Journal articles: 'Virginia State Golf Association' – Grafiati (2024)

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The 8th annual Southeast Greenhouse Conference and Trade Show (SGCTS) will be held in June 2000. This meeting is the result of cooperative efforts among the Alabama Nurserymen's Association, Florida Nurserymen and Growers Association, Georgia Commercial Flower Growers Association, North Carolina Commercial Flower Growers' Association, South Carolina Greenhouse Growers Association, Tennessee Flower Growers Association, Virginia Greenhouse Growers Association; and the Cooperative Extension Services and Land Grant Universities of all seven participating states, including Auburn Univ., Clemson Univ., the Univ. of Florida, the Univ. of Georgia, North Carolina State Univ., Univ. of Tennessee, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State Univ., and Virginia State Univ. Through pooling of efforts and resources, the SGCTS has become one of the major floriculture educational and trade show events in North America, and it has grown from an initial participation of 347 and a trade show of 89 booths in 1993 to 2407 participants and 398 booths in 1999. The SGCTS serves as an excellent example of cooperative partnering among grower organizations, Cooperative Extension, and faculty at Land Grant Institutions. It eliminates duplication of efforts among individual states, each historically holding their own state meeting. Proceeds from the conference support grower organizations, which in turn support research and educational programs at the cooperating universities. Over $55,000 were disbursed back to the state associations in 1999.

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In order to supplement the literature that describes individual injuries of the shoulder, carpal tunnel, and back in golfers, we administered a survey to demonstrate the incidence of golfers' injuries and describe the most frequent types. A questionnaire was administered to 1,790 members of the New York State Golf Association (amateur) under age 21. Three hundred sixty-eight players responded. Half of those responding had been struck by a golf ball at least on one occasion (47.6%), and 23% of the injuries were to the head or neck. Male golfers were 2.66 times more likely to be struck by a golf ball than females. Women and golfers with a higher handicap were at an increased risk for upper extremity problems, whereas younger and overweight golfers were more likely to have golf-related back problems. We concluded that golf is associated with a significant morbidity. Repetitious trunk and upper limb motions probably contribute to musculoskeletal disorders. However, an unexpectedly high incidence of trauma from projectile golf balls leads to the conclusion that no amount of stretching or muscular exercise is as important as increased alertness by golfers to decrease this hazard.

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Music has been reported as a positive intervention for improving psychophysiological conditions and exercise performance. However, the effects of music intervention on golf performance in association with psychophysiological responses have not been well examined in the literature. The purpose of the study was to investigate the acute effects of self-selected music intervention on golf swing and putting performance, heart rate (HR), HR variability (HRV), and anxiety. Twenty collegiate golfers voluntarily participated in this study (age = 20.2 ± 1.4 years, height = 171.7 ± 8.0 cm, body weight = 69.5 ± 14.6 kg, golf experience = 7.5 ± 2.1 years). A cross-over and within-subject design was used in this study. Participants performed a non-music trial (T1), pre-exercise music trial (T2), and simultaneous music trial (T3) in a randomized order with 48–72 h apart. The participants were attached to a HR monitor to record the HR and HRV during the measurement. The golf swing and putting performance was assessed by using the Golfzon golf simulator system. The state-trait anxiety inventory-state questionnaire (STAI-S) was used to evaluate anxiety state. All measurements were taken during baseline (phase one) and after resting or music intervention (phase two). Repeated measurement of analysis of variance (ANOVA) and Cohen’s effect size (ES) were used for statistical analyses. The results show no significant differences in golf swing and putting performance (p > 0.05). However, significant decrease in STAI-S score was found in T2 (p = 0.047, ES = 0.32). A significant increase in the standard deviation of normal R-R interval (SDNN), low-frequency power spectrum (LF), standard deviation of along the line-of-identity (SD2) in T2 and T3 were observed (p < 0.05). In conclusion, a single pre-exercise or simultaneous self-selected music intervention contributes minor effects to golf performance in collegiate golfers. The positive benefits of self-selected music intervention on the psychological condition and cardia-related modulation while practicing golf is warranted.

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The purpose of this study was to compare the concert band assessments of male-directed ensembles and female-directed ensembles in the state of Virginia. Data included overall ratings of male-directed and female-directed bands ( N = 3,229) that performed at District Concert Assessments held across the state in the past 6 years (2013–2018), which were publicly available on the website of the Virginia Band and Orchestra Directors Association. Results showed a statistically significant association between ratings and director gender at both the middle school and high school levels. In both instances, male-directed ensembles were more likely to receive a I rating, whereas female-directed ensembles were more likely to receive a II rating. This association was more pronounced at the high school level. Implications include a need for further exploration of possible bias in band festival rating systems as well as increased sensitivity to equitable hiring and representation of women in the field of secondary band teaching.

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Athletes’ commitments to nutrition practices can set them apart in their field. Few studies have investigated the impact of hydration practices on golfers’ performance who compete for up to eight hours a day, and none have studied female golfers. In this pilot, randomized crossover study, female elite golfers (n = 6) completed 4 simulated golf holes in both euhydrated and dehydrated states. Euhydration was attained by following NCAA (National Collegiate Athletic Association) hydration guidelines; dehydration was attained by a 12-h overnight fluid fast. Before any fluid intervention, five out of six participants were dehydrated at baseline using urinary specific gravity (USG) classifications for euhydration (USG < 1.010) and dehydration (USG > 1.010). No significant condition by time interactions were found between hydration conditions. Although not significant, participants in a dehydrated state demonstrated lesser mean 7-iron distance (141.9 ± 10.0 vs 144.2 ± 8.0 m), lower putting accuracy (2.4 ± 1.0 vs 2.7 ± 10.0 putts made out of 4 attempts), and greater perceived effort (10.9 ± 2.1 vs 10.5 ± 1.6) as compared to their euhydrated state. The finding of one participant out of six with significant dehydration (USG = 1.021) during attempted euhydrated state may suggest the need for alternative methods to promote adequate hydration in future studies and possibly in golf practice.

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In response to the rise of foreign tax haven usage by multinational corporations, several US states have enacted laws that require income from affiliated entities operating in tax haven jurisdictions to be included on the firm’s state income tax return. We examine the revenue effects of this legislation. Employing a variety of alternative empirical approaches including a difference-in-differences specification, state and year fixed effects regressions, and a synthetic control methodology, our results provide consistent evidence of a positive association between the enactment of tax haven legislation and state corporate income tax revenues in all enacting states except West Virginia. Our study contributes to the state tax policy literature and the literature on tax havens. Moreover, given that states continue to consider implementing, changing, or repealing tax haven legislation, our results inform this current policy debate.

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Abstract. Within-tree variation in abiotic conditions can create a mosaic of fitness gradients for herbivorous insects. To explore these effects, we quantified the patterns of mortality of the solitary oak leafminer, Cameraria hamadryadella (Lepidoptera: Gracillariidae), which lives within leaves of white oak, Quercus alba. We found differential patterns of survival and larval feeding rate within the tree and in association with several abiotic factors: light levels, leaf nitrogen content, and canopy height. We suggest that the leaf scale microhabitat conditions are fundamental to plant-herbivore-enemy interactions because of the differential fitness effects on herbivores. Such effects would be missed by studies that average effects by whole plants. Our study population of C. hamadryadella is located within the Orland E. White State Arboretum of Virginia in Boyce, Virginia, USA.

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Tom Pusateri received his doctorate degree in 1984 from Ohio State University. He is a professor of psychology at Loras College in Dubuque, Iowa specializing in Social and Industrial/Organizational psychology. He served a 2-year appointment as Assessment Coordinator for his campus, continues to serve on its assessment committee, and has delivered several conference presentations on assessment. Tom serves as Executive Director for the Society for the Teaching of Psychology. Tom McGovern is professor and cofounder of the interdisciplinary Department of Integrative Studies at Arizona State University West. He was the first campus-wide Director of Assessment at Virginia Commonwealth University. Tom chaired the American Psychological Association (APA)/Association of American Colleges' project on liberal learning and study in depth as well as the steering committee for the St. Mary's Conference on Enhancing Undergraduate Education in Psychology (McGovern, 1993). He coauthored the Quality Principles with the steering committee from that APA-sponsored conference (see McGovern & Reich, 1996).

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Abstract: This study analyzed the perceptions of four stakeholder groups (forest landowners, private forest consultants, forest management researchers or educators, and federal or state agency foresters), regarding their management practices and preferred geographic growing conditions of loblolly pine in Virginia by combining AHP (analytical hierarchy process) and regression modeling. By ranking the importance of different geographical conditions for managing loblolly pine, we aimed to identify ways to support loblolly growth as a potential feedstock for biofuel generation. We achieved this through collecting survey responses from 43 stakeholders during the 2019 Virginia Forestry Summit. The results showed that the landowner, researcher/educator, and federal/state agency stakeholder groups all indicated that proximity to a mill was the most important criteria, whereas the consultant stakeholder group indicated that proximity to a road was the most important criteria. All the stakeholder groups indicated that distance from protected land was the least important criteria, followed by proximity to a water body and flat land. The regression model revealed that acres of land managed and loblolly rotation age were correlated to the weight given to the distance to a mill criterion, where increased acreage and increased rotation age were associated with an increased prioritization of proximity to a mill. Distance from protected land, the lowest-ranking criteria, was shown to have an association with the level of experience with loblolly, where more experience was associated with a lower prioritization of proximity from protected land. A contingency analysis of the self-identified level of experience with loblolly in each stakeholder group revealed that federal/state agency foresters had the most experience, followed by consultants, landowners, and researchers/educators. The research supports the importance of understanding the variation of perceptions between and within stakeholder groups in order to develop the necessary infrastructural and policy support for the sustainable development of bioenergy.

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Although the overall rate of colorectal cancer (CRC) has remained stable, studies have shown an increase in the rate of CRC in young patients (<50) nationwide. We hypothesize that the rectal cancer (RC) rate in young people has increased in rural Appalachia. The goal is to provide insight into the future of RC epidemiology in underserved populations. This Institutional Review Board–approved retrospective study evaluated RC patients diagnosed in 2003 to 2016, and compared the ratio of early-onset RC to the state and national ratios using West Virginia State Cancer Registry, North American Association of Central Cancer Registries (NAACCR) and Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results Program Database. Demographics include age, gender, ethnicity, and county. We also evaluated cancer stage, family history, and comorbidities, including body mass index, smoking, and alcohol history. The rate of early-onset RC in our area is 1.5 times higher than the national rates. In our population, 100 per cent of patients were white with an equal gender distribution. Young patients with RC were noted to be more overweight than national rates. Young RC patients are more likely to have a first- or second-degree relative with cancer diagnosis. Smoking was strongly associated with young RC. Compared with national statistics, a higher proportion of young patients had Stage 1 or 2 disease which correlated with better survival. The rate of early-onset RC in the Tristate Appalachian area in West Virginia is higher than the national rate with risk factors including white ethnicity, obesity, diabetes mellitus, smoking, family history, and history of pelvic surgeries. It warrants further investigation and discussion of current CRC screening guidelines that begin at age 50.

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e16119 Background: Smoking has been suggested as a risk factor for adrenal cortical carcinoma (ACC), but, due to the rarity of this tumor, this hypothesis has only been inferred from single study using a mixed population of adrenal tumors that included pheochromocytoma and neuroblastoma as well as ACC. Methods: De-identified IRB exempted records were analyzed for age, gender, and smoking history in adult patients diagnosed with ACC in both the West Virginia University database containing 2,699,193 patients and, in the larger TriNetX database of 21,426,477 patients from 2008-2018. In addition, the statewide ratio of smoking to ACC prevalence was computed in all 50 states using data from SEER and the CDC. Results: Given the high rate of both tobacco use and ACC in the West Virginia Health System, we hypothesized that smoking contributed to increased prevalence of ACC in our state. We compared the rates of ACC and smoking in all 50 states using data from SEER. Among the 50 states, West Virginia had the highest smoking rate and the second highest rate of ACC. Utah had the lowest rate of smoking and the third lowest rate of ACC. The sample correlation between statewide smoking and ACC is .4177 indicating a significant association between the two (p = .0035). From 2008 to 2018, 20 patients with ICD10 code c74.0 (ACC) were abstracted from our EMR system. Examination of the individual charts determined 15 of the 20 patients had confirmed ACC diagnosis. This cohort was compared with matched age and gender matched controls. In the control group, there 13.3% were smokers while in the ACC group, 60% were smokers. The difference is significant (p = .0005) (OR) = 9.75 (95% CI; (2.54, 37.38). We next reviewed the larger TriNetX database and found that the prevalence of smoking in the ACC group to be 35.2% as compared to 9.0% in the TriNetX group(p-value < .0001). Conclusions: Our retrospective review strongly supports smoking as a major risk factor ACC. To our knowledge, this is the first study to demonstrate a strong association of smoking in a cohort of biopsy proven ACCs.

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ABSTRACTIxodes scapularisis the principal vector of Lyme disease on the East Coast and in the upper Midwest regions of the United States, yet the tick is also present in the Southeast, where Lyme disease is absent or rare. A closely related species,I. affinis, also carries the pathogen in the South but does not seem to transmit it to humans. In order to better understand the geographic diversity of the tick, we analyzed the microbiota of 104 adultI. scapularisand 13 adultI. affinisticks captured in 19 locations in South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Connecticut, and New York. Initially, ticks from 4 sites were analyzed by 454 pyrosequencing. Subsequently, ticks from these sites plus 15 others were analyzed by sequencing with an Illumina MiSeq machine. By both analyses, the microbiomes of female ticks were significantly less diverse than those of male ticks. The dissimilarity between tick microbiomes increased with distance between sites, and the state in which a tick was collected could be inferred from its microbiota. The genusRickettsiawas prominent in all locations.Borreliawas also present in most locations and was present at especially high levels in one site in western Virginia. In contrast, members of the familyEnterobacteriaceaewere very common in North CarolinaI. scapularisticks but uncommon inI. scapularisticks from other sites and in North CarolinaI. affinisticks. These data suggest substantial variations in theIxodesmicrobiota in association with geography, species, and sex.

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Over the past two decades considerable interest has developed in the subject of the victims of crime. This interest reached a peak in the United States in 1982 with the establishment and report of the President's Task Force on Victims of Crime, which made numerous recommendations for legislative, executive, and other institutional action on both the Federal and State levels, including an amendment to the United States Constitution. The momentum, however, continued. Subsequent developments have included the establishment of an Office for Victims of Crime in the Office of Justice Programs, a flurry of legislative activity across the nation, and the declaration of National Victims' Rights Weeks with the participation of the U.S. President. The interests of victims have been taken up not only by special organizations established for the purpose, such as the National Organization of Victims' Assistance (NOVA), the Victims' Assistance Legal Organization in Virginia, and the National Victim Center (founded in honor of Sunny von Bulow) — as well as more narrowly focussed groups such as MADD (Mothers against Drunk Driving), but also by such mainstream professional bodies as the American Bar Association, the National Association of Attorneys General, the National Conference of the Judiciary, the American Psychological Association, and the National Institute for Mental Health.

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e24064 Background: The number of cancer survivors in the United States (U.S.) is projected to exceed 20 million by 2024. More and more U.S. states are legalizing marijuana use for both recreational and medicinal purposes. This study estimated the prevalence of marijuana use by state among adult cancer survivors. Methods: U.S nationally representative, cross-sectional data from the 2018-2019 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System Survey (BRFSS) Marijuana Use module were used. A total of 13,174 cancer survivors in 17 states was included. Analyses were weighted to account for BRFSS’s complex survey design with results generalizable to 5.7 million cancer survivors. The outcome variable was marijuana use in the past 30 days. Weighted prevalence estimates were computed. Weighted, multivariable logistic regression model estimated the association between state and marijuana use, adjusting for sociodemographic, health, and healthcare factors. Analyses were performed in January 2021. Results: The prevalence of past-month marijuana use among adult cancer survivors in these states was 9.2%. States varied widely in terms of the prevalence of marijuana use. Marijuana use was higher among those who resided in Guam (15.9%), followed by New Hampshire (13.1%), and lowest for those in Puerto Rico (3.3%) ( p< 0.0001). In the adjusted models, compared with the adult cancer survivors residing in California, those living in Maryland, Minnesota, North Dakota, Ohio, South Carolina, Tennessee, Utah, West Virginia, and Wyoming were significantly less likely to use marijuana. Conclusions: Nearly 9% of adult cancer survivors used marijuana, and those who resided in Guam, New Hampshire, Florida, and California are at higher risk for marijuana use. Given the increasing number of cancer survivors and the proliferation of marijuana legalization, identifying high-risk cancer survivors for marijuana use and informing physicians and patients about safe uses and doses and the potential adverse effects of marijuana use is critical.

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Abstract Anthracycline-based chemotherapy regimens are considered the gold standard for treating patients with DLBCL. Prior to administration of chemotherapy, LVEF is routinely measured, usually by multiple-gated acquisition (MUGA) scans or echocardiography, as a screening tool for detecting asymptomatic left ventricular dysfunction. LVEF screening is recommended by the National Comprehensive Cancer Network clinical practice guidelines, is endorsed by the American Heart Association and the American College of Cardiology, appears on Federal Drug Administration-approved labeling guidelines, and is often required for patients to participate in US cancer cooperative group clinical trails. However, despite these recommendations, evidence supporting the utility of LVEF measurement prior to administration of anthracycline-based chemotherapy in patients with DLBCL is lacking (Conrad, J Oncol Pract 2012). The most common chemotherapy regimen currently administered to DLBCL patients is rituximab plus cyclophosphamide, doxorubicin, vincristine, and prednisone (R-CHOP). Patients with stage III or IV DLBCL typically receive 6 to 8 cycles of R-CHOP, with cumulative doses of doxorubicin ranging from 300 - 400 mg/m2. Cumulative doses of doxorubicin greater than 400 mg/m2have been associated with an increased risk of congestive heart failure (CHF) (Von Hoff, Ann Intern Med 1979). We are performing a retrospective analysis of approximately 325 patients with DLBCL who received treatment at Virginia Mason Medical Center from 2001-2011. Our objectives include the following: (1) to determine whether LVEF was measured by echocardiogram or MUGA scan prior to administration of anthracycline-based chemotherapy, (2) to establish whether the chemotherapy treatment regimen was modified based on LVEF values, and (3) to document the incidence of CHF in patients with DLBCL who did receive anthracycline-based chemotherapy. Patients were identified through a search of the Virginia Mason Cancer Registry. Specific data currently being collected through chart review include the following: age at diagnosis; Ann Arbor lymphoma stage; type of chemotherapy given; cumulative doxorubicin dose administered (mg/m2); LVEF measurement and modality used to assess LVEF; and incidence of CHF. We are also recording the number of CHF risk factors that patients possess, including male sex, obesity, hypertension, hyperlipidemia, prior cardiac disease, diabetes mellitus, smoking history, prior chemotherapy, radiation to the chest area, and other cardio-toxic exposures. Statistical analyses will include a Fischer’s exact or Chi-squared test to compare study groups and a Wilcoxon rank sum test to compare the number of CHF risk factors. A P value of less than 0.05 will be used to determine if an association is significant. In a preliminary sample of DLBCL patients (n = 50), 28 are men (56%). LVEF was measured in 40 patients (80%) prior to initiation of chemotherapy using echocardiogram (95%) and MUGA scan (5%). LVEF values were normal (55 – 75%) in 36 patients (90%), low (< 55%) in 3 patients (8%), and unknown in 1 patient (2%). Of the 36 patients with normal LVEF values, 30 received CHOP or R-CHOP regimens (83%), 2 received non-anthracycline chemotherapy (5%), 1 was treated by surgical excision alone (3%), 2 received no treatment (6%), and 1 patient’s treatment was unknown (3%). Of the 3 patients with initial low screening LVEF values, none had a prior history of CHF and all received R-CHOP (100%). Three patients did have CHF prior to treatment; however, only one received CHOP therapy. Of our initial 50 patients, 31 (62%) are alive and 2 (4%) were lost to follow-up. CHF was listed as a major contributor of death in 3 patients (6%). The median number of CHF risk factors did not differ significantly between patients who did develop CHF post-treatment and those who did not (4 vs. 2, P = 0.133). Our preliminary results suggest that the decision to administer an anthracycline-based chemotherapy regimen was not directly affected by echocardiogram or MUGA scan results. If these findings are reinforced at completion of our chart review, it may challenge the existing policy of routinely screening patients with DLBCL with echocardiograms or MUGA scans prior to initiation of treatment. Disclosures: No relevant conflicts of interest to declare.

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When I was a kid, my mother would send me or my younger brother to the attic—typically in late July or early August—to drag down the Samsonite suitcases to prepare for the annual family road trip to visit my father’s aunts, uncles, and cousins. In the late 1940s, my grandparents had plucked my father and his siblings from a backroad farm in the Tennessee hills and plunked them down on a similar backroad farm in Virginia. At the time, when telephones and car trips, even postage stamps, were luxuries, the comfort of family must have seemed a lifetime away. To maintain the bond, my grandfather’s nine sisters—none of whom ever moved more than 40 miles from the house they grew up in—hosted a summer family potluck. My grandfather always attended, even when he could not afford to take his family along. When my parents married, they made the trip to the reunion our annual “vacation.” The eight-hour road trip was a highlight of the year; it was essentially the only traveling my family did, and it required preparations. My mother spent the week prior to the trip choosing the clothes we would take, filling the toiletry case with small bottles of shampoo and new toothbrushes, and shopping for groceries for our in-route picnic lunch. My father disliked restaurants and air conditioning, so a shady picnic at a roadside table was a welcome relief from the sweaty backseat of our Chevrolet Impala. The hills of East Tennessee were dotted with “attractions”: air-brushed t-shirt shops, miniature golf greens, pancake houses, and steak-and-potato restaurants. After a few days, we would return home, mimicking the accents of our distant cousins and showing off our inexpensive souvenirs. Now, with the ubiquity of air travel, a journey of 350 miles seems inconsequential, but when I was young, the idea of a road trip possessed a sense of possibility. As the miles ticked by, moving me away from what I knew and understood best, the world across the state border shimmered with expectation.

