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Presentations 2002

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Systemic Glucose Injection Enhances Morphine-Induced Antinociception in Rats

Rinah Yamamoto

Past research has indicated that intake of palatable sweet substances can alter morphine-induced antinociception (MIA) in rodents. It is possible that the effects of sweet substances on MIA are due to the hedonic nature of these tastants. The role of glucose in MIA in the absence of taste hedonics was studied in male Long-Evans rats using the hot-water tail-withdrawal procedure. In the first study, after baseline tail-withdrawal latencies were established, rats were injected, IP, with either sterile water or 100, 300, or 560 mg/kg glucose solution. Thirty minutes after glucose injections, animals were assessed for MIA, after which MIA was evaluated in response to a cumulative SC morphine dosing regime with injections of morphine given every 30 minutes accumulating to 1.0, 3.0, 4.2, 5.6, and 10.0 mg/kg. The results of this study demonstrated that glucose at the 300 mg/kg dose was most effective in enhancing MIA as evaluated by the IED50 measurement. The second study replicated the first using only two groups of rats, one receiving the 300 mg/kg dose of glucose and the other sterile water, IP. Glucose or sterile water was administered concurrently with each cumulative dose of morphine. Hot-water tail-withdrawal latency was assessed 15 minutes after the paired injections. Animals that received 300 mg/kg glucose demonstrated a significant augmentation of morphine-induced antinociception. These results suggest that the systemic effects of sweet solutions may contribute to enhanced MIA in rats administered these solutions in the absence of taste hedonics

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Population, Environmental Change, and Food Security in East Africa

Michael Grossi

Academic and popular views on human population growth and environmental change often assume a simplistic direct relationship, with population growth leading to increasing environmental degradation and resource depletion. On a global scale, this assumption is reasonable, particularly over recent historical periods. However, examinations of local experience often show that environmental change is also contingent on a variety of social, political, cultural, and economic processes. This study utilizes a review of the literature and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) mapping tools to examine the relationship between population density and soil erosion in the administrative districts of Kenya and Tanzania in East Africa. The results show that, in some areas, high population density and severe soil erosion are well correlated (the intitive expectation), while in other areas, this is not the case, and in fact they are negatively correlated (the counter-intuitive result). This indicates that other factors may also be important in explaining this diversity of experience, and several of these other factors are examined in conjunction with population density. The literature and these preliminary results suggest that inherent resource endowments, infrastructure investment, access to labor, input, and output markets on the part of farmers, and historic land tenure security can either mitigate or exacerbate the impact of population pressure on resource use and depletion.

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Student Involvement with Clients in the Academic Setting

Julie Nastasi

The field of occupational therapy recently addressed the need for occupational therapy students to gain more experience prior to entering the field by changing the field entrance requirements from a bachelor’s degree to a master’s degree. Current literature addresses different techniques being used at occupational therapy programs to provide and prepare students for fieldwork assignments and entrance into the field. This study in particular was interested in student involvement with clients in the academic setting. Student involvement with clients in the academic setting specifically refers to entry-level master’s degree occupational therapy students working with clients under the supervision of a registered occupational therapist within an occupational therapy course. The students may be involved in any of the following activities while being supervised: evaluation, assessment, intervention, treatment, interview, or interaction. The perceptions of program directors were studied to investigate the profession’s academic leaders’ awareness and stances on student involvement with clients, and to see how each occupational therapy program provides students with clinical experience prior to fieldwork and entrance into the field.

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Invasion of Costa Rican Secondary Rain Forest by a Malaysian Ginger, Zingiber spectabile

Randi Rotjan

Costa Rica is home to some of the largest tracts of remaining primary rainforest in Central America. Continued reforestation efforts have led to an increase of secondary forest re-growth, yet these forests are still at an overall loss worldwide. The Wilson Botanical Gardens sit at the edge of a small but critical tract of secondary forest, of paramount importance due to the adjacent primary forest. The presence of exotic species planted at the gardens may pose a threat to the native ginger species. I studied one species of Malaysian ginger, Zingiber spectabile, and it’s distribution throughout the immediately surrounding primary and secondary forests, which host the native ginger species, Costus barbatus Suess, the spiral ginger. Tangential to the gardens, a transect was marked every 50 meters and reproductively viable invasive plants were quantified in 50-meter intervals for 1000 meters. Quantity of reproductive structures (flower stalks) were also recorded and analyzed. A significant correlation was found between the number of existing reproductive plants and the distance from the parent plant in the gardens, showing a decrease in plants as the distance from the parent plant increased. Interestingly, there is a marked boundary line at 800 meters, after which no plants are found. This is surprising, considering that there is no significant correlation in the amount of reproductive structures (an indicator of plant maturity and age) with increasing distance from the forest. Dispersal methods for this species may therefore be relatively unimportant in the spread of this species, and instead soil quality or some other abiotic factor may act as a barrier. Reciprocal transplant studies are needed to determine the ability of this plant to effectively grow in surrounding forest, and competition studies are needed to quantify the negative affect (if any) on the native ginger species due to the presence of Zingiber spectabile.

