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Research Assistant, PaCCSC Writer Job Vacancy in Sydney | Part – Time
UTS has a bold vision to be a world-leading university of technology. We are a dynamic and innovative university in central Sydney, consistently ranked the top young university in Australia. With a culturally diverse campus life and extensive international exchange and research programs, UTS prepares graduates for the workplaces of today and tomorrow.
UTS Health offers innovative, practise-based education and high impact research that focuses on improving health outcomes in both local and global communities. The Faculty is a respected leader in a broad range of disciplines including Sport and Exercise, Health Services Management, Midwifery, Nursing and Public Health.
The UTS Faculty of Health is currently seeking an organised and process driven part-time Research Assistant to join the UTS (IMPACCT) team. The Research Assistant-PaCCSC Writer supports the clinical research activities of the Palliative Care Clinical Studies Collaborative (PaCCSC), located within Improving Palliative, Aged and Chronic Care through Clinical Research and Translation (IMPACCT). This role will enable the development of high-quality clinical trial protocols and competitive grant funding submissions to support palliative and supportive care research for people with life-limiting illnesses.
The Research Assistant-PaCCSC Writer supports the core research activities of PaCCSC, including:
Working with the investigator team and members of the PaCCSC national office to write clinical trial protocols and prepare human research ethics submissions for new studies
Preparing submissions for competitive funding opportunities
Undertaking literature reviews on behalf of study working groups
Preparing agendas and minutes at project working group meetings to develop new study concepts
With examples, please outline in a separate document how you meet the following five (5) key selection criteria points below:
1. High-level writing skills in research proposals, ethics applications, research grants for competitive funding, and peer-reviewed publications
2. Demonstrated ability to learn and apply policy and procedure in complex environments and provide advice to a range of client groups in an appropriate manner
3. An understanding of research and clinical trials conduct gained from own studies through research higher degree, or through a prior working environment
4. Experience using a range of complex databases to process information and retrieve reports
5. Experience in a research environment, preferably in a large and complex organisation
Base Salary: $83,258 to $90,147 pa (HEW 6 – pro-rated)
This role attracts 17% superannuation (pension) in addition to the base salary.
UTS staff also benefit from a wide range of Employee Benefits include flexible work practices, child care centres, generous parental leave and salary packaging opportunities.
This position is part-time (21 hours per week) and appointment will be made on a fixed term basis of 15 months.
For the full list of the selection criteria and role responsibilities please click the apply link and download the Position Description from the UTS website.
You are required to address the selection criteria in your submission in a separate document.
As you will be unable to save your application once started, please have all required documents and information available prior to commencing.
Please ensure that the file name for each document submitted includes IRC190693
Specific enquiries or issues with your application may be directed to Amelia Holesgrove in the UTS Recruitment Team via recruitment@uts.edu.au
Closing Date: Thursday 28th January 2021 at 11:59pm (AEST)
Applicants must have current and valid work rights in Australia.
Please note: If you have a disability that requires adjustment to the recruitment process or an alternative application pathway please contact recruitment@uts.edu.au for assistance.


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General News » Headline News » News
South Asian Network of Simcoe hosts first Diwali event in Alliston
On Saturday, November 13, the South Asian Network of Simcoe, a new group founded by residents of Treetops in Alliston, hosted a Festival of Lights & Diwali event at the Legion – the first event of its kind in New Tecumseth.
The family-friendly gathering had something for everyone, including food, kids crafts, loot bags, henna tattoos, music and dance, and was well attended – including members of New Tecumseth Council, Mayor Rick Milne and Councillor Donna Jebb.
"Our Diwali celebration was a huge success," group and event co-founder Anjana Thom told The Times. "Everyone had a great time and we were honoured to host Mayor Milne and Councillor Jebb."
The South Asian Network was created on October 15, 2021, as a private Facebook group by Anjana Thom, Komal Dahiya, and Anjali Sharma. Membership is growing steadily, as present members extend invitations to others.
"Primarily, we created this group to create a vibrant and safe space for the members of the South Asian community who share common cultural beliefs, practices, and values," said Thom. "It is a vehicle to encourage social interaction and to ensure that the customs and traditions of the community stay alive."
The group is open to anyone who wants to join, with current members representing the South Asian community, as well as West Indian, and a few other ethnicities.
Councillor Jebb is a member also.
"We are an inclusive group that welcomes anyone who is willing to be a respectful part of our dynamic community," said Thom. "The goal of the group is to create a community space for the South Asian community; it began as a social media group and still maintains that presence. Most members have not met each other in person except for the key organizers of the Diwali event who met to initiate planning."
The first in-person event drew 60 attendees, a hopeful experience for organizers who say they're looking forward to the New Year, and registering the group as a non-profit organization.
"We [hope to] become organized with a proper governance structure, including elected directors on the board," said Thom. "We will meet as is necessary to plan and organize events such as fundraisers, cultural celebrations, social gatherings, programs for youth, and more."
Within just one short month, the South Asian Network has grown from three members to 91.
"We are growing in numbers every day, so we expect to surpass one hundred in a couple of weeks," said Thom. "Most members are motivated by the opportunity to connect with others from a similar cultural background, to be part of a larger social network, participate in cultural events, promote their business which may cater specifically to the South Asian community, and a few simply join out of curiosity and interest."
Still in its infancy, group leaders are encouraged by their ability to plan, organize, and execute a Diwali event in just two weeks.
"This speaks volumes about the commitment, vision, and dedication of our members," said Thom. "I think that this is simply a preview of many other activities that we will host in the coming year."
"Diwali is an annual celebration that takes place in India. It is celebrated with a great deal of enthusiasm and ceremony. Like many other cultural celebrations in the South Asian community, Diwali is a community event, and families begin their festivities days before the big day arrives, and on the day of Diwali, many families begin with prayers at home followed by a lavish meal and putting out many diyas – small clay lamps lit with wicks soaked in oil," explained Thom. "Then, it moves outside to the larger community where gifts and sweets are exchanged and fireworks light up the night sky well past midnight. Our event was meant to bring the community together to celebrate this festive occasion in a fun way. We had about twenty-two families participate. The evening was organized so there was something for everyone. There was a children's craft table set up, which was a huge hit. It kept the children engaged and happy for the better part of the evening."
The South Asian Network of Simcoe hopes to host a smaller-scale event over the Christmas holidays – once they have caught their breath, and rested up after an intense two-week planning period and spending spree.
For more information, or to join this private group, search "South Asian Network of Simcoe" on Facebook.
By Wendy Gabrek

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


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Home > About Dr. Nathalie
Hi, I'm Dr. Nathalie Beauchamp, B.Sc., D.C., IFMCP
I am a chiropractor, a former professional natural figure/bodybuilder, a wellness consultant, speaker, author, and radio & TV personality.
I've always had a passion for health and well-being. In fact, both have been at the core of every personal and professional milestone I have achieved in life so far.
My mission is to empower people all over the globe to take control of their health and lead happy and productive lives.
As a natural and holistic health care practitioner, I recognize that there isn't a one-size-fits-all solution for health. Everybody is different. What works for one person, may not work for you and that's why I'm here.
I like to think of myself as a no-nonsense, get-it-done kind of doctor, which is why I'm constantly writing and sharing blogs and eBooks, recording podcasts and appearing on different television segments so that you can have all of the health information you need to make the best decisions for your health!
Not only that, but I wrote Hack Your Health Habits and created its accompanying eCourse because I know how overwhelming and confusing health can be and wanted to be able to hold people's hand and guide them on their health and wellness journey.
I've helped countless people hack their health and I'm confident I can help you do the same.
Not sure where to start? Click here.
"I want to help people locally and globally achieve better health and wellness in their lives so they can have more energy and vitality!" – Dr. Nathalie Beauchamp