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Purpose Digital preservation is a term that is a bit of an enigma to many people both in and out of the digital arena, but it will undoubtedly be important in an increasingly all-digital world. The underlying work relating to digital preservation is essential to the long-term care of digital media, but who is charged with addressing this type of work, and can policy serve to structure and also reflect this complex concept? The main point of interest for this study is to examine existing digital preservation policies at Association of Research Libraries (ARL) institutions and analyze the content of the policies. The purpose will be to determine if these policies are able to provide a robust framework for true digital preservation work at this point in time. First, an introduction is made to provide the structure of the study and background. Next, a literature review is provided, followed by an outline of the methods and results of the study, and finally a conclusion with recommendations for future research. Design/methodology/approach An analysis of digital preservation policy at ARL institutions is conducted, with recommendations provided for further research. Findings This study was an attempt to highlight the current state of digital preservation policies, reviewing both the positive elements and the shortcomings of policies at ARL member institutions. The call for policies made for this study resulted in finding that 32 (26 per cent) ARL institutions currently have a digital preservation policy in place, from the institutions that responded (58 per cent response rate). In total, 23/40 institutions without a current policy indicate there is, or will be, work to complete a policy within the coming year (2016-2017). A call can be made at this time for more in-depth research and analysis of the policies for further inquiry. Both effective (University of Houston, University of Florida, York University) and ineffective (Colorado State University, University of Texas, Virginia Tech) digital preservation policies were discovered during the course of the study, with many policies falling somewhere in the middle. Many institutions provided a good template for digital preservation but lacked details for how this work would be addressed and who would be completing such work. Research limitations/implications Limited to ARL member institutions at the time of the study (January 2016). Originality/value There is currently a gap in analysis and research of digital preservation policies. This is an area of active policy creation for many institutions, and it will likely be a growing area for researchers to examine.

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Although dehydration of ≥ 2% body weight (BW) loss significantly impairs endurance performance, dehydration remains prevalent among athletes and may be owing to a lack of knowledge in relation to fluid requirements. The aim of this study was to assess the hydration status of university/club level athletes (n = 430) from a range of sports/activities (army officer cadet training; bootcamp training; cycling; Gaelic Athletic Association camogie, football and hurling; golf; hockey; netball; rugby; running (sprinting and endurance); Shotokan karate and soccer) immediately before and after training/competition and to assess their nutritional knowledge. Urine specific gravity (USG) was measured immediately before and after exercise and BW loss during exercise was assessed. Nutritional knowledge was assessed using a validated questionnaire. 31.9% of athletes commenced exercise in a dehydrated state (USG >1.020) with 43.6% of participants dehydrated posttraining/competition. Dehydration was particularly prevalent (>40% of cohort) among karateka, female netball players, army officer cadets, and golfers. Golfers that commenced a competitive 18 hole round dehydrated took a significantly higher number of strokes to complete the round in comparison with their euhydrated counterparts (79.5 ± 2.1 vs. 75.7 ± 3.9 strokes, p = .049). Nutritional knowledge was poor among participants (median total score [IQR]; 52.9% [46.0, 59.8]), albeit athletes who were euhydrated at the start of exercise had a higher overall score in comparison with dehydrated athletes (55.2% vs. 50.6%, p = .001). Findings from the current study, therefore, have significant implications for the education of athletes in relation to their individual fluid requirements around exercise.

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The third decade of the Association of Muslim Social Scientists' (AMSS)existence witnessed the collective effort by some of its members to identify majorareas for inclusion in its research agenda. Besides taking stock of past performance,the main determinants included those recent events in the ummah whichhave affected it as a whole and the ensuing problems calling for immediateattention.Following established tradition, the AMSS and one of its sister professionalorganizations, the Association of Muslim Scientists and Engineers (AMSE),convened their conferences at the same time and place.This year's banquet speaker was H.R.H. Crown Prince Hasan bin Talalof Jordan, whose address was delivered in his absence by Mohammad A.Hamadan, former Minister of Education of Jordan. The main thrust of PrinceHasan's address was the need for cooperation among the ummah's varioussegments in the service of professional and human resource development. TheIsma'il and Lamya al Fariiqi Memorial Lecture was given by Zafar I. Ansari,Director General, Islamic Research Center, Islamabad, Pakistan. The AMSEkeynote speaker was Ali Nayfeh, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University,Blacksburg, VA. Nayfeh suggested practical ways of fostering scientificand technological advancement in the ummah through intra-ummah as well asinternational collaboration.The main program consisted of seventeen thematic panels organized intoeleven sessions. The opening session was chaired by Sayyid M. Syeed, GeneralSecretary of the AMSS. It consisted of the welcome speeches of S. ImtiazAhmad, Conference Chair and President of the Islamic Society of NorthAmerica (ISNA); Sulayman Nyang, President of the AMSS; and MohammadZohdy, President of the AMSE. The Convention Chair also read out the felicitousmessages received from the White House, the State House, and the localgovernment. The program preview was given by its co-chairs, Mumtaz Ahmadand Dilnawaz Siddiqui (AMSS), and Sayed A. Nassar (AMSE).The second session had two concurrent panels: 1) "History of Muslim Communitiesin North America;' organized and moderated by Salahuddin Malik,State University of New York (SUNY ) at Brockport, Brockport, NY, and 2)'J\ndragogy: Education of Adults;' which was chaired by Mushtaqur Rahman,University oflowa at Ames, Ames, IA. The history panel featured Anwar Dil,U.S. International University, San Diego, CA, who traced the history of Muslim ...

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Abstract Context West Virginia (WV) is afflicted by high rates of teenage pregnancy and births, opioid usage during pregnancy, and Neonatal Abstinence Syndrome births. Current efforts are ineffective at reducing teenage pregnancy and opioid misuse. While pregnancy and opioid usage may appear to be separate issues, a number of associations suggest adolescent pregnancy, opioid use, and other health-related outcomes are part of a cluster of negative health conditions that should be addressed holistically. Objective To determine whether there is an association between teenage pregnancy and negative health outcomes, including opioid misuse, among WV adolescent girls. Methods This study was conducted from July 2018 to March 2019. We obtained the most recently-available aggregate data at the county level for each of the 55 WV counties from the WV Department of Health and Human Resources (WVDHHR) on July 30, 2018, and we analyzed it during the fall of 2018. Raw data regarding pregnancy-related outcomes included WV girls between the ages of 15 and 19, was acquired between 2014 and 2017 by county, and was provided by the WVDHHR as a mean taken across all four years. Raw data regarding opioid misuse outcomes and heart-health variables included WV girls and women of all ages, was collected between 2014 and 2017 by county, and was provided by the WVDHHR as a mean taken across all four years, unless stated otherwise. Pearson correlation analysis was utilized to examine the associations between the teenage pregnancy and birth rates, opioid misuse, pregnancy, and heart-health-related statistics, as well as environmental variables. Results Teenage pregnancy and birth rates were positively associated with fetal death rates (r=0.308, p<0.05 and r=0.261, p<0.10, respectively). The rate of fetal death among mothers aged 15–19 years was higher in counties with higher teenage pregnancy and birth rates. As the pregnancy and birth rates increased, the rate of abortion increased even more (r=0.434 and r=0.304 respectively, both p<0.05). Teenage pregnancy and birth rates were associated with opioid overdose death rates for all WV girls and women (Pearson correlations, r=0.444 and 0.418 respectively, both p<0.01). WV counties with higher pregnancy and birth rates among girls aged 15–19 years had a greater proportion of women dying from opioid overdose. Teenage pregnancy and birth rates were both positively correlated with obesity, physical inactivity, high cholesterol, and high blood pressure (all r>0.39, all p<0.05). Neither the high-school dropout rate nor the number of WVDHHR listed clinics were associated with teenage pregnancy or birth rates (p>0.10). Conclusion Reduction of unintended teenage pregnancy may be viewed as a nontraditional, holistic, method of ameliorating the opioid misuse crisis in the state of WV. This recommendation should be part of a multi-pronged approach to mitigating the opioid epidemic in WV and all of Appalachia.

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John (‘Jack’) Mitchell was a New Zealander who came to Oxford University on a scholarship of the Commission of the 1851 Exhibition. Mitchell’s association with Nevill (later Sir Nevill) Mott FRS during World War II, when they both worked at the Armament Research Department, afterwards led Mitchell to join Mott at Bristol University, where he began the research into the photographic process for which he is best known. His pursuit of an understanding of the mechanism through which a latent image forms led to the important discovery of the decoration by silver particles of individual dislocations in silver halide crystals and the mosaic microstructure of them. In turn the decoration technique provided the first clear experimental evidence of the link between plastic deformation and the creation and movement of dislocations. In 1960 Mitchell was appointed as professor in the Physics Department at the University of Virginia, where, apart from a brief spell in England as the Director of the National Chemical Laboratory, he worked happily for some 40 years. During this time his research group published many papers describing and explaining the mechanisms of plastic deformation in metallic alloys, devising and using state-of-the-art methods, thereby adding much to a wider understanding of mechanical properties and strength. All the time, working alone, Mitchell further developed and refined his photoaggregation theory of the photographic process, gaining worldwide recognition and honours for his effort.

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Abstract Background In individual states, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act has been associated with improved viral suppression (VS) rates for AIDS Drug Assistance Program (ADAP) clients or low-income people living with HIV (PLWH). This study aims to assess whether this association is consistent in multiple states (Nebraska, South Carolina, Virginia). Methods The multistate cohort included ADAP clients who were eligible for ADAP-funded Qualified Health Plans (QHPs). Data were collected from 2014 through 2015. A log-binomial model was used to estimate the association of demographics (age, race/ethnicity, sex, AIDS, rurality, HIV risk factor, previous VS) and healthcare delivery factors (income, previous ADAP plan, previous HIV care engagement) with QHP enrollment prevalence and 1-year risk of VS. Results For the cohort (n = 7,800; 5% NE, 36% SC, 59% VA), 52% enrolled in ADAP-funded QHPs with enrollment ranging from 35% to 63% by state. Enrollment in ADAP-funded QHPs in 2015 was higher for those who had ADAP-funded QHPs in 2014 (adjusted prevalence ratio [aPR] 3.28; 95% confidence interval [CI] 3.21–3.35) and those who were engaged in care in 2014 (aPR 1.16; 95% CI 1.05–1.27), and it was lower for those with a rural residence (aPR 0.91; 95% CI 0.81–1.00). Of those who were consistently engaged in care (n = 4,597), as defined by one viral load in 2014 and one viral load in 2015 separated by at least 180 days, those who received medications from Direct ADAP had a VS rate of 80.2% and those with ADAP-funded QHPs had a VS rate of 86.0%. The number needed to enroll in ADAP-funded QHPs for an additional PLWH to achieve VS is 18. Those who achieved VS in 2014 (adjusted risk ratio [aRR] 1.39, 95% CI 1.30–1.48) and those who enrolled in QHPs in 2015 (aRR 1.06, 95% CI 0.99–1.13) were more likely to achieve/maintain VS. Conclusion Additional efforts should be made to reach rural PLWH for QHP enrollment. State ADAPs, especially those in the South and those in states without Medicaid expansion, should consider investing in purchasing QHPs for PLWH because increased enrollment could improve VS rates. This evidence-based intervention could be a part of “Ending the HIV Epidemic.” Once ADAP clients are enrolled in ADAP-funded QHPs, they stay enrolled, and QHP enrollment is associated with VS across states and demographic groups. Disclosures All Authors: No reported Disclosures.

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Outsmarting Apartheid is an oral history of educational and cultural exchange programs conducted by the United States Government with citizens of South Africa during the apartheid period. The “OA” collection, published in one volume by the University Press of the State University of New York in April of 2014, conveys the stories of those who administered the programs, as well as those who benefitted, during three troubled decades of South African history. The exchanges involved some 2-3000 participants during a dark period of social unrest and institutionalized injustices. Quietly in the background, U.S. diplomats and their South African colleagues bent rules and stretched limits imposed by the apartheid regime. Collectively they played cat-and-mouse games to outsmart the regime through conniving and bravado. The author’s year as executive director of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training (Arlington, Virginia), 2006-07, provided a methodology and archiving structure forming the basis of the interviews, conducted over a two-year period in the United States and South Africa. There was little optimism at the time for South Africa’s political or social future during the 1960-1990 period. After Nelson Mandela’s release from prison in 1990 and during his presidency of 1995-99, the country discovered rich cadres from within, of intellectuals, artists, journalists, scientists, and political leaders prepared to take on the task of constructing the New South Africa. In no small measure, these exchange programs contributed to the quick and sudden realization of suppressed wishes and aspirations for a majority of South Africa’s citizens -- of all ethnic and racial backgrounds.

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AbstractIntroductionFemoral fractures are painful injuries frequently encountered by prehospital practitioners. Systemic opioids are commonly used to manage the pain after a femoral fracture; however, regional techniques for providing analgesia may provide superior targeted pain relief and reduce opioid requirements. Fascia Iliaca Compartment Block (FICB) has been described as inexpensive and does not require special skills or equipment to perform, giving it the potential to be a suitable prehospital intervention.ProblemThe purpose of this systematic review is to summarize published evidence on the prehospital use of FICB in patients of any age suffering femoral fractures; in particular, to investigate the effects of a prehospital FICB on pain scores and patient satisfaction, and to assess the feasibility and safety of a prehospital FICB, including the success rates, any delays to scene time, and any documented adverse effects.MethodsA literature search of MEDLINE/PubMED, Embase, OVID, Scopus, the Cochrane Database, and Web of Science was conducted from January 1, 1989 through February 1, 2017. In addition, reference lists of review articles were reviewed and the contents pages of the British Journal of Anaesthesia (The Royal College of Anaesthetists [London, UK]; The College of Anaesthetists of Ireland [Dublin, Ireland]; and The Hong Kong College of Anaesthesiologists [Aberdeen, Hong Kong]) 2016 along with the journal Prehospital Emergency Care (National Association of Emergency Medical Service Physicians [Overland Park, Kansas USA]; National Association of State Emergency Medical Service Officials [Falls Church, Virginia USA]; National Association of Emergency Medical Service Educators [Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania USA]; and the National Association of Emergency Medical Technicians [Clinton, Mississippi USA]) 2016 were hand searched. Each study was evaluated for its quality and its validity and was assigned a level of evidence according to the Oxford Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine (OCEBM; Oxford, UK).ResultsSeven studies involving 699 patients were included (one randomized controlled trial [RCT], four prospective observational studies, one retrospective observational study, and one case report). Pain scores reduced after prehospital FICB across all studies, and some achieved a level of significance to support this. Out of a total of 254 prehospital FICBs, there was a success rate of 90% and only one adverse effect reported. Few studies have investigated the effects of prehospital FICB on patient satisfaction or scene time delays.Conclusions and Relevance:The FICB is suitable for use in the prehospital environment for the management of femoral fractures. It has few adverse effects and can be performed with a high success rate by practitioners of any background. Studies suggest that FICB is a useful analgesic technique, although further research is required to investigate its effectiveness compared to systemic opioids.HardsM, BrewerA, BessantG, LahiriS. Efficacy of prehospital analgesia with Fascia Iliaca Compartment Block for femoral bone fractures: a systematic review. Prehosp Disaster Med. 2018;33(3):299-307.

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Jules M Rothstein, clinician, researcher, educator, author, and speaker, entered into the field of physical therapy in 1975 following graduation from the Department of Physical Therapy at New York University. He completed his Master of Arts Degree in Kinesiology in 1979 and his Doctor of Philosophy in Physical Therapy in 1983, also at New York University. During his training, he worked as Staff Physical Therapist at Peninsula Hospital Center in Queens, as Research Fellow with the Arthritis Foundation, and in private practice in Cedarhurst, New York. From 1977 to 1980, Dr Rothstein was Adjunct Instructor in the Department of Physical Therapy at New York University. From 1980 to 1983, he was Instructor and Coordinator of Clinical Research and Training Programs at Washington University School of Medicine, and from 1984 to 1990, he was Associate Professor at the Medical College of Virginia. A tenured professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago since 1990, Dr Rothstein also served as Head of the Department of Physical Therapy at the University of Illinois at Chicago and as Chief of Physical Therapy Services at the University of Illinois Hospital in Chicago until 1999. During that period, the department obtained more than $6 million in research funding and received APTA's 1997 Minority Initiative Award for consistently recruiting and maintaining ethnic and racial diversity among its students. He continues to serve as Professor in the Department of Physical Therapy and remains active in all areas of physical therapy, practice, research, and service. Dr Rothstein's expertise in measurement and research design has been used by many professionals—across disciplines—in the allied health community. He is in great demand as an invited guest speaker, having given professional presentations and keynote speeches on the topic of rehabilitation sciences at numerous national and international forums, including Sweden, Denmark, Iceland, Japan, and Saudi Arabia. He has also served as a consultant and visiting professor in South Africa, the Netherlands, and Poland. Dr Rothstein has made extensive contributions to the physical therapy profession's body of knowledge, including the publication of more than 60 refereed articles and abstracts. In 1985, he edited the text Measurement in Physical Therapy. He chaired the APTA Task Force on Standards for Measurement in Physical Therapy that produced the first APTA Standards for Tests and Measurements in Physical Therapy Practice in 1993. As part of that task force, he co-authored the Primer on Measurement: An Introductory Guide to Measurements Issues. Since 1989, Dr Rothstein has served as Editor of Physical Therapy and has been appointed to that position for three 5-year terms by the APTA Board of Directors. Dr Rothstein is a Catherine Worthingham Fellow of the American Physical Therapy Association. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Golden Pen Award, the Outstanding Service Award for Research, the Outstanding Service Award for Continuing Education, and the Outstanding Therapist Award in the State of Illinois. [Rothstein JM. Thirty-Second Mary McMillan Lecture: Journeys beyond the horizon. Phys Ther. 2001;81:1817–1829.]

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The objective of this panel is to provide attendees with the opportunity to learn about what they always wanted to know about the wide world of human factors consulting, but were afraid to ask (or didn’t know to ask). This session should be of interest to meeting attendees at any stage of their career, including students and those who might be considering a career change or branching out. These panelists, together, have experience over a wide range of consulting domains, as well as being individuals who are at different stages in their consulting careers. As such, the panel session will provide attendees with multiple perspectives on select topics and on responses to attendees’ questions. Sheree Gibson, PE, CPE is President of Ergonomic Applications, a small industrial ergonomics consulting firm in South Carolina. She has been a consultant for most of her professional life, working for a forensic consulting firm as well as an in-house ergonomics consultant for Michelin Tire before setting out on her own. She has a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering and a M.S.E. in Applied Ergonomics, both from West Virginia University. She is active in the American Industrial Hygiene Association, the American Society of Safety Engineers and HFES. Sheree is also Vice-President of the Foundation for Professional Ergonomics. Richard Kelly, PhD earned his doctorate in Engineering Psychology from New Mexico State University and went on to work as an engineering psychologist for the Army at White Sands and then for the Navy at SPAWAR in San Diego. After about 10 years supporting large and small RDT&E programs and leading teams of scientists and engineers, he left the government to start Pacific Science & Engineering (PSE). Over the past 34 years, PSE has grown steadily from 2 to 50 employees and has been a prime contractor, subcontractor, and consultant on hundreds of projects in many different domains, including military, intelligence, industrial process, commercial, medical, education, autonomous vehicles, and more. PSE remains an independent, employee-owned company entirely focused on human performance in complex systems. The technical staff have received numerous recognitions from clients and professional groups for their outstanding work that makes a real difference for our users. Dee Miller, PhD works at Dell, Inc. in the Business Transformation Office as the Senior Principal UX & Service Design Engineer building relationships and appropriately influencing relevant internal teams and direct business contacts in the adoption of a human-centered approach to designing internal systems and processes and delivering services related to Order Experience Life Cycle. She recently started an independent consultancy called Dawn Specialty Consulting. One of the first projects of the new consultancy is consulting with a local non-profit and a police department on applying design thinking to community policing initiatives. Dee has prior experience consulting with state and federal government agencies on matters pertaining to transportation and healthcare. Tom Albin, PE, CPE, PhD is a licensed professional engineer and a certified professional ergonomist. He holds a PhD from the Technical University of Delft in the Netherlands. Currently the principal of High Plains Ergonomics Service, Tom has been engaged in ergonomics consulting since 2001. He has extensive experience as a researcher, a corporate ergonomist and as a product developer. He is active in the US and International Standards community, chairing the ANSI/HFES 100 computer workstation standard and serving as an accredited US expert on several ISO committees. He was Executive Director of the Office Ergonomics Research Committee from 2007 until retiring in 2018. Tom’s consulting work has been principally concerned with physical ergonomics issues in office and industrial settings. Current projects deal with evaluation of injury risk during push and pull tasks and with applied anthropometry. Topics Panelists will each be given time to introduce themselves at the beginning of the session. Each will speak for 7-10 minutes about their career path, ‘what I like best about consulting’, and ‘3-5 things I wish I had known before I started consulting’. The panel will also address the following topics: ethics, running a business (business plans, financing, insurance, legalities, managing employees, marketing, building relationships with clients, and writing contracts), and work/life balance. These topics will be introduced, in the form of questions from the moderator if/when questions from the audience are exhausted.

