Viewing The Biggest Loser: modes of reception and reflexivity among obese people

This article builds on previous reception research and scholarship on makeover TV through an analysis of obese people's views of The Biggest Loser (TBL). TBL involves obese people competing to lose weight as personal trainers push them through dietary and physical activity regimes. We articulate four themes characterizing responses to TBL: “That's not reality,” “Public ownership and judgment of the fat body,” “The lure of the transformation,” and “A guilty pleasure.” We consider how these themes are reflected in participants' movement between mediated, discursive, transparent, and referential modes of reception. While some were adamant in their rejection of the program, others were ambivalent in accepting and identifying with the desire for weight loss but questioning TBL's aesthetic dimensions and moralizing undertones. We argue that the reflexivity of viewers complicates appraisals of TBL as governing at a distance and offer some alternative readings of the impact and appeal of the program.     

Nature,art and artfulness

[E]cosocialism entails different and more complex judgments of value than first-epoch socialism. It demands of us that we take into account a kind of valuation distinct from those values, attached to use and exchange, that enter into economic calculation. Once we open ourselves to the ecosphere, a realm of intrinsic value opens as well, a value inhering in ecosystemic being …. What is called an “ecocentric ethic” is essentially ethics in defense of intrinsic value. Simply put, it is the refusal to reduce the world to cash, and to knuckle under to the lords of economic calculation. … This perspective becomes necessary in the overcoming of the ecological crisis, and therefore the climate crisis as well. It is the deepest level of the resistance to capital, and the foundation of all others.1 ¹Joel Kovel, “Ecosocialism, Global Justice, and Climate Change,” Capitalism Nature Socialism, Vol. 19, No. 2, June 2008, p. 9.      

The effect of cleaning agents on the ability to obtain DNA profiles using the Identifiler™ and PowerPlex® Y multiplex kits

Abstract: A year after the introduction of Identifiler? into the forensic DNA laboratories of the Institute of Environmental Science and Research Limited (ESR), increasing occurrences of dropout of the three loci, D7S820, D18S51, and FGA, were observed in samples where the DNA was not degraded and sufficient DNA was present that full DNA profiles were to be expected. The dropout was either partial or complete at these loci. Full profiles could sometimes be obtained by reamplification of samples using the same input amount of DNA. After a thorough investigation of the methods and procedures used in the laboratory, the cause of this inhibition was identified as the cleaning agent TriGene? ADVANCE. This was determined after the deliberate addition of varying amounts of different cleaning reagents into the DNA amplification reactions. At concentrations of 0.004% TriGene? ADVANCE caused inhibition resulting in tri‐loci dropout. At concentrations of 0.04% and higher, complete inhibition was observed. An effect was also seen on the amplification of samples using the Y STR profiling system PowerPlex^®Y. This work highlights the importance of checking all reagents and chemicals prior to use, even those with no apparent direct influence on the DNA profiling process.