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U.S. airstrikes target al-Qaida leader
A Libyan military spokesman said Monday that three foreigners were among a number of militants killed in U.S. airstrikes in eastern Libya, but said it is too early to determine if the target, an Algerian al-Qaida-linked leader, was among them.
CAIRO — A Libyan military spokesman said Monday that three foreigners were among a number of militants killed in U.S. airstrikes in eastern Libya, but said it is too early to determine if the target, an Algerian al-Qaida-linked leader, was among them.
The U.S military said it launched weekend airstrikes in Libya targeting Mokhtar Belmokhtar, a militant who once belonged to al-Qaida who is charged with leading a 2103 attack on a gas plant in Algeria that killed at least 35 hostages, including three Americans. Pentagon spokesman Col. Steve Warren said it was believed the strike was successful but "post-strike assessments" were still underway to determine whether the target was killed.
"Our initial assessment is that it was a successful strike but we're not prepared to confirm that because we haven't finalized our assessment," he said. Libya's internationally recognized government, based in the country's east, said the strike was co-ordinated with the United States.
A Libyan Islamist with ties to Libyan militants, however, said the airstrikes missed Belmokhtar, instead killing four members of a Libyan extremist group, linked to al-Qaida, Ansar Shariah, in Ajdabiya, some 850 kilometres (530 miles) east of the Libyan capital, Tripoli.
If confirmed, Belmokhtar's death would be a major get for the U.S. Belmokhtar was considered among the most wanted terrorists in the region. There was no immediate proof provided for Belmokhtar's death, which requires a DNA test or an announcement by his group that he was killed.
This isn't the first time authorities have claimed to have killed Belmokhtar, a militant believed to be 43 who reportedly lost his eye in combat and fought in Afghanistan. He was one of a number of Islamist fighters who have battled Algeria's government since the 1990s, later joining al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, the group's North Africa branch. He then formed his own group, accused in the gas plant attack. He later emerged in Libya, and is believed to have been located there since based in the western and southern part of Libya.
The Libyan government initially said Belmokhtar was killed and hailed the raid as a sign of international help it has sought against miitants who run rampant in much of the country. Libya is split between the international recognized government based in the east and another government in Tripoli, backed by Islamist militias.
But highlighting the uncertainty of operating in chaos-plagued country, Libyan military spokesman Maj. Mohammed Hegazi told The Associated Press that it was too early to confirm if Belmokhtar was killed.
He said the government's statement was "too hasty," adding that tests are still under way.
Hegazi said the bodies are charred from the raid, that killed 17, including two foreign militant leaders and a Tunisian fighter.
"I don't confirm or deny. We are waiting confirmation," he told AP speaking by telephone.
Hegazi said the raid was based on solid intelligence that indicated that militants forced out of the eastern city of Benghazi by fighting there had taken refuge in Ajdabiya. He said that no civilians were killed in the raids. He said that after the Tunisian was fatally injured, the militants transported him to the local hospital in Ajdabiya, setting off clashes with local troops that left three soldiers dead.
Other officials gave conflicting numbers on the death toll, a sign of the confusion over the strike's aftermath.
One government official in Libya said the strike hit a group of Ansar Shariah militants in Ajdabiuya, killing five and wounding more. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to reporters. That group was linked to the Sept. 11, 2012, attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans.
The Islamist, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals in restive Libya, told AP early Monday that Belmokhtar wasn't at the site of the airstrike. He said the strike killed four Ansar Shariah members in Ajdabiya.
At the Pentagon, Warren said the strike hit a "hard structure," but gave few other details.
A U.S. official said two F-15 fighter jets launched multiple 500-pound bombs in the attack. The official was not authorized to discuss the details of the attack publicly so spoke on condition of anonymity. Authorities say no U.S. personnel were on the ground for the assault.
Intelligence officials say Belmokhtar essentially built a bridge between AQIM and the underworld, creating a system where various blends of outlaws now support each other and enrol local youth. He's been linked to terror attacks and the lucrative kidnapping of foreigners in the region. He's also known as Belaouer the One Eyed, Abou al-Abbes and "Mister Marlboro," the last name a play on the fact he's accused of smuggling contraband cigarettes through the Sahara and the Sahel.
The U.S. filed terrorism charges in 2013 against Belmokhtar in connection with the Algeria attack. Officials have said they believe he remained a threat to U.S. and Western interests. Belmokhtar had just split off from al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb to start his own franchise.
The charges filed against Belmokhtar by federal law enforcement officials in Manhattan included conspiring to support al-Qaida and use of a weapon of mass destruction. Additional charges of conspiring to take hostages and discharging a firearm in furtherance of a crime of violence carry the death penalty.
At the time, U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said in a release that Belmokhtar "unleashed a reign of terror years ago, in furtherance of his self-proclaimed goal of waging bloody jihad against the West."
Authorities also offered a $5 million reward for information leading to the arrest of Belmokhtar.
The airstrike comes as al-Qaida militants in eastern Libya continue to battle with members of the Islamic State, as the warring groups fight over power and resources.
And the U.S. has been involved before in the fight against extremists in Libya.
U.S. special forces in 2013 went into Tripoli and seized Abu Anas al-Libi, whisking him out of the country. Al-Libi was accused by the U.S. of involvement in the 1998 bombings of two American embassies in Africa. Al-Libi died January this year in a US hospital from a long-standing medical condition.
Last week, a senior al-Qaida leader was killed by masked gunman, prompting the group to declare holy war on the local Islamic State affiliate. Clashes between the two groups in the eastern coastal city of Darna killed 11 people.
Militants have taken advantage of the chaos, flowing fighters into the country's vast ungoverned spaces. And as the Islamic State group has grown in power, fueled by successes in Iraq and Syria, some al-Qaida fighters have switched loyalties.
In its statement Sunday, the Libyan government said that the operation "is a piece of the international support that it has long requested to fight terrorism that represents a dangerous threat to the regional and international situation." It added that the government would like more help fighting terrorism, including the Islamic State group, which controls Sirte and is moving west toward Misrata and south toward the Jufra military base.
With anger, sadness, Obama says church shooting shows need for reckoning on access to guns
Dickson honoured at gala for dedication to environment


Welcome to your club. Feel the difference when you walk through the doors of Highpoint Sports & Wellness. Our friendly, dedicated staff greets you before you head off to our executive locker rooms. Get energized in one of the many studios or fitness classes, where you'll be challenged and motivated by the best instructors in Burque. Unwind at one of our many happy hours or explore nearby Cibola National Forest with other members. You belong here.
With executive style locker rooms and towel service, incredible child care and massage services, we're elevating the health club experience to a whole new level.
Relax by our outdoor swimming pool with the whole family–and don't forget about the kiddie pool for the little ones!
Albuquerque offers the best of big city living with a local, community feel. With the Sandias so close by, we know that a healthy lifestyle is one of the many reasons so many people call Albuquerque home. Our team's mission is to keep you motivated and wanting more. We stay up-to-date with the latest breakthroughs in health and wellness, and we want to keep you in the loop too. The result is FitLikeThat.com, our blog dedicated to all things health and wellness.


LPC is multigenerational. From the young to the elderly, every age demographic of LPC has a vibrant community of engaged members.
LPC is transformational. Many members can share their personal story of the radical transformation Jesus Christ has brought about in their lives.
LPC is a campus of Apostolic Truth Church in Appleton. ATC is partnered with the community through The Blood Bank, Help for the Homeless, Womankind Medical Center, Storehouse Food Pantry, and Unite For Life.
LPC joins with ATC to support various ministries and missionaries around the globe.


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REPORTS: Hornets linked with Foster move
REPORTS: West Bromwich Albion keeper and former Watford loanee Ben Foster linked with Hornets return
Ben Foster in action against Watford last season. Picture: Action Images
Watford are being linked with a move for 2007 Player of the Season Ben Foster.
The Hornets are in the market for a new goalkeeper and it is reported they have turned their attentions to the West Bromwich Albion stopper, who enjoyed two seasons on loan at Vicarage Road.
The 35-year-old is settled with the Baggies and it is thought he is prepared to stay at the Hawthorns despite the club's relegation from the Premier League.
But it is claimed the lure of remaining in the top flight on a Premier League contract could tempt Foster to return to Vicarage Road in a deal that could be worth £10 million.
Signed on loan from Manchester United, the former Stoke City keeper was a key figure in Aidy Boothroyd's side achieving promotion to the Premier League in 2006.
Foster returned to the Hornets the following season and although his campaign was cut short by injury, his performances in the top flight were recognised in winning the Player of the Season award.


Apple has determined that, in rare cases, the battery in the Beats Pill XL Speaker may overheat and pose a fire safety risk. This product has been sold worldwide since January 2014 by Beats, Apple, and other retailers.
Customer safety is always a top priority at both Apple and Beats, and we have voluntarily decided to recall this product. If you have a Beats Pill XL Speaker, please stop using it and follow the process below to send it to Apple. In exchange, we will provide you with an Apple Store credit or electronic payment in the amount of 425 NZD.
This program only applies to the Beats Pill XL speaker which is shown below. The Beats Pill XL Speaker comes in 5 colors: black, white, pink, metallic sky and titanium which are also shown on this web page.
Please submit your return request by completing this web form.
We will contact you to arrange the return of your Beats Pill XL speaker to Apple.
After we receive it, your Apple Store credit or electronic payment will be available within approximately 3-4 weeks.
Product returns will only be processed via the web for this program. Please do not attempt to return your product to any location that sells or supports Apple or Beats products.
This program does not affect your statutory or warranty rights to receive a refund.
If you need assistance with the return process or have questions about requesting a refund, please contact Apple Support.


January is a busy time for our customers to start planning for their upcoming fundraising campaigns. Over the past few weeks, as our sales team has taken calls and helped our clients set up their fundraising websites, we've also found many people asking for additional fundraising resources. Below we highlight a few of the most commonly requested fundraising resources…just in case, these may also be helpful to plan your fundraiser.
Every fundraising campaign now includes an online fundraising component… which means, your organization is going to need to credit card processing services for accepting online donations, collecting registration payments, sponsor payments, etc. We often have our customers asking us who we "recommend" and finally, we can recommend ourselves! Our new merchant services division (launched this past fall) offers the lowest credit card processing rates in the industry along with many other benefits including: free credit card terminal, no annual contracts, 1-2 day approvals, AND a Free donations Website with Activation of a new Account (now you just can't beat that)!
Another question our customers often ask about is how to attract pitch and secure fundraising sponsors. After all, fundraising events aren't just about raising funds through donations, but often a good portion of funding comes in through sponsorships. luckily we have lot of resources to help you here including a video presentation titled "how to get sponsors to support your fundraiser". If you are interested in bringing sponsors on board, now is a great time to start. Often businesses start their budgeting at the beginning of the year, so even if your fundraising event doesn't take place until next Fall, now is the time to start bringing sponsors on board.
Every organization wants to be sure that they are properly communicating their mission and brand as part of their fundraising campaign. Our fundraising templates allow organizations to create a fundraising website that matches the brand standards of your organization while safely collecting donations and managing all details of the fundraising event. Organizations can easily upload images and videos, make goal statements, list sponsor logos, include event details, tools, maps, etc. and track fundraising success with a thermometer.
Many of our new customers often ask for advice to help them better prepare for their upcoming fundraising events. DoJiggy has a fundraising resource center loaded with helpful tools, tips, guidelines and free fundraising templates to help you with your planning. Some of our most popular downloadable templates include: a sample fundraising event budget, "how-to plan a walk-a-thon" guide, walk-a-thon pledge sheets, various golf tournament planning tools (entry forms, budgets, event check-lists), sample press release, auction bid sheets, and more.


