Reality first appeared in the late 1980s-in the sense not of
real life but rather of the TV entertainment genre inaugurated by
shows such as Cops and America's Most Wanted ; the
daytime gabfests of ...Geraldo, Oprah, and Donahue; and the tabloid
news of A Current Affair . In a bracing work of cultural
criticism, Eric Harvey argues that reality TV emerged in dialog
with another kind of entertainment that served as its foil while
borrowing its techniques: gangsta rap. Or, as legendary performers
Ice Cube and Ice-T called it, "reality rap."
Reality rap and reality TV were components of a cultural
revolution that redefined popular entertainment as a truth-telling
medium. Reality entertainment borrowed journalistic tropes but was
undiluted by the caveats and context that journalism demanded.
While N.W.A.'s "Fuck tha Police" countered Cops ' vision of
Black lives in America, the reality rappers who emerged in that
group's wake, such as Snoop Doggy Dogg and Tupac Shakur, embraced
reality's visceral tabloid sensationalism, using the media's
obsession with Black criminality to collapse the distinction
between image and truth. Reality TV and reality rap nurtured the
world we live in now, where politics and basic facts don't feel
real until they have been translated into mass-mediated
entertainment.
Moving beyond species count data is an essential step to better understand the effects of environmental perturbations on biodiversity and ecosystem functions, and to eventually better predict the ...strength and direction of those effects. Here, coupling an integrative path analysis approach with data from an extensive countrywide monitoring program, we tested the main spatial, environmental and anthropogenic drivers of change in the functional structure of aquatic macroinvertebrate communities along the entire Swiss Rhine river catchment. Functional structure was largely driven by inherent altitudinal variation influencing and cascading to regional scaled factors such as land use change and position in the riverine network, which, in turn, transformed local habitat structure variables. Those cascading effects across scales propagated through the biotic community, first affecting prey and, in turn, predators. Our results illustrate how seemingly less important local factors can act as essential transmission belts, propagating through direct and indirect pathways across scales to generate the specific context in which each functional group will strive or not, leading to characteristic landscape wide variations in functional community structure.
Disability has often been conflated with adjacent and overlapping topoi in the reception and scholarship of the Hebrew Bible in ways that have compounded ableist tendencies in some texts and ...manufactured them outright in others. The point is demonstrated here through various meanings of the couplet “they have eyes but do not see; they have ears but do not hear,” which in context can convey several reasons why seeing and hearing do not happen: unwillingness to accept a message (Jer 5:21, Ezek 12:2) and inanimacy (Pss 115:5b–6a, 135:16b–17a) in addition to the disabilities of blindness and deafness (Isa 43:8). Disability plays no conceptual or rhetorical role in the first four passages, as Hebrew biblical texts generally avoid the pitfall of equating disability with rebelliousness or lifelessness. Isaiah 43:8 uses blindness and deafness as metaphors for the condition of the exiled Judeans, but a careful reading in the context of Second Isaiah reveals that they serve as metaphors for captivity, not obduracy or immorality. Appreciating these distinctions produces more historically plausible readings of the five passages and opens the way to less ableist interpretations of other disability texts in the Hebrew Bible.
Ecosystems are widely interconnected by spatial flows of material, but the overall importance of these flows relative to local ecosystem functioning remains unclear. Here we provide a quantitative ...synthesis on spatial flows of carbon connecting ecosystems worldwide. Cross-ecosystem flows range over eight orders of magnitude, bringing between 10
and 10
gC m
year
to recipient ecosystems. Magnitudes are similar to local fluxes in freshwater and benthic ecosystems, but two to three orders of magnitude lower in terrestrial systems, demonstrating different dependencies on spatial flows among ecosystem types. The strong spatial couplings also indicate that ecosystems are vulnerable to alterations of cross-ecosystem flows. Thus, a reconsideration of ecosystem functioning, including a spatial perspective, is urgently needed.
Rationale
Adolescents represent a vulnerable group due to increased experimentation with illicit substances that is often associated with the adolescent period, and because adolescent drug use can ...result in long-term effects that differ from those caused by drug use initiated during adulthood.
