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Want to check out a pet? It’s possible at Harvard Medical School and Yale Law School, which both have resident therapy dogs in their libraries that can be borrowed through the card catalog just like a book.

“I don’t care if it’s 10 at night, we go to that dorm and sit on the floor. The kids are crying, and they grab the dog and put their face in the fur and just let it go,” said Adamle.

Pet-friendly dorms also are popping up where students can bring their dogs or cats from home.

Last month, Indiana University students romped around with dogs in the first ever “Rent-a-Puppy” day. For $5, students could book time with one of 20 puppies from the local animal shelter — and could adopt them if they couldn’t bear to say goodbye.

ATLANTA (AP) — Just down the hall from the reference desk at Emory University’s law library in a room housing antique legal texts is Stanley the golden retriever puppy, barking his head off.

Some dogs, like Harvard Medical School’s resident shih tzu Cooper, hold regular office hours. Researcher Loise Francisco-Anderson owns Cooper and said she got permission to bring him to campus after her husband read that Yale Law School had a therapy dog on campus named Monty.

Follow Dorie Turner at http://www.twitter.edu/dorieturner.

First-year Emory law student Anna Idelevich took a break from studying for exams at the library on a recent afternoon to visit Stanley and Hooch, two golden retrievers training to be companion dogs for disabled owners. The private university brought in the dogs as part of a new program to help students cope with the stress of exams.

Pups are in counseling centers for students to visit regularly or faculty and staff bring their pets to lift spirits.

From Kent State University in Ohio to Macalester College in Minnesota, more and more pooches are around campus during exams to help students relax and maybe even crack a smile or two.

Cooper, who sports a crimson scarf with paw prints on it, is so popular that undergraduate students have been petitioning for him to spend time on their side of campus. Many of them take the shuttle across the river to the medical school just to visit the pup on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

Most schools, like Emory, partner with organizations that train companion dogs so that the canines get their social training while students get stress relief. Others, like at Harvard, have faculty members bring their dogs — which are certified to be therapy pups — to campus certain hours during the week.

That’s why Kathleen Adamle, a nursing professor at Kent State, hopes to garner a grant so she can conduct research as part of her “Dogs on Campus” program. Adamle launched the program in 2006 with just her dog and has since added 11 other therapy canines to the team that visits dorms regularly throughout the year.

“We had a student who came in and a staff person commented they had never seen that student smile,” said Richelle Reid, a law librarian who started Emory’s pet therapy program this year after hearing about one at the University of California, San Francisco. “It has had positive effects, helping them to just have a moment to clear their minds and not have to think about studies, not have to think about books.”

Since 2006, Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn., has asked faculty and alumni to bring their dogs to campus during finals as part of the “Dog Day Afternoon” program. At Kenyon College in Ohio, the counseling center and dorms offer puppy play dates with Sunny the yellow lab and Sam the poodle-Chihuahua mix.

The dogs belong to Adamle or other community members and are certified therapy dogs.

Research shows that interaction with pets decreases the level of cortisol — or stress hormone — in people and increases endorphins, known as the happiness hormone. Scant research exists on the how pet programs on college campuses help students cope with stress.

“I’ve literally been here every day. This is the best thing that’s ever happened to me,” said Idelevich, 22. “They couldn’t have thought of a better way to relieve stress. If they don’t do it next year, I’ll be upset.”

She has plenty of anecdotal evidence that her program works. As soon as there’s a tragedy on campus — a student dies in a car wreck, for example — dorms scramble to book the dog team to help comfort upset students, she says.

“You can release some of the emotions to a pet that you can’t to a human. A pet keeps it confidential. You don’t have to worry about someone else saying, ‘Oh, I think she’s having a nervous breakdown over the science exam,’” said Francisco-Anderson.

The service is almost always free for students.

Photos: Tommy Ton; Neil Rasmus/BFAnyc.com; Sherly Rabbani and Josephine Solimene

"I think that he just maybe means that the end of the show - we're in six years - that the end of the show is visible on the horizon."

The show is partly based on Fey's experiences of working on long-running US sketch show Saturday Night Live.

The comedy was dropped from British terrestrial TV following its second series in 2009, after a run of poor viewing figures on Channel Five.

The final season will run for just 13 episodes, and will be announced as part of NBC's forthcoming primetime schedule next week.

Fey plays Liz Lemon, the head writer of fictional series TGS, who has to deal with dysfunctional stars and a disastrous love life.

'On the horizon'

It has since been shown in the UK on Comedy Central.

Hit US sitcom 30 Rock is to come to an end, following an abbreviated seventh series, amid falling ratings.