He will get nowhere. The Earth gives forth.
Teachers have a profound effect on their students and I wonder if they are really aware of that. Passing on our knowledge must be done in a way that enables the student to understand it, to retain it, to be able to implement it and to be enthused by it. – Robert Wade.


FICTIONAL REPORT:Approx 25.06.06, Evening. Perth coast. Two witnesses.
The witnesses had observed a bright light over the ocean for several minutes as they talked, but guessed it was a star, as it barely moved. Only when they looked back and saw that it had moved in front of a cloud did one go to grab the video camera.
REALITY: Shot from the same location as the previous clip, but with a better camera. Again, we were trying to tone things down a little, and keep it simple. The camera shake is meant to reflect the camera shake of a long lens, but this technique was improved gradually over the next few weeks.


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What a Difference a DNA (kit) Makes!
Redrawing Our Family Tree
Georgiann Potts
Writer's Note:
One of my very favorite things about the South is our oral history. Most Delta folk are just "natural born" storytellers, a trait I firmly believe has been handed down generation after generation. I can remember as a child the delight we cousins would have, gathered in the shadows listening to the adults talk. We especially enjoyed those stories that spun off late into the night and were interesting enough that we were forgotten about and allowed to stay up much later than our bedtimes.
Those passed-down stories that dealt with family presented a "window" on generations past that we loved. Ancestors became real people to us as we listened to the "facts" that were shared. There were some disagreements, of course. Daddy Moore might remember something one way, but Aunt Dorothy would be ready to correct him based on her genealogy research. Still, we had the general idea of who we were and where we came from.
And then our daughter and son-in-law, Leigh and Brian Grainger, gave Jim and me Ancestry.com DNA kits for our birthdays …
Much of what I know about my family history until recently was based partly on genealogy research and partly on family stories that had been passed down through the generations. The first efforts at "formal" research were begun by my maternal aunt, Dorothy Aly, who in the process amassed a formidable pile of papers and notes reflecting her extensive research into my grandfather's line. Aunt Dorothy was the eldest of Daddy Moore and Mom Moore's children, and she was the one who had the most time and interest to pursue the family tree. She focused on Daddy Moore's line instead of on Mom Moore's, and as a result there were significant "gaps" in my maternal line.
As for the family stories that I heard from earliest childhood, they were believed as Gospel truth by all of us who heard them. After all, they were being told by our nearest relatives, and we just knew that they were speaking the truth. It wasn't until I began investigating the research that Aunt Dorothy had done and comparing it to what I was finding through electronic databases that weren't available to Aunt Dorothy's generation that I began to realize that there were larger "gaps" than I had previously realized. I learned that many (perhaps all?) of our family stories had been modified through the telling and retelling process generation to generation.
This really shouldn't have surprised me because I, like so many others, have personal experience with the childhood game known in my day as "Rumor". You may remember it, too. One person would whisper something to another, and then that one would repeat it to the next person, and so on through a group. The last person would tell the "rumor" and the first person would tell the original story. The differences that crept in through just a handful of exchanges were hilarious --- and instructive. It is no wonder, then, that family stories handed down by word of mouth --- especially by gifted storytellers who relished (and likely embellished) their work --- would also experience some "amendments".
Family Storytellers Play a Role . . .
I come from a family of superb storytellers. My father's brothers and sisters were all exceptionally talented at it. They grew up in the time when telling stories and swapping tales was part of an evening's entertainment. Without television or other distractions, sitting around talking was an important way to relax. Although I didn't get to know all of them well, the aunts and uncles I did know and got to listen to were amazing.
Uncle Woody (W. W. Merritt) was my favorite storyteller of them all. I could listen to him for hours. I wasn't the only one apparently. He made a good living at it, actually. For years he was a much sought-after speaker for his company (known then as Ethyl Corporation from which he retired after 42 ½ years there), giving his professional safety talks "flavor" with some great tale-spinning as illustrations. He began his career as a laborer, but through effort and considerable talent, he worked his way up to become a safety engineer. He was so good at it that he eventually gave safety-related talks not only for Ethyl but also all around America for related organizations including the National Management Association.
The stories that I heard could be categorized in several ways. Some were basic family tree ancestry listings. This one was the son of that one who was the son of that one and so on. Others were more detailed, spelling out "known" details about courtships, marriages, family geographic moves and why the moves were necessary, and so forth. The favorites, though, were those that were told in whispers concerning real or imagined indiscretions such as Aunt Louise's (gasp!) divorce.
Databases Dispel Myths . . .
Through my own research (primarily using Ancestry.com and other genealogy databases available online) I learned that all of these categories were subject to inevitable changes with each retelling, generation by generation. Over time I began to correct some of Aunt Dorothy's assumptions --- all logical, but obscured by the lack of databases in which to research. There were errors in transcription, in spelling, and even among so-called legal paperwork. The more I got into it, the more interested I became.
I must warn you that doing this sort of research can be very time-consuming. I have the benefit of doing it online, and I recognize that this is a major advantage. Frankly, I am staggered at the thought of how much time Aunt Dorothy and those of her generation must have spent perusing public records in distant courthouses, libraries, and organization records. Even so, there is something akin to addiction that takes over when you start "looking" for clues about your ancestors.
The newest tool for uncovering family origins is the DNA test kit. This past April, the Grainger family surprised us with Ancestry.com DNA test kits so that Jim and I could discover even more about our families. We were both excited, and happily sent off our samples to be tested. It took about six weeks, but the results eventually arrived --- and in my case exposed several cherished family stories as myth. There was, however, more positive to come from this experience than negative.
DNA: Just the facts . . .
Before my results came in, I spent considerable time reading as much as I could find that would help me understand what DNA is, how DNA testing works, and what makes DNA test results reliable and, in some instances, acceptable as evidence in criminal courts. Before I was finished (gave up, really --- this is complex science), I had a better idea of how DNA is transferred from one human to another, and why brothers and sisters do not have identical DNA patterns. I learned that while environment certainly impacts the way we humans behave, DNA also contributes mightily to the "who" we are.
I had always been told that my maternal grandfather was Scotch-Irish and that there was a Cherokee ancestor who had marched in the Trail of Tears. My maternal grandmother was French (and an orphan) about which nothing more was known. On my dad's side, the family story was that there was a Russian riverboat gambler somewhere in the past on his father's side. As for his mother's side, all I ever really knew was that I was born one month after my paternal grandmother died.
Goodbye, Molly Halfacre . . .
When the DNA analysis arrived, I was eager to see "who" I really was. There was sufficient confirmation that I hailed from ancestors living in Great Britain. My DNA showed that I am 100% European (45% Great Britain, and 24% Ireland). There was a smattering of French and Russian, enough to indicate that the stories about my French grandmother and Russian gambler might be worth pursuing. To my great shock, however, there was absolutely no Native American in the mix. Aunt Dorothy's "discovery" of Molly Halfacre which had always been a source of pride for me was now clearly off the track. Molly was not, after all, in my line. It was fun to discover that I had always pretty much dismissed the Russian gambler family story, but had believed the one about Molly.
About a week after my DNA results were placed in the Ancestry.com database, I received an email from Julie Weiser Lanza. In it, this woman I had never met or even heard of told me that there was an "extremely high chance" that she and I were cousins through my maternal grandmother's line. She had received an alert from Ancestry.com about the likelihood of the relationship and reached out to me to see if we might share family history. I had received an alert as well, but I am still technically a beginner at all of this and hadn't looked.
A correspondence between us ensued, and it turns out that her great-grandfather, Charles Binnier, and my grandmother, Leta Binnier (Mom Moore) were brother and sister. The family name, Binnier, is French. There were orphans in the family, but new evidence suggests that my grandmother may not have been one. Julie's grandmother and her two sisters were orphans, and grew up in an orphanage in Illinois. Julie's mother, Nancy Weiser Gates, is my grandmother's niece.
Cousin Julie and I have begun the long process of putting together additional pieces of the puzzle. I have sent her a photograph of the main house at Kenilworth Plantation as well as a newspaper article from the Tensas Gazette that discusses the pending sale of the land to "northerners" from Illinois. She and I are searching out a distant relative known as "Elizabeth" who willed her niece and nephew (my grandparents) her home and land about 5 years before they bought Kenilworth and the two adjacent plantations. I have a hunch that this is where some of the capital came with which they made the purchase.
Time will tell (as other DNA results come in and more databases go online) a clearer story about this part of "who" we are. In the meantime, I will happily add this "new" family to my own family tree. With good reason, I believe that I'll be redrawing that tree for many years to come.
Aunt Dorothy would have loved this.


