The Effect of Art Training on Dementia

The present study explores the effect of visual art training on people with dementia (PWD), utilizing a randomized control trial (RCT) design, with a structured usual activity waitlist control group, in order to investigate the effects of an eight-week visual art training program on PWDs cognition, mood, and behaviour. Cognition was assessed with: The Backward Digit Span, measuring verbal working memory; the Body Part Pointing Test, measuring visuospatial working memory; and the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA), measuring overall cognitive function. Mood and behaviour were qualitatively assessed based on volunteer-completed observational reports. The results of the study indicate that while cognition is not significantly affected by an eight-week art training program, mood and behaviour are positively impacted

Cosmic ray acceleration to ultrahigh energy in radio galaxies

The origin of ultrahigh energy cosmic rays (UHECRs) is an open question. In this proceeding, we first review the general physical requirements that a source must meet for acceleration to 10-100 EeV, including the consideration that the shock is not highly relativistic. We show that shocks in the backflows of radio galaxies can meet these requirements. We discuss a model in which giant-lobed radio galaxies such as Centaurus A and Fornax A act as slowly-leaking UHECR reservoirs, with the UHECRs being accelerated during a more powerful past episode. We also show that Centaurus A, Fornax A and other radio galaxies may explain the observed anisotropies in data from the Pierre Auger Observatory, before examining some of the difficulties in associating UHECR anisotropies with astrophysical sources.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures. Proceedings of UHECR 2018, 8-12 October 2018, Paris, Franc

Amplification of perpendicular and parallel magnetic fields by cosmic ray currents

Cosmic ray (CR) currents through magnetised plasma drive strong instabilities producing amplification of the magnetic field. This amplification helps explain the CR energy spectrum as well as observations of supernova remnants and radio galaxy hot spots. Using magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) simulations, we study the behaviour of the non-resonant hybrid (NRH) instability (also known as the Bell instability) in the case of CR currents perpendicular and parallel to the initial magnetic field. We demonstrate that extending simulations of the perpendicular case to 3D reveals a different character to the turbulence from that observed in 2D. Despite these differences, in 3D the perpendicular NRH instability still grows exponentially far into the non-linear regime with a similar growth rate to both the 2D perpendicular and 3D parallel situations. We introduce some simple analytical models to elucidate the physical behaviour, using them to demonstrate that the transition to the non-linear regime is governed by the growth of thermal pressure inside dense filaments at the edges of the expanding loops. We discuss our results in the context of supernova remnants and jets in radio galaxies. Our work shows that the NRH instability can amplify magnetic fields to many times their initial value in parallel and perpendicular shocks.Comment: Published in MNRAS. 14 pages, 12 figures, 2 tables. Replacement corrects some typesetting error

The Milwaukee Moment: Oppression, Policing, and Possibilities

This dissertation examines how Black residents in Milwaukee, Wisconsin experience and manage their relationships with law enforcement. My analysis is based on eight focus group interviews with thirty Black Milwaukee residents ages 18-70. Research questions were: How do Black Milwaukee residents experience policing by the Milwaukee Police Department? What possibilities exist to repair the fractured relationship between the Milwaukee Police Department and the city’s Black communities? Findings focus on gender specific experiences of policing in the city, citizen complaints about the Milwaukee Police Department, and participant driven ideas to reinstate police legitimacy in Black communities. These findings uncover the complex relationship that over-policed, but under-protected communities have with law enforcement as participants reveal that they desire the police services, but demand to be treated with dignity, fairness, and respect

“Ask Him If You’re Being Detained”: bystander resistance in street police encounters

Recent uprisings in Baltimore, Maryland and Ferguson, Missouri have revealed a crisis of legitimacy for police in poor communities of color. This project considers the crisis of legitimacy for police at the street level. Data come in the form of third party videos collected by a local resident of the Fillmore, a poor black neighborhood subject to aggressive policing located in San Francisco, CA. Videos capture police-citizen interactions and analysis focused on bystander participation during the street encounter. Videos were analyzed using methods of analytic induction and visual coding schemes. Findings show that bystanders use taunting and insulting the police as a form of resistance. Additionally, bystanders give advice to the subject of the encounter. Furthermore, bystander comments reveal the ways they believe gender and race to be relevant to the police-citizen encounter and relationship with law enforcement more generally. Bystander talk reframes the encounter and positions the subject as victim and law enforcement as the source of trouble. Bystanders accuse the police of going beyond the parameters of their jobs to express sexual desire and racial antipathy. Additionally, bystander participation dramatizes the limits of police authority as bystanders offer the subject legal advice and creates derogatory experiences for the police

