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"Growth (Plants) Fiction."
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The garden crew
Develops reading skills through games and a fictional story about a group of students who plant and tend a garden, with the help of their teacher, and finally have a big feast with all the food they have grown.
Book
Capitalism against the planet: Posthuman ecocriticism in Alistair Mackay's It Doesn't Have To Be This Way
In this article, I examine various dimensions of displacement resulting from the environmental crisis envisaged in the speculative debut novel of the South African author Alistair Mackay: It Doesn't Have To Be This Way (2022). The theoretical framework is located in the area of posthumanist studies but also involves elements of trauma theory, as the issue of psychological displacement is viewed through E. Ann Kaplan's concept of pre-trauma, a paralysing anxiety about the future disaster evoked by the scenarios of the near apocalypse. I also offer a brief review of the political and economic conditions of post-apartheid South Africa, discussing the country's adoption of neoliberal tenets. Since Mackay' novel represents climate change as the result of ecologically hazardous activities of multinational corporations which stem from their colonial/imperialist commodification of the natural environment, my analysis draws from ecocritical African studies and contemporary critiques of capitalism, thus situating the climatic catastrophe of the Anthropocene in the context of destructive practices of the neoliberalist economy. Furthermore, in this article, I employ the posthumanist perspective (Hayles; Braidotti) to discuss the issue of body augmentation, presenting the reservations of Mackay's characters towards dehumanising effects of integrating our bodies with ultramodern technologies. Finally, a pro-active ecological endeavour of tree-planting is examined in the context of Donna Haraway's notion of the Chthulucene as well as a long-standing African appreciation of the forest-as a biological asset, regulating climate and farming, and as a spiritual one, the abode of deities. Keywords: Alistair Mackay, ecocriticism, South Africa, apocalyptic fiction, posthumanism, environment, capitalism, neoliberalism, colonialism.
Journal Article
Little Boo
A pumpkin seed tries unsuccessfully to be scary until it grows into a pumpkin and Halloween arrives.
Book
Effects of Forsythia Suspense Extract as an Antibiotics Substitute on Growth Performance, Nutrient Digestibility, Serum Antioxidant Capacity, Fecal Escherichia coli Concentration and Intestinal Morphology of Weaned Piglets
The aim of this study is to determine the efficiency of Forsythia suspense extract (FSE) as an antibiotics substitute on performance, nutrient digestibility, serum antioxidant capacity, fecal Escherichia coli concentration and intestinal morphology of weaned piglets. A total of 108 Duroc × (Landrace × Yorkshire) weaned piglets (28 days (d) weaned, average body weight of 8.68 ± 1.36 kg) were randomly assigned into three dietary treatments, six pens per treatment, three barrows and three gilts per pen. The treatments contained a corn-soybean meal basal diet (CTR), an antibiotic diet (basal diet + 75 mg/kg chlortetracycline; CTC), and an FSE diet (basal diet + 200 mg/kg FSE; FSE). The experiment included phase 1 (d 1 to 14), phase 2 (d 15 to 28) and phase 3 (d 29 to 35). Compared with CTR, piglets fed FSE show improved (p < 0.05) average daily gain (ADG) and average daily feed intake in phase 2, as well as enhanced (p < 0.05) ADG from day 15 to 35 and day 1 to 28. Piglets supplemented with CTC and FSE showed a reduced (p < 0.05) diarrhea rate in phase 1, while piglets fed FSE showed enhanced (p < 0.05) apparent total tract digestibility (ATTD) of dry matter, organic matter, crude protein and gross energy, as well as lower (p < 0.05) nitrogen output in phase 2 compared with CTR and CTC. The content in the form of Colony-Forming Units (CFUs) of fecal E. coli on day 14 and 28 was lower (p < 0.05) in piglets fed FSE in comparison with CTR. The contents of total antioxidant capacity, superoxide dismutase and catalase in serum are enhanced (p < 0.05) compared with CTR and CTC, whereas the concentration of malondialdehyde in serum was decreased (p < 0.05) for piglets fed FSE on day 28 compared with CTC. The villus height to crypt depth ratio in ileum was numerically higher (p < 0.05) in piglets fed FSE in comparison with CTR. In conclusion, dietary FSE supplementation could substitute CTC in improving antioxidant capacity, nutrients digestibility and reducing fecal E. coli content, so as to reduce nitrogen output and diarrhea rate, and eventually improve performance in weaned piglets.