At Akeel & Valentine, PLC, we never lose sight of what matters to our clients. We believe that they are all entitled to justice and protection of their constitutional rights and freedoms in the workplace. That commitment also applies to clients of all ethnic backgrounds, including those that were born outside of the United States.
Akeel & Valentine, PLC, with offices in Dearborn and Troy, understands human rights and vigorously represent people in discrimination claims involving national origin. Whether you have suffered so-called harmless teasing, harassment or wrongful termination based on your ethnicity, we will pursue justice on your behalf.
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D. Mitrany
Rumania: Her History and Politics
by D. Mitrany
from The Balkans: a History of Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece, Rumania, Turkey, by Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth (Oxford, 1915)
The problem of the origin and formation of the Rumanian nation has always provided matter for keen disputation among historians, and the theories which have been advanced are widely divergent. Some of these discussions have been undertaken solely for political reasons, and in such cases existing data prove conveniently adaptable. This elastic treatment of the historical data is facilitated by the fact that a long and important period affecting the formation and the development of the Rumanian nation (270-1220) has bequeathed practically no contemporary evidence.
2. Formation of the Rumanian Nation
About the fifth century B.C., when the population of the Balkan-Carpathian region consisted of various tribes belonging to the Indo-European family, the northern portion of the Balkan peninsula was conquered by the Thracians and the Illyrians. The Thracians spread north and south, and a branch of their race, the Dacians, crossed the Danube. The latter established themselves on both sides of the Carpathian ranges, in the region which now comprises the provinces of Oltenia (Rumania), and Banat and Transylvania (Hungary).
3. The Foundation and Development of the Rumanian Principalities
The first attempt to organize itself into a political entity was made by the Rumanian nation in the thirteenth century, when, under the impulse of the disaffected nobles coming from Hungary, the two principalities of 'Muntenia' (Mountain Land), commonly known as Wallachia and 'Moldavia', came into being. The existence of Rumanians on both sides of the Carpathians long before Wallachia was founded is corroborated by contemporary chroniclers.
4. The Phanariote Rule
These offices very presently fell to the lot of the Phanariotes (Greek merchants and bankers inhabiting the quarter of Phanar), who had in some way or another assisted the princes to their thrones, these being now practically put up to auction in Constantinople. As a natural consequence of such a state of affairs the thoughts of the Rumanian princes turned to Russia as a possible supporter against Ottoman oppression.
5. Modern Period to 1866
In 1821 the Greek revolution, striving to create an independent Greece, broke out on Rumanian ground, supported by the princes of Moldavia and Muntenia. Of this support the Rumanians strongly disapproved, for, if successful, the movement would have strengthened the obnoxious Greek domination; If unsuccessful, the Turks were sure to take a terrible revenge for the assistance given by the Rumanian countries.
6. Contemporary Period: Internal Development
In order to obviate internal disturbances or external interference, the leaders of the movement which had dethroned Prince Cuza caused parliament to proclaim, on the day of Cuza's abdication, Count Philip of Flanders - the father of King Albert of Belgium - Prince of Rumania. The offer was, however, not accepted, as neither France nor Russia favoured the proposal. Meanwhile a conference had met again in Paris at the instance of Turkey and vetoed the election of a foreign prince.
7 . Contemporary Period: Foreign Affairs
Up to 1866 Rumanian foreign politics may be said to have been non-existent. The offensive or defensive alliances against the Turks concluded by the Rumanian rulers with neighbouring princes during the Middle Ages were not made in pursuance of any definite policy, but merely to meet the moment's need.
8. Rumania and the Present War
(a) The Rumanians outside the Kingdom


