This project analyzes drug use in Mexico City between 1960 and 1980, the decades when the Mexican state began criminalizing common drugs like marijuana, and prosecuting the consumers of legal drugs such as toxic inhalants. In order to explain this contradiction, this dissertation assesses more than 3,000 Juvenile Court records, police files, health department and hospital documents, journal articles, drug legislation, and personal anecdotes. It argues that consumption and prosecution trends largely corresponded to socioeconomic class. Furthermore, these class-based consumption trends affected Mexican drug policies. According to the Mexican health department and penal reports examined in this dissertation, the Mexican state responded to the rise in drug use by pushing legislation to further criminalize marijuana. Yet the inner workings of that legislation tell a different story. Police records and Juvenile Court cases expose a rise in the detention and arrest of children who consumed toxic inhalants, a legal substance. The Mexican state found it more difficult to punish the children of middle-class government employees and professionals than the poor. In criminalizing poor, young drug users, the government could demonstrate its active efforts to address rising drug use. Consequently, the state created a new criminal class out of lower-class children who inhaled toxic legal substances in Mexico City. From a criminal and health perspective, this dissertation emphasizes the need to consider the impact of Mexican drug use trends on drug policy from the 1960s to the 1980s.

The primary purpose of the investigation was to compare the responses of white, lower-class kindergartners and first graders with white, middle-class kindergartners and first graders on the Boehm Test of Basic Concepts (BTBC) in order to determine if a statistically significant difference existed between socioeconomic level and the number of concepts correctly identified on the BTBC. A secondary purpose was to determine is a significant relationship existed between concept development as measure by the BTBC and intelligence from an assessment of receptive vocabulary by using the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT). One hundred white, lower middle socioeconomic level children from two elementary schools in Portland were selected as subjects to be included in this study. Variable controlled were grade level, auditory acuity, emotional stability, and sooioeconomioc status. The BTBC consists of fifty pictorial items, arranged in approximate order of difficulty and divided evenly between two booklets. Included in the fifty items are twenty-three spatial concepts, four time concepts, eighteen quantity concepts, and five concepts classified as miscellaneous. The PPVT was used to provide an estimate of subject’s verbal intelligence though a measurement of his receptive vocabulary. On both tests, the subject was instructed to point to the picture representing the stimulus item. The results of this study revealed a relationship exists between socioeconomic status and the number of concepts correctly identified on the BTBC. This relationship was observed when the lower-class subjects were compared with their middle-class peers at each grade level, when all kindergarteners were compared to all first graders, and in a comparison of the fifty lower-class and fifty middle-class subjects. The subjects of the middle socioeconomic level tended to identify more concepts correctly than the subjects of the lower socioeconomic level, while the first grade subjects, generally, identified more concepts correctly than the kindergartners. An analysis of the conceptual areas of space, time, and quantity revealed that socioeconomic status was related to the number of concepts correctly identified when the fifty lower-class subjects were compared to the fifty middle-class subjects. The children of the middle-class identified more concepts correctly in each area than the lower-class subjects. Grade level also was related to the number of concepts correctly identified in each of' the concept areas. The first graders tended to identify more concepts in each area than the kindergarteners. When the scores of the lower- and middleclass subjects at the kindergarten level were compared, there was no relationship between socioeconomic status and the number of concepts correctly identified in each of the three areas. No relationship was observed between the scores of the two groups of first graders on the spatial concepts. Socioeconomic level, however, did effect the number of time and quantity concepts correctly identified. The subjects of the middle socioeconomic level, generally, identified more time and quantity concepts correctly than the subjects of the lower socioeconomic level. These results suggest a higher .degree of abstraction abilities may be found with increased age and a higher socioeconomic level. The findings also tend to support the views of many researchers in the field of conceptual development who have stated that the language of the disadvantaged child inhibits his ability to abstract. Results of a Pearson's Product-Moment correlation calculated between the subjects’ scores on each of the tests indicated no significant correlation between the children's I.Q. scores and the number of concepts correctly identified.

No description available.