Objectives
The purpose of the present study was to determine the effects of repeated heroin vapor inhalation during adolescence on measures of nociception, and anxiety-like behavior during adulthood in female and male Wistar rats.
Methods
Rats were exposed twice daily to 30 min of heroin vapor from post-natal day (PND) 36 to PND 45. At 12 weeks of age, baseline thermal nociception was assessed across a range of temperatures with a warm-water tail-withdrawal assay. Anxiety-like behavior was assessed in an elevated plus-maze (EPM) and activity was measured in an open-field arena. Starting at 23 weeks of age, baseline thermal nociception was re-assessed, nociception was determined after acute heroin or naloxone injection, and anxiety-like behavior was redetermined in the EPM.
Results
Adolescent heroin inhalation altered baseline thermal nociception in female rats at 12 weeks of age and in both female and male rats at ~ 23 weeks. Heroin-treated animals exhibited anxiety-like behavior when tested in the elevated plus-maze, showed blunted heroin-induced analgesia, but exhibited no effect on naloxone-induced hyperalgesia.
Conclusions
The present study demonstrates that heroin vapor inhalation during adolescence produces behavioral and physiological consequences in rats that persist well into adulthood.
•E-cigarette use is increasingly common yet few preclinical studies are available.•Locomotor and temperature effects of nicotine are produced by inhalation in rats.•Co-exposure to THC and nicotine ...results in independent effects of each drug.•This model will be of use to evaluate a range of health effects of e-cigarettes.
Electronic nicotine delivery systems (ENDS, e-cigarettes) are increasingly used for the self-administration of nicotine by various human populations, including previously nonsmoking adolescents. Studies in preclinical models are necessary to evaluate health impacts of ENDS including the development of nicotine addiction, effects of ENDS vehicles, flavorants and co-administered psychoactive substances such as Δ9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC). This study was conducted to validate a rat model useful for the study of nicotine effects delivered by inhalation of vapor created by ENDS.
Male Sprague-Dawley rats (N = 8) were prepared with radio telemetry devices for the reporting of temperature and activity. Experiments subjected rats to inhalation of vapor generated by an electronic nicotine delivery system (ENDS) adapted for rodents. Inhalation conditions included vapor generated by the propylene glycol (PG) vehicle, Nicotine (1, 10, 30 mg/mL in the PG) and THC (12.5, 25 mg/mL).
Nicotine inhalation increased spontaneous locomotion and decreased body temperature of rats. Pretreatment with the nicotinic cholinergic receptor antagonist mecamylamine (2 mg/kg, i.p.) prevented stimulant effects of nicotine vapor inhalation and attenuated the hypothermic response. Combined inhalation of nicotine and THC resulted in apparently independent effects which were either additive (hypothermia) or opposed (activity).
These studies provide evidence that ENDS delivery of nicotine via inhalation results in nicotine-typical effects on spontaneous locomotion and thermoregulation in male rats. Effects were blocked by a nicotinic antagonist, demonstrating mechanistic specificity. This system will therefore support additional studies of the contribution of atomizer/wick design, vehicle constituents and/or flavorants to the effects of nicotine administered by ENDS.
Sepsis is a leading cause of death in hospitals requiring prompt recognition and treatment. The sepsis bundle is the cornerstone of sepsis treatment. Studies have evaluated the impact of a sepsis ...huddle on sepsis bundle compliance but not in sepsis identification.
Measure the effect of a multidisciplinary sepsis bedside huddle in the Emergency Department (ED) on sepsis identification and sepsis bundle compliance.
Retrospective, single-center, cohort study. Pre-huddle patients were identified via Best Practice Advisory (BPA) alert on the electronic medical record from 11/01/2019–3/31/2020. The post-huddle group were patients for whom a sepsis huddle was activated from 11/01/2020–3/31/2021.
116 patients met inclusion criteria and 15 were determined to not have sepsis for a total of 21 pre-huddle and 80 post-huddle patients. Comparing pre-post results, sepsis huddle increased code sepsis activation (10% vs 91%, p < 0.001); sepsis bundle compliance (24% vs 80%, p < 0.001); antibiotics within one hour (33% vs 90%, p < 0.001); culture within one hour (67% vs 95%, p < 0.001), order entry <30 min. (29% vs 86%, p < 0.001); and median order entry time (48 vs. 3 min, p < 0.001). Post-huddle, 80% of order entries were ≤ 20 min. Logistic regression predicting sepsis code found huddle to be the first predictor, (p < 0.0000005). Hour-1 bundle compliance was predicted by physician/physician assistant order ≤30 min (R2 = 0.36, p < 0.0000005).
