Sewanee: The University of the South
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Community Perceptions of Aid to the Informal Economy: A Comparison of Cases in Rural Haiti and Cameroon
No full textThe informal economy consists of economic activity not regulated nor protected by a state entity. It plays a vital role in reducing unemployment and stimulating the economies of many countries in the Global South. In Cameroon, it accounts for 20-30% of the GDP and 90% of employment. Similarly, 47% of Haiti’s population engages in the informal economy. Due to its significance in national economies, those investing in development, including local entrepreneurs, NGOs, and multilateral aid organizations, will often target the informal sector. However, the intentions of investors may or may not align with the goals of the communities in which they are investing. Separate surveys of a fishing community in Cameroon and farming households in Haiti were conducted. To identify factors that contribute to effective community development in the Global South, the two cases were compared to determine how informal economy workers’ perceptions of investors affected their productivity and project success. Fifty Haitian farmers were surveyed to assess the impact that payments for ecosystem services had in establishing and maintaining shade-coffee agroforestry systems. Eighteen semi-structured interviews were conducted to better understand the factors that adversely affect fishers in Cameroon and their strategies to cope with them. The studies suggest that 1) when participants can identify a clear path to self-sufficiency, productivity is higher and 2) sustained support and collaboration between investors and those participating in the informal economy is conducive to higher project success rates.Dr. Deborah McGrath, Sewanee-in-Haiti Institute, Office of Undergraduate Research, School for International Trainin
The Narcissism of the Second Family Bestiary
No full textIn the mid-twentieth century, an American poet named Wallace Stevens wrote a poem, at once cute and profound, called “A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts”. What’s remarkable about this poem is how deftly the poet enters into the mind of his subject – the rabbit contemplating existence at the end of the day, when ‘nothing is left except light on your fur’ and the grass is ‘full of yourself’. The rabbit’s peaceful narcissism is lovely, and not unlike the day’s-end meditations of its fellow biped – the equally solipsistic human. When watching the sun set over distant mountains, when dipping feet into cold river-water, it’s easy to regard (or peacefully not regard) the whole universe as our own, a theater for individual identity, a mirror of our own faces. Someone with a mystical inclination might think that the Garden of Eden was never lost, that it only scattered over time and space, and that, around the next bend of the trail, the garden ‘full of yourself’ is waiting to be found – where every falling leaf and darting squirrel is only your reflection, the object to your subject, waiting patiently to be named.
In any case, certain thinkers of the Western tradition have found a special joy in ‘re-naming’ creation, exercising an artistic and scientific power over the natural world. From the Physics of Aristotle to Jorge Luis Borges’s Manual de Zoologia Fantastica, writers have been creating taxonomies – whether natural, philosophical, or religious – that further the Judeo-Christian original, when God tasked and gifted Adam with the responsibility of naming the various animals.
My research project focuses on one such version of this project, which was especially popular in twelfth-century Europe: the so-called ‘second-family bestiary’. There are nearly forty extant second-family bestiaries today, mostly from France and England, which illustrate and categorize a selection of animals from the Physiologus, while tempering the allegory of their descriptions with (relatively) empirical passages found in Isidore’s Etymologies. Importantly, most of these bestiaries begin with a textual account (often accompanied by many beautiful illustrations) of the Judeo-Christian creation, and Adam’s subsequent naming, of the natural world. I argue that the texts and illustrations of these entries represent a philosophical problem at the heart of the bestiary – indeed, at the heart of any project which seeks to name and order the known universe. Namely, these entries represent the narcissism of the garden; the lion and the elephant, instead of becoming their own subjects, become the object of a human subject. They are both depicted in terms of their relationship to people, and for this reason they become an ‘other’.
Such a post-humanist concern might appear trivial; after all, we can’t ask every medieval bestiarist to possess the poetic or philosophical capacities to step into the minds of their lions and elephants as Wallace Stevens did for his rabbit. However, a study of these depictions and the illustrated relationships shed light on how, exactly, these animals were meant to be read by a human audience – as distinctly ‘other’: indefinable and somewhat alien beasts which cannot be entirely understood or tamed. Having used these entries to approach a definition of the ‘other’, I then argue that the lion and the elephant also represent a more powerful and deep-seated caesura, as representations of the geographical ‘other’. For not only were these bestiaries aimed at humans, but they were aimed at some very specific humans, as the heavily Christian and European details make clear. Certain details in the texts and illustrations of these entries define the animals not only in terms of their relationship to humans, but to Western humans, as well.
