C. elegans gives the dirt on aging

The worm Caenorhabditis elegans has become a popular model organism for the study of mechanisms involved in aging. The C. elegans life span is controlled by several pathways that have been extensively characterized at the molecular level. These include pathways that regulate metabolism and development (namely, the insulin/IGF-1 pathway), nutrition, mitochondrial activity, and reproduction. Presentations at a recent C. elegans conference add to the growing body of knowledge about the genetic networks that control the complex process of aging and suggest new avenues for further investigations.     

Urban wildlife ecology and conservation:A brief history of the discipline

Urban wildlife ecology and conservation is a discipline worldwide in scope. Although some attention was given the subject in the early to mid-1900s, most activity in the field is of more recent origin. Many European countries have active programs and activities, including the United Kingdom-Man and the Biosphere (UK-MAB) Urban Forum and The Wildlife Trusts of England, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization's MAB Program, and urban ecology research in Germany and Poland. The Netherlands' concept of “ecological landscapes” introduced a new approach to design of urban open space. Durban, South Africa followed with “D'MOSS,” a metropolitan open space system founded on the principles of island biogeography theory. The park connector network of Singapore combines principles of conservation biology and landscape planning. Urban wildlife programs and activities exist in the United States at the federal, state, and local levels as well as in private conservation organizations. The Wildlife Society established an Urban Affairs and Regional Planning Committee in the mid-1970s that later became the Urban Wildlife Committee and then evolved into the Urban Wildlife Working Group. Urban wildlife research is providing knowledge of wildlife and plant populations and communities in urban areas that hopefully will lead to better understanding and greater sustainability of urban ecosystems.     

The natural South Florida system II: Predrainage ecology

The goal of the South Florida restoration process is to reestablish a sustainable ecological system that approximates the predrainage system (i.e., the system that existed before canals and water control structures were built). A critical step in the restoration process is to describe the predrainage system with sufficient detail to capture the essential landscape features (e.g., space, connectivity, patterns) that gave the region its defining character and supported its natural abundance and diversity of plants and wildlife.A previous attempt at reconstruction of predrainage (circa 1870) vegetation patterns covered only the Everglades (Davis et al., 1994) but introduced a concept of landscape mosaics that should be extended to South Florida. We propose 16 landscape units that include freshwater landscapes, upland landscapes, coastal wetlands, and estuaries (particularly Florida and Biscayne Bays), the Florida Keys and Reef Tract, and the Inner Southwest Florida Shelf.The predrainage area, because of its enormous size, supported a landscape heterogeneity that was advantageous to animals with several distinct habitat-related life strategies. Five species have been selected to illustrate different dependencies on landscape patterns in predrainage South Florida: wood stork (Mycteria americana), American alligator (Alligator mississippiensis), snail kite (Rostrhamus sociabilis), Cape Sable seaside sparrow (Ammodramus maritimus mirabilis), and pink shrimp (Penaeus duorarum). As individuals or as populations, these animals operated across several spatial and temporal scales. The predrainage system's large spatial extent and complex hydropatterns allowed wood storks and other animals with large feeding ranges to take advantage of the strongly seasonal rainfall pattern, while at the same time providing a refuge somewhere in the system for survival of all other species. Landscape heterogeneity and large spatial extent promoted the region's natural wildlife abundance and species diversity.     

Subfield history: Caenorhabditis elegans as a system for analysis of the genetics of aging

This article reviews key events in the genetic analysis of aging in the worm. The events are presented in the form of a timeline and include landmark papers, key meetings, and the development of important funding agencies. I also speculate on events that might appear in this timeline if this review were written in the distant future.     

Forest ethnography: An approach to study the environmental history and political ecology of urban forests

Urban Ecosystems - A landscape succession paradigm has shaped much of our understanding about the processes of forest emergence and transformation in the United States. Drawing heavily from theory...     

The natural history of cigarette smoking and young adult social roles.

