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This chapter explores the use of the term “Alpha patient population” to refer to the individuals who received Medicaid-subsidized prenatal care from the clinic. It considers how it is that the vastly different groups of women who seek prenatal health care from the Alpha can be referred to as a single population. It argues that the shared poverty of the pregnant women who become patients at the Alpha Hospital enables them to be seen as “high risk”. It then juxtaposes “Alpha patient population” with a figure that staff, providers, and administrators offered when speaking about the imagined the “average” Alpha patient. It concludes that the “Alpha patient population” operates as a deracialized racialist discourse that allows the providers, staff, and administrators who evoked it to speak of race tacitly, yet avoid its explicit mention.

This chapter deals with the topic of decomposition theorems in polarisation studies of mixed surface and volume scattering. It begins with coherent decompositions, starting from the Pauli matrix approach, and leading to the Cameron and Krogager decompositions. This leads to the scattering alpha parameter and its relationship to boundary conditions for dielectric objects and to orthogonality of scattering mechanisms. The chapter then considers incoherent decompositions, first using the Huynen approach and then the eigenvalue/eigenvector formulation of Chapter 2, before considering model-based approaches using the surface and volume scattering results in Chapter 3. The chapter includes a review of the most important model-based approaches, due to Freeman-Durden and Yamaguchi, before developing a new hybrid approach, fusing the model-based with the eigenvector decomposition. Finally, consideration is given to the distorting effects of propagation on such decompositions, with Faraday rotation being used as an example.

This chapter examines fraternity stereotypes by focusing on the tropes of the “Man’s Man,” “Ladies’ Man,” and “Gentleman” as they relate to three black Greek-letter fraternities (BGLFs): Kappa Alpha Psi, Alpha Phi Alpha, and Omega Psi Phi. It shows how these relatively newfound cultural images are propelled in part by the racist imagery of black men as animals. After reviewing the literature on the historical formation of BGLFs, social identity, and stigma, the chapter explores how BGLFs interpret black manhood, how African American men construct identities, and how they survive in a cultural situation that can sometimes be hostile.

This chapter focuses on the deanship of Vernon W. Lippard, a Massachusetts native who had taken the five-year combined medical course in the Sheffield Scientific School, receiving his M.D. degree cum laude in 1929. One of five students elected to membership in the medical honor society, Alpha Omega Alpha, he was also awarded the Parker Prize, given annually to the graduating student “who has shown the best qualifications for a successful practitioner.” During his final year, the first issue of the Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine was published, and it contained two abstracts, based on articles by faculty members, signed “V.W.L.” After graduating, Lippard remained in New Haven for an internship in pediatrics with Grover Powers at the New Haven Hospital. He then went to Cornell for residency training and was the first chief resident when the Cornell Department of Pediatrics moved to the newly completed New York Hospital in 1932.

This chapter examines the interrelationships among membership, professionalism, and community activism in black Greek-letter organizations (BGLOs) by focusing on the life of Loraine Richardson Green, second national president of Alpha Kappa Alpha (AKA). More specifically, it looks at the connectivity between Green’s AKA affiliation, the realization of her unique sociology, and her life’s passion and ultimate career as a community servant and activist. The chapter first considers Green’s sociology, especially her paradigm of feminist pragmatism, and how her training as a pragmatist at the University of Chicago and her AKA affiliation gave her a unique perspective. It then discusses her association with AKA and her employment with the Chicago Board of Education, her affiliation with the Chicago School of Sociology, and her volunteer work and activism in the community. Finallly, it highlights the connectivity between Green’s AKA affiliation, her sociology, and her various roles in community activism to include her position on the Chicago public school board.

This chapter begins by describing the care that the Alpha Hospital gives to its patients as “war-zone medicine”. It explains that race is a discursive phenomenon; race encompasses ideas about difference that become visible and tangible as they are made to be reflected in material conditions within society. It notes that material and societal conditions appear to affirm the veracity of ideas about race and the unfortunate dialectic continues. It examines this dialectical process of race formation as it occurs during women's pregnancies because pregnancy engages racial discourses to such a dramatic extent that pregnancy can be described as a racially salient event.

