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The thesis is a sociological study of the Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp. It addresses the question of how it is possible for women to act collectively to promote social change: primarily, to resist and transform relations of male domination and female subordination, and, secondarily, to resist the forces of militarism. It highlights the importance for feminist sociology of theoretical and substantive attention to women's agency. The thesis offers an analysis of the origins of Greenham, thereby developing a critique of the gender-ignorance of previous theoretical work on social movements and arguing the importance of attention to macro-, ineso- and micro-level processes in the studying of the creation of collective politA.cal action. The particular character and ethos of Greenham as a form of feminist politics is explored, both in terms of the internal workings of the movement and in its actions confronting the outside world. The responses of the forces which were challenged by Greenham are analyzed, in order to assess its impact. Finally, the transformations in consciousness and identity experienced by women who had been involved with Greenham are discussed, contributing both theoretically and substantively to feminist understandings of women's consciousness and identity.

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Local currencies have been founded in dozens of communities around the United States. By printing their own money that can only be used at participating local merchants or service providers, or in direct exchange with community members, advocates of local currencies try to reinvigorate local commerce, demonstrate community opposition to "big box" retailers and globalization, and support local employment. Although many local currencies have been founded, most of them have had only limited success, but even where local currencies fail to thrive, they raise important questions about the ways in which we organize institutions. This dissertation has two key concerns that emerge from those questions, the first of which is to explore the ways in which the meaning of money is reconfigured by the organizers and the users of local currencies. Second, this project seeks to explain the conditions under which local currencies operate, with the goal of building an understanding of how organizations successfully challenge the deeply embedded and institutionalized practices that surround the use of money. Local currencies are an innovative form of community economic organization that has previously gone under-studied by scholars. This project, the first to address local currencies with a large set of quantitative macro-level data as well as case-oriented archival and survey data, adds to knowledge of movement development and maintenance, and the social construction and use of money. Local currency reminds us that the systems of dollars and cents are socially constructed and that they therefore are changeable. But changing institutions that are part of our everyday life is difficult; because the use of money is so deeply embedded in routines and institutions, it's difficult to even ask questions about money: Where does money come from? Why do we trust it? And how might alternatives to money work? Local currency reminds us that money is not necessarily as "real" as we tend to think and it invites us to think about the system of institutions in which we live.

Twelve spatial-cueing experiments examined stimulus-driven and goal-driven control of visual attention orienting under multiple-cue conditions. Spatial cueing involves presenting a cue at a potential target location before a target appears in a display, and measuring the cue's effect on responses to the target stimulus. Under certain conditions, a cue that appears abruptly in a display (direct cue) can speed responses to a target appearing at the previously cued location relative to other uncued locations (called the cue effect). The experiments in this dissertation used a new multiple-cue procedure to decouple the effects of stimulus-driven and goal-driven processes on the control of attention. This technique involved simultaneously presenting a red direct cue (Unique Cue) that was highly predictive of the target location along with multiple grey direct cues (Standard Cues) that were not predictive of the target location. The basic finding was that while cue effects occurred at all cued locations, they were significantly larger at the Unique-Cue location. This finding was interpreted as evidence for stimulus-driven cue effects at all cued locations with additional goal-driven cue effects at the Unique-Cue location. Further experiments showed that Standard-Cue effects could occur independently at multiple locations, that they seemed to involve a sensory-based interaction between the cues and the target, and that they were mediated by a limitedcapacity tracking mechanism. In addition, Unique-Cue effects were found to be the product of goal-driven operations, to interact with Standard-Cue effects, and to involve inhibited processing at unattended locations. These results were explained in terms of a filter-based model of attention control that assigns priority to potential attention-shift destinations. According to this model, stimulus-driven and goal-driven factors generate signals (activity distributions) that drive a filter to open an attention channel at the highest priority location by suppressing the signals at other locations. The final experiments confirmed the central assumptions of this model by providing evidence that the prioritydestination process was sufficient to produce cue effects independent of attention, and that attending to a location involved a suppression of processing at unattended locations. The implications of this model for the larger visual attention literature were also discussed.