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The DebateQuestion 1: Various commentators have frequently invoked the importance of moderate Muslims and the role that they can play in fighting extremism in the Muslim world. But it is not clear who is a moderate Muslim. The recent cancellation of Tariq Ramadan’s visa to the United States, the raids on several American Muslim organizations, and the near marginalization of mainstream American Muslims in North America pose the following question: If moderate Muslims are critical to an American victory in the war on terror, then why does the American government frequently take steps that undermine moderate Muslims? Perhaps there is a lack of clarity about who the moderate Muslims are. In your view, who are these moderate Muslims and what are their beliefs and politics? AC: I would like to say from the outset that I am neither a Muslim nor a sociologist. Therefore, my remarks should be taken as those of an interested and sympathetic outsider. I do not believe at all that the American government “undermines” moderate Muslims. The problem is more complicated. Many American officials abhor engagement in religion or the politics of religion. They believe that the American Constitution separates religion and state and does not allow them to make distinctions when it comes to different interpretations of Islam. For some of them, Salafiya Islam is as good as Sufi Islam. Others do not have a sufficient knowledge base to sort out the moderates from the radicals, identify the retrograde fundamentalists, or recognize modernizers who want political Islam to dominate. This is wrong. Radical ideologies have to do more with politics and warfare than religion, and, in some extreme cases, should not enjoy the constitutional protections of freedom of religion or free speech. There is a difference between propagating a faith and disseminating hatred, violence, or murder. The latter is an abuse and exploitation of faith for political ends, and should be treated as such. For example, the racist Aryan Nation churches were prosecuted and bankrupted by American NGOs and the American government. One of the problems is that the American government allows radical Muslims who support terrorism to operate with impunity in the United States and around the world, and does very little to support moderate Muslims, especially in the conflict zones. To me, moderate Muslims are those who do not view the “greater jihad” either as a pillar of faith or as a predominant dimension thereof. A moderate is one who is searching for a dialogue and a compromise with people who adhere to other interpretations of the Qur’an, and with those who are not Muslim. Amoderate Sunni, for example, will not support terror attacks on Shi`ahs or Sufis, or on Christians, Jews, or Hindus. Moderate Muslims respect the right of individuals to disagree, to worship Allah the way they chose, or not to worship – and even not to believe. Amoderate Muslim is one who is willing to bring his or her brother or sister to faith by love and logic, not by mortal threats or force of arms. Amoderate Muslim decries suicide bombings and terrorist “operations,” and abhors those clerics who indoctrinate toward, bless, and support such atrocities. The list of moderate Muslims is too long to give all or even a part of it here. Shaykh Muhammad Hisham Kabbani (chairman of the Islamic Supreme Council of America) and Sheikh Abdul Hadi Palazzi (secretarygeneral of the Rome-based Italian Muslim Association) come to mind. Ayatollah Ali Sistani may be a moderate, but I need to read more of his teachings. As the Wahhabi attacks against the Shi`ah escalate, Shi`i clerics and leaders are beginning to speak up. Examples include Sheikh Agha Jafri, a Westchester-based Pakistani Shi`ah who heads an organization called the Society for Humanity and Islam in America, and Tashbih Sayyed, a California-based Pakistani who serves as president of the Council for Democracy and Tolerance. I admire the bravery of Amina Wadud, a female professor of Islamic studies at Virginia Commonwealth University who led a mixed-gender Friday Islamic prayer service, according to Mona Eltahawy’s op-ed piece in The Washington Post on Friday, March 18, 2005 (“A Prayer Toward Equality”). Another brave woman is the co-founder of the Progressive Muslim Union of America, Sarah Eltantawi. And the whole world is proud of the achievements of Judge Shirin Ebadi, the Iranian human rights lawyer who was awarded the Nobel peace prize in 2003. There is a problem with the first question, however. It contains several assumptions that are debatable, to say the least, if not outright false. First, it assumes that Tariq Ramadan is a “moderate.” Nevertheless, there is a near-consensus that Ramadan, while calling for ijtihad, is a supporter of the Egyptian Ikhwan al-Muslimin [the Muslim Brotherhood] and comes from that tradition [he is the grandson of its founder, Hasan al-Banna]. He also expressed support for Yusuf al-Qaradawi (and all he stands for) on a BBC TVprogram, and is viewed as an anti-Semite. He also rationalizes the murder of children, though apparently that does not preclude the European Social Forum from inviting him to be a member. He and Hasan al-Turabi, the founder of the Islamic state in Sudan, have exchanged compliments. There are numerous reports in the media, quoting intelligence sources and ex-terrorists, that Ramadan associates with the most radical circles, including terrorists. In its decision to ban Ramadan, the United States Department of Homeland Security was guided by a number of issues, some of them reported in the media and others classified. This is sufficient for me to believe that Ramadan may be a security risk who, in the post-9/11 environment, could reasonably be banned from entering the United States.1 Second, the raids on “American Muslim organizations” are, in fact, a part of law enforcement operations. Some of these steps have had to do with investigations of terrorist activities, such as the alleged Libyan conspiracy to assassinate Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. Others focused on American Islamist organizations that were funding the terrorist activities of groups on the State Department’s terrorism watch list, such as Hamas. To say that these criminal investigations are targeting moderate Islam is like saying that investigating pedophile priests undermines freedom of religion in the United States. Finally, American Muslims are hardly marginalized. They enjoy unencumbered religious life and support numerous non-governmental organizations that often take positions highly critical of domestic and foreign policy – something that is often not the case in their countries of origin. There is no job discrimination – some senior Bush Administration officials, such as Elias A. Zerhouni, head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), are Muslims. American presidents have congratulated Muslims on religious holidays and often invite Muslim clergymen to important state functions, such as the funeral of former president Ronald Reagan.

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The DebateQuestion 1: Various commentators have frequently invoked the importance of moderate Muslims and the role that they can play in fighting extremism in the Muslim world. But it is not clear who is a moderate Muslim. The recent cancellation of Tariq Ramadan’s visa to the United States, the raids on several American Muslim organizations, and the near marginalization of mainstream American Muslims in North America pose the following question: If moderate Muslims are critical to an American victory in the war on terror, then why does the American government frequently take steps that undermine moderate Muslims? Perhaps there is a lack of clarity about who the moderate Muslims are. In your view, who are these moderate Muslims and what are their beliefs and politics? AC: I would like to say from the outset that I am neither a Muslim nor a sociologist. Therefore, my remarks should be taken as those of an interested and sympathetic outsider. I do not believe at all that the American government “undermines” moderate Muslims. The problem is more complicated. Many American officials abhor engagement in religion or the politics of religion. They believe that the American Constitution separates religion and state and does not allow them to make distinctions when it comes to different interpretations of Islam. For some of them, Salafiya Islam is as good as Sufi Islam. Others do not have a sufficient knowledge base to sort out the moderates from the radicals, identify the retrograde fundamentalists, or recognize modernizers who want political Islam to dominate. This is wrong. Radical ideologies have to do more with politics and warfare than religion, and, in some extreme cases, should not enjoy the constitutional protections of freedom of religion or free speech. There is a difference between propagating a faith and disseminating hatred, violence, or murder. The latter is an abuse and exploitation of faith for political ends, and should be treated as such. For example, the racist Aryan Nation churches were prosecuted and bankrupted by American NGOs and the American government. One of the problems is that the American government allows radical Muslims who support terrorism to operate with impunity in the United States and around the world, and does very little to support moderate Muslims, especially in the conflict zones. To me, moderate Muslims are those who do not view the “greater jihad” either as a pillar of faith or as a predominant dimension thereof. A moderate is one who is searching for a dialogue and a compromise with people who adhere to other interpretations of the Qur’an, and with those who are not Muslim. Amoderate Sunni, for example, will not support terror attacks on Shi`ahs or Sufis, or on Christians, Jews, or Hindus. Moderate Muslims respect the right of individuals to disagree, to worship Allah the way they chose, or not to worship – and even not to believe. Amoderate Muslim is one who is willing to bring his or her brother or sister to faith by love and logic, not by mortal threats or force of arms. Amoderate Muslim decries suicide bombings and terrorist “operations,” and abhors those clerics who indoctrinate toward, bless, and support such atrocities. The list of moderate Muslims is too long to give all or even a part of it here. Shaykh Muhammad Hisham Kabbani (chairman of the Islamic Supreme Council of America) and Sheikh Abdul Hadi Palazzi (secretarygeneral of the Rome-based Italian Muslim Association) come to mind. Ayatollah Ali Sistani may be a moderate, but I need to read more of his teachings. As the Wahhabi attacks against the Shi`ah escalate, Shi`i clerics and leaders are beginning to speak up. Examples include Sheikh Agha Jafri, a Westchester-based Pakistani Shi`ah who heads an organization called the Society for Humanity and Islam in America, and Tashbih Sayyed, a California-based Pakistani who serves as president of the Council for Democracy and Tolerance. I admire the bravery of Amina Wadud, a female professor of Islamic studies at Virginia Commonwealth University who led a mixed-gender Friday Islamic prayer service, according to Mona Eltahawy’s op-ed piece in The Washington Post on Friday, March 18, 2005 (“A Prayer Toward Equality”). Another brave woman is the co-founder of the Progressive Muslim Union of America, Sarah Eltantawi. And the whole world is proud of the achievements of Judge Shirin Ebadi, the Iranian human rights lawyer who was awarded the Nobel peace prize in 2003. There is a problem with the first question, however. It contains several assumptions that are debatable, to say the least, if not outright false. First, it assumes that Tariq Ramadan is a “moderate.” Nevertheless, there is a near-consensus that Ramadan, while calling for ijtihad, is a supporter of the Egyptian Ikhwan al-Muslimin [the Muslim Brotherhood] and comes from that tradition [he is the grandson of its founder, Hasan al-Banna]. He also expressed support for Yusuf al-Qaradawi (and all he stands for) on a BBC TVprogram, and is viewed as an anti-Semite. He also rationalizes the murder of children, though apparently that does not preclude the European Social Forum from inviting him to be a member. He and Hasan al-Turabi, the founder of the Islamic state in Sudan, have exchanged compliments. There are numerous reports in the media, quoting intelligence sources and ex-terrorists, that Ramadan associates with the most radical circles, including terrorists. In its decision to ban Ramadan, the United States Department of Homeland Security was guided by a number of issues, some of them reported in the media and others classified. This is sufficient for me to believe that Ramadan may be a security risk who, in the post-9/11 environment, could reasonably be banned from entering the United States.1 Second, the raids on “American Muslim organizations” are, in fact, a part of law enforcement operations. Some of these steps have had to do with investigations of terrorist activities, such as the alleged Libyan conspiracy to assassinate Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. Others focused on American Islamist organizations that were funding the terrorist activities of groups on the State Department’s terrorism watch list, such as Hamas. To say that these criminal investigations are targeting moderate Islam is like saying that investigating pedophile priests undermines freedom of religion in the United States. Finally, American Muslims are hardly marginalized. They enjoy unencumbered religious life and support numerous non-governmental organizations that often take positions highly critical of domestic and foreign policy – something that is often not the case in their countries of origin. There is no job discrimination – some senior Bush Administration officials, such as Elias A. Zerhouni, head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), are Muslims. American presidents have congratulated Muslims on religious holidays and often invite Muslim clergymen to important state functions, such as the funeral of former president Ronald Reagan.

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AbstractBackgroundThe Opioid Reduction Act (SB 273) took effect in West Virginia in June 2018. This legislation limited ongoing chronic opioid prescriptions to 30 days’ supply, and first-time opioid prescriptions to 7 days’ supply for surgeons and 3 days’ for emergency rooms and dentists. The purpose of this study was to determine the effect of this legislation on reducing opioid prescriptions in West Virginia, with the goal of informing future similar policy efforts.MethodsData were requested from the state Prescription Drug Monitoring Program (PDMP) including overall number of opioid prescriptions, number of first-time opioid prescriptions, average daily morphine milligram equivalents (MME) and prescription duration (expressed as “days’ supply”) given to adults during the 64 week time periods before and after legislation enactment. Statistical analysis was done utilizing an autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) interrupted time series analysis to assess impact of both legislation announcement and enactment while controlling secular trends and considering autocorrelation trends. Benzodiazepine prescriptions were utilized as a control.ResultsOur analysis demonstrates a significant decrease in overall state opioid prescribing as well as a small change in average daily MME associated with the date of the legislation’s enactment when considering serial correlation in the time series and accounting for pre-intervention trends. There was no such association found with benzodiazepine prescriptions.ConclusionResults of the current study suggest that SB 273 was associated with an average 22.1% decrease of overall opioid prescriptions and a small change in average daily MME relative to the date of legislative implementation in West Virginia. There was, however, no association of the legislation on first-time opioid prescriptions or days’ supply of opioid medication, and all variables were trending downward prior to implementation of SB 273. The control demonstrated no relationship to the law.

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“Closing the digital divide is a national challenge among historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs),” writes White examining the state of information technology readiness of five four-year HBCUs in the Commonwealth of Virginia. The inequalities created by the digital divide have the potential of undermining the effort of HBCUs in educating an “African American workforce capable of fully participating in a global information economy”.The National Association for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education (NAFEO), a nonprofit Black college association representing the interests of HBCUs in its HBCU Technology Assessment Study (TAS) produced the most comprehensive report of its kind in assessing the computing resources, networking, and connectivity of the Historic Black Colleges and University serves as the primary source for this narrative.

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Abstract Background For year 1 of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), Virginia AIDS Drug Assistance Program (ADAP) clients with Qualified Health Plans (QHPs) achieved a higher rate of viral suppression. This study characterizes the demographic and health care delivery factors associated with QHP enrollment in year 2 and assesses the relationship between 2015 QHP coverage and HIV viral suppression. Methods The cohort included Virginia ADAP clients who were eligible for ADAP-funded QHPs. Data were collected from 2014 to 2015. Multivariable binary logistic regression was conducted to assess the association of demographic and health care delivery factors with QHP enrollment and viral suppression. Results In year 2, 63% of the cohort (n = 4631) enrolled in QHPs; 2015 ADAP-funded QHP enrollment was associated with 2014 ADAP-funded QHP (adjusted odds ratio [aOR], 111.11; 95% confidence interval [CI], 90.91–166.67), 2014 engagement in care (aOR, 2.16; 95% CI, 1.65–2.82), age (P &lt; .001), race/ethnicity (P = .03), financial status (P &lt; .001), and region (P &lt; .001). For clients engaged in care (n = 2501), viral suppression was higher (83.3%) for those with ADAP-funded QHP coverage than for those who received medications from ADAP (79.9%). In multivariable binary logistic regression, achieving viral suppression was associated with 2015 QHP coverage (aOR, 1.27; 95% CI, 1.01–1.60), an initially undetectable viral load (aOR, 2.69; 95% CI, 2.13–3.39), gender (P = .03), age (P = .01), no AIDS diagnosis (aOR, 1.41; 95% CI, 1.12–1.78), financial status (P = .004), and region (P &lt; .001). Conclusions Virginia ADAP client 2015 QHP enrollment increased compared with year 1 and varied based on demographic and health care delivery factors. QHP coverage was again associated with viral suppression, an essential outcome for individuals and for public health.

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Schools are an important resource in combating the physical inactivity and obesity epidemics in rural economically depressed areas. Through a University-community partnership, teachers and adolescents in a rural West Virginia county with one of the highest obesity rates in the state developed a school-based research intervention to increase physical activity opportunities. The intervention included walking routes, educational sessions, and pedometers. A survey about barriers to physical activity revealed that “lack of willpower” was a barrier of concern among program participants (mostly school employees) and had a statistically significant (p = .0033) pre to post mean score decrease during the year two offering. Focus groups with the adolescent researchers revealed that pedometers may facilitate maintenance of physical activity and a broader community impact. Focus group dialogue combined with teacher-researcher perspectives suggested that the adolescents changed their weight control paradigm from “dieting” to include the critical role of energy expenditure. Approval to conduct this research was provided by the West Virginia University Institutional Review Board for the Protection of Human Subjects Protocols No. 16041 and 15632. A poster based on this paper was presented at the 135th Annual Meeting & Exposition of the American Public Health Association, Washington, DC, November, 2007. The authors are very appreciative of the HSTA students for their continued efforts in addressing important public health problems in their community. The project described was supported by funds from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Grant Award No. H75CCH322130-02 through the West Virginia University Prevention Research Center and by Grant Number 2R25RR12329-04 from the National Center for Research Resources (NCRR), a component of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Its contents are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of CDC, NCRR, or NIH.

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The 70th Annual Meeting of The Canadian Rheumatology Association (CRA) was held at the Fairmont Chateau Frontenac, Quebec City, Quebec, Canada, February 4–7, 2015. The program consisted of presentations covering original research, symposia, awards, and lectures. Highlights of the meeting include 2015 Award Winners: Distinguished Rheumatologist Award: Carter Thorne; Distinguished Investigator Award: Hani El-Gabalawy; Teacher-Educator Award: Andrew E. Thompson; Young Investigator Award: Sindhu Johnson; Summer Studentship Mentor Award: Lori Albert; Innovation in Education Award: Henry Averns; Best Abstract for Basic Science Research by a Trainee: Sina Rusta-Sallehy; Best Abstract for Research by an Undergraduate Student: Tristan Kerr; Best Abstract for Research by a Rheumatology Resident: Claire Barber; Best Poster by a Medical Student: Dennis Wong; Best Poster by a Post-Graduate Resident: Zainab Alabdurubalnabi; CRA/ARF Best Epidemiology/Health Services Research Award: Evelyn Vinet; CRA/ARF Best Clinical Research Award: Glen Hazelwood; CRA/ARF Best Basic Science Research Award: Carolina Landolt-Marticorena; Ian Watson Award for Best Abstract for SLE Research by a Trainee: Ripneet Puar; Phil Rosen Award for Best Abstract for Clinical or Epidemiology Research by a Trainee: Liam O’Neil. Lectures and more: The 2015 Dunlop Dottridge Lecture: HLA-B27, the Microbiome, and the Pathogenesis of Spondyloarthritis, by James Rosenbaum; Preventing Rheumatoid Arthritis: What We’ll Need to Know Before We Start Navigating this Uncharted Territory, by Distinguished Investigator Awardee Hani El-Gabalawy; and the 2015 State of the Art Lectures: A Genomic Approach to Understanding Rheumatic Disease, by Dr. Virginia Pascual, and Modifiable Risk Factors in RA: You Can Lead a Horse to Water but …, by Michael Vallis. The Great Debate: Treat Pre-RA vs Not Treat Pre-RA. Arguing for: Volodko Bakowsky and Derek Haaland; Against: Hani El-Gabalawy and Rob McDougall. The contributions presented at the meeting are reflected in the abstracts, which we are pleased to publish in this issue.

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AbstractObjectiveTo evaluate the association between US state policies that establish age 18 or 21 years as the minimum purchaser age for the sale of handguns and adolescent suicide rate.DesignRegression discontinuity and difference-in-differences analyses.Setting46 US states without policy changes between 2001 and 2017; Missouri and South Carolina, which lowered the age for handgun sales in 2007 and 2008, respectively; and West Virginia and Wyoming, which increased the age for handgun sales in 2010.ParticipantsAdolescents aged 13 to 20 years(554 461 961 from 2001 to 2017) in the regression discontinuity analysis, and adolescents aged 18 to 20 years (168 934 041 from 2002 to 2014) in the main difference-in-differences analysis.Main outcome measureSuicide rate per 100 000 adolescents.ResultsIn the regression discontinuity analysis, state policies that limited the sale of handguns to those aged 18 or older (relative to 21 or older) were associated with an increase in suicide rate among adolescents aged 18 to 20 years equivalent to 344 additional suicides in each state where they were in place between 2001 and 2017. In the difference-in-differences analysis, state policies that limited the sale of handguns to those aged 21 or older were associated with 1.91 fewer suicides per 100 000 adolescents aged 18 to 20 years (95% confidence interval −3.13 to −0.70, permutation adjusted P=0.025). In the difference-in-differences analysis, there were 1.83 fewer firearm related suicides per 100 000 adolescents (−2.66 to −1.00, permutation adjusted P=0.002), with no association between age 21 handgun sales policies and non-firearm related suicides. Separate event study estimates indicated increases in suicide rates in states that lowered the age of handgun sales, with no association in states that increased the age of handgun sales.ConclusionsA clear discontinuity was shown in the suicide rate by age at age 18 in states that limited the sale of handguns to individuals aged 18 or older. State policies to limit the sale of handguns to individuals aged 21 or older were associated with a reduction in suicide rates among adolescents. Increases in suicide rates were observed after states lowered the age of handgun sales, but no effect was found in states that increased the age of handgun sales.

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ObjectiveOpioid and illicit substance abuse continues to have major public health implications in the state of West Virginia. By analyzing the Emergency Medical Service (EMS) utilization history of drug overdose decedents, opportunities to improve surveillance of fatal and non-fatal drug overdoses can be identified which can help lead prevention efforts of fatal drug overdoses in the state.IntroductionWest Virginia continues to lead the nation in drug overdose deaths per capita. In 2016, the age-adjusted rate of drug overdose deaths was 52 per 100,0001. In the same year, there were roughly 64,000 overdose deaths in the United States, a 21.5% rate increase from 20151. The drug overdose epidemic in West Virginia has taken a significant toll on individuals, families, communities, and resources.As part of a rapid response plan to help reduce the burden of overdose deaths, the West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources conducted an investigative report to study 830 overdose related deaths that occurred in 2016 and identify opportunities for intervention in the 12 months prior to death.Utilization of EMS among decedents was analyzed to determine demographic differences between decedents at different time points of EMS contact: EMS contact at death only; EMS contact 12 months prior to death only; and both EMS contact at death and 12 months prior to death.MethodsA list of decedents that had died in 2016 from a drug overdose was obtained from the West Virginia Vital Registration Office and then matched to EMS ambulance run data. The inclusion criteria for this decedent sample were: state residency, drug overdose as the primary cause of death, and a history of EMS utilization. Overall, 588 West Virginia overdose decedents were identified for analysis.Drug classes, identified by forensic toxicology reports, and demographic information including gender, age, race, marital status, education level, and occupation of each decedent were analyzed to identify trends related to overdose deaths.A ‘death run’ was defined as an EMS run that occurred within 48 hours of death. A ‘prior EMS run’ was defined as an EMS run that occurred within 12 months prior to death.ResultsAmong decedents with an EMS contact, 50% (N=295) of decedents’ only contact was at death. Of the remaining half of decedents with an EMS contact: One-third (N=195) had both a previous EMS run in the 12 months prior to death and at death; and 17% (N=98) of decedents only EMS contact was in the year prior to death that was not a fatal run (Table 1).There were gender differences in EMS utilization among male and female decedents at death run only, 12 months prior to death only, and at both time points. When comparing time points, the largest percentage of EMS contact among males and females occurred at death run only; although males (53% n=206) had more contact with EMS at death run only compared to females (45%, n=89). However among those that had utilized EMS at both time points, females had more encounters with EMS (38.3%, n=75) than male decedents (30.61%, n=120) (Table 1).Decedents aged 15-24 years (64.5%, n=20) had the largest percentage of EMS utilization at death run only compared to the other age groups. Decedents aged 65 years and older of prior EMS runs (50.0%), compared to other age groups (Table 1).Of the decedents that received at least one naloxone administration in their EMS history (n=178), decedents that utilized EMS at both time points received the largest administration at 44% (n=80). This was followed by 41% (n=73) of decedents that had EMS contact at death only.ConclusionsFor half of the decedents analyzed, their only encounter with EMS was associated with their death. This could be explained by the type of drugs that contributed to their deaths, as stronger illicit and/or pharmaceutical drugs such as fentanyl, contributed to more overdose deaths in this population than other drug types2. Although decedents aged 15-24 years had highest EMS contact at death run only, illicit drugs were more commonly found in this particular group than other age groups2.Evidence has shown that a prior non-fatal overdose in the past, increases the risk of a fatal overdose in the future3. One-third (n=195) of decedents in this analysis had both a prior contact with EMS in the year before death and within 48 hours of death. However, it is unknown whether their previous contacts with EMS was associated with an overdose. Further investigation into chief complaints of EMS runs would need to be done to assess the association between prior EMS contact due to a non-fatal overdose and risk of a subsequent fatal overdose.In this analysis, women had a larger percentage of EMS contact at both time points than men. Studies have indicated that women are more at risk than men for having a fatal overdose4. One possibility is that the concurrent use of opioid prescription and illicit drugs, occurs more often among women than in men elevating their risk of having non-fatal and fatal overdoses.Identifying high-risk individuals with previous overdoses can help to minimize the gap between overdose and accessibility to treatment services. As part of the rapid response plan, the West Virginia Drug Control Policy Act was passed to improve drug overdose surveillance and help strengthen response5. The policy enacted the creation of a central repository that will store drug overdose information, making drug overdoses a notifiable condition.References1. Seth P, Scholl L, Rudd RA, Bacon S. Overdose Deaths Involving Opioids, Cocaine, and Psychostimulants — United States, 2015–2016. MMWR Morb Mortal Wkly Rep. 2018; 67: 349–358.2. West Virginia Violence and Injury Prevention Center. 2016 WV Overdose Fatality Analysis: Healthcare Systems Utilization, Risk Factors, and Opportunities for Intervention. 2017 Dec 20.3. Stoové MA, Dietze PM, Jolley D. Overdose deaths following previous non-fatal heroin overdose: record linkage of ambulance attendance and death registry data. Drug Alcohol Rev. 2009 Jul; 28(4): 347-52.4. Evans E, Kelleghan A, Li L, Min J, Huang D, Urada D, Hser YI, Nosyk B. Gender differences in mortality among treated opioid dependent patients. Drug Alcohol Depen. 2015 Oct 1; 155: 228-35.5. West Virginia Legislature. West Virginia Drug Control Policy Act [Internet]. 2017. Available from: http://www.wvlegislature.gov/Bill_Status/bills_text.cfm?billdoc=HB2620 SUB ENR.htm&yr=2017&sesstype=RS&billtype=B&houseorig=H&i=2620.

