Showing papers by "Hampshire College published in 2004"

Application of laser ablation–inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry (LA–ICP–MS) to investigate trace metal spatial distributions in human tooth enamel and dentine growth layers and pulp

Abstract: Human tooth enamel provides a nearly permanent and chronological record of an individual’s nutritional status and anthropogenic trace metal exposure during development; it might thus provide an excellent bio archive We investigated the micro-spatial distribution of trace metals (Cu, Fe, Mg, Sr, Pb, and Zn) in 196×339 μm2 raster pattern areas (66×104 μm2) in a deciduous tooth using laser ablation-inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry (LA–ICP–MS) Ablated areas include prenatal and postnatal enamel, the neonatal line, the dentine–enamel junction (DEJ), dentine, and the dentine–pulp junction Topographic variations in the surface elemental distribution of lead, zinc, strontium, and iron intensities in a deciduous tooth revealed heterogeneous distribution within and among regions 43Ca normalized elemental intensities showed the following order: Sr>Mg>>Zn>Pb>Fe>Cu Elevated zinc and lead levels were present in the dental pulp region and at the neonatal line This study demonstrates the ability of LA–ICP–MS to provide unique elemental distribution information in micro spatial areas of dental hard tissues Elemental distribution plots could be useful in decoding nutrition and pollution information embedded in their bio apatite structure

Tension perturbations of black brane spacetimes

Abstract: We consider black brane spacetimes that have at least one spatial translation Killing field that is tangent to the brane. A new parameter, the tension of a spacetime, is defined. The tension parameter is associated with spatial translations in much the same way that the ADM mass is associated with the time translation Killing field. In this work, we explore the implications of the spatial translation symmetry for small perturbations around a background black brane. For static-charged black branes we derive a law which relates the tension perturbation to the surface gravity times the change in the horizon area, plus terms that involve variations in the charges and currents. We find that as a black brane evaporates the tension decreases. We also give a simple derivation of a first law for black brane spacetimes. These constructions hold when the background stress–energy is governed by a Hamiltonian, and the results include arbitrary perturbative stress–energy sources.

Assessing Intellectual Development: Three Approaches, One Sequence

Abstract: In this paper, I compare three developmental assessment systems, employed to score a set of 152 interviews of engineering students: the Perry Scoring System (W. G. Perry, 1970), the Hierarchical Complexity Scoring System (T. L. Dawson, 2004, 1/31/03), and the Lexical Abstraction Assessment System (LAAS; T. L. Dawson & M. Wilson, in press). Overall, the Hierarchical Complexity Scoring System and Perry Scoring System agree with one another within the parameters of interrater agreement commonly reported for either one of the systems, and the Perry system and the LAAS agree with one another about as well as the LAAS and the Hierarchical Complexity Scoring System, upon which the LAAS is based.

The politics of engagement between Islam and the secular state: ambivalences of 'civil society'.

Abstract: The paper reveals contemporary transformations of the interaction between Islam and secular states from opposition to engagement. In-depth ethnographic evidence challenges the predominant juxtaposition of Islam against the secular state. Following micro-sites of interaction between the Gulen movement and the state from Turkey to Kazakhstan, my fieldwork revealed a continuum of engagements between them. The paper analyses the engagements ranging from contestation and negotiation to co-operation. The case illustrates the extent to which scholarly interest in opposition and clash has left a wide-ranging variety of state-Islam interaction understudied with regard to civil society. It also reveals the conditions under which effective Islamic horizontal organizations have provided the platforms of vertical engagements with the secular states. The major argument of the paper is that both civil and uncivil outcomes in the Muslim world are primarily shaped by the nature of state-Islam interaction. The evidence suggests that the key to understanding the relationship between Islam and civil society is the state.

"A good education is ...." The development of evaluative thought across the life span.

Abstract: The author uses a cognitive developmental approach to investigate educational conceptions, addressing the question, How does evaluative reasoning about education change over the course of cognitive development? The author conducted independent analyses of the developmental level and conceptual content of 246 interview performances of individuals aged 5 to 86 years. The developmental level of the interview performances was assessed with a content-general scoring system, the Hierarchical Complexity Scoring System. A Rasch analysis of the results revealed 6 developmental levels and provided support for invariant sequence, developmental spurts and plateaus, and similar developmental patterns for childhood and adulthood levels. The results of the subsequent analysis of the propositional content of the same interview texts were used to produce qualitative descriptions of changes in evaluative reasoning about education across the 6 levels identified in the data. Finally, descriptions constructed in this way, alt...

The LAAS: A Computerized Scoring System for Small- and Large-Scale Developmental Assessments.

Abstract: The evaluation of developmental interventions has been hampered by a lack of practical, reliable, and objective developmental assessment systems. This article describes the construction of a domain-general computerized developmental assessment system for texts: the Lexical Abstraction Assessment System (LAAS). The LAAS provides assessments of the order of hierarchical complexity of oral and written texts, employing scoring rules developed with predictive discriminant analysis. The LAAS is made possible by a feature of conceptual structure we call hierarchical order of abstraction, which produces systematic quantifiable changes in lexical composition with development. The LAAS produces scores that agree with human ratings of hierarchical complexity more than 80% of the time within one-third of a complexity order across 6 complexity orders (18 levels), spanning the portion of the lifespan from about 4 years of age through adulthood. This corresponds to a Kendall's tau of .93.

