University of Maryland, Baltimore County
Not a member yet
17643 research outputs found
Sort by
Making English Grammar Meaningful and Useful Mini Lesson #18
No full textEnglish GrammarThis lesson was developed by John Nelson and Tymofey Wowk, 2012
Making English Grammar Meaningful and Useful
Mini Lesson #18
English Grammar: It’s Not So Difficult
The purpose of this lesson is to summarize a few trends that have been demonstrated in these
lessons to show that English grammar follows certain regular patterns which are easily learned
when identified by self-describing terms.
The previous lessons progress from the basic concept of Subject-Verb Combinations to the use
of Contrary-To-Fact If Clauses. Throughout, self-describing terminology has been used to make
grammatical features more easily understood. Some of these terms have been recycled through
several lessons. They are summarized here:
• Tense – A term applied to the Verb in a Subject-Verb Combination which usually
consists of a Helping Verb and a Main Verb, and which communicates the time of
the action or event of the Subject-Verb Combination.
• Helping Verb – A verb that accompanies a Main Verb in a Verb Tense and
which has many functions
• Before Tenses – Verb Tenses that use ‘have’ as a Helping Verb and
communicate the meaning of before a certain time.
• Control Verb – A verb that controls the form of a following verb. The following
verb can be in the TO Form, the ING Form or the Simple Form.
• Doers and Receivers – Terms that describe the Subjects of Active Voice and
Passive Voice sentences respectively.
• N-N Noun – A noun that is neither Singular nor Plural. It is often referred to an
uncountable noun.
• Determiner – A word that accompanies a noun and determines the noun type.
There are Simple Determiners, Definite Determiners, Possessive Determiners,
Place Determiners and Quantifying Determiners.
• Connector – A words that connects. Connectors connect words, phrases, clauses,
and even sentences.
This lesson was developed by John Nelson and Tymofey Wowk, 2012
• Clause – A word group that has a Subject-Verb Combination.
• Contrary-to-Fact – An expression that communicates the opposite of reality.
A few fundamental grammatical concepts are important in several aspects of English
structure.
• Simple – The word means not complicated or not complex. In these lessons the
Simple Form, Simple Tenses, Simple Determiners and Simple Connectors
were all presented. Simple Sentences have only one Subject-Verb Combination.
• Subject-Verb Combinations – Every English sentence requires an S-V
combination. All S-V Combinations require a tense. Many English sentences
require S-V agreement. S-V relationships are the basis for Active and Passive
Voice distinctions. All Clauses require S-V Combinations.
• Verb Forms – Verbs have more forms than most other parts of speech. Some
Verb Forms are used in Verb Tenses. Others are used in phrases, following
Control Verbs, and when they are used as adjectives or nouns.
• Helping Verbs – Most English Tenses use Helping Verbs. They have both
grammatical and communicational functions. They are used in nearly all negative
statements and in nearly all questions. Modals are Helping Verbs with meaning.
• Word Groups – English words are found in groups with certain word orders and
collocations. Some word groups are Sentences, others are Clauses and others are
Phrases. Many word groups are used as idioms, metaphors, and similes. Others
are used in fixed expressions.
Mastery of these grammatical terms and concepts can enable English language learners to
become more proficient and accurate in their use of the language
“I can’t help you. You’re on your own”: Alison Bechdel’s Graphic Memoir
No full text“I can’t help you. You’re on your own”: Alison Bechdel’s Graphic Memoir
by Ellen Handler Spitz
Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama
Alison Bechdel’s engrossing new graphic memoir Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama is a worthy successor to the work of Art Spiegelman, Robert Crumb, William Steig, and Bill Watterson. Bechdel’s book follows by six years her widely acclaimed Fun Home, which memorializes an aesthetically absorbed, emotionally constricted, closeted gay funeral director—Bechdel’s father—who putatively committed suicide when Bechdel was twenty. This synopsis, however, conveys nothing of Bechdel’s originality and erudition, her meticulous drawing, her sensitivity to suggestive design.