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Domestic dogs and cats are potentially effective sentinel populations for monitoring occurrence and spread of Lyme disease. Few studies have evaluated the public health utility of sentinel programmes using geo-analytic approaches. Confirmed Lyme disease cases diagnosed by physicians and ticks submitted by veterinarians to the West Virginia State Health Department were obtained for 2014-2016. Ticks were identified to species, and only Ixodes scapularis were incorporated in the analysis. Separate ordinary least squares (OLS) and spatial lag regression models were conducted to estimate the association between average numbers of Ix. scapularis collected on pets and human Lyme disease incidence. Regression residuals were visualised using Local Moran’s I as a diagnostic tool to identify spatial dependence. Statistically significant associations were identified between average numbers of Ix. scapularis collected from dogs and human Lyme disease in the OLS (β=20.7, P<0.001) and spatial lag (β=12.0, P=0.002) regression. No significant associations were identified for cats in either regression model. Statistically significant (P≤0.05) spatial dependence was identified in all regression models. Local Moran’s I maps produced for spatial lag regression residuals indicated a decrease in model over- and under-estimation, but identified a higher number of statistically significant outliers than OLS regression. Results support previous conclusions that dogs are effective sentinel populations for monitoring risk of human exposure to Lyme disease. Findings reinforce the utility of spatial analysis of surveillance data, and highlight West Virginia’s unique position within the eastern United States in regards to Lyme disease occurrence.

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As asynchronous learning becomes the norm throughout academia, changes are taking place in campus information systems. Academic libraries, as the entity responsible for serving the information needs of the university, have little choice but to change dramatically. In fact, academic libraries have a history of being aggressive in adapting state-of-the-art technologies. One can point to decades-long involvement with the development of online catalogs and the use of shared cataloging utilities. Libraries continue to serve academic teaching and learning by taking on new roles, revising traditional services, and time and space constraints.Libraries have, however, been slower to adjust organizational structures and processes to leverage the potential of technology. Replies to a recent survey of Association of Research Libraries (ARL) indicate that change in the responding libraries at this time is incremental rather than dramatic. Patterns are emerging, however, relative to resource reallocation and the formation of partnerships with other university units that reflect new priorities.This article describes two examples of innovative information delivery initiatives. VIVA, the Virtual Library of Virginia, was proposed by the state’s Library Advisory Council in 1993 to encourage collaboration among the Commonwealth’s institutions of higher education and to support the electronic dissemination of information. Academic libraries are also leading the way by providing new and unique sources of online information such as Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs), by developing electronic submissions, online archiving, and Web access, as well as bringing to the forefront discussions about issues such as copyright and publishers’ control of academic publications. Network-based access to information resources such as these is changing higher education, and the opportunities offered by asynchronous learning networks are challenging libraries to adjust their policies, processes, and services.

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07–562Al-Jarf, Reima Sado (King Saud U, Saudi Arabia; reima2000_sa@yahoo.com), Processing of advertisem*nts by EFL college students. The Reading Matrix (Readingmatrix.com) 7.1 (2007), 132–140.07–563Alkire, Scott (San Jose State U, California, USA; scott.alkire@sjsu.edu) & Andrew Alkire, Teaching literature in the Muslim world: A bicultural approach. TESL-EJ (http://www.tesl-ej.org) 10.4 (2007), 13 pp.07–564Belcher, Diane (Georgia State U, USA; dbelcher1@gsu.edu), Seeking acceptance in an English-only research world. Journal of Second Language Writing (Elsevier) 16.1 (2007), 1–22.07–565Bell, Joyce (Curtin U, Australia; Joyce.Bell@curtin.edu.au), Reading practices: Postgraduate Thai student perceptions. The Reading Matrix (Readingmatrix.com) 7.1 (2007), 51–68.07–566Bndaka, Eleni (ebintaka@sch.gr), Using newspaper articles to develop students' reading skills in senior high school. The Reading Matrix (Readingmatrix.com) 7.1 (2007), 166–175.07–567Coiro, Julie & Elizabeth Dobler, Exploring the online reading comprehension strategies used by sixth-grade skilled readers to search for and locate information on the Internet. Reading Research Quarterly (International Reading Association) 42.2 (2007), 214–257.07–568Cole, Simon (Daito Bunka U, Japan), Consciousness-raising and task-based learning in writing. The Language Teacher (Japan Association for Language Teaching) 31.1 (2007), 3–8.07–569Commeyras, Michelle & Hellen N. Inyega, An Integrative review of teaching reading in Kenyan primary schools. Reading Research Quarterly (International Reading Association) 42.2 (2007), 258–281.07–570Compton-Lilly, Catherine (U Wisconsin–Madison, USA), The complexities of reading capital in two Puerto Rican families. Reading Research Quarterly (International Reading Association) 42.1 (2007), 72–98.07–571Duffy, John (U Notre Dame, Notre Dame, USA), Recalling the letter: The uses of oral testimony in historical studies of literacy. Written Communication (Sage) 24.1 (2007), 84–107.07–572Dyehouse, Jeremiah (U Rhode Island, USA), Knowledge consolidation analysis: Toward a methodology for studying the role of argument in technology development. Written Communication (Sage) 24.2 (2007), 111–139.07–573Godley, Amanda J., Brian D. Carpenter (U Pittsburgh, USA) & Cynthia A. Werner, ‘I'll speak in proper slang’: Language ideologies in a daily editing activity. Reading Research Quarterly (International Reading Association) 42.1 (2007), 100–131.07–574Guénette, Danielle (U du Québec, Canada; guenette.daniele@uqam.ca), Is feedback pedagogically correct? Research design issues in studies of feedback on writing. Journal of Second Language Writing (Elsevier) 16.1 (2007), 40–53.07–575Gutiérrez-Palma, Nicolás (U de Jaén, Spain; ngpalma@ujaen.es) & Alfonso Palma Reves (U Granada, Spain), Stress sensitivity and reading performance in Spanish: A study with children. Journal of Research in Reading (Blackwell) 30.2 (2007), 157–168.07–576Hu, Guangwei (Nanyang Technical U, Singapore; guangwei.hu@nie.edu.sg), Developing an EAP writing course for Chinese ESL students. RELC Journal (Sage) 38.1 (2007), 67–86.07–577Hunt, George (U Edinburgh, UK; george.hunt@ed.ac.uk), Failure to thrive? The community literacy strand of the Additive Bilingual Project at an Eastern Cape community school, South Africa. Journal of Research in Reading (Blackwell) 30.1 (2007), 80–96.07–578Jiang, Xiangying & William Grabe (Northern Arizona U, USA), Graphic organizers in reading instruction: Research findings and issues. Reading in a Foreign Language (U Hawaii, HI, USA) 19.1 (2007), 34–55.07–579Jin Bang, Hee & Cecilia Guanfang Zhao (New York U, USA; heejin.bang@nyu.edu), Reading strategies used by advanced Korean and Chinese ESL graduate students: A case study. The Reading Matrix (Readingmatrix.com) 7.1 (2007), 30–50.07–580Keshavarz, Mohammad Hossein, Mahmoud Reza Atai (Tarbiat Moallem U, Iran) & Hossein Ahmadi, Content schemata, linguistic simplification, and EFL readers' comprehension and recall. Reading in a Foreign Language (U Hawaii, HI, USA) 19.1 (2007), 19–33.07–581Kirkgöz, Yasemin (Çukurova U, Turkey; ykirkgoz@cu.edu.tr), Designing a corpus based English reading course for academic purposes. The Reading Matrix (Readingmatrix.com) 6.3 (2006), 281–298.07–582Kolić-Vehovec, Svjetlana & Iqor Bajšanski (U Rijeka, Crotia; skolic@ffri.hr), Comprehension monitoring and reading comprehension in bilingual students. Journal of Research in Reading (Blackwell) 30.2 (2007), 198–211.07–583Li, Yongyan, Apprentice scholarly writing in a community of practice: An intraview of an NNES graduate student writing a research article. TESOL Quarterly (Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages) 41.1 (2007), 55–79.07–584Marianne (Victoria U Wellington, New Zealand; m.marianne@vuw.ac.nz), A comparative analysis of racism in the original and modified texts ofThe Cay. Reading in a Foreign Language (U Hawaii, HI, USA) 19.1 (2007), 56–68.07–585Marsh, Charles (U Kansas, Lawrence, USA), Aristotelian causal analysis and creativity in copywriting: Toward a rapprochement between rhetoric and advertising. Written Communication (Sage) 24.2 (2007), 168–187.07–586Mellard, Daryl, Margaret Becker Patterson & Sara Prewett, Reading practices among adult education participants. Reading Research Quarterly (International Reading Association) 42.2 (2007), 188–213.07–587Mishra, Ranjita (U London, UK) & Rhona Stainthorp, The relationship between phonological awareness and word reading accuracy in Oriya and English: A study of Oriya-speaking fifth-graders. Journal of Research in Reading (Blackwell) 30.1 (2007), 23–37.07–588Naq, Sonali (The Promise Foundation, India; sonalinag@t-p-f.org), Early reading in Kannada: The pace of acquisition of orthographic knowledge and phonemic awareness. Journal of Research in Reading (Blackwell) 30.1 (2007), 7–22.07–589Pretorius, Elizabeth & Deborah Maphoko Mampuru (U South Africa, South Africa; pretoej@unisa.ac.za), Playing football without a ball: Language, reading and academic performance in a high-poverty school. Journal of Research in Reading (Blackwell) 30.1 (2007), 38–58.07–590Pulido, Diana (Michigan State U, USA), The effects of topic familiarity and passage sight vocabulary on L2 lexical inferencing and retention through reading. Applied Linguistics (Oxford University Press) 28.1 (2007), 66–86.07–591Purcell-Gates, Victoria (U British Columbia, Canada), Neil K. Duke & Joseph A. Martineau, Learning to read and write genre-specific text: Roles of authentic experience and explicit teaching. Reading Research Quarterly (International Reading Association) 42.1 (2007), 8–45.07–592Rahimi, Mohammad (Shiraz U, Iran; mrahimy@gmail.com), L2 reading comprehension test in the Persian context: Language of presentation as a test method facet. The Reading Matrix (Readingmatrix.com) 7.1 (2007), 151–165.07–593Rao, Zhenhui (Jiangxi Normal U, China; rao5510@yahoo.com), Training in brainstorming and developing writing skills. ELT Journal (Oxford University Press) 61.2 (2007), 100–106.07–594Ravid, Dorit & Yael Epel Mashraki (Tel Aviv U, Israel; doritr@post.tau.ac.il), Prosodic reading, reading comprehension and morphological skills in Hebrew-speaking fourth graders. Journal of Research in Reading (Blackwell) 30.2 (2007), 140–156.07–595Rosary, Lalik (Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State, USA) & Kimberly L. Oliver, Differences and tensions in implementing a pedagogy of critical literacy with adolescent girls. Reading Research Quarterly (International Reading Association) 42.1 (2007), 46–70.07–596Suzuki, Akio (Josai U, Japan), Differences in reading strategies employed by students constructing graphic organizers and students producing summaries in EFL reading. JALT Journal (Japan Association for Language Teaching) 28.2 (2006), 177–196.07–597Takase, Atsuko (Osaka International U, Japan; atsukot@jttk.zaq.ne.jp), Japanese high school students' motivation for extensive L2 reading. Reading in a Foreign Language (U Hawaii, HI, USA) 19.1 (2007), 1–18.07–598Tanaka, Hiroya & Paul Stapleton (Hokkaido U, Japan; higoezo@ybb.ne.jp), Increasing reading input in Japanese high school EFL classrooms: An empirical study exploring the efficacy of extensive reading. The Reading Matrix (Readingmatrix.com) 7.1 (2007), 115–131.07–599Weinstein, Susan (Louisiana State U, Baton Rouge, USA), Pregnancy, pimps, and ‘clichèd love things’: Writing through gender and sexuality. Written Communication (Sage) 24.1 (2007), 28–48.07–600Williams, Eddie (U Bangor, UK; eddie.williams@bangor.ac.uk), Extensive reading in Malawi: Inadequate implementation or inappropriate innovation?Journal of Research in Reading (Blackwell) 30.1 (2007), 59–79.07–601Yamash*ta, Junko, The relationship of reading attitudes between L1 and L2: An investigation of adult EFL learners in Japan. TESOL Quarterly (Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages) 41.1 (2007), 81–105.07–602Yi, Youngjoo (U Alabama, USA; yyi@ua.edu), Engaging literacy: A biliterate student's composing practices beyond school. Journal of Second Language Writing (Elsevier) 16.1 (2007), 23–39.07–603Zhu, Yunxia (U Queensland, New Zealand; zyunxia@unitec.ac.nz), Understanding sociocognitive space of written discourse: Implications for teaching business writing to Chinese students. International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching (Walter de Gruyter) 44.3 (2006), 265–285.

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ObjectiveTo identify gaps in current U.S. animal data collection andsurveillance systems, describe how surveillance of animal populationscan provide important early warnings of emerging threats to humanpopulations from infectious disease epidemics, and explain thebenefits of integrating human and animal surveillance data into acommon linked system.IntroductionSince the majority of emerging infectious diseases over the pastseveral decades have been zoonotic, animal health surveillance isnow recognized as a key element in predicting public health risks.Surveillance of animal populations can provide important earlywarnings of emerging threats to human populations from bioterrorismor naturally occurring infectious disease epidemics. This studyinvestigated current animal data collection and surveillance systems,isolated major gaps in state and national surveillance capabilities, andprovided recommendations to fill those gaps.MethodsInitially, an extensive literary review was performed to betterunderstand what is currently available for Animal Health DiseaseSurveillance in the United States and recognize the gaps. Afterthis review meetings were arranged with numerous animal healthand public health surveillance experts to isolate their surveillancepriorities: Department of Homeland Security (DHS), USDA AnimalPlant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), U.S. Army VeterinaryCorps, University Laboratories/Veterinary Teaching Hospitals, TheNational Capitol Region (NCR) ESSENCE Public Health SteeringCommittee, Maryland Arbovirus, Zoonotic, and Vector DiseaseGroup, and the Maryland State Veterinarian.A key animal disease surveillance stakeholder group that hasbeen underrepresented in prior requirements assessments is privatepractitioners. Preliminary discussions with key practitioners revealedclearly that there are monumental gaps in animal health surveillanceand it frequently limits their ability to rapidly respond to potentialdisease risks within their animal population of concern. To betterunderstand these gaps and potential ways to improve surveillance inthis area, a voluntary survey was developed and sent out to membersof the Maryland Veterinary Medical Association, Virginia VeterinaryMedical Association, and the District of Columbia Academy ofVeterinary Medicine.ResultsThrough this comprehensive study three current U.S. animal healthdisease surveillance gaps were isolated: integrated human and animalhealth surveillance, real-time animal health data collection, andcompanion animal surveillance.The survey was also well received and had almost 160 participants.Key issues addressed in the survey included: Animal Medical Records– availability, capabilities, and concerns, Zoonotic disease exposureand reporting, and support for development of integrated human-animal disease surveillance tools.Key Findings:- Almost 90% of responding practitioners reported havingencountered a zoonotic disease in practice.- Although less than 50% have reported a zoonotic disease to thestate or federal government.- Almost 70% of veterinarians in the National Capital Region(NCR) who participated in the survey also reported that they do nothave access to a surveillance system.- Veterinarian’s responses to the question: “What is your opinionof the current status of local, regional, or national zoonotic diseasesurveillance and the use of animal data for surveillance?”:“I think it is difficult to find up to date local and regional data.Email alerts etc. would be nice, rather than having to search forinformation that frequently isn’t current.”“I feel that many zoonotic diseases go unreported due to the lackof ease of reporting them and there is no communication betweenthe human and veterinary medical communities as far as reportablediseases affecting both people and animals.”“With the proliferation of tick borne disease, closer surveillance ofanimal cases would benefit human medicine. We knew exactly whenLyme hit our area. It was three years later before VA Dept. of Healthsent out a letter outlining the prevalence of disease in southwest VAhuman cases.”ConclusionsLinking the systems that report human and animal diseases wouldenable health professionals to swiftly identify and respond to zoonoticdisease outbreaks. Since funding for animal health surveillance islimited, integrating animal data into existing, well-established humanhealth surveillance systems would reduce the resources neededwhile still providing the advanced capabilities that are availablefor human health surveillance. The need for integrated surveillancehas been recognized by regulatory officials, but concerns regardingfunding, data acquisition, data confidentiality, and identification ofdesired stakeholders must still be addressed. The sometimes disparateinterests of large industry, private practitioners, and state governmentsmake gaining access to large centralized pools of animal health dataa challenge. By using existing human health surveillance systems asa platform to develop integrated human-animal surveillance systemsand by working with experts in the human surveillance field, theseconcerns can be ameliorated. This would lead to more advancedintegrated health surveillance capabilities and heighten the nation’sability to quickly detect and respond to emerging zoonotic diseases.

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06–475Al-Ali, Mohammed N. (Jordan U of Science and Technology, Irbid, Jordan), Genre-pragmatic strategies in English letter-of-application writing of Jordanian Arabic–English bilinguals. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism (Multilingual Matters) 9.1 (2006), 119–139.06–476Anderson, Bill (Massey U College of Education, New Zealand; w.g.anderson@massey.ac.nz), Writing power into online discussion. Computers and Composition (Elsevier) 23.1 (2006), 108–124.06–477Blaır, Kristine & Cheryl Hoy (Bowling Green State U, USA; kblair@bgnet.bgsu.edu), Paying attention to adult learners online: The pedagogy and politics of community. Computers and Composition (Elsevier) 23.1 (2006), 32–48.06–478Blakelock, Jane & Tracy E. Smith (Wright State U, USA; jane.blakelock@wright.edu) Distance learning: From multiple snapshots, a composite portrait. Computers and Composition (Elsevier) 23.1 (2006), 139–161.06–479Bulley, Míchael, Wasthatnecessary?English Today (Cambridge University Press) 22.2 (2006), 47–49.06–480Chi-Fen, Emily Chen (National Kaohsiung First U of Science and Technology, Taiwan; emchen@ccms.nkfust.edu.tw), The development of email literacy: From writing to peers to writing to authority figures.Language Learning & Technology (http://llt.msu.edu) 10.2 (2006), 35–55.06–481Chikamatsu, Nobuko (DePaul U, Chicago, USA; nchikama@condor.depaul.edu), Developmental word recognition: A study of L1 English readers of L2 Japanese. The Modern Language Journal (Blackwell) 90.1 (2006), 67–85.06–482DePew, Kevin Eric (Old Dominion U, USA; Kdepew@odu.edu), T. A. Fishman, Julia E. Romberger & Bridget Fahey Ruetenik, Designing efficiencies: The parallel narratives of distance education and composition studies. 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Abstract:

