Stable oxygen isotope and Mg/Ca ratios on Globorotalia inflata

We present a species-specific Mg/Ca-calcification temperature calibration for Globorotalia inflata from a suite of 38 core top samples from the South Atlantic (from 8° to 49°S). G. inflata is a deep-dwelling planktonic foraminifer commonly occurring in subtropical to subpolar conditions, which qualifies it for reconstructions of the permanent thermocline. Apparent calcification depths and calcification temperatures were determined by comparing measured d18O with equilibrium d18O of calcite based on water column properties. Based on our core top samples, G. inflata apparent calcification depth is constant throughout the South Atlantic mid-latitudes with a depth of 350-400 m within the permanent thermocline. The resulting Mg/Ca-calcification temperature calibration is Mg/Ca = 0.72 +/-0.045/0.042 exp (0.076 +0.006 calcification 2 temperature) (r2 = 0.81) and covers the temperature range 3.1-16.5°C. We applied our Mg/Ca calibration to gravity core PS2495-3 from the Mid-Atlantic Ridge at ca. 41°S to test its validity by reconstructing a low-resolution record covering the last two glacial-interglacial cycles. Our paleotemperature record reveals large changes in temperature for Terminations I and II, when permanent thermocline temperature increased by as much as 8°C. The G. inflata paleotemperature record suggests that oceanic fronts repeatedly migrated over the location of site PS2495-3 during the last 160 kyr. This study shows the potential of G. inflata Mg/Ca to reconstruct paleotemperatures in the permanent thermocline.

Cidades saudáveis e qualidade de vida em Uberlândia (MG): aportes metodológicos para um processo em construção

The current study includes theoretical and methodological reflections on the quality of life in the city of Uberlândia, Minas Gerais. It started from the thought that the quality of life is multifactorial and is permanently under construction and the main objective of analyzing it as one of the componets of Healthy Cities's moviment. The theoretical research focused on the concepts of healthy cities, quality of life, health, sustainability, well-being, happiness, indexes and indicators. From the use of multiple search strategies, documentary and on field of quantitative and qualitative character, this research of exploratory descriptive nature can offers a contribution to the studies on the quality of life in cities. It is proposed that the studies startes to work with some concept, like some notions os life quality adequated for some paticular reality, whose notions can approach concepts already established as health. This step is important on the exploratory researches. The studies may include aspects of objective analysis, subjective or both. The objective dimension, which is most common approach, are traditionally considered variables and indicators related to: the urban infrastructure (health, education, leisure, security, mobility), dwelling (quantitative and qualitative dwlling deficit), the urban structure (density and mix uses), socioeconomic characteristics (age, income, education), urban infrastructure (sanitation, communication), governance (social mobilization and participation). To focus on the subjective dimension, most recent and unusual, it is proposed to consider the (dis)satisfaction, the personal assessment in relation to the objective aspects. In conclusion, being intrinsically related to the health, the quality of life also has a number of determinants, and the ideal of the reach of quality of life depends on the action of all citizens based on the recognition of networks and territories, in a interescalar perspective and intersectoral. Therefore, emphasis in given on the potential of tools, such as the observatories, to monitor and intervent in reality, aiming in a building process of healthy cities.

Responsiveness and clinical utility of the geriatric self-efficacy index for urinary incontinence

OBJECTIVES: To report on the responsiveness testing and clinical utility of the 12-item Geriatric Self-Efficacy Index for Urinary Incontinence (GSE-UI). DESIGN: Prospective cohort study. SETTING: Six urinary incontinence (UI) outpatient clinics in Quebec, Canada. PARTICIPANTS: Community-dwelling incontinent adults aged 65 and older. MEASUREMENTS: The abridged 12-item GSE-UI, measuring older adults' level of confidence for preventing urine loss, was administered to all new consecutive incontinent patients 1 week before their initial clinic visit, at baseline, and 3 months posttreatment. At follow-up, a positive rating of improvement in UI was ascertained from patients and their physicians using the Patient's and Clinician's Global Impression of Improvement scales, respectively. Responsiveness of the GSE-UI was calculated using Guyatt's change index. Its clinical utility was determined using receiver operating curves. RESULTS: Eighty-nine of 228 eligible patients (39.0%) participated (mean age 72.6+5.8, range 65–90). At 3-month follow-up, 22.5% of patients were very much better, and 41.6% were a little or much better. Guyatt's change index was 2.6 for patients who changed by a clinically meaningful amount and 1.5 for patients having experienced any level of improvement. An improvement of 14 points on the 12-item GSE-UI had a sensitivity of 75.1% and a specificity of 78.2% for detecting clinically meaningful changes in UI status. Mean GSE-UI scores varied according to improvement status (P<.001) and correlated with changes in quality-of-life scores (r=0.7, P<.001) and reductions in UI episodes (r=0.4, P=.004). CONCLUSION: The GSE-UI is responsive and clinically useful.

