial to achieve these objectives.
Exposure to a Mnemonic Interferes with Recall of Suicide Warning Signs in a Community‐Based Suicide Prevention Program
Authors: Bryan Craig J. , Steiner‐Pappalardo Nicole , Rudd M. David
Published: June 2009

The incremental impact of adding a mnemonic to remember suicide warning signs to the Air Force Suicide Prevention Program (AFSPP) community awareness briefing was investigated with a sample of young, junior‐enlisted airmen. Participants in the standard briefing significantly increased their ability to list suicide warning signs and improved consistency with an expert consensus list, whereas participants in the standard briefing plus mnemonic demonstrated no learning. Both groups demonstrated positive changes in beliefs about suicide. Results suggest that inclusion of the mnemonic in the AFSPP briefing interfered with participants' ability to learn suicide warning signs, and that increased confidence in the perceived ability to recognize suicide risk is not related to actual ability to accurately recall warning signs.
Suicide Rates in the World: 1950–2004
Authors: Liu Kayuet
Published: June 2009

The cross‐country differences and the trends of suicide rates in 71 countries from 1950 to 2004 are described. The data are from the World Health Organization's Mortality Database. It shows that suicide rates vary greatly across countries, even within the same region or at similar levels of development. Random‐effect models were used to examine the between‐country and within‐country stabilities in suicide rates. The results show that more than 90% of the variance in suicide rates is due to between‐country differences, suggesting suicide rates display a strong temporal stability.
A Study of Suicide and Socioeconomic Factors
Authors: Ying Yung‐hsiang , Chang Koyin
Published: June 2009

The topic of suicide has long been an important socioeconomic issue studied in many countries. Suicides inject an atmosphere of unrest into society, and media attention furthers that social uneasiness. From the viewpoint of economics and management, suicide is a waste of human resource: it decreases the labor force in society and deteriorates human capital. This paper provides a series of analyses of suicide rate based on theoretical reasoning and empirical approaches. Aggregate data from G7 countries are obtained and stacked into panel data for analysis. Data are collected for different age groups. Even though suicide issues have been extensively discussed in the past, newly developed econometric tools are applied to her. Beyond previously recognized relationships between economic factors and suicide rates findings include that unemployment strikes men more than women in terms of psychological pressure: for middle age or older women, unemployment may even be positive for the entire family; and female labor force participation exerts pressure on male counterparts and increases its suicide rate. As a result, a low income family with an unemployed man and an employed woman is at high risk for adult male suicide.
Female Suicide Rates in Ghizer, Pakistan
Authors: Khan Murad M. , Ahmed Aziz , Khan Sultan R.
Published: June 2009

Suicide is an understudied subject in Pakistan. There are many social, legal, and religious sanctions against it. National rates of suicides are not known. We calculated suicide rates of women in the Ghizer District of the remote Northern Areas of Pakistan. During years 2000 to 2004, 49 women committed suicide. Taking average mean population for women for 5 years as 65,783, we calculated annual crude suicide rates for women as 14.89/100,000/year. For women over the age of 15 years, rates were 33.22/100,000/year; age‐specific rates for 15–24 years were 61.07/100,000 per year. These figures are considerably higher than suicide rates in other parts of Pakistan and may be related to high psychiatric morbidity in Pakistani women. This study underscores the need for a standardized system of registration of suicides in Pakistan. There is also urgent need to address high psychological distress in women in Pakistan.
Loss of Arctic sea ice causing punctuated change in sightings of killer whales (Orcinus orca) over the past century
Authors: Higdon Jeff W. , Ferguson Steven H.
Published: June 2009

Killer whales (Orcinus orca) are major predators that may reshape marine ecosystems via top‐down forcing. Climate change models predict major reductions in sea ice with the subsequent expectation for readjustments of species' distribution and abundance. Here, we measure changes in killer whale distribution in the Hudson Bay region with decreasing sea ice as an example of global readjustments occurring with climate change. We summarize records of killer whales in Hudson Bay, Hudson Strait, and Foxe Basin in the eastern Canadian Arctic and relate them to an historical sea ice data set while accounting for spatial and temporal autocorrelation in the data. We find evidence for “choke points,” where sea ice inhibits killer whale movement, thereby creating restrictions to their Arctic distribution. We hypothesize that a threshold exists in seasonal sea ice concentration within these choke points that results in pulses in advancements in distribution of an ice‐avoiding predator. Hudson Strait appears to have been a significant sea ice choke point that opened up approximately 50 years ago allowing for an initial punctuated appearance of killer whales followed by a gradual advancing distribution within the entire Hudson Bay region. Killer whale sightings have increased exponentially and are now reported in the Hudson Bay region every summer. We predict that other choke points will soon open up with continued sea ice melt producing punctuated predator–prey trophic cascades across the Arctic.
Multiple regression models for hindcasting and forecasting midsummer hypoxia in the Gulf of Mexico
Authors: Greene Richard M. , Lehrter John C. , III James D. Hagy
Published: June 2009