Introduction: Our current obsession with the lives of others “Biography—that is to say, our creative and non-fictional output devoted to recording and interpreting real lives—has enjoyed an extraordinary renaissance in recent years,” writes Nigel Hamilton in Biography: A Brief History (1). Ian Donaldson agrees that biography is back in fashion: “Once neglected within the academy and relegated to the dustier recesses of public bookstores, biography has made a notable return over recent years, emerging, somewhat surprisingly, as a new cultural phenomenon, and a new academic adventure” (23). For over a decade now, commentators having been making similar observations about our obsession with the intimacies of individual people’s lives. In a lecture in 1994, Justin Kaplan asserted the West was “a culture of biography” (qtd. in Salwak 1) and more recent research findings by John Feather and Hazel Woodbridge affirm that “the undiminished human curiosity about other peoples lives is clearly reflected in the popularity of autobiographies and biographies” (218). At least in relation to television, this assertion seems valid. In Australia, as in the USA and the UK, reality and other biographically based television shows have taken over from drama in both the numbers of shows produced and the viewers these shows attract, and these forms are also popular in Canada (see, for instance, Morreale on The Osbournes). In 2007, the program Biography celebrated its twentieth anniversary season to become one of the longest running documentary series on American television; so successful that in 1999 it was spun off into its own eponymous channel (Rak; Dempsey). Premiered in May 1996, Australian Story—which aims to utilise a “personal approach” to biographical storytelling—has won a significant viewership, critical acclaim and professional recognition (ABC). It can also be posited that the real home movies viewers submit to such programs as Australia’s Favourite Home Videos, and “chat” or “confessional” television are further reflections of a general mania for biographical detail (see Douglas), no matter how fragmented, sensationalized, or even inane and cruel. A recent example of the latter, the USA-produced The Moment of Truth, has contestants answering personal questions under polygraph examination and then again in front of an audience including close relatives and friends—the more “truthful” their answers (and often, the more humiliated and/or distressed contestants are willing to be), the more money they can win. Away from television, but offering further evidence of this interest are the growing readerships for personally oriented weblogs and networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook (Grossman), individual profiles and interviews in periodical publications, and the recently widely revived newspaper obituary column (Starck). Adult and community education organisations run short courses on researching and writing auto/biographical forms and, across Western countries, the family history/genealogy sections of many local, state, and national libraries have been upgraded to meet the increasing demand for these services. Academically, journals and e-mail discussion lists have been established on the topics of biography and autobiography, and North American, British, and Australian universities offer undergraduate and postgraduate courses in life writing. The commonly aired wisdom is that published life writing in its many text-based forms (biography, autobiography, memoir, diaries, and collections of personal letters) is enjoying unprecedented popularity. It is our purpose to examine this proposition. Methodological problems There are a number of problems involved in investigating genre popularity, growth, and decline in publishing. Firstly, it is not easy to gain access to detailed statistics, which are usually only available within the industry. Secondly, it is difficult to ascertain how publishing statistics are gathered and what they report (Eliot). There is the question of whether bestselling booklists reflect actual book sales or are manipulated marketing tools (Miller), although the move from surveys of booksellers to electronic reporting at point of sale in new publishing lists such as BookScan will hopefully obviate this problem. Thirdly, some publishing lists categorise by subject and form, some by subject only, and some do not categorise at all. This means that in any analysis of these statistics, a decision has to be made whether to use the publishing list’s system or impose a different mode. If the publishing list is taken at face value, the question arises of whether to use categorisation by form or by subject. Fourthly, there is the bedeviling issue of terminology. Traditionally, there reigned a simple dualism in the terminology applied to forms of telling the true story of an actual life: biography and autobiography. Publishing lists that categorise their books, such as BookScan, have retained it. But with postmodern recognition of the presence of the biographer in a biography and of the presence of other subjects in an autobiography, the dichotomy proves false. There is the further problem of how to categorise memoirs, diaries, and letters. In the academic arena, the term “life writing” has emerged to describe the field as a whole. Within the genre of life writing, there are, however, still recognised sub-genres. Academic definitions vary, but generally a biography is understood to be a scholarly study of a subject who is not the writer; an autobiography is the story of a entire life written by its subject; while a memoir is a segment or particular focus of that life told, again, by its own subject. These terms are, however, often used interchangeably even by significant institutions such the USA Library of Congress, which utilises the term “biography” for all. Different commentators also use differing definitions. Hamilton uses the term “biography” to include all forms of life writing. Donaldson discusses how the term has been co-opted to include biographies of place such as Peter Ackroyd’s London: The Biography (2000) and of things such as Lizzie Collingham’s Curry: A Biography (2005). This reflects, of course, a writing/publishing world in which non-fiction stories of places, creatures, and even foodstuffs are called biographies, presumably in the belief that this will make them more saleable. The situation is further complicated by the emergence of hybrid publishing forms such as, for instance, the “memoir-with-recipes” or “food memoir” (Brien, Rutherford and Williamson). Are such books to be classified as autobiography or put in the “cookery/food & drink” category? We mention in passing the further confusion caused by novels with a subtitle of The Biography such as Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. The fifth methodological problem that needs to be mentioned is the increasing globalisation of the publishing industry, which raises questions about the validity of the majority of studies available (including those cited herein) which are nationally based. Whether book sales reflect what is actually read (and by whom), raises of course another set of questions altogether. Methodology In our exploration, we were fundamentally concerned with two questions. Is life writing as popular as claimed? And, if it is, is this a new phenomenon? To answer these questions, we examined a range of available sources. We began with the non-fiction bestseller lists in Publishers Weekly (a respected American trade magazine aimed at publishers, librarians, booksellers, and literary agents that claims to be international in scope) from their inception in 1912 to the present time. We hoped that this data could provide a longitudinal perspective. The term bestseller was coined by Publishers Weekly when it began publishing its lists in 1912; although the first list of popular American books actually appeared in The Bookman (New York) in 1895, based itself on lists appearing in London’s The Bookman since 1891 (Bassett and Walter 206). The Publishers Weekly lists are the best source of longitudinal information as the currently widely cited New York Times listings did not appear till 1942, with the Wall Street Journal a late entry into the field in 1994. We then examined a number of sources of more recent statistics. We looked at the bestseller lists from the USA-based Amazon.com online bookseller; recent research on bestsellers in Britain; and lists from Nielsen BookScan Australia, which claims to tally some 85% or more of books sold in Australia, wherever they are published. In addition to the reservations expressed above, caveats must be aired in relation to these sources. While Publishers Weekly claims to be an international publication, it largely reflects the North American publishing scene and especially that of the USA. Although available internationally, Amazon.com also has its own national sites—such as Amazon.co.uk—not considered here. It also caters to a “specific computer-literate, credit-able clientele” (Gutjahr: 219) and has an unashamedly commercial focus, within which all the information generated must be considered. In our analysis of the material studied, we will use “life writing” as a genre term. When it comes to analysis of the lists, we have broken down the genre of life writing into biography and autobiography, incorporating memoir, letters, and diaries under autobiography. This is consistent with the use of the terminology in BookScan. Although we have broken down the genre in this way, it is the overall picture with regard to life writing that is our concern. It is beyond the scope of this paper to offer a detailed analysis of whether, within life writing, further distinctions should be drawn. Publishers Weekly: 1912 to 2006 1912 saw the first list of the 10 bestselling non-fiction titles in Publishers Weekly. It featured two life writing texts, being headed by an autobiography, The Promised Land by Russian Jewish immigrant Mary Antin, and concluding with Albert Bigelow Paine’s six-volume biography, Mark Twain. The Publishers Weekly lists do not categorise non-fiction titles by either form or subject, so the classifications below are our own with memoir classified as autobiography. In a decade-by-decade tally of these listings, there were 3 biographies and 20 autobiographies in the lists between 1912 and 1919; 24 biographies and 21 autobiographies in the 1920s; 13 biographies and 40 autobiographies in the 1930s; 8 biographies and 46 biographies in the 1940s; 4 biographies and 14 autobiographies in the 1950s; 11 biographies and 13 autobiographies in the 1960s; 6 biographies and 11 autobiographies in the 1970s; 3 biographies and 19 autobiographies in the 1980s; 5 biographies and 17 autobiographies in the 1990s; and 2 biographies and 7 autobiographies from 2000 up until the end of 2006. See Appendix 1 for the relevant titles and authors. Breaking down the most recent figures for 1990–2006, we find a not radically different range of figures and trends across years in the contemporary environment. The validity of looking only at the top ten books sold in any year is, of course, questionable, as are all the issues regarding sources discussed above. But one thing is certain in terms of our inquiry. There is no upwards curve obvious here. If anything, the decade break-down suggests that sales are trending downwards. This is in keeping with the findings of Michael Korda, in his history of twentieth-century bestsellers. He suggests a consistent longitudinal picture across all genres: In every decade, from 1900 to the end of the twentieth century, people have been reliably attracted to the same kind of books […] Certain kinds of popular fiction always do well, as do diet books […] self-help books, celebrity memoirs, sensationalist scientific or religious speculation, stories about pets, medical advice (particularly on the subjects of sex, longevity, and child rearing), folksy wisdom and/or humour, and the American Civil War (xvii). Amazon.com since 2000 The USA-based Amazon.com online bookselling site provides listings of its own top 50 bestsellers since 2000, although only the top 14 bestsellers are recorded for 2001. As fiction and non-fiction are not separated out on these lists and no genre categories are specified, we have again made our own decisions about what books fall into the category of life writing. Generally, we erred on the side of inclusion. (See Appendix 2.) However, when it came to books dealing with political events, we excluded books dealing with specific aspects of political practice/policy. This meant excluding books on, for instance, George Bush’s so-called ‘war on terror,’ of which there were a number of bestsellers listed. In summary, these listings reveal that of the top 364 books sold by Amazon from 2000 to 2007, 46 (or some 12.6%) were, according to our judgment, either biographical or autobiographical texts. This is not far from the 10% of the 1912 Publishers Weekly listing, although, as above, the proportion of bestsellers that can be classified as life writing varied dramatically from year to year, with no discernible pattern of peaks and troughs. This proportion tallied to 4% auto/biographies in 2000, 14% in 2001, 10% in 2002, 18% in 2003 and 2004, 4% in 2005, 14% in 2006 and 20% in 2007. This could suggest a rising trend, although it does not offer any consistent trend data to suggest sales figures may either continue to grow, or fall again, in 2008 or afterwards. Looking at the particular texts in these lists (see Appendix 2) also suggests that there is no general trend in the popularity of life writing in relation to other genres. For instance, in these listings in Amazon.com, life writing texts only rarely figure in the top 10 books sold in any year. So rarely indeed, that from 2001 there were only five in this category. In 2001, John Adams by David McCullough was the best selling book of the year; in 2003, Hillary Clinton’s autobiographical Living History was 7th; in 2004, My Life by Bill Clinton reached number 1; in 2006, Nora Ephron’s I Feel Bad About My Neck: and Other Thoughts on Being a Woman was 9th; and in 2007, Ishmael Beah’s discredited A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier came in at 8th. Apart from McCulloch’s biography of Adams, all the above are autobiographical texts, while the focus on leading political figures is notable. Britain: Feather and Woodbridge With regard to the British situation, we did not have actual lists and relied on recent analysis. John Feather and Hazel Woodbridge find considerably higher levels for life writing in Britain than above with, from 1998 to 2005, 28% of British published non-fiction comprising autobiography, while 8% of hardback and 5% of paperback non-fiction was biography (2007). Furthermore, although Feather and Woodbridge agree with commentators that life writing is currently popular, they do not agree that this is a growth state, finding the popularity of life writing “essentially unchanged” since their previous study, which covered 1979 to the early 1990s (Feather and Reid). Australia: Nielsen BookScan 2006 and 2007 In the Australian publishing industry, where producing books remains an ‘expensive, risky endeavour which is increasingly market driven’ (Galligan 36) and ‘an inherently complex activity’ (Carter and Galligan 4), the most recent Australian Bureau of Statistics figures reveal that the total numbers of books sold in Australia has remained relatively static over the past decade (130.6 million in the financial year 1995–96 and 128.8 million in 2003–04) (ABS). During this time, however, sales volumes of non-fiction publications have grown markedly, with a trend towards “non-fiction, mass market and predictable” books (Corporall 41) resulting in general non-fiction sales in 2003–2004 outselling general fiction by factors as high as ten depending on the format—hard- or paperback, and trade or mass market paperback (ABS 2005). However, while non-fiction has increased in popularity in Australia, the same does not seem to hold true for life writing. Here, in utilising data for the top 5,000 selling non-fiction books in both 2006 and 2007, we are relying on Nielsen BookScan’s categorisation of texts as either biography or autobiography. In 2006, no works of life writing made the top 10 books sold in Australia. In looking at the top 100 books sold for 2006, in some cases the subjects of these works vary markedly from those extracted from the Amazon.com listings. In Australia in 2006, life writing makes its first appearance at number 14 with convicted drug smuggler Schapelle Corby’s My Story. This is followed by another My Story at 25, this time by retired Australian army chief, Peter Cosgrove. Jonestown: The Power and Myth of Alan Jones comes in at 34 for the Australian broadcaster’s biographer Chris Masters; the biography, The Innocent Man by John Grisham at 38 and Li Cunxin’s autobiographical Mao’s Last Dancer at 45. Australian Susan Duncan’s memoir of coping with personal loss, Salvation Creek: An Unexpected Life makes 50; bestselling USA travel writer Bill Bryson’s autobiographical memoir of his childhood The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid 69; Mandela: The Authorised Portrait by Rosalind Coward, 79; and Joanne Lees’s memoir of dealing with her kidnapping, the murder of her partner and the justice system in Australia’s Northern Territory, No Turning Back, 89. These books reveal a market preference for autobiographical writing, and an almost even split between Australian and overseas subjects in 2006. 2007 similarly saw no life writing in the top 10. The books in the top 100 sales reveal a downward trend, with fewer titles making this band overall. In 2007, Terri Irwin’s memoir of life with her famous husband, wildlife warrior Steve Irwin, My Steve, came in at number 26; musician Andrew Johns’s memoir of mental illness, The Two of Me, at 37; Ayaan Hirst Ali’s autobiography Infidel at 39; John Grogan’s biography/memoir, Marley and Me: Life and Love with the World’s Worst Dog, at 42; Sally Collings’s biography of the inspirational young survivor Sophie Delezio, Sophie’s Journey, at 51; and Elizabeth Gilbert’s hybrid food, self-help and travel memoir, Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything at 82. Mao’s Last Dancer, published the year before, remained in the top 100 in 2007 at 87. When moving to a consideration of the top 5,000 books sold in Australia in 2006, BookScan reveals only 62 books categorised as life writing in the top 1,000, and only 222 in the top 5,000 (with 34 titles between 1,000 and 1,999, 45 between 2,000 and 2,999, 48 between 3,000 and 3,999, and 33 between 4,000 and 5,000). 2007 shows a similar total of 235 life writing texts in the top 5,000 bestselling books (75 titles in the first 1,000, 27 between 1,000 and 1,999, 51 between 2,000 and 2,999, 39 between 3,000 and 3,999, and 43 between 4,000 and 5,000). In both years, 2006 and 2007, life writing thus not only constituted only some 4% of the bestselling 5,000 titles in Australia, it also showed only minimal change between these years and, therefore, no significant growth. Conclusions Our investigation using various instruments that claim to reflect levels of book sales reveals that Western readers’ willingness to purchase published life writing has not changed significantly over the past century. We find no evidence of either a short, or longer, term growth or boom in sales in such books. Instead, it appears that what has been widely heralded as a new golden age of life writing may well be more the result of an expanded understanding of what is included in the genre than an increased interest in it by either book readers or publishers. What recent years do appear to have seen, however, is a significantly increased interest by public commentators, critics, and academics in this genre of writing. We have also discovered that the issue of our current obsession with the lives of others tends to be discussed in academic as well as popular fora as if what applies to one sub-genre or production form applies to another: if biography is popular, then autobiography will also be, and vice versa. If reality television programming is attracting viewers, then readers will be flocking to life writing as well. Our investigation reveals that such propositions are questionable, and that there is significant research to be completed in mapping such audiences against each other. This work has also highlighted the difficulty of separating out the categories of written texts in publishing studies, firstly in terms of determining what falls within the category of life writing as distinct from other forms of non-fiction (the hybrid problem) and, secondly, in terms of separating out the categories within life writing. Although we have continued to use the terms biography and autobiography as sub-genres, we are aware that they are less useful as descriptors than they are often assumed to be. In order to obtain a more complete and accurate picture, publishing categories may need to be agreed upon, redefined and utilised across the publishing industry and within academia. This is of particular importance in the light of the suggestions (from total sales volumes) that the audiences for books are limited, and therefore the rise of one sub-genre may be directly responsible for the fall of another. Bair argues, for example, that in the 1980s and 1990s, the popularity of what she categorises as memoir had direct repercussions on the numbers of birth-to-death biographies that were commissioned, contracted, and published as “sales and marketing staffs conclude[d] that readers don’t want a full-scale life any more” (17). Finally, although we have highlighted the difficulty of using publishing statistics when there is no common understanding as to what such data is reporting, we hope this study shows that the utilisation of such material does add a depth to such enquiries, especially in interrogating the anecdotal evidence that is often quoted as data in publishing and other studies. Appendix 1 Publishers Weekly listings 1990–1999 1990 included two autobiographies, Bo Knows Bo by professional athlete Bo Jackson (with Dick Schaap) and Ronald Reagan’s An America Life: An Autobiography. In 1991, there were further examples of life writing with unimaginative titles, Me: Stories of My Life by Katherine Hepburn, Nancy Reagan: The Unauthorized Biography by Kitty Kelley, and Under Fire: An American Story by Oliver North with William Novak; as indeed there were again in 1992 with It Doesn’t Take a Hero: The Autobiography of Norman Schwarzkopf, Sam Walton: Made in America, the autobiography of the founder of Wal-Mart, Diana: Her True Story by Andrew Morton, Every Living Thing, yet another veterinary outpouring from James Herriot, and Truman by David McCullough. In 1993, radio shock-jock Howard Stern was successful with the autobiographical Private Parts, as was Betty Eadie with her detailed recounting of her alleged near-death experience, Embraced by the Light. Eadie’s book remained on the list in 1994 next to Don’t Stand too Close to a Naked Man, comedian Tim Allen’s autobiography. Flag-waving titles continue in 1995 with Colin Powell’s My American Journey, and Miss America, Howard Stern’s follow-up to Private Parts. 1996 saw two autobiographical works, basketball superstar Dennis Rodman’s Bad as I Wanna Be and figure-skater, Ekaterina Gordeeva’s (with EM Swift) My Sergei: A Love Story. In 1997, Diana: Her True Story returns to the top 10, joining Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes and prolific biographer Kitty Kelly’s The Royals, while in 1998, there is only the part-autobiography, part travel-writing A Pirate Looks at Fifty, by musician Jimmy Buffet. There is no biography or autobiography included in either the 1999 or 2000 top 10 lists in Publishers Weekly, nor in that for 2005. In 2001, David McCullough’s biography John Adams and Jack Welch’s business memoir Jack: Straight from the Gut featured. In 2002, Let’s Roll! Lisa Beamer’s tribute to her husband, one of the heroes of 9/11, written with Ken Abraham, joined Rudolph Giuliani’s autobiography, Leadership. 2003 saw Hillary Clinton’s autobiography Living History and Paul Burrell’s memoir of his time as Princess Diana’s butler, A Royal Duty, on the list. In 2004, it was Bill Clinton’s turn with My Life. In 2006, we find John Grisham’s true crime (arguably a biography), The Innocent Man, at the top, Grogan’s Marley and Me at number three, and the autobiographical The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama in fourth place. Appendix 2 Amazon.com listings since 2000 In 2000, there were only two auto/biographies in the top Amazon 50 bestsellers with Lance Armstrong’s It’s Not about the Bike: My Journey Back to Life about his battle with cancer at 20, and Dave Eggers’s self-consciously fictionalised memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius at 32. In 2001, only the top 14 bestsellers were recorded. At number 1 is John Adams by David McCullough and, at 11, Jack: Straight from the Gut by USA golfer Jack Welch. In 2002, Leadership by Rudolph Giuliani was at 12; Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert Caro at 29; Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper by Patricia Cornwell at 42; Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative by David Brock at 48; and Louis Gerstner’s autobiographical Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance: Inside IBM’s Historic Turnaround at 50. In 2003, Living History by Hillary Clinton was 7th; Benjamin Franklin: An American Life by Walter Isaacson 14th; Dereliction of Duty: The Eyewitness Account of How President Bill Clinton Endangered America’s Long-Term National Security by Robert Patterson 20th; Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith by Jon Krakauer 32nd; Leap of Faith: Memoirs of an Unexpected Life by Queen Noor of Jordan 33rd; Kate Remembered, Scott Berg’s biography of Katharine Hepburn, 37th; Who’s your Caddy?: Looping for the Great, Near Great and Reprobates of Golf by Rick Reilly 39th; The Teammates: A Portrait of a Friendship about a winning baseball team by David Halberstam 42nd; and Every Second Counts by Lance Armstrong 49th. In 2004, My Life by Bill Clinton was the best selling book of the year; American Soldier by General Tommy Franks was 16th; Kevin Phillips’s American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush 18th; Timothy Russert’s Big Russ and Me: Father and Son. Lessons of Life 20th; Tony Hendra’s Father Joe: The Man who Saved my Soul 23rd; Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton 27th; co*kie Roberts’s Founding Mothers: The Women Who Raised our Nation 31st; Kitty Kelley’s The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty 42nd; and Chronicles, Volume 1 by Bob Dylan was 43rd. In 2005, auto/biographical texts were well down the list with only The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion at 45 and The Glass Castle: A Memoir by Jeanette Walls at 49. In 2006, there was a resurgence of life writing with Nora Ephron’s I Feel Bad About My Neck: and Other Thoughts on Being a Woman at 9; Grisham’s The Innocent Man at 12; Bill Buford’s food memoir Heat: an Amateur’s Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany at 23; more food writing with Julia Child’s My Life in France at 29; Immaculée Ilibagiza’s Left to Tell: Discovering God amidst the Rwandan Holocaust at 30; CNN anchor Anderson Cooper’s Dispatches from the Edge: A Memoir of War, Disasters and Survival at 43; and Isabella Hatkoff’s Owen & Mzee: The True Story of a Remarkable Friendship (between a baby hippo and a giant tortoise) at 44. In 2007, Ishmael Beah’s discredited A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier came in at 8; Walter Isaacson’s Einstein: His Life and Universe 13; Ayaan Hirst Ali’s autobiography of her life in Muslim society, Infidel, 18; The Reagan Diaries 25; Jesus of Nazareth by Pope Benedict XVI 29; Mother Teresa: Come be my Light 36; Clapton: The Autobiography 40; Tina Brown’s The Diana Chronicles 45; Tony Dungy’s Quiet Strength: The Principles, Practices & Priorities of a Winning Life 47; and Daniel Tammet’s Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant at 49. Acknowledgements A sincere thank you to Michael Webster at RMIT for assistance with access to Nielsen BookScan statistics, and to the reviewers of this article for their insightful comments. Any errors are, of course, our own. References Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC). “About Us.” Australian Story 2008. 1 June 2008. ‹http://www.abc.net.au/austory/aboutus.htm>. Australian Bureau of Statistics. “1363.0 Book Publishers, Australia, 2003–04.” 2005. 1 June 2008 ‹http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/mf/1363.0>. Bair, Deirdre “Too Much S & M.” Sydney Morning Herald 10–11 Sept. 2005: 17. Basset, Troy J., and Christina M. Walter. “Booksellers and Bestsellers: British Book Sales as Documented by The Bookman, 1891–1906.” Book History 4 (2001): 205–36. Brien, Donna Lee, Leonie Rutherford, and Rosemary Williamson. “Hearth and Hotmail: The Domestic Sphere as Commodity and Community in Cyberspace.” M/C Journal 10.4 (2007). 1 June 2008 ‹http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/10-brien.php>. Carter, David, and Anne Galligan. “Introduction.” Making Books: Contemporary Australian Publishing. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 2007. 1–14. Corporall, Glenda. Project Octopus: Report Commissioned by the Australian Society of Authors. Sydney: Australian Society of Authors, 1990. Dempsey, John “Biography Rewrite: A&E’s Signature Series Heads to Sib Net.” Variety 4 Jun. 2006. 1 June 2008 ‹http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117944601.html?categoryid=1238&cs=1>. Donaldson, Ian. “Matters of Life and Death: The Return of Biography.” Australian Book Review 286 (Nov. 2006): 23–29. Douglas, Kate. “‘Blurbing’ Biographical: Authorship and Autobiography.” Biography 24.4 (2001): 806–26. Eliot, Simon. “Very Necessary but not Sufficient: A Personal View of Quantitative Analysis in Book History.” Book History 5 (2002): 283–93. Feather, John, and Hazel Woodbridge. “Bestsellers in the British Book Industry.” Publishing Research Quarterly 23.3 (Sept. 2007): 210–23. Feather, JP, and M Reid. “Bestsellers and the British Book Industry.” Publishing Research Quarterly 11.1 (1995): 57–72. Galligan, Anne. “Living in the Marketplace: Publishing in the 1990s.” Publishing Studies 7 (1999): 36–44. Grossman, Lev. “Time’s Person of the Year: You.” Time 13 Dec. 2006. Online edition. 1 June 2008 ‹http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0%2C9171%2C1569514%2C00.html>. Gutjahr, Paul C. “No Longer Left Behind: Amazon.com, Reader Response, and the Changing Fortunes of the Christian Novel in America.” Book History 5 (2002): 209–36. Hamilton, Nigel. Biography: A Brief History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2007. Kaplan, Justin. “A Culture of Biography.” The Literary Biography: Problems and Solutions. Ed. Dale Salwak. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996. 1–11. Korda, Michael. Making the List: A Cultural History of the American Bestseller 1900–1999. New York: Barnes & Noble, 2001. Miller, Laura J. “The Bestseller List as Marketing Tool and Historical Fiction.” Book History 3 (2000): 286–304. Morreale, Joanne. “Revisiting The Osbournes: The Hybrid Reality-Sitcom.” Journal of Film and Video 55.1 (Spring 2003): 3–15. Rak, Julie. “Bio-Power: CBC Television’s Life & Times and A&E Network’s Biography on A&E.” LifeWriting 1.2 (2005): 1–18. Starck, Nigel. “Capturing Life—Not Death: A Case For Burying The Posthumous Parallax.” Text: The Journal of the Australian Association of Writing Programs 5.2 (2001). 1 June 2008 ‹http://www.textjournal.com.au/oct01/starck.htm>.