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The Illustrated Insectopedia - Hugh Raffles (2010)
"The maggot is a power in this world," wrote Jean-Henri Fabre, the Insect Poet, in a moment of characteristic awe. He was philosophizing about flies—bluebottles, greenbottles, bumblebee flies, gray flesh flies—and their capacity "to purge the earth of death's impurities and cause deceased animal matter to be once more numbered among the treasures of life."1 He was pondering the rhythm of the seasons and the cycles of mortality, and he was exploring the grounds of his new house in Sérignan du Comtat, a small village in Provence close to Orange where he was unearthing his own treasures: decaying bird corpses, fetid sewer ducts, ruined wasps' nests—secret refuges of nature's alchemy.
Fabre had called this house, with its large garden, l'Harmas ("the name given, in this district, to an untilled, pebbly expanse abandoned to the vegetation of the thyme"), and it is now a national museum, recently reopened after six years' renovation.2
It is a beautiful house, large and imposing, glowing pink in the summer sunshine, thick walled to keep out the mistral, pale-green shutters. A handsome house that was known locally as le château.3 Fabre was fifty-six when he moved here. Almost immediately he had a two-story addition built onto the main residence: on the first floor, a greenhouse where he and his gardener grew plants for the grounds and for his botanical studies; above, a naturalist's laboratory, in which he spent the greatest part of his time. The property is on the outskirts of Sérignan, and one of Fabre's first acts was to surround its nearly two and a half acres with a stone wall six feet high, isolating it still further. Indeed, Anne-Marie Slézec, the director of the museum, told me, in his thirty-six years here, Fabre never once ventured the few hundred yards into the village.
Mme. Slézec had been assigned to l'Harmas from her position as a research mycologist at the Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle, and now, after six years in the provinces, her task complete, she was eagerly anticipating her return to Paris.
There was a good reason to select a mycologist for this posting: among the chief treasures of l'Harmas are 600 luminous aquarelles of local fungi, delicate portraits that Fabre painted in an effort to preserve the colors and substance of objects that, once collected, rapidly lost all relation to their living form. The paintings are justly famous, and they seem in some way to distill Fabre's entire life's work. Powerfully descriptive and immediately accessible, they strive to capture the ecological whole and, in doing so, to convey the beauty and what he saw as the mysterious perfection of nature. They are the product of exceptional observational skills. They utilize a talent that was largely self-taught. And they reveal a profound intimacy with their subject.
But Mme. Slézec's task was to be less mycological than antiquarian. She rapidly turned detective. To reconstruct Fabre's study, she hunted down old photographs, securing the crucial lead from a librarian in Avignon who found a contemporary image, which the director set out to reproduce in every respect. Somehow she turned up the very same framed pictures; the same books; the same clock (which she had restored to working order); the same globe; the same chairs; the same cases of snails, fossils, and seashells; the same set of scales. She reinstated the famous writing desk, just two and a half feet long, a school desk really, insubstantial enough for Fabre to pick up and move as needed. She brought the photograph back to life. Or rather, she brought it into the present and, in the process, re-created the study as a memorial. Only Fabre himself is missing (and he is missing from the image, too), though the sunlight that still floods through the garden window fills the room with the aura of his life, a life lived fully right in this space.
The grounds presented a different challenge. When Fabre arrived, in 1879, he discovered that the nearly two and a half acres of land he now owned had once been a vineyard. Cultivation had involved the removal of most of the "primitive vegetation." "No more thyme, no more lavender, no more clumps of kermes-oak," he lamented.4 Instead, his new garden was a mass of thistles, couch grass, and other upstarts. He ripped it out and replanted. By the time Mme. Slézec arrived, however, the Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle, which had taken possession on the death of Fabre's last surviving son, in 1967, had turned much of the land into a botanical garden. Scouring Fabre's notebooks, his manuscripts, and his correspondence, studying photographs taken on the grounds, Mme. Slézec searched for clues that would enable her to restore what Fabre had intended to persist after his death. She cleared the shrubs obstructing his much-loved view of Mount Ventoux, the isolated outlier of the French Alps that—following in Petrarch's famous footsteps—Fabre often climbed. She reintroduced bamboo, forsythia, roses, and Lebanon oak, and she protected and managed the surviving Atlas cedars, the Aleppo and Corsican pines, and the graceful lilac walk that leads from the entry gate to the house.
The garden, she determined, had been planned in three sections. In front of the house, Fabre had laid out a formal flower garden surrounding a large ornamental pond. This was where he entertained his not inconsiderable number of visitors: members of the local intellectual elite and, toward the end of his life, dignitaries and admirers from further afield. Beyond the flower beds, he established the harmas for which the house was named, an area of native shrubs and trees that were planted, nurtured, then left to grow with minimum management. Finally, beyond the harmas, he planted a large area of trees, a parc arboré, again allowed to thrive with relatively little intervention. These latter two areas were his "laboratory of living entomology," the habitats for his insect studies.5 Viewed from the flower garden, they looked wild and untamed, but as in the Romantic tradition of landscape gardening, this naturalness was an effect of much art and labor.
Fabre lived at l'Harmas until his death in 1915 at age ninety-two, and it was here that he wrote nine of the ten volumes of his Souvenirs entomologiques, a massive work with a mass readership on which his fame and reputation rest. It was a labor he conceived as an irrefutable demonstration of the "Intelligence [that] shine[s] behind the mystery of things"6 and as a monument against "transformism"—that is, the evolution of plants and animals through the adaptive transformation of species descended from common ancestors, a formulation of evolution general enough to include both Darwin and his French forerunner, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. It was here in the harmas and the parc arboré that Fabre encountered the animals that fill those volumes and bear the burden of his calling: the wasps, bees, beetles, grasshoppers, crickets, caterpillars, scorpions, and spiders whose behavior he describes in such vivid detail. It was here, in this "Eden of bliss," as he put it (with one eye ever trained on his legacy), that he would "live henceforth alone with the insect."7
The garden at l'Harmas and the countryside surrounding it were a naturalist's paradise, and Fabre's interests were voracious, his knowledge encyclopedic. He studied birds, plants, and fungi. He collected fossils, seashells, and snails. But above all, it was the insects that fascinated him.
Fascination, though, is not always twinned with affection. Hundreds of cicadas lived in the two plane trees outside his front door, and each day in summer he heard their calls. "Ah! Creature possessed," he despaired soon after arriving, "the plague of my dwelling, which I hoped would be so peaceful!" He considered hacking down the trees to be rid of them. He had already eliminated the frogs from his pond ("by means perhaps a little too rigorous," he admitted).8 If he could, said Mme. Slézec, he would have silenced the songbirds too.
The cicadas were a "real torment."9 But like all of nature, they were also an opportunity. As a child, Fabre had been deeply impressed by La Fontaine's Fables, though less by their moral complexity and social satire than by their ability to make the natural world serve as a vehicle of moral instruction. Nature was everywhere and at every turn offered occasion for inquiry and education. Insects, especially, were around every corner and beneath every footstep. And so were their secrets. Insects struggled, they triumphed, they failed. Their lives were full of drama both epic and homespun; they had personalities, desires, preferences, habits, and fears. Indeed, their lives were much like his own. Unearthing an insect's biography was both an exploration of the unknown and something more: a journey on which everyone was invited and for which Fabre was both the guide and the subject. "Fabre's accounts of insect life," writes the historian Norma Field perceptively, "convey both the drama he found in it and the drama he experienced in exploring it.… The narrative of insect life becomes the narrative of Fabre's life."10 Field sees in this convergence a persuasive narrative structure that gives Fabre's writing its exceptional force. And perhaps it's not only his readers who are being persuaded. All this narrative blurring signals an ontological blurring between the man and his insects, an effect of deep affinities. What does it take, we might wonder, to become a true insect poet?
Everyone could participate in Fabre's narrative. Scientific inquiry demanded specialized skills, patience, and ingenuity. But its dissemination would be accessible and democratic. Each insect was a mysterious neighbor whose true identity was revealed only through the patience and ingenuity of its biographer. By the time he is done, each insect has given up its secrets, surrendered its life story. And, Fabre insists, this biographical approach is a surer route to knowledge than any science that takes as its object the dead animal pinned to a card and viewed under a microscope. Morphological similarities might be meaningful to the elite theorists in their metropolitan studies, but what counted out here in the world was 'margin-bottom:0cm;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-align: justify;text-indent:12.0pt;line-height:normal'>The great institutions of natural history, botany, and zoology were increasingly preoccupied with questions of classification. For Fabre, such activities and (what he saw as) their newly distanced ways of engaging with nature—as object, specimen, icon—were, quite simply, "burying us."11 Insects were all around, yet we scarcely knew them. If, like La Fontaine, we observed their behavior with patience and dedication, they could provide an unrivaled source of moral and scientific education. Even the cicadas. Even the maggots. And even—perhaps especially—those ruthless hymenopteran hunters, the solitary wasps.
Work on the high wall surrounding l'Harmas started soon after Fabre and his family arrived in 1879, but construction was frustratingly slow. For the naturalist, however, the delays were serendipitous. The builders left large piles of stone and sand in the garden, and these were soon occupied by bees and wasps. Two wasps, the Bembix and the Languedocian sphex, were old friends that Fabre knew well from previous encounters. They made homes in the sand, and he spent much of his days observing and recording their behavior.
Fabre truly loved wasps. Along with beetles, they occupy more of the Souvenirs than any other group. (He wrote little on ants and butterflies.) He loved that they were still so unknown. He loved their determination—so close to his own—to overcome the largest obstacles. He loved their precision. Above all, he loved that they allowed him to disclose the astonishing complexities of their behavior and then, like a magician, reveal that this behavior, no matter how much it looked like problem solving and ingenuity was—contra Darwin—entirely devoid of intelligence. He loved the wasps because, as exemplars to him of both the "wisdom" and the "ignorance" of instinct, they were his accomplices in the campaign against transformism.
He seeks them out. Knowing their habits, he finds a likely spot—a sand dune, a steep roadside bank, a small clearing in the undergrowth, a south-facing garden wall, a kitchen fireplace—and he waits. He watches each species prepare its nest in its own style. Here is the Bembix rostrata digging like a puppy ("The sand, shot backwards under the abdomen, passes through the arch of the hind-legs, gushes like a fluid in a continuous stream, describes its parabola and falls to the ground some seven or eight inches away").12 Here is a small group of Cerceris tuberculata, "industrious miners" who "patiently remove with their mandibles a few bits of gravel from the bottom of the pit and push the heavy mass outside."13 Here are some yellow-winged sphex (Sphex flavipennis), "a troop of merry companions encouraging one another in their work; … the sand flies, falling in a fine dust on their quivering wings; and the too bulky gravel, removed bit by bit, rolls far away from the workyard. If a piece seems too heavy to be moved, the insect gets up steam with a shrill note which reminds one of the woodman's 'Hoo!'").14 And here are the Eumenes wasps, whose nest is so "gracefully curved" and so carefully decorated with snail shells and pebbles that it is "both a fortress and a museum."15
Their nests complete, the wasps fly off. Fabre waits, his patience inexhaustible. Finally, they return, laden with food for the larva that will hatch in their nests. A Cerceris lands with a metallic Buprestis beetle. A hairy Ammophila (a sphex) arrives with an outsize lepidopteran larva. Here is a Chalybion (another sphex) clasping a spider between her legs. Here comes a yellow-winged sphex dragging a cricket far larger than itself.
Facedown on the ground, lens in hand, as close as his quarry allows, Fabre permits no detail to escape him, hour after hour, an eager giant spying on a Lilliputian world. Sometimes, anxious for discovery, he goes further, dislodging the nest and prizing it open with his knife. Maybe there's a lone victim, paralyzed and positioned on its back, a single egg placed on its abdomen just beyond reach of its feebly flickering legs; maybe there are several victims in a cell, stacked on top of one another or arranged front to back, the freshest farthest from the egg.
"Observation sets the problem," he writes; "experiment solves it."16 Sometimes he tests the animal in situ. He might wait for the moment when the wasp, descending to check the nest, leaves its captive momentarily unguarded. Swiftly, Fabre purloins the immobilized victim and, breath bated, observes the wasp's agitation on surfacing. Or he allows the wasp to position her prey in the nest and then enters stealthily, removes the victim, and watches to see if she will nonetheless deposit her egg and seal the entrance as usual (or as he would have it, as predetermined).
Sometimes he carries the nest carefully back to the house. Often, he captures the insect, brings it to his laboratory, and creates controlled and convenient conditions in which to observe its behavior and devise more complex experiments of longer duration. Perhaps, searching for answers in anatomy as well as psychology, he chloroforms and dissects it.
His first dissection was a revelation. It catalyzed his decision to abandon a career teaching mathematics and to make a living from his true passion, natural history. It was 1848. The Second Republic had just been established, and France was in uproar. Fabre was in Corsica, twenty-five years old, teaching physics in the college at Ajaccio and as entranced by the luxuriant landscape ("the infinite, glittering sea at my feet, the dreadful masses of granite overhead")17 as any Humboldt setting foot in the New World.
He had leaped at the posting, eager to escape Carpentras ("that accursed little hole").18 Just a few months previously, he had resigned his job as a schoolmaster there, revealing the sense of outrage that would never fully desert him, his hurt at the exclusions that refused to end no matter his achievements. It was the memory of his ejection from school when his parents—Provençal peasants who tried (and failed) to make a living keeping cafés in a series of towns—could not keep up the monthly fees. It was his frustration as a young man laboring on railroad-construction sites, repeatedly passed over for academic postings and denied the opportunity to show his capacities ("The injustice was too unheard-of," he wrote to his brother, Frédéric, in September 1848, "… to give … [me] two licentiate's diplomas, and to make … [me] conjugate verbs for a pack of brats!").19 It was his disappointment at the commercial failure of his decade's work on a process to extract madder, the red dye used for military uniforms, an enterprise designed to provide him with the income he would need to take up academic employment (which, at the time, was unpaid and intended only for men of means). It was his distress when the clerical backlash against Napoleon III's educational reforms led to his dismissal from teaching (he had been giving free science classes that were open to girls), throwing his family into poverty and upon the charity of a close friend, the English liberal theorist John Stuart Mill (who had moved to Provence to live and die near the grave of his wife, the early feminist Harriet Taylor).20 It was bitterness that all this misfortune was compounded by the failure of those with power over him to appreciate that his successes (his baccalaureates in letters and mathematics, his degrees in the mathematical and physical sciences, his doctorate in the natural sciences, his more than 200 publications: textbooks as well as volumes of popular science written at a time when the genre scarcely existed; as well as his major scientific discoveries: the first demonstrations of taxis in animals and the proof of hypermetamorphosis in beetles) were won against odds unimaginable by the Parisian scientific elite. It was more bitterness that when recognition finally came, at the end of his long life, the university, the scientists, even the entomologists, rarely paid homage; it was the literary lions—Victor Hugo (who dubbed him the Homer of insects); Edmond Rostand, the author of Cyrano de Bergerac (who, not to be outdone, anointed him the insects' Virgil); the playwright Romain Rolland (for whom Fabre was "un des Français que j'admire le plus"); and the Provençal poet Frédéric Mistral—who campaigned for Fabre's nomination for the 1911 Nobel Prize—not for a scientific prize, please note, but for the prize for literature.21 It was his helpless anger at the sudden loss of his eldest son at sixteen and the subsequent deaths of two young daughters and two wives, tragedies that were to cast a pall over his life but tragedies, it must be admitted, from which he himself created a badge of lifelong suffering that became an against-all-odds story of the homespun genius, the poverty-stricken hermitlike poet of science at work in his garden, alone with his insects, simplicity, sacrifice, naïveté in the strict sense, the story that would thrill the Parisian cultural set in his last days and draw them down to the unfamiliar environs of Sérignan.
It was a raw anger that fueled a vigorous populism. Addressing an imagined audience of elite scientists, the men who had responded to his antagonism to evolutionary theory by removing his textbooks from classrooms and once more plunging him into grim poverty, he articulates a passion so consuming that it temporarily absolves the cicadas: "You rip up the animal and I study it alive; you turn it into an object of horror and pity, whereas I cause it to be loved; you labor in a torture chamber and dissecting room, I make my observations under the blue sky to the song of the Cicadas, you subject cell and protoplasm to chemical tests, I study instinct in its loftiest manifestations; you pry into death, I pry into life."22 He meant, of course, that he studied the living animal, the animal in its true form, as God intended it to be known, a being of spirit, mystery, and definite purpose, a being accessible through experience not theory, through intimacy not abstraction.
But he was, as we already know, not averse to prying into death, and indeed, according to his friend and biographer, the doctor-politician Georges Victor Legros, it was with that first dissection, in Ajaccio, that his story began. In Corsica, he had befriended Alfred Moquin-Tandon, a professor of botany at Toulouse, a man of letters twenty years his senior who wrote poetry in vernacular Provençal and talked of the importance of an accomplished style, even in the writing of biology. Over dinner, Moquin-Tandon, improvising instruments from his sewing basket, dissected a snail. "From that time forward," wrote Legros, Fabre "began to collect not only dead, inert, or desiccated forms, mere material for study, with the aim of satisfying his curiosity; he began to dissect with ardor, a thing he had never done before. He housed his tiny guests in his cupboard; and occupied himself, as he was always to do in the future, with the smaller living creatures only." Soon after, Fabre wrote Frédéric from Corsica, "My scalpels are tiny daggers which I make myself out of fine needles; my marble slab is the bottom of a saucer; my prisoners are lodged by the dozen in old match-boxes; maxime miranda in minimis."23
Maxime miranda in minimis. Of the many tiny marvels he would encounter over the succeeding decades, the most miraculous were the hunting wasps. Some of what they revealed to him was already known, but some was entirely new. Not even the illustrious René-Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur—the pioneer of entomological observation who described the Odynerus wasp at length in his six-volume Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire des insectes (1734–42)—knew that instead of laying their egg directly on the "swarming heap" of two dozen captive weevil larvae, the Odynerus (and the Eumenes) suspend it from a fine thread attached to the domed roof of the nest.24 After years of trying to engineer the opportunity, Fabre was finally a witness. It was, he confessed, "one of those moments of inward joy which atone for much vexation and weariness." The hatched wasp larva lowers itself to feed ("head downwards, it is digging into the limp belly of one of the caterpillars"), and then—when its meal becomes too agitated—it hoists itself safely out of reach.25
Each of his insects confirmed the power of instinct. It might seem, he said, as if these animals know what they're doing. It might appear as if their astonishing behavior is an exterior manifestation of an interior life. But that would be entirely wrong. They act without consciousness and without self-knowledge. They follow instincts they have possessed since the Creation, instincts that are blind, rigid, and innate, that are not learned but are instead possessed fully formed from birth, perfect and infallible, highly specialized to their function and peculiar to each species. These instincts possess "wisdom": they generate flawless behavior that solves the most complex problems of physical existence. Yet under the stress of experimental disruption, they prove themselves completely "ignorant," unresponsive to the simplest changes in familiar conditions.26
Over and over he told this story, believing—as many creationists still do—that in instinct he had found evolution's Achilles' heel, proof that species are fixed and immutable and have been so since the beginning. Because—and his argument is quite this simple—how could intermediary stages exist for such extraordinarily complex and precisely calibrated behavior? Think of the hunting wasps, he says; it's a zero-sum game: "The art of preparing the larva's provisions allows of none but masters and suffers no apprentices."27 If the prey isn't adequately immobilized, he says, it will destroy the egg or the larva; if the prey is so badly wounded that it dies, the egg will hatch but the larva's food source will putrefy and the hatchling will starve. What animal genius enables the delicate calculation by which, time after time, the prey is rendered insensate but with all vital functions intact? As he watches the hairy Ammophila paralyze its victim, he faces life's most profound truth, the mystery of mysteries, before which even grown men of science can only weep: "Animals obey their compelling instinct, without realizing what they do. But whence comes that sublime inspiration? Can theories of atavism, of natural selection, of the struggle for life interpret it reasonably? To me and my friend, this was and remained one of the most eloquent revelations of the unutterable logic that rules the world and guides the ignorant by the laws of its inspiration. Stirred to our innermost being by the flash of truth, both of us felt tears of undefinable emotion spring to our eyes."28