Other Than a Citizen: Vernacular Poetics in Postwar America

Few symbols of 1950s-1960s America remain as central to our contemporary conception of Cold War culture as the iconic ranch-style suburban home. While the house took center stage in the Nixon/Khrushchev kitchen debates as a symbol of modern efficiency and capitalist values, its popularity depended largely upon its obvious appropriation of vernacular architecture from the 19th century, those California haciendas and Texas dogtrots that dotted the American west. Contractors like William Levitt modernized the historical common houses, hermetically sealing their porous construction, all while using the ranch-style roots of the dwelling to galvanize a myth of an indigenous American culture. At a moment of intense occupational bureaucracy, political uncertainty and atomized social life, the rancher gave a self-identifying white consumer base reason to believe they could master their own plot in the expansive frontier. Only one example of America’s mid-century love affair with commodified vernacular forms, the ranch-style home represents a broad effort on the part of corporate and governmental interest groups to transform the vernacular into a style that expresses a distinctly homogenous vision of American culture. “Other than a Citizen” begins with an anatomy of that transformation, and then turns to the work of four poets who sought to reclaim the vernacular from that process of standardization and use it to countermand the containment-era strategies of Cold War America.

In four chapters, I trace references to common speech and verbal expressivity in the poetry and poetic theory of Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka and Gwendolyn Brooks, against the historical backdrop of the Free-Speech Movement and the rise of mass-culture. When poets frame nonliterary speech within the literary page, they encounter the inability of writing to capture the vital ephemerality of verbal expression. Rather than treat this limitation as an impediment, the writers in my study use the poem to dramatize the fugitivity of speech, emphasizing it as a disruptive counterpoint to the technologies of capture. Where critics such as Houston Baker interpret the vernacular strictly in terms of resistance, I take a cue from the poets and argue that the vernacular, rooted etymologically at the intersection of domestic security and enslaved margin, represents a gestalt form, capable at once of establishing centralized power and sparking minor protest. My argument also expands upon Michael North’s exploration of the influence of minstrelsy and regionalism on the development of modernist literary technique in The Dialect of Modernism. As he focuses on writers from the early 20th century, I account for the next generation, whose America was not a culturally inferior collection of immigrants but an imperial power, replete with economic, political and artistic dominance. Instead of settling for an essentially American idiom, the poets in my study saw in the vernacular not phonetic misspellings, slang terminology and fragmented syntax, but the potential to provoke and thereby frame a more ethical mode of social life, straining against the regimentation of citizenship.

My attention to the vernacular argues for an alignment among writers who have been segregated by the assumption that race and aesthetics are mutually exclusive categories. In reading these writers alongside one another, “Other than a Citizen” shows how the avant-garde concepts of projective poetics and composition by field develop out of an interest in black expressivity. Conversely, I trace black radicalism and its emphasis on sociality back to the communalism practiced at the experimental arts college in Black Mountain, North Carolina, where Olson and Duncan taught. In pressing for this connection, my work reveals the racial politics embedded within the speech-based aesthetics of the postwar era, while foregrounding the aesthetic dimension of militant protest.

Not unlike today, the popular rhetoric of the Cold War insists that to be a citizen involves defending one’s status as a rightful member of an exclusionary nation. To be other than a citizen, as the poets in my study make clear, begins with eschewing the false certainty that accompanies categorical nominalization. In promoting a model of mutually dependent participation, these poets lay the groundwork for an alternative model of civic belonging, where volition and reciprocity replace compliance and self-sufficiency. In reading their lines, we become all the more aware of the cracks that run the length of our load-bearing walls.

The Roles of Phenotypic Plasticity and Plant-Microbe Interactions in the Evolution of Complex Traits in Boechera stricta

All organisms live in complex habitats that shape the course of their evolution by altering the phenotype expressed by a given genotype (a phenomenon known as phenotypic plasticity) and simultaneously by determining the evolutionary fitness of that phenotype. In some cases, phenotypic evolution may alter the environment experienced by future generations. This dissertation describes how genetic and environmental variation act synergistically to affect the evolution of glucosinolate defensive chemistry and flowering time in Boechera stricta, a wild perennial herb. I focus particularly on plant-associated microbes as a part of the plant’s environment that may alter trait evolution and in turn be affected by the evolution of those traits. In the first chapter I measure glucosinolate production and reproductive fitness of over 1,500 plants grown in common gardens in four diverse natural habitats, to describe how patterns of plasticity and natural selection intersect and may influence glucosinolate evolution. I detected extensive genetic variation for glucosinolate plasticity and determined that plasticity may aid colonization of new habitats by moving phenotypes in the same direction as natural selection. In the second chapter I conduct a greenhouse experiment to test whether naturally-occurring soil microbial communities contributed to the differences in phenotype and selection that I observed in the field experiment. I found that soil microbes cause plasticity of flowering time but not glucosinolate production, and that they may contribute to natural selection on both traits; thus, non-pathogenic plant-associated microbes are an environmental feature that could shape plant evolution. In the third chapter, I combine a multi-year, multi-habitat field experiment with high-throughput amplicon sequencing to determine whether B. stricta-associated microbial communities are shaped by plant genetic variation. I found that plant genotype predicts the diversity and composition of leaf-dwelling bacterial communities, but not root-associated bacterial communities. Furthermore, patterns of host genetic control over associated bacteria were largely site-dependent, indicating an important role for genotype-by-environment interactions in microbiome assembly. Together, my results suggest that soil microbes influence the evolution of plant functional traits and, because they are sensitive to plant genetic variation, this trait evolution may alter the microbial neighborhood of future B. stricta generations. Complex patterns of plasticity, selection, and symbiosis in natural habitats may impact the evolution of glucosinolate profiles in Boechera stricta.