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Biosensor technologies have enormous potential in the field of biomedical diagnostics. Despite this, certain barriers have prevented the widespread application of existing biodiagnostic technologies. The limitations include the requirements of high-end, expensive, and complicated laboratory instruments, as well as the lengthy laboratory procedures that may cause error on the part of the user. I have developed an Automated Portable Detection Platform for Point of Care Diagnostics to overcome these limitations. This platform includes a custom microfluidic Lab-On-Chip (LOC) device capable of performing point-of-care diagnostics, which will be demonstrated by performing enzyme-linked immunoassay, ELISA, tests. Using a low-cost pump and valves helped create a pneumatic system for a contactless flow between solutions in a microfluidic LOC device. The platform is relatively inexpensive and much more compact than other equipment that can be used to conduct similar tests. The automation is done via a user-friendly interface which could be accessed with a PC or Raspberry Pi microcomputer; here, a custom script may be entered to perform different functions and tests. This Automated Portable Detection Platform will be described in detail in this thesis, including its reliability and stability for precision control over the fluidic flow. In addition, data was collected and will be presented to demonstrate the abilities of this platform. Overall, this thesis will cover a significant step forward toward the adaptation of widespread point-of-care testing platforms in different clinical settings.

The eruption of the Hunga Tonga undersea volcano in January 2022 injected water vapor to altitudes as high as 53 km, but also an unprecedented and much larger amount of water vapor into the stratosphere. Several months after the eruption, measurements from the Aura Microwave Limb Sounder (MLS) and from three ground-based Water Vapor Millimeter Wave (WVMS) instruments began to measure record-high amounts of water vapor in the mesosphere over a wide range of latitudes. While there are indications that some of this mesospheric increase in water vapor was probably caused by the Hunga Tonga eruption, the dynamical situation in 2022 also played an important part in establishing the unusually large water vapor mixing ratios, both in the upper and lower mesosphere.

Having taught and published in the areas of American Studies and ethnomusicology for three decades, I know firsthand that the scholars of cultural studies and music don't always know how to talk to...

This query examines the history of Harlem calypso in the 1920s and 1930s, and Brooklyn soca music in the 1980s. Unfolding in the context of diasporic Caribbean Carnival celebrations, the evolution ...

There is an imperative need for secondary physical education programming to prepare students for lifetime fitness and health. Physical activity levels in adolescents and adults are dismal, and the negative health outcomes associated with sedentary behaviors are catastrophic. Secondary physical education programs have the opportunity to implement a curriculum that can enable students to create and execute their own health-enhancing fitness plan. The current focus in most programs is on a sport and game model that has had limited results in influencing the adoption of healthy lifestyle habits. The purpose of this article is to provide practitioners with a practical and feasible split-week program model that is designed to potentially induce behavioral change in students for lifelong physical activity and fitness. The split-week program holds health-related fitness education at the core while also teaching outdoor recreation, sport and rhythmic activities.

The US Environmental Protection Agency's National Estuary Program (NEP) was established in 1987 under the Clean Water Act to improve the water quality and ecological integrity of estuaries of national importance. There are twenty-eight individual local programs in the NEP, covering watersheds in eighteen coastal states and Puerto Rico. Each is charged with bringing together citizens, scientists, businesses and government officials to collaboratively solve environmental problems and promote healthy, vibrant communities. Decisions are based on sound science and actions are implemented using adaptive management strategies. With expertise and comprehensive local networks, each local NEP is able to serve as a foundation for addressing emerging environmental problems, including hazardous events, such as oil spills and hurricanes. An example is the unique role that the NEPs along the Gulf of Mexico played during the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Immediately following the spill, while federal and state agencies and oil industry experts worked to contain the spill, local communities were faced with conflicting and confusing information about the activities. The NEPs provided credible and continuously-updated information to local communities; led major outreach efforts in their communities concerning the event; and served as conduits for scientific information and data to local, state and federal agency scientists and officials. Gulf NEPs continued to facilitate community involvement and provide long-term assistance to the state and federal recovery efforts along the Gulf, and are now coordinating community-based restoration efforts to assist in the long-term recovery of the resources and communities along the Gulf coast.