Any of his insects could bring him here. But it was the wasps, he believed, that presented the most forceful case against the Darwinian view that instincts are inherited adaptive behaviors; that, as Darwin put it in 1871 in The Descent of Man, complex instincts are gained "through the natural selection of variations of simpler instinctive actions," and "those insects which possess the most wonderful instincts are certainly the most intelligent." Darwin's instincts were, of course, inherited, and they were far from fixed and far from perfect. They were adaptive, not prescient. As he summarized it, "intelligent actions, after being performed during several generations, become converted into instincts and are inherited."29
It was against these heresies that Fabre marshaled the wasps. And it was the wasps that gave him license to state categorically, "I reject the modern theory of instinct." "Modern theory," his disparaging term for evolution, was "an ingenious game in which the arm-chair naturalist, the man who shapes the world according to his whim, is able to take delight, but in which the observer, the man grappling with reality, fails to find a serious explanation of anything whatsoever that he sees."30
The hairy Ammophila chooses for her prey the larva of the lepidopteran Agrotis segetum, a creature up to fifteen times her weight. Fabre's description of the struggle between the tiny wasp and the large "gray worm" is one of his most famous. "Never," he wrote, "did the intuitive science of instinct show me anything more exciting."
He is walking with his friend close to home when they catch sight of the agitated Ammophila. The two men "at once lay down on the ground, close to where she was working," so close, in fact, that—in a typically Doctor Dolittle detail—the wasp briefly settles on Fabre's sleeve.31 They watch as she scours a narrow patch of ground, evidently on the track of her prey. Ill-advisedly, the larva surfaces. "The huntress was on the spot at once, gripping him by the skin of his neck and holding tight in spite of his contortions. Perched on the monster's back, the Wasp bent her abdomen and deliberately, without hurrying, like a surgeon thoroughly acquainted with his patient's anatomy, drove her lancet into the ventral surface of each of the victim's segments, from the first to the last. Not a ring was left without receiving a stab; all, whether with legs or without, were dealt with in order, from front to back."32
Note the key observation: the wasp delivers nine stings, each injected at a precise point in a different segment of the caterpillar's body. And note also that the stings are delivered in sequence. Fabre's subsequent dissection seems to prove the wasp's foresight. These are surgical strikes, each taking out one of the caterpillar's motor ganglia. But the best is to come.
The victim's head is still unscathed, the mandibles are at work: they might easily, as the insect is borne along, grip some bit of straw in the ground and successfully resist this forcible removal; the brain, the primary nervous center, might provoke a stubborn contest, which would be very awkward with so heavy a burden. It is well that these hitches be avoided. The caterpillar, therefore, must be reduced to a state of torpor which will deprive him of the least inclination for self-defence. The Ammophila succeeds in this by munching his head. She takes good care not to use her needle: she is no clumsy bungler and knows quite well that to inflict a wound on the cervical ganglia would mean killing the caterpillar then and there, the very thing to be avoided. She merely squeezes the brain between her mandibles, calculating every pinch; and, each time, she stops to ascertain the effect produced, for there is a nice point to be achieved, a certain degree of torpor that must not be exceeded, lest death should intervene. In this way, the requisite lethargy is obtained, a somnolence in which all volition is lost. And now the caterpillar, incapable of resistance, incapable of wishing to resist, is seized by the nape of the neck and dragged to the nest. Comment would mar the eloquence of such facts as these.33
In a classic paper first published in 1972, the psychologist Richard Herrnstein (now remembered less fondly as co-author of The Bell Curve), located Fabre as a major figure in the "intuitional approach to instinct," a position Herrnstein neatly summarized as "a set of denials held together by a sense of awe."34
In this late-nineteenth–early-twentieth-century post-Darwinian moment of intense debate about the nature and origins of human and animal behavior, instinct was a central, much-contested philosophical and empirical concept. The intuitional position—with its idea of instinct as a special and undefined "capacity for adaptation"35 distinct from intelligence—was only one of several key poles. Herrnstein identified three and contrasted Fabre's account with what he called the "reflexive view," which brought together such diverse figures as Herbert Spencer, the behaviorists Jacques Loeb and (in his early work) John B. Watson, and the psychologist-philosopher William James, who was quite clear on the distinction between his own position and that of a Fabre: "The older writings on instinct are ineffectual wastes of words … [that] smothered everything in vague wonder at the clairvoyant and prophetic power of the animals—so superior to anything in man—and at the beneficence of God in endowing them with such a gift. But God's beneficence endows them, first of all, with a nervous system; and, turning our attention to this, makes instinct immediately appear neither more nor less wonderful than all the other facts of life."36 In this intuitional account, says James, instincts are little more than complex, differentiated reflexes ("compound reflex action" was Spencer's famous phrase).
Herrnstein's third position, which, like the reflexive view, assumed that instincts are subject to selective pressures in ways similar to morphological traits, was termed hormic (as in hormonal) psychology by William McDougall, its main proponent. According to McDougall, instincts are highly malleable and susceptible to environmental influence but organized around a stable core, which is driven by a striving toward a defined outcome (the building of a nest, the imprisoning of prey, and so on) and is the impulse behind almost all human and animal behavior. Instincts, wrote McDougall, are "the mental forces that maintain and shape all the life of individuals and societies."37
With the rise of behaviorism in the 1920s, instinct fell out of favor as an explanation of animal behavior and reemerged only in the 1950s with the popularization of the ethologists, especially Konrad Lorenz and Nikolaas Tinbergen, who, though Darwinians, enforced a sharp division between instinct and learning. There is a line here that reaches across the decades from Fabre to these more recent students of animal behavior and is held together by simple behavioral experiments in natural settings, by close observation, and by the familiar combination of science and wonder. It's a line that somehow bypasses Fabre's hostility to evolution and instead picks up his commitment to popular pedagogy—the impulse to accessibility that led Lorenz, Tinbergen, and their colleague Karl von Frisch to cultivate an eager reading public and capture the Nobel Prize that eluded their predecessor.
It is a line of flight. The wasps fly straight through here, veering off in unanticipated directions, touching down at decisive moments. They flee science to foment Fabrean wonder among the modern creationists, for example, and sometimes they appear in more intriguing places, as in the imagination of the influential philosopher Henri Bergson, a great admirer of Fabre's (he attended the celebration at l'Harmas organized by Legros in 1910 that heralded the Provençal hermit's belated journey to the limelight). Bergson listens to the description of the nine-times-stabbing Ammophila surgeon and develops his own idiosyncratic metaphysics of evolution, which draws on Georges Cuvier's early-nineteenth-century notion that animals, like sleepwalkers, are equipped with a "somnambulist" consciousness ("a kind of consciousness which is intellectually unaware of its purpose").38
Bergson offers an intuitional view of instinct as a "divinatory sympathy" and, like Fabre, opposes instinct to intelligence. But the opposition has a different basis. Where Fabre sees intelligence as the mark of human superiority, to Bergson it is a limited form of understanding, cold and external. Where Fabre sees instinct as mechanical and shallowly automatic, to Bergson it is a profound understanding, a kind of knowledge that takes us to "the very inwardness of life," reaching back through the common evolutionary history of wasp and caterpillar, back before they diverged on the tree of life, back to a deep intuition of each other, so that the Ammophila simply knows how to paralyze the caterpillar without ever having learned and so that their dramas "might owe nothing to outward perception, but result from the mere presence together of the Ammophila and the caterpillar, considered no longer as two organisms, but as two activities."39
Still, as Bertrand Russell noted as early as 1921, "love of the marvellous may mislead even so careful an observer as Fabre and so eminent a philosopher as Bergson."40 Fabre got a lot wrong about the hairy Ammophila, and it is on plain empirics that his critique of natural selection has been most effectively dismissed. This is not, it seems, a zero-sum game after all. It is true that, in general, the wasp paralyzes its Lepidoptera larvae with multiple stings, one to each segment. But the operation is not so miraculously accurate, nor so consistent, nor does it always follow the same order. Nor does the caterpillar even survive every time. Sometimes the larvae feed off its putrefying body. Sometimes they are killed by its thrashing torso. Moreover, as both reflexive and hormic theorists suggested, the wasp adjusts its behavior in response to changing external stimuli, such as climate, the availability of food, and the condition and behavior of its prey. And it readily alters the sequence and (what, for want of a better term, we might call) the logic of its actions for reasons that may be self-evidently necessary or, on other occasions, quite opaque. Wasps have been observed stinging forty separate larvae and then choosing to drag the forty-first, unparalyzed, to their nest. They have been recorded paralyzing their prey but not following this action with any kind of nest building. They have been seen stinging at random, opportunistically, apparently just trying to get a good shot in. And it has been discovered that their sting is an injection as well as a stab and that it contains poison that produces instant paralysis and the longer-term effect of inhibiting metamorphosis and maintaining the larval body in a supple state, the effect on the victim less percussive than chemical.41
There's something uncanny here. And it's not only the wasp. Herrnstein was right to point to the mysticism at the heart of Fabre's account. He understood that the "vague wonder" that readers take from Fabre is the most potent legacy of the intuitional position. Yet it has its paradoxes too. Fabre pleads with us to understand that these animals are acting blindly, automatically, without will or intention. And to get there, he revels in the animals' behavior, believing that the more complex it is and the more rational it appears, the more devastating his unmasking of it as no more than blind instinct, the more crushing his denunciation of the transformists that follows. These wasps are "surgeons" who "calculate" and "ascertain." Their victims "resist." But the effect is unforeseen. Fabre is enthralled. And the wasps claim the stage. He is their host. They speak through him, live through him. His prose leaves us not with a sense of the insects' insufficiencies but with a profound impression of their capacities. A profound impression of the wasps' capacities, that is, and of Fabre's too. Despite his insistence, it is not instinct that is miraculous but the animals themselves.
The celebrity Fabre enjoyed in his final years did not long survive his death. Though there was little possibility of his embrace by the scientific community, literary fashion ensured that his stature as a nature writer would also rapidly fall. Nowadays, he is largely forgotten both in France and in the English-speaking world. Not even the creationists claim him.
Only in Japan is Fabre now a household name. There, he is a stalwart of the elementary school curriculum and is often a child's first introduction to a natural world that soon comes alive in summer insect-collecting assignments. He frequently returns in later life too, as parents introduce their children to the pleasures of natural history and recall the carefree days of their own youthful insect love. ("I write above all things for the young," Fabre, a schoolteacher for a full twenty-six years, once told his critics in the scientific establishment; "I want to make them love the natural history which you make them hate.")42
As we might expect, he is a fixture of Japan's numerous insectaria. But he also pops up in less likely places: incarnated in the resourceful boy hero of a current manga (Insectival Crime Investigator Fabre) in the top-selling biweekly omnibus Superior; as an anime character (in the series Read or Die, he is cloned as an evil genius with the power to turn insects loose against civilization); as a free promotional plastic figurine (a souvenir entomologique)—along with models of the cicada, the scarab beetle, the hairy Ammophila, and other favorites—in any of the thousands of 7-Eleven convenience stores throughout the country; and in luxury advertising, as a marker of male cosmopolitanism, intellectual curiosity, and a certain spiritual yearning.43
But it is not just in schools, nature centers, and Japan's vibrantly commodified popular culture that Fabre's presence is felt. While his writings are available in English only in haphazard and elderly translation, a recent tally calculated that Japanese scholars produced forty-seven complete or partial editions of the Souvenirs alone between 1923 and 1994.44 Okumoto Daizaburo, literature professor, insect collector, and founder-director of Tokyo's new Fabre Museum, points out that the early history of these translations is especially interesting.45 It was, after all, Osugi Sakae, the famous anarchist and author of the memorably subversive aphorism "Beauty is to be found in disarray," who completed the first systematic translation of Fabre into Japanese and whose plan—cut short by his brutal murder in the police repression that followed the great Kanto earthquake of 1923—was to translate the entire Souvenirs. In 1918, around the time he first read Fabre, Osugi wrote: "I like a spirit. But I feel a repugnance when it is theorized. Under process of theorizing, it is often transformed into a harmony with social reality, a slavish compromise, and a falsehood."46
Though a committed Darwinian (he had already translated the Origin of Species), Osugi felt he had found a kindred spirit in Fabre. Captivated by the energy of Fabre's prose and by the pedagogical possibilities of popular science, Osugi was also drawn strongly to Fabre's hostility to theorizing. The problem of theory, the charismatic writer-activist believed, lay less in its ability to explain than in its desire to order, less in its ambition to make sense of the world than in its appeal to the analytic over the experiential. The ordering impulse was a constraining impulse, one driven by the desire to dominate, to master, both intellectually and practically. The elevation of the rational, he asserted, impoverished the possibilities of apprehension. "To desire collapsing the universe into a single algorithm and to master all of reality with the precepts of reason" was, Fabre had written, a "grandiose enterprise," not a grand one.47 It didn't seem to matter to Osugi that this suspicion of global explanation arose from Fabre's constant rediscovery of God's hand in nature, a very different basis for wariness than his own.48
I don't know whether Okumoto is correct in his argument that Fabre's appeal for Osugi lay in their shared nonconformity, but I like where it leads us. As Okumoto tells it, the revolutionary labor leader took inspiration from the schoolteacher-naturalist's rejection of authoritarian pedagogy, his insistence on teaching girls as well as boys, and above all, his attitude toward categorization. ("A fig for systems!" Fabre exclaims in the Souvenirs when discussing taxonomists' refusal to classify spiders as insects.)49 Fabre's celebration of the sensuality of inquiry, his rejection of authority, and his democratic accessibility fascinated Osugi—as it does Okumoto, who places Fabre alongside the celebrated naturalist and folklorist Kumagusu Minakata (1867–1941), another household name in today's Japan and another figure honored for his nonconformity and independence: "These two idiosyncratic autodidacts never simplified their own thoughts into laws and formulas. Some people criticized their lack of strong, consistent theories, but they kept searching for the diversity of the world and kept seeing everything with a fresh eye. They are, indeed, what Rimbaud calls 'voyants.'"50
"Insect lovers are anarchists," writes Okumoto elsewhere; "they hate following other people's orders and try to create something like 'order' by themselves—or else they don't care about such a thing at all!"51Insect lovers, he says, see the world from the place of the insect, from inside the life of the animal, from within its micro world. They pry into life, not death.
There's another insect lover who might help here. Imanishi Kinji, ecologist, mountaineer, anthropologist, founder of Japanese primatology, and best-selling theorist of nature study (shizengaku), began his career in the 1930s studying mayfly larvae in the Kamo River, in Kyoto. A theorist of evolution, Imanishi was no theoretical Fabrean. But he was no Darwinian either. Like Osugi's hero, the great anarchist Peter Kropotkin, Imanishi saw cooperation as the motor of evolution, rejecting both inter- and intraspecific competition as the basis of natural selection. Imanishi stressed the connection and harmonious interaction among living things but insisted that the meaningful ecological units are societies, outside of which an individual cannot survive. Individuals come together not for reproduction but because they have needs in common, which they meet through collaboration. With its interest in cooperating groups rather than competing monads, his shizengaku is, he maintained, a Japanese view of evolution, distinct from a Darwinian system ideologically rooted in Western individualism.52 Like Fabre, Imanishi attracted considerable condescension from professional biologists in Europe and North America, who scented an anti-scientific anti-Darwinism at work. But Imanishi's ideas have widespread popularity in Japan.53 Even though there is little overlap between the architecture of Imanishi's thought and Fabre's natural historical theology, there is an unambiguous affinity. "There are people in the world," Imanishi wrote in 1941,
who have spent their whole lives dressed in white smocks, and have never once been out of the laboratory. There are probably even famous scholars who have never once seen animals and plants as they exist in nature. I will not stand for the lumping together of people who have views of nature like that, and people like me, who have shaped their views of nature by spending their lives in the midst of nature; this feeling, perhaps an undercurrent, is somewhere behind my work. Even if there are no natural sciences, nature will still exist. No matter how great the natural sciences make themselves look, they can know only a part of nature. Having subdivided nature and become a specialist in some field, one is a mere specialist of constituent nature (bubun shizen). In the schools they do not teach us that, in addition to constituent nature, there is also total nature (zentai shizen). It was the mountains and exploration which taught me of the existence of total nature.54
The "anti-science" rejection of mechanistic theory, the intuitive connection of observer and observed, the immersive affinity of person and world, this enfolding of a life and its work. Remember Fabre: the simplicity, the patience, the life eked out far from metropolitan glamour, the attempt to grasp the living whole, the disdain for authoritarianism, the ethical independence, the moral life, the scholarly life, the pedagogical life. These are lessons that appeal just as strongly to old and young, to radical and conservative.
And what's more, for Imanishi as for Okumoto, Fabre's pursuit of the godly in insects is recognizable in another way. It has a sensibility that is easily assimilated to a set of ideas often invoked by Japanese nature lovers (and foreign commentators on Japanese attitudes toward nature) seeking to explain what nationalists, Romantics, New Agers, and others frequently consider a unique Japanese affinity to nature and, in particular, to insects: that animist, Shintoist—and subsequently Japanese Buddhist—notion that divinity (kami) "take[s] abode in natural features that give people a feeling of awe or spirituality," that "nature is divine," that nature itself is divine.55 (Not, I should emphasize, as Fabre would have it, that nature is an expression of the Divine.)
And there's something else. Osugi and Okumoto reveal the inadequacies of literal-meaning-centered reading. They remind us that to understand Fabre and his appeal, we have to listen for other languages in his work, not simply to what the linguistic philosopher J. L. Austin would call his "constative" meanings—his unconvincing theory of instinct, his poorly reasoned rebuttal of transformism—but to his poetics, the poetics of his storytelling and of the writing that unexpectedly pulls you through the hand lens and into the wasps' nest, the poetics of his haunted life and of his consummate self-mythologizing, the poetics of grand affinity with the natural world, the poetics of his insects, of the impossible, uncertain intimacy between you, me, and those others that are simultaneously most commonplace and most alien.56
In one of his famous monthly essays in the magazine Natural History, the evolutionary biologist and historian of science Stephen Jay Gould noted that the parasitic wasps—both the endoparasites, which consume their living prey from the inside out, and those ectoparasites described by Fabre, who eat from the outside in—confronted Western theologians of the eighteenth and nineteenth century with their most terrifying problem, the problem of evil. If God is benevolent and the Creation an expression of his goodness and wisdom, "why," they agonized, "are we surrounded with pain, suffering, and apparently senseless cruelty in the animal world?"57 It was easy to understand that predation was intrinsic to survival in nature, but why would a compassionate God allow the horrors inflicted by the wasp on its victims, the "slow death by parasitic ingestion," a death made more nightmarish in that it was suffered by living, evidently conscious beings in a manner that, as Gould put it, recalled "the ancient English penalty for treason—drawing and quartering, with its explicit object of extracting as much torment as possible by keeping the victim alive and sentient."
"As the king's executioner drew out and burned his client's entrails," Gould wrote, "so does the [wasp] larvae eat fat bodies and digestive organs first, keeping the [victim] alive by preserving intact the essential heart and central nervous system."58
It is hardly original to point out that nature has long been an irresistible mirror to the human condition, its laws seen as expressions of God's laws, its every gesture embodying a moral lesson, its "societies" taken as atavistic versions of our own. Faced with the frightening inscrutability of the parasitic wasp, two roads were possible to these observers. One involved the painful acknowledgment of nature's evil followed by the necessary next step of a determination to transcend animality and fulfill the promise of humanity through goodness. The second, more common nowadays than in earlier centuries and more aligned with the contingency of modern evolutionary theory, rested on the moral disenchantment of nature, on the claim that there are in fact no lessons to be found in the behavior of nonhuman beings or phenomena, that nature, in Gould's word, is "nonmoral," that, as he put it, "Caterpillars are not suffering to teach us something; they have simply been outmaneuvered" (and that, although currently improbable, they and their fellow victims may one day even turn the tables on the wasps).
But parasitic wasps don't lend themselves to disenchantment. Somehow, in their presence, observation is filled with drama. "We cannot," Gould pointed out, "render this corner of natural history as anything but story, combining the themes of grim horror and fascination and usually ending not so much with pity for the caterpillar as with admiration for the [wasp]."59
Poor parasitized Fabre! A fine host indeed. If he had only seen it this clearly perhaps he would not have told us quite so much about the Sphex, the Bembix, and the rest. He might have thought twice before dwelling so long on the details of their hunting strategies and, in particular, on the precision of their surgical skills. But the point, of course, is that he couldn't help himself. From the moment he wept before the Ammophila, the die was cast. And that surrender was both his undoing and his triumph. When it came to it, he let the animals tell their tales. In this, at least, his instincts were exactly right.