A bargain between the secular state and Turkish Islam: politics of ethnicity in Central Asia

Abstract: . This paper reveals and analyses the ethnic politics mobilised by a fast-growing Islamic movement, the Gulen movement, which emerged in the 1980s in Turkey and expanded to Central Asia in the mid-1990s. Following the micro-sites, where nationness is reproduced as an everyday practice, my ethnographic research in Almaty-Kazakhstan explored the emergent Islamic sensibilities for the nation and ethnic identity. Revivalist Islam has often been essentialised as incompatible with nationalism, since it has been widely associated with the Muslim community rather than nations and nation-states. I argue that this bias is facilitated and maintained by the deep division in the literature. Scholarly work on both Islam and nationalism are split into two opposing approaches, state-centered and culture-centered. The findings of the present study challenge the binary thinking that juxtaposes politics against culture and dichotomises ethnic and state-framed base of nationalism and nationhood. My major finding is that the Gulen movement has not only inherited the symbols and myths of descent from the founding fathers of the Turkish state, but it is also currently reproducing the related ethnic politics in cooperation with–not in opposition to–the secular states in the post-Soviet Turkic world. The study reconciles ethno-symbolic and state-centered approaches in explaining the convergence between Islamic and secular nationalism in the formation of ethnic politics in Almaty-Kazakhstan.

Pulque intake during pregnancy and lactation in rural Mexico: alcohol and child growth from 1 to 57 months.

Abstract: Objective: To examine maternal intake of a mildly alcoholic beverage (pulque) during pregnancy and lactation, and its potential effect on postpartum child growth and attained size. Design: A prospective cohort study that followed mothers (during pregnancy and lactation) and their offspring (from birth to approximately 57 months of age). Setting: Six villages in rural, central Mexico. Subjects: Subjects are 58 mother–child pairs. Pulque intake was measured as part of a dietary assessment that was conducted for 2days/month during pregnancy and early lactation. Results: Most mothers consumed pulque during pregnancy (69.0%) and lactation (72.4%). Among pulque drinkers, the average ethanol intake was 125.1 g/week during pregnancy and 113.8 g/week during lactation. Greater pulque intake during lactation, independent of intake during pregnancy, was associated with slower weight and linear growth from 1 to 57 months, and smaller attained size at 57 months. Low-to-moderate pulque intake during pregnancy, in comparison to either nonconsumption or heavy intake, was also associated with greater stature at 57 months. Conclusions: Pulque intake during lactation may have adversely influenced postnatal growth in this population. Public health interventions are urgently needed in Mexico to reduce heavy intake of pulque by pregnant and lactating women, and to replace intake with foods that provide the vitamins and minerals present in the traditional alcoholic beverage.

Fetch Halting on critical load misses

Abstract: As the performance gap between processors and memory systems increases, the CPU spends more time stalled waiting for data from main memory. Critical long latency instructions, such as loads that miss to main memory and floating point arithmetic operations, are primarily responsible for these stalls. We present a technique, Fetch Halting that suspends instruction fetching when the processor is stalled by a critical long latency instruction. This enables us to save power in one of the primary sources of power dissipation, the issue logic. By reducing the occupancy rates in the issue queue and reorder buffer, we save power by disabling a large number of unused queue entries. In order to characterize critical instructions, our approach combines software profiling and hardware monitoring techniques. Statistical profiling information obtained from sample runs is used to identify critical instructions while hardware cache-miss prediction is used to monitor these instructions. We show that, on average, Fetch Halting can reduce issue queue and reorder buffer occupancy rates by 17.2% and 23.4%, respectively, with an average performance loss of only 4.6%.

The Effect of Chemosterilization on Sex Steroid Production in Male Sea Lampreys

Abstract: The sterile male release technique (SMRT) is currently used as part of an integrated effort to control Great Lakes populations of sea lampreys Petromyzon marinus, yet the effects of chemosterilization on the reproductive endocrinology of the sea lamprey are unknown. Male sea lampreys were chemosterilized with bisazir (P, P-bis(1-aziridinyl)-N-methylphosphinothioic amide) and given timed-release implants containing lamprey d-Arg(6)-GnRH I (where GnRH is an acronym for gonadotropin-releasing hormone) and lamprey d-Arg(6)-GnRH III. The effects of chemosterilization on the reproductive endocrine system were evaluated by measuring plasma concentrations of 17β-estradiol (E2) and 15α-hydroxytestosterone (15α-T) with radioimmunoassays. The effectiveness of the implants was evaluated by measuring plasma concentrations of steroids and determining the duration of steroidal responses. The E2 and 15α-T response profiles showed no difference between sterilized and untreated male sea lampreys (P = 0.53). Peak c...

