Digital Commons Network^™

Peptide Hydrolysis And The Uptake Of Dipeptides By Phytoplankton, Margaret R. Mulholland, Cindy Lee

OES Faculty Publications

Rates of peptide hydrolysis (using the fluorescent substrate, lucifer yellow anhydride-labeled tetra-alanine) and dipeptide uptake (using dually labeled, ¹⁵N and ¹³C, dialanine) were measured in phytoplankton cultures and in natural populations during algal blooms dominated by one or two taxa. During most sampling events, both peptide hydrolysis and dipeptide uptake were greatest in the size fraction containing the dominant phytoplankter, suggesting that phytoplankton contribute substantially to or may even dominate observed extracellular peptide hydrolysis and dipeptide uptake in the environment. These are the first data suggesting that dipeptides may be taken up directly by phytoplankton and this may …

“I Hope You Never See Another Day Like This”: Pedagogy & Allegory In “Post 9/11” Video Games, Marc A. Ouellette

English Faculty Publications

Although critics and scholars have considered the extent to which the terror attacks of 11 Sept. 2001 influenced subsequent media productions, video games comprise a largely unexamined form. This oversight also applies to related forms of media production and among those who study video games is in part attributable to the ongoing debate regarding the relationship(s) between narrative and play. Even so, as early as 1997, JC Herz was investigating the role of video games in the military-entertainment complex. That said, the focus of this paper will not be the obvious games which draw settings and plots directly from the …

Syncretism In Narrativity, Visuality And Tactility: A Case Study Of Information Visualization Concerning A News Media Event, Ashley Holmes

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

This article re-examines the appropriateness of a conceptual framework based on the semiotic scholarship of Greimas and Courtés which Margaret Morse championed as being suitable for analysis of television and new media. That framework is supplemented with the suggestion that narrative, visual and tactile modes of communication involve syncretism. In a case study of information visualization examples produced for Australian news media during a mine collapse tragedy and rescue at the Beaconsfield Gold Mine in Tasmania in 2006 this idea is used to identify communicative qualities potentially inherent in traditional print and television and emergent new media visualization techniques.

On Davin Heckman's A Small World: Smart Houses And The Dream Of The Perfect Day, Mike Dubose

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

In A Small World, Heckman traces the evolution of the smart house, starting with the narratives of futurism inherent in the influx of electrical appliances into the early twentieth century, through the competing futuristic visions of the "house of tomorrow"in Disney's EPCOT and Celebration, into the introduction of computers and new technologies of home control in the 1980s, culminating in the latest version of the smart house characterized by a high level of media saturation. The contemporary smart home, Heckman argues, culminates in the Perfect Day, "an attempt to institutionalize everyday life as the ultimate consumer practice...[which] …

Bisphenol A Blood And Saliva Levels Prior To And After Dental Sealant Placement In Adults, Joyce Marie Downs

Dental Hygiene Theses & Dissertations

Placement of pit and fissure dental sealants is an effective therapy for tooth decay prevention and is widely accepted as a standard of care throughout the United States. Pit and fissure dental sealants (sealants) are manufactured using the resin component of composite dental materials, formed by reacting glycidyl methacrylate with bisphenol A. Bisphenol A (BPA) is a hormonally active, synthetic chemical that is part of a broad group of chemicals known as endocrine disrupting compounds, xenoestrogens, which mimic bioactivity of estrogen. This study measured BP A in saliva and blood after the placement of a widely used, pit and fissure …

Martin Luther: Perceptions Of The Reformer In Popular Culture And Historical Scholarship, Kathryn R. Cross

History Theses & Dissertations

Martin Luther's remarkable life, his impressive body of written work, his dynamic and charismatic personality, and his impact on the world have long been a source of interest in the world of academia and of popular culture. This thesis examines the affect of the scholarly historical research of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries regarding Luther and its affect on perception of the reformer in popular culture as presented by the media.

