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Predation can influence the magnitude of herbivory that grazers exert on primary producers by altering both grazer abundance and their per capita consumption rates via changes in behavior, density‐dependent effects, and size. Therefore, models based solely on changes in abundance may miss key components of grazing pressure. We estimated shifts in grazing pressure associated with changes in the abundance and per capita consumption rates of sea urchins triggered by size‐selective predation by sea otters (Enhydra lutris). Field surveys suggest that sea otters dramatically decreased the abundance and median size of sea urchins. Furthermore, laboratory experiments revealed that kelp consumption by sea urchins varied nonlinearly as a function of urchin size such that consumption rates increased to the 0.56 and 0.68 power of biomass for red and green urchins, respectively. This reveals that shifts in urchin size structure due to size‐selective predation by sea otters alter sea urchin per capita grazing rates. Comparison of two quantitative models estimating total consumptive capacity revealed that a model incorporating shifts in urchin abundance while neglecting urchin size structure overestimated grazing pressure compared to a model that incorporated size. Consequently, incorporating shifts in urchin size better predicted field estimates of kelp abundance compared to equivalent models based on urchin abundance alone. We provide strong evidence that incorporating size‐specific parameters increases our ability to describe and predict trophic interactions. We estimated shifts in grazing pressure associated with changes in the abundance and per capita consumption rates of sea urchins triggered by size‐selective predation by sea otters (Enhydra lutris). We provide strong evidence that incorporating size‐specific parameters into ecological models enhances our ability to describe species interactions and predict trophic cascades by accounting for a common and large source of variation in per capita interaction strength: size.

As the global climate crisis continues, pursuing political consensus on pro-climate actions becomes a more urgent priority. At the same time that the United States is a major driver of climate change, its population is characterized by great variability in opinions on this phenomenon. The leading analysis of climate opinion within the U.S. population indicates that it consists of six distinct audience segments that vary in their stances toward climate change. Given this myriad landscape, a variety of styles of public communication on climate-related issues is warranted. This dissertation explores the attitudinal effects of a short video message describing the reproductive health harms of air pollution, a frame that has not yet been extensively employed in climate communications. A survey was carried out with 1551 U.S.-based participants who reported their level of concern about air pollution, support for clean energy policy, and support for energy rebates after exposure to the message. Participants’ ratings of these variables were compared to a group that watched a video describing the environmental harms of air pollution, as well as a group that viewed no message. Analysis reveals that the reproductive health message appeals to certain groups on certain issues. Notably, the message was particularly effective at engendering support for energy rebates, leading to equal or greater ratings of support for energy rebates as compared to the environmental message in every case tested in this project. These findings suggest that there is underutilized potential in a reproductive health frame within the sphere of climate communications.

The present essay is mainly concerned with the coronation entries staged for James I and Charles II by the City of London in 1604 and 1661, and especially with the temporary arches made out of wood and canvas and erected to mark nodal points along the routes. These events have been the subjects of scholarship keenly attuned to their place in accessions more than usually demanding upon representations of the king’s majesty, in as much as James was the first Stuart king of England and, by the terms of hereditary monarchy, his grandson’s reign began twelve years before his coronation, at the moment Charles I’s head was severed from the neck. Here, however, the arches will explain, or emblematize, a particular way of conceiving architecture: as an assemblage of readily-dismountable parts like Lego bricks, or like a trophy, the ornamental group of symbolic or typical objects arranged for display. In this kind of architecture ‘classical’ ornament comprises, not the material realization of a stable, rational, and universal intellectual system elsewhere promoted by the early Stuarts’ patronage of Inigo Jones, for example, but what Sir Balthazar Gerbier in 1648 called a ‘true History’ of destruction and triumph, the result of more or less random despoliation and reassembly. What follows is not, therefore, directly concerned with majesty, nor with the arches’ iconography or their audiences, their place in London’s ceremonial geography, nor even their elaboration of the ‘complex relationships between two distinct but interconnected political domains’, the City that built them and the monarchy that graced them.

Christine Stevenson reviews two books about English architect and stage designer Inigo Jones, \"Inigo Jones and the classical tradition\" (Cambridge University Press, 2007), by Christy Anderson, and \"Inigo Jones and the European classicist tradition\" (Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2007), by Giles Worsley.

Today in the U.S. the narrative of the “bad drug” has become quite a familiar account. There is an ever-growing collection of pharmaceutical products whose safety and efficacy has been debunked through the scandalous exposure of violations of integrity on the part of researchers, lapses in procedure and judgment on the part of the FDA, and reckless profiteering on the part of big pharma. However, a closer look reveals that the oversights and loopholes depicted in the bad drug narrative are not incidental failures of an otherwise intact, effective system. Rather, bad drugs, like good drugs, are a product of normal operations of the system; the same processes, actors, and influences manifest in both. The aim of this project is to shed light on these processes, actors, and influences at work in drug normalization by interrogating the peculiar case of the drug Lupron. Lupron exhibits all of the controversial features of the “bad drug” narrative but has remained an endorsed and embraced staple of the infertility industry. This contradiction situates Lupron to expose a number of the contingencies on which drug normalization rests more generally. In order to put forth an explanatory model for drug normalization, three such contingencies are described in detail for the case at hand: the nature of drug regulation, the structures and value that underpin the medical categorization of diseases, and the inextricability of post-medicine from the forces of industry. These contingencies provide some explanatory power for understanding not only the retention of Lupron but the ways in which all drugs are produced, validated, and perpetuated in a society.

Despite nearly forty years of research on the summer reading loss phenomenon, defined as the backsliding in reading achievement that may occur during the summer when students were not enrolled in school, consensus remains elusive regarding the most effective way to mitigate reading regression. This quantitative, non-experimental research study examined the relationship between summer reading regression and summer school attendance for a sample of first grade and second grade struggling readers within a suburban school district in the Midwest region of the United States of America. For the purposes of this study, the researcher defined struggling readers as first and second grade students scoring at or below the 45th percentile on the STAR Reading Enterprise Test at the end of their current grade. Analyzing three consecutive years of archival data in the form of STAR Reading Enterprise scores, the researcher intended to determine if any statistically significant difference exists between struggling readers who attend summer school and struggling readers who do not attend summer school. This study intended to determine the influence of early intervention during the summer following first grade for struggling readers, including, but not limited to, students with limited English proficiency, students who were eligible for free and reduced price lunch, and students diagnosed with a specific learning disability. The study also included a similar examination of the relationship between summer school attendance and reading regression for struggling readers during the summer following second grade. Statistical tests of archival data, including a linear regression analysis, did not support any of the proposed hypotheses as findings for this research study indicated that summer school does not have a statistically significant influence on the reading regression for struggling readers in first grade or second grade. Moreover, there was no statistically significant influence on reading regression for struggling readers by race, gender, socioeconomic status, English proficiency, and specific learning disability diagnosis. The findings were further examined regarding implications for current educational practices as well as recommendations for further research.