A new suite of multiple regression models was developed that describes relationships between the area of bottom water hypoxia along the northern Gulf of Mexico and Mississippi–Atchafalaya River nitrate concentration, total phosphorus (TP) concentration, and discharge. Model input variables were derived from two load estimation methods, the adjusted maximum likelihood estimation (AMLE) and the composite (COMP) method, developed by the U.S. Geological Survey. Variability in midsummer hypoxic area was described by models that incorporated May discharge, May nitrate, and February TP concentrations or their spring (discharge and nitrate) and winter (TP) averages. The regression models predicted the observed hypoxic area within ±30%, yet model residuals showed an increasing trend with time. An additional model variable, Epoch, which allowed post‐1993 observations to have a different intercept than earlier observations, suggested that hypoxic area has been 6450 km2 greater per unit discharge and nutrients since 1993. Model forecasts predicted that a dual 45% reduction in nitrate and TP concentration would likely reduce hypoxic area to approximately 5000 km2, the coastal goal established by the Mississippi River/Gulf of Mexico Watershed Nutrient Task Force. However, the COMP load estimation method, which is more accurate than the AMLE method, resulted in a smaller predicted hypoxia response to any given nutrient reduction than models based on the AMLE method. Monte Carlo simulations predicted that five years after an instantaneous 50% nitrate reduction or dual 45% nitrate and TP reduction it would be possible to resolve a significant reduction in hypoxic area. However, if nutrient reduction targets were achieved gradually (e.g., over 10 years), much more than a decade would be required before a significant downward trend in both nutrient concentrations and hypoxic area could be resolved against the large background of interannual variability. The multiple regression models and statistical approaches applied provide improved capabilities for evaluating dual nutrient management strategies to address Gulf hypoxia and a clearer perspective on the strengths and limitations of approaching the problem using regression models.
Risk assessment of genetically engineered crops: fitness effects of virus‐resistance transgenes in wild Cucurbita pepo
Authors: Laughlin Karen D. , Power Alison G. , Snow Allison A. , Spencer Lawrence J.
Published: June 2009

The development of crops genetically engineered for pathogen resistance has raised concerns that crop‐to‐wild gene flow could release wild or weedy relatives from regulation by the pathogens targeted by the transgenes that confer resistance. Investigation of these risks has also raised questions about the impact of gene flow from conventional crops into wild plant populations. Viruses in natural plant populations can play important roles in plant fecundity and competitive interactions. Here, we show that virus‐resistance transgenes and conventional crop genes can increase fecundity of wild plants under virus pressure. We asked how gene flow from a cultivated squash (Cucurbita pepo) engineered for virus resistance would affect the fecundity of wild squash (C. pepo) in the presence and absence of virus pressure. A transgenic squash cultivar was crossed and backcrossed with wild C. pepo from Arkansas. Wild C. pepo, transgenic backcross plants, and non‐transgenic backcross plants were compared in field plots in Ithaca, New York, USA. The second and third generations of backcrosses (BC2 and BC3) were used in 2002 and 2003, respectively. One‐half of the plants were inoculated with zucchini yellow mosaic virus (ZYMV), and one‐half of the plants were maintained as healthy controls. Virus pressure dramatically decreased the fecundity of wild C. pepo plants and non‐transgenic backcross plants relative to transgenic backcross plants, which showed continued functioning of the virus‐resistance transgene. In 2002, non‐transgenic backcross fecundity was slightly higher than wild C. pepo fecundity under virus pressure, indicating a possible benefit of conventional crop alleles, but they did not differ in 2003 when fecundity was lower in both groups. We detected no fitness costs of the transgene in the absence of the virus. If viruses play a role in the population dynamics of wild C. pepo, we predict that gene flow from transgenic, virus‐resistant squash and, to a much lesser extent, conventionally bred squash would increase C. pepo fecundity. Studies such as this one, in combination with documentation of the probability of crop‐to‐wild gene flow and surveys of virus incidence in wild populations, can provide a solid basis for environmental risk assessments of crops genetically engineered for virus resistance.
Decomposition of leaf litter from a native tree and an actinorhizal invasive across riparian habitats
Authors: Harner Mary J. , Crenshaw Chelsea L. , Abelho Manuela , Stursova Martina , Shah Jennifer J. Follstad , Sinsabaugh Robert L.
Published: June 2009

