College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences

OBJECTIVE: Native Hawaiians are at higher risk for cardiometabolic disease, including diabetes and cardiovascular disease compared with other ethnic groups. Diet, body mass index (BMI) and psychosocial, as well as cultural issues may influence risk for cardiometabolic disease. Our team conducted a community-based participatory research study and examined diet, height/weight, psychosocial factors, and community health concerns in Native Hawaiians living in Southern California. DESIGN AND METHODS: Cross-section of 55 participants, <18-years-old. Dietary data were collected via three 24-hr dietary recalls, anthropometrics were measured, and psychosocial factors and cardiometabolic conditions were self-reported. Talk story related to diet and health was completed in a sub-sample. Means and frequencies were calculated on dietary intakes, cardiometabolic disease and BMI. Independent t-test and chi square analyses, as appropriate, were performed to assess differences in dietary intakes, obesity and psychosocial factors between those with and without a pre-existing cardiometabolic condition. RESULTS: Of those with pre-existing health conditions (n=28), 72% reported being diagnosed with a cardiometabolic condition. For those with pre-existing cardiometabolic conditions, the daily vegetable consumption was 2.57 servings (+/-1.66) and the mean fruit consumption was 1.43 servings (+/-0.1.99). The mean fiber intake was 16.24 grams (+/-6.92), the mean percentage energy from fat was 34.82% (+/-6.40) and the mean % energy from carbohydrate was 47.15 (+/-6.77). The psychosocial data showed significantly (p<0.05) lower social support, social interaction, self-monitoring and cognitive-behavioral strategies related to exercise for those with cardiometabolic disease compared with those without disease. All the talk story discussion groups expressed concern over diabetes and weight management, both as an individual and community issue. CONCLUSIONS: The dietary data indicate that Native Hawaiians residing in Southern California should aim to increase their vegetable, fiber, and reduce % energy from fat and saturated fat. Additionally, the psychosocial data suggests that implementing physical activity programs based on socio-cultural values such as ohana, community gatherings, as well as individual self-monitoring and cognitive-behavioral strategies may improve cardiometabolic outcomes. In efforts to reduce cardiometabolic disease disparity, these data suggest that Native Hawaiians in Southern California are aware and concerned about cardiometabolic disease in the community, and that implementation of an effective energetic (diet plus physical activity) intervention that is socially, and culturally specific for Native Hawaiians in Southern California is critical.

Abstract

In contemporary Sino-French cinema, father characters who are dead, long lost or geographically distant leave gaping holes in the lives of the offspring left behind. The absent fathers in Sino-French films by Taiwanese auteurs Cheng Yu-chieh, Hou Hsiao-hsien and Tsai Ming-liang serve as metaphors for French auteurs. French New Wave films constitute the majority of the intertexts; however, early 1950s French cinema and even late nineteenth-century painting reflect the expansiveness of French influence. Despite the possibility of an orientalist dynamic, Taiwanese auteurs not only pay homage to their French 'fathers', and especially New Waver Franc¸ois Truffaut, but also strike out on their own, contributing innovative work to contemporary transnational cinemas.

Professional identity formation (PIF) is a multi-year, complex, social, and intellectual process that culminates in trainees “thinking, acting, and feeling like a doctor.” Some of the processes of PIF, particularly the Hidden Curriculum, may result in suboptimal outcomes in student’s cognition, including implicit bias and poor clinical decision-making. Many have recognized the importance of reflective writing, particularly metacognition, in undergraduate medical education. However, there are few concrete examples and explanations for fully integrating reflective writing exercises across multiple situations, experiences, and levels of growth. The authors provide conceptual frameworks, concrete curricular structures, and reflective tools used at two medical schools.

This article discusses ways that Indigenous dance is an ontological praxis that is embodied and telluric, meaning “of the earth.” It looks at how dancing bodies perform in relationship to ecosystems and entities within them, producing ontological distinctions and hierarchies that are often imbued with power. This makes dance a site of ontological struggle that potentially challenges the delusional ontological universality undergirding imperialism, genocide, and ecocide. The author explores these theoretical propositions through her participation in Oxlaval Q'anil, an emerging Ixil Maya dance project in Guatemala, and Dancing Earth, an itinerant and inter-tribal U.S.-based company founded by Rulan Tangen eleven years ago.