In this way, the divisions between animal and human, and between East and West, both find representation in the polyvalent images of the lion and the elephant. These animals, then, are layered images, hybrids of hybridity, if you will, in which rifts and caesurae going in many different directions come together, to form a multi-dimensional map of imagined European distinctions. The project then proves that these images communicate subversive truths that ultimately deconstruct the many cultural boundary-lines as imagined by twelfth-century inhabitants of Britain. Please contact author for more information - abstract only.Dr. Alexandra Paddock through CMRS-Middlebury-Oxfor
Safety and Consent on College Campus
No full textIn this study I am taking a close look into how students feel regarding sexual assault, safety, and administrative policy on the Sewanee campus. Participants are provided an online survey consisting of 53 questions covering demographics, safety, education, sexual assault experience, campus experience, and Greek life. There is also an optional interview portion in which students are given an opportunity to speak in greater detail about how they feel regarding safety on campus. In the interview, students’ voice changes they wish to see and personal experiences that will inform areas the school should focus on. Once all the data are collected, I will determine the effect of gender and graduating class on rates of sexual assault and the safety that people feel at specific Greek organizations. I will also be examining factors such as past sex education, openness of parents, and personal experience with sexual assault and how they interact with other variables. One goal of this study is to develop a better understand of what Sewanee could be doing to minimize sexual assault on campus
Contract Year Phenomenon: NFL Quarterbacks
Get PDFAthletes may decide, consciously or unconsciously, to perform at their peak capabilities the year preceding their free agency—their contract year—to ensure the greatest opportunity of earning the best possible contract. This paper examines this contract year phenomenon for professional quarterbacks in the National Football League (NFL). We use data for ten quarterbacks from 2010 to 2019 and employ a fixed effects model. We find that while there isn’t much statistically significant evidence towards the contract year phenomenon, there was an increase in performance in the years prior to the contract year
Place, Palimpsest, and Memory in Willa Cather's My Antonio
Get PDFSince its inception, ecocriticism has evolved into a multifaceted critical literary theory. Of those facets, place-studies has emerged as a unique critical lens with which to examine not only physical place but also intimate place in literature. Willa Cather’s novel My Ántonia lends itself easily to ecocritical approaches of various kinds, and while a discussion of physical place in the novel is a viable examination in itself, I look at place in Cather’s novel in a way that acknowledges geography but also looks beyond the physical into a more intimate aspect of place: memory.
Cather’s Nebraska prairie remains firmly established among “canonical literature’s [most] famous imagined countries,” according to Lawrence Buell, but as one would expect in a novel very much invested in ideas of immigrant experience and migration, the novel hardly limits itself to Nebraska, recalling geographic places from many places in the U.S. and Europe. These varied places find connection here not only by way of physical mobility but also through shared stories and memories. Memory figures both prominently and pivotally in the novel, of course, as the frame introduction establishes the text as a collection of Jim Burden’s memories. But as the novel progresses, it becomes clear that Jim’s memories are heavily augmented by others’ memories and stories. Both memory and the physical landscape share similar layered and composite characteristics. In my thesis I show that just as the land holds layers of story (both readable and unreadable) there are similar layers of story within memory: two palimpsests, neither defining the other but both informing the other.
I begin with a discussion of the evolution of place studies and introduce the theorists Yi-Fu Tuan, Gaston Bachelard, and Lawrence Buell. From there I address the critical difference between common literary setting vs. place. And a discussion of memory in Cather’s writing must acknowledge the strong connection of Cather’s own memories with her writing. Though Jim indicates that “the thing about Antonia . . . hasn’t any form,” the novel’s structure progressively reveals both layers of the natural world, layers of geography, layers of memory, and the significance of each. From here, I examine the novel’s frame introduction that highlights memory as impetus for Jim’s narrative and creates the earliest sense of a palimpsest of geography (Iowa, New York, and Nebraska) and a palimpsest of memory (the narrator’s shared [but ultimately unwritten] memories of Ántonia alongside Jim’s). I discuss collective memory in the novel as Jim’s memories are often augmented by many stories from other characters essentially becoming memories of experiences he never had (for example, Peter and Pavel’s story of the wedding party). Remembering and forgetting figure notably in the novel and I discuss this binary as it relates to the larger nature vs. culture conflict. The struggle between the two informs much of the interior of the novel and also leads to an analysis of the spatial language used in the novel. I argue that Cather uses this spatial language to illustrate a literal, physical palimpsest of humans struggling to find an equilibrium between dominance and defeat from within the natural world. Jim’s reunion with Ántonia after twenty years recalls the novel’s frame introduction and provides the novel with a satisfying denouement, but it also calls to the fore the significant gap in his memories regarding her. My discussion ends by addressing how Antonia’s memories hold their own both against and among Jim’s memories in these final chapters of the novel. As they do, they allow the reader to read beyond (under) Jim’s text to a more layered and less romanticized picture of Ántonia, while Jim’s words indicate a turn away from this vital and dynamic Ántonia of the present in favor of the curated Ántonia of his memories