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Abstract:

Through my last lengthy writing project, it did not take long to I realise I had become obsessed with paths. The proof of it was there in my notebooks, and, most prominently, in the backlog of photographs cluttering the inner workings of my mobile phone. Most of the photographs I took had a couple of things in common: first, the astonishing greenness of the world they were describing; second, the way a road or path or corridor or pavement or trail led off into distance. The greenness was because I was in England, in summer, and mostly in a part of the country where green seems at times the only colour. I am not sure what it was about tailing perspective that caught me.Image 1: a) Undercliffe Cemetery, Bradford; b) Undercliffe Cemetery, Bradfordc) Leeds Road, Otley; d) Shibden Park, Halifax Image 2: a) Runswick Bay; b) St. Mary's Churchyard, Habberleyc) The Habberley Road, to Pontesbury; d) Todmorden, path to Stoodley Pike I was working on a kind of family memoir, tied up in my grandmother’s last days, which were also days I spent marching through towns and countryside I once knew, looking for clues about a place and its past. I had left the north-west of England a decade or so before, and I was grappling with what James Wood calls “homelooseness”, a sensation of exile that even economic migrants like myself encounter. It is a particular kind of “secular homelessness” in which “the ties that might bind one to Home have been loosened” (105-106). Loosened irrevocably, I might add. The kind of wandering which I embarked on is not unique. Wood describes it in himself, and in the work of W.G. Sebald—a writer who, he says, “had an exquisite sense of the varieties of not-belonging” (106).I walked a lot, mostly on paths I used to know. And when, later, I counted up the photographs I had taken of that similar-but-different scene, there were almost 500 of them, none of which I can bring myself to delete. Some were repeated, or nearly so—I had often tried to make sure the path in the frame was centred in the middle of the screen. Most of the pictures were almost entirely miscellaneous, and if it were not for a feature on my phone I could not work out how to turn off (that feature which tracks where each photograph was taken) I would not have much idea of what each picture represented. What’s clear is that there was some lingering significance, some almost-tangible metaphor, in the way I was recording the walking I was doing. This same significance is there, too (in an almost quantifiable way), in the thesis I was working on while I was taking the photographs: I used the word “path” 63 times in the version I handed to examiners, not counting all the times I could have, but chose not to—all the “pavements”, “trails”, “roads”, and “holloways” of it would add up to a number even more substantial. For instance, the word “walk”, or derivatives of it, comes up 115 times. This article is designed to ask why. I aim to focus on that metaphor, on that significance, and unpack the way life writing can intersect with both the journey of a life being lived, and the process of writing down that life (by process of writing I sometimes mean anything but: I mean the process of working towards the writing. Of going, of doing, of talking, of spending, of working, of thinking, of walking). I came, in the thesis, to view certain kinds of prose as a way of imitating the rhythms of the mind, but I think there’s something about that rhythm which associates it with the feet as well. Rebecca Solnit thinks so too, or, at least, that the processes of thinking and walking can wrap around each other, helixed or concatenated. In Wanderlust she says that:the rhythm of walking generates a kind of rhythm of thinking, and the passage through a landscape echoes or stimulates the passage through a series of thoughts. This creates an odd consonance between internal and external passage, one that suggests that the mind is also a landscape of sorts and that walking is one way to traverse it. (5-6)The “odd consonance” Solnit speaks of is a kind of seamlessness between the internal and external; it is something which can be aped on the page. And, in this way, prose can imitate the mind thinking. This way of writing is evident in the digression-filled, wandering, sinuous sentences of W.G. Sebald, and of Marcel Proust as well. I don’t want to entangle myself in the question of whether Proust and Sebald count as life writers here. I used them as models, and, at the very least, I think their prose manipulates the conceits of the autobiographical pact. In fact, Sebald often refused to label his own work; once he called his writing “prose [...] of indefinite form” (Franklin 123). My definition of life writing is, thus, indefinite, and merely indicates the field in which I work and know best.Edmund White, when writing on Proust, suggested that every page of Remembrance of Things Past—while only occasionally being a literal page of Proust’s mind thinking—is, nevertheless, “a transcript of a mind thinking [...] the fully orchestrated, ceaseless, and disciplined ruminations of one mind, one voice” (138). Ceaselessness, seamlessness ... there’s also a viscosity to this kind of prose—Virginia Woolf called it “impassioned”, and spoke of the way some prosecan lick up with its long glutinous tongue the most minute fragments of fact and mass them into the most subtle labyrinths, and listen silently at doors behind which only a murmur, only a whisper, is to be heard. With all the suppleness of a tool which is in constant use it can follow the windings and record the changes which are typical of the modern mind. To this, with Proust and Dostoevsky behind us, we must agree. (20)When I read White and Woolf it seemed they could have been talking about Sebald, too: everything in Sebald’s oeuvre is funnelled through what White described in Remembrance as the cyclopean “I” at the centre of the Proustian consciousness (138). The same could be said about Sebald: as Lynne Schwartz says, “All Sebald’s characters sound like the narrator” (15). And that narrator has very particular qualities, encouraged by the sense of homelooseness Wood describes: the Sebald narrator is a wanderer, by train through Italian cities and New York Suburbs, on foot through the empty reaches of the English countryside, exploring the history of each settlement he passes through [...] Wherever he travels, he finds strangely vacant streets and roads, not a soul around [...] Sebald’s books are famously strewn with evocative, gloomy black-and-white photographs that call up the presence of the dead, of vanished places, and also serve as proofs of his passage. (Schwartz 14) I tried to resist the urge to take photographs, for the simple reason that I knew I could not include them all in the finished thesis—even including some would seem (perhaps) derivative. But this method of wandering—whether on the page or in the world—was formative for me. And the linkage between thinking and walking, and walking and writing, and writing and thinking is worth exploring, if only to identify some reason for that need to show proof of passage.Walking in Proust and Sebald either forms the shape of narrative, or one its cruxes. Both found ways to let walking affect the rhythm, movement, motivation, and even the aesthetic of their prose. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, for example, is plotless because of the way it follows its narrator on a walking tour of Suffolk. The effect is similar to something Murray Baumgarten noticed in one of Sebald’s other books, The Emigrants: “The [Sebaldian] narrator discovers in the course of his travels (and with him the reader) that he is constructing the text he is reading, a text at once being imagined and destroyed, a fragment of the past, and a ruin that haunts the present” (268). Proust’s opus is a meditation on the different ways we can walk. Remembrance is a book about momentum—a book about movement. It is a book which always forges forward, but which always faces backward, where time and place can still and footsteps be paused in motion, or tiptoed upstairs and across tables or be caught in flight over the body of an octogenarian lying on a beach. And it is the walks of the narrator’s past—his encounters with landscape—that give his present (and future) thoughts impetus: the rhythms of his long-past progress still affect the way he moves and acts and thinks, and will always do so:the “Méséglise way” and the “Guermantes way” remain for me linked with many of the little incidents of that one of all the divers lives along whose parallel lines we are moved, which is the most abundant in sudden reverses of fortune, the richest in episodes; I mean the life of the mind [...] [T]he two “ways” give to those [impressions of the mind] a foundation, depth, a dimension lacking from the rest. They invest them, too, with a charm, a significance which is for me alone. (Swann’s Way 252-255)The two “ways”—walks in and around the town of Combray—are, for the narrator, frames through which he thinks about his childhood, and all the things which happened to him because of that childhood. I felt something similar through the process of writing my thesis: a need to allow the 3-mile-per-hour-connection between mind and body and place that Solnit speaks about seep into my work. I felt the stirrings of old ways; the places I once walked, which I photographed and paced, pulsed and pushed me forwards in the present and towards the future. I felt strangely attached to, and disconnected from, those pathways: lanes where I had rummaged for conkers; streets my grandparents had once lived and worked on; railways demolished because of roads which now existed, leaving only long, straight pathways through overgrown countryside suffused with time and memory. The oddness I felt might be an effect of what Wood describes as a “certain doubleness”, “where homesickness is a kind of longing for Britain and an irritation with Britain: sickness for and sickness of” (93-94). The model of seamless prose offered some way to articulate, at least, the particularities of this condition, and of the problem of connection—whether with place or the past. But it is in this shift away from conclusiveness, which occurs when the writer constructs-as-they-write, that Baumgarten sees seamlessness:rather than the defined edges, boundaries, and conventional perceptions promised by realism, and the efficient account of intention, action, causation, and conclusion implied by the stance of realistic prose, reader and narrator have to assimilate the past and present in a dream state in which they blend imperceptibly into each other. (277)It’s difficult to articulate the way in which the connection between walking, writing, and thinking works. Solnit draws one comparison, talking to the ways in which digression and association mix:as a literary structure, the recounted walk encourages digression and association, in contrast to the stricter form of a discourse or the chronological progression of a biographical or historical narrative [...] James Joyce and Virginia Woolf would, in trying to describe the workings of the mind, develop of style called stream of consciousness. In their novels Ulysses and Mrs Dalloway, the jumble of thoughts and recollections of their protagonists unfolds best during walks. This kind of unstructured, associative thinking is the kind most often connected to walking, and it suggests walking as not an analytical but an improvisational act. (21)I think the key, here, is the notion of association—in the making of connections, and, in my case, in the making of connections between present and past. When we walk we exist in a roving state, and with a dual purpose: Sophie Cunningham says that we walk to get from one place to the next, but also to insist that “what lies between our point of departure and our destination is important. We create connection. We pay attention to detail, and these details plant us firmly in the day, in the present” (Cunningham). The slipperiness of homelooseness can be emphasised in the slipperiness of seamless prose, and walking—situating self in the present—is a rebuttal of slipperiness (if, as I will argue, a rebuttal which has at its heart a contradiction: it is both effective and ineffective. It feels as close as is possible to something impossible to attain). Solnit argues that walking and what she calls “personal, descriptive, and specific” writing are suited to each other:walking is itself a way of grounding one’s thoughts in a personal and embodied experience of the world that it lends itself to this kind of writing. This is why the meaning of walking is mostly discussed elsewhere than in philosophy: in poetry, novels, letters, diaries, travellers’ accounts, and first-person essays. (26)If a person is searching for some kind of possible-impossible grounding in the past, then walking pace is the pace at which to achieve that sensation (both in the world and on the page). It is at walking pace that connections can be made, even if they can be sensed slipping away: this is the Janus-faced problem of attempting to uncover anything which has been. The search, in fact, becomes facsimile for the past itself, or for the inconclusiveness of the past. In my own work—in preparing for that work—I walked and wrote about walking up the flank of the hill which hovered above the house in which I lived before I left England. To get to the top, and the great stone monument which sits there, I had to pass that house. The door was open, and that was enough to unsettle. Baumgarten, again on The Emigrants, articulates the effect: “unresolved, fragmented, incomplete, relying on shards for evidence, the narrator insists on the inconclusiveness of his experience: rather than arriving at a conclusion, narrator and reader are left disturbed” (269).Sebald writes in his usual intense way about a Swiss writer, Robert Walser, who he calls le promeneur solitaire (“The Solitary Walker”). Walser was a prolific writer, but through the last years of his life wrote less and less until he ended up incapable of doing so: in the end, Sebald says, “the traces Robert Walser left on his path through life were so faint as to have almost been effaced altogether” (119).Sebald draws parallels between Walser and his own grandfather. Both have worked their way into Sebald’s prose, along with the author himself. Because of this co*cktail, I’ve come to read Sebald’s thoughts on Walser as sideways thoughts on his own prose (perhaps due to that cyclopean quality described by White). The works of the two writers share, at the very least, a certain incandescent ephemerality—a quality which exists in Sebald’s work, crystallised in the form and formlessness of a wasps’ nest. The wasps’ nest is a symbol Sebald uses in his book Vertigo, and which he talks to in an interview with Sarah Kafatou:do you know what a wasp’s nest is like? It’s made of something much much thinner than airmail paper: grey and as thin as possible. This gets wrapped around and around like pastry, like a millefeuille, and can get as big as two feet across. It weighs nothing. For me the wasp’s nest is a kind of ideal vision: an object that is extremely complicated and intricate, made out of something that hardly exists. (32)It is in this ephemerality that the walker’s way of moving—if not their journey—can be felt. The ephemerality is necessary because of the way the world is: the way it always passes. A work which is made to seem to encompass everything, like Remembrance of Things Past, is made to do so because that is the nature of what walking offers: an ability to comprehend the world solidly, both minutely and vastly, but with a kind of forgetting attached to it. When a person walks through the world they are firmly embedded in it, yes, but they are also always enacting a process of forgetting where they have been. This continual interplay between presence and absence is evidenced in the way in which Sebald and Proust build the consciousnesses they shape on the page—consciousnessess accustomed to connectedness. According to Sebald, it was through the prose of Walser that he learned this—or, at least, through an engagement with Walser’s world, Sebald, “slowly learned to grasp how everything is connected across space and time” (149). Perhaps it can be seen in the way that the Méséglise and Guermantes ways resonate for the Proustian narrator even when they are gone. Proust’s narrator receives a letter from an old love, in the last volume of Remembrance, which describes the fate of the Méséglise way (Swann’s way, that is—the title of the first volume in the sequence). Gilberte tells him that the battlefields of World War I have overtaken the paths they used to walk:the little road you so loved, the one we called the stiff Hawthorn climb, where you professed to be in love with me when you were a child, when all the time I was in love with you, I cannot tell you how important that position is. The great wheatfield in which it ended is the famous “slope 307,” the name you have so often seen recorded in the communiqués. The French blew up the little bridge over the Vivonne which, you remember, did not bring back your childhood to you as much as you would have liked. The Germans threw others across; during a year and a half they held one half of Combray and the French the other. (Time Regained 69-70)Lia Purpura describes, and senses, a similar kind of connectedness. The way in which each moment builds into something—into the ephemeral, shifting self of a person walking through the world—is emphasised because that is the way the world works:I could walk for miles right now, fielding all that passes through, rubs off, lends a sense of being—that rush of moments, objects, sensations so much like a cloud of gnats, a cold patch in the ocean, dust motes in a ray of sun that roil, gather, settle around my head and make up the daily weather of a self. (x)This is what seamless prose can emulate: the rush of moments and the folds and shapes which dust turns and makes. And, well, I am aware that this may seem a grand kind of conclusion, and even a peculiarly nonspecific one. But nonspecificity is built by a culmination of details, of sentences—it is built deliberately, to evoke a sense of looseness in the world. And in the associations which result, through the mind of the writer, their narrator, and the reader, much more than is evident on the page—Sebald’s “everything”—is flung to the surface. Of course, this “everything” is split through with the melancholy evident in the destruction of the Méséglise way. Nonspecificity becomes the result of any attempt to capture the past—or, at least, the past becomes less tangible the longer, closer, and slower your attempt to grasp it. In both Sebald and Proust the task of representation is made to feel seamless in echo of the impossibility of resolution.In the unbroken track of a sentence lies a metaphor for the way in which life is spent: under threat, forever assaulted by the world and the senses, and forever separated from what came before. The walk-as-method is entangled with the mind thinking and the pen writing; each apes the other, and all work towards the same kind of end: an articulation of how the world is. At least, in the hands of Sebald and Proust and through their long and complex prosodies, it does. For both there is a kind of melancholy attached to this articulation—perhaps because the threads that bind sever as well. The Rings of Saturn offers a look at this. The book closes with a chapter on the weaving of silk, inflected, perhaps, with a knowledge of the ways in which Robert Walser—through attempts to ensnare some of life’s ephemerality—became a victim of it:That weavers in particular, together with scholars and writers with whom they had much in common, tended to suffer from melancholy and all the evils associated with it, is understandable given the nature of their work, which forced them to sit bent over, day after day, straining to keep their eye on the complex patterns they created. It is difficult to imagine the depths of despair into which those can be driven who, even after the end of the working day, are engrossed in their intricate designs and who are pursued, into their dreams, by the feeling that they have got hold of the wrong thread. (283)Vladimir Nabokov, writing on Swann’s Way, gives a competing metaphor for thinking through the seamlessness afforded by walking and writing. It is, altogether, more optimistic: more in keeping with Purpura’s interpretation of connectedness: “Proust’s conversations and his descriptions merge into one another, creating a new unity where flower and leaf and insect belong to one and the same blossoming tree” (214). This is the purpose of long and complex books like The Rings of Saturn and Remembrance of Things Past: to draw the lines which link each and all together. To describe the shape of consciousness, to mimic the actions of a body experiencing its progress through the world. I think that is what the photographs I took when wandering attempt, in a failing way, to do. They all show a kind of relentlessness, but in that relentlessness is also, I think, the promise of connectedness—even if not connectedness itself. Each path aims forward, and articulates something of what came before and what might come next, whether trodden in the world or walked on the page.Author’s NoteI’d like to express my thanks to the anonymous reviewers who took time to improve this article. I’m grateful for their insights and engagement, and for the nuance they added to the final copy.References Baumgarten, Murray. “‘Not Knowing What I Should Think:’ The Landscape of Postmemory in W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants.” Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 5.2 (2007): 267-287. 28 Sep. 2018 <https://doi.org/10.1353/pan.2007.0000>.Cunningham, Sophie. “Staying with the Trouble.” Australian Book Review 371 (May 2015). 23 June 2016 <https://www.australianbookreview.com.au/abr-online/archive/2015/2500-2015-calibre-prize-winner-staying-with-the-trouble>.Franklin, Ruth. “Rings of Smoke.” The Emergence of Memory: Conversations with W.G. Sebald. Ed. Lynne Sharon Schwartz. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2007. 121-122.Kafatou, Sarah. “An Interview with W.G. Sebald.” Harvard Review 15 (1998): 31-35. Nabokov, Vladimir. “Marcel Proust: The Walk by Swann’s Place.” 1980. Lectures on Literature. London: Picador, 1983. 207-250.Proust, Marcel. Swann’s Way. Part I. 1913. Trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff in 1922. London: Chatto & Windus, 1960.———. Time Regained. 1927. Trans. Stephen Hudson. London: Chatto & Windus, 1957.Purpura, Lia. “On Not Pivoting”. Diagram 12.1 (n.d.). 21 June 2018 <http://thediagram.com/12_1/purpura.html>.Schwartz, Lynne Sharon, ed. The Emergence of Memory: Conversations with W.G. Sebald. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2007.Sebald, W.G. The Rings of Saturn. 1995. Trans. Michael Hulse in 1998. London: Vintage, 2002.——. “Le Promeneur Solitaire.” A Place in the Country. Trans. Jo Catling. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2013. 117-154.Solnit, Rebecca. Wanderlust: A History of Walking. 2001. London: Granta Publications, 2014.White, Edmund. Proust. London: Phoenix, 1999.Wood, James. The Nearest Thing to Life. London: Jonathan Cape, 2015.Woolf, Virginia. “The Narrow Bridge of Art.” Granite and Rainbow. USA: Harvest Books, 1975.