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Books, Relics and the Ambivalence of Sacred Text in the Later Middle Ages

Heidi Gearhart

The Medieval book was more than simply a collection of images and text or a literary object. Books often took on an active role that extended beyond their textual or illustrative contents. They function as did a relic: with an operative religious power. The idea of the book as relic, or as an active religious force in itself, brings to the fore the ambivalence and problematic nature of the book and the Word in the increasingly literate and anti-Jewish Christian society of 12th and 13th century Western Europe. Such a study of the book as active element, or relic, and the ambivalence towards text in which this activation was rooted, can contribute to an understanding of Medieval Christians’ view of self and of the Jewish "other."

This paper will examine a few of the ways in which Scripture and the book is encoded as relic. The active book-object literally embodied the Word, setting the New Testament apart and above what St. Paul called the "killing letter" and law of the Hebrew Bible.1 Christianity needed the legitimization of Christianity it found in the Old Testament, but it also needed to emphasize the supremacy of the New Testament and the "New Law" that it contained. The activation of the New Testament by the consideration of sacred text and books as relics fulfilled this need.

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The effect of the slippersnail Crepidula convexa on shell selection by the hermit crab Pagurus longicarpus

Wei Li

The slippersnail Crepidula convexa is often found living on periwinkle shells inhabited by hermit crabs (Pagurus longicarpus). Do the hermit crabs seek out shells with C. convexa or is there some other reason for the association? To address this question, we performed a series of shell selection experiments and found that hermit crabs significantly preferred to live in periwinkle shells with no C. convexa compared to the same-sized shells with large C. convexa. In these experiments, we defined "large" to refer to C. convexa with shells at least 70% of the periwinkle shell length, or multiple C. convexa with total shell length at least 70% of the periwinkle shell length. However, the hermit crabs showed no preference between shells with no C. convexa and shells with a small C. convexa (C. convexa shell length shorter than 35% of the periwinkle shell length). When given a choice between an intact shell with large C. convexa and a shell that had been drilled by a moon snail, the hermit crabs preferred the former. Since at our field site in Nahant, MA, there is strong competition for adequate shells and a large proportion of the empty available shells are drilled, this result may explain why we see the hermit crabs carrying large C. convexa in the field. Since C. convexa lacks a dispersing larval stage and adults can move only slowly, whether or not the hermit crabs inhabit the periwinkle shells that C. convexa live on may affect how far the snails disperse

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Reinforcing or Debunking Racial Stereotypes? A Tale of Two Mikados.

Lucas Dennis

Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado (1885) exhibits many traits of Orientalist discourses of the day. The satire, which Gilbert claimed was directed at the English, relied on painstakingly "researched" elements of Japanese culture. The production generated and reinforced essentialist definitions, through a series of binary oppositions, which strengthened the English audience's view of themselves as the rightful, rational, imperial "rulers" of the hopelessly old-fashioned, naïve, and even bloodthirsty Japanese. White, English actors, of course, played the Japanese characters.

The Federal Theatre Project's The Swing Mikado (1938), which employed a cast consisting entirely of African-American actors and featured a setting transposed from Japan to a tropical island, included, clearly, some major changes from the original Mikado. These changes included the re-scoring of five of the original numbers so that they would "swing," the insertion of some popular dance sequences including "The Truck" and "The Cakewalk," and the updating of some of the dialogue into the producers' version of black dialect. For the most part, however, the original dialogue and score of 1885 were used.

Unlike the 1885 Mikado, I would argue, this production did more to reinscribe than to reinforce negative stereotypes. The immensely talented African-American cast played the straight, Savoy-style sections of The Mikado with as much skill and style as the stereotypical, minstrel-inspired sections of dialect and dancing, proving that the entire production, and culture in general, is no more than a bunch of masks. The actors' mimicry of stereotypical black characters effectively crossed over into mockery: the fact that they could sing and act with impeccable diction and delivery when required debunked the stereotypical images, rendering them completely without merit. They proved that the color of their skin did not limit the types of characters they could play and the styles of theatre in which they could work. This type of literally ambivalent (ambi-valent or "two-powered") performance discredited generalized, essentialist definitions of race. Orientalist elements, equally present in The Swing Mikado as in the original production, considering that both used nearly the same libretto and score, became more of the satire Gilbert may have intended in the hands of the Chicago "Negro Unit" of the Federal Theatre Project in 1938.

