The study of climate change has established retreating glaciers and rising global temperatures from a number of data sources. Establishing the influence of mankind upon these effects has been more difficult, because the climate is subject to oscillations that are much longer in duration than our record of direct temperature measurements, which extends back only about 150 years.      By drilling and conducting chemical and physical studies of ice cores on six of the seven continents, scientists have developed a method of estimating climatic information that had previously been thought inaccessible. Ice cores removed from the earth's crust and studied in order to draw such inferences are termed paleo-proxies. The values of various climatic variables at a particular time and place can be inferred through some form of proxy analysis in a given ice core sample. For example, deuterium excess indicates humidity levels, electrical conductivity indicates volcanic activity, beryllium levels indicate solar activity, and particle size and concentration indicate wind speeds. Temperature, in particular, can be inferred from the ratios of water molecules composed of stable isotopes of oxygen and hydrogen, namely 1H2H16O and 1H218O. Because molecules consisting of these isotopes have slightly different weights than their more common counterparts, their concentration in the ice core in a given epoch depends on the condensation temperature prevailing at the time. This technique enables scientists to estimate the air temperature of condensation when the snow fell and establish variations in temperature over a series of multiple samples.      One advantage of using ice cores as a paleo-proxy is that ice core samples can be extracted from across the world using different drilling techniques, for analysis either on-site or in a laboratory, with results that can be compared to each other and stitched into a coherent global picture. The primary sources of ice cores are the ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland, whose thickness allows scientists to extract long cores representing time spans of up to 100,000 or even 400,000 years. Nevertheless, samples representing spans of multiple centuries have been extracted more recently at low latitudes--for example, at Mt. Kilimanjaro, in the Andes Mountains, and on the Himalayan plateau. Depending on the objectives of the project and the nature of the ice core, scientists use a variety of types of drill ranging from hand-powered auger drill to electro-mechanical drills. A limitation of using ice cores is that they represent data for conditions during snowfall only. Periods bereft of snowfall will fail to leave a record in the ice and can even disrupt the essential step of dating the samples. To mitigate this problem, multiple cores are typically extracted from nearby locations. A more critical limitation of the ice core method, one indicative of the larger problem at hand, is that as ice fields continue to retreat, the ability to measure in some locations will disappear entirely.  

     Two historians of the First World War both depict women as taking up roles previously reserved for men, but they differ slightly in the significance they ascribe to these unprecedented but temporary wartime duties. Gail Braybon describes the war as a liberating experience for many women. Although women working in munitions factories were subject to new dangers, such as explosions and trinitrotoluene poisoning, they were mindful of and proud of supporting the war effort, whether or not they considered the broader significance of their actions. Joshua Goldstein too describes a sense of freedom in women but emphasizes that it was short-lived. Although the war bent gender roles, it did not lessen hostility to women in traditionally male jobs, increase compensation for female labor, or uproot the notion that home life was a strictly female responsibility. Braybon might reply by noting that, while other changes were slower in coming, some women suffragists supported the war and women's role in it to further their cause, and this may indeed have contributed to the advent of women's right to vote after the war, even by Goldstein's account. Perhaps more central to Braybon's position is that the liberation that women experienced during the war was one of sentiment and therefore made no less real by the lack of accompanying widespread reform. Furthermore, even though the spirit of liberation must have faded with the end of the war, it might have lived on in a latent form and ultimately contributed to the formation of the women's movement.    

     One strain of historical thought that achieved popularity in the 1950s forwarded the notion that immigration - more than the frontier experience, or any other specific event or factor - had been and continued to be the defining element of United States history. In this depiction, the 30 million immigrants who entered the country between 1820 and 1900 had common experiences regardless of their national, religion, or race: namely, in experiencing hardship and alienation, they themselves changed, but they also carried on the development of the nation itself.      Both casual and formal students of history should, however, be careful in equating the experiences of different groups of immigrants, especially under the somewhat blurring concept of "hardship." The description that all immigrants experienced hardship and immigration fails to account properly for the fact that in the 17th and 18th century millions of Africans were forcibly shipped to the United States and sold into slavery. While this group of people should not be excluded from any full reckoning of the nation's migrants, its alienation and hardship was of a substantially different character from that of the other populations, who migrated more willingly and independently and who arrived under and lived in vastly different conditions. If it is, indeed, the degree of hardship and alienation experienced by the different groups of our nation's migrants that have above all shaped both themselves and their nation, then to ignore these distinctions would be to distort an important element of what our nation has been shaped to be.    

