Temperature variations in a parked vehicle

There were two reasons why this work was conducted. The first was to help determine the time of death of suicide and homicide victims inside vehicles. The second was to investigate the serious threat to life of children or pets left in stationary vehicles on a hot summers day. This paper demonstrates that when a vehicle is parked in the sun, temperature levels in the cabin of the vehicle can be more than 20°C above the ambient temperature. A simple 'greenhouse' model for predicting the daily internal vehicle temperatures, using readily available local meteorological data, was developed. This statistical model was calibrated using meteorological data and temperature data collected on parked vehicles over several summer seasons. The model uses environmental temperature and radiation data as input, and is shown to predict cabin temperatures to within about 1°C. Both the data collected and the model developed show that the temperature inside the cabin of a black vehicle is typically 5°C higher than that inside a white vehicle on a hot summer day. Also lowering the driver's window of the vehicle by 2.5 cm typically reduces cabin temperatures by about 3°C, which is not sufficient to reduce significantly the safety concerns for children or pets left in parked vehicles.     

“The tender mother”: The social construction of motherhood and the lady's magazine

My aim in this essay is to explore the politics of one of the seemingly least political forms of literature, the woman's magazine. Specifically, I will analyze the ideological content of the Lady's Magazine, one of the most popular and profitable of British monthly miscellanies in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth‐centuries.¹ In this essay I will explore the role the Lady's Magazine played in the development of the idea of the “tender mother,” a concept which was key in the formation of the cult of domesticity and in the development of the ideology of “woman's sphere” as a realm distinct and separate from the man's world of work.²An underlying assumption informing this essay is that the concept of motherhood was (and still is) culturally constituted,³ and that literature, including popular literature found in magazines, has played an important role in this process.⁴ In the Lady's Magazine's portrayal of motherhood we can see one of the means by which the ideology of motherhood, in particular, the concept of the tender mother, was created, legitimated, and perpetuated.⁵     

Negative expectations and self-evaluations in dysphoria

In a sample of female college students, dysphoric and intermittently dysphoric subjects, in comparison to nondysphoric subjects, were expected to perform more poorly on a game requiring eye-hand coordination. Actual performance showed no differences between these three groups. Following performance, relative to nondysphoric subjects, dysphoric and intermittently dysphoric subjects evaluated their performance more negatively. Results are discussed in terms of cognitive theories of depression and recent research. Implications for future research are suggested.