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Filming Shakespeare Writing

Chris Scully

Recent scholarship has begun to call into question long-held assumptions about how Shakespeare's plays came to be in the physical forms which we now have. Rejecting the desire to remove the "veil of print" from early quartos and folios, many scholars have come to realize that we know very little about how Shakespeare actually worked. Recent work on so-called "bad" quartos has offered new explanations for their origins and suggested different paradigms for Shakespeare's process. Faced with this uncertainty, many have encouraged emphasizing the materiality of the text, choosing to concentrate on what we actually have rather than hypothesize about what we do not.

Recent Shakespearean films, however, have conversely chosen to emphasize the process of writing. Films such as Shakespeare in Love and Prospero's Books emphasize rather than shy away from the act of writing, whether Shakespeare's own or that of an ambiguously similar figure. These films appear to draw attention to the very process of adaptation from one medium to another in which they are engaged, making their subject not only their story, but their own creative process as well.

This discussion will attempt to use the changing understanding of Shakespeare writing being formulated by editorial and literary critics to inform the depictions of "Shakespeare writing" found in films such as those mentioned above. Why, at a time when our understanding of how Shakespeare worked is so unsettled, do films desire to foreground the act of writing? How do the films in question construct writing as an activity? What issues raised in critical discussions are echoed or amplified in film?

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Tangible Bookmarks

Eduardo Calvillo

In this work we introduce Tangible Bookmarks (TBM). TBM are a part of a growing area of user interface research called Tangible User Interfaces (TUI). TUI use physical forms to represent information and data, which takes advantage of the skills already learn by humans, for whom, for example, is more natural to grab and move real objects instead of pointing and clicking on them indirectly.

TBM allow Internet Browser users a more natural interaction with the information in a computer by letting them "touch" and physically arrange web pages; with TBM the user can grab web pages out of the computer, use them and then put them back in the computer. In this talk we will present the current prototype of TBM, which consist of the software embedded in a non-commercial Internet Browser and the hardware portion. This is ongoing research in the Human Computer Interaction Lab.

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Art, Spectacle, and Reconciliation: The Gettysburg Cyclorama in Boston

Kristin Baker

In 1884, the new Boston Cyclorama building opened its doors for the much-anticipated exhibition of Paul Philippoteaux’s panoramic painting of the Battle of Gettysburg. The accuracy of the rendition was its most significant feature: newspaper accounts detailed the painstaking efforts of the artists to recreate the topography of the field; advertisements list dozens of Civil War generals consulted; souvenir programs detail the troop movements and reference War Department maps; local war heroes were on hand to bear testimony to its truthfulness. The painting was presented to the public as an honest and complete document of the battle—the next best thing to being there.

Nevertheless, the painting is not without an agenda. Reconciliation is the implicit theme of the painting, making it emblematic of much the war-themed popular art of the 1880s. Unlike novels and serials, however, the Gettysburg Cyclorama was experiential rather than simply descriptive. It didn’t only seek to tell the story of the battle; it undertook to transport the viewer to the battlefield of July 3, 1863. By doing so with an eye to reuniting the Southern and Northern brothers, the Boston Cyclorama Company created a powerful cultural artifact that succeeded in re-writing cultural memory of the war. Looking at the history and reception of this unusual cultural artifact, this study will investigate its role contributing to as well as profiting from the shifting historical view of the war in Boston.

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Italian-American Religious Festivals: Music and Identity in Boston's North End

Jennifer L. Caputo

This paper examines the significance of music at Italian-American religious festivals in the North End community of Boston, Massachusetts. The study focuses on the Roma Band, one of the oldest feast bands in the Boston area, and concentrates on the band's prominent role at these festivals. The Roma Band performs at almost all of the religious festivals in the North End and has continued to represent the community's history and ethnic identity through the music played at these events. This work explores issues of Americanization, assimilation, and secularization of Italian-American religious festivals and how music clearly represents and even promotes these cultural transformations. The significance of music at religious festivals in general is discussed in the context of public displays of ethnicity and religion. The uniqueness of the community and of the Roma Band is apparent through careful analysis and comparisons between other Italian-American communities and between other feast bands. Overall, the paper demonstrates how music not only embodies the identity of the North End, but also influences both the internal and external view of the neighborhood.

