Crossing Without Looking

Crossing Without Looking is a collection of essays that explores changes from within, both small scale and large. In each essay, the narrator grapples with the coming to terms of events in her life, whether it\u27s the harmful effects of hurricanes, how growing up with hurricanes transformed them into a source of comfort, embracing the good in the bad and vice versa, letting go of a certain naïveté, routinely facing grief as a means to cope, etc. It is a collection about reconciling

Normalizing Weak Boson Pair Production at the Large Hadron Collider

The production of two weak bosons at the Large Hadron Collider will be one of the most important sources of SM backgrounds for final states with multiple leptons. In this paper we consider several quantities that can help normalize the production of weak boson pairs. Ratios of inclusive cross-sections for production of two weak bosons and Drell-Yan are investigated and the corresponding theoretical errors are evaluated. The possibility of predicting the jet veto survival probability of VV production from Drell-Yan data is also considered. Overall, the theoretical errors on all quantities remain less than 5-20%. The dependence of these quantities on the center of mass energy of the proton-proton collision is also studied.Comment: 11 pages; added references, minor text revisions, version to appear in Phys. Rev.

Cultural adaptation of birthing services in rural Ayacucho, Peru.

PROBLEM: Maternal mortality is particularly high among poor, indigenous women in rural Peru, and the use of facility care is low, partly due to cultural insensitivities of the health care system. APPROACH: A culturally appropriate delivery care model was developed in poor and isolated rural communities, and implemented between 1999 and 2001 in cooperation with the Quechua indigenous communities and health professionals. Data on birth location and attendance in one health centre have been collected up to 2007. LOCAL SETTING: The international nongovernmental organization, Health Unlimited, and its Peruvian partner organization, Salud Sín Límites Perú, conducted the project in Santillana district in Ayacucho. RELEVANT CHANGES: The model involves features such as a rope and bench for vertical delivery position, inclusion of family and traditional birth attendants in the delivery process and use of the Quechua language. The proportion of births delivered in the health facility increased from 6% in 1999 to 83% in 2007 with high satisfaction levels. LESSONS LEARNED: Implementing a model of skilled delivery attendance that integrates modern medical and traditional Andean elements is feasible and sustainable. Indigenous women with little formal education do use delivery services if their needs are met. This contradicts common victim-blaming attitudes that ascribe high levels of home births to 'cultural preferences' or 'ignorance'

An exploration of sex-specific linkage disequilibrium on chromosome X in Caucasians from the COGA study

This paper explores the decay of linkage disequilibrium (LD) on the autosomes and chromosome X. The extent of marker-marker LD is important for both linkage and association studies. The analysis of the Caucasian sample from the Collaborative Study on the Genetics of Alcoholism study revealed the expected negative relationship between the magnitude of the marker-marker LD and distance (cM), with the male and female subgroups exhibiting similar patterns of LD. The observed extent of LD in females was less across the pseudoautosomal markers relative to the heterosomal region of chromosome X. Marked differences in LD patterns were also observed between chromosomes X and the 22 autosomes in both males and females

The role of acculturation and training in personal protective equipment (PPE) use among Hispanic farmworkers: A follow-up from the ¡Protejase! study.

Hispanic farmworkers are at disproportionate risk of pesticide exposure. Moreover, new immigrant, Spanish-speaking farmworkers are least likely to receive safety training and protection from pesticides in the form of personal protective equipment (PPE). Provision is known to increase PPE use among farmworkers, but it is unclear whether provision helps new immigrant Hispanic farmworkers. Thus, this study examined the extent to which provision increases Hispanic farmworkers’ use of PPE. Additionally, we examined associations with English language acculturation since language barriers might influence training and use of PPE in a largely new immigrant, Spanish-speaking workforce. Farmworkers were provided three types of PPE (chemical-resistant gloves, safety glasses, and long-sleeved shirts) as part of the ¡Protejase! study. We assessed differences in the use of PPE that was provided by the ¡Protejase! study compared to PPE that farmworkers were not provided. We also measured workers’ English language acculturation, training, and other work demographic variables. PPE use was measured at baseline and after 30 days, and analyzed using OLS regression. Use of study-provided PPE was significantly higher, but only among participants with low levels of English language acculturation (p \u3c .05). Thus, providing PPE increases its use among farmworkers with low levels of English language acculturation