Fun Home opens with a young Bechdel perched on her father’s upended feet for an airplane ride she calls “Icarian.” Casting her father in the role of Daedalus, she cherishes this game because, in the “arctic” gloom of their gothic Victorian mansion in rural Pennsylvania, it provides her with rare moments of physical contact. (Her mother stopped kissing her goodnight when she was seven.) At the end of the book, Bechdel draws herself as a slightly older child in a swimming pool with her father who holds out his arms as if to catch her. She ponders what would have happened if instead of plunging to his death (like her father, who fell under a truck), Icarus had lived and inherited his father’s talents? A coda to the Daedalus-Icarus myth—not mentioned by Bechdel—explains that Daedalus was involved with a talented young apprentice called Perdix of whom he was jealous and whom he managed to drown for fear of being surpassed. His own beloved son’s subsequent fall to doom, therefore, can be read as a punishment visited upon Daedalus. This silent back-story shadows Bechdel’s art. For in her personal fantasy, her father doubles as craftsman-perpetrator and victim.
Are You My Mother? is a title borrowed from another pictured quest for a parent published in 1960, the year of Bechdel’s birth. In this now classic children’s book by P.D. Eastman, available even on YouTube, a newborn bird goes in search of its mother who has left the nest to forage. With no idea what to look for, the small bird wanders off; after a string of zany and dangerous mistakes, it eventually finds her. In Bechdel’s case, the finding involves not her mother per se but an understanding of her.
Through her unsparing pictorial narration, we see, hear, and swallow the struggles that lacerate every childhood. (Not by accident does a mirror adorn this book’s jacket). This is American life at its most candid. It stops mattering very much that the author hails from a Catholic family, that Bechdel is a lesbian, or that she has created this work while her mother is bristlingly alive and cognizant of the project. Bechdel’s journey—backward in time—brings her in contact with a host of non-mothers (including a famous psychoanalyst, a pair of warmly caring women psychotherapists, and lesbian lovers) — but also iterations of her actual mother, who proves beautiful, highly literary, self-disciplined, and who morphs repeatedly according to decade fashions. However, Bechdel’s mother remains enduringly remote: “’I can’t help you. You’re on your own,’” she announces tersely when told about her daughter’s need to do the Fun Home memoir. A child hearing such words knows with a pang that he or she is actually chained to the parent who says this.
Smarting like a slap, her rebuff occurs in an exchange so dreaded by the artist that, anticipating it, she almost crashes into a truck. “I hope that in time you’ll come to understand,” she imagines herself saying as she steers along a road with a background sign that reads: “No Shoulder.” The ensuing letdown foreshadows much that is to come. But unlike authors of smarmy bad-mother diatribes who in retaliation sharpen knives of resentment, Bechdel achingly wants not to fight but to understand: what has her withholding mother not withheld from her? Sharing each hard-won insight, she welcomes readers to re-think their own less than perfect parents.
Generous without sacrificing honesty, Bechdel twins herself with her mother by drawing both characters with strikingly matched jet-black hair, a color code she accentuates by making all the other significant women blonde. This twinning holds even when Bechdel’s mother turns gray, for in those images her short bob mimics her daughter’s boyish cut. Like so much else, the visual pairing performs its effects subliminally.
Chapters begin with pictured dreams. The first of these appears transparently birth-like in that the artist must escape through a tiny window and plunge in fetal pose into turgid water. Icarus comes readily to mind. Each chapter’s title, moreover, cites a theoretical premise by the late British pediatrician and psychoanalyst, D.W. Winnicott, the artist’s adoptive intellectual mentor. She even resuscitates Winnicott in imaginative scenarios as she does likewise Virginia Woolf. Interlarding well-chosen snippets of literature and psychoanalytic theory with the wrenching details of her life, she offers transferable interpretive insights. The book itself becomes a teaching tool.
Several times Bechdel informs us of her mother’s spider phobia and, elsewhere, of her own childhood horror of vomiting. In a riveting page, she connects the two in a session with her first therapist. Awakening her mother in the middle of the night, Bechdel (age 10) vomits a mess that uncannily resembles a spider. Her mother’s affect is uncharacteristically kind, but a phobia ensues. The principal link concerns unconscious aggression and rejection, for a mother’s most primitive function is to feed her child, and vomiting reverses this completely. Children feel shame and sometimes even terror as their bodies lurch out of control. As for the spider, it condenses every constructive and destructive maternal impulse into one irregular black shape. Louise Bourgeois’ Mamans materialize as we read. Bechdel, twinned with her mother yet painfully distant from her, eventually learns that she cannot find her in this book, but she can recreate her.