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On Top of the Big Dig: Economic Analysis of the Urban Parks Created by the Boston Central Artery/Tunnel Project

Kayo Tajima

Parks and open spaces in a central city have an important role in enhancing the local environment, by providing recreational opportunities and beautiful views, and thereby boosting the image of the city. In this study, the economic benefits of proximity to parks in Boston, Massachusetts are estimated, based on the hedonic pricing method.

Assessed values of condominium units in nine zip codes of central Boston are used to estimate the implicit prices for their location attributes. The coefficients obtained from the hedonic regression are then applied to estimate the economic benefits of the planned 30 acres of parks that will be created by the Big Dig after the elevated highway (I-93) is brought underground. In order to estimate the effects of demolishing the elevated highway, the effect of proximity to highways on housing prices is simultaneously estimated.

It is shown that shorter distances to urban open space have positive impacts, and shorter distances to highway have negative impacts on property prices. Parks larger than one acre have larger impacts than smaller parks. The impact of the highway demolition may have already appeared in property prices by the year 2000. Applying the estimated value of living near a park, it appears that the new 30-acre open space will increase the property values by a quarter of a billion dollars in aggregate. This estimate far exceeds the estimated capital costs for the parks. The highway demolition has even larger impacts on property prices, adding close to a billion dollars to nearby property values.

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Reason, Revolution, and Songs

Joseph Ramsey

Critics of William Blake tend to oppose both his difficult poetic mode and his 'infernal' political theology to the simply stated radicalism and the Enlightenment rationalism of his contemporary, Thomas Paine. Contrasting Blake's limited readership, to Paine's widespread circulation-- Blake's deep rejection of systematized Reason, to Paine's valorization of reason as the measure of government-- these critics often make it difficult to reconcile their understanding of Blake and Paine with the undisputed fact that Blake was actually a tremendous Paine-admirer. Under close analysis, it comes clear that these two writers' philosophical and political thought as embodied in their early works contain a number of important similarities, as well as some important differences. This paper will highlight some of each.

Moreover, as part of a broader culture of radicalism responding to the French Revolution, Painite and Blakian images and ideas can be traced across the decade of the 1790s, across the Irish Sea to the patriotic Irish ballads of the Paddy's Resource, a republican song-book that circulated throughout colonial Ireland. These songs helped to give voice to a politicized Irish popular culture which attempted (and failed tragically) to transform some of the best of Paine and Blake into a real revolution in 1798.

This paper will trace continuities and mark differences in the way revolution, social oppresion, reason and freedom, are figured in the work of Blake, Paine, as well as Wolfe Tone and the Songs of the United Irishmen. In addition to reading the works closely, I will offer a historical context for connecting these often prematurely segregated 'revolutionary' texts.

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From Pike to Spike or Fangs for Nothing: Girl-Power and Neo-Feminism in Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Sunil Swaroop and Kathryn Buckman

Buffy the Vampire Slayer has been marked as an icon of girl-power presenting a model of feminism for young women who look to the character as an archetype of feminine power. However, the sexualization of Buffy in the movie and the television series raises questions about the positioning of gender in the acquiring of power for adolescents. Buffy’s need to define herself through her association with men capable of dominating her problematizes the notion of "girl-power". This paper explores Buffy's romantic life and the relationship between her sexuality and her role as the slayer.

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Objects of Our Affections: Racialization in Gay Male Pornography

Sunil Swaroop

Gay male pornography has seen a massive growth in production and distribution in the past ten years. Over these years the influx of minority men has increased considerably. With the addition of so many minority characters, one needs to question how these characters are represented and to whom. This paper explores how gay minority men are sexualized for consumption within the gay community and whether this representation creates a fetishistic reality within the gay male community. By examining the marketing strategies and advertisements, the goal is to show clear racial implications in these films.

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Entertaining Children: Aristotle and the History of the Double Standard

Kathryn Buckman

In the age of video game and television show ratings and the parental advisory sticker on albums, that some entertainment is appropriate for adults and may not be appropriate for children has become a fact of life. Children cannot legally purchase pornography or often get into an R rated movie without adult supervision. There are very few people who would have it otherwise. However, this double standard has undergone a major shift in the last two hundred years. Previously social class rather than age has been the deciding factor in which activities would be appropriate for which people. In this paper, I will discuss Aristotle's ideas on the place of the arts in the education of the young and how these ideas have withstood the test of time.

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Contact information

GSC Academic Committee Co-Chairs:
Eduardo H. Calvillo : calvillo@eecs.tufts.edu
Martin Paczynski : martin.paczynski@tufts.edu