Once Again Caligula Illness

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When Protest Doesn\u27t Quite Fit the Mold

White people protesting is powerful. It is a privilege to be guaranteed that someone will listen to us, as pointed out by Jerome Clarke in a piece about last year’s “Won’t Stand For Hate” protest. With that privilege comes a responsibility that has been neglected on this campus. I agree with the students who protested on the steps of Penn Hall and spoke out during the Student Senate meeting about the way our administration is handling the mold situation in Hanson Hall. The response was insufficient and it directly contradicts the College’s verbal commitment to promoting a healthy living and learning environment. However, as I walked by the students protesting on Friday, I was hit with irony and felt ashamed of the way many of us have responded to this issue. Perhaps I wouldn’t feel that way if every issue facing the students of this campus, specifically those most marginalized, were met with similar outcry from the majority population here. [excerpt

Relaxing The Hamilton Jacobi Bellman Equation To Construct Inner And Outer Bounds On Reachable Sets

We consider the problem of overbounding and underbounding both the backward and forward reachable set for a given polynomial vector field, nonlinear in both state and input, with a given semialgebriac set of initial conditions and with inputs constrained pointwise to lie in a semialgebraic set. Specifically, we represent the forward reachable set using the value function which gives the optimal cost to go of an optimal control problems and if smooth satisfies the Hamilton-Jacobi- Bellman PDE. We then show that there exist polynomial upper and lower bounds to this value function and furthermore, these polynomial sub-value and super-value functions provide provable upper and lower bounds to the forward reachable set. Finally, by minimizing the distance between these sub-value and super-value functions in the L1-norm, we are able to construct inner and outer bounds for the reachable set and show numerically on several examples that for relatively small degree, the Hausdorff distance between these bounds is negligible

Probing light WIMPs with directional detection experiments

The CoGeNT and CRESST WIMP direct detection experiments have recently observed excesses of nuclear recoil events, while the DAMA/LIBRA experiment has a long standing annual modulation signal. It has been suggested that these excesses may be due to light mass, m_chi ~ 5-10 GeV, WIMPs. The Earth's motion with respect to the Galactic rest frame leads to a directional dependence in the WIMP scattering rate, providing a powerful signal of the Galactic origin of any recoil excess. We investigate whether direct detection experiments with directional sensitivity have the potential to observe this anisotropic scattering rate with the elastically scattering light WIMPs proposed to explain the observed excesses. We find that the number of recoils required to detect an anisotropic signal from light WIMPs at 5 sigma significance varies from 7 to more than 190 over the set of target nuclei and energy thresholds expected for directional detectors. Smaller numbers arise from configurations where the detector is only sensitive to recoils from the highest speed, and hence most anisotropic, WIMPs. However, the event rate above threshold is very small in these cases, leading to the need for large experimental exposures to accumulate even a small number of events. To account for this sensitivity to the tail of the WIMP velocity distribution, whose shape is not well known, we consider two exemplar halo models spanning the range of possibilities. We also note that for an accurate calculation the Earth's orbital speed must be averaged over. We find that the exposures required to detect 10 GeV WIMPs at a WIMP-proton cross-section of 10^-4 pb are of order 10^3 kg day for a 20 keV energy threshold, within reach of planned directional detectors. Lower WIMP masses require higher exposures and/or lower energy thresholds for detection.Comment: 9 pages, 6 figures, v2: version to appear in Phys. Rev. D with additional discussio

Rapid fabrication of polymer microfluidic systems for the production of artificial lipid bilayers

A polymer microfluidic device has been fabricated using rapid prototyping techniques. The device was built up to allow the formation and subsequent investigation of artificial bilayer lipid membranes (BLMs). A simple dry film photoresist stamp was used to hot emboss microfluidic channels into PMMA films. Laser micromachining was employed to form an aperture into PMMA films. Laser micromachining was employed to form an aperture through the PMMA channels, across which the BLM was later formed. The dry film phororesist was also used as a simple etch mask for the deep etching of glass substrates in buffered HF solutions, which was used in this work for the production of glass embossing stamps. We show that bilayer films can be successfully produced across laser micromachined apertures in PMMA films

Who goes to a sexual health clinic? Gender differences in service utilisation.

Aim: Our aim was to review utilisation of the Hamilton Sexual Health Clinic (Hamilton, Waikato, New Zealand) with regard to gender differences. Methods: Notes of those attending during 9 months (1 February 2008–31 October 2008) were reviewed—and their demographic details, source of referral, reasons for attending, and diagnostic coding data were compared. In addition, Waikato Hospital laboratory provided Chlamydia trachomatis test results for the study period. Data was analysed for gender differences. Results: Overall, more women attended than men. By age bands, more 15–19 year old women than men attended (23.3% vs 12.5%, p<0.001) but, for all age-bands 20 years and older, men were at least as likely to attend as women. Further, for those aged 25– 29 years (20.3% vs 17%, p<0.5) and 45 years and older (11.9% vs 7.4%, p<0.001), more men than women of the same-age band were seen. Men who attended were more likely to self-refer (58.5% vs 43%, p<0.001) and less likely to be asymptomatic (30.3% vs 38.4%, p<0.001). Conclusions: Our data suggest men aged 20 years and older are at least, if not more, likely than women to attend a sexual health clinic for sexual health concerns. However, there appears to be under-utilisation by younger men. To improve sexual health for men and women, help-seeking must be timely and effective. We need to better understand and address sexual healthcare barriers for young men