Digital Commons Network^™

The Thrifty Gene Hypothesis: Considering The Significance Of A 47-Year Old Theory, William Graham

Quill & Scope

The thrifty gene hypothesis suggests that a unique genetic profile passed down from our hunter-gatherer predecessors has contributed to the increased incidence of diabetes and obesity in particular Western populations. This highly contentious theory has been met with both support and skepticism from the research community. Debate surrounding the identification of particular 'thrifty genes has been ongoing, and alternative theories have been presented to debunk or refute the hypothesis. I argue that such discussions have distracted from the understanding of the significance of the hypothesis, and propose some alternative options for settling the debate.

A Sense Of Community And Community Change: An Ethnographic Study Of A Contemporary Louisiana Juke Joint As It Compares To Historical Literature On The Subject, Kristopher Ian Debnam

LSU Master's Theses

The rural juke joint is a phenomenon that has been mentioned quite frequently in literature pertaining to blues music, but has not received the amount of scholarly attention that it deserves. This social institution is an integral part of the Mississippi Delta’s cultural landscape. Over time, it has developed a dual reputation as a fun place for weekend entertainment, and also a dangerous place for sin and vice. Using qualitative methods, this thesis explores a modern-day juke joint located in Waterproof, Louisiana, a small town in the northeast part of the state. It is the goal of this research to …

Putting A Face On Prehistory: Reconstructing Late-Mississippian Faces, Alicia Canfield

LSU Master's Theses

This paper examines the results of artificial cranial deformation on the human skull in relation to the human face and the use of three-dimensional printing in the making of skull casts. Forensic facial reconstructions, following the American Method, were performed on three Native American skulls from the Late-Mississippian period, excavated from the Humber Site and on loan from the University of Southern Mississippi, in order to see whether or not the artificial deformation radically changed the faces of the individuals. Skull casts were made out of ABS plastic using rapid prototyping technology, as the original skulls were too fragile for …

Public Opinion And The Katrina Disaster: Linking Support For Rebuilding And Perceptions Of Flood Victims In New Orleans, Vincenzo Pasquantonio

LSU Master's Theses

Public support for government assistance to the needy has long been the focus of scholarly attention. Some assert that the perceived race of recipients of such aid is the primary determinant influencing such support. Others cite that it is the degree of trust one has in government institutions while still others cite American notions of individualism and self-reliance versus collective responsibility. The present study analyzes public opinion regarding aid to the City of New Orleans and its inhabitants following Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent flooding of the city. Several important findings emerge from this analysis. First, it cannot be demonstrated …

The Theo-Logic Of Paul's Ethics In Recent Research: Crosscurrents And Future Directions In Scholarship In The Last Forty Years, Nijay Gupta

Faculty Publications - Portland Seminary

This essay presents a survey of scholarship on the theology or logic (hence ‘theo-logic’) of Paul’s ethics in the last forty years. Exploring the work of such prominent Pauline scholars as V.P. Furnish, P. Sampley, W. Schrage, R. Hays and D. Horrell, attention will be drawn to their contributions as well as future desiderata in this field. An important conclusion drawn from this study is that Furnish’s work is a milestone in Paul’s theo-logic of ethics especially with regard to eschatological, Christological and sociological dimensions, and subsequent Pauline interpreters have largely expanded on his work. Such elaborations, though, have often …

Living Behind Bars? An Investigation Of Gated Communities In New Tampa, Florida, Scott E. Nonnemaker

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

With protective gates and guard booths restricting access to their entrances, master-planned gated communities have become a dominant form of suburban development throughout much of the country. Many home builders, developers, and real estate companies promote gated communities as a developmental step towards the creation of a real-life utopia. However, many academics, like Karina Landman and Martin Schonteich (2002), argue that their existence simply marks a new chapter in the fragmentation and polarization of societies all across the world. This study used a mixed methods approach to analyze the demographic makeup of individuals living in gated communities in New Tampa, …

For Neither Love Nor Money: Gender, Sexuality, And Tourism In Costa Rica, Ellen Puccia

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Costa Rica has been a popular tourist destination for decades, and is currently the second largest industry in the country. With so many tourists coming into the country, Costa Rica provides a rich environment within which to examine sex tourism. Costa Rica is a known destination for male sex tourists hoping to experience legal prostitution or child prostitution. Although it is lesser known, female sex tourism also occurs in Costa Rica. Female sex tourism occurs in the form of pseudo-romantic relationships between female tourists and Costa Rican men working in the tourist industry. These people spend a great deal of …

What Happens To Class When A Language Dies? Language Change Vs. Language Death, George Tucker Childs

Applied Linguistics Faculty Publications and Presentations

This paper presents the first documentation of the noun class system of the dying language Mani (buy), Bullom So in Ethnologue, a.k.a. Mmani, Mandenyi, etc. spoken in Guinea and Sierra Leone. Mani has some few hundred speakers, all of whom speak either Soso (sus) or Temne (tem) as their everyday language. The Mani are concentrated in a restricted coastal area straddling the border between Guinea and Sierra Leone near the town of Morebaya, Kambia District, in Sierra Leone. A few other speakers are scattered in the littoral region from Conakry to Freetown.