We examine the theoretical interrelations between progressive income taxation and macroeconomic (in)stability in an otherwise standard one-sector real business cycle model with utility-generating government purchases of goods and services. When private and public consumption expenditures are complements in the household utility and the tax schedule is progressive, we analytically show that the economy exhibits indeterminacy and sunspots if and only if the degree of government-spending preference externality is higher than a critical threshold. Unlike traditional Keynesian-type stabilization policies, raising the tax progressivity may destabilize this version of our model by generating endogenous cyclical fluctuations. Moreover, the economy always displays saddle-path stability and equilibrium uniqueness under utility substitutability between private and public consumptions and progressive taxation.

Our study examines empirically the impact of agricultural research inputs on the creation and dissemination of knowledge by the University of California Cooperative Extension (UCCE). We formulate a conceptual framework to understand the relationship between the agricultural research inputs employed by UCCE and the knowledge shared. We develop an index of knowledge based on a weighted average of the various modes through which knowledge is produced by UCCE's agricultural research for all counties in the state of California during 2007–2013. Empirical results indicate significant positive impacts of research inputs on the production of knowledge. We find research input, such as number of research positions measured as full-time equivalent (FTE), level of salary per researcher (including seniority and status), and investment in research infrastructure per FTE, positive and significant. Our models suggest diminishing marginal knowledge returns to research infrastructure, and a linear knowledge production function with respect to the number of FTE and the salary per FTE in the UCCE system.

Fiona Cheong's two novels about Singapore, The Scent of the Gods and Shadow Theatre, should be read as gothic tales of self-writing in which the protagonist emerges as an objective rather than a subjective self. This essay draws on Martin Heidegger and Michel Foucault's discussion of technology and poetics, together with Jacques Rancière's conceptualization of aesthetics, to argue that Cheong's novels are a narrative renovation of an older literary genre (the gothic) for contemporary purposes. Scent's invocation of the gothic spaces complicate the allegorical yoking of family history and nation formation, while Shadow Theatre's polyphonic and gynocentric structure creates an alternative social and narrative space within heroic, patriarchal nationalism. Both novels deploy gothic tropes immanently to critique the postcolonial Singaporean state's neoliberalizing technologies that shape individuals and the entire population as entrepreneurial subjects.

Abstract Literature in Singapore is written in the country’s four official languages: Chinese, English, Malay, and Tamil. The various literatures flourished in the late 19th and early 20th centuries with the rise of print culture in the British colony, but after independence in 1965, English became emphasized in both the education system and society at large as part of the new government’s attempts to modernize the country. Chinese, Malay, and Tamil were seen as mother tongue languages to provide Singaporeans with cultural ballast while English was regarded as a language for administration, business, and scientific and technological development. Correspondingly, literatures in other languages than English reached a plateau in terms of writerly output and readership during the 1970s and 1980s. However, since 1999, with the state’s implementation of the Renaissance City Plan to revitalize arts and culture in Singapore, there have been various initiatives to increase the visibility of contemporary Singaporean writing both within the country itself and on an international scale. Translation plays a key role in bridging the linguistic and literary divides wrought by the state’s mother tongue policies, with several works by Cultural Medallion winners in different languages translated into English, which remains at present the shared language in Singapore. Literary anthologies are also invaluable forms through which the concepts of a national literature and national identity are expressed and negotiated. A number of anthologies involving Singaporean authors and those from other countries also highlight the growing international presence of and interest in Singaporean literature. Several anthologies also focus on the topic of urban space, city life, and the rapid transformation of Singapore’s physical environment. Writings about gender and sexuality have also become more prominent in single-author collections or edited anthologies, with writers exploring various inventive and experimental narrative forms. A number of poets and writers are also established playwrights, and theater has historically been and continues to be an extremely vital form of creative expression and cultural production. Graphic novels, crime and noir fiction, and speculative and science fiction publications are also on the rise, with the awarding of the Singapore Literature Prize to Sonny Liew’s The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye signaling that these genres merit serious literary consideration. A number of literary publications and materials related to Singaporean literature can be found on the Internet, such as the journal Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, the website Singapore Poetry, and the database Poetry.sg. Various nonprofit organizations are also working toward increasing public awareness about literature through events such as Singapore Poetry Writing Month, the Migrant Worker Poetry Competition, the Singapore Writers Festival and National Poetry Festival, and also through projects that exhibit poetry in train stations and on public thoroughfares.