     The release of accumulated stress at a particular point during an earthquake alters the shear and normal stresses along the tectonic plate boundary and surrounding fault lines. According to geophysical theory, the Coulomb Failure Stress Change, which is the estimated alteration and resultant transfer of shear and normal stresses along a plate margin, is a function of change in shear stress along a fault and secondarily the change in normal stress along a fault and the change in pore pressure in the fault zone, the latter two factors scaling according to the friction coefficient characteristic to the plate margin.     By measuring and calculating the stress transfer following seismic activity, it is possible to subsequently construct basic contour maps of regions where there have been positive stress changes and are therefore of higher risk of being potential epicenters of future large earthquakes. Calculations have revealed that when an earthquake occurs, approximately 80% of the energy is released as seismic waves, whereas the remaining 20% is stored and transferred to different locations along the fault, making those specific regions more susceptible to future earthquakes.     Predicting earthquakes by using the theory of stress transfer has important potential applications. The main rival technique for forecasting, the statistical analysis of patterns in seismic activity, suffers from a contradiction. Foreshocks are deemed evidence of the potential for a future high-magnitude earthquake, but the lack of foreshocks along faults known to be active has been considered an equally plausible potential precursor for large events.     The stress transfer theory has been used to predict the location of a magnitude 7.4 earthquake that occurred two years later in the port city of Izmit, Turkey, killing more than 30,000 people. A limitation of the theory as currently applied, due to insufficient understanding of plate kinematics, is that refining predictions with temporal constraints appears to be far more problematic; the team that gave the Izmit prediction had forecast an event near the city within thirty years.    

     How aquatic vertebrates evolved into land vertebrates has been difficult for evolutionary biologists to study, in part because the shift from water to land appears to have occurred rapidly and has thus has yielded a scarce fossil record. Prior to the advent of DNA sequencing, the primary guideposts in tracing the emergence of tetrapods had been morphological considerations, which highlighted the coelacanth and the lungfish as species of interest.      Coelacanths and lungfish are distinct from other fish in that they are lobe-finned species. Lobe-finned species, like ray-finned fishes such as tuna and trout, possess not cartilage but a bony skeleton, a key prerequisite for survival on land. Lobe-finned fish species are distinguished from ray-finned species by fins that are joined to a single bone, and which thus have the potential to evolve into limbs. Coelacanths and lungfish are two of the only lobe-finned species that are not extinct, and since they have evolved minimally since the time of the appearance of tetrapods, they are sometimes referred to as "living fossils." In fact, the first live coelacanth was discovered more than 100 years after the species had been discovered in fossilized form.      Whether the coelacanth in particular is rightly called a living fossil and whether it is the closest living relative of the original tetrapods are two questions that have been illuminated recently by genetic analysis. The coelacanth's sequenced genome, and this analysis has led to the conclusion that the lungfish is the closer relative of tetrapods. Moreover, coelacanth DNA has shown evolution over time, although at a rate much slower than that of most animals. The fish's morphology and its environment deep in the Indian Ocean may have created favorable conditions, allowing a more slowly evolving species to have survived for the last 400 million years.    

     Physical theory implies that the existence of astronomical entities above a certain mass is evidence for the existence of black holes. The Earth does not itself collapse upon itself under gravitational force because gravity is countered by the outward pressure generated by the electromagnetic repulsion between the atoms making up the planet. But if these forces are overpowered, gravity will always lead to the formation of a black hole. Assuming the validity of general relativity, we can calculate the upper bound for a star, the Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff limit, to be 3.6 solar masses; any object heavier than this will be unable to resist collapse under its own mass and must be a black hole.     The search for entities more massive than the Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff limit brings us to the examination of X-ray binary systems. In an X-ray binary, two bodies rotate around their center of mass, a point between them, while one component, usually a normal star, sheds matter to the other more massive component known as the accretor. The shedding matter is released as observable X-ray radiation. Since binary stars rotate around a common center of gravity, the mass of the accetor can be calculated from the orbit of the visible one. By 2004, about forty X-ray binaries that contained candidates for black holes had been discovered. The accretors in these binary systems did not appear visible, as is to be expected of black holes, but that fact alone does not distinguish them from very dense and hence less luminescent stars, such as neutron stars. More to the point is that these accretors were of mass far in excess of 3.6 solar masses. Famously, Cygnus X-1, an X-ray binary in the constellation Cygnus, has an accretor whose mass has been calculated to be 14 solar masses, plus or minus 4 solar masses. While it does not rule out other phenomena without further interpretation, it provides strong proof that black holes exist.     The conclusion that black holes exist depends on the reliability of the general-relativistic calculations involved. If more generous assumptions are made, the Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff limit can be calculated to be as high as 10 solar masses. The finding also establishes plausibility, if not direct evidence, for the existence of supermassive black holes hypothesized to exist at the center of some galaxies.  