The opening section of the thesis presents an examination and evaluation of Lutheran scholarship and how historical trends have affected the reformer's image in the academic world. Documents …

Chavs, Neds, Neets And Yobs: The Anti-Social Underclass Of The United Kingdom, Alexander Michael Marra

Graduate Program in International Studies Theses & Dissertations

This work is the result of the first look by an American into anti-social and yobbish behavior in the UK, and who's responsible for it. The delinquent subculture whose members are alternately either known as chavs or neds will be analyzed in detail. In addition, the NEET, the British government's designation for those who are not in employment, education, or training, will also be analyzed for the roots and reasons behind what may come to be known as the NEET generation in the UK in the years to come. For now they are sometimes called the ASBO generation because of …

Suspended Animation: Meditations On The Time And Space Of The Moving Image, Davin Heckman

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

An appropriate introduction to a cultural studies journal's special issue on cartoons should begin with two things: 1) A rough overview of the material and cultural processes of animation at its creation, and 2) and a rough overview of the cultural and material frames in which cartoons are consumed.

The Simpsons: A Reflection Of Violence, Theodore S. Huptich

Sociology & Criminal Justice Theses & Dissertations

Violence in the media has always been a concern to many people. There have been numerous studies that have reviewed the effect that violent television programming has had on the people that have viewed; most of these studies have shown an increase in aggression in the people that viewed the violent programming. However, there have been very few, if any, studies that have examined the amount and type of violence that exists in television programs. This study uses the television program "The Simpsons", due to its popularity and longevity, to examine the amount and type of violence that exists. This …

Topographies Of Class. Modern Architecture And Mass Society In Weimar Berlin, By Sabine Hake. University Of Michigan Press: Ann Arbor, 2008 (Book Review), Frederick Lubich

World Languages and Cultures Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Exploring Interdisciplinary Prayer Research In A Health Context, E. James Baesler

Communication & Theatre Arts Faculty Publications

Communication, Psychology, and Sociology are three leading academic disciplines engaged in the social scientific study of prayer, the spiritual communication between a believer(s) and God, but rarely do these disciplines collaborate in interdisciplinary prayer scholarship. Possibilities for interdisciplinary prayer research in a health context are explored through a review of the literature and academic interviews. Interdisciplinary linkages in the prayer-health context are organized in an integral "all-quadrant" theoretical model, and an assessment of the viability of interdisciplinary prayer-health research is considered.

Blogging About Feminist Lnterdisciplinarity In The Study Of Communication, Language, And Gender, Cynthia Berryman-Fink, Janet Bing, Deborah Cameron, Amy Sheldon, Anita Taylor

English Faculty Publications

This article provides information about several blog posts discussed during a round-table discussion on feminist interdisciplinary studies in relation to communication, language, and gender. Topics under discussion include the nature of interdisciplinarity and its relevance to feminist studies, intercultural communication, and the study and teaching of gender in women's studies programs in higher education.

The Politicization Of Everyday Life In Cleave's Weekly Police Gazette (1834-36), Edward Jacobs

English Faculty Publications

With circulation as high as 40,000, Cleave's Weekly Police Gazette, published 1834–36, was one of the first and most popular unstamped newspapers to mix political news with coverage of non-political events like sensational crimes, strange occurrences, and excerpts from popular fiction. Scholars have differed widely in their interpretations of the fact that the paper's mixture of radical politics and "entertainment" outsold unstamped papers that offered undiluted political news, such as Hetherington's Poor Man's Guardian (1831–35), whose circulation peaked at around 16,000. Some, like Louis James and Virginia Berridge, argue that Cleave's helped to co-opt legitimate working-class political discourse by …

Orientalizing Post/Communism: Europe's 'Wild East' In Literature And Film, Nataša Kovačević

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

The essay posits post/communist Eastern Europe as a neocolonial terrain to show how contemporary discursive underpinnings of global capitalism and liberal democracy have been shaped by a combined Orientalist demonization of communist regimes and Eastern European cultures. It analyzes how old Orientalisms surface in the Cold War period, re-articulated in narratives that define a European or civilizational ideal as an essentially liberal-democratic project against the discursive palimpsest of totalitarian, barbarian, and Oriental communists. The establishment of this discourse has helped to justify transitions to market economy and liberal-civic society in post-communism. These developments increasingly provincialize Eastern Europe through suppressing its …

Lignin Degradation In Wood-Feeding Insects, Scott M. Geib, Timothy R. Filley, Patrick G. Hatcher, Kelli Hoover, John E. Carlson, Maria Del Mar Jimenez-Gasco, Akiko Nakagawa-Izumi, Rachel L. Sleighter, Ming Tien