‘Community’, Semiotic Flows, And Mediated Contribution To Activity, Steven L. Thorne

World Languages and Literatures Faculty Publications and Presentations

This article begins with an overview and problematization of the term community through a brief assessment of its history, diverse uses, core attributes, heterogeneous elements, and collocational companions. Following this, I describe demographics and processes associated with collective engagement in digitally mediated environments. Utilizing select alternatives to the term ‘community’ and incorporating the cultural-historical notions of mediation and activity, I then present research describing exogenous influences affecting educational uses of technology in L2 settings, the use of instant messaging and blogging for out-of-class FL interaction at the secondary school level, and a pedagogically focused example of a remixing text posted …

Right Directions, Wrong Maps: Understanding The Involvement Of Low-Ses African American Parents To Enlist Them As Partners In College Choice, Michael J. Smith

Education Faculty Publications and Presentations

While research extols the benefits of parent involvement in college choice, low SES African American parents are increasingly less able to match the efforts of wealthier parents. A qualitative methodology is used to explore the lives 5 urban African American single parents whose low-SES parents encouraged education for postsecondary advancement. The study found that the high school diploma was the normative credential for upward mobility in their communities. Their parents used narratives of struggle to encourage their children while utilizing maps that helped navigate the road towards a high school diploma. It concludes that a high level of involvement already …

Turn-Taking And Gaze Behavior Among Cajun French And Cajun English Speakers In Avoyelles Parish, Andrew Mandell Riviere

LSU Master's Theses

Languages are the verbal and non-verbal codes of a culture. A culture houses a language(s) and is comprised of the gaze and distance/use of personal sphere. Linguists and anthropologists have long since argued over which takes priority: culture or language. French and Louisiana are synonymous: it is unimaginable to picture Louisiana without French because French constitutes the culture in Louisiana. Since linguists have debated the priority of language or culture, looking at Louisiana within the confines of this debate proves informative.

The language shift forced upon the residents of South Louisiana by the 1921 State Legislature made English the sole …

An Empirical Analysis Of Lateral Lawyer Trends From 2000 To 2007: The Emerging Equilibrium For Corporate Law Firms, William D. Henderson, Leonard Bierman

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

People, Sheep, And Landscape Change In Colonial Mexico: The Sixteenth-Century Transformation Of The Valle Del Mezquital, Richard Hunter

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The causes of central Mexico’s environmental degradation are poorly understood. Scholarly contention centers on the role of introduced livestock as agents of soil erosion. This dissertation explores New Spain’s sixteenth-century livestock ecology by drawing upon archival and field data to reconstruct the spatio-temporal characteristics of sheep ranches in a southeastern section of central Mexico’s Valle del Mezquital. The introductory chapter outlines a scholarly disagreement from the 1990s that underscored differences between historical and geographical approaches to studying historical landscape transformations. On one side of this debate, geographer Karl W. Butzer finds in the sixteenth-century Mexican Bajío little evidence for environmental …

Derivative Lawsuits Outside Of Their Cultural Context: The Divergent Examples Of Italy And Japan, Scott H. Mollett

University of San Francisco Law Review

This Article introduce some comparative frameworks about legal transplants, introduces Teubner's model in detail, introduces corporate governance and derivative suits, provides an extended and comparative look at derivative suits in Italy and Japan.

Doc 2008-01 The Common Academic Program, University Of Dayton. Common Academic Program Committee

Senate Documents

Official document of the Academic Senate of the University of Dayton.

Perceptions About The Impact Of Global Medical Travel On Poorer Populations In India, Blair Gifford, Sinyoung Park, Sharmila Anand

Department of Health Administration Faculty Publications

There is anecdotal evidence that the increasing focus on global medical travel health services for foreigners in India is likely to exacerbate the different levels of access to health services between India’s wealthy and poor populations. However, surveyed physicians (n=177) at three hospitals in New Delhi indicated positive attitudes to global medical travel, especially in regards to global medical travel’s effects on poorer populations. Overall, these results appear to be the result of respondents’ support of the economic development, new medical technologies, and increased medical training that comes from the health infrastructure investments needed to attract foreign patients.

Cosmopolitanism After Derrida: City, Signature And Sovereignty, Puspa Damai

English Faculty Research

Cosmopolitanism in Derrida's works sounds like an afterthought in comparison to other more recurring themes of his texts, like 'writing', 'differance', 'supplement', 'metaphysics', or 'violence'. Cosmopolitanism seems to belong to deconstruction, which is often associated with decentring, fragmentation, and critique of totality and universality, only as an intimate other, a foreign element grafted in the body by force, or by miracle. That is the reason why, perhaps, hardly any cosmopolitanist refers to the issue of cosmopolitanism in Derrida or in deconstruction, so much so that even Derrida has written very sparsely on it as it belongs perhaps to the dormant, …

Spectrogenetic Translation In Arundhati Roy's The God Of Small Things And Elsewhere, Puspa Damai

English Faculty Research

South Asians, in their attempts to articulate post-colonial subjectivity, have themselves only reinscribed various aspects of colonial exoticism in their work. South Asian author Arundhati Roy’s rendering of untouchability in terms of godliness in The God of Small Things resonates with colonial ideologies that read “subalterns” as objects, not as subjects. Roy’s invocation of colonial methods of translation envisions untouchability in “absolutist terms”—a strategy that may ultimately mitigate against a recognition of the highly varied experiences, social agencies, and subjectivities of dalits living in South Asia and abroad.

