BOXED UP

The purpose of this thesis is to conduct an examination through creative nonfiction of the definition of home and how I personally define and apply this definition to my own life. In the nine essays serving as my thesis, collectively entitled Boxed Up, I have delved into the definitions of home and how it applies to my family, my experiences and encounters with people around me, and the twelve times that I have moved. The sense and definition of a home has a strong tie to where someone grew up and to what culture one acclimates oneself. There is also a strong tie to a culture of people without one specific culture and without a singular place where they grew up. Military kids find themselves living a transient lifestyle because of the constant need to uproot where they live and follow one or both parents. The melting pot and cross-cultural effect that finds itself not only affecting America, but affecting the world, finds individuals having one culture they are supposed to call their home and yet discovering their own identity in a completely different culture. I find myself with a transient lifestyle and yet neither of these reasons applies to me. I choose to uproot myself and the focus of this body of work explores reasons why. I have looked closely at a myriad of works, roaming across America with John Steinbeck in Travels with Charley, where I too found the urge to be someplace else was on me, and accepting Walker Percy that it is possible to live in both cultures without being suffocated by the one or seduced by the other in Signposts in a Strange Land. I interviewed friends on their definitions and feelings toward home and researched not just my past homes, but the homes of my parents and siblings before I was born. I found that for a large majority of my friends, they had a definitive home, a definitive location. I also found that for a large majority of my upbringing I let others\u27 depictions of what home should be, dictate how I ca11ed home for myself. Through this process, I even began to accept in humility that perhaps Phillip Lopate, author of 71,c Art of the Personal Essay, was right in saying that with middle age also comes a taste for equilibrium .. . it is hard to think of anyone who made a mark on the personal essay form in his or her youth. While I am still not as emphatic as Lopate about this assertion, through the direction and study of this thesis, I have become aware of my own youth and my bland equilibrium. Lopate argues that a young person still thinks it is possiblethere is time enough-to become a11 things and that the personal essayist - undoubtedly well into his forties- looks back at the choices that were made, the roads not taken, the limiting familial and historic circumstances, and what might be called the catastrophe of personality. The direction of this thesis is to recount my youth, the many roads that I have already taken, and where that has led me today, where it has allowed me to define a home for myself. Well, Lopate, I am still in my youth and I do still think it is possible and I hope that well into my forties I will still find it possible. However, the roads I have already traveled have brought me to a place where I can define home for now, but I would be naive to think I have it all figured out and that this will be my home forever. I still have the urge to be someplace else and I welcome every signpost and every strange land on the way until I run into my own catastrophe of a home

Cultural Exclusion for Latinos and Asian Americans

This issue brief outlines the Ethnoracial Pentagon, a more culturally inclusive form of racial identification, which proved to be exclusionary instead. Legislation, such as, Affirmative Action, addresses and compensates for ethnoracial inequalities, however, the problem extends beyond the inequalities that Affirmative Action accounts for

Demographics of Suicide Victims in Maine for 2017 and 2018 with Emphasis on Suicide Notes

This study examined Maine suicide deaths from 2017 and 2018 to determine if there were correlations between the demographics of suicide victims and variables of the suicide acts: age, gender, veteran status, method, and presence of a note. Results indicate that 30 percent of suicide victims in Maine a left note. Initial findings from this study revealed interesting correlations between the act of leaving a suicide note and suicide methods that require advanced planning, e.g., carbon monoxide poisoning. A lower percentage of notes were associated with spur-of-the-moment type suicides. Based on these preliminary findings, we suggest modifying targeted interventions to mitigate and reduce suicide rates in Maine including programs to support overlooked vulnerable populations. Due to Maine’s high rate of suicide by firearms, we also suggest that new policies and laws be implemented to limit access to and possession of firearms for individuals identified as at risk of suicide

One moment you're covered in blood and next it's what’s for tea? An interpretative phenomenological analysis of residential care staff's experiences of managing self-harm with looked after children

Young people in care have been found to have a higher incidence of self-harming behaviours. However, despite research findings that managing self-harm can be stressful for carers, there has been a dearth of literature which has specifically examined residential carers' experiences of this. Therefore, the current study used an interpretative phenomenological approach to explore the experiences of residential carers in relation to self-harm. Three superordinate themes emerged from the study, each with a number of subordinate themes. 'Surviving' illustrated how managing self-harm can be a difficult experience for residential carers and therefore they need a number of coping strategies to draw upon to manage. 'We're out here alone' represented participants' feelings around being held individually responsible for managing acts of self-harm and also feeling as though outside agencies were inadequate or slow to respond to the young people’s needs. 'Losing control' reflected when coping strategies failed, and participants were left feeling uncontained. It also demonstrated the potential negative consequences on their life outside of work. Recommendations are discussed for future practice, including regular staff supervision, team consultation, training and shared risk planning