     In the realm of the psychology of decision-making, the role of expert intuition is under attack. People's inclination is to trust intuition and to point to many examples, across various disciplines, in which experts are able to make difficult judgments in seemingly negligible amounts of time. But this trust of intuition has been undermined by the research of other psychologists who have taken care to expose and document thoroughly the cognitive biases that can impede both our use of intuition and our ability to judge the use of intuition in a broader sense. How, then, can we know when expert intuition is to be trusted?      Gary Klein's research has provided a basis on which to establish how expert intuition, also known as naturalistic decision making, works at its best, which it does according to a recognition-primed decision model. One of his studies examined the thought process of experienced fireground commanders, the leaders of firefighter teams. One finding was that fireground commanders do not only consider a small number of options in deciding how to approach a firefighting situation; they tend to consider only one option. When presented with a situation, the commander was observed to think of one option spontaneously and then mentally simulate acting on that proposed course of action to see whether it would work. More specifically, Klein formulated the recognition-primed decision model as occurring in two steps. In the first step, a tentative plan comes to the mind of the expert by an automatic function of associative memory; the situation provides one or more clues recognized by the expert. Second, the plan is mentally simulated to see whether it will work.      When, then, can expert intuition be tested? Klein's model implies that the successful application of expert intuition will be limited to circumstances in which situational clues are reproduced and can be recognized over time. Situational regularity and individual memory are critical components of success. Reliable intuition is primarily — and, arguably, nothing more than — recognition. By this somewhat controversial inference, intuition is essentially memory. Consequently, all cases in which we might anticipate expert intuition to be valid are not equally conquerable by this faculty. Some environments may not be sufficiently regular to be predictable, and, of course, even in regular environments, the presumed expert must draw on a sufficient depth of practice. We can conclude, for example, that if a dedicated stock picker is to make judgments as skilled as those of a dedicated chess player, that person will do so not by relying primarily on intuition. One might note that, with or without intuition, it is incumbent on any true expert to know the limits of his or her knowledge.    

     The outsourcing of production factories to locations overseas from companies' home countries has been a hallmark practice of multinational brands since the 1990s and is lauded by some economists as advancing the well-being of people in both the home country and the production country. However, not all of the benefits attributed to this globalization practice necessarily accrue, and there are concerns about outsourcing that are not readily addressed within the formulations of economic theory. First, a home company that separates its brand and its product as completely as possible and places the brand as paramount hardly sends a message that product quality is central to its operations; more likely, all of its innovation attempts will focus on branding, and such a company will settle with a product that is merely (and maybe barely) good enough. Dismissing this point, economists may cite the law of comparative advantage: outsourcing allows both companies involved to pursue greater profit and well-being according to their capabilities. Specifically, workers in the companies of manufacture should be paid more than they would be paid otherwise, even if they are paid less than factory workers in the original country; meanwhile, workers in the home country should be pushed to increase their skills and education and move to higher-skill jobs that are less available in the country of manufacture. Whether displaced workers in the home country acquire skills and make this shift in any reasonable timeframe is hardly demonstrated, however, and while outsourcing may create value by lowering costs, it has been asserted that workers in the countries of production are making no more after outsourcing than previously and hence in effect are enjoying none of the new profit. The CEO of one outsourcing company, when pressed on this point by a reporter, explained that, as the employees of those factories were not employees of his company, he could not be responsible for them. He asked the reporter whether journalists should be expected to know, and be responsible for, the manufacturing conditions of the paper on which their articles are printed. This comment, as much as it defends corporations, highlights the broadest form of worry about outsourcing: in global supply chains with increasingly distant and opaque connections, responsibility is too easy to shirk and maybe even impossible to determine.  

