Journal articles on the topic 'Worcester Academy, Worcester, Mass'

The 18 th Annual Critical Geography Conference: Constructing a Radical Politics in an Age of Crisis took place in November 4–6, 2011, at Clark University, in Worcester Massachusetts. In this report the conference organizers summarize the results and offer some insights on the challenges and opportunities of mobilizing politically through the critical geography community. We argue that institutionalized actions within the academy, like this conference, are political events. We highlight the need for critical geographers to focus using the intellectual, financial, and institutional resources of the academy to facilitate activism and open new political spaces.

To begin, I wish to thank the Academy of Toxicological Sciences for bestowing this honor on me. I have had a rewarding career in basic research and clinical medicine, beginning with research in high school and always planning on becoming a physician. I have had the good fortune of having outstanding mentors, wonderful parents, and a supportive and intuitive wife and family. This article provides a brief overview of some of the events of my career and individuals who have played a major role, beginning with the M.D./Ph.D. program at the University of Wisconsin, pathology residency and faculty at St. Vincent Hospital, Worcester, Massachusetts, a year as visiting professor at Nagoya City University, and my career at the University of Nebraska Medical Center since 1981. This could not have happened without the strong input and support from these individuals, the numerous students, residents and fellows with whom I have learned so much, and the more than 500 terrific collaborators.

Abstract Introduction In 2011, the American Academy of Paediatrics (AAP) published revised health supervision guidelines for children with Down syndrome (DS). In the absence of South African guidelines, we described the health supervision received by children with DS at a rural regional hospital in the Western Cape, South Africa compared with the AAP guidelines. Methods This was a 5-year retrospective description of the implementation of the 2011 AAP guidelines at the DS clinic at Worcester Provincial Hospital (WPH), specifically related to screening for and management of cardiac, thyroid, hearing and haematological disorders. Results Sixty-two children received care at WPH DS clinic during the study period. Thirty-six (58%) children lived in Worcester while 26 (42%) children were referred from peripheral hospitals. The median age at first clinic visit was 0.5 years [inter-quartile range (IQR) 0.2–1.2], a total of 177 person-years of follow-up with a median duration of 1.8 years (IQR 0.3–4.8). Two deaths occurred during the study period. Forty-nine (79%) children had a screening echocardiogram performed, the median age at first echocardiogram was 0.8 years (IQR 0.2–1.4). Five (14%) children from WPH compared with no children from the peripheral hospitals received the echocardiogram within the first month of life in keeping with AAP guidance (p = 0.06). Those requiring cardiac surgery were operated on at a median age of 2 years (IQR 0.9–2.3). Compared with the AAP guidelines, within the first month of life 17 (27%) children had a thyroid screen, 20 (32%) children had a full blood count and 7 (11%) children had a hearing assessment. Conclusion AAP guidelines for health supervision in DS are challenging to achieve within our local health system. The development and advocacy for a South African DS health supervision guideline that can be applied not only in specialist clinics might improve the care of children with DS.

Abstract Objective.—To test the hypothesis that quantification of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) F2-isoprostanes (F2-IsoPs), in vivo biomarkers of free radical damage, along with CSF Aβ42 and tau levels improves laboratory diagnostic accuracy for Alzheimer disease (AD). Participants.—Patients with probable AD (n = 19), dementias other than AD (n = 8), and age-matched controls (n = 10). Main Outcome Measures.—Cerebrospinal fluid concentrations of Aβ42 and tau were determined by a commercially available test (Athena Diagnostics, Worcester, Mass). Cerebrospinal fluid F2-IsoP levels were quantified by gas chromatography/mass spectrometry. Results.—Individuals were classified as AD or non-AD by a published method using CSF Aβ42 and tau levels (95% sensitivity, 50% specificity), by CSF F2-IsoP levels greater than 25 pg/mL and Aβ42 concentrations less than 1125 pg/mL (90% sensitivity, 83% specificity), and by combined analysis using CSF F2-IsoP, Aβ42, and tau levels (84% sensitivity, 89% specificity). Conclusion.—Cerebrospinal fluid F2-IsoP quantification may enhance the accuracy of the laboratory diagnosis of AD.