text:
Welcoming Foxa2 in the Bile Acid Entourage
Antonio Moschetta
IRCCS Giovanni Paolo II
Homeostatic regulation of bile acid metabolism and biliary lipid secretion is critical to prevent enterohepatic diseases. Kaestner and coworkers (Bochkis et al., 2008) show that loss of forkhead box transcription factor Foxa2 in the liver leads to hepatic injury due to downregulation in the expression levels of bile acid transporters and detoxification enzymes.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cmet.2008.09.009
10.1016/j.cmet.2008.09.009
Dive into the research topics of 'Welcoming Foxa2 in the Bile Acid Entourage'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.
Bile Acids and Salts Medicine & Life Sciences 100%
bile acid binding proteins Medicine & Life Sciences 76%
Forkhead Transcription Factors Medicine & Life Sciences 63%
Lipid Metabolism Medicine & Life Sciences 46%
Down-Regulation Medicine & Life Sciences 33%
Wounds and Injuries Medicine & Life Sciences 23%
Moschetta, A. (2008). Welcoming Foxa2 in the Bile Acid Entourage. Cell Metabolism, 8(4), 276-278. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cmet.2008.09.009
Welcoming Foxa2 in the Bile Acid Entourage. / Moschetta, Antonio.
In: Cell Metabolism, Vol. 8, No. 4, 08.10.2008, p. 276-278.
Moschetta, A 2008, 'Welcoming Foxa2 in the Bile Acid Entourage', Cell Metabolism, vol. 8, no. 4, pp. 276-278. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cmet.2008.09.009
Moschetta A. Welcoming Foxa2 in the Bile Acid Entourage. Cell Metabolism. 2008 Oct 8;8(4):276-278. doi: 10.1016/j.cmet.2008.09.009
Moschetta, Antonio. / Welcoming Foxa2 in the Bile Acid Entourage. In: Cell Metabolism. 2008 ; Vol. 8, No. 4. pp. 276-278.
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title = "Welcoming Foxa2 in the Bile Acid Entourage",
abstract = "Homeostatic regulation of bile acid metabolism and biliary lipid secretion is critical to prevent enterohepatic diseases. Kaestner and coworkers (Bochkis et al., 2008) show that loss of forkhead box transcription factor Foxa2 in the liver leads to hepatic injury due to downregulation in the expression levels of bile acid transporters and detoxification enzymes.",
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doi = "10.1016/j.cmet.2008.09.009",
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AB - Homeostatic regulation of bile acid metabolism and biliary lipid secretion is critical to prevent enterohepatic diseases. Kaestner and coworkers (Bochkis et al., 2008) show that loss of forkhead box transcription factor Foxa2 in the liver leads to hepatic injury due to downregulation in the expression levels of bile acid transporters and detoxification enzymes.
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text:
Q: Asp.Net MVC Error Handling & logging I am trying to Catch exceptions and log it.
Presently I have written a Utility method and Passing the Exception to it in the catch block and finally logging the application using MS Enterprise Library 4.0.