A paradigmatic scene constitutes the book’s climax, and it occurs twice. Needing special shoes to correct her arches when she was small, Bechdel was taken for repeated visits to a hospital where she witnessed severely crippled children and found herself envying them just as Bemelmans’s Madeline is envied by the other little girls because of the attention won by her appendectomy. In Madeline, Miss Clavel silences them, but Alison Bechdel enjoys a superior fate. Bidding hard, she pretends to be a crippled child herself. With bated breath we watch as an amazing scene unfolds. Her mother joins in, makes believe with her, offers her imaginary leg braces, even pretends to lace up a pair of special shoes. What Bechdel comes to realize through this re-animation is how her mother actually gave her some of what she needed to become an artist. The mother-spider cripples you but also helps you walk. The family’s background, in which a mother is sexually sidelined by a husband who preferred young men, a mother moreover who was taught long ago by her own mother to favor sons over daughters, begins to fade. What matters is that she plays! And that Bechdel can use her now, in Winnicott’s sense, of discovering that, no longer compelled to experience her as a need-gratifying object, she can recognize what has been offered all along as well as what was denied. And the book closes with measured gratitude and the words: “She has given me the way out.” This “meta-book,” as Bechdel’s mother called it, is a masterful meditation on growing up
Availability of HIV testing in the substance abuse treatment system: Organizational, community, and policy factors
No full textBackground: Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) remains a major public health problem in the United States. It is estimated that one in five Americans with HIV are unaware that they are infected. Populations with addictive disorders are disproportionately impacted by HIV. While the importance of conducting on-site HIV testing as part of substance abuse treatment has long been recognized, research shows that many programs do not offer this service. Aims: The current study examines the role of specific organizational, community, and policy factors in shaping the availability of on-site HIV testing in U.S. substance abuse treatment facilities. Methods: This study uses a project-specific dataset that draws from several complementary data sources, including the National Survey of Substance Abuse Treatment Services (N-SSATS), the American Community Survey, the Kaiser Family Foundation, and the peer-reviewed literature. Hypothesized relationships at the organizational, county, and state levels are tested using a multilevel logistic regression modeling approach. Results: This study identifies a number of factors associated with substance abuse treatment organizations' adoption of on-site HIV testing, including public ownership/operation, county-level demographics (proportion of the population that is African American or Hispanic), and policies requiring allocation of substance abuse block grants towards HIV prevention. Adoption of HIV testing did not differ based on organizations' receipt of direct public funding, county economic characteristics, state HIV testing statutes, or state-level public expenditures on substance abuse treatment or HIV prevention. Conclusions: Adoption of HIV testing in substance abuse treatment programs is influenced by a complex web of organizational, community, and state characteristics. The patterning of treatment organizations' adoption of on-site HIV testing holds potential implications for facilitating diffusion of this evidence-based public health technology throughout the substance abuse treatment system
The Role of the Congress in Shaping the Emergency Shipbuilding Program of the World War II Era, 1933-1943
No full textAbstract Title of Document: THE ROLE OF THE CONGRESS IN SHAPING THE EMERGENCY SHIPBUILDING PROGRAM OF THE WORLD WAR II ERA, 1933-1943 James Louis Scott, Ph.D., 2012 Directed: John W. Jeffries, Professor of History Dean, College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences. This dissertation examines the role Congress played in shaping the emergency shipbuilding program of the World War II era. The Merchant Marine Act of 1936 provided the statutory foundation for the shipbuilding program and was the most significant contribution Congress made in influencing national shipbuilding policy. It was the detailed consideration of the 1936 legislation that enabled this study to identify a greater degree of congressional influence than had prior maritime policy research. Congressional manuscript collections were used in this dissertation, and that differentiates it from prior examinations of American maritime policy history. The insights gleaned from these manuscript collections were integrated with information from the extensive public records of congressional committees with responsibility for shipbuilding and shipping issues and the United States Maritime Commission to prepare a historical narrative covering the years 1933 - 1943. The analysis of the historical record was augmented using theories from American Political Development, Historical Institutionalism and