In autoimmune type 1 diabetes mellitus, proinflammatory cytokine-mediated apoptosis of β-cells has been considered to be the first event directly responsible for β-cell mass reduction. In the Bio-Breeding (BB) rat, an in vivo model used in the study of autoimmune diabetes, β-cell apoptosis is observed from 9 wk of age and takes place after an insulitis period that begins at an earlier age. Previous studies by our group have shown an antiproliferative effect of proinflammatory cytokines on cultured β-cells in Wistar rats, an effect that was partially reversed by Exendin-4, an analogue of glucagon-like peptide-1. In the current study, the changes in β-cell apoptosis and proliferation during insulitis stage were also determined in pancreatic tissue sections in normal and thymectomized BB rats, as well as in Wistar rats of 5, 7, 9, and 11 wk of age. Although stable β-cell proliferation in Wistar and thymectomized BB rats was observed along the course of the study, a decrease in β-cell proliferation and β-cell mass from the age of 5 wk, and prior to the commencement of apoptosis, was noted in BB rats. Exendin-4, in combination with anti-interferon-γ antibody, induced a near-total recovery of β-cell proliferation during the initial stages of insulitis. This highlights the importance of early intervention and, as well, the possibilities of new therapeutic approaches in preventing autoimmune diabetes by acting, initially, in the insulitis stage and, subsequently, on β-cell regeneration and on β-cell apoptosis.

Quentin Howieson Gibson was born in Aberdeen, obtained his MD (1944) and PhD (1946) from Queen's University in Belfast and subsequently took a faculty position at the University of Sheffield (1947), where he was appointed Professor of Biochemistry in 1957. In 1963 he moved to the USA, where he held a faculty position at the University of Pennsylvania before he became the Greater Philadelphia Professor in the Section of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Cornell University in 1966. After retiring from Cornell, he became a Distinguished Faculty Fellow at Rice University and an Adjunct Professor at the University of Massachusetts Medical School at Worcester. While at Cornell, Quentin was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (1969), a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1970), and a member of the National Academy of Sciences, USA (1982), served as an associate editor of Journal of Biological Chemistry (1975–94) and received the Keilin Memorial Medallist Award and Lectureship (1990). Quentin's major scientific accomplishments include the discovery of the biochemical cause of familial methaemoglobinaemia, construction of the first practical stopped-flow rapid-mixing spectrometer, adaptation of flash photolysis methods to haem proteins, identification of the first semi-stable intermediates in the O 2 reactions of flavoenzymes, the first direct kinetic measurement of intermediates for the reaction of O 2 with cytochrome c oxidase, quantitative kinetic evaluations of cooperative O 2 binding to haemoglobins, determinations of how iron reactivity and ligand diffusion govern rates of ligand binding, and experimental mapping of the pathways for O 2 entry into the active sites of globins.

The composite volume now known as Cambridge, Corpus Christi College [CCCC] 190, contains on pages 143 to 151 a mixture of liturgical exposition and prescription. The Latin passages constitute neither a polished work nor, like much else in the manuscript, an obvious antecedent to Old English texts, and so the group has never attracted much notice. I offer here the first discussion and edition of the passages in the belief that they shed new light on the sources and applications of liturgical commentary in late Anglo-Saxon England. Of equal or perhaps greater interest, the excerpts also include portions of the ordo for a pontifical mass on Christmas Day. The ordo, as we shall see, resists close dating or localization, but the very type of document has rarely survived in pre-Conquest English manuscripts and so merits attention. Both the expository and ordinal passages occasionally hint of access to unusual sources at some late Anglo-Saxon church, possibly Worcester cathedral during the pontificate of Wulfstan I (1002–16).