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Introduction Presidents “define who Americans are—often by declaring who they aren’t”, and “by their very utterances […] have shaped our sense of who we are as Americans” (Stuckey, front cover). This advocacy of some groups and policies to the exclusion of others has been facilitated in the United States’ political culture by the country music industry. Indeed, President Richard Nixon said of country music that it “radiates a love of this nation—a patriotism,” adding that it “makes America a better country” (Bufwack and Oermann 328). Country music’s ardent support of American military conflict, including Vietnam, has led to its long-term support of Republican candidates. There has been a general lack of scholarly interest, however, in how country music has promoted Republican definitions of what it means to be an American. Accordingly, we have two primary objectives. First, we will demonstrate that Republicans, aided by country music, have used the theme of defence of “country,” especially post-9/11, to attempt to intimidate detractors. Secondly, Republicans have questioned the love of “country,” or “patriotism,” of their electoral opponents just as country musicians have attempted to silence their own critics. This research is timely in that little has been done to merge Presidential advocacy and country music; furthermore, with the election of a new President mere days away, it is important to highlight the tendencies toward intolerance that both conservatism and country music have historically shared. Defence of ‘Country’ After the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush addressed the nation before a Joint Session of Congress on 20 September 2001. During this speech, the president threatened the international community and raised the spectre of fear in Americans both while drawing distinctions between the United States and its enemies. This message was reflected and reinforced by several patriotic anthems composed by country artists, thus enhancing its effect. In his remarks before Congress, Bush challenged the international community: “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists;” thus “advocating some groups to the exclusion of others” on the international stage (20 September 2001). With these words, the President expanded the definition of the United States’ enemies to include not only those responsible for the 9/11 attacks, but also anyone who refused to support him. Republican Senator John McCain’s hawkishness regarding the attacks mirrored the President’s. “There is a system out there or network, and that network is going to have to be attacked,” McCain said the next morning on ABC (American Broadcasting Company) News. Within a month he made clear his priority: “Very obviously Iraq is the first country,” he declared on CNN. Later he yelled to a crowd of sailors and airmen: “Next up, Baghdad!” (http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/08/17/america/mccain.php). Bush’s address also encouraged Americans at home to “be calm and resolute, even in the face of a continuing threat” (20 September 2001). The subtle “us vs. them” tension here is between citizens and those who would threaten them. Bush added that “freedom and fear” had always “been at war” and “God is not neutral between them” (20 September 2001) suggesting a dualism between God and Satan with God clearly supporting the cause of the United States. Craig Allen Smith’s research refers to this as Bush’s “angel/devil jeremiad.” The President’s emphasis on fear, specifically the fear that the American way of life was being assailed, translated into public policy including the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and the Patriot Act. This strategic nomenclature strengthened the power of the federal government and has been used by Republicans to suggest that if a candidate or citizen is not a terrorist then what does he/she have to fear from the government? The impact of Bush’s rhetoric of fear has of late been evaluated by scholars who have termed it “melodrama” in international affairs (Anker; Sampert and Treiberg). To disseminate his message for Americans to support his defence of “country,” Bush needed look no further than country music. David Firestein, a State Department diplomat and published authority on country music, asserted that the Bush team “recognised the power of country music as a political communication device” (86). The administration’s appeal to country music is linked to what Firestein called the “honky-tonk gap” which delineates red states and blue states. In an analysis of census data, Radio-Locator’s comprehensive listing by state of country music radio stations, and the official 2004 election results, he concluded that If you were to overlay a map of the current country music fan base onto the iconic red-and-blue map of the United States, you would find that its contours coincide virtually identically with those of the red state region. (84) And country musicians were indeed powerful in communicating the Republican message after 9/11. Several country musicians tapped into Bush’s defence of country rhetoric with a spate of songs including Alan Jackson’s Where Were You? (When the World Stopped Turning), Toby Keith’s Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue (the Angry American), and Darryl Worley’s Have You Forgotten? to name a few. Note how well the music parallels Bush’s attempt to define Americans. For instance, one of the lines from Keith’s Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue (the Angry American) speaks of those who have given their lives so that other Americans may rest peacefully. This sentiment is reiterated by the theme of Worley’s Have You Forgotten? in which he talks of spending time with soldiers who have no doubts about why they are at war. Both songs implicitly indict the listener for betraying United States soldiers if his/her support for the Iraqi war wanes or, put in Bush terms, the listener would become a supporter of “terrorism.” Country music’s appeal to middle-America’s red state conservatism has made the genre a natural vehicle for supporting the defence of country. Indeed, country songs have been written about every war in United States history; most expressing support for the conflict and the troops as opposed to protesting the United States’ action: “Since the Civil War and Reconstruction, ‘Dixie’ has always been the bellwether of patriotic fervour in time of war and even as the situation in Vietnam reached its lowest point and support for the war began to fade, the South and its distinctive music remained solidly supportive” (Andresen 105). Historically, country music has a long tradition of attempting to “define who Americans were by defining who they weren’t” (Stuckey). As Bufwack and Oermann note within country music “images of a reactionary South were not hard to find.” They add “Dixie fertilized ‘three r’s’ – the right, racism, and religion” (328). Country musicians supported the United States’ failed intervention in Vietnam with such songs as It’s for God and Country and You Mom (That’s Why I’m Fighting In Vietnam), and even justified the American massacre of noncombatants at My Lai in the Battle Hymn of Lt. Calley (328). Thus, a right-wing response to the current military involvement in Iraq was not unexpected from the industry and the honky-tonk state listeners. During the current election, Republican presidential nominee McCain has also received a boost from the country music genre as John Rich, of Big and Rich, wrote Raising McCain, a musical tribute to McCain’s military service used as his campaign theme song. The song, debuted at a campaign rally on 1 August 2008, in Florida, mentions McCain’s ‘Prisoner of War’ status to keep the focus on the war and challenge those who would question it. Scholars have researched the demographics of the country music listener as they have evaluated the massification theory: the notion that the availability of a widespread media culture would break down social and cultural barriers and result in a “hom*ogenised” society as opposed to the results of government-controlled media in non-democratic countries (Peterson and DiMaggio). They have determined that the massification theory has only been partially demonstrated in that regional and class barriers have eroded to some extent but country music listeners are still predominately white and older (Peterson and DiMaggio 504). These individuals do tend to be more conservative within the United States’ political culture, and militarism has a long history within both country music and conservatism. If the bad news of the massification theory is that a mass media market may not perpetuate a hom*ogenous society, there is good news. The more onerous fears that the government will work in tandem with the media to control the people in a democracy seem not to have been borne out over time. Although President Bush’s fear tactics were met with obsequious silence initially, resistance to the unquestioning support of the war has steadily grown. In 2003, a worldwide rally opposed the invasion of Iraq because it was a sovereign state and because the Bush doctrine lacked United Nations’ support. Further opposition in the United States included rallies and concerts as well as the powerful display in major cities across the nation of pairs of combat boots representing fallen soldiers (Olson). Bush’s popularity has dropped precipitously, with his disapproval ratings higher than any President in history at 71% (Steinhauser). While the current economic woes have certainly been a factor, the campaigns of Barack Obama and John McCain can also be viewed as a referendum on the Bush war. The American resistance to the Bush rhetoric and the Iraq war is all the more significant in light of research indicating that citizens incorrectly believe that the opposition to the Vietnam War was typified by protests against the troops rather than the war itself (Beamish). This false notion has empowered the Republicans and country musicians to challenge the patriotism of anyone who would subsequently oppose the military involvement of the United States, and it is to this topic of patriotism that we now turn. Patriotism Patriotism can be an effective way for presidential candidates to connect with voters (Sullivan et al). It has been a particularly salient issue since the 9/11 attacks and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Ironically, George W. Bush, a man whose limited military service had been the subject of debate in 2000, was able to employ the persistent patriotic themes of country music to his electoral advantage. In fact, Firestein argued that country music radio had a greater effect on the 2004 election than any ads run by issue groups because it “inculcated and reinforced conservative values in the red state electorate, helped frame the issues of the day on terms favourable to the conservative position on those issues, and primed red state voters to respond positively to President Bush’s basic campaign message of family, country, and God” (Firestein 83). Bush even employed Only in America, a patriotic anthem performed by Brooks and Dunn, as a campaign theme song, because the war and patriotism played such a prominent role in the election. That the Bush re-election campaign successfully cast doubt on the patriotism of three-time Purple Heart winner, Democratic Senator John Kerry, during the campaign is evidence of Firestein’s assertion. The criticism was based on a book: Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry (O’Neill and Corsi). The book was followed by advertisem*nts funded by Swift Boat Veterans for Truth which included unsubstantiated claims that Kerry lied or exaggerated his combat role in Vietnam in order to obtain two of his Purple Hearts and his Bronze Star; the testimony of Kerry’s crewmen and Navy records notwithstanding, these ads were effective in smearing Kerry’s service record and providing the President with an electoral advantage. As far as country music was concerned, the 2004 election played out against the backdrop of the battle between the patriotic Toby Keith and the anti-American Dixie Chicks. The Dixie Chicks were berated after lead singer Natalie Maines’s anti-Bush comments during a concert in London. The trio’s song about an American soldier killed in action, Travelin’ Soldier, quickly fell from the top spot of the country music charts. Moreover, while male singers such as Keith, Darryl Worley, and Alan Jackson received accolades for their post 9/11 artistic efforts, the Dixie Chicks endured a vitriolic reaction from country music fans as their CDs were burned, country radio refused to play their music, their names were added to an internet list of traitors, their concerts were protested by Bush supporters, and their lives were even threatened (http://www.poppolitics.com/archives/2003/04/Bandwagon). Speaking from experience at the 2008 Democratic National Convention, Kerry addressed the issue of patriotism stating: This election is a chance for America to tell the merchants of fear and division: you don’t decide who loves this country; you don’t decide who is a patriot; you don’t decide whose service counts and whose doesn’t. […] After all, patriotism is not love of power or some cheap trick to win votes; patriotism is love of country. (http://www.clipsandcomment.com/2008/08/27/full-text-john-kerry-speech-democratic-national-convention/) Kerry broached the issue because of the constant attacks on the patriotism of Democratic nominee, Senator Barack Obama. At the most basic level, many of the attacks questioned whether Obama was even an American. Internet rumours persisted that Obama was a Muslim who was not even an American citizen. The attacks intensified when the Obamas’ pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, came under fire for comments made during a sermon in which he stated “God damn America.” As a result, Obama was forced to distance himself from his pastor and his church. Obama was also criticised for not wearing a United States flag lapel pin. When Michelle Obama stated for the “first time [she was] proud of her country” for its willingness to embrace change in February of 2008, Cindy McCain responded that she “had always been proud of her country” with the implication being, of course, a lack of patriotism on the part of Michelle Obama. Even the 13 July 2008 cover of the liberal New Yorker portrayed the couple as flag-burning Muslim terrorists. During the 2008 election campaign, McCain has attempted to appeal to patriotism in a number of ways. First, McCain’s POW experience in Vietnam has been front and centre as he touts his experience in foreign policy. Second, the slogan of the campaign is “Country First” implying that the Obama campaign does not put the United States first. Third, McCain’s running mate, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, insisted in a speech on 4 October 2008, that Barack Obama has been “palling around with terrorists who would target their own country.” Her reference was to Obama’s acquaintance, Bill Ayers, who was involved in a series of Vietnam era bombings; the implication, however, was that Obama has terrorist ties and is unpatriotic. Palin stood behind her comments even though several major news organisations had concluded that the relationship was not significant as Ayers’ terrorist activities occurred when Obama was eight-years-old. This recent example is illustrative of Republican attempts to question the patriotism of Democrats for their electoral advantage. Country music has again sided with the Republicans particularly with Raising McCain. However, the Democrats may have realised the potential of the genre as Obama chose Only in America as the song played after his acceptance speech at the Democratic Convention. He has also attempted to reach rural voters by starting his post-convention campaign in Bristol, Virginia, a small, conservative town. Conclusion Thus, in the wake of 9/11, Republicans seized the opportunity to control the culture through fear and patriotic fervour. They were facilitated in this endeavor by the country music industry with songs that that would questions the motives, defence of “country,” and patriotism, of anyone who would question the Bush administration. This alliance between country music and the right is an historically strong one, and we recommend more research on this vital topic. While this election may indeed be a referendum on the war, it has been influenced by an economic downturn as well. Ultimately, Democrats will have to convince rural voters that they share their values; they don’t have the same edge as Republicans without the reliance of country music. However, the dynamic of country music has changed to somewhat reflect the war fatigue since the 2004 campaign. The Angry American, Toby Keith, has admitted that he is actually a Democrat, and country music listeners have grown tired of the “barrage of pro-troop sentiment,” especially since the summer of 2005 (Willman 115). As Joe Galante, the chief of the RCA family of labels in Nashville, stated, “It’s the relatability. Kerry never really spent time listening to some of those people” (Willman 201). Bill Clinton, a Southern governor, certainly had relatability, carrying the normally red states and overcoming the honky-tonk gap, and Obama has seen the benefit of country music by playing it as the grand finale of the Democratic Convention. Nevertheless, we recommend more research on the “melodrama” theory of the Presidency as the dynamics of the relationship between the Presidency and the country music genre are currently evolving. References Andreson, Lee. Battle Notes: Music of the Vietnam War. 2nd ed. Superior, WI: Savage Press, 2003. Anker, Elisabeth. “Villains, Victims and Heroes: Melodrama, Media and September 11th.” Journal of Communication. 55.1 (2005): 22-37. Baker, Peter and David Brown. “Bush Tries to Tone Down High-Pitched Debate on Iraq.” Monday, 21November 2005, Page A04. washingtonpost.com Beamish, Thomas D., Harvey Molotch, and Richard Flacks. “Who Supports the Troops? Vietnam, the Gulf War, and the Making of Collective Memory.” Social Problems. 42.3 (1995): 344-60. Brooks and Dunn. Only in America. Arista Records, 2003. Bufwack, Mary A. and Robert K. Oermann. Finding Her Voice The Saga of Women in Country Music. New York: Crown Publishers, 1993. Dixie Chicks. “Travelin Soldier.” Home. Columbia. 27 August 2002. Firestein, David J. “The Honky-Tonk Gap.” Vital Speeches of the Day. 72.3 (2006): 83-88. Jackson, Alan. Where Were You? (When the World Stopped Turning) Very Best of Alan Jackson. Nashville: Arista, 2004. Keith, Toby. Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American). Nashville: Dreamworks. November 9, 2004. Olson, Scott. “Chicago remembers war dead with 500 pairs of empty boots.” 22 January 2004. http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2004-01-22-chicago-boots_x.htm O’Neill, John E. and Jerome L. Corsi. “Unfit for Command Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry.” Washington D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 2004. Peterson, Richard A. and Peter Di Maggio. “From Region to Class, the Changing Locus of Country Music. A Test of the Massification Hypothesis.” Social Forces. 53.3 (1975): 497-506. Rich, John. Raising McCain. Production information unavailable. Sampert, Shannon, and Natasja Treiberg. “The Reification of the ?American Soldier?: Popular Culture, American Foreign Policy, and Country Music.” Paper presented at the International Studies Association 48th Annual Convention, Chicago, Illinois, United States, 28 February 2007. Smith, Craig Allen. “President Bush’s Enthymeme of Evil: The Amalgamation of 9/11, Iraq, and Moral Values.” American Behavioral Scientist. 49 (2005): 32-47. Steinhauser, Paul. “Poll: More disapprove of Bush that any other president.” Politics Cnn.politics.com. 1 May 2008. Stuckey, Mary E. Defining Americans: The Presidency and National Identity. Lawrence: UP of Kansas, 2004. Sullivan, John L., Amy Fried, Mary G. Dietz. 1992. “Patriotism, Politics, and the Presidential Election of 1988.” American Journal of Political Science. 36.1 (1992): 200-234. Willman, Chris. Rednecks and Bluenecks: The Politics of Country Music. New York: The New Press, 2005. Worley, Darryl. Have You Forgotten? Nashville: Dreamworks, 2003.

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According to Oscar Wilde, the problem with socialism was that it took up too many evenings. Wilde’s aphorism alludes to a major issue that bedevils all attempts to influence the public sphere: the fact that public activities encroach unduly on citizens’ valuable time. In the 21st century, the dilemma of how to deal with “too many evenings” is one that many citizen journalists face as they give their own time to public pursuits. This paper will look at the development of the public citizen and what it means to be a citizen journalist with reference to some of the writer’s own experiences in the field. The paper will conclude with an examination of future possibilities. While large media companies change their change their focus from traditional news values, citizen journalism can play a stronger role in public life as long as it grasps some of the opportunities that are available. There are substantial compensations available to citizen journalists for the problems presented by Wilde’s evenings. The quote from Wilde is borrowed from Albert Hirschman’s Shifting Involvements, which among other things, is an examination of the disappointments of public action. Hirschman noted how it was a common experience for beginners who engage in public action to find that takes up more time than expected (96). As public activity encroaches not only on time devoted to private consumption but also on to the time devoted to the production of income, it can become a costly pursuit which may cause a sharp reaction against the “practice of citizenship” (Hirschman 97). Yet the more stimuli about politics people receive, the greater the likelihood is they will participate in politics and the greater the depth of their participation (Milbrath & Goel 35). People with a positive attraction to politics are more likely to receive stimuli about politics and participate more (Milbrath & Goel 36). Active citizenship, it seems, has its own feedback loops. An active citizenry is not a new idea. The concepts of citizen and citizenship emerged from the sophisticated polity established in the Greek city states about 2,500 years ago. The status of a citizen signified that the individual had the right to full membership of, and participation in, an independent political society (Batrouney & Goldlust 24). In later eras that society could be defined as a kingdom, an empire, or a nation state. The conditions for a bourgeois public sphere were created in the 13th century as capitalists in European city states created a traffic in commodities and news (Habermas 15). A true public sphere emerged in the 17th century with the rise of the English coffee houses and French salons where people had the freedom to express opinions regardless of their social status (Habermas 36). In 1848, France held the first election under universal direct suffrage (for males) and the contemporary slogan was that “universal suffrage closes the era of revolutions” (Hirschman 113). Out of this heady optimism, the late 19th century ushered in the era of the “informed citizen” as voting changed from a social and public duty to a private right – a civic obligation enforceable only by private conscience (Schudson). These concepts live on in the modern idea that the model voter is considered to be a citizen vested with the ability to understand the consequences of his or her choice (Menand 1). The internet is a new knowledge space which offers an alternative reading of the citizen. In Pierre Lévy’s vision of cyberculture, identity is no longer a function of belonging, it is “distributed and nomadic” (Ross & Nightingale 149). The Internet has diffused widely and is increasingly central to everyday life as a place where people go to get information (Dutton 10). Journalism initially prospered on an information scarcity factor however the technology of the Internet has created an information rich society (Tapsall & Varley 18). But research suggests that online discussions do not promote consensus, are short-lived with little impact and end up turning into “dialogues of the deaf” (Nguyen 148). The easy online publishing environment is a fertile ground for rumours, hoaxes and cheating games to circulate which risk turning the public sphere into a chaotic and anarchic space (Nguyen 148). The stereotypical blogger is pejoratively dismissed as “pajama-clad” (Papandrea 516) connoting a sense of disrespect for the proper transmission of ideas. Nevertheless the Internet offers powerful tools for collaboration that is opening up many everyday institutions to greater social accountability (Dutton 3). Recent research by the 2007 Digital Futures project shows 65 percent of respondents consider the Internet “to be a very important or extremely important source of information” (Cowden 76). By 2006, Roy Morgan was reporting that three million Australians were visiting online news site each month (Cowden.76). Crikey.com.au, Australia’s first online-only news outlet, has become a significant independent player in the Australia mediascape claiming over 5,000 subscribers by 2005 with three times as many non-paying “squatters” reading its daily email (Devine 50). Online Opinion has a similar number of subscribers and was receiving 750,000 page views a month by 2005 (National Forum). Both Crikey.com.au and Online Opinion have made moves towards public journalism in an attempt to provide ordinary people access to the public sphere. As professional journalists lose their connection with the public, bloggers are able to fill the public journalism niche (Simons, Content Makers 208). At their best, blogs can offer a “more broad-based, democratic involvement of citizens in the issues that matter to them” (Bruns 7). The research of University of North Carolina journalism professor Philip Meyer showed that cities and towns with public journalism-oriented newspapers led to a better educated local public (Simons, Content Makers 211). Meyer’s idea of good public journalism has six defining elements: a) the need to define a community’s sense of itself b) devotion of time to issues that demand community attention c) devotion of depth to the issues d) more attention to the middle ground e) a preference for substance over tactics and f) encouraging reciprocal understanding (Meyer 1). The objective of public journalism is to foster a greater sense of connection between the community and the media. It can mean journalists using ordinary people as sources and also ordinary people acting as journalists. Jay Rosen proposed a new model based on journalism as conversation (Simons, Content Makers 209). He believes the technology has now overtaken the public journalism movement (Simons, Content Makers 213). His own experiments at pro-am Internet open at assignment.net have had mixed results. His conclusion was that it wasn’t easy for people working voluntarily on the Internet to report on big stories together nor had they “unlocked” the secret of successful pro-am methods (Rosen). Nevertheless, the people formerly known as the audience, as Rosen called them, have seized the agenda. The barriers to entry into journalism have disappeared. Blogging has made Web publishing easy and the social networks are even more user friendly. The problem today is not getting published but finding an audience. And as the audience fragments, the issue will become finding a niche. One such niche is local political activism. The 2007 Australian federal election saw many online sites actively promoting citizen journalism. Most prominent was Youdecide2007 at Queensland University of Technology, funded by the Australian Research Council (ARC) in partnership with SBS, Online Opinion and the Brisbane Institute. Site co-editor Graham Young said the site’s aim was to use citizen journalists to report on their own electorates to fill the gap left by fewer journalists on the ground, especially in less populated areas (Young). While the site’s stated aim was to provide a forum for a seat-by-seat coverage and provide “a new perspective on national politics” (Youdecide2007), the end result was significantly skewed by the fact that the professional editorial team was based in Brisbane. Youdecide2007 published 96 articles in its news archive of which 59 could be identified as having a state-based focus. Figure 1 shows 62.7% of these state-based stories were about Queensland. Figure 1: Youdecide2007 news stories identifiable by state (note: national stories are omitted from this table): State Total no. of stories %age Qld 37 62.7 NSW 8 13.6 Vic 6 10.2 WA 3 5.1 Tas 2 3.4 ACT 2 3.4 SA 1 1.6 Modern election campaigns are characterised by a complex and increasingly fragmented news environment and the new media are rapidly adding another layer of complexity to the mix (Norris et al. 11-12). The slick management of national campaigns are is counter-productive to useful citizen journalism. According to Matthew Clayfield from the citizen journalism site electionTracker.net, “there are very few open events which ordinary people could cover in a way that could be described as citizen journalism” (qtd. in Hills 2007). Similar to other systems, the Australian campaign communication empowers the political leaders and media owners at the expense of ordinary party members and citizens (Warhurst 135). However the slick modern national “on message” campaign has not totally replaced old-style local activity. Although the national campaign has superimposed upon the local one and displaced it from the focus of attention, local candidates must still communicate their party policies in the electorate (Warhurst 113). Citizen journalists are ideally placed to harness this local communication. A grassroots approach is encapsulated in the words of Dan Gillmor who said “every reporter should realise that, collectively, the readers know more than they do about what they write about” (qtd. in Quinn & Quinn-Allan 66). With this in mind, I set out my own stall in citizen journalism for the 2007 Australian federal election with two personal goals: to interview all my local federal Lower House candidates and to attend as many public election meetings as possible. As a result, I wrote 19 election articles in the two months prior to the election. This consisted of 9 news items, 6 candidate interviews and 4 reports of public meetings. All the local candidates except one agreed to be interviewed. The local Liberal candidate refused to be interviewed despite repeated requests. There was no reason offered, just a continual ignoring of requests. Liberal candidates were also noticeably absent from most candidate forums I attended. This pattern of non-communicative behaviour was observed elsewhere (Bartlett, Wilson). I tried to turn this to my advantage by turning their refusal to talk into a story itself. For those that were prepared to talk, I set the expectation that the entire interview would be on the record and would be edited and published on my blog site. As a result, all candidates asked for a list of questions in advance which I supplied. Because politicians devote considerable energy and financial resources to ensure the information they impart to citizens has an appropriate ‘spin’ on it, (Negrine 10) I reserved the right to ask follow-up questions on any of their answers that required clarification. For the interviews themselves, I followed the advice of Spradley’s principle by starting with a conscious attitude of near-total ignorance, not writing the story in advance, and attempting to be descriptive, incisive, investigative and critical (Alia 100). After I posted the results of the interview, I sent a link to each of the respondents offering them a chance to clarify or correct any inaccuracies in the interview statements. Defamation skirts the boundary between free speech and reputation (Pearson 159) and a good working knowledge of the way defamation law affects journalists (citizen or otherwise) is crucial, particularly in dealing with public figures. This was an important consideration for some of the lesser known candidates as Google searches on their names brought my articles up within the top 20 results for each of the Democrat, Green and Liberal Democratic Party candidates I interviewed. None of the public meetings I attended were covered in the mainstream media. These meetings are the type of news Jan Schaffer of University of Maryland’s J-Lab saw as an ecological niche for citizen journalists to “create opportunities for citizens to get informed and inform others about micro-news that falls under the radar of news organisations who don’t have the resources” (Schaffer in Glaser). As Mark Bahnisch points out, Brisbane had three daily newspapers and a daily state based 7.30 Report twenty years ago which contrasts with the situation now where there’s no effective state parliamentary press gallery and little coverage of local politics at all (“State of Political Blogging”). Brisbane’s situation is not unique and the gaps are there to be exploited by new players. While the high cost of market entry renders the “central square” of the public sphere inaccessible to new players (Curran 128) the ease of Web access has given the citizen journalists the chance to roam its back alleys. However even if they fill the voids left by departing news organisations, there will still be a large hole in the mediascape. No one will be doing the hardhitting investigative journalism. This gritty work requires great resources and often years of time. The final product of investigative journalism is often complicated to read, unentertaining and inconclusive (Bower in Negrine 13). Margaret Simons says that journalism is a skill that involves the ability to find things out. She says the challenge of the future will be to marry the strengths of the newsroom and the dirty work of investigative journalism with the power of the conversation of blogs (“Politics and the Internet”). One possibility is raised by the Danish project Scoop. They offer financial support to individual journalists who have good ideas for investigative journalism. Founded by the Danish Association for Investigative Journalism and funded by the Danish Foreign Ministry, Scoop supports media projects across the world with the only proviso being that a journalist has to have an agreement with an editor to publish the resulting story (ABC Media Report). But even without financial support, citizens have the ability to perform rudimentary investigative journalism. The primary tool of investigative journalism is the interview (McIlwane & Bowman 260). While an interview can be arranged by anyone with access to a telephone or e-mail, it should not be underestimated how difficult a skill interviewing is. According to American journalist John Brady, the science of journalistic interviewing aims to gain two things, trust and information (Brady in White 75). In the interviews I did with politicians during the federal election, I found that getting past the “spin” of the party line to get genuine information was the toughest part of the task. There is also a considerable amount of information in the public domain which is rarely explored by reporters (Negrine 23). Knowing how to make use of this information will become a critical success factor for citizen journalists. Corporate journalists use databases such as Lexis/Nexis and Factiva to gain background information, a facility unavailable to most citizen journalists unless they are either have access through a learning institution or are prepared to pay a premium for the information. While large corporate vendors supply highly specialised information, amateurs can play a greater role in the creation and transmission of local news. According to G. Stuart Adam, journalism contains four basic elements: reporting, judging, a public voice and the here and now (13). Citizen journalism is capable of meeting all four criteria. The likelihood is that the future of communications will belong to the centralised corporations on one hand and the unsupervised amateur on the other (Bird 36). Whether the motive to continue is payment or empowerment, the challenge for citizen journalists is to advance beyond the initial success of tactical actions towards the establishment as a serious political and media alternative (Bruns 19). Nguyen et al.’s uses and gratification research project suggests there is a still a long way to go in Australia. While they found widespread diffusion of online news, the vast majority of users (78%) were still getting their news from newspaper Websites (Nguyen et al. 13). The research corroborates Mark Bahnisch’s view that “most Australians have not heard of blogs and only a tiny minority reads them (quoted in Simons, Content Makers 219). The Australian blogosphere still waits for its defining Swiftboat incident or Rathergate to announce its arrival. But Bahnisch doesn’t necessarily believe this is a good evolutionary strategy anyway. Here it is becoming more a conversation than a platform “with its own niche and its own value” (Bahnisch, “This Is Not America”). As far as my own experiments go, the citizen journalism reports I wrote gave me no financial reward but plenty of other compensations that made the experience richly rewarding. It was important to bring otherwise neglected ideas, stories and personalities into the public domain and the reports helped me make valuable connections with public-minded members of my local community. They were also useful practice to hone interview techniques and political writing skills. Finally the exercise raised my own public profile as several of my entries were picked up or hyperlinked by other citizen journalism sites and blogs. Some day, and probably soon, a model will be worked out which will make citizen journalism a worthwhile economic endeavour. In the meantime, we rely on active citizens of the blogosphere to give their evenings freely for the betterment of the public sphere. References ABC Media Report. “Scoop.” 2008. 17 Feb. 2008 http://www.abc.net.au/rn/mediareport/stories/2008/2151204.htm#transcript>. Adam, G. Notes towards a Definition of Journalism: Understanding an Old Craft as an Art Form. St Petersburg, Fl.: Poynter Institute, 1993. Alia, V. “The Rashom*on Principle: The Journalist as Ethnographer.” In V. Alia, B. Brennan, and B. Hoffmaster (eds.), Deadlines and Diversity: Journalism Ethics in a Changing World. Halifax: Fernwood Publishing, 1996. Bahnisch, M. “This Is Not America.” newmatilda.com 2007. 17 Feb. 2008 http://www.newmatilda.com/2007/10/04/not-america>. Bahnisch, M. “The State of Political Blogging.” Larvatus Prodeo 2007. 17 Feb. 2008 http://larvatusprodeo.net/2007/09/30/the-state-of-political-blogging/>. Bartlett, A. “Leaders Debate.” The Bartlett Diaries 2007. 19 Feb. 2008 http://andrewbartlett.com/blog/?p=1767>. Batrouney, T., and J. Goldlust. Unravelling Identity: Immigrants, Identity and Citizenship in Australia. Melbourne: Common Ground, 2005. Bird, R. “News in the Global Village.” The End of the News. Toronto: Irwin Publishing, 2005. Bruns, A. “News Blogs and Citizen Journalism: New Directions for e-Journalism.” In K. Prasad (ed.), E-Journalism: New Directions in Electronic News Media. New Delhi: BR Publishing, 2008. 2 Feb. 2008 http://snurb.info/files/News%20Blogs%20and%20Citizen%20Journalism.pdf>. Cowden, G. “Online News: Patterns, Participation and Personalisation.” Australian Journalism Review 29.1 (July 2007). Curran, J. “Rethinking Media and Democracy.” In J. Curran and M. Gurevitch (eds.), Mass Media and Society. 3rd ed. London: Arnold, 2000. Devine, F. “Curse of the Blog.” Quadrant 49.3 (Mar. 2005). Dutton, W. Through the Network (of Networks) – The Fifth Estate. Oxford Internet Institute, 2007. 6 April 2007 http://people.oii.ox.ac.uk/dutton/wp-content/uploads/2007/10/ 5th-estate-lecture-text.pdf>. Glaser, M. “The New Voices: Hyperlocal Citizen’s Media Sites Want You (to Write!).” Online Journalism Review 2004. 16 Feb. 2008 http://ojr.org/ojr/glaser/1098833871.php>. Habermas, J. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989 [1962]. Hills, R. “Citizen Journos Turning Inwards.” The Age 18 Nov. 2007. 17 Feb. 2008 http://www.theage.com.au/news/federal-election-2007-news/citizen-journos- turning-inwards/2007/11/17/1194767024688.html>. Hirschman, A, Shifting Involvements: Private Interest and Public Action. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1982. Hunter, C. “The Internet and the Public Sphere: Revitalization or Decay?” Virginia Journal of Communication 12 (2000): 93-127. Killenberg, G., and R. Dardenne. “Instruction in News Reporting as Community Focused Journalism.” Journalism & Mass Communication Educator 52.1 (Spring 1997). McIlwane, S., and L. Bowman. “Interviewing Techniques.” In S. Tanner (ed.), Journalism: Investigation and Research. Sydney: Longman, 2002. Menand, L. “The Unpolitical Animal: How Political Science Understands Voters.” The New Yorker 30 Aug. 2004. 17 Feb. 2008 http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/08/30/040830crat_atlarge>. Meyer, P. Public Journalism and the Problem of Objectivity. 1995. 16 Feb. 2008 http://www.unc.edu/%7Epmeyer/ire95pj.htm>. Milbrath, L., and M. Goel. Political Participation: How and Why Do People Get Involved in Politics? Chicago: Rand McNally M, 1975. National Forum. “Annual Report 2005.” 6 April 2008 http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/documents/reports/ annual_report_to_agm_2005.pdf>. Negrine, R. The Communication of Politics. London: Sage, 1996. Nguyen, A. “Journalism in the Wake of Participatory Publishing.” Australian Journalism Review 28.1 (July 2006). Nguyen, A., E. Ferrier, M. Western, and S. McKay. “Online News in Australia: Patterns of Use and Gratification.” Australian Studies in Journalism 15 (2005). Norris, P., J. Curtice, D. Sanders, M. Scammell, and H. Setemko. On Message: Communicating the Campaign. London: Sage, 1999. Papandrea, M. “Citizen Journalism and the Reporter’s Privilege.” Minnesota Law Review 91 (2007). Pearson, M. The Journalist’s Guide to Media Law. 2nd ed. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2004. Quinn, S., and D. Quinn-Allan. “User-Generated Content and the Changing News Cycle.” Australian Journalism Review 28.1 (July 2006). Rosen, J. “Assignment Zero: Can Crowds Create Fiction, Architecture and Photography?” Wired 2007. 6 April 2008 http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2007/07/assignment_zero_all>. Ross, K., and V. Nightingale. Media Audiences: New Perspectives. Maidenhead, Berkshire: Open UP, 2003. Schaffer, J. “Citizens Media: Has It Reached a Tipping Point.” Nieman Reports 59.4 (Winter 2005). Schudson, M. Good Citizens and Bad History: Today’s Political Ideals in Historical Perspective. 1999. 17 Feb. 2008 http://www.mtsu.edu/~seig/paper_m_schudson.html>. Simons, M. The Content Makers. Melbourne: Penguin, 2007. Simons, M. “Politics and the Internet.” Keynote speech at the Brisbane Writers’ Festival, 14 Sep. 2007. Tapsall, S., and C. Varley (eds.). Journalism: Theory in Practice. South Melbourne: Oxford UP, 2001. Warhurst, J. “Campaign Communications in Australia.” In F. Fletcher (ed.), Media, Elections and Democracy, Toronto: Dundurn Press, 1991. White, S. Reporting in Australia. 2nd ed. Melbourne: MacMillan, 2005. Wilson, J. “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Electorate.” Youdecide2007 2007. 19 Feb. 2008 http://www.youdecide2007.org/content/view/283/101/>. Young, G. “Citizen Journalism.” Presentation at the Australian Blogging Conference, 28 Sep. 2007. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Barry, Derek. "Wilde’s Evenings: The Rewards of Citizen Journalism." M/C Journal 10.6/11.1 (2008). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0804/09-barry.php>. APA Style Barry, D. (Apr. 2008) "Wilde’s Evenings: The Rewards of Citizen Journalism," M/C Journal, 10(6)/11(1). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0804/09-barry.php>.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