the Two Congress framework. The use of political science theory was valuable in helping determine how shipbuilding policy was made, and especially in investigating why certain policies developed as they did. It is recommended that future policy history scholars use political science and policy sciences theory in their research. Utilization of concepts from American Political Development concerning the importance of history in understanding policy outcomes was critical to the conclusions of this research because shipbuilding decisions made by Congress in 1789 and 1817 limited the options available to the Congress in 1935 and 1936. They also determined the structure of the shipbuilding and shipping industries the Congress was forced to deal with as it endeavored to reform national maritime policy. The study concluded that, in addition to the impact of the Merchant Marine Act of 1936, the ability of individual members of Congress to influence shipbuilding policy was dependent on an intersection of position and interest. Those members who chaired major authorizing committees had the greatest opportunity to influence policy, but that only happened when there was also a strong personal interest in shipbuilding issues. That interest was as often determined by local constituent needs as it was by national policy considerations
The effect of artificial selection for extended life span and late age fecundity on the age-specific phagocytic ability of blood cells in adult Drosophila melanogaster
No full textImmunosenescence is defined as the functional decline of the immune response with age and is found in most organisms. In mammals both the innate and adaptive components of the immune response decline with age, however, the cellular and genetic mechanisms of this phenomenon still remain unclear. Here, I use Drosophila melanogaster as our model to study the general effect of age on innate immunity. I studied the effect of age on phagocytic ability in six distinct Drosophila populations: three populations that had been artificially selected for extended life span and three unselected control populations. I measured phagocytic ability by injecting fluorescently-labeled heat killed E. coli into flies at different ages and counted the number of E. coli engulfed by the blood cells around the heart. Interestingly, I found that the average number of E. coli that were engulfed by blood cells increased with age in all six fly populations. While there was no difference between the Selected and Control flies when data were combined across ages, I did find that the effect of age on phagocytic ability differed between the Control and Selected populations. The Control populations had a relatively larger number of engulfed bacteria at early age while populations selected for longer life span and increased late age fecundity had a higher engulfment at older age. To further test the efficiency of the phagocytic ability, I independently injected four of the populations with latex beads, which cannot be digested after engulfment by the blood cells. I found variable results with the beads but in general they were consistent with the bacteria data. In conclusion, our data indicates that life span extension is genetically correlated with phagocytosis ability and exhibits a trade-off with early age phagocytic efficiency. Understanding the genetic basis of this trade-off is an important topic for future study
The Association of Neighborhood Crime and Cardiovascular Risk Factors in the Healthy Aging in Neighborhoods of Diversity Across the Life Span (HANDLS) Study
No full textAspects of neighborhood socioeconomic status (SES) may be associated with cardiovascular disease (CVD) independent of individual SES and other known risk factors. The present study investigated relations of neighborhood crime to CVD risk factors, and potential psychosocial mediators, in a sample of 1787 community-dwelling Black and White men and women who participated in the Healthy Aging in Neighborhoods of Diversity Across the Lifespan Study (HANDLS). Objective neighborhood crime rates and a composite measure of psychosocial vulnerability were examined for associations with waist circumference, body mass index, systolic and diastolic blood pressure, total, HDL, and LDL cholesterol, triglycerides and glucose. No significant associations were noted for neighborhood crime and CVD risk in the entire sample. Exploratory analyses showed, among Whites, a significant association of greater overall crime rate with higher total and LDL cholesterol (p's < .05) among those not living in poverty. In Blacks, greater overall crime was associated significantly with higher diastolic blood pressure and glucose (p's < .05); and was associated significantly with lower HDL cholesterol in women (p < .05). These associations were not mediated by psychosocial vulnerability. Thus, for Whites, those living above the poverty line may be most vulnerable to the impact of neighborhood crime on metabolic risk factors, whereas Blacks may be vulnerable for diastolic blood pressure and glucose, and HDL cholesterol in women only. Relations of crime to cardiovascular risk factors are subject to complex effect modification that is not explained by psychosocial mediators