Times of Violence

This essay reads the NBC drama The West Wing against the cultural anxieties and ambivalences about the contemporary presidency, arguing that the program presents a powerful and meaningful “presidentiality,” a discursive construction of the presidency with ideological and rhetorical relevance. Specifically, The West Wing mimetically captures a view of the presidency, offering, in the process, a romantic vision of the institution that reflects the postmodernity of U.S. politics and the uncertainty that pervades questions of heroism and hierarchy at the turn of the twenty‐first century. In part, the political drama disrupts images of traditional power politics, presenting a more chaotic, inclusive, and communal portrayal of the presidency. Against this narrative backdrop, however, we contend that the program situates its postmodern rendition of presidentiality within a cathartic portrayal of the presidency, relying on conservative demarcations of presidential leadership ordered by commitments to intellectualism, militarism, masculinity, and whiteness.     

Teenagers' Use of MSN Features,Discussion Topics,and Online Friendship Development: The Impact of Media Richness and Communication Control

With a sample of 248 Hong Kong adolescents, this study probed the impact of media richness and communication control on teenagers' use of MSN® for online friendship development. Both media richness and communication control contributed to MSN's overall functionality and teenagers' self-presentation and friendship development. Media richness positively influenced both social and task communications and shortened the time needed to turn a stranger to friend, whereas communication control showed a positive relationship to social friendship communication. Rich features, such as webcam and MSN Spaces, facilitated the increase of acquaintances, new friends, opposite-sex friends, and total number of friends, whereas messaging helped build close friendships. Overall, media richness and communication control appeared to be valid constructs in explaining teenagers' MSN feature use and online friendship development.     

Latino expectations of communicative competence: A focus group interview study

Drawing on Martin, Hammer, and Bradford's (1994) work on intercultural communicative competence, this investigation explored Latino expectations of communicative competence using focus group interviews. Like the Martin et al. (1994) study, communicative competence was examined in four contexts — intracultural‐social, intracultural‐task, intercultural‐social, and intercultural‐task. Results indicated overall support for seven of Martin et al.’s (1994) eight behavioral categories. Data from focus group interviews in this study suggested an additional competence category specific to task contexts as well as some emic behaviors not identified in the Martin et al. (1994) investigation.     

University Students’ Conceptualization and Interpretation of Topographic Maps

This study investigates the strategies and assumptions that college students entering an introductory physical geology laboratory use to interpret topographic maps, and follows the progress of the students during the laboratory to analyze changes in those strategies and assumptions. To elicit students’ strategies and assumptions, we created and refined a topographic visualization test that was administered before and after instruction to 26 students during the first semester of the study and to 92 students during the second semester. To more deeply understand how students think about and conceptualize topographic maps, we focused on eight individual students who were interviewed about their pretest and posttest answers as well as videotaped during three laboratory sessions. We found that even students who claim never to have worked with topographic maps often perform impressively on their pretests by making useful assumptions about symbolic topographic information. Some students, however, begin with less productive assumptions that may be unfamiliar to some instructors (e.g., thinking that the spacing of contour lines indicates elevation instead of slope). Initial success should not be misinterpreted, however, as an integrated understanding of topographic maps. Only in posttest interviews do most students express explanations integrating multiple normative assumptions. In addition to highlighting the strategies and assumptions that college students use to interpret topographic maps, we outline the implications of these findings for the design of learning objectives, curricular activities, and assessments for topographic lessons in introductory college geology courses and the training of future geoscientists.     

Writing and writers: the perceptions of young children and their parents

Over the past three decades early writing research has focused on the processes involved as children learn to write. There is now a powerful evidence base to show that children’s earliest discoveries about written language are learned through active engagement with their social and cultural worlds. In addition, the idea of writing development as an emergent process is well established. The study reported in this paper adopted case study methodology combined with an age-appropriate data collection technique in order to explore children’s perceptions of themselves as writers. A focused task using a hand puppet called Baby Bear was used to elicit children’s perceptions. The children’s parents were interviewed to elicit their perceptions of their children as writers. This small-scale exploratory study found that the children had clear perceptions about themselves as writers. There were important links between parents’ perceptions of their children as writers and the ethos for writing they created in the home. It was found that, overall, more positive parental perceptions were linked with more attention to the meaning of children’s writing. It is concluded that early years settings could usefully identify and compare children’s and parents’ perceptions of writing in order to enhance children’s writing development.     

Relative Endurance of High- and Low-Strength Women

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to analyze the relative endurance ability of women in terms of muscle mass, static muscle strength, and critical occluding tension levels (COTL). Women physical education majors volunteered as subjects for this study (N = 56). The percentages of grip strength used for the relative endurance tests were 30%, 45%, 60%, and 75% with local circulation to the forearm muscles intact and artificially occluded by a pressure cuff. Analysis of the data revealed that there was no significant difference in the endurance times of high- and low-strength women. The relationship between grip strength and relative endurance time for each tension level was insignificant (r = ?.23 to ?.34). These findings were discussed in light of the relatively small differences in muscle mass and similarity in COTL of high- and low-strength women.     

Hyperferritinemia in Pulmonary Tuberculosis

High ferritin levels have been found to be associated with non infectious as well as infectious causes including tuberculosis. This is one case report of 41 year old male who presented with cough with expectoration. The patient had Multi drug resistant tuberculosis (MDRTB) and type 2 diabetes mellitus. The laboratory findings showed Iron 280 μg/dl, Total iron binding capacity (TIBC) 61 μg/dl, and ferritin 92,945 ng/ml which indicates that iron is an essential nutrient for the survival of the pathogen Mycobacterium tuberculosis.     

Successful Scholarly Communication at a Small University: Integration of Education,Services, and an Institutional Repository at Valparaiso University

Beginning in 2011, the Christopher Center Library Services (CCLS) unit at Valparaiso University (VU) started implementing new scholarly communication services utilizing two different components: (1) the education and training of library staff in scholarly communication trends and issues; and (2) the implementation of ValpoScholar, VU's institutional repository (IR) and its associated services. These components allowed for new skills to be developed, new services to be delivered, and the library's digital collections to grow with minimal impact to existing services. This model may provide a framework for other small institutions interested in adding scholarly communication services to their existing library services.     

Evaluation of three point-of-care healthcare databases: BMJ Point-of-Care, Clin-eguide and Nursing Reference Centre

Background: Point of care resources make it easier for clinicians to find answers to questions that arise during a clinical encounter. In order to make informed purchase decisions in times of tight budgets, librarians need to have a better understanding of which resources will meet their patrons’ clinical information needs. Objectives: The goal of this study was to assess the content, interface and usability of three point‐of‐care tools: BMJ Point‐of‐Care, Clin‐eguide and Nursing Reference Centre. Methods: A questionnaire designed to gather quantitative and qualitative data was created using Survey Monkey. The survey was distributed to healthcare practitioners in Alberta’s two largest health regions, and the data were analysed for emergent themes. Results: The themes that arose – ease of use, validated content, relevancy to practice – generally echoed those stated in the literature. No one database fared significantly better, due to differing features, content and client preference. Conclusions: Despite the limitations of the survey, the themes that emerged provide a springboard for future research on the efficacy of information resources used at the point of care, and the need for deeper analysis of these recent additions to the medical information market.