The world is already in climate “crisis” mode. Fossil fuels are the largest driver of climate change, and eliminating their use is an important step toward addressing the future of climate change. Yet, I argue that eliminating fossil fuel use alone is insufficient to address the crises not only of climate change, but the uneven effects of climate change and fossil fuel racial capitalism as they play out across the world. Building on the work of W.E.B. Du Bois in thinking through the establishment of abolition democracy in the post-emancipation project of Black Reconstruction, this article offers a conceptual analysis of why and to what end such a framework is essential to building a radically democratic society rooted in liberation for all. The article looks toward an abolitionist energy democracy, where abolition democracy offers guiding principles for developing theory and organizing praxis. Using a case study of the People Power Solar Cooperative in Oakland, California, USA, the article considers how people are working to dismantle fossil fuel racial capitalism through the simultaneous building up of new institutions and infrastructures in the spirit of abolition democracy. This article thus considers a notion of abolition democracy rooted in not just the elimination of a system of dominance, but the simultaneous remaking of new systems as an important way of thinking about fighting for social and ecological change.

Abstract Indigenous language endangerment is a global crisis, and in response, a normative “endangered languages” narrative about the crisis has developed. Though seemingly beneficent and accurate in many of its points, this narrative can also cause harm to language communities by furthering colonial logics that repurpose Indigenous languages as objects for wider society's consumption, while deemphasizing or even outright omitting the extreme injustices that beget language endangerment. The objective of this essay is to promote social justice praxis first by detailing how language shift results from major injustices, and then by offering possible interventions that are accountable to the communities whose languages are endangered. Drawing from my experiences as a member of a Native American community whose language was wrongly labeled “extinct” within this narrative, I begin with an overview of how language endangerment is described to general audiences in the United States and critique the way it is framed and shared. From there, I shift to an alternative that draws from Indigenous ways of knowing to promote social justice through language reclamation.

This paper examines the legacies of the emergence of the animal control and sheltering industry in the United States and their impact on contemporary public animal shelters. While decades of gradual reform have helped substantially reduce the number of animals entering shelters and being killed there, contemporary animal sheltering largely continues to follow the path set when animal sheltering developed in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Three key interrelated legacies of the pound model of early animal control and sheltering enduringly shape sheltering today: (1) the institutional culture of animal shelters grounded in the logics of caging and killing; (2) the lack of visibility and transparency, especially within government shelters; and (3) the economic logics of the pound model, including the disparities in sheltering resources across communities. Examining the origins of animal control and sheltering and identifying the specific legacies of this pound model within contemporary government-funded shelters improves understanding of why such shelters in the US have developed with a particular set of practices and ideologies, and thus provides an important footing for envisioning and enacting radical changes in animal sheltering.

A series of articles exploring Nao Bustamante's work with the history of women's participation in the Mexican Revolution.

Abstract Writers’ use of modality, an interpersonal linguistic resource commonly used for expressing probability, reveals key information about their claims. Most research on modality addresses L2 English learners, leaving a gap in research in advanced language development in other languages. This paper addresses this gap by studying how heritage language (HL) speakers of Spanish express doubt and probability in Spanish and how the lexicogrammatical features they use across genres reveal how they express these meanings. Drawing on Systemic Functional Linguistics and pragmatics, this study examines modality in 125 texts written in Spanish by HL students in the U.S., including narratives, expositions, article reviews, personal responses, and research papers. The results reveal that students use the most modality resources in personal responses and the least in reviews. This work offers insights about the interpersonal resources writers choose to express their argumentative stance and the socio-pragmatic competence in writing among HL students.

This music score was submitted for the Kaleidoscope 2020 Call for Scores, an open access collaboration with the UCLA Music Library.

From the time it was completed nearly four hundred years ago, Caravaggio’s painting of a nude boy embracing a ram (today in the Pinacoteca Capitolina, Rome) has confounded viewers as to its subject, which has been variously called ‘Pastor friso’, Saint John the Baptist, Corydon, Paris, and ‘nude youth with a ram’. This essay argues that none of these titles accounts for what we see in the painting and, no less importantly, what we do not. Using a range of modes of analysis, we propose a new reading of the painting as a variant on the theme of the Sacrifice of Isaac, one that has fascinating implications for Caravaggio’s conception of the viewer–subject relationship and which contributes to a deepening of our understanding of one of early modern Europe’s most innovative and provocative painters.

This article explores the feasibility of face-recognition technologies for analyzing works of portraiture and, in the process, provides a quantitative source of evidence to art historians in answering many of their ambiguities concerning identity of the subject in some portraits and in understanding artists? styles. Works of portrait art bear the mark of visual interpretation of the artist. Moreover, the number of samples available to model these effects is often limited. Based on an understanding of artistic conventions, we show how to learn and validate features that are robust in distinguishing subjects in portraits (sitters) and that are also capable of characterizing an individual artist?s style. This can be used to learn a feature space called portrait feature space (PFS) that is representative of quantitative measures of similarities between portrait pairs known to represent same/different sitters. Through statistical hypothesis tests, we analyze uncertain portraits against known identities and explain the significance of the results from an art historian?s perspective. Results are shown on our data consisting of over 270 portraits belonging largely to the Renaissance era.