Journal Article
Everyone starts small
Spring rains change Water from a tumbling creek to a roaring river and bring Tree nutrients it needs to stretch toward the sky. As Sun's rays intensify, the sprouts and fruits and insects of the forest grow and bloom and develop, all working together in harmony. Even Fire, whose work causes Tree to ache from the inside, brings opportunity for the next generation of flora and fauna. Paired with the vivid, organic imagery of Dominique Ramsey, Liz Garton Scanlon's poetic tribute to our planet's resilience is a resonant story of life, death, and regeneration.
Book
DATA TRANSMISSION AND ENERGY EFFICIENT INTERNET DATA CENTERS
The internet is a marvel of human accomplishment and a feat of technological engineering, which allows nearly instantaneous communication across the globe-an act once considered the stuff of science fiction. It has been lauded for its environmental benefits, such as reducing paper production and waste, but, as with any great accomplishment, there are unintended consequences. The increased proliferation of electronic devices to access the internet and the exponential advancement of those devices results in large amounts of electronic waste-a problem in its own right. Compounding the issue, for all of those internet-enabled devices to work, they must rely on the backbone of the internet: data servers. Data servers are connected by the thousands within data centers, and these centers must continuously draw electricty from the national electric grid to keep up with internet user demand. This overwhelming amount of energy and electricity consumption creates huge electricity bills for U.S. companies and produces millions of metric tons of toxic carbon emissions annually. This Comment addresses the impacts of increased energy consumption by internet data centers and suggests a regulatory solution to make those data centers more energy efficient. Within the United States, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is the best-suited agency to address the energy efficiency of the internet. Under the Federal Power Act-and consistent with the Supreme Court's interpretation of the Act's language in New York v. FERC and FERC v. Electric Power Supply Ass'n-FERC has the authority to mandate efficiency standards for internet data centers because those data centers transmit electric energy in interstate commerce and may be considered transmission facilities. Overall, this Comment aims to suggest a regulatory means by which the United States can reduce its energy consumption, thereby harmonizing environmental and business concerns to allow for sustainable economic growth.
Journal Article
Twists of the Lily: Floral Ambivalence in the Work of Virginia Woolf and Georgia O'Keeffe
As iconic female artists, Virginia Woolf and Georgia O’Keeffe have garnered quite a bit of attention for their use of flowers: one thinks immediately of Woolf 's short story “Kew Gardens,” of the flower shop in Mrs. Dalloway (1925), of the blooming gardens of Fernham in A Room of One's Own (1929), of Rhoda's petals in The Waves (1937), and, of course, of O’Keeffe's giant, vulvic petunias, her upright, autonomous calla lilies, her involuted sweet peas, and her spiraled roses.1 However, a growing body of scholarship, such as Amy King's Bloom, has begun to complicate the simple identification of female and floral beauty, revealing how modernist women artists re-coded flower imagery to covertly express their rebellion against gender conventions. Virginia Woolf began by using flowers in a number of ways: as markers of Victorian gender expectations, as traditional literary-archetypal allusions, as structural devices or design elements often linking characters. But she also deployed them in ways that complicate and extend their conventional associations, in particular presenting them as sometimes-androgynous figures for the integrated and autonomous life. Woolf 's floral imagery can be informatively compared with Georgia O’Keeffe's similarly complicated deployment of flowers as a challenge to over-simplistic Freudian interpretations of her work; both women self-consciously manipulated, reversed, and sometimes deconstructed traditional floral symbolism in an effort to create a new female rhetoric of modernism.Although inhabiting separate continents, Woolf and O’Keeffe came from similar historical contexts. Born in 1887, Georgia O’Keeffe's background was characterized by art critic Arlene Raven as extending from “‘womb-centered’ Victorian culture” through “‘woman centered’ first wave feminism,” and the description is equally attributable to Woolf, born five years earlier (115). Both Woolf and O’Keeffe had strong ties to the feminist movement: Woolf 's connections to the Strachey sisters and suffragette Ethel Smyth were matched by O’Keeffe's life-long friendship with Anita Pollitzer, who was instrumental in the passage of the Suffrage Amendment. But in her search for independence, Woolf needed to kill off the compliance with floral rituals characteristic of the “Angel in the House” and separate from the old-fashioned gender roles associated with her mother, while O’Keeffe needed to differentiate herself from the sexual innuendos created by the exhibition of the revealing pictures of her taken by Alfred Steiglitz.
Book Chapter