Advancing Research on Men and Reproduction

While feminist scholarship has centred reproduction in women’s lives, it has inadequately explored its meanings in men’s. If we assume that reproduction happens in relationships of one kind or another between males and females, then missing men is a considerable oversight. Although there is now much research on fatherhood,merely focussing on this end-stage assumes that women take care of all of the foreplay, leaving unanswered questions in relation, inter alia, to men’s desires for parenthood,men’s involvement in planning or lack of planning to have children, the way men struggle or cope with infertility, their encounters with new reproductive technologies and surrogate mothers, their experiences of foetal screening, their involvement in abortion decision-making, and their experiences of becoming or not becoming a father. In this article I argue that men have compelling experiences throughout the reproductive trajectory deserving of more attention. I offer a profeminist theoretical composition for advancing further enquiries on men and reproduction,which begins with the feminism-informed Critical Studies of Men and Masculinities (CSM), and then weaves this together with the theories of intimate citizenship, sociology of the body, and the sociology of science and technology. I will propose how concepts from these collective theories may be useful in opening up layered questions about gender relations, intimacy, bodies, and technologies in future studies of men and reproduction.

Polymorphism and physiology of arsenate tolerance in Holcus lanatus L. from an uncontaminated site

The polymorphism of arsenate tolerance in a Holcus lanatus L. population from an uncontaminated soil was investigated and a high percentage of tolerant individuals (65%) was found in the population studied. Influx of arsenate was highly correlated to arsenate tolerance within the population, with the most tolerant individuals having the lowest rates of arsenate influx. Isotherms for the high affinity arsenate uptake systems were determined in six tolerant and six non-tolerant genotypes. Tolerant plants had the lowest rates of arsenate influx. This was achieved by adaptation of the V_max of arsenate influx with the V_max of the high affinity uptake system saturating at lower substrate concentrations in the tolerant plants. The polymorphism is discussed with relation to adaptation to the extreme environments to which the plants are subjected on mine-spoil soils. © 1992 Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Binaural Reproduction of Finite Difference Simulations Using Spherical Array Processing

Due to its efficiency and simplicity, the finite-difference time-domain method is becoming a popular choice for solving wideband, transient problems in various fields of acoustics. So far, the issue of extracting a binaural response from finite difference simulations has only been discussed in the context of embedding a listener geometry in the grid. In this paper, we propose and study a method for binaural response rendering based on a spatial decomposition of the sound field. The finite difference grid is locally sampled using a volumetric array of receivers, from which a plane wave density function is computed and integrated with free-field head related transfer functions, in the spherical harmonics domain. The volumetric array is studied in terms of numerical robustness and spatial aliasing. Analytic formulas that predict the performance of the array are developed, facilitating spatial resolution analysis and numerical binaural response analysis for a number of finite difference schemes. Particular emphasis is placed on the effects of numerical dispersion on array processing and on the resulting binaural responses. Our method is compared to a binaural simulation based on the image method. Results indicate good spatial and temporal agreement between the two methods.