Instagram

Overview: Capturing pictures helps to preserve memories that will be saved forever, and looking at them allows someone to take a journey back in time to when any given picture was taken. In this day and age, smartphones such as Androids and iPhones help to make picture taking quick and easy. With the swipe of a finger and a tap on the screen, a picture can be taken and saved on a camera roll in mere seconds. But it doesn\u27t stop there, with the smartphone application (app) called Instagram, photography can be taken to the next level. Instagram is a website, and also a free app, compatible with most smartphones. It is a form of social media in which users create a profile, including their name and a small biography about themselves. It allows them to upload and post pictures or short fifteen-second videos of anything they please and include a caption that goes with it. Both gender and age play defining roles in how the user actually uses the app. When looking at gender, it is interesting to explore the differences between what men and women post and how often they post. It is suspected there are differences in their usage because of cultural context. In general, women like to share with others what is going on with their lives and men are usually more reserved. This could potentially explain why women post more often, so their followers know what they are experiencing. Age is also something that impacts usage. When looking at the younger generations compared to the older, there is a difference in what and how often they post as well, so it would be interesting to explore why in fact there is this inconsistency in posting rates. Different ages have different audiences, so this could play into why they post what they do. Maybe the younger generation posts more to look cool, and maybe the older generation does not post as much, because they are consumed with more important things, such as work or school. I want to illustrate a clear picture about why there is this split through asking questions about purpose of usage, why they post, and why they post what they post. In summary, I want to uncover what kind of identity they are forming for themselves based on their Instagram activity, and how what they post and like shows others who they are in the social media world

Varieties of Spiritual Sense: Cusanus and John Smith

This chapter offers a window into the theologies of Cusanus and the Cambridge Platonist John Smith (1618–52) by illuminating their contrasting appropriations of Origen’s concept of the spiritual senses. Both early modern Neoplatonists of sorts, they evince many common concerns even while a definitive link between them remains elusive. This traditional notion in mystical theology is essential to a proper account of Christian experience not adequately addressed by the scholasticism of their times. While both use the language of spiritual sensation throughout their extant works, their understandings thereof are markedly different. Each appropriated and reformulated the spiritual senses to meet their intellectual and religious contexts. Cusa attempted what has been called a synthesis of Aristotelian and Origenist aesthetics while Smith’s Reformed Neoplatonism led him to reject peripatetic philosophy outright. For Cusanus, spiritual sensation is a fundamentally apophatic process whereby we come to “see that we do not see” which points back to the sacramental practices and eschatological hope of the Catholic Church. For Smith, spiritual sensation is a direct and personal kataphatic process whereby we leave unfitting modes of perception behind in exchange for the divine intellect within us. For the Cardinal, ordinary sense perception, including contemplating images, is central. But this sacramental showing includes hiddenness within itself. For this reason spiritual sensation supplies a mediated “foretaste” of things only fully revealed in the eschatological future. Smith, on the other hand, allows little to no positive role for ordinary sense perception. Instead, he emphasizes that spiritual sensation is an intellectual matter more or less achievable in this life. Both sought to reform the Origenist tradition for their own situations sure that contemplation of the divine is more tasted than calculated

The IDSA and the homogeneous sphere: Issues and possible improvements

In this paper, we are concerned with the study of the Isotropic Diffusion Source Approximation (IDSA) (Baxter et al., Phys. Rev. E 73, 046118, 2006) of radiative transfer. After having recalled well-known limits of the radiative transfer equation, we present the IDSA and adapt it to the case of the homogeneous sphere. We then show that for this example the IDSA suffers from severe numerical difficulties. We argue that these difficulties originate in the min-max switch coupling mechanism used in the IDSA. To overcome this problem we reformulate the IDSA to avoid the problematic coupling. This allows us to access the modeling error of the IDSA for the homogeneous sphere test case. The IDSA is shown to overestimate the streaming component, hence we propose a new version of the IDSA which is numerically shown to be more accurate than the old one. Analytical results and numerical tests are provided to support the accuracy of the new proposed approximation.Comment: 25 pages, 8 figures, accepted for publication in DCDS-

Urine collection device

A urine collection device for females is described. It is comprised of a collection element defining a urine collection chamber and an inlet opening into the chamber and is adapted to be disposed in surrounding relation to the urethral opening of the user. A drainage conduit is connected to the collection element in communication with the chamber whereby the chamber and conduit together comprise a urine flow pathway for carrying urine generally away from the inlet. A first body of wicking material is mounted adjacent the collection element and extends at least partially into the flow pathway. The device preferably also comprise a vaginal insert element including a seal portion for preventing the entry of urine into the vagina

Horizontal Branch evolution, metallicity and sdB stars

Context. Abundance anomalies have been observed in field sdB stars and in nearly all Horizontal Branch (HB) stars of globular clusters with Teff > 11 000K whatever be the cluster metallicity. Aims. The aim is to determine the abundance variations to be expected in sdB stars and in HB stars of metallicities Z \geq 0.0001 and what observed abundances teach us about hydrodynamical processes competing with atomic diffusion. Methods. Complete stellar evolution models, including the effects of atomic diffusion and radiative acceleration, have been computed from the zero age main-sequence for metallicities of Z0 = 0.0001, 0.001, 0.004 and 0.02. On the HB the masses were selected to cover the Teff interval from 7000 to 37000K. Some 60 evolutionary HB models were calculated. The calculations of surface abundance anomalies during the horizontal branch depend on one parameter, the surface mixed mass. Results. For sdB stars with Teff 11 000K in all observed clusters, independent of metallicity, it was found that most observed abundance anomalies (even up to ~ x 200) were compatible, within error bars, with expected abundances. A mixed mass of ~1.E-7 M\odot was determined by comparison with observations. Conclusions. Observations of globular cluster HB stars with Teff > 11 000K and of sdB stars with Teff < 37 000K suggest that most observed abundance anomalies can be explained by element separation driven by radiative acceleration occuring at a mass fraction of ~1.E-7 M\odot. Mass loss or turbulence appear to limit the separation between 1.E-7 M\odot and the surface.Comment: Accepted for publication by A&

Innovative Financing Mechanisms for Global Health: Overview & Considerations for U.S. Government Participation

Defines, classifies, and inventories innovative financing mechanisms for global health such as front-loading funds, public-private research partnerships, and performance incentives. Examines U.S. government involvement and policy considerations

Joint Labour Supply Dynamics of Older Couples

This paper studies the labour force participation dynamics of older couples in the United States.Longitudinal data from the five available waves of the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) is used to investigate if the dynamics introduced by considering both spouses' behavior provide additional information in trying to fit observed participation sequences.The paper uses a bivariate dynamic binary choice model with unobserved heterogeneity and serial correlation to disentangle the many sources of dynamics and correlation in a couple's decision making.First, strong true state-dependence is found and results in a bunching of participation and non-participation sequences.Cross-spouse state-dependence is also found which points to indirect effects of social security and pension incentives through complementarity in leisure.Second, the Spouse Allowance program is found to have predicted effects on participation of the couple and these effects are statistically significant.A simulation exercise presents evidence that the elimination of the spouse allowance can raise participation of wives at age 62 by more than the decrease in participation of husbands at age 65.labour supply;retirement;panel data;older workers