Sepsis bedside huddle in the ED improves identification and sepsis bundle compliance. Results suggest increased order entry speed caused bundle improvement.
Beyoncé's Digital Stardom Harvey, Eric
Black camera : the newsletter of the Black Film Center/Archives,
10/2017, Volume:
9, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
In this essay, I contend that, since 2013, Beyoncé has become the exemplar of digital stardom in the popular music world by negotiating the representational affordances of social media platforms and ...striving to innovate in digital music commerce. I examine three specific moments in which Beyoncé transformed her star image in ways that are uniquely digital. In the promotional documentary Life Is But a Dream (2013), she adopts the visual aesthetics of Instagram and Tumblr to address the audience in a strategically intimate way. With the surprise release of BEYONCÉ (2013), she positioned herself as a self-made industry entrepreneur, while relying on her significant social media following to promote the album for free. Finally, with Lemonade (2016), she created a work suffused with representations of black womanhood that summoned a networked public of black women scholars—a group long excluded from popular music discourse—whose online conversations about the album were crucial in shaping its reception, and Beyoncé's image as a black feminist. Because both stardom and media technologies are social constructions, these three transformative moments are inextricable from the technologies that shaped them, and have shaped Beyoncé's star image into a reflection not only of her work and persona, but what it means to live in a digital world.
Rationale
Recent reports on the abuse of novel synthetic cathinone derivatives call attention to serious public health risks of these substances. In response to this concern, a growing body of ...preclinical research has characterized the psychopharmacology of these substances, particularly mephedrone (MEPH) or methylenedioxypyrovalerone (MDPV), noting their similarities to 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA) and cocaine. Few studies have utilized drug discrimination methodology to characterize the psychopharmacological properties of these substances.
Objectives
The present study employed a rodent drug discrimination assay to further characterize the stimulus effects of MEPH and MDPV in comparison to MDMA and to a drug mixture comprised of d-amphetamine and MDMA.
Methods
Eight male Sprague-Dawley rats were trained to discriminate 1.5 mg/kg MDMA, and eight rats were trained to discriminate a mixture of 1.5 mg/kg MDMA and 0.5 mg/kg d-amphetamine (MDMA + AMPH) from vehicle. Substitution tests were conducted with MDMA, d-amphetamine, MDPV, MEPH, and cocaine.
Results
Dose-response curves generated with MDMA and MEPH were comparable between training groups. In contrast, AMPH, MDPV, and cocaine produced only partial substitution in animals trained to discriminate MDMA but produced full substitution in animals trained to discriminate the MDMA + AMPH mixture.
Conclusions
These findings indicate that MDPV’s effects may be more similar to those of traditional psychostimulants, whereas MEPH exerts stimulus effects more similar to those of MDMA. Additional experiments with selective DA and 5-hydroxytryptamine (5-HT) receptor antagonists are required to further elucidate specific receptor mechanisms mediating the discriminative stimulus effects of MDPV and mephedrone.
Food webs assemble via the interacting constraints of dispersal limitation and bottom-up trophic dependencies where consumers can only establish after their resources have arrived. These factors can ...affect assembly by influencing the expression of the regional species pool in local patches, but how this unfolds mechanistically remains unclear. Here, we use a large-scale grassland meta-community experiment to demonstrate how the independent influences of spatial factors and bottom-up constraints on insect trophic guilds interact to create divergent local insect communities. Bottom-up trophic dependencies tightly controlled the composition and abundance of specialist trophic guilds, resulting in different communities among islands because producer communities were mainly determined by patch size contingencies. Spatial isolation controlled the composition and abundance of generalist trophic guilds, resulting in different insect communities among islands based on distance from mainland. These results demonstrate that neither diet-based constraints nor the spatial characteristics of islands can predict the early structure of locally assembling food webs, with their establishment deriving instead from interactions between both processes.
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