Chemistry & Biochemistry Faculty Publications

The aromatic polymer lignin protects plants from most forms of microbial attack. Despite the fact that a significant fraction of all lignocellulose degraded passes through arthropod guts, the fate of lignin in these systems is not known. Using tetramethylammonium hydroxide thermochemolysis, we show lignin degradation by two insect species, the Asian longhorned beetle (Anoplophora glabripennis) and the Pacific dampwood termite (Zootermopsis angusticollis). In both the beetle and termite, significant levels of propyl side-chain oxidation (depolymerization) and demethylation of ring methoxyl groups is detected; for the termite, ring hydroxylation is also observed. In addition, culture-independent fungal gut …

Shadowy Aesthetics: The Cultural Front, Literary Judgments And Perceptions Of Mass Entertainment, Graham Barnfield

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Michael Denning's The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century was published in late 1996. There are numerous ways of reading its contribution to American cultural studies. Simply put, the book pursued a reading of US cultural history using the "Birmingham School" cultural studies approach developed in Britain in the 1970s to which Denning himself was a contributor. Simultaneously, it sought to recover a home-grown analytical and radical tradition, by looking at the early contributions of loosely analogous intellectual tendencies situated in the US labor movement in the quarter century or so after the …

Introducing 'Class, Culture, And Public Intellectuals': A Special Issue Of Reconstruction, Graham Barnfield, Victor Cohen, Joseph G. Ramsey

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First two paragraphs]

Editing this issue of Reconstruction has become an illustration of the very processes that we set out to discuss and document.

Calling for papers commenced a well-defined project, with all the parameters in place for producing a routine academic work. We knew the Reconstruction editorial collective was keen to do an issue on themes of class. We were also aware of two publication anniversaries in our academic field of U.S. literary radicalism: The New York Intellectuals by Alan Wald in 1987, and The Cultural Front by Michael Denning, about a decade later. Combining a 20th anniversary …

The Dialectics Of Hope: Marxism And Method In The Cultural Front, Charles D. Cunningham

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

The tenth anniversary of Michael Denning's The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century is a fitting occasion to revisit a work posing questions that remain fresh today and probably will as long as there is a need to analyze the relationship between dissident cultural movements and a non-egalitarian social order. Encyclopedic in scope, the book is a study of the "cultural production" of the Popular Front of the 1930s and 40s that moves eruditely through a wide range of objects, including proletarian literature, popular music, theater, film, cartoons, and cultural theory. Denning makes …

On Warren Farrell And James P. Sterba's Does Feminism Discriminate Against Men?, Marc Ouellette

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Until I began contemplating this review, I had never considered warning my readers about the content of my work despite my specialization and frequent engagement with gender, sex and sexuality. Indeed, I have been an anti-censorship advocate and I have written many times in defence of books that school boards were considering removing. Yet, I cannot cover Warren Farrell's "debate" with Daniel Sterba adequately without revealing the depth of the reductive, offensive and juvenile approach offered in the section written by Farrell and which claims to demonstrate the ways in which feminism discriminates against men. Simply put, how …

Always Passing, Alan Clinton

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

The essay leading off this issue of Reconstruction, "History, Ethnicity and Religion and the Sudanese North-South Conflict," points out not only the slipperiness of race, but the fact that it is erased and reappears depending on various political contexts. Muslims in Northern Sudan, although claiming an ethnic identity, "are not Arab in a genetic sense." Rather, the goal was to pass as Arab in order to gain status (trade relationships, escape from slavery) with Muslims in the Arabian Peninsula. Yet, what may have begun for many as a pragmatic conversion has in turn passed into an identity claimed …

Contributors, Alan Clinton

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Information about editors and contributors to articles in volume 8, issue 4 of Reconstruction.

Drowning The Past With A Thunderous Shout: Black Culture Workers And Mccarthyism, Paul M. Heideman

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Drawing upon a critical deployment of a key Althusserian framework (Repressive State Apparatuses and Ideological State Apparatuses) this essay maps the presence and the repression of different strains of the African-American left between the world wars. Representing jazz musicians – among others – as organic intellectuals is crucial to reconstructing the combination of economic pressures and institutional co-option that shaped their activities and allegiances.