Chapter 4 recounts the mass in-migration of English-speaking Caribbean people to Brooklyn in the wake of the new 1965 immigration laws. The closing down of Harlem Carnival in 1961 did not lead to the cessation of Carnival activity in New York. In 1971 the West Indian American Day Carnival Association (WIADCA) launched a Labor Day Carnival parade down Brooklyn’s Eastern Parkway, establishing Brooklyn as the new center of New York’s Carnival. There would also be stage shows at the Brooklyn Museum and other nearby venues, as well as an annual Panorama contest and Dimanche Gras dance and stage show as part of the Labor Day festivities. Brooklyn’s Labor Day Carnival would eventually expand into the borough’s premiere cultural event, attracting millions of viewers and providing a nurturing environment for the growth of steelband and calypso, as well as the emerging soca style. Carnival music lay at the heart of the celebration.

The Introduction lays out the organization and the research methodology of the book Jump Up! Caribbean Carnival Music in New York City. It outlines the history of calypso, soca, and steelband music in the diaspora, including the globalization of Trinidad Carnival, which was transplanted to Harlem in the 1930s and to Brooklyn in the late 1960s. The concept of diaspora looms large here, of course, given the historical circumstances of New York’s Afro-Caribbean migrants. The Introduction also looks at the concept of hybridity, including hybridization between African and European musical practices in the Caribbean, which is central to diasporic transnationalism in this context. Also discussed is the concept of “heritage music,” or music that is important and needs to be preserved and protected. In addition, relevant writings on Caribbean music are reviewed and the study is positioned within the broader field of transnational diasporic music scholarship. And finally, a chapter outline is offered.

The first chapter offers a brief history of Carnival music in Trinidad and the emergence of diasporic Carnival celebrations in New York, London, and Toronto. The tangled transnational origins of calypso, steelband, and soca along with their development as expressions of cultural identity and resistance for Afro-Trinidadians together set the stage for the music’s migration to North America and Europe. Calypso and steelband are recognized today as Trinidad’s most distinctive contributions to the world’s musics. The traditions associated with the twentieth-century Carnival are best understood as products of musical hybridity. That is, both calypso and steelband evolved through a similar process of hybridization. This chapter provides the necessary background for understanding this music’s migration and life outside the Caribbean in Harlem and Brooklyn.

Chapter 2 focuses on Harlem Carnival activities from the late 1920s through the 1940s. The stories of the early dance orchestras led by the Trinidad expatriate Gerald Clark, and those of New York-based calypsonians Wilmoth Houdini, Cecil “Duke of Iron” Anderson, Sir Lancelot Pinard, and Patrick “MacBeth the Great” MacDonald, are recounted. Their recording careers and performances in Harlem dance halls and downtown Village clubs are explored. The rise of Harlem’s Carnival parade coincided with an upsurge in interest in calypso music by non-Caribbean white and black Americans that culminated in the “calypso craze” of the 1950s. The dance orchestras, calypsonians, and steelband players who provided the music were constantly seeking to broaden their audiences by crossing over into new cultural arenas. This chapter looks at the host of Caribbean-themed dances and calypso performances that were popular in Harlem’s clubs and dance halls from the mid-1930s through the 1950s, and to the calypso shows that proliferated in midtown concert halls and downtown clubs during this period.

Building upon the history of the Brooklyn-based record companies outlined in the previous section, chapter 7 interprets soca music as transnational expression, anchored in Trinidadian tradition but indelibly shaped by musical and production practices in the diaspora. The style, structure, and themes of Brooklyn-produced songs are examined and positioned within the broader context of Caribbean and world music recordings of the period. An alternative history of soca is proposed, one emphasizing transnational roots resulting from the confluence of Trinidadian and American musical influences. Various patterns of musical style, international marketing, and diasporic song content are useful in assessing the dynamics of cultural globalization. This chapter looks at issues of stylistic transformation, lyrical content, soca’s location vis-à-vis other popular diasporic world musics, and the interplay of musical hybridity and cultural identity.

Chapter 9 offers a brief survey of recent developments in Brooklyn Carnival and the current status of its steelband and calypso/soca scenes. A description of Labor Day Carnival 2017, marking the 50th anniversary of the celebration, serves as a final coda. Carnival had survived in the face of a multitude of financial, political, and organizational obstacles for five decades, and New York’s Caribbean community was still jamming to soca and steelband music on Labor Day weekend. Over the previous decades, the press continued to portray the event as the city’s largest outdoor celebration, cementing Brooklyn Caribbean Carnival’s stature as an iconic New York cultural attraction. But what was once participatory ritual has increasingly taken on the aura of presentational spectacle. And while the Monday-morning pre-dawn J’Ouvert celebration, continued to operate, violence had marred the occasion in recent years. Nonetheless, Carnival music in Brooklyn has managed to survive, and in some corners flourished, despite a plethora of ongoing financial and logistical challenges.