This chapter describes the location of the Alpha Hospital within the larger public health context. It discusses the colourful history of the Alpha Hospital, situated within New York City, and also the nation. It argues that the Alpha Hospital is the best public hospital in the country and one of the few places in the nation where poor people have access to first-rate outstanding health care. It clarifies that although the Alpha Hospital is unique, it should not be understood as singular—to the extent that the Alpha is a site wherein poor, pregnant women's bodies are excessively problematized and racial inequities are reiterated, this is a product not of some curious quality of the Alpha, but rather the Alpha as an institution depends upon public dollars to deliver health care to uninsured, marginalized persons in the United States.

This chapter explores the use of Medicaid in the Alpha Hospital by patients who need prenatal care. It notes that as a condition of receipt of this aid, women were required to meet with a battery of professionals—namely, social workers, health educators, nutritionists, and financial officers—who are legally obliged to inquire into areas of women's lives that frequently exceed the realm of the medical. It concludes that Medicaid mandates an intrusion into women's private lives and produces pregnancy as an opportunity for state supervision, management, and regulation of poor, otherwise uninsured women.

This chapter explores the medical technology provided to indigent pregnant women within the Alpha Hospital. It characterizes the prenatal health care that poor, pregnant women receive and notes that it is delivered within an abundantly technological, biomedical paradigm of pregnancy. It argues that what Medicaid-insured, pregnant women's bodies receive is excessive in the sense that it goes beyond any necessary and appropriate medicalization, as well as that offered to privately insured women. It concludes that the result of this excessive medicalization is that poor women are produced as possessors of “unruly bodies”. It notes that the excesses of Medicaid's medicalization, which can be understood as a suspicion of poor women's bodies as especially “at risk”, provides an important basis for the argument that the “high risk” patients receiving prenatal care from the Alpha are thought to embody the image they have been given, and it coalesces them into an apprehensible population.

This chapter explains how the personally held racist beliefs of physicians may contribute to health disparities between racial groups. It grounds the less-obvious medical disenfranchisement of women of color. It discusses the largely, unrecognized, yet still influential, racist oral tradition in medicine. It argues that notions of the obstetrical and gynaecological hardiness of the marginalized have exhibited a remarkable hardiness of their own as they have managed to persist over the decades. It demonstrates this persistence of racial folklore alongside interviews conducted with obstetricians practicing in the Alpha clinic. It then puts ethnographic data in conversation with the literature documenting the persistence of racial disparities in health. It attempts to continue to shatter notions of doctors' personal privacy—notions that have functioned to hide the racism that may contribute to health disparities in the United States.

This chapter details the differences between the marginalized women at Alpha and the homeless men and women who are, for all intents and purposes, invisible to the state. It explains that the patients at the Alpha Hospital are different in a very important respect—the profound vulnerability of these marginalized women and men at Alpha, found within a maelstrom of state institutions, results from the tenacity and insistence of the state's relationship with them. It emphasizes the fundamental and inherent ambivalence of a power that is simultaneous in its productivity and repression. It notes that although power may operate in the Alpha WHC as an entity that enables the problematization, surveillance, regulation, and management, and punishment of the patients seeking prenatal health care there, all in the effort to produce docile bodies, power concurrently produces resistances.

The Breakthrough Starshot project was launched in 2016 with the aim of developing the technology to send robot spacecraft to the nearest stars. The first spacecraft to head out of the Solar System were launched in the 1970s. Pioneer 10 carries a plaque offering information about Earth and its inhabitants to any alien species that might one day intercept the craft. The Breakthrough Starshot panel included Stephen Hawking and Freeman Dyson. The idea is to use banks of lasers to accelerate mini robot craft to one-fifth of the speed of light with the aim of reaching the Alpha Centauri system within about twenty years.

Kappa Alpha, a Greek fraternal organization with chapters in universities across the nation, compromises to shield itself from scrutiny for entrenched racist history. Negative press incidents lead to the removal of its Confederate flag and Old South balls, even as the organization is monological in its historical alliance with white supremacy and Robert E. Lee, as its “spiritual founder.” In this chapter, Whitney Jordan Adams dissects an online message board in reaction to the loss of Old South balls, finding “frozen loci,” isolated argument of resentment devoid of historical reasoning or context. Adams calls for a pedagogical disturbance in the classroom, one that creates new dialogism for these students who have never dealt with difference in their lived proximity. Disturbances such as personal narratives, anti-racist art, and DEI-themed university history tours are promoted as workable unsettling of frozen loci.