BackgroundNon-medical/illegal use of prescription stimulants popularly have been referred to as "study drugs". This paper discusses the current prevalence and consequences of misuse of these drugs and implications of this information for drug policy.ResultsStudy drugs are being misused annually by approximately 4% of older teens and emerging adults. Yet, there are numerous consequences of misuse of prescription stimulants including addiction, negative reactions to high dosages, and medical complications. Policy implications include continuing to limit access to study drugs, finding more safe prescription drug alternatives, interdiction, and public education.ConclusionMuch more work is needed on prescription stimulant misuse assessment, identifying the extent of the social and economic costs of misuse, monitoring and reducing access, and developing prevention and cessation education efforts.

Through a case study of Meituan Waimai, China's dominant food delivery platform, this article examines how algorithmic management is entangled with labor politics. It develops the concept of the technopolitics of labor expendability, which rests on two interrelated arguments. First, the logic of optimization underpinning algorithmic management is not realized solely through the manipulation of data inputs and computational models; rather, it fundamentally depends on the presumed expendability of migrant workers. In the Chinese context, couriers are first imagined as disposable, an assumption that enables the exclusion of their needs, preferences, and well-being from the computational frame. Second, this vision is further normalized and legitimized through its alignment with specific political and ideological formations, particularly China's fetishization of technological superiority and the long-standing marginalization of rural migrant workers. By situating algorithmic management within the local political economy, this article challenges its dominant portrayal as a universal technical phenomenon and highlights the situated labor conditions that shape its design and application.

Do university ethics classes influence students' real-world moral choices? We aimed to conduct the first controlled study of the effects of ordinary philosophical ethics classes on real-world moral choices, using non-self-report, non-laboratory behavior as the dependent measure. We assigned 1332 students in four large philosophy classes to either an experimental group on the ethics of eating meat or a control group on the ethics of charitable giving. Students in each group read a philosophy article on their assigned topic and optionally viewed a related video, then met with teaching assistants for 50-minute group discussion sections. They expressed their opinions about meat ethics and charitable giving in a follow-up questionnaire (1032 respondents after exclusions). We obtained 13,642 food purchase receipts from campus restaurants for 495 of the students, before and after the intervention. Purchase of meat products declined in the experimental group (52% of purchases of at least $4.99 contained meat before the intervention, compared to 45% after) but remained the same in the control group (52% both before and after). Ethical opinion also differed, with 43% of students in the experimental group agreeing that eating the meat of factory farmed animals is unethical compared to 29% in the control group. We also attempted to measure food choice using vouchers, but voucher redemption rates were low and no effect was statistically detectable. It remains unclear what aspect of instruction influenced behavior.

A key element of risk assessment is accounting for the full range of variability in response to environmental exposures. Default dose-response methods typically assume a 10-fold difference in response to chemical exposures between average (healthy) and susceptible humans, despite evidence of wider variability. Experts and authoritative bodies support using advanced techniques to better account for human variability due to factors such as in utero or early life exposure and exposure to multiple environmental, social, and economic stressors.This review describes: 1) sources of human variability and susceptibility in dose-response assessment, 2) existing US frameworks for addressing response variability in risk assessment; 3) key scientific inadequacies necessitating updated methods; 4) improved approaches and opportunities for better use of science; and 5) specific and quantitative recommendations to address evidence and policy needs.Current default adjustment factors do not sufficiently capture human variability in dose-response and thus are inadequate to protect the entire population. Susceptible groups are not appropriately protected under current regulatory guidelines. Emerging tools and data sources that better account for human variability and susceptibility include probabilistic methods, genetically diverse in vivo and in vitro models, and the use of human data to capture underlying risk and/or assess combined effects from chemical and non-chemical stressors.We recommend using updated methods and data to improve consideration of human variability and susceptibility in risk assessment, including the use of increased default human variability factors and separate adjustment factors for capturing age/life stage of development and exposure to multiple chemical and non-chemical stressors. Updated methods would result in greater transparency and protection for susceptible groups, including children, infants, people who are pregnant or nursing, people with disabilities, and those burdened by additional environmental exposures and/or social factors such as poverty and racism.