The relation between cigarette smoking (in adolescence and adulthood) and the occupancy of conventional adult social roles was investigated in the current study. Two alternative predictions for this relation were examined--"role incompatibility" (which predicts a negative relation between adolescent smoking and adult role occupancy) and "pseudomaturity" (which predicts a positive relation between adolescent smoking and adult role occupancy). Processes of role selection and role socialization were examined using data from a longitudinal study of smoking from adolescence to young adulthood. Both pseudomaturity and role incompatibility predictions found some support in the data, and the two views could be reconciled by considering the student role as the key transition into other adult statuses. Implications for the study of social roles and substance use are discussed.     

Practice wisdom: the art and science of social work

Practice wisdom is the foundation for effective practice and encompasses both the art and science of social work. The divide between practice and theory has existed since the profession emerged and practice wisdom is the bridge to this gap. The epistemology and ontology of practice wisdom highlights its importance for research, education and practice for the next generation of social workers. The work of Howard Goldstein is critical in the examination of the artistry of practice wisdom, which can be taught and measured by supporting the development of critical thinking and reflection skills of students. Capturing the essence of practice wisdom lays the foundation for developing a pedagogy that promotes its development in social work students.     

Against wisdom: the social politics of anger and aging

Focusing on two books key to the cultural history of aging in America in the twentieth century—G. Stanley Hall's Senescence: The Last Half of Life [Hall, G. S. (1922, rpt. 1972). Senescence: the last half of life. New York: Arno Press] and Betty Friedan's The Fountain of Age [Friedan, B. (1993). The fountain of age. New York: Simon and Schuster], this essay explores: (1) the cultural reflex of invoking wisdom as the special strength of the old and (2) the strategy of using anger to call attention to ageism. “Against Wisdom” argues that it is difficult, if not virtually impossible, to envision a productive future for the elderly through the joint cultural building blocks of wisdom and anger. A manifesto of sorts, the essay calls for a moratorium on wisdom and suggests that stories of a vitalizing anger at being marginalized because old be told and circulated, and concludes with a story from Barbara Macdonald's Look Me in the Eye: Old Women, Aging, and Ageism.     

Cooling the Mother Out: Revisiting and Revising Goffman's Account

This article revisits Erving Goffman's important yet neglected metaphor of “cooling the mark out.” Drawing on a study of mothers whose child has Down's syndrome, I explore the value of Goffman's work for capturing how mothers interpret their child's diagnosis as a loss and rectify this breach by constructing an acceptance of their new situation. The mothers' accounts highlight how Goffman's contentions can be enriched by acknowledging the gendered, temporal, and public character of a loss. This article, thus, can be read both as a celebration and critical revision of his theoretical contribution.     

Straw men and fairy tales: Evaluating reactions to a natural history of rape

In this paper we respond to two frequent criticisms of our book, A Natural History of Rape (Thornhill & Palmer, 2000). The first criticism portrays the book as little more than a “just‐so” story that human rape is an adaptation. We demonstrate that this portrayal is not accurate. The second criticism reflects a common response to the book's challenge of the popular assertion that rapists are not motivated by sexual desire but instead commit these crimes motivated by the urge to power, domination, and violence, and the urge to degrade and humiliate women. We demonstrate that such criticisms of our book are inherently contradictory and illogical. We believe it is important for sex researchers to understand that these sorts of criticisms are seriously flawed so that future research efforts toward understanding the causes of sexual coercion are not stalled.     

Revising and updating the inventory of cross-cultural sensitivity

The following article outlines research conducted to examine cross-cultural sensitivity in a sample of 949 incoming university students in the USA. The study was conducted during the process of updating an existing measure of cross-cultural sensitivity known as the Inventory of Cross-Cultural Sensitivity (ICCS), and to examine the various levels of understanding among the students. Additionally, data were gathered to determine whether there was any relationship between the results and the demographic factors commonly cited in the literature. Results of the study indicate that the updated version of the ICCS, the ICCSv2, is a more robust and reliable measure of intercultural sensitivity for a specific group of freshmen students. Recommendations are made for future research.     

