“Come Think With Me”: Finding Communion in the Liberatory Textual Practices of Kameelah Janan Rasheed

Defining text as anything that can be read, self-identified learner and artist Kameelah Janan Rasheed explores reading as radical communion within her multifaceted textual practice. A 2021 Guggenheim Fellow, Rasheed’s work spans vast bodies of knowledge and temporalities to interrogate both the aesthetic and the limits of the text. At times producing collages with letters cut out from books in her own expansive library, and at other times posting scans from various books that are marked up with her rigorous note-taking, Rasheed approaches the text as an invitation to commune with the author in order to collectively arrive at new ways of knowing and being. Rasheed’s work maps both her own hypertextual engagements while simultaneously enacting a Black feminist approach to literacy, one that recognizes Black women’s textual practices as mapping geographic, corporeal, and psychological sites of resistance. (In the issue section Bibliographic Knowledge(s)

The Intersection of Structural Racism and Health Services Research in Characterizing the Epidemiology of Uterine Fibroids

This study by Langton et al explores the association between maternal family history and the development of uterine fibroids among a cohort of Black women who were fibroid-free at baseline. By ascertaining maternal fibroid history through direct surveying of the mothers, Langton et al provide a more robust assessment of family history of fibroids than has been captured previously using variable methods. Despite this enhanced method, this investigation by Langton et al offers a critical example of how structural racism intersects with health services delivery that affects the fundamental epidemiologic understanding of a medical condition disproportionately experienced by Black women

An Autoethnographic Approach to Developing Human Connections: A Prison Educator’s Lived Experiences

Storytelling and reflective practices have been recent buzzwords in the fields of education and family and consumer sciences. The point is to tell our stories and inform the public about the infinite number of ways educators and family and consumer sciences professionals impact our schools and communities. Through this autoethnographic study, the researcher details how making human connections and the sharing of these stories has the potential to improve correctional institutions, education programs, and student-teacher relationships. Lessons learned and experiences easily translate to public education, higher education, and industry. Journey with the researcher through his memories and reflections as an educational administrator in a federal prison. The researcher’s goal is to foster personal growth, safer prisons, and the building of human connections in all aspects of work, community, and family

Squaring the Circle: The Cultural Relativity of 'Good' Shape

The Gestalt theorists of the early twentieth century proposed a psychological primacy for circles, squares and triangles over other shapes. They described them as 'good' shapes and the Gestalt premise has been widely accepted. Rosch (1973), for example, suggested that shape categories formed around these 'natural' prototypes irrespective of the paucity of shape terms in a language. Rosch found that speakers of a language lacking terms for any geometric shape nevertheless learnt paired-associates to these 'good' shapes more easily than to asymmetric variants. We question these empirical data in the light of the accumulation of recent evidence in other perceptual domains that language affects categorization. A cross-cultural investigation sought to replicate Rosch's findings with the Himba of Northern Namibia who also have no terms in their language for the supposedly basic shapes of circle, square and triangle. A replication of Rosch (1973) found no advantage for these 'good' shapes in the organization of categories. It was concluded that there is no necessary salience for circles, squares and triangles. Indeed, we argue for the opposite because these shapes are rare in nature. The general absence of straight lines and symmetry in the perceptual environment should rather make circles, squares and triangles unusual and, therefore, less likely to be used as prototypes in categorization tasks. We place shape as one of the types of perceptual input (in philosophical terms, 'vague') that is readily susceptible to effects of language variation

Nonlocal games and quantum permutation groups

We present a strong connection between quantum information and the theory of quantum permutation groups. Specifically, we define a notion of quantum isomorphisms of graphs based on quantum automorphisms from the theory of quantum groups, and then show that this is equivalent to the previously defined notion of quantum isomorphism corresponding to perfect quantum strategies to the isomorphism game. Moreover, we show that two connected graphs X and Y are quantum isomorphic if and only if there exists x is an element of V(X) and y is an element of V(Y) that are in the same orbit of the quantum automorphism group of the disjoint union of X and Y. This connection links quantum groups to the more concrete notion of nonlocal games and physically observable quantum behaviours. In this work, we exploit this by using ideas and results from quantum information in order to prove new results about quantum automorphism groups of graphs, and about quantum permutation groups more generally. In particular, we show that asymptotically almost surely all graphs have trivial quantum automorphism group. Furthermore, we use examples of quantum isomorphic graphs from previous work to construct an infinite family of graphs which are quantum vertex transitive but fail to be vertex transitive, answering a question from the quantum permutation group literature. Our main tool for proving these results is the introduction of orbits and orbitals (orbits on ordered pairs) of quantum permutation groups. We show that the orbitals of a quantum permutation group form a coherent configuration/algebra, a notion from the field of algebraic graph theory. We then prove that the elements of this quantum orbital algebra are exactly the matrices that commute with the magic unitary defining the quantum group. We furthermore show that quantum isomorphic graphs admit an isomorphism of their quantum orbital algebras which maps the adjacency matrix of one graph to that of the other. We hope that this work will encourage new collaborations among the communities of quantum information, quantum groups, and algebraic graph theory. (C) 2020 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved

Radiographic film dosimetry for IMRT fields in the near‐surface buildup region

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/135573/1/acm20087.pd

Orthogonal Representations, Projective Rank, and Fractional Minimum Positive Semidefinite Rank: Connections and New Directions

Fractional minimum positive semidefinite rank is defined from r-fold faithful orthogonal representations and it is shown that the projective rank of any graph equals the fractional minimum positive semidefinite rank of its complement. An r-fold version of the traditional definition of minimum positive semidefinite rank of a graph using Hermitian matrices that fit the graph is also presented. This paper also introduces r-fold orthogonal representations of graphs and formalizes the understanding of projective rank as fractional orthogonal rank. Connections of these concepts to quantum theory, including Tsirelson's problem, are discussed