This essay reconstructs the unexplored history of a group of women who claimed a place for themselves in the male-dominated public sphere of Toronto in the early 1850s. The history of these women, who took a public stand on the issues of slavery, abolition and the fugitives escaping to Canada, does not fit seamlessly into the history of the struggle for women's rights nor the history of women's philanthropy. While the anti-slavery women engaged in some of the same activities as these better-known subjects of women's history, they brought a distinctive set of social and political concerns to their activism. Troubled by the influx of destitute fugitive slaves arriving in Canada from the United States, the potential extension of slavery on the North American continent, and the implications these developments could have for the free Christian nation they were building in Canada, these women took advantage of the public sphere to voice and act on their concerns about the moral progress of society, especially in their city. They constructed a distinctly feminine political culture that represented themselves and their activities as conforming to the canons of femininity and domesticity, while it enabled the women to secure access and influence for themselves - albeit limited access and influence - in the public sphere. With aspirations to influence public opinion, but without formal positions of authority in the public sphere, these women called upon the moral authority that nineteenth century society ascribed to women to underwrite their public activities. Feminine moral authority affirmed the righteousness of the values and beliefs that underlay their public activities, and it justified their attempts to persuade others to espouse similar beliefs. It was the foundation upon which these women tried to build a collective political culture and speak on behalf of all Canadian women in the public sphere. Construed as gender-specific, this moral authority rested, however, not only on the distinction of gender, but also on a combination of social attributes and cultural distinctions that included the distinction of race. While there is no doubt that positions of authority in the public sphere of mid-nineteenth century Toronto were dominated by white men, the inroads the women achieved and the roadblocks they confronted suggest that the public sphere was undergoing considerable change in the early 1850s. To be sure, their attempts to influence the formation of public opinion were indicative of larger social and political changes underway in Canadian society — changes that historians have only begun to consider.

The present study tested the hypothesis that distractor-based facilitation of visual search occurs because familiar distractors are processed and rejected in groups. We recorded participants’ eye movements during a visual search task to determine if familiar distractors were associated with an increased average distance between fixations and distractors. The study provided convergent evidence of a strong relation between search efficiency and distractor familiarity, wherein the distance between fixations and distractors increases with the efficiency of search. Further examination of eye movements suggested that the grouping of familiar distractors resulted in an efficient scanning of the search display by increasing the area of the display effectively processed during each fixation and therefore reducing the need to fixate individual distractors.

Summary Hemophilia A and B are two X-linked recessive bleeding disorders caused by deficiency or absence of coagulation factor VIII and IX, respectively. There are more then 100 patients with this disorder in Lithuania. Affected individuals develop a variable degree of haemorrhage predominantly into joints and muscles. The severity of bleeding symptoms is correlating well with the residual activities of the corresponding clotting factors. Thus, patients with severe disease (F VIII / F IX < 1 %) usually experience recurrent spontaneous bleeding episodes while non-severely affected patients (F VIII / F IX > 1%) mainly bleed unop provocation. People who suffer from hemophilia are troubled by deformation of joints, alternation of limbs' length, arthrosis aches, and muscle contractures. The experience of latter summer camps showed that there was success to decrease those handicap phenomena significantly. That was reached by hemophilia patients' active physical activity at the seaside and kinesitherapy procedures. Evaluating the efficiency of kinesitherapy for the joint amplitude and muscle strength for those who suffer from hemophilia, it was depended on the dynamics of joints movements, measuring of arms and legs segments size, determination of muscle strength by Brooke's modified scale. Patients suffering from 19A and B forms of disease participated in the survey. They were divided into 2 groups according to the age - children up to 16 years of age and adults over 16 years of... [to full text]

Background: The 22q11.2 deletion syndrome (22q11.2 DS) causes a wide variety of symptoms, but the central nervous system (CNS) dysfunction is the one most likely to affect the day-to-day life of those affected by this genetic disorder. In addition to affecting the educational needs of children with 22q11.2 DS, the neurological deficits in childhood and adolescence could be related to future psychosis and schizophrenia, which can affect 30% of these patients. Thus, the development of screening tools for CNS dysfunction could help identify children who are most at risk for developing later psychosis, allowing them to receive additional care. As saccadic eye movement behaviours reflect the integrity of multiple brain structures, a battery of oculomotor tasks could help identify neurological deficits. This study sought to test the hypothesis that children with 22q11.2 DS would have deficits in oculomotor performance compared to typically developing children. Methods: A cohort of 16 children with 22q11.2 DS, and 32 age- and sex-matched controls completed prosaccade, antisaccade, delayed memory-guided sequential (DMS) and predictive eye movement tasks. Results: Compared to controls, children with 22q11.2 DS exhibited increased direction errors in the antisaccade task, increased timing errors in the DMS task, as well as decreased predictive and increased regular saccades in the predictive task. The group of children with 22q11.2 DS also exhibited an increase in saccade amplitude in the prosaccade, antisaccade and predictive tasks, increased error in saccade trajectory in the prosaccade, antisaccade and DMS tasks and decreased saccade velocity in the predictive saccade tasks. Conclusion: This study showed that performance in the eye movement tasks could be used to assess injury to the frontostriatal circuitry and cerebellum in children with 22q11.2 DS. / Thesis (Master, Neuroscience Studies) -- Queen's University, 2011-04-29 15:16:39.848

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