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The Effects of Oral Contraceptives on the Risk of Ovarian Cancer
No full textNumerous studies have assessed potential prevention methods to reduce the risk of gynaecological cancers. The current study investigates how oral contraceptive use can decrease a woman’s risk for ovarian cancer. The relationship between oral contraceptive use and ovarian cancer, the effects of dose and duration of use, and the potentially greatly beneficial effects for high-risk individuals are thoroughly explored. The reviewed literature provided strong support that oral contraceptive use decreases a woman’s risk for ovarian cancer. Thus, the thesis that oral contraceptives protect against ovarian cancer was supported. 
Destinations: for Stella
Get PDFA poem about Manila, Philippines, and Vancouver and Kelowna, BC, Canada
“A Sounding Happens: Pauline Oliveros, Expanded Consciousness, and Healing”
Get PDFOur essay is written with the deepest (pun intended) respect for the life and work of Pauline Oliveros. We draw on her performances, recordings and writings, those of her numerous collaborators and others who write so well about her, and on our own experiences. By writing together, by generating a dialogue, or, perhaps better, by performing an improvisation around Pauline’s influence “a sounding happens.” Our metalogue of multiple voices, fragments of situations, and historical resonances parallels and reveals the subjective, experiential and embodied modes of knowing and healing that Oliveros’ work ultimately achieves and teaches. As in publications by Oliveros and her collaborator Ione, we blend methods of analysis and intuition through different modes of writing. This format is designed to encourage the reader to allow connections and continuities to emerge. Mirroring the participatory role of the audience in many of Oliveros’ compositions, your performance as a reader plays an integral role in producing meaning out of our words. Please listen and sound with us
Sound: An Enrichment or State
Get PDFLecture given at Sound Practice—the first UKISC conference on Sound, Culture and Environments Dartington Hall, Dartington College of Arts, England. February 17, 200
Voicescapes: The (En)chanting Voice & Its Performance Soundscapes
Get PDFThis is an exploration of a type of chanting that is not ordinarily considered music, but through “musical” parameters such as pitch, vocal style and intensity, it is often performed in settings in a musical way in order to create a vocal soundscape that surpasses that of everyday speech, although is distant from the singing voice in terms of its context and style of performance. This paper draws on Schafer’s work on soundscape in order to explore the ways the voice forms part of a meaningful sound environment (e.g., 1977, 1992, 1993). A performer who uses chanting, or a vocal style very close to this creates its sound-scapes, or “voicescapes”, in order to position it within a particular social situation and context to command a position of intense affect. This exploration of the socially performed voice shows that in some contexts it clearly has musical traits—something that challenges the boundaries of what music is or is not— and that social performance is an important process allowing such vocal performances to carry meaning. The discussion presents several examples of the chanting voice as a performing instrument that is essential to many contexts of everyday life. It is an instrument that creates voicescapes in a multitude of social settings in order to, for example, capture the attention of listeners, add expression to a situation, or position the chanter vis-à-vis an audience. The contexts in which such vocal performances are found include auctions, horse races, sports commentaries, marches, and markets. In such contexts the voice is performed in a chant-like way in order to capture the attention of an audience or to express in an emotional way a scene or image. In each, the voice is usually raised in pitch, in intensity, and it chants
Mediated Music & Meditation in Modernity:: Radio Pop and Train Whistles in Public and Private Spaces
Get PDFInfluenced by the Massachusetts Peace Movement of the early 1800s, transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau believed that peace was derived from an awareness of an internal state of being. Thoreau longed for peace within his soul and surroundings. He retreated into the woods that embraced his Walden, a respite for time and space appropriate for independent thought..
Listening to the Ecosystem of the Turtle: : Enabling the disabled to cross the listening paths of acoustic ecology and environmental education
Get PDFEnvironmental education and awareness projects foster environmentally friendly attitudes, contributing to the protection of the environment, through active participation. Special Environmental Education provides to groups of people with disabilities, opportunities for both education and active participation in environmental protection projects. The science and art of Acoustic Ecology may function as an especially useful educational tool, which could assist students with disabilities to metaphorically cross the listening path of environmental education.
The National Marine Park of Zakynthos (NMPZ) is officially recognized as a nesting beach of the sea turtle Caretta caretta. Within the framework of academic research, appropriate environmental education material was created for special groups, and particularly for people with visual, hearing, as well as mobility disabilities.
The National Marine Park of Zakynthos was chosen as the location for the case study, because it appeared to be an ideal site for environmental education activities that could ‘embrace’ people with disabilities.
An interdisciplinary approach was adopted for the development of the environmental education material for special groups, combining Acoustic Ecology with Conservation Education, that is, education for ecosystem’s management and conservation (Jakobson, 1987, 1991). The current research drew on knowledge from these two fields. The educational material was created and successfully implemented, resulting in the participants’ increase of environmental awareness and the development of environmentally friendly attitudes, as demonstrated by the research results
American Frontier Soundscapes: Rehearing the Old West
Get PDFOur journey starts on the East Coast in the mid-1800s. Henry David Thoreau’s cabin was nestled among the Concord, Massachusetts’ woods less than one quarter mile away from the Fitchburg Railroad stop. The train crossed near the southern tip of the pond, and its morning arrival was often cloaked by its own billowing clouds of smoke and the woods that stood between society and Thoreau (1884: “Solitude”)..
Hearing the Free Music: Percy Grainger, Australian Visionary of the Soundscape, Creator of Electro-Acoustic Free Music and Sound Machines
Get PDFIn the Free Music Statement of 1938, Percy Grainger clearly articulated his philosophy of music as coming from an intimate relationship he had to the environment and his attentiveness to the sonic world around him. From this he imagined a new free music, following contours of the physical and acoustic landscape to create a microtonal graphic and sounding world of polyphonic complexity like the world of nature. So too the introduction of machines such as trains and planes was a metaphor for the kind of sound pattern and automatic machines he was to develop. This article identifies these relationships, showing how Grainger passionately interpreted the soundscape into a new sonic world of free music heralding the new age of electronic music. Grainger himself said the Free Music was his only important contribution to music and that the theremin was the most perfect of all instruments. The world premiere of the Free Music for multiple theremins did not occur for another sixty years in 1998 when I curated it for the Beaming the Theremin event for the Melbourne International Festival of the Arts at the Grainger museum. This article articulates these events and asks why Grainger’s pioneering contribution to the soundscape and electro-acoustic free music has been so largely ignored
Cell Death & Certainty
Get PDFI’m Diya Mukherjee, a high school senior based in San Jose, CA with an interest in computational biology and public health. The summer of 2023 marked a turning point for me that is familiar to any science student: my first wet lab experience. I was given the incredible opportunity to participate in the Summer Science Research Program (SSRP) at Rockefeller University in New York, NY, working with research mentors from the Fuchs Lab of Mammalian Cell Biology and Development on a project about the role of inflammation in skin cancer. Cell Death & Certainty depicts an incident from my third week of the program, in which many of my cell samples began to mysteriously die overnight. I deliberately wrote the story with a melodramatic tone, because I think that science so often feels that way