Marietta Holley, Alice Duer Miller, the Rhetoric of Suffrage Humor, and the Changing Notions of Womanhood, 1848-1920

Generally when people think of the suffrage movement, they conjure up serious images of impassioned speeches, violent protests, and intense congressional lobbying. However, there was another side to the movement and that was laughter. This dissertation investigates suffrage humor as a rhetorical act: the strategic use of laughter to restrain people from engaging in certain behaviors, to reinforce certain perceptions or beliefs, to undermine opposing views, and to unify like-minded individuals. Laughter was a rhetorical tool both for the movement and against it as both sides fought to gain the middle ground and claim common sense as their own. Guiding the debate about votes for women was the public struggle over the ideals of True Womanhood. The years of the fight over suffrage, 1848-1920, were years of great upheaval in United States, a time of questioning and re-evaluating long-held assumptions and cherished notions of what it meant to be a woman. Therefore, the evolution of the use of humor by pro-suffragists and the rhetorical strategies they employed reflects the progress of twentieth-century notions of womanhood. Suffrage humor, as it moved from ineffectual pleas for simple justice to popular domestic arguments to aggressive, mocking satire illustrates the much larger battle over woman's proper place in society. In the end, suffrage humorists were successful because their conception of what constitutes the best role for women was fluid enough to evolve alongside the audience's perceptions. Pro-suffrage humorists constantly reframed the suffrage argument to reflect the current boundaries of woman's proper place. The rhetoric of suffrage humor, therefore, evolved as conceptions of womanhood evolved, moving from appeals for parity to arguments of social and political expediency. The audience willingly accepted the notion of women as politically and socially active yet still feminine and domestic, able to clean up politics and their kitchen floors. Even further, suffrage humor, having built a foundation of consensus, moved from Marietta Holley's rhetoric of conciliation and moderation, stressing conformity to the values of True Womanhood, to Alice Duer Miller's rhetoric of aggression and punishment, rejecting gender distinctions and refusing to conform to any model of acceptable womanhood

Mood Congruency Effect on Academic Content Retention for Emotionally Disturbed High School Students

The effect of mood on the encoding and recall of memories is crucial to create more affective classroom environments conducive to retention of academic content. The current study hypothesized that emotionally disturbed (ED) students encode less academic content then their peers due to their pervasive negative mood. In three separate conditions, 73 participants were shown a 5 min video clip to either induce a positive or negative mood or to neutralize mood. Subjects were asked to rate their mood before and after the film clip. Finally, participants were instructed to recall as many words as they could from a presented word list containing emotionally positive, negative and neutral words. A paired samples t-test demonstrated statistically significant results for mood-induction in a positive, negative, and neutral condition (p = 0.001, p = 0.004, p = 0.003, respectively), which did concur with the hypothesis. However, no statistical significance demonstrated correlation between mood and memory

Alien Registration- Leblanc, Julia (Portland, Cumberland County)

https://digitalmaine.com/alien_docs/24107/thumbnail.jp

Alien Registration- Leblanc, Julia (Portland, Cumberland County)

https://digitalmaine.com/alien_docs/24107/thumbnail.jp

A Bayesian Model of Pasture Curing

Curing percentage (the percentage of dead material in the sward) is a necessary component of fire behaviour modelling and subsequent fire danger ratings in grasslands. Current methods of estimating curing have limitations. Curing is controlled by leaf turnover in grasses but individual leaf turnover rates of themselves do not give estimates of curing. Bayesian modelling provides the potential to incorporate leaf turnover rates representing the entire life cycle of each leaf into a standalone model of curing from which statistical summaries can be generated and used in field models. In this study, curing percentage was estimated over thermal time for four common C3 grasses, and tested against field data

Inferring the temperature dependence of population parameters: the effects of experimental design and inference algorithm

Understanding and quantifying the temperature dependence of population parameters, such as intrinsic growth rate and carrying capacity, is critical for predicting the ecological responses to environmental change. Many studies provide empirical estimates of such temperature dependencies, but a thorough investigation of the methods used to infer them has not been performed yet. We created artificial population time series using a stochastic logistic model parameterized with the Arrhenius equation, so that activation energy drives the temperature dependence of population parameters. We simulated different experimental designs and used different inference methods, varying the likelihood functions and other aspects of the parameter estimation methods. Finally, we applied the best performing inference methods to real data for the species Paramecium caudatum. The relative error of the estimates of activation energy varied between 5% and 30%. The fraction of habitat sampled played the most important role in determining the relative error; sampling at least 1% of the habitat kept it below 50%. We found that methods that simultaneously use all time series data (direct methods) and methods that estimate population parameters separately for each temperature (indirect methods) are complementary. Indirect methods provide a clearer insight into the shape of the functional form describing the temperature dependence of population parameters; direct methods enable a more accurate estimation of the parameters of such functional forms. Using both methods, we found that growth rate and carrying capacity of Paramecium caudatum scale with temperature according to different activation energies. Our study shows how careful choice of experimental design and inference methods can increase the accuracy of the inferred relationships between temperature and population parameters. The comparison of estimation methods provided here can increase the accuracy of model predictions, with important implications in understanding and predicting the effects of temperature on the dynamics of populations

Equal fitness paradigm explained by a trade-off between generation time and energy production rate

Most plant, animal and microbial species of widely varying body size and lifestyle are nearly equally fit as evidenced by their coexistence and persistence through millions of years. All organisms compete for a limited supply of organic chemical energy, derived mostly from photosynthesis, to invest in the two components of fitness: survival and production. All organisms are mortal because molecular and cellular damage accumulates over the lifetime; life persists only because parents produce offspring. We call this the equal fitness paradigm. The equal fitness paradigm occurs because: (1) there is a trade-off between generation time and productive power, which have equal-but-opposite scalings with body size and temperature; smaller and warmer organisms have shorter lifespans but produce biomass at higher rates than larger and colder organisms; (2) the energy content of biomass is essentially constant, ~22.4 kJ g−1 dry body weight; and (3) the fraction of biomass production incorporated into surviving offspring is also roughly constant, ~10–50%. As organisms transmit approximately the same quantity of energy per gram to offspring in the next generation, no species has an inherent lasting advantage in the struggle for existence. The equal fitness paradigm emphasizes the central importance of energy, biological scaling relations and power–time trade-offs in life history, ecology and evolution