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Syllabus
Datebook
Academese
Forever Altered
Here and Abroad
Bottom Line
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Up and Comer
Findings
JHUniverse
Vital Signs


Syllabus

Course: "Transnationalism and Globalization in Music"

Instructor: Elizabeth Tolbert, History of Music, Peabody Institute

Course Description: How has the increase in the speed and spread of people, information, symbols, capital, and commodities affected the kinds of music that are created and consumed both locally and globally? How does music contribute to discourses of authenticity, difference, and global homogeneity? In this course students address issues such as the above, with emphasis on an ethnomusicological approach to music in its transnational and global contexts.

Reading List:

Music Grooves: Essays and Dialogues, Charles Keil and Steven Feld (1994).

Global Pop: World Music, World Markets, Timothy Taylor (1997).

Linguistic Anthropology, "Theories of Culture," Alessandro Duranti (1997).

Subcultural Sounds: Micromusics of the West, Mark Slobin (1993).

Nightsong: Performance, Power, and Practice in South Africa, Veit Erlmann (1996).

Cultural Survival Quarterly 15(3): 36-39, "Singing Other People's Songs," Anthony Seeger (1992).

The World of Music 40(2): 85-106, "The Mbira, Worldbeat, and the International Imagination," Thomas Turino (1998).

Public Culture 2(2): 1-24, "Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy," Arjun Appadurai (1996).


Datebook

A day in the life of ROTC cadet major Marc Hohman, a senior majoring in biology and minoring in Spanish, with sights set on med school ...

0615: Wake Up, Shave, and Dress

Don shorts and T-shirt emblazoned with "ARMY" for morning physical training (PT).

0645-0745: Evaluate PT Leader

Clipboard in hand at the ROTC building, scrutinize performance of battalion sergeant major Jonathan Grassbaugh '03 as he runs 27 cadets through an hour-long workout (sit-ups, push-ups, and a vigorous game of Capture the Flag).

0745-0830: Counsel PT Leader

Award Grassbaugh an "excellent" rating. Comments: Great use of humor in motivating the troops; you missed the cadet with her shirt untucked.

0830-1050: Shower, Dress, Study

Wednesdays mean battle dress uniform--fatigues and Army boots.

1100-1250: Class, Errands, Lunch

Spanish: Advanced Reading and Writing, then Practical Composition in Gilman Hall. Mail secondary med school application to Mayo Medical School. Lunch at Megabytes in AMR II.

1400-1545: Clean Apartment, Study

1600-1800: ROTC Lab

All 80 ROTC cadets from the area (Villa Julie, UMBC, etc.) attend. Today's agenda includes an awards ceremony. Receive ribbons for high GPA, high score on physical training test.

1830-2000: Staff Meeting

Meet with half dozen student ROTC leaders to organize field training at Edgewood Arsenal on October 5-7. On the program: rappelling, orienteering, infantry tactics.

2000-2300: Dinner

Friends gather at apartment for dinner prepared by roommate: beef curry and garlic chicken, Jell-O that doesn't set. Lights out at 2345. --SD


Academese

In the fast-paced world of the Johns Hopkins Hospital Emergency Room, verbal shorthand is the order of the day:

Elope: When a patient leaves before being discharged and without informing the staff.

Revitalize: To check a patient's vital signs at regular intervals. "Have you revitalized the guy in 12?"

SWAF: Drug Shooter With a Fever above 102 degrees; usually an automatic admit.

Pulse Ox: Short for pulse oximeter, a machine that measures how much oxygen is in the blood. Used to monitor chest pains, asthma.

Fly By: When ambulances and helicopters en route to Hopkins must divert to another facility. This can happen when the ER has issued a Code Yellow (no more beds) or a Code Red (no more cardiac-monitored beds).

Ambo: Ambulance

SOB: Don't be offended if this appears on your chart. It's a commonly used abbreviation for "shortness of breath."