Food and vulnerability in Aotearoa/New Zealand: A review and theoretical reframing of food insecurity, income and neoliberalism

The incidence of food insecurity in rich countries has remained stubbornly consistent in recent decades, even as rates of undernourishment in poorer countries have dived since 1990 (United Nations, 2015). This article addresses this apparent contradiction through a theoretical reframing of food insecurity in rich liberal democracies, built on a review of key literature and data. We draw a broad distinction between critical social science approaches to engaging with food insecurity and more empirical, policy-oriented approaches. These produce research that emphasises, respectively, the determinate role of economic class and neoliberalism in generating food insecurity, and the wide array of other factors associated with suffering food insecurity. We argue that both offer useful but analytically confined accounts of food insecurity and its drivers in rich liberal democracies. We proceed, seeking to broaden rather than abandon the strengths of these two accounts, with a review of data on incomes and the incidence of food insecurity in the Aotearoa/New Zealand case. Our review reveals patterns of socio-political deprivation beyond class with parallels across both data sets, significantly along lines of gender and ethnicity. This both offers texturing specifics to a 'monolithic' generic view of neoliberalism and contextualises demographic trends of food insecurity within the neoliberalised "contours of contemporary political-economic power" (Peck and Tickell, 2002, pp.381-382). We subsequently argue for the utility of vulnerability as a concept to capture socio-political dynamics and engage with food insecurity in rich liberal democracies. The framing work done by the concept of vulnerability offers the opportunity to: (1) align the strengths of research approaches emphasising theoretically derived context and empirically founded complexity; (2) account for the consistencies and complexities observed in the relationship between the political-economic landscape of rich liberal democracies following the neoliberal turn and the incidence of food insecurity; and (3) reconsider the relationship between political-economic and socio-political contexts of rich liberal democracies that consistently produce food insecurity and groups of people who live and consistently suffer food insecurity in these countries, for example as "structural violence" (Shepherd, 2012, p.206)

A bayesian approach for NDT data fusion: The Saint Torcato Church case study

This paper presents a methodology based on the Bayesian data fusion techniques applied to non-destructive and destructive tests for the structural assessment of historical constructions. The aim of the methodology is to reduce the uncertainties of the parameter estimation. The Young's modulus of granite stones was chosen as an example for the present paper. The methodology considers several levels of uncertainty since the parameters of interest are considered random variables with random moments. A new concept of Trust Factor was introduced to affect the uncertainty related to each test results, translated by their standard deviation, depending on the higher or lower reliability of each test to predict a certain parameter.The authors would like to acknowledge the Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia, which supported this research work as a part of the Project “Improved and innovative techniques for the diagnosis and monitoring of historical masonry”, PTDC/ECM/104045/2008

Rydberg atom mediated polar molecule interactions: a tool for molecular-state conditional quantum gates and individual addressability

We study the possibility to use interaction between a polar molecule in the ground electronic and vibrational state and a Rydberg atom to construct two-qubit gates between molecular qubits and to coherently control molecular states. A polar molecule within the electron orbit in a Rydberg atom can either shift the Rydberg state, or form Rydberg molecule. Both the atomic shift and the Rydberg molecule states depend on the initial internal state of the polar molecule, resulting in molecular state dependent van der Waals or dipole-dipole interaction between Rydberg atoms. Rydberg atoms mediated interaction between polar molecules can be enhanced up to $10^{3}$ times. We describe how the coupling between a polar molecule and a Rydberg atom can be applied to coherent control of molecular states, specifically, to individual addressing of molecules in an optical lattice and non-destructive readout of molecular qubits