‘Verbatim Theatre’ has been the term utilized by Derek Paget during his extensive researches into that form of documentary drama which employs (largely or exclusively) tape-recorded material from the ‘real-life’ originals of the characters and events to which it gives dramatic shape. Though clearly indebted to sources such as the radio ballads of the 'fifties, and to the tradition which culminated in Joan Littlewood's Oh what a Lovely War, most of its practitioners acknowledge Peter Cheeseman's work at Stoke-on-Trent as the direct inspiration - in one case, as first received through the ‘Production Casebook’ on his work published in the first issue of the original Theatre Quarterly (1971). Quite simply, the form owes its present health and exciting potential to the flexibility and unobtrusiveness of the portable cassette recorder - ironically, a technological weapon against which are ranged other mass technological media such as broadcasting and the press, which tend to marginalize the concerns and emphases of popular oral history. Here, Derek Paget, who is currently completing his doctoral thesis on this subject, discusses with leading practitioners their ideas and working methods. Derek Paget teaches English and Drama at Worcester College of Higher Education, and has also had practical theatre experience ranging from community work to the West End, and from Joan Littlewood's final season at Stratford East to the King's Head, Islington.

Cardiovascular-related complications are on the rise in people with HIV/AIDS (PWH); however, the relationship among HIV and antiretroviral therapy (ART)-related parameters, cardiovascular risk, and cardiac electrical activity in PWH remain poorly studied, especially in sub-Saharan African populations. We investigated whether HIV and ART are associated with cardiometabolic and cardiac electrical activity in PWH from Worcester in the Western Cape Province, South Africa. This was a cross-sectional study with HIV-negative (HIV−, n = 24) and HIV-positive on ART (HIV+/ART+, n = 63) participants. We obtained demographic, lifestyle, and medical history data and performed anthropometric, clinical assessments, and blood/urine biochemistry. We performed multiple stepwise linear regression analyses to determine independent associations among HIV, ART, cardiometabolic, and electrocardiographic (ECG) variables. HIV+/ART+ independently associated with a lower body mass index (p = 0.004), elevated gamma-glutamyl transferase levels (β: 0.333 (0.130–0.573); p = 0.002), and elevated alanine aminotransferase levels (β: 0.427 (0.224–0.629); p < 0.001) compared to HIV−. Use of second-line ART was positively associated with high-sensitivity C-reactive protein (p = 0.002). Although ECG parameters did not differ between HIV− and HIV+/ART+, viral load positively associated with p-wave duration (0.306 (0.018–0.594); p = 0.038), and longer HIV duration (≥5 years) with ST-interval (0.270 (0.003–0.537); p = 0.047) after adjusting for confounding factors. Our findings suggest that HIV and ART are associated with mixed effects on this population’s cardiometabolic profile and cardiac electrical activity, underpinning the importance of cardiovascular risk monitoring in PWH.

Suwanwalaikorn S, Ongphiphadhanakul B, Braverman LE, Baran DT. Differential responses of femoral and vertebral bones to long-term excessive l-thyroxine administration in adult rats. Eur J Endocrinol 1996;134:655–9. ISSN 0804–4643 Recent studies suggest that thyroid-stimulating hormone suppressive doses of thyroid hormone decrease bone mass in humans and growing rats. To determine the long-term effects of excessive l-thyroxine administration on the femur and vertebrae in an adult rat model, 20 male Sprague-Dawley rats (20 weeks old) were randomized into two groups. Group 1 received l-thyroxine (20 μg/100 g body weight ip daily), and group 2 received normal saline ip daily for 20 weeks. Femoral and lumbar vertebral bone mineral density measurements were performed at 0, 6, 15, 18 and 20 weeks of treatment. After 20 weeks of treatment, total RNA was isolated from both femoral and lumbar bones. Northern hybridization was performed with 32P-labeled DNA probes for osteocalcin, osteopontin, alkaline phosphatase and tartrate-resistant acid phosphatase. Significant decreases in bone mineral density in the femur of l-thyroxine-treated rats were observed after 15 weeks (p < 0.03). Lumbar bone mineral density was not affected. Both osteoblast (osteocalcin, osteopontin, alkaline phosphatase) and osteoclast (tartrate-resistant acid phosphatase) gene expression markers were increased significantly in the femoral bone (p < 0.001), but not in the lumbar vertebrae of the l-thyroxine-treated rats. We conclude that long-term administration of excessive doses of l-thyroxine to the adult rat preferentially affects femoral but not vertebral bone. This is manifested by decreased bone mineral density as well as increased gene expression markers for osteoblast and osteoclast activity in the femur. Daniel T Baran, Department of Orthopedics, University of Massachusetts Medical School, 55 Lake Avenue North, Worcester, MA 01655, USA

