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Henry Luce's many critics accused him of using his Time Inc. media to advocate for Chinese General Chiang Kai-shek and his Nationalist party during the pre-war, World War II, and post-war eras. Specifically, Luce is accused of using Soong Mei-ling, the English-speaking, American-educated, and Christian wife of General Chiang, as part of his strategy to generate support among Americans for the Chiangs' Nationalist Party. This research reviews U.S. news magazines' coverage of Madame Chiang's three trips to America in 1943, 1944-45, and 1948 to understand the differences in the reporting, thereby potentially revealing an embedded Luce agenda. While the reportage in the U.S. news magazines evolved, this analysis demonstrated few substantive differences in the magazines' portrayals of Madame Chiang during her three visits during the 1940s, challenging common depictions of Luce's distinct agenda. The tone and direction of the coverage mirrored the changing relationship between the United States and China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a study that examined the impact of race on newspaper readership among early adolescents in the U.S. For the 10 newspaper sections that were examined in the study, African Americans and whites read them at significantly different rates. Four of the sections, namely local news, celebrity news, lifestyle and entertainment, were more often read by African American teenagers, while international news, advice columns, horoscopes and comics were more often read by whites. Given that the children in this sample were from the same middle schools in the sample area, were exposed to the same curricula in school, live in rural, city and suburban areas at relatively the same rate, it is interesting that race may have a significant impact on newspaper readership as early as the seventh grade. Second, it was surprising to learn that within the white adolescent cohort, newspaper consumption tended to have a negative effect on the intellectual lives of these teenagers. Third, according to this study, newspaper readership is not a priority to the majority of early teens. Given the importance of cultivating future generations of newspaper readers, it may make more sense for the newspaper industry to focus their efforts on developing readers at the elementary level, rather than middle- or high-school level.

The day-to-day discourse of illicit drug users is replete with stylized narratives of street experience. These "war stories," as they are popularly known, are shared among drug users as they hustle for money, purchase drugs, get high, and hang out in diverse street locations. Drug-user narratives, which describe complex adventures and grave suffering, are primary ethnographic sources of information about patterns of drug consumption and risk behaviors. Importantly, in the time of AIDS, street narratives provide a much-needed window on the generally hidden lives of socially marginalized street drug users. As part of an effort to put the analysis of drug-user war stories to use in HIV prevention, in this article the authors analyze a corpus of street narratives told to members of an HIV-prevention research team in Hartford, Connecticut. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unexpected variations in sulfur were encountered during mining of the Glenalum Tunnel coal in Wyoming County, West Virginia, in the Central Appalachian Basin. A geological analysis was initiated to determine the cause of the sulfur variations and provide a predictive tool for anticipating high-sulfur anomalies during future mining operations. The coal seam is comprised of six benches including bright to dull clarain, bone coal, and carbonaceous shale. The lower three benches are consistently less than 1% in raw and 1.5 sp. gr. sulfur, with average values for each bench less than 0.73%. The average raw and 1.5 sp. gr. sulfur for each of the upper benches is greater than 1.23%, and ranges from 0.27 to 6.07%. The majority of the sulfur occurs as finely disseminated pyrite. Thirteen cores drilled in 2012 indicate that the coal is overlain by laterally and vertically variable lacustrine, deltaic and estuarine facies. This interval averages 6.7 m thick and is overlain by the Oceana Shale, a widespread marine unit. A sinuous, branching belt of high-sulfur coal approximately 305–610 m wide and 3.22 km long extends across the southern portion of the property. This belt correlates with cores where the lacustrine shale of the immediate roof is thin or absent and where the stratigraphic interval between the coal and the base of the Oceana Shale is comprised mostly of sandstone. Raw sulfur generally exceeds 1% and is more variable where the lacustrine roof shale is less than 52 cm thick and where roof sandstone occupies 78–100% of the interval. The 1.5 sp. gr. sulfur generally exceeds 1% where the lacustrine roof shale is less than 33.5 cm and where the roof sandstone occupies 80–100% of the interval. High-sulfur areas are attributable to 1) the local influence of brackish to marine waters from tidal or deltaic distributaries which eroded down to the peat, and/or 2) thinning or removal of impermeable, lacustrine roof shale by channel erosion and hydraulic connection of the Oceana Shale marine pore fluids to the peat via permeable channel-fill sands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Celeste is a robust peer-to-peer object store built on top of a distributed hash table (DHT). Celeste is a working system, developed by Sun Microsystems Laboratories. During the development of Celeste, we faced the challenge of complete object deletion, and moreover, of deleting “files” composed of several different objects. This important problem is not solved by merely deleting meta-data, as there are scenarios in which all file contents must be deleted, e.g., due to a court order. Complete file deletion in a realistic peer-to-peer storage system has not been previously dealt with due to the intricacy of the problem — the system may experience high churn rates, nodes may crash or have intermittent connectivity, and the overlay network may become partitioned at times. We present an algorithm that eventually deletes all file contents, data and meta-data, in the aforementioned complex scenarios. The algorithm is fully functional and has been successfully integrated into Celeste. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

A study of drug use locations in Hartford, CT, is designed to understand the environmental and social conditions within "high risk sites" where drug users inject drugs or smoke crack, in order to develop AIDS prevention models that build upon the physical and social organization of these locations. The study assesses high-risk sites characterized on the basis of type of location or structure, presence and strength of gatekeepers, and presence and strength of HIV prevention opportunities and pressures. A combination of ethnographic, epidemiological, and social network methods are used to document the characteristics, social organization, natural history, and dynamics of these sites, the network relations of site users, and the various opportunities for, or barriers to, on-site social-level HIV prevention intervention. This paper provides an overview of the study and presents preliminary findings, including the degree to which drug injectors and crack smokers use specific types of sites in Hartford. The paper also discusses the ways these findings inform development of on-site, type-specific and peer-led or structural HIV-prevention interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Antimicrobial resistance is a current global health crisis, and the increasing emergence of multidrug resistant infections has led to the resurgent interest in bacteriophages as an alternative treatment. Prior to clinical application, phage suitability is assessed, via susceptibility testing and breadth of host range to bacteriophage, however, these are both large-scale manual processes and labor-intensive. The aim of the study was to establish and validate a scaled down methodology for high-throughput screening to reduce procedural footprint. In this paper, we describe a scaled-down adapted methodology that can successfully screen bacteriophages, isolated and purified from wastewater samples. Furthermore, we describe a miniaturized host range assay against clinical Pseudomonas aeruginosa isolates using a spot test (2 μL/ drop) that was found to be both sensitive (94.6%) and specific (94.7%). It also demonstrated a positive predictive value (PPV) of 86.4% and negative predictive value (NPV) of 98%. The breadth of host range of bacteriophages that exhibited lytic activity on P. aeruginosa isolates was corroborated using the scaled down assay. The high correlation achieved in this study confirms miniaturization as the first step in future automation that could test phage diversity and efficacy as antimicrobials. Created with BioRender.com. [Display omitted] • Antimicrobial resistance is commonplace contributing to a global health crisis. • With little investment into new antibiotics alternaitve treatments are needed. • Bacteriophages are of interest but screening their suitability is labor-intensive. • A miniaturized host range assay was developed to reduce procedural footprint. • The developed and validated assay is both highly sensitive and specific. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]