Gender and Empowerment: Contemporary Lakota Women of Rosebud

Western-European stereotypes still permeate Plains Indian culture suggesting that women were passive and subjugated while men were dominant warriors. This research challenges those stereotypes through exploration of origin and spirituality accounts, kinship organization, historical impact, contemporary and traditional issues, and through first hand ethnographic research of the Sicangu Nation of Lakota people in regards to gender roles. Using feminist critique and reflexive theoretical approaches, information was collected through participant observation and interviews with Sicangu people in 2004. By focusing on how Lakota women have empowered themselves, this research illustrates how women were and continue to be respected, influential members of what is now a matrifocal society

Understanding Medical Malpractice Insurance: A Primer

Analyzes the causes of and potential solutions to address malpractice crises, and discusses how medical malpractice insurance works, why premiums change, and what can be done about it

Extended 2d generalized dilaton gravity theories

We show that an anomaly-free description of matter in (1+1) dimensions requires a deformation of the 2d relativity principle, which introduces a non-trivial center in the 2d Poincare algebra. Then we work out the reduced phase-space of the anomaly-free 2d relativistic particle, in order to show that it lives in a noncommutative 2d Minkowski space. Moreover, we build a Gaussian wave packet to show that a Planck length is well-defined in two dimensions. In order to provide a gravitational interpretation for this noncommutativity, we propose to extend the usual 2d generalized dilaton gravity models by a specific Maxwell component, which gauges the extra symmetry associated with the center of the 2d Poincare algebra. In addition, we show that this extension is a high energy correction to the unextended dilaton theories that can affect the topology of space-time. Further, we couple a test particle to the general extended dilaton models with the purpose of showing that they predict a noncommutativity in curved space-time, which is locally described by a Moyal star product in the low energy limit. We also conjecture a probable generalization of this result, which provides a strong evidence that the noncommutativity is described by a certain star product which is not of the Moyal type at high energies. Finally, we prove that the extended dilaton theories can be formulated as Poisson-Sigma models based on a nonlinear deformation of the extended Poincare algebra.Comment: 21 pages, IOP LaTeX2e preprint classfile, Improved discussions, Minor corrections, More didactic, More self-contained, New results concerning noncommutativity in curved space-time, Accepted for publication in Classical and Quantum Gravity on 02 Jul 200