Nationally, there is a great demand for systems that meet the needs of local employers as well as develop tools and training for their incumbent workers. Concurrently, demand for healthcare professionals is growing and projected to continue for the next decade. Worcester State University created the “Direct Care Workforce Development Program” to offer a pathway for nontraditional-aged students in direct care positions to advance to higher-level jobs with family sustaining wages. Direct care workers (DCWs) (e.g., patient care assistant) encounter challenges in a quest to continue their education. They may be non-native speakers, lack a foundation in basic numeracy skills, or lack experience with technology. Therefore, DCWs require many support services for success in professional health-studies programs. In response, a partnership emerged between an urban medical center, state university, and labor union to provide academic pathways for DCWs to progress in careers through higher education. Two cohorts of DCWs from the medical center enrolled in the program, which provided courses totaling nine college credits. Career maps, containing action steps towards goals, and individual coaching helped DCWs define their aspirations. Many workers who completed the program matriculated into two and four-year professional programs, while others plan to do so in the future.

Dr. Eric DeMeulenaere is Associate Professor of Education at Clark University in Worcester, MA. When he received the Ernest A. Lynton Award for the Scholarship of Engagement in 2015, he was an Assistant Professor coming up for promotion and tenure. He received the Lynton award because his scholarly work exemplifies deep collaboration with community partners across the faculty roles of teaching, research, and service. That reciprocity and valuing of the knowledge assets in the community comes across strongly in this essay. His essay is fundamentally about engagement that disrupts the dominant epistemology of the academy, which narrowly constrains ways of knowing and passes for legitimate knowledge. Much of this essay reflects the keynote address that Eric gave at the Lynton Colloquium at the University of Massachusetts, Boston in September of 2015. He received the Lynton Award at the annual meeting of the Coalition of Urban and Metropolitan Universities in Omaha, Nebraska the following month. Scholars like Eric, and all Lynton Award recipients, need supportive institutional environments of campuses—like those of CUMU—that redefine excellence through demonstrated engagement with and positive impact across their local cities and communities, valuing and nurturing their epistemic orientations and those of their students. —John Saltmarsh, University of Massachusetts, Boston.