Chapter 8 describes the emergence of Brooklyn’s J’Ouvert celebration in the 1990s. With its steelband and percussion-only policy, which strictly forbade deejays and amplified bands, J’Ouvert reflected a conscious attempt to preserve and revitalize older Carnival musical practices as forms of cultural heritage in response to their near disappearance from the more commercial Eastern Parkway parade. This chapter will flesh out the emergence of Brooklyn J’Ouvert, focusing on how a group of Trinidadian migrants revived a century-old celebration to create an event that appeared to some to actually be “more authentic” than what was going on back in Trinidad at the time. It is an extraordinary story of cultural revitalization within Brooklyn’s Caribbean community. Brooklyn J’Ouvert was derived from its parent Trinidad celebration, but like many diasporic expressions, it took on a life of its own.

Jump Up! Caribbean Carnival Music in New York City is the first comprehensive history of Trinidadian calypso and steelband music in the diaspora. Carnival, transplanted from Trinidad to Harlem in the 1930s and to Brooklyn in the late 1960s, provides the cultural context for the study. Blending urban studies, oral history, archival research, and ethnography, Jump Up! examines how members of New York’s diverse Anglophile-Caribbean communities forged transnational identities through the self-conscious embrace, transformation, and hybridization of select Carnival music styles and performances. The work fills a significant void in our understanding of how Caribbean Carnival music—specifically calypso, soca (soul/calypso), and steelband—evolved in the second half of the twentieth century as it flowed between its island homeland and its burgeoning New York migrant community. Jump Up! addresses the issues of music, migration, and identity head on, exploring for the first time the complex cycling of musical practices and the back-and-forth movement of singers, musicians, arrangers, producers, and cultural entrepreneurs between New York’s diasporic communities and the Caribbean.

Chapter 3 turns to the establishment of Harlem’s Dame Lorraine Carnival dances in the mid-1930s and the founding of an outdoor Carnival parade on Seventh Avenue in 1947. The importance of calypso music and the early steelbands in the parade is examined, and the music’s role in maintaining connections to Trinidad and uniting Harlem’s Caribbean migrants is considered. The first large-scale Carnival dances were those produced by the bandleader Gerald Clark, who called his events “Gala Dame Lorraine,” a reference to an early nineteenth-century female Carnival character who was always elegantly dressed. At these dances, bands came clad in themed costumes to compete for prize money. These events showed that New York’s Caribbean migrant communities were eager to support annual Carnival celebrations that combined three essential components of Trinidadian Carnival: dance orchestras, calypso song battles, and masquerade contests. Their success led to an outdoor Carnival parade up Harlem’s Seventh Avenue.

Chapter 5 chronicles the rise of steelbands on Eastern Parkway and the establishment of WIADCA’s Brooklyn Panorama steelband competition during the 1970s and 1980s. These bands were extensions of Trinidad’s steelband movement that afforded Brooklyn’s migrants, now far from home, the opportunity to re-experience their native culture. The uptick in post-1965 Caribbean migration to Brooklyn led to the influx of skilled steelband players, arrangers, and tuners with years of experience with the Trinidad bands. The transnational flow of steel pan players and musical practices was relatively unidirectional in the early years of Brooklyn Carnival, as Trinidadian musicians, arrangers, and tuners regularly visited Brooklyn and helped shape the emerging steelband scene. New York’s complex multiethnic political landscape served as a backdrop for WIADCA’s struggle to deploy various Carnival expressions, particularly steelband and calypso music, in hopes of uniting Brooklyn’s diverse island populations under a single pan-Caribbean banner, while also encouraging greater social integration of Caribbean culture into mainstream urban society.

Chapter 6 focuses on the rise of Brooklyn soca (soul/calypso), beginning with the story of the early Bronx-based independent record company Camille Records, before shifting to the three most important Brooklyn-based labels: Straker’s Records, Charlie’s Records, and B’s Records. These Caribbean-owned businesses, along with a cadre of influential calypso/soca singers and the music arrangers with whom they collaborated, played a crucial role in the evolution of modern calypso and soca music during the 1970s and 1980s. Brooklyn’s Labor Day celebration had been dominated by calypso from its inception. Indeed, calypso and the new variant soca (soul/calypso) were essential hallmarks of the festivities. Equally important, and concurrent with the rise of Brooklyn Carnival in the 1970s, was the borough’s emergence as a vital transnational center for the recording and production of calypso and soca music.