Last month, Baldwin appeared to suggest on Twitter that he was leaving the show, but Fey rebuffed the rumours on US talk show The View.

"As far as I know, he's not leaving the show. We're all in this together 'til the end," said Fey, in April.

Created by comedian Tina Fey, the show revolves around the production of a late night sketch show, and stars Fey alongside Alec Baldwin.

The critically-acclaimed comedy, which debuted in 2006, won a string of Emmys but has been overshadowed by the success of Modern Family and Glee.

However, audiences have dwindled to an average 3.5 million viewers in the US.

"In one sense, increasing that total by 20% or so doesn't change that story. On the other hand, I'm a demographic historian, and we need to do the most precise job we can at determining what the impact of the war was."

Previous to Prof Hacker's work, historians had widely relied on an estimate that 620,000 soldiers died in the war, a figure reached through the combined efforts of two former Union army officers in the late 19th Century.

That was until December, when historian J David Hacker published a paper that used demographic methods and sophisticated statistical software to study newly digitised US census records from 1850 to 1880.

It ended in 1865 with the surrender of the southern, or Confederate forces, to the Union army; slavery was officially abolished by constitutional amendment that year.

All along, however, historians sensed that number underrepresented the death toll.

"We already knew that the war was devastating," Prof Hacker says.

Continue reading the main story “Start Quote

The Civil War began in 1861 when southern slave-holding states, fearing the institution of slavery was under threat in a nation governed by northern free states, seceded from the US after the election of President Abraham Lincoln.

Reporting by Daniel Nasaw in Washington

William Fox and Thomas Livermore based their estimates on battlefield reports, pension filings of Civil War widows and orphans, and other sources that, historians have acknowledged, significantly undercounted the war dead.

"A numbers game gets us only so far in understanding the war's impact on American life," he says.

"It left a degree of family and social devastation unprecedented for any Western society."

"There is an ongoing debate about the number of slaves brought from Africa to the New World during the slave trade era - nine million, 12 million, 14 million. Does it really matter when we are assessing the morality of the slave trade?"

Prof Hacker's figure of 750,000 would translate into about 7.5 million US deaths in proportion to America's current population, Prof McPherson notes.

"The Civil War left a culture of death, a culture of mourning, beyond anything Americans had ever experienced or imagined," says David Blight, a Civil War historian at Yale University.

Prof Hacker's findings, published in the December 2011 issue of Civil War History, have been endorsed by some of the leading historians of the conflict.

A part of BBC News Magazine, Who, What, Why? aims to answer questions behind the headlines

Proportionate to the US's 2012 population, 7.5m US soldiers died in the War; above, Arlington Cemetery

Continue reading the main story The answer An exact count of soldiers who died in combat and from disease during the Civil War is impossible, historians say Prof Hacker estimates between 650,000 - 850,000 deaths, but believes the most likely number was about 750,000 That is equivalent to 7.5 million US dead in 2012 numbers In 2010 UK numbers, it is comparable to 1.5 million British soldiers dead

Continue reading the main story WHO, WHAT, WHY?

The war devastated the economy and society of the agrarian southern states where most of the fighting occurred, and killed so many Americans it was impossible directly to tally the dead.

Prof Hacker acknowledges the method must account for a large margin of error, and he declines to make bold claims about its accuracy.

In any case, Columbia University historian Eric Foner questions the values of focusing on the death toll of such a horrific period in US history.

The US Civil War was incontrovertibly the bloodiest, most devastating conflict in American history, and it remains unknown - and unknowable - exactly how many men died in Union and Confederate uniform.

Using statistics software SPSS, he counted the number of native-born white men of military age in 1860 and determined how many of that group were still alive in 1870.

Prof Hacker began by taking digitised samples from the decennial census counts taken 1850-1880.

For more than a century, it has been accepted with a grain of salt that about 620,000 Americans died in the conflict, with more than half of those dying off the battlefield from disease or festering wounds.

In proportion to Britain's 2010 population of 62.3 million, it's about 1.5 million people.

About a third of US citizens are said to have an ancestor who lived through the war

Prof Hacker's finding "ups the ante on just how destructive the Civil War is", says Joshua Rothman, a 19th Century US historian and director of the Summersell Center for the Study of the South at the University of Alabama.

US Civil War deaths therefore could range from 617,877 to 851,066, and he settles on an estimate of 750,000 dead.

A study suggests a previously widely accepted death toll of the US Civil War may actually be way under the mark. How many did perish in this conflict, fought before the era of modern record-keeping and DNA identification?

The calculations yielded the number of "excess" deaths of military-age men between 1860-1870 - the number who died in the war or in the five subsequent years from causes related to the war.