In the mass media, the primacy of ever more intimate perspectives on violent confrontation, which has long been a staple of journalistic profit and practice, has undergone a crucial transformation over the last century. From an overt eagerness to take an active role in the experience of war to a coy, self-promoting emphasis on the risks of the trade, the representation of violent subjects has consistently been filtered through reportorial, yet tremendous change has befallen the role of professional interlocutors in the serving up the experience of war and violent conflict for domestic consumption. The triumph of a technologised perspective has eclipsed journalistic agency, collapsing the distinction between the pen and the sword in a way that reporters, for all their efforts to command the prestige of each, could never achieve. The focus on the fight, narrowed to the point of impact, strips away orienting discourses to produce a dehumanised perspective that is, if no more or less violent in its own right, unquestioning in its pursuit of the vivid sensation violence provides. In this essay, I hope to illuminate some of the relationships between pen and sword that have evolved from the time of my own historical period of specialisation, the Cuban-Spanish-American and Philippine-American wars, to the unfortunate juncture at which we find ourselves a century later. I will begin, however, in the middle, for it is in my own experience of looking for a fight, finding and reporting on it, and then, later, as a historian, reflecting upon the phenomenon in historical comparison with previous correspondents, that I arrived at the conclusions presented here. My work as a “front-line” correspondent took place in environments largely lacking front lines or sophisticated machinery. From skulking about in back alleys to avoid Duvalier’s secret police in Haiti, I had graduated to the “low intensity conflict” of the Philippines. Sporadic and isolated though such violence might be, it was nonetheless my mission to seek it out and capitalise upon it. I felt long past appreciating the news value of being in the line of fire, however, I was soon speeding madly from the scene of my first at-risk gunplay, on February 7, 1986, the day of the Marcos-Aquino election, prelude to the People Power revolution later that month. That violence begets violence, incidental and otherwise, was being made all too clear: as I listened to the thumps representing the likely ends of roadside dogs and cats unfortunate enough to be in the way of the speeding getaway car driven by my Filipino oppositionist hosts, I noted that my ostensibly peaceful guides were vigorously contemplating an armed response. There was news value in the scene, but I was sickened by their rapid descent into revenge mode. My disappointment was not entirely based on aversion to the addictive and infectious power of violence, however: in showing that they, too, were capable of bloodshed, my once-sympathetic guides were spoiling a clean story line. In the moment, knowing my market, I was, it must be admitted, every bit as inclined to value a sharp image over a nuanced portrait as the narrowly focused machine I at other times decry. My article presented the story in diverse detail, but the market logic of its genesis had directed it toward the singular, violent departure point on which I did, indeed, focus when, asked that morning where I wanted to go, I had responded, “Wherever there’s going to be fighting.” In addition to market considerations holding violence as the highest news value, though, my approach had roots in the aspiring war correspondent’s classic infatuation with getting a piece of the action. Just as soldiers need a war to amass the medals and experience necessary for rapid advancement, journalists can extract from exposure to the most arresting stories professional opportunity and, often, the thrill of a lifetime. The cultural capital offered by a role in a good fight is a currency subjected to official devaluation over the years, but in the marketplace of personal identity, war stories retain worth. My students appear to like hearing them; I must admit that I can revel in telling one. Like an accounting of scars and scares past, it celebrates triumph over threats large and small. Even a well-established reputation is no bar to glory-seeking on the basis of proximity to the fight. Top New York Times reporter R.W. Apple’s tale of a bullet passing through the loose folds of his trousers was undermined by the absence of evidence (other reporters could not believe he would throw out so treasured a souvenir), but it only serves to emphasise all the more the delicious appeal to reporters of a physical link to the fighting. Such anecdotes, and the ascendant prestige accorded photojournalists, who must place themselves closer to the action than those who only have to write about it, serve to emphasise the emergence of an informal pecking order based on proximity to peril. This emphasis on risk, with its evocation of potential sacrifice, represents a historical change. Where today facing danger is a featured facet of journalistic practice, a century ago the emphasis was on dishing it out. For example, I found in the Manuscript Division of the U.S. Library of Congress a letter from John Barrett, the first journalist to suggest military action in the Philippines to a national American audience, in which he wrote to his mother of having derived “great pleasure in firing five or six shots at the enemy.” Despite his former rank as consul to Siam and the position of power and distinction he enjoyed as correspondent for both the prestigious North American Review and the widely-read network of newspapers headed by William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal, Barrett sought parity with simple soldiers whose institutional base more readily connoted glory. "[I] may not be an enlisted soldier but in my way as a correspondent of the greatest daily newspapers of the world—i.e., the most extensively read—bear a responsibility quite equal to a lesser officer unto those who are on the rank.” he wrote to his mother on June 26, 1898, adding, “I would not send any 'fake' account of the battle even if ordered to do so by the editor himself and if I do not send a 'fake' story I must be at the front where I can see what is actually done." Barrett’s location of the “actual” war