New Releases by Heather Jane

The purpose of this study was to identify the way that English Language Learners (ELL) acquires fluency more quickly. There were five students involved in the study, all were in the 40% percentile and below in reading on the Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) test, and didn''t qualify for special education services. There were two groups of students; the groups either received teacher led direct instruction or computer-assisted instruction using a program called Read Naturally. The students were seen four days a week for 30 minutes each day. Students were given a one minute DIBELS fluency check each week. The results of the study were inconclusive. Students from each group did make progress. There was not one student who made gradual progress each week.

The book provides a critical examination of discrimination based on sexuality, gender, and body size in Canadian physical education. It illustrates how students with queer bodies--whether lesbian, gay, trans-gendered, or overweight or fat--cope with homophobia, transphobia, and fat phobia in physical education. Drawing from qualitative interviews, the book reveals how students are marginalized because they do not conform to taken-for-granted ideas about healthy or athletic bodies.

This dissertation describes the use of infrared and Raman microspectroscopic methods for the analysis of small mineral inclusions in kidney biopsies and efforts to quantitatively analyze components at the localized mineral/tissue interface. Chapter 1 provides a background on the current state of kidney stone disease research and also describes the instrumental methods utilized. Chapter 2 presents the use of attenuated total internal reflection (ATR) infrared spectroscopy to generate calibration curves for mixtures of powdered kidney stone components. This study demonstrates that reproducible quantitation can be achieved if the particle sizes of the components are small and comparable. ATR imaging was employed to analyze kidney biopsies with small mineral inclusions in Chapter 3. ATR imaging has several benefits over other infrared sampling methods (primarily transflection and transmission) for the analysis of kidney biopsies due to the smaller focused beam size achievable and the reduced optical pathlength that eliminates spectral artifacts. Chapter 4 describes an investigation into small particle analysis with transmission infrared microspectroscopy and ATR imaging. The results of the study show that spectral artifacts are dependent on the particle''s size and shape and it is anticipated that this research will provide a framework for the analysis of particles below the diffraction limit. Chapter 5 presents a comparative study of Raman microspectroscopy and ATR imaging for kidney biopsy analysis. Using both methods in unison allows the investigator to obtain a full spectroscopic picture of the sample. Because Raman interrogates a larger, more uncontrolled sample volume, ATR may be more beneficial for quantitative studies. Chapter 6 summarizes the presented research and discusses future work.

In 1854, American Presbyterian missionaries arrived in Egypt as part of a larger Anglo-American Protestant movement aiming for worldwide evangelization. Protected by British imperial power, and later by mounting American global influence, their enterprise flourished during the next century. American Evangelicals in Egypt follows the ongoing and often unexpected transformations initiated by missionary activities between the mid-nineteenth century and 1967--when the Six-Day Arab-Israeli War uprooted the Americans in Egypt. Heather Sharkey uses Arabic and English sources to shed light on the many facets of missionary encounters with Egyptians. These occurred through institutions, such as schools and hospitals, and through literacy programs and rural development projects that anticipated later efforts of NGOs. To Egyptian Muslims and Coptic Christians, missionaries presented new models for civic participation and for women''s roles in collective worship and community life. At the same time, missionary efforts to convert Muslims and reform Copts stimulated new forms of Egyptian social activism and prompted nationalists to enact laws restricting missionary activities. Faced by Islamic strictures and customs regarding apostasy and conversion, and by expectations regarding the proper structure of Christian-Muslim relations, missionaries in Egypt set off debates about religious liberty that reverberate even today. Ultimately, the missionary experience in Egypt led to reconsiderations of mission policy and evangelism in ways that had long-term repercussions for the culture of American Protestantism.

Counterfactual reasoning, an understanding of events that are counter to reality, or false, is an essential ingredient of our everyday cognition. Counterfactual situations are frequently depicted through language, yet surprisingly little is known of how they are processed during reading or listening. This is remarkable given the social importance of understanding counterfactuals and the wealth of psychological research that has focused on the production of counterfactual statements. In this thesis, I present eight experiments that investigate how a counterfactual discourse can disrupt or facilitate processing of some subsequent linguistic input and address related comprehension issues involving negation and theory of mind. The main findings suggest that a counterfactual scenario (e.g. ''If cats were vegetarians'') leads the comprehender to rapidly update their processing model to incorporate a counterfactual continuation. However, a secondary process briefly interferes at the point of ambiguity resolution in cases where world knowledge has been violated (e.g. ''Families could feed their cat a bowl of fish/ carrots''). The effects are compared across the different experimental paradigms used, including eye- tracking, event- related brain potentials and the visual world paradigm, which reveal distinct integration, neural and anticipatory processes. Finally, these findings are discussed in relation to existing research on counterfactuals and the processing relationships between counterfactuals, negation and theory of mind reasoning.

Guppy populations in Trinidad have been a model for studies of evolutionary ecology and sexual selection. This thesis extends these studies to examine the phylogeographic history of Poecilia reticulata Peters (the guppy), and to test whether patterns of parallel morphological divergence seen in Trinidad extend across the natural range. In Chapter 2, phylogenetic, nested clade, and population genetic analyses of nuclear (X-src) and mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) sequences were used to investigate population genetic structure. Geographic structuring based on river drainages was detected for both loci, while parallel upstream/downstream patterns of morphological adaptation, known to differentiate on a local scale in response to natural and sexual selection pressures in Trinidad persists across the natural guppy range. In Chapter 3, evidence is presented which supports the''speciation ''speciation by sexual selection'' hypothesis for theCumana guppy, a cluster of populations from Cumana, Venezuela. When compared with several geographically isolated standard guppy populations, these Cumana populations show (i) significant divergence in male display traits correlated to differences in between-population mating success, (ii) little mitochondrial genetic differentiation, and (iii) no evidence for genetic incompatibility with several geographically isolated standard guppy populations. These results suggest that divergent sexual selection has contributed to differentiation of the Cumana guppy, and is the first example of incipient speciation in the guppy. The mtDNA phylogeographic study of P. reticulata inferred two highly divergent mtDNA haplotype lineages for the Cumana guppy. In Chapter 3, I test whether the presence of these lineages is supported by data from microsatellite loci. The mtDNA and microsatellite genetic divergence estimates were incongruent; individuals from within each Cumana morph sampling site were not genetically subdivided into separate microsatellite-based lineages. A hypothesis of incomplete mtDNA introgression is proposed, as one quarter of the Cumana morph individuals sequenced share haplotypes with individuals sampled from upstream localities. The remaining haplotypes are highly divergent from other guppy populations, and are hypothesized to be an ancestral Cumana lineage. Despite mtDNA and nuclear introgression, the distinctive Cumana male morphotype is maintained, suggesting differential rates of introgression among genes coding for characters related to biological divergence and those that do not.

Catalogue of an exhibition held at the Bard Graduate Center, New York, July 22-Oct. 17, 2004.

Sharkey examines the history of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan (1898-1956) and the Republic of Sudan that followed in order to understand how colonialism worked on the ground, affected local cultures, influenced the rise of nationalism, and shaped the postcolonial nation state.