Young women with a disorder of sex development: learning to share information with health professionals, friends and intimate partners about bodily differences and infertility

Aim: To understand the experiences of young women with a disorder of sex development when sharing information about their body with healthcare professionals, friends and intimate partners. Background: Disorders of sex development are lifelong conditions that create bodily difference such as absence of reproductive organs which can impact on young women's fertility and sexual experiences. Design: Interpretive phenomenological analysis with thirteen young women (14-19 years old) with a disorder of sex development. Methods: The young women chose to participate in either a face-to-face semi-structured interview or to complete a paper diary between 2011-2012. Results: A superordinate theme focusing on the meaning bodily differences held for these young women is presented through three themes: self-awareness and communicating this to others; actualizing intimacy; and expressing meaning of altered fertility to self or professionals or partners. During early adolescence, the young women were guarded and reticent about sharing personal information about their disorder of sex development but as they moved towards adulthood, some of the young women learnt to engage in conversations with more confidence. Frustrations about their bodily differences and the limitations of their bodies were talked about as factors which limited physical spontaneity, impacted on their perceived sexual fulfilment and challenged the development or sustainability of close friendships or intimate partnerships. The young women wanted empathic, sensitive support from knowledgeable health professionals to help them understand their bodies. Conclusion: Attachment and a 'sense of being' were the concepts that were closely linked to the young women's development of a secure identity

On Online Collaboration and Construction of Shared Knowledge: Assessing Mediation Capability in Computer Supported Argument Visualization Tools

Collaborative Computer-Supported Argument Visualization (CCSAV) has often been proposed as an alternative over more conventional, mainstream platforms for online discussion (e.g., online forums and wikis). CCSAV tools require users to contribute to the creation of a joint artifact (argument map) instead of contributing to a conversation. In this paper we assess empirically the effects of this fundamental design choice and show that the absence of conversational affordances and socially salient information in representation-centric tools is detrimental to the users' collaboration experience. We report empirical findings from a study in which subjects using different collaborative platforms (a forum, an argumentation platform, and a socially augmented argumentation tool) were asked to discuss and predict the price of a commodity. By comparing users' experience across several metrics we found evidence that the collaborative performance decreases gradually when we remove conversational interaction and other types of socially salient information. We interpret these findings through theories developed in conversational analysis (common ground theory) and communities of practice and discuss design implications. In particular, we propose balancing the trade-off between knowledge reification and participation in representation-centric tools with the provision of social feedback and functionalities supporting meaning negotiation

Unconventional Cosmology

I review two cosmological paradigms which are alternative to the current inflationary scenario. The first alternative is the "matter bounce", a non-singular bouncing cosmology with a matter-dominated phase of contraction. The second is an "emergent" scenario, which can be implemented in the context of "string gas cosmology". I will compare these scenarios with the inflationary one and demonstrate that all three lead to an approximately scale-invariant spectrum of cosmological perturbations.Comment: 45 pages, 10 figures; invited lectures at the 6th Aegean Summer School "Quantum Gravity and Quantum Cosmology", Chora, Naxos, Greece, Sept. 12 - 17 2012, to be publ. in the proceedings; these lecture notes form an updated version of arXiv:1003.1745 and arXiv:1103.227

The Similarity Hypothesis in General Relativity

Self-similar models are important in general relativity and other fundamental theories. In this paper we shall discuss the ``similarity hypothesis'', which asserts that under a variety of physical circumstances solutions of these theories will naturally evolve to a self-similar form. We will find there is good evidence for this in the context of both spatially homogenous and inhomogeneous cosmological models, although in some cases the self-similar model is only an intermediate attractor. There are also a wide variety of situations, including critical pheneomena, in which spherically symmetric models tend towards self-similarity. However, this does not happen in all cases and it is it is important to understand the prerequisites for the conjecture.Comment: to be submitted to Gen. Rel. Gra

Conditions for Generating Scale-Invariant Density Perturbations

We analyze the general conditions on the equation of state $w$ required for quantum fluctuations of a scalar field to produce a scale-invariant spectrum of density perturbations, including models which (in the four dimensional effective description) bounce from a contracting to an expanding phase. We show that there are only two robust cases: $w\approx -1$ (inflation) and $w \gg 1$ (the ekpyrotic/cyclic scenario). All other cases, including the $w \approx 0$ case considered by some authors, require extreme fine-tuning of initial conditions and/or the effective potential. For the ekpyrotic/cyclic ($w \gg 1$) case, we also analyze the small deviations from scale invariance.Comment: 6 pages, no figure

The Movember Global Action Plan 1 (GAP1): Unique Prostate Cancer Tissue Microarray Resource

BackgroundThe need to better understand the molecular underpinnings of the heterogeneous outcomes of patients with prostate cancer is a pressing global problem and a key research priority for Movember. To address this, the Movember Global Action Plan 1 Unique tissue microarray (GAP1-UTMA) project constructed a set of unique and richly annotated tissue microarrays (TMA) from prostate cancer samples obtained from multiple institutions across several global locations.MethodsThree separate TMA sets were built that differ by purpose and disease state.ResultsThe intended use of TMA1 (Primary Matched LN) is to validate biomarkers that help determine which clinically localized prostate cancers with associated lymph node metastasis have a high risk of progression to lethal castration-resistant metastatic disease, and to compare molecular properties of high-risk index lesions within the prostate to regional lymph node metastases resected at the time of prostatectomy. TMA2 (Pre vs. Post ADT) was designed to address questions regarding risk of castration-resistant prostate cancer (CRPC) and response to suppression of the androgen receptor/androgen axis, and characterization of the castration-resistant phenotype. TMA3 (CRPC Met Heterogeneity)'s intended use is to assess the heterogeneity of molecular markers across different anatomic sites in lethal prostate cancer metastases.ConclusionsThe GAP1-UTMA project has succeeded in combining a large set of tissue specimens from 501 patients with prostate cancer with rich clinical annotation.ImpactThis resource is now available to the prostate cancer community as a tool for biomarker validation to address important unanswered clinical questions around disease progression and response to treatment.</p

Global maps of soil temperature.

Research in global change ecology relies heavily on global climatic grids derived from estimates of air temperature in open areas at around 2 m above the ground. These climatic grids do not reflect conditions below vegetation canopies and near the ground surface, where critical ecosystem functions occur and most terrestrial species reside. Here, we provide global maps of soil temperature and bioclimatic variables at a 1-km &lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; resolution for 0-5 and 5-15 cm soil depth. These maps were created by calculating the difference (i.e. offset) between in situ soil temperature measurements, based on time series from over 1200 1-km &lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; pixels (summarized from 8519 unique temperature sensors) across all the world's major terrestrial biomes, and coarse-grained air temperature estimates from ERA5-Land (an atmospheric reanalysis by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts). We show that mean annual soil temperature differs markedly from the corresponding gridded air temperature, by up to 10°C (mean = 3.0 ± 2.1°C), with substantial variation across biomes and seasons. Over the year, soils in cold and/or dry biomes are substantially warmer (+3.6 ± 2.3°C) than gridded air temperature, whereas soils in warm and humid environments are on average slightly cooler (-0.7 ± 2.3°C). The observed substantial and biome-specific offsets emphasize that the projected impacts of climate and climate change on near-surface biodiversity and ecosystem functioning are inaccurately assessed when air rather than soil temperature is used, especially in cold environments. The global soil-related bioclimatic variables provided here are an important step forward for any application in ecology and related disciplines. Nevertheless, we highlight the need to fill remaining geographic gaps by collecting more in situ measurements of microclimate conditions to further enhance the spatiotemporal resolution of global soil temperature products for ecological applications