at the front lines, where hot lead and blood were imagined to flow freely, adhered to a prevailing press perspective valorizing immersion in the fight. As the nineteenth century drew to a close, widespread acceptance was accorded to the notion of the superiority of “hard-won” knowledge, gained through exposure to combat (or perhaps, as in the case of a rival interlocutor of Philippine affairs, Dean Worcester, to alternative threats such head-hunters). In part a reflection of the rough-edged Social Darwinism holding up such survivors as the “fittest” and in part a simple testament to the universal power of warrior myths, battle-certified claims to a higher degree of both patriotism and veracity were an effective rhetorical trump card against the reasoned, impassioned pleas for caution and humanity emerging from the mostly older men of letters leading the anti-imperialist movement. Other reporters of the age also won fame for their activist roles. One of Hearst’s other minions, Karl Decker, engineered an 1897 jailbreak in Cuba that brought to a nationwide audience New York Journal’s tale of the “Cuban girl martyr,” Evangelina Cosio y Cisneros. Other reporters fought alongside the Cuban rebels, sweetening the romantic notion of siding with the underdog—which contributed mightily to the popularity of the “yellow” press’ sensational accounts of war. While the insertion of such blatant reportorial machismo into war reporting has diminished with time and the supposed rise of objectivity as a guiding standard, the interest of media audiences in intimate details of the experience of war has not diminished, and the technologies available to answer such demands have proliferated. From the “living room war” so roundly decried by those who mistakenly saw the seeds of defeat in enhanced public access to the details of war in Vietnam, we have “advanced” to a perspective on warfare that is funneled through the dispassionate gaze of the weapons themselves. The video game metaphor for war, popularised during and since the first Persian Gulf War, gave rise to a missile’s-eye-view that rendered apparently superfluous the role of the reporter. Government restrictions on press access to war zones, instituted in Grenada in 1983 and carried to new lengths in Iraq in 1991, further contributed to the marginalisation of the reportorial agency. It did not help that reporters did so poor and tardy a job of exposing as false the notions of technological infallibility promoted by officialdom. Their failure to question the Big Lie of reported Patriot missile accuracy in striking down Iraqi Scuds only served to support the notion that machines were more reliable than men. Meanwhile, the celebrity of “Scud Stud” Arthur Kent was largely based on his positioning before a pyrotechnic backdrop of flares, tracers, and the occasional missile, which helped keep alive the impression that a reporter’s importance is contingent upon close physical connection with the scene of the fight. Today, we see the new face of war through the lens of the Predator, an unmanned drone that can both gather and disseminate information and issue a deadly strike. The bomber-camera combo dissolves the dated dichotomy constructed as pen vs. sword. All too frequently a false construction in the first place, the “which is mightier?” question nonetheless offered value in its oppositional frame. Even if reporters understood the supremacy of arms, and tied their own identities to their use in diverse and sometimes contradictory fashion, their ability to wield words had a self-interested way of conveying the hazards of war, and thus at least some of its potential human consequences. Akin to the dashboard-cam that has pervaded consciousness in the age of “Cops” and other all-car-chase-all-the-time forms of television, the machine vision that orders and produces audience perceptions of distant fighting has sidelined the reportorial perspective, putting the viewer in the imaginary cockpit. Has the stripping away of reportorial mediation produced any more or less humane or accurate an impression? Despite the often pugnacious and self-glorifying approach of reporters seeking to validate their vitality and influence, the removal of journalistic agency has left the field open for manipulation by the controllers of the bomber-camera combo, and thus has impoverished public understanding of the deadly spiral violence inspires. There is historical precedent, or at least parallel, for this, and it is not encouraging. Public enthusiasm for taking the Philippines was stirred in 1898 by the ease with which the technologically superior new American gunboats destroyed the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay. Newspapers filled page after page with illustrations and descriptions of naval ordnance, inspiring a fusion of technophilia and war fever that helped prepare the way for the United States’ rapid conversion from an anti-imperialist polity into an expanding power with global ambitions and concomitant responsibilities and exposures. What began as an ostensibly diversionary military manoeuver designed to keep Spanish ships from playing a highly unlikely role in reinforcing the defense of Cuba—a preemptive strike, to use a currently popular term—grew, through an initial affinity for the new fighting machines, into an engagement that ended up portending a transoceanic American empire and altered national destinies to go with it. Not long after, bogged down in a grisly and unexpectedly lengthy land war against Filipino independence-seekers, Americans had reason to rethink their assumptions about the ease with which wars could be prosecuted. The Philippine-American war has been largely erased from American history, along with the accounts of the war correspondents who covered it. But the legacy of globalised imperial violence it initiated lives on, with the next installment coming soon. Check your local listings. Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Vaughan, Christopher. "If It Bleeds, It Leads" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 6.1 (2003). Dn Month Year < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0302/04-ifitbleeds.php>. APA Style Vaughan, C., (2003, Feb 26). If It Bleeds, It Leads. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6,(1). Retrieved Month Dn, Year, from http://www.media-culture.org.au/0302/04-ifitbleeds.html