Tags and the Evolution of Cooperation in Complex Environments.

Abstract: Cooperation in evolving populations of agents has been explained as arising from kin selection, reciprocity during repeated interactions, and indirect reciprocity through agent reputations. All of these mechanisms require signican t agent capabilities, but recent research using computational models has shown that arbitrary markers called \tags" can be used to achieve signican t levels of cooperation even in the absence of memory, repeated interactions or knowledge of kin. This is important because it helps to explain the evolution of cooperation in organisms with limited cognitive capabilities, and also because it may help us to engineer cooperative behaviors in multi-agent systems. The computational models used in previous studies, however, have typically been constrained such that cooperation is the only viable strategy for gaining an evolutionary advantage. Here we show that tagmediated recognition can lead to signican t levels of cooperation in a less constrained articial life simulation, even when other viable survival strategies exist. The results suggest that tags provide a simple yet eectiv e mechanism for promoting the emergence of collective behaviors in evolving agent populations.

Content design issues in adaptive hyperbooks

Abstract: We explore the design issues of adaptive hyperbooks in relation to how using hypermedia technology changes the nature of the traditional book. To address some of these issues we have developed and tested MetaLinks, an authoring tool and web server for adaptive hyperbooks. The system is designed to: 1) support inquiry, exploratory, or curiosity-driven learning in richly interconnected material; 2) support the construction and conceptualisation of content through three "epistemic" forms: narrative, network, and hierarchy, and 3) ameliorate a number of usability issues: disorientation, cognitive overload, poor narrative flow, and poor conceptual flow. These goals are achieved through a number of interface and adaptive features, including "narrative smoothing", "custom depth control", and "thematic links".

Reproductive liberty and overpopulation: a response.

Abstract: This appraisal of Carol A. Kates Reproductive Liberty and Overpopulation challenges her call for world-wide population control measures - using compulsory methods if necessary - to save the worlds environment. The most successful part of Kates paper is her argument that reproductive rights are not indefeasible and nonnegotiable but that like many rights they are conditional and open to a balancing of individual freedom against collective community interests. But her advocacy of mandatory state population controls is flawed in several respects. First she underestimates the force of the emerging consensus for voluntary population reductions through policies that empower women. Second she walks on difficult ethical grounds. Are compulsory controls on reproduction ethically justified simply because humans are loathe to take the alternative route of curtailing their individualistic materialistic’ appetites for more economic growth and consumption? Third Kates fails to recognise that her search for measures that immediately and directly reverse population growth would necessitate coercing an entire generation of women toward zero reproduction in order for death rates to have their effect. Lastly problems with the feasibility of her plan and the absence of international support make it unlikely it will ever come to pass. Alternatives to Kates policies are discussed at the close. (authors)

Something Less Than Joyful

Abstract: Contemporary Jewish Americans are not a monolithic population; to the contrary, they are very diverse in religious beliefs and affiliations. Nevertheless, most seem to take for granted that their infant sons should be circumcised. With only the vaguest understanding of the traditional liturgy, and content to accept claims for medical or “hygienic” benefits, many choose circumcision by a physician for their infant sons, and have little or no interest in religious prescriptions. Even most of those who accept ritual circumcision have very little understanding of what happens or why. Although many circumcision liturgies have been extensively modified and “sanitized” nowadays, the traditional liturgy includes three features that might cause considerable unease if understood: biblical passages referring to wallowing in blood, human sacrifice, and a “peace pact” following a double murder. This paper explains the significance of the passages in their ritual context, then describes how authors of contemporary books addressed to mainstream audiences try to construct acceptable interpretations of the passages and justifications for continuation of the rite. Most Jewish Americans now say that they observe only those ritual practices (if any) that contribute to their “spiritual” welfare. If and when hospitals discontinue “routine” circumcisions, Jewish-American parents will need to decide whether to accept a ritual procedure that is so obviously inappropriate for life in contemporary America.

Classroom strategies for simulation-based collaborative inquiry learning

Abstract: SimForest is a simulation-based learning environment in the domain of forest ecology that simulates tree and forest growth, the succession of tree species over time, and the effects of environmental and man made disturbances on forest growth (see www.ddc.hampshire.edu/~simforest/). With the simulation students can set environmental parameters such as rainfall, temperature, soil fertility, soil texture, and soil depth; they plant (or load in from a file) a plot of trees from a list of over 30 species; and they "run" the simulation and observe the trees as they grow and the forest evolves. A forest plot's sensitivity to natural and man-made disturbances can be evaluated, and emergent properties such as species succession can be characterized. This short paper summarizes some of the results of a research project involving several development and implementation phases: the development of the SimForest learning environment, development of curriculum materials and activities surrounding the software, software evaluation in college biology classrooms, a summer professional development institute teaching secondary school teachers how to implement the software and curriculum, and a study following these teachers as they used the software in their class over two semesters. In this paper we summarize one aspect of this project: the characterization of diverse pedagogical strategies used by an expert teacher to support simulation-based collaborative inquiry learning. We used these results to give suggestions to the participants during the teacher training phase of the project.