According to Oscar Wilde, the problem with socialism was that it took up too many evenings. Wilde’s aphorism alludes to a major issue that bedevils all attempts to influence the public sphere: the fact that public activities encroach unduly on citizens’ valuable time. In the 21st century, the dilemma of how to deal with “too many evenings” is one that many citizen journalists face as they give their own time to public pursuits. This paper will look at the development of the public citizen and what it means to be a citizen journalist with reference to some of the writer’s own experiences in the field. The paper will conclude with an examination of future possibilities. While large media companies change their change their focus from traditional news values, citizen journalism can play a stronger role in public life as long as it grasps some of the opportunities that are available. There are substantial compensations available to citizen journalists for the problems presented by Wilde’s evenings. The quote from Wilde is borrowed from Albert Hirschman’s Shifting Involvements, which among other things, is an examination of the disappointments of public action. Hirschman noted how it was a common experience for beginners who engage in public action to find that takes up more time than expected (96). As public activity encroaches not only on time devoted to private consumption but also on to the time devoted to the production of income, it can become a costly pursuit which may cause a sharp reaction against the “practice of citizenship” (Hirschman 97). Yet the more stimuli about politics people receive, the greater the likelihood is they will participate in politics and the greater the depth of their participation (Milbrath & Goel 35). People with a positive attraction to politics are more likely to receive stimuli about politics and participate more (Milbrath & Goel 36). Active citizenship, it seems, has its own feedback loops. An active citizenry is not a new idea. The concepts of citizen and citizenship emerged from the sophisticated polity established in the Greek city states about 2,500 years ago. The status of a citizen signified that the individual had the right to full membership of, and participation in, an independent political society (Batrouney & Goldlust 24). In later eras that society could be defined as a kingdom, an empire, or a nation state. The conditions for a bourgeois public sphere were created in the 13th century as capitalists in European city states created a traffic in commodities and news (Habermas 15). A true public sphere emerged in the 17th century with the rise of the English coffee houses and French salons where people had the freedom to express opinions regardless of their social status (Habermas 36). In 1848, France held the first election under universal direct suffrage (for males) and the contemporary slogan was that “universal suffrage closes the era of revolutions” (Hirschman 113). Out of this heady optimism, the late 19th century ushered in the era of the “informed citizen” as voting changed from a social and public duty to a private right – a civic obligation enforceable only by private conscience (Schudson). These concepts live on in the modern idea that the model voter is considered to be a citizen vested with the ability to understand the consequences of his or her choice (Menand 1). The internet is a new knowledge space which offers an alternative reading of the citizen. In Pierre Lévy’s vision of cyberculture, identity is no longer a function of belonging, it is “distributed and nomadic” (Ross & Nightingale 149). The Internet has diffused widely and is increasingly central to everyday life as a place where people go to get information (Dutton 10). Journalism initially prospered on an information scarcity factor however the technology of the Internet has created an information rich society (Tapsall & Varley 18). But research suggests that online discussions do not promote consensus, are short-lived with little impact and end up turning into “dialogues of the deaf” (Nguyen 148). The easy online publishing environment is a fertile ground for rumours, hoaxes and cheating games to circulate which risk turning the public sphere into a chaotic and anarchic space (Nguyen 148). The stereotypical blogger is pejoratively dismissed as “pajama-clad” (Papandrea 516) connoting a sense of disrespect for the proper transmission of ideas. Nevertheless the Internet offers powerful tools for collaboration that is opening up many everyday institutions to greater social accountability (Dutton 3). Recent research by the 2007 Digital Futures project shows 65 percent of respondents consider the Internet “to be a very important or extremely important source of information” (Cowden 76). By 2006, Roy Morgan was reporting that three million Australians were visiting online news site each month (Cowden.76). Crikey.com.au, Australia’s first online-only news outlet, has become a significant independent player in the Australia mediascape claiming over 5,000 subscribers by 2005 with three times as many non-paying “squatters” reading its daily email (Devine 50). Online Opinion has a similar number of subscribers and was receiving 750,000 page views a month by 2005 (National Forum). Both Crikey.com.au and Online Opinion have made moves towards public journalism in an attempt to provide ordinary people access to the public sphere. As professional journalists lose their connection with the public, bloggers are able to fill the public journalism niche (Simons, Content Makers 208). At their best, blogs can offer a “more broad-based, democratic involvement of citizens in the issues that matter to them” (Bruns 7). The research of University of North Carolina journalism professor Philip Meyer showed that cities and towns with public journalism-oriented newspapers led to a better educated local public (Simons, Content Makers 211). Meyer’s idea of good public journalism has six defining elements: a) the need to define a community’s sense of itself b) devotion of time to issues that demand community attention c) devotion of depth to the issues d) more attention to the middle ground e) a preference for substance over tactics and f) encouraging reciprocal understanding (Meyer 1). The objective of public journalism is to foster a greater sense of connection between the community and the media. It can mean journalists using ordinary people as sources and also ordinary people acting as journalists. Jay Rosen proposed a new model based on journalism as conversation (Simons, Content Makers 209). He believes the technology has now overtaken the public journalism movement (Simons, Content Makers 213). His own experiments at pro-am Internet open at assignment.net have had mixed results. His conclusion was that it wasn’t easy for people working voluntarily on the Internet to report on big stories together nor had they “unlocked” the secret of successful pro-am methods (Rosen). Nevertheless, the people formerly known as the audience, as Rosen called them, have seized the agenda. The barriers to entry into journalism have disappeared. Blogging has made Web publishing easy and the social networks are even more user friendly. The problem today is not getting published but finding an audience. And as the audience fragments, the issue will become finding a niche. One such niche is local political activism. The 2007 Australian federal election saw many online sites actively promoting citizen journalism. Most prominent was Youdecide2007 at Queensland University of Technology, funded by the Australian Research Council (ARC) in partnership with SBS, Online Opinion and the Brisbane Institute. Site co-editor Graham Young said the site’s aim was to use citizen journalists to report on their own electorates to fill the gap left by fewer journalists on the ground, especially in less populated areas (Young). While the site’s stated aim was to provide a forum for a seat-by-seat coverage and provide “a new perspective on national politics” (Youdecide2007), the end result was significantly skewed by the fact that the professional editorial team was based in Brisbane. Youdecide2007 published 96 articles in its news archive of which 59 could be identified as having a state-based focus. Figure 1 shows 62.7% of these state-based stories were about Queensland. Figure 1: Youdecide2007 news stories identifiable by state (note: national stories are omitted from this table): State Total no. of stories %age Qld 37 62.7 NSW 8 13.6 Vic 6 10.2 WA 3 5.1 Tas 2 3.4 ACT 2 3.4 SA 1 1.6 Modern election campaigns are characterised by a complex and increasingly fragmented news environment and the new media are rapidly adding another layer of complexity to the mix (Norris et al. 11-12). The slick management of national campaigns are is counter-productive to useful citizen journalism. According to Matthew Clayfield from the citizen journalism site electionTracker.net, “there are very few open events which ordinary people could cover in a way that could be described as citizen journalism” (qtd. in Hills 2007). Similar to other systems, the Australian campaign communication empowers the political leaders and media owners at the expense of ordinary party members and citizens (Warhurst 135). However the slick modern national “on message” campaign has not totally replaced old-style local activity. Although the national campaign has superimposed upon the local one and displaced it from the focus of attention, local candidates must still communicate their party policies in the electorate (Warhurst 113). Citizen journalists are ideally placed to harness this local communication. A grassroots approach is encapsulated in the words of Dan Gillmor who said “every reporter should realise that, collectively, the readers know more than they do about what they write about” (qtd. in Quinn & Quinn-Allan 66). With this in mind, I set out my own stall in citizen journalism for the 2007 Australian federal election with two personal goals: to interview all my local federal Lower House candidates and to attend as many public election meetings as possible. As a result, I wrote 19 election articles in the two months prior to the election. This consisted of 9 news items, 6 candidate interviews and 4 reports of public meetings. All the local candidates except one agreed to be interviewed. The local Liberal candidate refused to be interviewed despite repeated requests. There was no reason offered, just a continual ignoring of requests. Liberal candidates were also noticeably absent from most candidate forums I attended. This pattern of non-communicative behaviour was observed elsewhere (Bartlett, Wilson). I tried to turn this to my advantage by turning their refusal to talk into a story itself. For those that were prepared to talk, I set the expectation that the entire interview would be on the record and would be edited and published on my blog site. As a result, all candidates asked for a list of questions in advance which I supplied. Because politicians devote considerable energy and financial resources to ensure the information they impart to citizens has an appropriate ‘spin’ on it, (Negrine 10) I reserved the right to ask follow-up questions on any of their answers that required clarification. For the interviews themselves, I followed the advice of Spradley’s principle by starting with a conscious attitude of near-total ignorance, not writing the story in advance, and attempting to be descriptive, incisive, investigative and critical (Alia 100). After I posted the results of the interview, I sent a link to each of the respondents offering them a chance to clarify or correct any inaccuracies in the interview statements. Defamation skirts the boundary between free speech and reputation (Pearson 159) and a good working knowledge of the way defamation law affects journalists (citizen or otherwise) is crucial, particularly in dealing with public figures. This was an important consideration for some of the lesser known candidates as Google searches on their names brought my articles up within the top 20 results for each of the Democrat, Green and Liberal Democratic Party candidates I interviewed. None of the public meetings I attended were covered in the mainstream media. These meetings are the type of news Jan Schaffer of University of Maryland’s J-Lab saw as an ecological niche for citizen journalists to “create opportunities for citizens to get informed and inform others about micro-news that falls under the radar of news organisations who don’t have the resources” (Schaffer in Glaser). As Mark Bahnisch points out, Brisbane had three daily newspapers and a daily state based 7.30 Report twenty years ago which contrasts with the situation now where there’s no effective state parliamentary press gallery and little coverage of local politics at all (“State of Political Blogging”). Brisbane’s situation is not unique and the gaps are there to be exploited by new players. While the high cost of market entry renders the “central square” of the public sphere inaccessible to new players (Curran 128) the ease of Web access has given the citizen journalists the chance to roam its back alleys. However even if they fill the voids left by departing news organisations, there will still be a large hole in the mediascape. No one will be doing the hardhitting investigative journalism. This gritty work requires great resources and often years of time. The final product of investigative journalism is often complicated to read, unentertaining and inconclusive (Bower in Negrine 13). Margaret Simons says that journalism is a skill that involves the ability to find things out. She says the challenge of the future will be to marry the strengths of the newsroom and the dirty work of investigative journalism with the power of the conversation of blogs (“Politics and the Internet”). One possibility is raised by the Danish project Scoop. They offer financial support to individual journalists who have good ideas for investigative journalism. Founded by the Danish Association for Investigative Journalism and funded by the Danish Foreign Ministry, Scoop supports media projects across the world with the only proviso being that a journalist has to have an agreement with an editor to publish the resulting story (ABC Media Report). But even without financial support, citizens have the ability to perform rudimentary investigative journalism. The primary tool of investigative journalism is the interview (McIlwane & Bowman 260). While an interview can be arranged by anyone with access to a telephone or e-mail, it should not be underestimated how difficult a skill interviewing is. According to American journalist John Brady, the science of journalistic interviewing aims to gain two things, trust and information (Brady in White 75). In the interviews I did with politicians during the federal election, I found that getting past the “spin” of the party line to get genuine information was the toughest part of the task. There is also a considerable amount of information in the public domain which is rarely explored by reporters (Negrine 23). Knowing how to make use of this information will become a critical success factor for citizen journalists. Corporate journalists use databases such as Lexis/Nexis and Factiva to gain background information, a facility unavailable to most citizen journalists unless they are either have access through a learning institution or are prepared to pay a premium for the information. While large corporate vendors supply highly specialised information, amateurs can play a greater role in the creation and transmission of local news. According to G. Stuart Adam, journalism contains four basic elements: reporting, judging, a public voice and the here and now (13). Citizen journalism is capable of meeting all four criteria. The likelihood is that the future of communications will belong to the centralised corporations on one hand and the unsupervised amateur on the other (Bird 36). Whether the motive to continue is payment or empowerment, the challenge for citizen journalists is to advance beyond the initial success of tactical actions towards the establishment as a serious political and media alternative (Bruns 19). Nguyen et al.’s uses and gratification research project suggests there is a still a long way to go in Australia. While they found widespread diffusion of online news, the vast majority of users (78%) were still getting their news from newspaper Websites (Nguyen et al. 13). The research corroborates Mark Bahnisch’s view that “most Australians have not heard of blogs and only a tiny minority reads them (quoted in Simons, Content Makers 219). The Australian blogosphere still waits for its defining Swiftboat incident or Rathergate to announce its arrival. But Bahnisch doesn’t necessarily believe this is a good evolutionary strategy anyway. Here it is becoming more a conversation than a platform “with its own niche and its own value” (Bahnisch, “This Is Not America”). As far as my own experiments go, the citizen journalism reports I wrote gave me no financial reward but plenty of other compensations that made the experience richly rewarding. It was important to bring otherwise neglected ideas, stories and personalities into the public domain and the reports helped me make valuable connections with public-minded members of my local community. They were also useful practice to hone interview techniques and political writing skills. Finally the exercise raised my own public profile as several of my entries were picked up or hyperlinked by other citizen journalism sites and blogs. 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