• Publications close
• Research data close
• Other research products close
• Lecture close
• English close
• North American Studies close

Dr. Laura Kramer has 50 years’ experience studying arboviruses in the field and laboratory, from both experimental and observational approaches, using both classical and molecular tools. She was Director of the Arbovirus Laboratory, Wadsworth Center, New York State Department of Health from 2000 – Dec 2020 when she retired, and Professor of Biomedical Sciences, State University of New York (SUNY) School of Public Health, Albany, NY. She is also an Adjunct Professor in the Biology department at SUNY Albany. Dr. Kramer also is a virology moderator of ProMED-mail [Program for Monitoring Emerging Diseases] where she reports on COVID-19 and Ebola as well as vaccine-preventable diseases. In this MOOD Science Webinar, Laura discussed her comprehensive research paper "Introduction, Spread, and Establishment of West Nile Virus in the Americas" published on the Journal of Medical Entomology, illustrating the complex relationships among West Nile Virus (WNV), vector mosquitoes and vertebrate hosts, as well as how certain environmental variables - including land use and climate - affected the spillover risk to humans in the United States since its introduction.

This paper has as objective to give some directions on how journalists can regain their ‘lost hero status’. News outlets have to deal with an audience that lost confident in the news media. This reduced confidence may be explained by a reduced quality of journalism, driven by increased economic pressure, cutbacks in news gathering, and a decreased editorial autonomy. A historical event which is still cited as iconic for the mythical status of journalism is the news coverage about the Watergate affair. More specifically, there are the countless references to the work of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, two journalists who worked for the Washington Post at that time. They received their status as celebrity journalists primarily due to the best seller they have written in the course of the events, All the president’s men, and even more to the movie with the same title, with Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford as the lead actors. Although the affair lasted from 1972 to 1974, so today forty years ago, it still appeals to the imagination of anyone who thinks of what good journalism ought to be (to give just one example: a movie poster of All the President’s Men sticks to the apartment walls of journalist Katrine Fønsmark in the successful Danish TV series Borgen). Understanding the way of how Woodward and Bernstein dealt with the events might help to ‘upgrade’ the status of journalists today. The research questions are: What lessons can be learned from the way Woodward and Bernstein covered the events forty years ago? Are these practices still useful today, and if not, why not? This would give us a clue whether or not current journalists would still be able to break a story as Watergate. The method consists of a critical reading of the book of the two journalists, a literature review and personal meetings with Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein at the University of Texas Austin (that purchased and manages the archives of the two journalists). The paper is structured around ten statements on what a good journalists should do. Afterwards, all statements are refuted one by one. The erroneous statements are: 1. Journalists themselves are the greatest source of information (external nonprofessional sources are unreliable) 2. To find out the truth, the end justifies the means (and that goes beyond journalistic ethics) 3. If one threatens you with a lawsuit, you better watch your steps (you do not have a monopoly on the truth after all) 4. Base your story on interviews (and make sure you can quote your interviewees literally) 5. Press conferences provide all relevant information, and in addition, try to pick up information from expert sources (after all, they are organized to provide the press with information ready-to-use) 6. Postpone a story to a later moment in time makes no sense (your competitors will publish it anyway) 7. Make sure that if you bring a story you can also bring the wider picture (if you can’t do so, and the Why? Question remains unanswered, you better keep your mouth) 8. Partisan journalism cannot be objective (neutrality is preferred at any time) 9. A journalist operates in the shadows, like a fly on the wall (journalists that are in the spotlight make themselves suspicious) 10. Make sure that the sources you cite are verifiable (so that there is absolute transparency of sources) ispartof: ECREA's Journalism Studies Section Conference location:Thessaloniki, Greece date:28 Mar - 29 Mar 2014 status: published

ispartof: American Novelists’ Autobiographical Acts: Nonfictional Disruptions location:Aix-Marseille Université date:6 Jul - 7 Jul 2023 status: published

ispartof: OpenCast Community Summit location:Valencia, Spain date:1 Mar - 3 Mar 2017 status: accepted

Webinar presentation by the co-chairs of the Alberta Council on Academic Integrity working group on cheating cheating. In this eye-opening webinar Eaton & Boisvert talk about contract cheating in Alberta, including about essay mills, homework completion services, unethical tutoring services, and thesis consultation services that all cross the line into academic misconduct. Participants learned about the size and scope of this predatory industry and how it preys on our students, including engaging in blackmail and extortion. By the end of this session engaged participants will be able to: (1) Describe what contract cheating is; (2) analyze how contract cheating impacts students; and (3) discover practical tips and strategies to promote academic integrity. Cite this presentation as: Eaton, S. E., & Boisvert, S. (2021, October 20). Contract cheating in Alberta and beyond. Paper presented at the Academic Integrity Week: Taylor Institute for Teaching and Learning, University of Calgary [online[Calgary, Canada.

„Ein Traum ist ein Wunsch, den Dein Herz ausspricht“, singt die Heldin von Walt Disneys Cinderella. Das gilt so auch für die kollektiven Phantasien und fabrizier- ten sozialen Mythen, die wir „Filme“ nennen, und sie sind es um so mehr dann, wenn sie von gar nichts Besonderem zu handeln scheinen. Richard Dyer vertritt die These, dass „Unterhaltung“ im Wesentlichen Kompensation ist und bietet uns „etwas, nach dem wir uns zutiefst sehnen und in unserem Alltagsleben nicht finden können“. Dieses Etwas kann auch etwas sein, von dem wir gar nicht wussten, das wir es wollten. Für viele Amerikaner war ein solches Etwas Ronald Reagan, der ehemalige Filmschauspieler, der zwei Mal zum Präsidenten gewählt wurde. Politiker in liberalen Demokratien und die Produzenten der Massenkultur haben eine gemeinsame Mission: Szenarien zu entwerfen, die auf natürliche Weise hegemonial auftreten, beruhigend wirken und das größtmögliche Publikum ansprechen. Welche gesellschaftlichen Kräfte haben uns Ronald Reagan beschert, und welche kollektiven Phantasien vermochte er zu artikulieren? Und welcher historischer Prozess oder kosmischer Zufall war es, der diese Phantasien im Film Ghostbusters (1984) Gestalt annehmen ließ?

The Romantic sublime, which has influentially shaped the Western relationship with nature, is no longer viable in the Anthropocene because it views nature as separated from humans and does not fully represent the intricacy of human/non-human relationship (Caracciolo 2021). This paper assesses the limits and affordances of the notion of the “haptic sublime” (McNee 2016) for challenging the Eurocentrism, androcentrism, and ocularcentrism of the Romantic sublime in a way that would also lead to heightened self- and/or environmental awareness. To that end, it analyzes extracts from American ecobiographical memoirs that build on American Romanticism’s, and more specifically Henry D. Thoreau’s multisensorial approach to nature (Lombard 2019), which suitably integrates the subjective and embodied dimensions of the haptic sublime. Inspired by insights from affective ecocriticism and rhetorical (eco)narratology, these analyses show that the haptic sublime involves bodily and multisensorial contact with material environments which induce affects such as guilt, satisfaction, and joy, that move beyond the confines of the romantic experiences of awe and horror. Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air and Silvia Vásquez-Lavado's In the Shadow of the Mountain are considered so as to argue that recent mutations in the rhetoric of the sublime retrospectively unearths haptic dimensions to the experience of the sublime. ispartof: The American Comparative Literature Association's 2023 Annual Meeting location:Chicago, IL, United States date:16 Mar - 19 Mar 2023 status: published

Phase I: Methods and Problems in Developing the List o[Potential Biota of Concern (PBOC)