The Psyche Topography and Geomorphology Investigation

Detailed mapping of topography is crucial for the understanding of processes shaping the surfaces of planetary bodies. In particular, stereoscopic imagery makes a major contribution to topographic mapping and especially supports the geologic characterization of planetary surfaces. Image data provide the basis for extensive studies of the surface structure and morphology on local, regional and global scales using photogeologic information from images, the topographic information from stereo-derived digital terrain models and co-registered spectral terrain information from color images. The objective of the Psyche topography and geomorphology investigation is to derive the detailed shape of (16) Psyche to generate orthorectified image mosaics, which are needed to study the asteroids’ landforms, interior structure, and the processes that have modified the surface over geologic time. In this paper we describe our approaches for producing shape models, and our plans for acquiring requested image data to quantify the expected accuracy of the results. Multi-angle images obtained by Psyche’s camera will be used to create topographic models with about 15 m/pixel horizontal resolution and better than 10 m height accuracy on a global scale. This is slightly better as global imaging obtained during the Dawn mission, however, both missions yield resolutions of a few m/pixel locally. Two different techniques, stereophotogrammetry and stereophotoclinometry, are used to model the shape; these models will be merged with the gravity fields obtained by the Psyche spacecraft to produce geodetically controlled topographic models. The resulting digital topography models, together with the gravity data, will reveal the tectonic, volcanic, impact, and gradational history of Psyche, and enable co-registration of data sets to determine Psyche’s geologic history

EVLA Observations Constrain the Environment and Progenitor System of Type Ia Supernova 2011fe

We report unique EVLA observations of SN 2011fe representing the most sensitive radio study of a Type Ia supernova to date. Our data place direct constraints on the density of the surrounding medium at radii ~10^15-10^16 cm, implying an upper limit on the mass loss rate from the progenitor system of Mdot <~ 6 x 10^-10 Msol/yr (assuming a wind speed of 100 km/s), or expansion into a uniform medium with density n_CSM <~ 6 cm^-3. Drawing from the observed properties of non-conservative mass transfer among accreting white dwarfs, we use these limits on the density of the immediate environs to exclude a phase space of possible progenitors systems for SN 2011fe. We rule out a symbiotic progenitor system and also a system characterized by high accretion rate onto the white dwarf that is expected to give rise to optically-thick accretion winds. Assuming that a small fraction, 1%, of the mass accreted is lost from the progenitor system, we also eliminate much of the potential progenitor parameter space for white dwarfs hosting recurrent novae or undergoing stable nuclear burning. Therefore, we rule out the most popular single degenerate progenitor models for SN 2011fe, leaving a limited phase space inhabited by some double degenerate systems and exotic progenitor scenarios.Comment: Accepted to Ap

A Report Card on Urban Erosion and Sedimentation Control in North Carolina

In 1973 North Carolina enacted what has become one of the most stringent erosion and sedimentation control programs in the nation. This article discusses how a survey of 128 construction sites in North Carolina turned up evidence that practice falls short of state goals to curb urban erosion and sedimentation. The authors then discuss policy options to remedy these shortcomings

Evaluation of machine learning algorithms and structural features for optimal MRI-based diagnostic prediction in psychosis

A relatively large number of studies have investigated the power of structural magnetic resonance imaging (sMRI) data to discriminate patients with schizophrenia from healthy controls. However, very few of them have also included patients with bipolar disorder, allowing the clinically relevant discrimination between both psychotic diagnostics. To assess the efficacy of sMRI data for diagnostic prediction in psychosis we objectively evaluated the discriminative power of a wide range of commonly used machine learning algorithms (ridge, lasso, elastic net and L0 norm regularized logistic regressions, a support vector classifier, regularized discriminant analysis, random forests and a Gaussian process classifier) on main sMRI features including grey and white matter voxel-based morphometry (VBM), vertex-based cortical thickness and volume, region of interest volumetric measures and wavelet-based morphometry (WBM) maps. All possible combinations of algorithms and data features were considered in pairwise classifications of matched samples of healthy controls (N = 127), patients with schizophrenia (N = 128) and patients with bipolar disorder (N = 128). Results show that the selection of feature type is important, with grey matter VBM (without data reduction) delivering the best diagnostic prediction rates (averaging over classifiers: schizophrenia vs. healthy 75%, bipolar disorder vs. healthy 63% and schizophrenia vs. bipolar disorder 62%) whereas algorithms usually yielded very similar results. Indeed, those grey matter VBM accuracy rates were not even improved by combining all feature types in a single prediction model. Further multi-class classifications considering the three groups simultaneously made evident a lack of predictive power for the bipolar group, probably due to its intermediate anatomical features, located between those observed in healthy controls and those found in patients with schizophrenia. Finally, we provide MRIPredict (https://www.nitrc.org/projects/mripredict/), a free tool for SPM, FSL and R, to easily carry out voxelwise predictions based on VBM images