Electronic Noise
No full textElectronic noise plagues all of our systems today we use today. What do people mean when we use the term “noise”? What exactly is noise and how does it affect our measurements? Noise by definition is unwanted disturbance (sound) in an electrical system. By nature noise itself is totally random and in most cases completely unavoidable. Noise itself splits into different categories. We call these categories the colors of noise because of the names assigned to them. These categories are Pink and White noise. The difference between these two types is how “powerful” they are at different frequencies. White noise gets its name because of its equally distributed affect on all frequencies. No matter the frequency white noise will have the same magnitude. This is not the case for pink noise whose characteristics are it affects lower frequencies much greater than the higher frequencies. The electronic noise I have been studying is white noise and more specifically thermal noise also known Johnson-Nyquist noise as well as Shot Noise. Thermal noise by definition is the thermal agitation or charge carriers ( electrons) insane an electrical conductor (resistor). These thermal fluctuations occur regardless of applied voltage, current, and frequency. Thermal noise is only proportional to the temperature of the system. With rise to temperate causes a rise in the thermal noise of the system. Through my research and studies I believe I have found an effective explanation to the nature of properties of Thermal Noise
Remittances and HDI
Get PDFABSTRACT. This paper’s purpose is to evaluate how remittances compare to other sources of aid, namely foreign direct investment (FDI) and official developmental assistance (ODA), in its effect on the Human Development Index (HDI) of countries. For this purpose, a fixed-effects annual panel data estimation procedure for the 2000 to 2016 period, on 18 Latin American countries, is used to estimate the impact of remittances on HDI relative to the aforementioned sources of capital. The results suggest that the impact of remittances on human development indicators is negative. FDI and ODA are found to be statistically insignificant and to have no impact on HDI. Human capital indicators (education and health expenditure) are found to have a larger, and positive impact on HDI than remittances. The results indicate that remittances are not conductive to long-term economic development as they do not expand people’s capabilities
Polymorphic microsatellite markers identified for genotyping of Sassafras albidum
Get PDFWe show that 12 loci originally identified in Sassafras randaiense are polymorphic microsatellites in Sassafras albidum and can be used to genotype individuals which belong to the same clone. Microsatellite markers provide a cost-effective approach at unambiguously differentiating clones. Most temperate plant species have some form of clonal growth. While clonal growth provides advantages in favorable, stable environments (such as increased foraging and reproductive assurance), it does not provide offspring with the same level of genetic variability for adaptation to changes in the environment as sexual reproduction. Sassafras albidum has been characterized as producing clones from its roots, but no studies have described the clonal growth of S. albidum in natural conditions. These microsatellite markers will be used to determine individuals and the fine scale spatial clonal structure of S. albidum on the Domain. The sampling strategy involved both random samples from throughout the Domain and nested plot sampling from Dr. Jonathan Evans’ long term demographic plot, which will enable the identification of the spatial scale relevant for clonal structure in S. albidum
Donation After Cardiac Death Liver Transplant with Steatotic Livers
Get PDFBackground: The obesity epidemic has led to an increase in the frequency with which steatotic donor livers are encountered. The usage of steatotic livers from DCD donors has generally been avoided due to the potential for additive risk. There exists a paucity of data investigating the outcomes with transplantation using steatotic DCD livers.
Methods: DCD liver transplants (N=383) performed at Mayo Clinic Florida between 1998-2018 were analyzed. Routine donor allograft biopsies were performed and were read by liver specific pathologists at Mayo Clinic. Patients were divided into groups based on the degree of macrosteatosis: Moderate Macrosteatosis (30-60%), Mild Macrosteatosis (10-29%) and No Steatosis.
Results: Donor and recipient characteristics were similar between groups. Primary non function (PNF) was significantly higher for patients in the DCD Moderate Macrosteatosis group (16.7%) compared to the DCD No Steatosis group (1.2%) (p<0.001). No difference in PNF was seen between the DCD Mild Macroteatosis (0%) and No Steatosis groups (1.2%) (p=0.54). No differences in overall biliary complication or ischemic cholangiopathy were seen between the three groups. No difference in patient (p=0.65) or graft survival (p=0.62) was seen between the three groups.
Conclusions: Liver Transplantation utilizing DCD liver with mild macrosteatosis (<30%) results in no increase in complications and similar patient and graft survival to DCD livers with no steatosis. DCD livers with moderate macrosteatosis (≥ 30%) resulted in higher rates of PNF. Caution should be taken when utilizing DCD livers with ≥30% macrosteatosis.Mayo Clini