In the 1860s, governments in the US and the Confederacy (the name the southern states took for their secessionist entity) were shoddy record keepers.

He controlled for other demographic assumptions, including mortality rates of foreign-born soldiers, added the relatively small number of black soldiers killed, and compared the numbers with the rates of female survival over the same periods.

It remains to be seen whether Prof Hacker's new estimates will diffuse into mainstream American thinking, supplanting Fox and Livermore's estimates. (The new numbers have already been incorporated into the Wikipedia page on the war.)

Now, it appears a long-held estimate of the war's death toll could have undercounted the dead by as many as 130,000. That is 21% of the earlier estimate - and more than twice the total US dead in Vietnam.

His finding: An estimated 750,000 soldiers died in the war - 21% higher than the 19th Century estimate.

The publication's editors wrote that his scholarship was "among the most consequential pieces ever to appear in this journal's pages".

He compared that survival rate with the survival rates of the men of the same ages from 1850-1860, and from 1870-1880 - the 10-year census periods before and after the Civil War.

"The moral weight of the Civil War is so large and the consequences of emancipation loom so large that we forget just how brutal the war actually is. It's good to remember that."

End Quote Joshua Rothman University of Alabama historian

The moral weight of the Civil War is so large and the consequences of emancipation loom so large that we forget just how brutal the war actually is”

Nor had any historian undertaken the mammoth task of devising and executing a new count.

Confederate records were largely destroyed in the war's final stages, when the Union army captured its capital Richmond, Virginia.

And in the US Civil War, like all wars, men deserted or defected, bodies sank forever into the mud or were blown to bits or were misidentified, and troops initially listed as wounded in action subsequently perished from their injuries.

They had no comprehensive system of registering births and deaths, and military muster rolls were intended more for tabulating troop strength than recording fatalities.

He acknowledges further it cannot distinguish between Union and Confederate dead, between deaths on the battlefield or from illness, nor tally postwar deaths from wounds incurred in battle.

Photo: Billy Farrell / BFAnyc.com

By Sasha Charnin Morrison for UsMagazine.com. To read more of the Recessionista blog, click here.

And of course because this is always a must-have summer staple, companies like AsraiStyle.com have this look for as little as $24.99.

The Simone Camille bag has just completely sold out on net-a-porter.com. They’re priced at $1860 also on stylist Simone Harouche’s Web site. They’re multi colored, embroidered, and made completely from vintage textiles. Completely handmade, no two are alike. Harouche’s company can design a custom bag for you, as well.

I love this bag. I love this site. Their bags are roomy, embroidered, very colorful and unique. AsraiStyle.com is brilliant because there are a variety of colors, styles (boho, cross body, hippie, hobo, patchworked, purse styles, backpacks, and shoulder), prints, patterns and embroideries.

While most celebs are carrying their newly acquired Birkin’s and structured, top handle, leather “it” bags, there is a group like Miley Cyrus, Nicole Richie and Julia Roberts who prefer a softer alternative.

You can pack everything into these deep pocketed bag. A broad shoulder band is perfect for easing shoulder and back aches and those colors are so beautiful and can last a very long time, because they simply do not go out of style. Dress up or down your jeans, maxi dresses and broomstick skirts with these easy bags. Great for all occasions and also the perfect Indian Summer, prefall transition bag!

According to Internet speculation, he also goes by the name Lady Gaga. That’s certainly the easiest way to explain his never-before-seen presence on the cover of September’s Vogue Hommes Japan, shot by Gaga go-to Nick Knight and styled by her own stylist, Nicola Formichetti, who leaked a few preview images on his blog this morning. (In fairness, he’s also Vogue Hommes Japan’s fashion editor.) Whoever Calderone is, he/she gave an interview to Jo-Ann Furniss explaining his background (maybe):

How would you describe what you do/your occupation?
Mechanic for my dad’s business. This is the first time I’ve had my picture taken.

What are your ambitions?
I’d love to own my own car shop; I have a bunch of my own “muscle” cars. Maybe if I take some more pictures I can afford it.

What is your relationship to Lady Gaga?
I met her at a shoot Nick Knight was doing. She’s fuckin’ beautiful, and funny, and interesting. I was a little nervous for Nick to start shooting. She said, “Don’t be, baby, you were ‘born this way. ” I took her out after. The rest is private ; )

If he’s got anything to do with Lady G., it won’t be private for long.

Photo: Alice Bensi / GoRunway.com

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By Sasha Charnin Morrison for UsMagazine.com. To read more of the Recessionista blog, click here.

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