Gender and place influences on health risk perspectives in northern Canadian Aboriginal communities

Developing a better understanding of the factors underlying health and environmental risk perspectives has been the focus of significant research in recent years. Although many previous studies have shown that perspectives of risk are often associated with gender, sociocultural variables and place, our understanding of the relationship between these factors and risk remains equivocal. A research study was undertaken to develop better insights into the understanding and perspectives of various types of health risks in two sets of northern Canadian Aboriginal communities – the Yellowknives Dene First Nation communities of N'Dilo and Dettah in the Northwest Territories and the Inuit communities of Nain and Hopedale in Nunatsiavut. Gender was found to have a limited overall effect on risk perspectives, consistent with other studies that found no gender differences in communities stressed by multiple and concurrent risks. Nonetheless, subtle gender differences were seen in the qualitative responses, with women focusing more on community impacts and mitigating actions. Threats to ‘place-identity’ associated with changes in traditional lifestyle and connection to the land were strongly associated with risk perspectives. These results reinforce the need to be cautious in making assumptions about the complex effects of community and personal attributes, such as gender and gender relations, in assessing the factors underlying risk views and concerns. They also suggest the importance of gathering multiple types of data (both quantitative and qualitative) in order to fully assess the effects of both gender and place. Ultimately, understanding risk in a northern context requires recognizing the unique circumstances and identities of northern Aboriginal peoples.     

A history of anatomy theaters in sixteenth-century Padua

The history of anatomy includes not only professors and the support of their institutions but also medical students. Because medical students were quick to assess a teacher's pedagogy, their complaints tell us a great deal about the transition from Galenic to Aristotelian projects of anatomy. When Fabricius of Aquapendente instituted a new style of anatomical inquiry, one based on Aristotle and the search for universal principles, students repeatedly complained that his demonstrations did not provide technical education in structural anatomy (as demonstrations employing a hands-on, Galenic pedagogy did). Within the new anatomy theater (the second of its kind in Padua), however, students were persuaded to accept Fabricius's demonstrations. Fabricius's philosophical orientation combined with the formal atmosphere and aesthetic features of the new theater to create anatomy demonstrations that relied on orations and music for their structure (rather than on the progressive stages of human dissection). A place that emphasized a discourse of anatomy as the study of the "secrets of nature," the new theater so effectively publicized a new style of anatomy that a larger, more diverse group of spectators attended subsequent demonstrations and participated in the celebration of leading academic figures as well as the institution of the university.     

An Improved Algorithm for Selecting Ground Motions to Match a Conditional Spectrum

This paper describes an algorithm to efficiently select ground motions from a database while matching a target mean, variance, and correlations of response spectral values at a range of periods. The approach improves an earlier algorithm by Jayaram et al. [2011]. Key steps in the process are to screen a ground motion database for suitable motions, statistically simulate response spectra from a target distribution, find motions whose spectra match each statistically simulated response spectrum, and then perform an optimization to further improve the consistency of the selected motions with the target distribution. These steps are discussed in detail, and the computational expense of the algorithm is evaluated. A brief example selection exercise is performed, to illustrate the type of results that can be obtained. Source code for the algorithm has been provided, along with metadata for several popular databases of recorded and simulated ground motions, which should facilitate a variety of exploratory and research studies.     

The beginnings of royal pardon in Scotland

The well attested (and comprehensively studied) animus that informed English attitudes towards the Gaelic-speaking peoples of the British Isles in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries has tended to obscure important developments in the legal landscape of contemporary Scotland. This article argues that soon after 1200, the king of Scots deliberately abandoned as barbaric, obnoxious and unbecoming a Christian prince the practice of mutilating high-status political enemies and ritually defiling their bodily remains. The transformation reflected influences from England and Europe in general, but the argument here is that ultimately the change reflected the maturation of the Scottish ideas about Christian kingship, royal justice and royal mercy.     

In Search of an Invisible Culture in David Plante’s American Ghosts and Robert Cormier’s Fade

David Plante’s American Ghosts (2005) and Robert Cormier’s Fade (1988), autobiographical narratives about growing up in southern New England in French Catholic neighborhoods called Little Canadas, both employ the trope of invisibility to convey the ethnic community’s lack of presence, agency, or permanence within an englobing American culture that progressively erodes the foundations of its cultural otherness. Both texts hinge upon cultural erasure. In Plante’s memoir, in which he seeks to gain access to his cultural past, his childhood self is haunted by the ghosts of his Indian forebears and his adult self, by the ghosts of his parish. These supernatural beings who shuttle between absence and presence signal the loss of cultural memory and identity that assimilation engenders. Cormier’s novel chronicles the effects of invisibility on three “faders” representing first-, second-, and third-generation French Canadians in New England. A metaphor for the progressive loss of ancestral heritage in the adopted land, Fade offers a portrait of the gradual disintegration of Frenchtown from its heyday in the 1930s to its dissolution in the 1960s.