Stat: Used only on TV. In real life, no one ever says, "Get that morphine. Stat!"
--Emily Carlson (MA '01)


Forever Altered

Mentor, hero, inspiration: Hopkins teachers who have left their mark.

"In my third year of medical school at Hopkins, I received the intro to my psychiatry rotation from Paul McHugh, director of psychiatry at the School of Medicine. Paul delivered a cross between a sermon and one-act play-- polished as if delivered one million times, but from the heart and not scripted.

"What he talked about, without ever using the word, was 'empathy.' His goal, I recognized much later, was to help us cultivate empathy for those with mental illness. I don't know if I can ever remember any other time in my medical career when teaching about empathy was the clear 'educational objective.' Paul helped us understand that we were all, at some level, suffering along the spectrum between mental illness and wellness.

"Furthermore, he reminded us that patients come to us for help and that it is our responsibility to understand what in their mental life is making them feel unwell. We must never walk away from those who are suffering emotionally but who cannot tell us why.

"The words Paul McHugh spoke that day began to open me up to a career-long process of embracing the indistinct line between mind and body in sickness and healing. They helped me understand that even with all the advances in biomedical science, it is largely the relationship we have with our patients that is what heals them."

Bob Whitaker (MD '87), MPH, is associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine and a general academic pediatrician at Children's Hospital Medical Center. He is currently on sabbatical at Princeton University as a senior visiting research scholar at the Center for Health and Wellbeing at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.


Here and Abroad

For the first time, Hopkins undergraduates this fall are immersing themselves in art history, literature, and Italian at the picturesque Villa Spelman in Florence, Italy, through the university's Singleton Center for Italian Studies. About a dozen Hopkins undergrads are living with host families and studying with Hopkins history professor Louis Galambos at the Italian villa that has long served as a location for scholarly and graduate studies. Says villa director Walter Stephens, "They'll take breakfast and supper with their families and then they are out in the big world of Florence." ... More than 4,000 alumni from Johns Hopkins are living and working in countries throughout Europe, with more than 1,000 in the United Kingdom, reports the university's European Office in Berlin, which was opened in January 2000 to foster exchanges between European and American faculty, scholars, alumni, and students. ... On September 11, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice had been set to give the annual Rostov Lecture at Hopkins's Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). Her topic: foreign policy under the Bush administration. Instead, Rice was among those at the White House rushed to safety underground after the attacks. When SAIS public affairs director Felisa Neuringer tried to call to cancel the event, the White House was in the middle of being evacuated. The school and Rice's staff hope to reschedule. ... In early October, U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson announced that Hopkins's D.A. Henderson will chair the nation's newly created National Advisory Council on Public Health Preparedness for Bioterrorism. Henderson is director of the School of Public Health's Center for Civilian Biodefense Studies. ... Multicultural appreciation on the Homewood campus is the goal of "Culture Fest 2001." Events slated for November 8-17 include Indian dance groups and Japanese calligraphy workshops, as well as music, food courts, and a diversity workshop. "The aim is to get everybody to come together," says co-chair Paul Richie, a sophomore. --Joanne Cavanaugh Simpson


Bottom Line

60: Number of Hopkins medical staff who traveled to Washington, D.C., the day after terrorist attacks to assist in a blood drive called for by President Bush

45: Number of minutes it took to mobilize those medical staff volunteers

50: Number of first-time donors who took part in the Red Cross blood drive at Homewood on September 24-25

120: Number of students at the School of Nursing who attended a post-disaster counseling session led by staff from Homewood's Counseling and Student Development Center

11: Number of Homewood students who sought out individual counseling from center psychologists

3,100: Total number of international students (both graduate and undergraduate) currently enrolled at Hopkins

240: Total number of students from Middle Eastern countries enrolled at Hopkins

1: Number of international students who withdrew in the wake of the attacks
--Compiled by SD


Photo by Aaron Levin Vignette

A Piece of Hopkins

The bouquet attracted almost as much notice as the handsome bride. The creamy white roses and carnations, nestled in ferns and tied with a wide satin ribbon, were a gift from Florence Nightingale, confirming that the founder of modern nursing held the bride--American nursing leader Isabel Hampton--in the highest esteem.

