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"Unpacking the complicated ways superheroes reproduce cultural beliefs about gender, sexuality, and romance, Love, Sex, Gender, and Superheroes delves into the underlying and erotic implications of caped crusaders. Superheroes are more popular than ever, with a seemingly endless run of record-breaking Hollywood movies, hit television and streaming series, the mainstreaming of comic books as a literary form, and superhero themed merchandising available almost everywhere. The genre has always been about good vs. evil, larger-than-life heroes vs. stylish villains, and a never-ending fight for "Truth, Justice and the American way." But, in a less obvious way, the genre has also been about gender ideals: how men and women are supposed to look, act, and interact with each other. Under the guise of being merely childish fantasies, superheroes have consistently provided fantastic adventures that make abstract ideas about gender and sexuality seem natural. Superheroes deal with topics as diverse as: fetishism, phallic symbolism, bodies, love, marriage, eroticized violence, queer identities, homosociality, transexuality, orgasms, and robot/human sexual relations. This spicier underside of superheroes reveals and reinforces attitudes about gender and sex, and how some of those ideas are changing in a modern world"--

Dangerous Curves: Action Heroines, Gender, Fetishism, and Popular Culture addresses the conflicted meanings associated with the figure of the action heroine as she has evolved in various media forms since the late 1980s. Jeffrey A. Brown discusses this immensely popular character type as an example of, and challenge to, existing theories about gender as a performance identity. Her assumption of heroic masculine traits combined with her sexualized physical depiction demonstrates the ambiguous nature of traditional gender expectations and indicates a growing awareness of more aggressive and viol

IntroductionSeveral large health data networks such as FDA Sentinel, PCORnet, and the Canadian Network of Observational Drug Effect Studies (CNODES) facilitate multi-site research using real-world electronic health data such administrative claims data, electronic health record data and registries. Experience in operation of mutliple health data networks will described.
Objectives and ApproachOver the past 15 years substantial progress has been made in developing the optimal network operational design, governance, and technical architecture to facilitate the creation and operation of large-scale distributed health data networks. The design, architecture, and operation of a sustainable health data network requires balancing the needs of the network stakeholders such as funders, data sources, investigators, and regulatory bodies while enabling rapid and efficient use of data to support evidence generation and decision making. Important topics include protection of patient privacy, security, data autonomy, distributed analytics, data quality, and protection of confidential information.
ResultsThe design and architecture of existing distributed health data networks provides guidance regarding the potential operational model for new networks and identifies areas of research to improve network functionality and capabilities. Most health data network adopt a common data model approach to facilitate multi-site querying and data quality assessment. This approach is coupled with distributed querying in which data partners maintain physical and operational control of their data. This design maximizes protection of confidential and proprietary information and minimizes the need to share patient-level data. Privacy-preserving distributed regression approaches and methods that obviate the need to share person-level data while generating robust results help to ensure network participation. Strong security and governance structures are also necessary for effective operation of a distributed network.
Conclusion/ImplicationsDistributed health data networks offer the opportunity to use real-world data for public health surveillance and comparative safety and effectiveness research across large populations. The operational design, technical and analytic architecture, and governance models of networks drive their acceptance and success.

Cultural concerns about race, class and beauty often intersect with mass-mediated depictions of the female body. Drawing on Foucault's theories about disciplining the public body, this article examines the changing public perception of Anna Nicole Smith from an ideal beauty to a white trash stereotype. This analysis argues that Smith's very public weight gains, her outrageous behaviour and her legal battle for her late husband's fortune is presented in the media as an example of inappropriate conduct for a white beauty ideal and thus is repositioned as white trash culture. Central to this repositioning is the constant tabloid depiction of Smith as an 'out of control' grotesque. This article argues that contrary to the optimistic understanding of female grotesques as effective agents of cultural criticism and social change, Smith represents the female grotesque as an agent of cultural control that instructs middle-class women on how to avoid committing classed, racial and gendered transgressions. The article concludes that the case of Anna Nicole Smith functions as a cautionary tale that reinforces cultural standards of normalization.

The long-standing tradition of male masochism in popular cinema represents a dilemma for psychoanalytically informed gender studies. The persistent image of heroic male bodies bruised, beaten, and displayed for the film audience challenges the gendered binaries that have characterized such moments of powerlessness as feminine. The excessive physical tortures endured by Mel Gibson's characters in such movies as Lethal Weapon, Braveheart, and most clearly Payback illustrate the importance of suffering as an essentially masculine trait. Instead of representing sadism as categorically masculine and masochism as categorically feminine, the torture of cinematic heroes, such as Gibson's Porter in Payback, signifies the necessity of both sides of the sadomasochistic continuum in constructing a superior and unified image of masculinity. Moreover, the visual evidence of physical suffering on display in Gibson's films enhances his sex symbol status by clearly positioning the character's masculinity as undeniably heterosexual and authentic.

State DOT's are grappling with how to meet federal mandates that they engage in multimodal transportation planning with metropolitan planning organizations and other governmental agencies. The experience of one state, California, shows that the recent round of soul-searching is nothing new. California's experience is one of episodic, triage-style planning undertaking in response to a recurring series of fiscal or physical crises and external mandates. The only exception to this pattern was the long-range planning surrounding the California Freeway System plan adopted in 1959. But given today's transportation policy environment and prevailing public attitudes abut building large transportation facilities, the ability of state DOTs to craft far-reaching, long-range plans along the lines of the 1959 example is a Herculean task. Today's round of organizational soul-searching could represent the first hesitant steps towards an era of thoughtful, proactive planning, or it could simply be the latest example of reactive planning. Past experience suggests that the latter is more likely the case.

Since the passage of the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act (ISTEA) of 1991, federal surface transportation legislation has mandated that state departments of transportation (DOTs) engage in increasingly collaborative and multi-modal transportation planning. Over the past decade state DOTs have had to reassess both their role in and approach to statewide transportation planning. Such reassessments, by their very nature, require one to consider pre-ISTEA (and TEA-21) planning efforts by state DOTs. What have been the driving forces – both issues and interest groups – shaping state transportation policy and how have they evolved over time? Reexamining the past allows us to look at the specific agency responses to these forces – both successes and failures – and offers lessons on the appropriate planning role for state-level transportation agencies. This paper considers the experiences of the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) and its predecessor agencies in addressing the task of statewide transportation planning in California. The paper begins with the early efforts of the Bureau of Highways, in tandem with an array of good roads movement activists, to create the state highway system for California, and the paper ends in the present-day with its debates over the proper roles of state versus regional and local governments in transportation planning. The historical discussion is divided into eras of statewide transportation planning, with each era focused on a particular policy or planning issue or set of issues. The paper concludes with general observations on the themes and lessons suggested by the state's experiences.