This chapter presents an overview of some of the most relevant state initiatives in the field of cultural heritage from 1992 to 2012. The first section provides a historical background against which to locate the democratic government's work in the field of cultural heritage and public culture. The second section presents an overview of some of the heritage work carried out under Alpha Oumar Konaré's administration (1992–2002). It documents state efforts to build a democratic culture as well as to cultivate rational–critical perspectives vis-è-vis the national past. The third and last section describes heritage work under Amadou Toumani Touré (2002–12), analyzing some continuities but also noticeable shifts, particularly in his adoption of the transnational trope of reconciliation and the proliferation of public rituals of appeasement and consensus building. This section also examines the shrinking opposition's countermemory project; the rekindling of struggles around Modibo Keita's legacy; and the emergence of new ones around the legacy of Abdoul “Cabral” Karim Camara, one of heroes of the opposition to Moussa Traoré's dictatorship.

In the 1970s, British Protestant churches were changed by a movement that criticized formality and tradition as ‘churchianity’ and claimed access to the supernatural ‘gifts of the spirit’. Large numbers of loosely networked fellowships were formed, and many mainstream congregations adopted the movement’s rock-music worship style. Its embodiment in the Alpha course training programme was widely adopted. But the movement attracted few non-Christians, and it peaked in the 1990s, because the pool from which it recruited—young Christians put off the mainstream by conservative mores and traditional worship—was shrinking. Its emphasis on personal experience rather than shared belief meant that, instead of revitalizing the churches, it served as a bridge from conventional faith to personal idiosyncrasy and indifference.

Israel was now trapped between East and West. The East openly and fully supported the Arabs, while the west stood aloof, except for France which supplied Israel with a minimum of necessary weapons. However, Israel knew that what it needed was a security guarantee from the most powerful western power. Yet, the new administration in America, headed by President Eisenhower, was not favourable to Israel. The new secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, wanted to build a regional alliance based on Turkey and the Arab states. Although he discovered that the majority Arab states were unwilling to join a western alliance, he was far from agreeing to Israel’s need for deterrence. Together with the British he planned to reduce Israel’s territory and to convince it to accept some of the Palestinian refugees (the Alpha plan). The Czech-Egyptian arms deal did not change American policy in Israel’s favour.

Decline of the English share of world production of hops from 30% to 1% in 20^th century. The reasons for this decline explained, including the centralised management of English markets. England remained a leader in hop breeding, but fell behind in drying mechanisation. Brewers, notably Guinness and Whitbread invested in hop farming and drying. Hop picking was mechanised and the September visits of city hop pickers ended. Hop kilns became integrated modern industrial units. By the 21^st century only a handful of traditional brick kilns remained in use. Redundant oast have been saved from demolition by widespread conversion into dwellings, especially in South East England

This chapter considers the evolution of the legislative and regulatory approach to occupational health and safety for the oil and gas industry on the UK continental shelf. This reveals the particular circumstances that attended the adoption of the three distinct approaches that have now been tried and thus the degree of the challenge facing policy makers and regulators. Examining the development of regulation in this way also allows the particularity of the current permissioning regime to be properly understood. Finally, it allows an appraisal of the current regime’s ability to cope with the challenges thrown up by the maturity of the UKCS as a hydrocarbon province and by the proposed European Union intervention following the Macondo disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.

The fifth chapter looks at the ways in which three teen suburban noirs – Brick (Johnson, 2004), Alpha Dog (Cassavetes, 2006) and Chumscrubber (Posin, 2005) – engage with the suburban environment. The chapter pays attention to the ways which the teenagers – and their parents – (are able to) navigate space: where do they go, how do they move, how can they interact in space? Drawing on the work of Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau as well as close textual analysis of dialogue and composition, it argues that these films, each in their own way, present the suburb not as a static, depthless non-place, but on the contrary as a space that can be experienced, extended and appropriated – in short, as a lived space.