     Billions of people in the world suffer from water scarcity. The problem is not a lack of suitable water in the world; it is an uneven distribution of that water—an uneven distribution, to be more exact, of the resources and facilities needed to manage water, as well as the natural sources of water themselves. It has been estimated that a billion people lack access to potable water, and 2.4 billion lack access to the basic sanitation that is necessary for basic water usage.      In the case of the domestic shortage of water, which is small in demand relative to commercial uses of water, the problem is not so much that there are no water resources, but that those without water lack the political and financial capital to access that water. Granted, natural forces do play a role. In regions of need, terrestrial water resources may be distributed quite unevenly, leaving large populations at great distances without such sources, and rainwater may fall only sporadically throughout the course of a given year. In such regions, making water accessible is costlier and may require considerable investment in infrastructure.      I would like to propose a radical measure to address water shortage, especially in African countries. I suggest that multinational soft drink companies be given incentives to enter the countries afflicted by water shortage and invest in the development of the water infrastructure. This proposal is not as absurd as it may first sound. First of all, most major soft drink companies nowadays are also in the business of selling bottled water; they have expertise in purification and other relevant knowledge areas. Second, the soft drink industry is among the very first industries to penetrate and profit in emerging markets, because of the general appeal and low price of their product. Moreover, the more a given economy develops, the more that particular soft drink provider stands to profit. In other words, soft drink companies have both the capability to help and some interest to operate in a given country that needs assistance.      You may object that soft drink companies already would have entered a country to help if they had seen benefit in doing so. That critique may be true, but it does not necessarily mean that a company could not be driven to action through direct financial incentives, partial ownership of constructed infrastructure, assistance from international organizations and pressure from more developed neighboring countries in which that company already has an entrenched interest. Moreover, to the criticism that infrastructure building is the work of governments, not companies, there is a valid response: partnerships between governments and corporations have thrived for centuries in major projects and could benefit both the people and involved corporations in this case, as well.

     The stock market tends to move in response to the monthly release of the U.S. consumer confidence index (CCI), signaling that individuals make investment decisions on the basis of this information. Such behavior is mostly irrational. The CCI is generally understood to be a lagging indicator; by the time the CCI has been released, the stock market should have already reflected the latest adjustments to its prices based on consumer sentiment. Furthermore, the CCI, to the degree that it reflects on the stock market, reflects only on the stock market as a whole, not on individual stocks. The questions that make up the CCI, indeed, gauge individual levels of confidence about factors, such as employment rates, that should have little direct bearing on most individual stocks relative to other factors. To dampen the influence of the CCI on the stock market, the Conference Board, the nonprofit group that reveals the information each month, should adjust its timetable in order to publish the CCI outside of stock market hours. In that case, the impact of the CCI on stock market prices would be smoothed and would be more likely to reflect individual investors' business estimates, rather than their animal whims.    

   M31, M32, and M33 are members of the Local Group, an assemblage of more than 54 galaxies in the neighborhood of the Milky Way, the galaxy which contains our solar system. Like the Milky Way, M31 and M33 are spiral galaxies, whereas M32 is a dwarf elliptical galaxy. Of the three, M31, also known as the Andromeda Galaxy, is the largest, with a mass that has been estimated in recent studies to be equal to or greater than that of the Milky Way. Comprised primarily of older faint stars, M32 is a substantially smaller galaxy and a satellite of Andromeda. M33, known as the Triangulum Galaxy, is more distant and less massive than Andromeda and is believed to have collided with that galaxy in the past.      The attributes of these four galaxies may reflect their past interactions and are likely to shape future encounters. For example, astronomers are not currently sure how M32's compact ellipsoid shape took form, but they suspect that M32 may have had a spiral shape earlier that was transformed by a tidal field from Andromeda into its current elliptical shape. Meanwhile, Triangulum and Andromeda are connected by a stream of hydrogen and stars, which is evidence that the two galaxies have interacted in the past between 2 and 8 billion years ago. Finally, among the trio M31, M33 and the Milky, every pair is potentially on a collision course compelled by gravity. Triangulum might be ripped apart and absorbed by M31, it might collide with the Milky Way before the latter has any violent interaction with Andromeda, or it might participate in the collision between the Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy, which is expected to occur in about 4 billion years.    

     A recent analysis has yielded information about the decline of megafauna (giant animals) in modern-day New Zealand. Evolutionary biologists compared DNA from fossils of nine species of moa, large flightless birds that lived for millions of years on the country's South Island. The birds' genetic information suggests that their populations were stable for at least 4,000 years before declining with extreme rapidity only after the arrival of humans on the New Zealand archipelago, 600 years ago.