CONTROL: the extractive ecology of corn monoculture

This article tells the history of the industrial and biotechnological development of large-scale corn agriculture, from a new materialist perspective. Addressing the large-scale economy of industrial food production as a form of more-than-human configuration, it demonstrates how corn has been made into a quintessential commodity and factor of production for a consumption-based economy. Set within discourses around the climate crisis, this account critically assesses the Anthropocene and its advocacy for human accountability in regards to the exploitation of nonhuman matters. I ask: who is the Anthropos? How does it/he/she meet with its domesticated subjects, or rather makes them into domesticable materials? Telling the history of corn monoculture from a new materialist standpoint exposes this industry’s distribution of agency, power and control across a diversity of human and nonhuman actors. This is at the centre of this article’s three sections: (1) an argument for inscribing extractivism within new materialist literature, (2) an account of the industrialization of corn monoculture, exposing the industry’s main mechanisms and economic endeavours, as well as its ramifications with a biopolitics of invasion and (3) the biotechnological development of the industry and its shifts from a biopolitics of vegetal matter to an informational extractivism and a necropolitics of killable life. Thus I argue that if the industry of corn monoculture belongs to a broader network of detrimental industries characteristic of the Anthropocene, the geological Anthropos is not to be understood as synonymous with the human species, but as a very restrictive ecology of humans and nonhumans, including corporate, industrial, technoscientific and extractive actors. As such, the article emphasizes the moral necessity of rupturing with the narrative of the Anthropocene, a discourse better suited for supporting existing mechanisms of domination and exploitation constitutive of the economy of climate change.     

WOMEN AND THE INTERNET The natural history of a research project

This article represents a narrative, 'women and the internet', as a women and technology origin story with a fixed beginning, a contested centre, and an open ending. This article analyses our engagement with this narrative as a pilot study was conducted to look at women's perceptions of, and relationships to, the internet. Although this story felt like a coherent and persuasive narrative, this was questioned as the outcomes of the pilot study were reflected upon. Women coming to the 'net' led to a reconstruction of the questions that need to be addressed in researching gender and information technology. This article begins by describing and deconstructing the motivating story which was brought to this research project. Three genres are introduced-'the webbed utopia', 'flamed out' and 'locked into locality'-which are seen as forming the contested centre of this narrative. While each genre has its own narrative logic, all of them draw on a common tale of historical origins. From each of these perspectives 'Women and the internet' has an ending which is still open, but is rapidly closing. Three questions are then identified which have been raised by analysis: what do we mean by 'access'?; what do we mean by 'the internet'? and 'which women'? The seeming simplicity of these questions disguises serious difficulties which research in this area must address.     

Practice wisdom in social work: an uncommon sense in the intersubjective encounter

Social work is not, and should not be, a practice of common sense. The author revisited a vast array of literature on practice wisdom in social work and parallel conceptions in cognate disciplines. For better or worse, the idea of practice wisdom has been revitalized in standing against the deprofessionalization of social work. However, its ambiguity in meaning has somehow overridden its reputation. Practice wisdom is intuitive, tacit, and spontaneous in nature. It is an embodied phronesis of experienced practitioners. The author argues that practice wisdom in social work is not only the wisdom of analytical experience, but it is also the wisdom or a quality characterized by courtesy, kindness, consideration, compassion, and benevolence. It is uniquely uncommonsensical and has to be cultivated through the intersubjective encounter between the practitioner and service user.     

Researching the history of social work: exposition of a history of the present approach

This paper provides an exposition of Michel Foucault's ‘history of the present’ in order to make the case for its relevance to the study of social work history. It sets out the general principles underpinning this practice and considers its application to a particular research question relating to history of child welfare and protection social work in the Republic of Ireland. The paper seeks to highlight the challenges involved in its use and illuminate its potential value as an approach for researching the history of social work. It is concluded that this exposition offers one appropriate approach that could be employed within the growing field of social work history research across Europe.