On Ian Tyrrell's Transnational Nation: United States History In Global Perspective, Alexandra Ganser

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

About nine decades after Randolph Bourne's much-cited pamphlet "Trans-National America" was published on the eve of the U.S.'s entry to World War [1], the field of American Studies has recently undergone what has been called a transnational turn. Within this paradigm, the focus of study is increasingly on the transnational exchange of ideas and goods, on border-crossing migrations of people, and on how all of these movements shape (and are shaped by) cultural discourses within and outside the U.S., always in a historically diachronic perspective [2]. Bourne, coining the term "trans-national", started his essay by an analysis of …

Review Of Cultural Globalization: A User's Guide, By J. Macgregor Wise, Samuel Gerald Collins

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

There's no question that Wise's Cultural Globalization is a useful addition to cultural studies pedagogy. In a field dominated by a hand-full of textbooks - Storey's Cultural Theory and Popular Culture, During's Cultural Studies, Hebdige's Subcultures - it's nice to have an alternative for your staid, "introduction to cultural studies" syllabus. And this one is resolutely global, with examples drawn from all over the world, especially East and Southeast Asia, testament to Wise's childhood perambulations.

The Cultural Commons: An Interview With Michael Denning, Victor Cohen

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Michael Denning is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of American Studies at Yale University. His first two books, Cover Stories: Narrative and Ideology in the British Spy Thriller (Routledge, 1987) and Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working Class Culture (Verso, 1987), examined the politics of popular fiction. He followed them up with The Cultural Front: Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (Verso, 1998), which has become the encyclopedic study of the culture of the American Popular Front. Denning's most recent work, Culture in an Age of Three Worlds (Verso, 2004), analyses the rise and fall of American …

Reconstructing The 'Humanscape' Of Left Culture And Commitment: An Interview With Alan Wald, Joseph G. Ramsey

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[From Introduction]

Alan Waldis H. Chandler Davis Collegiate Professor in the Department of English and the Program in American Culture and the University of Michigan. (Note: H. Chandler Davis was a University of Michigan faculty member fired in 1954 and subsequently imprisoned for refusing to co-operate with the House Committee on Un-American Activities.) Renowned among established and emerging scholars of the U.S. literary left for his "encyclopedic" grasp of the field - not just as it stands embodied in published works, but as it lies hidden in private papers, personal correspondence, oral histories, and other subaltern sources scattered throughout the …

Radically American: John Dos Passos, Culture And Politics, Alice Béja

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

This essay takes the well-known and near-canonical figure of John Dos Passos, considering his own claims to a form of radicalism independent of political parties and their perceived ideological rigidity. Drawing upon documentary and non-fiction writings, the essay evaluates the writer’s negotiations of radicalism within the constraints of a so-called national political character.

Contributors, Graham Barnfield, Victor Cohen, Joseph G. Ramsey

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Information about contributors to articles in volume 8 issue 1 of Reconstruction.

Interactions Between Changing Pco2, N2 Fixation, And Fe Limitation In The Marine Unicellular Cyanobacterium Crocosphaera, Fei-Xue Fu, Margaret R. Mulholland, Nathan S. Garcia, Aaron Beck, Mark E. Warner, Sergio A. Sañudo, David A. Hutchins

OES Faculty Publications

We examined the physiological responses of steady-state iron (Fe)-replete and Fe-limited cultures of the biogeochemically critical marine unicellular diazotrophic cyanobacterium Crocosphaera at glacial (19 Pa; 190 ppm), current (39 Pa; 380 ppm), and projected year 2100 (76 Pa; 750 ppm) CO₂ levels. Rates of N₂ and CO₂ fixation and growth increased in step with increasing partial pressure of CO₂ (pCO₂), but only under Fe- replete conditions. N₂) and carbon fixation rates at 75 Pa CO₂ were 1.4-1.8-fold and 1.2-2.0-fold higher, respectively, relative to those at present day and glacial pCO_{2 …}

The Jazz Critic As Flâneur, Peter Schulman

World Languages and Cultures Faculty Publications

“I love to watch you play,” a reporter once said to Duke Ellington during a television interview. As Ellington gracefully moved up and down the keyboard, he replied, grinning wistfully, “Playing? I’m not playing . . . I’m dreaming!”1 For the poet Jacques Réda, whose most famous works such as Les ruines de Paris (1977) and Amen (1988) chronicle his experiences as a modern flâneur in a Paris which is sometimes overtaken by what Marc Augé has labeled surmodernité,2 or an anaesthetizing over-abundance of technology and empty modern spaces, Réda has also led another life as a jazz critic, …