A growing body of literature offers exciting perspectives on the use of brain stimulation to boost training-related perceptual improvements in humans. Recent studies suggest that combining visual perceptual learning (VPL) training with concomitant transcranial electric stimulation (tES) leads to learning rate and generalization effects larger than each technique used individually. Both VPL and tES have been used to induce neural plasticity in brain regions involved in visual perception, leading to long-lasting visual function improvements. Despite being more than a century old, only recently have these techniques been combined in the same paradigm to further improve visual performance in humans. Nonetheless, promising evidence in healthy participants and in clinical population suggests that the best could still be yet to come for the combined use of VPL and tES. In the first part of this perspective piece, we briefly discuss the history, the characteristics, the results and the possible mechanisms behind each technique and their combined effect. In the second part, we discuss relevant aspects concerning the use of these techniques and propose a perspective concerning the combined use of electric brain stimulation and perceptual learning in the visual system, closing with some open questions on the topic.

Do goals, beliefs, and desires affect visual experience? This question has long been controversial in cognitive science. There exists extensive literature documenting motivational effects on perceptual reports, but these findings could reflect biases in what people report seeing rather than what they see. Here, we propose that examining the underlying neurocomputational processes can provide new perspectives on this longstanding debate. We review evidence suggesting that motivation biases both perception and action, but does so via distinct neural systems: amygdala and locus coeruleus (LC)-norepinephrine (NE) activity enhances sensory representations for desirable stimuli, while striatal dopamine biases action selection toward goal-congruent actions. The neurocomputational approach provides a framework to advance a mechanistic understanding of motivated seeing and how these biases are shaped by context.

Implicit measures were developed to provide relatively pure estimates of attitudes and stereotypes, free from the influence of processes that constrain true and accurate reporting. However, implicit measures are not pure estimates of attitudes or stereotypes but, instead, reflect the joint contribution of multiple processes. The fact that responses on implicit measures reflect multiple cognitive processes complicates both their interpretation and application. In this article, I highlight contributions made to research using implicit measures by multinomial processing trees (MPTs), an analytic method that quantifies the joint contributions of multiple cognitive processes to observed responses. I provide examples of how MPTs have helped resolve mysteries that have arisen over the years, examples of findings that were initially taken at face value but were later reinterpreted by MPTs, and look to the future for ways in which MPTs seem poised to further advance research using implicit measures.

BACKGROUND: Cognitive impairment is associated with increased mortality rates in late life, but it is unclear whether worse cognition predicts working-age mortality. METHODS: The data come from a U.S. national survey (N = 3 973 aged 32-84 at cognitive testing in 2004-06, mean age 56.6, 56.3% female; N = 3 055 retested in 2013-18 at ages 42-94, mean age 64.6, 56.6% female; mortality follow-up through 2019). We use Cox hazard models to investigate whether cognition is associated with mortality below age 65, how the magnitude of this risk compares with the risk in later life, and whether the association persists after adjusting for potential confounders. RESULTS: Worse cognition is associated with mortality, but the demographic-adjusted hazard ratio (HR) diminishes with age from 2.0 per standard deviation (SD; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.7-2.4) at age 55-1.4 (95% CI, 1.3-1.6) at age 85. In the fully adjusted model, the corresponding HRs are 1.4 (95% CI, 1.2-1.7) and 1.3 (95% CI, 1.1-1.4), respectively. The absolute differences in mortality by level of cognition, however, are larger at older ages because mortality is rare at younger ages. The fully adjusted model implies a 2.7 percentage point differential in the estimated percentage dying between ages 55 and 65 for those with low cognition (1 SD below the overall mean, 5.7%) versus high cognition (1 SD above the mean, 3.0%). The corresponding differential between ages 75 and 85 is 8.4 percentage points (24.6% vs 16.2%, respectively). CONCLUSIONS: Cognitive function may be a valuable early warning sign of premature mortality, even at working ages, when dementia is rare.

The two white male cosponsors, a Democrat and a Republican, dressed as King George and Hamilton, respectively, as they rapped the resolution in the state senate. InHamilton, chief creator Lin-Manuel Miranda stakes out space for an immigrant from the Caribbean who was in the room where the United States of America was founded. Based on Ron Chernow's biography,Hamiltonfollows the struggles and successes of Alexander Hamilton in a story largely told by his nemesis, Aaron Burr. The musical opened Off-Broadway at the Public Theater in 2015 and subsequently moved to Broadway. With its Founders Chic historical approach, hip-hop aesthetic, and multiracial cast, this Broadway blockbuster has earned substantial commercial and critical acclaim from across the political spectrum. Former President Barack Obama joked, “Hamilton, I'm pretty sure, is the only thing Dick Cheney and I agree on.”