*

*I want to know is there any other better way to log errors.

*Show exception message in the same view for some type of exceptions for rest navigate to error page.

If someone can help me on this!
Navish

A: You could try elmah for error logging if that is what you are looking for.

A: If you were rolling your own Exception logging you could create a base Controller class that overrides the OnException method
public class BaseController : Controller
{
    protected override void OnException(ExceptionContext filterContext)
    {
        ExceptionPolicy.HandleException(filterContext.Exception, "MyPolicy");
        base.OnException(filterContext);
    }
}

A: Elmah
Elmah could be great option for you. It is easy to use, after installing nuget package is ready for use.
Custom logging with log4net etc.
If you want to log errors by your own, I recommend this example app: https://github.com/mholec/mvcexceptionhandler where is explained global logging with your favorite log tool (log4net, nlog, etc.)
Application Insights
Another and maybe the best way is to use Application Insights. Application Insights you can install quickly using NuGet and you will get great overview of your application errors, website availability and you can get more information about your users. This service is free.

A: I recommend ELMAH http://code.google.com/p/elmah/
You can get started very quickly with it by using Nuget to set it up.
http://nuget.codeplex.com/

*

*Setup Nuget.

*In vstudio ->
View -> Other Windows -> Package
Manager

*List-Package -filter elmah

*install-package elmah and
you're all set.

You can view the log just like trace.axd by going to http://mysite/elmah.axd
and manually throw errors to elmah like this:
try {
}
catch (Exception ex)
{
   ErrorSignal.FromCurrentContext().Raise(ex);
}

hope that helps,
-fs

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


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