Dynamics of nutrient exchange between floodplains and rivers have been altered by changes in flow management and proliferation of nonnative plants. We tested the hypothesis that the nonnative, actinorhizal tree, Russian olive (Elaeagnus angustifolia), alters dynamics of leaf litter decomposition compared to native cottonwood (Populus deltoidesssp.wislizeni) along the Rio Grande, a river with a modified flow regime, in central New Mexico (USA). Leaf litter was placed in the river channel and the surface and subsurface horizons of forest soil at seven riparian sites that differed in their hydrologic connection to the river. All sites had a cottonwood canopy with a Russian olive‐dominated understory. Mass loss rates, nutrient content, fungal biomass, extracellular enzyme activities (EEA), and macroinvertebrate colonization were followed for three months in the river and one year in forests. Initial nitrogen (N) content of Russian olive litter (2.2%) was more than four times that of cottonwood (0.5%). Mass loss rates (k; in units of d−1) were greatest in the river (Russian olive,k= 0.0249; cottonwood,k= 0.0226), intermediate in subsurface soil (Russian olive,k= 0.0072; cottonwood,k= 0.0031), and slowest on the soil surface (Russian olive,k= 0.0034; cottonwood,k= 0.0012) in a ratio of about 10:2:1. Rates of mass loss in the river were indistinguishable between species and proportional to macroinvertebrate colonization. In the riparian forest, Russian olive decayed significantly faster than cottonwood in both soil horizons. Terrestrial decomposition rates were related positively to EEA, fungal biomass, and litter N, whereas differences among floodplain sites were related to hydrologic connectivity with the river. Because nutrient exchanges between riparian forests and the river have been constrained by flow management, Russian olive litter represents a significant annual input of N to riparian forests, which now retain a large portion of slowly decomposing cottonwood litter with a high potential for N immobilization. As a result, retention and mineralization of litter N within these forests is controlled by hydrologic connectivity to the river, which affects litter export and in situ decomposition.
Variation in ecosystem function in Appalachian streams along an acidity gradient
Authors: Simon K. S. , Simon M. A. , Benfield E. F.
Published: June 2009

Acidification is a widespread phenomenon that damages aquatic systems, and it has been the focus of intensive management efforts. While most management has focused on community structure as an endpoint, ecosystem function is also sensitive to acidification and important in stream health. We examined how a key ecosystem function in streams, leaf breakdown, varied along a gradient of pH resulting from acid deposition, natural conditions, and liming. We also measured how invertebrate and microbial assemblage structure and microbial function were related to altered leaf breakdown rates. Leaf breakdown rates declined more than threefold along a gradient of stream acidity from pH 6.8 to 4.9. The diversity of leaf‐shredding invertebrates, bacteria, and fungi showed little response to variation in pH. The abundance of one acid‐sensitive caddisfly, Lepidostoma, declined with acidification, and Lepidostoma abundance explained 37% of the variation in leaf breakdown rates among sites. Microbial respiration was suppressed along the acidity gradient, although the pattern was weaker than that for breakdown rate. In short‐term laboratory incubations, microbes at acidic and circumneutral sites demonstrated adaptation to ambient pH. The activity of microbial extracellular enzymes was strongly influenced by pH. In particular, the pattern of activity of phosphatase indicated increasing P limitation of microbes with increasing acidification. Our results show that leaf breakdown is a sensitive tool for examining the response of stream function to acidification and also for defining the mechanisms that drive functional response. Future management efforts should focus on key taxa that are particularly sensitive and effective at shredding leaves and also the role of shifting acidity in mediating the availability of phosphorus to microbial films that are important for stream function.
Spatial and temporal patterns of chronic wasting disease: fine‐scale mapping of a wildlife epidemic in Wisconsin
Authors: Osnas Erik E. , Heisey Dennis M. , Rolley Robert E. , Samuel Michael D.
Published: June 2009