The admiration was returned; Isabel Hampton Robb kept the bouquet and ribbon from her wedding day of July 11, 1894. Eventually, the items became part of her archives at the Hopkins School of Nursing, which is the descendant of the Training School for nurses supervised by Miss Hampton from its inception in 1889 until her marriage to Dr. Hunter Robb.

Fast forward to Phoebe Evans Letocha, responsible for cataloging Hampton Robb's papers for the Hopkins nursing historical collection. Although Letocha knew of the bouquet's existence, she was surprised to find such well-preserved bits of flora amid desiccated tissue paper in a hosiery box. She presented her find to the staff at the Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives, and they pondered what to do with the bouquet's remains.

Would the tobacco-colored bits yield enough clues to establish the bouquet's composition? Finding an expert "sounded easy," said archivist Nancy McCall, but it turned into an extended treasure hunt with, finally, opinions from Smithsonian botanists (to identify the bits of flora) and horticulturalists (to discern the bouquet's arrangement). Mahonia japonica, myrtle, maiden-hair fern, and other ferns and plants accompanied the roses and carnations, the experts decided; Paula Dobbe-Maher of Baltimore's Dutch Connection florist painstakingly re-created the bouquet. Coincidentally, descendants of Isabel Hampton Robb had planned to visit Hopkins to see the archives and her portrait; the bouquet was a surprise addition.

The archives hold an affirmation of Hampton Robb's delight in the bouquet, and her thrill at a rare audience days before her wedding with the reclusive Miss Nightingale. She penned these words to her mentor: "Thank you ... not only for your kind thoughtfulness in sending me flowers but for the still greater pleasure in permitting me to see you and talk over nursing work with you." --Mary Mashburn


Up and Comer

Name: Hope Jahren    Age: 31
Assistant professor,
Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Krieger School of Arts and Sciences

Stats: BA, Geology, University of Minnesota-Minneapolis, '91; PhD in Soil Science, UC-Berkeley, '96

Scouting Report: Says Steven Stanley, professor of Earth and planetary sciences, "Hope is a quick study. She moves into a new area and immediately identifies the important questions. This is the key to innovative research."

Day Job: Using geochemical techniques to examine living and fossil terrestrial plants at sites from northern Canada to Bogota, Colombia. The goal: to describe the plants' roles in the history of Earth's climate, as well as their role in modern environmental change.

Latest Quest: Jahren and her team traveled to the Arctic, where they excavated a 45 million-year-old forest. The fossilized trees, which have tissue composition resembling that of the giant redwoods in the Pacific Northwest, would have lived in total darkness four months a year. Jahren says the discovery challenges notions about photosynthesis.

Bragging Rights: 2001 Young Scientist Award from the Geological Society of America, for original research that has brought about a major advance in the Earth sciences; Fulbright Scholar to Norway; 1994 Jonathan O. Davis Scholarship and Dissertation Award.

Occupational Hazard: Severe allergy to poison ivy, discovered during a cross-country plant sampling trip; her head swelled so badly she had to be taken to the ER. "Now I have to study conifers and wetlands to get away from deciduous forests, where poison ivy grows."

Working Philosophy: "You have to get your hands full of soil and leaves and roots and really saturate your five senses."
--EC


Findings

Just Charge It

Talk about power walking: A shoe sole outfitted to fuel a battery pack or spark other means of electricity as you walk or run is being developed by a group of inventors at Hopkins's Applied Physics Laboratory.

Binh Le, a principal engineer at APL, came up with the idea after reading about a pilot shot down in Bosnia who couldn't radio for help because the battery had run down. So Le and a team of Space Department scientists started working on "rechargeable shoe" concepts during their lunch hours and after work. The group has filed a U.S. patent application and is now seeking funding to build a prototype.

Le projects that military and commercial applications could include powering radios, cell phones, and medical equipment, as well as Walkmans or toys.