"If I Was a Dude This Decision Would Be Easy": The Early Emergence of the Gender Leadership Gap Among College Seniors

During the last 10 years, much attention has been given to women who “opt out” of the workforce. Researchers, Op-Eds, and popular media have turned to the issue of highly educated, highly paid women who leave the workforce and do not return, seeking to discover why and how they make these decisions. Still, consensus has not been reached and meanwhile, valuable members of the labor force fail to reach the pinnacle of their careers or abandon the workforce all together. One fact that everyone tends to agree on is that adults face new, challenging demands after having children. They must decide how to manage a finite amount of time. Do you trade your career for your family or your family for your career? Is there a middle ground? These are often questions that factor into a woman’s decision to leave the workforce. Yet, what happens before women have children? At what point do both women and men begin thinking about how their careers will affect their family lives in the future? Little research has been conducted with college seniors who are about to begin their first full time career. As a member of this cohort, I was curious about what other college students had to say about these questions. I wanted to know whether others had given thought to what they wanted their future work and family life to look like. Therefore, I interviewed a random sample of seniors at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Upon analyzing their responses through qualitative data software, I discovered that most men had given at least rudimentary thought to these questions. However, females had given significantly greater thought to them, so much so that many reported having already changed their career goals as a result. There was a clear divide between female and male responses, with their perspectives and answers to my questions being largely dependent on their gender. The interviews showed that if the gender leadership gap is to be closed by my generation or the one that follows us, policymakers must support initiatives that help men think progressively about the desires of their female counterparts while simultaneously helping women feel that they will be able to navigate their careers without sacrificing their desire for a family. Importantly, policy changes will not be effective if they only target those who are already in the workforce. My study revealed that women are especially likely to change their career paths and goals as early as college and thus, policy must be responsive to this trend.Bachelor of Art

Lake Whatcom Monitoring Project 2012/2013 Report

This report is part of an on-going series of annual reports and special project reports that document the Lake Whatcom monitoring program. This work is conducted by the Institute for Watershed Studies and other departments at Western Washington University. The major objective of this program is to provide long-term baseline water quality monitoring in Lake Whatcom and selected tributaries. Each section contains brief explanations about the water quality data, along with discussions of patterns observed in Lake Whatcom

Environmental art and its contribution to establishing an awareness of the sacred in nature

The introduction establishes the goal of the research, which is to discover that art concerned with re-evaluating the relationship to the environment and spirituality can serve to connect people to one another, and to the environment. The context of the research is the contemporary ecological and spiritual crisis of the postmodern world. The background places the discussion within the contexts of modernism and postmodernism. The historical background focuses on the period from the 1960s to the present day. Land and Environmental artists who work in a manner that is conscious of environmental issues and who suggest a sacred and creative attitude to ecology are discussed. My own creative work which is a response to both ancient and contemporary sites as well as to contemporary theories of art and spirituality is discussed. The four projects, are discussed in chronological order, they are: Quest - A journey into Sacred Space; Gaika's Kop - Sacred Mountain; Labyrinth - Journeys to the Centre; and Transforming the Centre. The conclusion shows that the multi-faceted, intertextual and relativistic philosophy of postmodernism has brought about a significant change in the attitude of humanity towards the environment. Artists who reject the modernist aesthetic and philosophy are making art that emphasises relationship to, rather than separation from the natural world

Particle acceleration in astrophysical jets

In this chapter, we review some features of particle acceleration in astrophysical jets. We begin by describing four observational results relating to the topic, with particular emphasis on jets in active galactic nuclei and parallels between different sources. We then discuss the ways in which particles can be accelerated to high energies in magnetised plasmas, focusing mainly on shock acceleration, second-order Fermi and magnetic reconnection; in the process, we attempt to shed some light on the basic conditions that must be met by any mechanism for the various observational constraints to be satisfied. We describe the limiting factors for the maximum particle energy and briefly discuss multimessenger signals from neutrinos and ultrahigh energy cosmic rays, before describing the journey of jet plasma from jet launch to cocoon with reference to the different acceleration mechanisms. We conclude with some general comments on the future outlook.Comment: To appear in New Astronomy Reviews special volume '100 Years of Astrophysical Jets' (eds. Rob Fender and Ralph Wijers). 23 pages, 8 figure