Emerging infectious diseases threaten wildlife populations and human health. Understanding the spatial distributions of these new diseases is important for disease management and policy makers; however, the data are complicated by heterogeneities across host classes, sampling variance, sampling biases, and the space–time epidemic process. Ignoring these issues can lead to false conclusions or obscure important patterns in the data, such as spatial variation in disease prevalence. Here, we applied hierarchical Bayesian disease mapping methods to account for risk factors and to estimate spatial and temporal patterns of infection by chronic wasting disease (CWD) in white‐tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) of Wisconsin, USA. We found significant heterogeneities for infection due to age, sex, and spatial location. Infection probability increased with age for all young deer, increased with age faster for young males, and then declined for some older animals, as expected from disease‐associated mortality and age‐related changes in infection risk. We found that disease prevalence was clustered in a central location, as expected under a simple spatial epidemic process where disease prevalence should increase with time and expand spatially. However, we could not detect any consistent temporal or spatiotemporal trends in CWD prevalence. Estimates of the temporal trend indicated that prevalence may have decreased or increased with nearly equal posterior probability, and the model without temporal or spatiotemporal effects was nearly equivalent to models with these effects based on deviance information criteria. For maximum interpretability of the role of location as a disease risk factor, we used the technique of direct standardization for prevalence mapping, which we develop and describe. These mapping results allow disease management actions to be employed with reference to the estimated spatial distribution of the disease and to those host classes most at risk. Future wildlife epidemiology studies should employ hierarchical Bayesian methods to smooth estimated quantities across space and time, account for heterogeneities, and then report disease rates based on an appropriate standardization.
Land‐to‐sea connectivity: linking human‐derived terrestrial subsidies to subtidal habitat change on open rocky coasts
Authors: Gorman Daniel , Russell Bayden D. , Connell Sean D.
Published: June 2009

Spatial subsidies are considered strong where differences in resource availability between donor and recipient systems are greatest. We tested whether human activities on land can increase subsidies of terrigenous nitrogen to open rocky coasts and whether these differences can predict apparent deforestation of kelp forests. We first identified landscape‐scale variation in the human‐mediated transfer of dissolved inorganic nitrogen (DIN) from natural, agricultural, and urban catchments to temperate coasts after episodes of rainfall. Compared to natural catchments, subsidies of DIN were on average 8–407 times greater in urban catchments, and 1–63 times greater in agricultural catchments. Urban derived nitrogen was attributed to the release of sewage effluent, as delineated by δ15N isotopic values of transplanted algae. Having made this link, we then assessed whether this catchment‐scale variation may account for variation in structure of subtidal habitats, particularly as related to theory of nutrient‐driven shifts of habitat from perennial (i.e., canopy‐forming algae) to opportunistic species (i.e., turf‐forming algae). We not only detected patterns consistent with this theory, but also established that the size and total proportion of patches of turf‐forming algae were greater where the ratio of donor : recipient nitrogen loads was greater (i.e., size of subsidy). An important realization was that deforestation may be more strongly related to variation in the size of subsidy rather than size of human populations, particularly among urban catchments. These data directly link the type of human activity within catchments to the modification of land‐to‐sea subsidies and indirectly support theory that predicts terrestrial inputs to have greater ecological effects where the disparity in resource availability between donor and recipient is exacerbated. Our evidence has been used by coastal managers to reconsider their management of coastal systems and has subsequently contributed to new water‐recycling policy and initiatives.
Modeling the effects of environmental disturbance on wildlife communities: avian responses to prescribed fire
Authors: Russell Robin E. , Royle J. Andrew , Saab Victoria A. , Lehmkuhl John F. , Block William M. , Sauer John R.
Published: June 2009

Prescribed fire is a management tool used to reduce fuel loads on public lands in forested areas in the western United States. Identifying the impacts of prescribed fire on bird communities in ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa) forests is necessary for providing land management agencies with information regarding the effects of fuel reduction on sensitive, threatened, and migratory bird species. Recent developments in occupancy modeling have established a framework for quantifying the impacts of management practices on wildlife community dynamics. We describe a Bayesian hierarchical model of multi‐species occupancy accounting for detection probability, and we demonstrate the model's usefulness for identifying effects of habitat disturbances on wildlife communities. Advantages to using the model include the ability to estimate the effects of environmental impacts on rare or elusive species, the intuitive nature of the modeling, the incorporation of detection probability, the estimation of parameter uncertainty, the flexibility of the model to suit a variety of experimental designs, and the composite estimate of the response that applies to the collection of observed species as opposed to merely a small subset of common species. Our modeling of the impacts of prescribed fire on avian communities in a ponderosa pine forest in Washington indicate that prescribed fire treatments result in increased occupancy rates for several bark‐insectivore, cavity‐nesting species including a management species of interest, Black‐backed Woodpeckers (Picoides arcticus). Three aerial insectivore species, and the ground insectivore, American Robin (Turdus migratorius), also responded positively to prescribed fire, whereas three foliage insectivores and two seed specialists, Clark's Nutcracker (Nucifraga columbiana) and the Pine Siskin (Carduelis pinus), declined following treatments. Land management agencies interested in determining the effects of habitat manipulations on wildlife communities can use these methods to provide guidance for future management activities.