Historians regularly conceive of “gentlemen” (shi 士) in 7th–14th century China as men belonging to an elite social stratum, defined by their study of the classical and literary canons, participation in the civil service examinations, officeholding in the imperial bureaucracy, engagement in various literary or intellectual undertakings, hereditary status from a patriline, or connection to certain marriage, kinship, or friendship networks. This dissertation seeks to expand as well as complicate this perception of “gentlemen” as a social category, by understanding the label as referring not to an elite social stratum but to an identity, internalized and enacted in a variety of ways by men in low and high social positions alike. Using this framework to analyze the construction of “gentlemanly” identities in various arts and activities that served as leisure for some and livelihoods for others, this dissertation reveals a significant expansion in the repertory of signals and strategies used to create and perform “gentlemanly” identities in these fields, reshaping what it meant to be a “gentleman” in middle period China. Each chapter draws upon extensive source material from libraries, digital databases, and museums, to examine processes of identity construction and presentation in a series of different arts or activities in which both the “gentlemanly” and “non-gentlemanly” participated: painting, music making, practicing medicine, divining, farming and gardening, fishing and woodcutting, and playing the board game weiqi 圍棋 (also known as go). In each of these fields, between the 7th and 14th centuries, new “gentlemanly” identity signals were constructed to distinguish the “gentlemanly” sort from social categories like “artisan” (gong 工) that they viewed as inferior. New kinds of “gentlemen” like the “qin-zither gentleman” (qinshi 琴士), “painting gentleman” (huashi 畫士), and “classicist physician” (ruyi 儒醫) emerged; older labels like “recluse” (yinshi 隱士) expanded to encompass a wider variety of ways of living. New offices and titles at court were created that could signal membership in “gentlemanly” communities despite a close connection with arts like medicine or painting. And beyond these labels, men developed new “gentlemanly” identities through distinct modes of engagement in the respective field: the way one divined others’ fates, the strategies one used to win a board game, the metaphysical elements and ideals expressed in one’s art and discursive artistic judgments, the tools one didn’t use when fishing, and so on. These identity signals were situational, and each chapter draws upon examples of disagreement or doubt over the inclusion or exclusion of certain men as “gentlemen” to explore instances in which such signals were performed with varying degrees of efficacy. In my conclusion, I discuss the connection between many of these “gentlemanly” identity signals and an emerging form of social snobbery that I call the “discourse of ‘gentlemanly’ expertise.” In the 7th century and earlier, if the “gentlemanly” sort compared themselves to “artisans,” it would almost certainly be based on what they did. However, around the 9th–13th centuries, the “gentlemanly” sort became more actively involved (or vocal about their involvement) in the arts, and started to contrast their own practice and appreciation of these arts more actively with the (ostensibly inferior) practice and appreciation of “non-gentlemanly” sorts. In doing so, they began to define and distinguish themselves not by what they did, but by how they did it. They did not stop with simply articulating “gentlemanly” practices as different but equally good; they asserted that their practices and products were superior, claiming expertise in these fields on the basis of their ethical values, cultural norms, aesthetic preferences, and abstract knowledge of the cosmos and the ineffable “Way” (Dao 道). I argue that, ironically, this snobbish discourse of social distinction actually made it increasingly possible for people earning a livelihood in various arts to enact “gentlemanly” identities, by associating symbolic capital with the demonstration or depiction of “gentlemanly” modes of engagement. By focusing on the increasing number of ways in which “gentlemanly” identities were constructed and performed in 7th–14th century China, this dissertation offers insight into how individuals and groups made decisions of inclusion or exclusion, offered or obtained access to resources, and developed a sense of self and place in society. In doing so, it enriches our understandings of both the social forces shaping the middle period Chinese social world, and the individuals and groups who inhabited it.

No description available.

Rainbow trout are an important salmonid species whose poor utilization of dietary carbohydrates spurred research investigating molecular and physiological components of its glucoregulation. Among the environmental factors described to exert robust changes in glucose metabolism in rainbow trout, nutrition and social stress are among the most studied: Diets exceeding 20% of carbohydrates and chronic social stress induce hyperglycemia in adult and juvenile rainbow trout, respectively. Common to both responses is a contribution of hepatic de novo gluconeogenesis, which has been described to evade repression in response to high dietary carbohydrate content and to be stimulated in subordinate rainbow trout. Compared to previous studies investigating the regulation of hepatic gluconeogenesis at the molecular level, the recent publication of the annotated rainbow trout genome has opened novel possibilities to investigate paralogue-specific and posttranscriptional regulation of gluconeogenesis. In this thesis, I identify and describe the regulation of the novel phosphoenolpyruvate carboxykinase paralogue pck2b in rainbow trout and identify specific miRNA candidates predicted to contribute to gene paralogue-specific regulation of gluconeogenesis in nutritional and social contexts using small RNA next generation sequencing, real-time RT-PCR and in silico target prediction approaches. In nutritional and social status experiments, in silico predicted targets of differentially expressed hepatic miRNAs are enriched for gluconeogenesis regulation, suggesting a posttranscriptional component in regulating gluconeogenic transcript abundance. Differentially expressed hepatic miRNAs in both experiments comprise evolutionarily conserved and teleost-specific miRNAs, and are indicative of both environmental factor-specific and common regulation of gluconeogenesis transcripts in rainbow trout liver. Together this work provides novel comparative insight into hepatic miRNA-dependent glucoregulation and identifies several specific candidate miRNAs for future functional validation in hepatic glucoregulation in rainbow trout.

The purpose of the present study is to determine the effectiveness of sociometric groupings in bringing about improved social status of rejected girls in eighth-grade homemaking classes. Specifically, the study seeks to answer to the questions: Do significant changes occur in personal and social adjustment when pupils are placed in groups according to their choice? Is there evidence of improved social status of rejected pupils when sociometric groupings are used throughout the year?

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.