Theory, Identity, Vocation: Three Models Of Christian Legal Scholarship, William S. Brewbaker Iii

Seton Hall Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Expansion Of Class Concepts And The Colorado Coal Field War Project, David M. Amrine

Nebraska Anthropologist

The Colorado Coal Field War Project was an attempt by McGuire, Reckner, and others to develop a 'working-class' archaeology that served the public as well as the archaeologists performing excavations and research. The attempt was successful, promoting and supporting ideas that had been discussed in archaeology about gender, class, and the treatment of archaeology as a craft. Their example of using archaeology to benefit communities as well as academic interests can and should be tested in other regions of the United States as well as the rest of the world.

Native Hubs: Culture, Community, And Belonging In Silicon Valley And Beyond And Going Indian Book Reviews, Alison Fields

American Studies Faculty and Staff Publications

Two new books, Native Hubs by Reyna Ramirez and Going Indian by James Hamill, contribute to an ever-growing body of scholarship examining the way Native people understand identity and belonging in today's world.

I'Ll Start Walking Your Way, You Start Walking Mine: Sociological Perspectives On Professional Identity Development And Influence Of Generational Differences, Melissa Heames Weresh

South Carolina Law Review

No abstract provided.

At His Bar Mitzvah Erving Gave A Little Speech That He Wrote Himself And That He Called “Ode To Mother”, Frances Goffman Bay

Bios Sociologicus: The Erving Goffman Archives

This conversation with Frances Goffman Bay was recorded over the phone on January 1, 2009. After Dmitri Shalin transcribed the conversation, Frances Goffman Bay read the text and approved posting the present version in the Goffman Archives. Breaks in the conversation flow are indicated by ellipses. Supplementary information and additional materials inserted during the editing process appear in square brackets. Undecipherable words and unclear passages are identified in the text as “[?]”.

Invisible Hands: Recognizing Archivists’ Work To Make Records Accessible, Sammie L. Morris, Shirley K. Rose

Libraries Research Publications

Two faculty members, one an archivist and the other a rhetoric and composition scholar/professor collaborated in processing the papers of a rhetoric and composition scholar. This project allowed the archivist to gain a better understanding of archival researchers' needs, while allowing the researcher to better understand the thought process and activities inherent in archival processing-- the activities of organizing, describing, and preserving primary source materials in the archives. Through this article the authors seek to demystify and increase transparency of archival processing, while enhancing researchers' abilities to interpret the archival collections with which they work.

The Fourth Level Of Social Structure In A Multi-Level Society: Ecological & Social Functions Of Clans In Hamadryas Baboons, Amy Schreier, Larissa Swedell

Publications and Research

Hamadryas baboons are known for their complex, multi-level social structure consisting of troops, bands, and one-male units (OMUs) [Kummer, 1968]. Abegglen [1984] observed a 4^th level of social structure comprising several OMUs that rested near one another on sleeping cliffs, traveled most closely together during daily foraging, and sometimes traveled as subgroups independently from the rest of the band. Abegglen called these associations “clans” and suggested that they consisted of related males. Here we confirm the existence of clans in a second wild hamadryas population, a band of about 200 baboons at the Filoha site in lowland Ethiopia. During …

Male Aggression Towards Females In Hamadryas Baboons: Conditioning, Coercion And Control, Larissa Swedell, Amy Schreier

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Rochdale (22bo654) And Dry Bayou (22co666) : A Study Of Lower Mississippi Valley Hopewell Interaction, Joshua Engle

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Geophysical Prospection And Excavation At An Early Woodland Ceremonial Circle In Bourbon County, Ky, Edward R. Henry

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Self-Portrait As Western Saddle, Casey Thayer

All NMU Master's Theses

No abstract provided.

Reinvention In The Line Of Death: A Reconsideration Of Geoffrey Hill's Commemorative Verse, Michael Christopher Bartch

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This paper considers the embodied ethics of Geoffrey Hill’s poetic practice. Hill stages his engagement with poetry through the idioms, images, tropes, and diction of the literary tradition. Through this pragmatic rehearsal of the language of the dead, Hill’s poetry projects the tradition into the present. Hill resists the ethical entrapments of appropriative poetry through his insistence upon the brute physicality of atrocity and through a rigorous (for both poet and reader) formal difficulty. Hill’s practice refuses to console after the models of Peter Sacks, Jahan Ramazani, or John Vickery. Instead, concerned with modernity’s disconnectedness, Hill’s poetry returns us to …