In one version of the design, heel pressure triggers a lever arm that strikes a miniaturized motorized generator, which in turn spins a flywheel to create electricity. In another, a walking motion would drive fluid between two chambers in the shoe's sole to create energy.

A radio might even be built into a sole, evoking TV secret agent Maxwell Smart's leather shoe phone. Smart, here. --JCS

A New Drug for a Global Scourge

Hopkins chemists have designed a new drug for fighting malaria that has proven both safe and effective in the first stage of preclinical testing in mice and rats.

"In addition, it's water soluble and therefore easy to administer orally and intravenously," says Gary Posner, professor of chemistry in the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences. The new compound, carboxyphenyl trioxane, has its roots in the plant artemisia, a traditional Chinese herbal remedy for malaria.

Developing new drugs is a top priority because the malaria parasite is becoming increasingly resistant to existing medications. Results of the Hopkins study appear in the September 2001 issue of the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry.


JHUniverse

near.jhuapl.edu/iod/20010731

Here's your chance to land on an asteroid! See stunning close-up views of the jagged cracks, boulders, and dust-filled craters of 433 Eros in a minute-long movie that captures the controlled descent of NASA's Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) space-craft, built and managed by Hopkins's Applied Physics Laboratory. The February 12 landing capped a five-year space mission that generated 10 times more data than scientists had originally planned.


Vital Signs

New Hope for Preventing Blindness?

Gene therapy may one day be able to halt or even prevent blindness caused by macular degeneration and diabetic retinopathy, according to promising new animal studies led by researchers at Hopkins's Wilmer Eye Institute.

Both conditions are caused by an overgrowth of blood vessels in the eye. Current therapies include laser treatment or surgery, both of which fail to attack the underlying stimuli for blood vessel growth. "As a result, the blood vessels tend to come back. Even with initially successful treatments, many patients still end up with severe loss of vision," says professor of ophthalmology and neuroscience Peter A. Campochiaro, senior author of the studies.

Campochiaro's team injected two different genes into the tail veins or eyes of lab mice with conditions similar to macular degeneration and diabetic retinopathy. One gene is for endostatin, which inhibits blood vessel growth; the other is a substance that increases cell survival. The therapy reduced new blood vessel growth by up to 90 percent. Campochiaro calls initial results "very exciting."

A Rice-Based Solution to Diarrhea

A rice-based oral rehydration solution (ORS) has outperformed the standard treatment for children suffering from cholera and life-threatening diarrheas, according to a study conducted by researchers at the Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

In the randomized study of children living in Bangladesh, those who received a new prepackaged rice-based ORS had 20 percent less stool output within the first eight hours of treatment compared to children given the standard glucose-based ORS. The findings appear in the May 2001 issue of Acta Paediatrica.

Hospitals in Bangladesh have been using freshly ground rice in ORS for some time, reports Hopkins international health professor David Sack. But fresh rice spoils quickly and requires expertise to prepare, he notes, problems the prepackaged solution surmounts.

Earlier Detection for Melanoma

When it comes to treating melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer, early detection is crucial. But "telling the difference between precancerous moles and early-stage melanoma can be very difficult," notes Rhoda Alani, Hopkins assistant professor of oncology, dermatology, molecular biology, and genetics.

In the August 15 issue of Cancer Research, Alani and collaborators from Sloan-Kettering and New York University Medical Center reported a link between two genes that trigger skin cancers and could serve as early diagnostic markers for the disease.

The researchers found that in melanomas, a cell growth regulatory gene known as Id1 deactivates an important tumor suppressor gene (p16/Ink4a), allowing cancer cells to grow uncontrollably. High levels of Id1 proteins are found only in the first stages of melanoma--a potentially life-saving warning sign for doctors. Says Alani, "If it's melanoma, you want to catch it very early and treat it aggressively by removing as much tissue as possible to cure the disease." --Compiled by SD

Return to November 2001 Table of Contents

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