     In reviewing possible causes for this phenomenon, the scientists dismissed the climatic explanation that accounts for the decline of other megafauna because the extinction happened long after other megafauna had disappeared at the end of the last Ice Age. They ruled out sampling bias because a sample selection impact would not have allowed for the different results observed between the nine species. They rejected the possibility of major impacts by disease or volcanic activity because consistent genetic diversity indicates that no population diminishment occurred prior to the arrival of humans to New Zealand. The lack of population decline prior to human arrival suggests that the moa extinction was caused entirely by human hunting—a hypothesis corroborated by the remains of moa at every life stage found in rubbish piles from the earliest decade of human occupation of the islands. Such evidence leads the researchers to believe that the earliest Polynesian arrivals to New Zealand engaged in indiscriminate hunting of moa and moa eggs because their large size made them attractive as easily obtained food.

     A recent underwater survey has found clues in a Mayan cenote, a type of sinkhole, about the development of the Mesoamerican city of Mayapán (1150–1450 CE). The city wall curves to avoid this particular cenote, Sac Uayum, in which research divers found more than a dozen skeletal human remains. Normally cenotes are found within city limits, to provide water, so the location of the cenote and number of remains are notably atypical.

     Researchers are considering various possibilities to explain their findings. A theory that the cenote might have served as a general city cemetery was rejected, because most city residents were interred near or under their homes. A theory of ceremonial human sacrifice was dismissed because the bones were unmarked, showing no indications of rituals or cause of death. A theory of social elitism was eliminated, because shards of other artifacts discovered at the same site were mainly those of plain water pitchers, displaying no indications of wealth or high social rank. So far the most tenable interpretation under consideration is that the cenote may have served as an attempt at contagious-disease containment—a plague pit, kept deliberately beyond the city wall and apart from drinking water supplies. The persistence into modern times of local taboos and superstitions around Sac Uayum, threatening death if the gods are not appeased with rituals before the water is approached, lends further credence to the researchers' theory.

     When Venezuelan-born political leader Simón Bolívar arrived in Europe to pursue his military education when he was a teenager, he arrived at a fortuitous time in world history. What made the time exceptional was Napoleon's 1804 coronation as emperor of France and the wars throughout Europe still ongoing in the wake of the French Revolution, which made the environment ripe for someone determined to achieve freedom, self-determination, and independence from European colonial overlords for the peoples of Latin America.

     Hoping to emulate the revolutionary successes of other colonial societies, many of the countries administered by Spain watched the radical political changes occurring in Europe and North America with longing, even as they continued to be ruled from abroad by foreign elites. The people of Latin America saw their incipient nations exploited for the profit of Madrid, just as they had been for centuries. Summarizing modern historical scholarship, most academics with knowledge of the period argue that the period of revolution in early nineteenth-century Latin America was an inevitable consequence of the dissemination of Enlightenment ideals: a mature society conscious of the prospect of self-rule will almost invariably attempt to bring about that eventuality, by armed means or otherwise.

     Some historians maintain that Bolívar is responsible for the revolutionary circumstances from which he manufactured, in the early years of the nineteenth century, the most momentous set of political changes in Latin American history. But such a narrative only obfuscates the historical trends that had already imbued most Latin American polities with a revolutionary spirit. This spirit did not originate with Bolívar; instead, he served as its focal point and primary agent in world affairs.

     In semi-aquatic ecosystems, bodies of water present peculiar difficulties for the hunting strategies of spiders. Ponds, lakes, and rivers can provide unnavigable escape vectors for prey organisms, making it likely that predators will lose out on valuable nutritional resources. The water spider Dolomedes, in particular, demonstrates adaptations that allow it to take advantage of waterborne food sources.

     The difficulty that members of the species Dolomedes face is best evidenced by the typical hunting strategies of terrestrial spiders. All spiders produce silk and arboreal species generally spin their silk into fine, latticework structures that they suspend in the environment to trap passing arthropods, which entangle themselves due to the exigencies of the forested ecosystem. In environs lacking tree coverage or comparable large structures, however, web-hunting becomes inefficient, and other strategies of predation have to be pursued. That many spider species persist in environments lacking significant tree coverage suggests that certain behavioral adaptations enable them to locate food effectively in a variety of environmental circumstances.

     One such adaptation is the proactive use of water bodies by Dolomedes, who eschew silk in favor of water tension, which they use to monitor the movements of prey animals. Organisms fall into a pond, lake, or river, and send waves vibrating from the point of impact across the surface of the pool. Dolomedes uses these vibrations to locate and capture the fallen organism. For arboreal spiders, who can only monitor the vibrations caused by insects caught in the webs they've spun, this is useless information. Such a hunting strategy does not require that the arboreal spiders pay attention to extraneous prey when other prey is acquired in abundance by other adaptations. In comparison, Dolomedes acquires its prey by yet another aquatic adaptation, using a coat of tiny, hydrophobic hairs that allow the spider to submerge itself in the liquid environment. By causing a pocket of air to gather and surround the surface of the spider's body, these hairs allow Dolomedes to submerge itself in water, thus giving it access to sources of prey closed off to other species.

     A recent trend lauds the supposedly obvious benefits of locally produced diets and of urban agriculture in particular. These benefits, they say, offer antidotes to pollution, poverty, and illness, and many advocates are urging cities to take action to encourage the growth of food farming in small urban spaces in order to introduce more locally produced food into the market.

     To evaluate these proposals, it is helpful to compare the claims with facts. A central idea of urban agriculturists is that the transportation of non-local food creates pollution. In fact, transportation constitutes a minute percentage of the agricultural sector's greenhouse gas emissions, and the production inefficiencies inherent in farming on small plots could easily erase gains made in transportation. Large rural farms transport production workers and equipment much more efficiently. Moreover, mode of transportation affects the carbon footprint of a meal. The shipment of food over long distances by train or tractor-trailer often consumes less fuel than does transportation more locally using smaller vehicles.

     For urban planners, land use is potentially the most contentious aspect of urban agriculture. Sunlit spaces, especially in the largest and most densely populated cities, often come at a premium. Given the limits on yields and profit margins for food agriculture, costs and benefits must be weighed against those of other businesses in terms of job creation, aesthetic value (since agriculture is a messy business), and scalability (local food's high price limits the market and raises the possibility of saturation). Limited space may be better utilized by housing or retail outlets than by urban gardening.

     It is obvious that there is not enough data on urban agriculture to justify implementation of agriculture-promoting policies within the limits of the largest cities. Many faddish environmental projects in the last two centuries have failed to live up to their promises and subsequently waned, and so might the urban agriculture movement. Meanwhile, the many urban farms currently in operation will have the chance to defy such cynicism, and city governments would do well to allocate resources to those that do.

     While the usual methods for taxonomy rely heavily on phenotype (physical characteristics) as markers distinguishing between species, a polyphyletic group, defined in this paper as a group including species with similar characteristics that were not inherited from a common ancestor, can defy these methods of categorization. But because other characteristics are not easily observed, the identification of polyphyletic groups takes time. Often only vigorous scientific discussion can prompt further investigation into a group's taxonomy; for instance, lively controversies about the classification of the Felimida complex of nudibranch species have resulted in genetic analyses of several specimens in an attempt to determine their origins. Such investigations may overturn decades of accepted scientific knowledge. Whereas the Felimida group had been classified based on phenotypes of four species, two of the “species” are in fact subgroups of two other species, while another, new species has been established based on the new species' lack of a common ancestor with the rest of Felimida. The usefulness of phenotype as a criterion for classification, then, appears to depend on several factors, including the phenotypic diversity of the genus as well as its interspecies interactions (for example, predator-prey interactions heavily influence phenotypic expression) and its geographic range (since similar phenotypes might evolve independently in similar but distant environments).

     Autoethnographic writing, in accounting for the subjectivities through which observers engage with culture, encourages researchers to accept the experiences of engaged participants as contributing to academic epistemology, alongside the use of “impartial” observation, in substantial and meaningful ways. These methods, unlike those of a more traditional or empirical bent, document the lived experiences of researchers as they confront cultural externalities, acknowledge the limitations of so-called objective science, and present the anxieties felt by cultural subjects as meaningful realities, mattering both to the individual and in a broader social context.

     Practitioners of autoethnography should beware, however, of thinking that their experiences are commonplace. Autoethnographic documents come no closer to the establishment of universal truth than more conventional research methods. Moreover, even when some biases are acknowledged, autoethnography is subject to a suite of prejudices and cultural influences, as well as subconscious personal tendencies, of which a researcher may not be fully cognizant. An experience had at a certain age, for example, may condition a researcher to respond to a given circumstance in a highly idiosyncratic way. Thus, an autoethnographer who writes that an adult experience played a major role in her development of ethnic or gendered consciousness might unwittingly disregard earlier experiences that were ultimately more formative.