Effects of a Mindfulness Intervention to Improve Teachers’ Well-being

Teacher attrition has increased by 50% over the past 15 years. The purpose of this study was to determine whether a mindfulness-based intervention would be effective for reducing stress and increasing mindfulness, self-efficacy, job satisfaction, and well-being among teachers at Title I (low-income) schools. The researchers evaluated the effects of a mindfulness intervention created specifically for teachers using a four-way ANOVA (2 × 3 × 2 × 5) with two between subjects’ factors, groups and levels, and two within subjects/repeated measures factors, pretest-posttest and scales. While the study did not show significant effects for mindfulness, stress, self-efficacy, and well-being, teachers in the control group demonstrated significantly lower levels of job satisfaction compared to the experimental group. These results are commensurate with previous studies that suggest with a mindfulness-based intervention, teachers report increased job satisfaction

Limits on Associated Production of Visibly and Invisibly Decaying Higgs Bosons from Z Decays

Many extensions of the standard electroweak model Higgs sector suggest that the main Higgs decay channel is "invisible", for example, $h \to J J$ where $J$ denotes the majoron, a weakly interacting pseudoscalar Goldstone boson associated to the spontaneous violation of lepton number. In many of these models the Higgs boson may also be produced in association to a massive pseudoscalar boson (HA), in addition to the standard Bjorken mechanism (HZ). We describe a general strategy to determine limits from LEP data on the masses and couplings of such Higgs bosons, using the existing data on acoplanar dijet events as well as data on four and six $b$ jet event topologies. For the sake of illustration, we present constraints that can be obtained for the ALEPH data.Comment: FTUV/94-36, IFIC/94-31 TIFR/TH/94--25, 12 pages + 4 figures (included as ps files at the end

Association Between Hispanic Parents’ Attitudes and Knowledge Regarding Obesity and Their Children’s Body Mass Index

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 13.7 million children experience obesity nationally and Hispanic children display the highest occurrences of obesity for all racial/ethnic groups (Hales et al., 2020). Because parents have a significant influence on their children’s overall health, we were interested in examining whether parents’ attitudes and knowledge about obesity impacted their child’s body mass index (BMI) for their age. We surveyed 210 adult Hispanic parents whose children were receiving general healthcare services at a pediatric medical clinic located near the U.S.-Mexico border. A multiple regression analysis was conducted to evaluate the estimation between the independent variables (knowledge about obesity, socioeconomic status, education, physical activity, dietary habits, medical history, age, and gender) and the dependent variable (attitudes toward obesity). Specifically, the study examined the relationship between Hispanic children’s BMI-for-age and their parents’ attitudes toward obesity, and the relationship between Hispanic children’s BMI-for-age and their parents’ knowledge regarding obesity-related risks. The results indicated the level of physical activity, dietary habits, and level of knowledge were predictive of Hispanic parents’ attitudes toward obesity. Implications of the study and recommendations for researchers, educators, and counselors to minimize the obesity epidemic are provided

New Constraints On Lepton Nonconserving R-parity Violating Couplings

Strong upper bounds are derived on certain product combinations of lepton nonconserving couplings in the minimal supersymmetric standard model with explicit $R$-parity violation. The input is information from rare leptonic decays of the long-lived neutral kaon, the muon and the tau as well as from the mixings of neutral $K$- and $B$-mesons. One of these bounds is comparable and another superior to corresponding ones obtained recently from neutrinoless double beta decay.Comment: 10 pages, LaTeX, uses style files fullpage.sty and subeqn.sty (included

RR-parity-Violating Supersymmetric Yukawa Couplings: A Mini-review

I review the bounds on the $R$-parity-violating supersymmetric Yukawa couplings from the considerations of proton stability, $n$--$\bar{n}$ oscillation, $\nu_e$-Majorana mass, neutrino-less double $\beta$ decay, charged-current universality, $e$--$\mu$--$\tau$ universality, $\nu_\mu$--$e$ scattering, atomic parity violation, $\nu_\mu$ deep-inelastic scattering, $K^{+}$-decays, $\tau$-decays, $D$-decays and from the precision LEP electroweak observables. I also mention about the sparticle bounds at colliders when the assumption of $R$-parity-conservation is relaxed. Finally, I mention how $R$-parity-violating models have been invoked in an attempt to explain the reported excess in ALEPH 4-jet events.Comment: 6 pages, Latex, no figures; uses espcrc2.sty; Talk given at the 4th International Conference on Supersymmetry (SUSY 96), College Park, University of Maryland, 29 May -- 1 June, 1996. Revised version: Minor modifications, reference adde

Supersymmetric QCD flavor changing top quark decay

We present a detailed and complete calculation of the gluino and scalar quarks contribution to the flavour-changing top quark decay into a charm quark and a photon, gluon, or a Z boson within the minimal supersymmetric standard model including flavour changing gluino-quarks-scalar quarks couplings in the right-handed sector. We compare the results with the ones presented in an earlier paper where we considered flavour changing couplings only in the left-handed sector. We show that these new couplings have important consequences leading to a large enhancement when the mixing of the scalar partners of the left- and right-handed top quark is included. Furthermore CP violation in the flavour changing top quark decay will occur when a SUSY phase is taken into account.Comment: 14 pages, latex, 3 figure

Irregular Input Data in Convergence Acceleration and Summation Processes: General Considerations and Some Special Gaussian Hypergeometric Series as Model Problems

Sequence transformations accomplish an acceleration of convergence or a summation in the case of divergence by detecting and utilizing regularities of the elements of the sequence to be transformed. For sufficiently large indices, certain asymptotic regularities normally do exist, but the leading elements of a sequence may behave quite irregularly. The Gaussian hypergeometric series 2F1 (a, b; c; z) is well suited to illuminate problems of that kind. Sequence transformations perform quite well for most parameters and arguments. If, however, the third parameter $c$ of a nonterminating hypergeometric series 2F1 is a negative real number, the terms initially grow in magnitude like the terms of a mildly divergent series. The use of the leading terms of such a series as input data leads to unreliable and even completely nonsensical results. In contrast, sequence transformations produce good results if the leading irregular terms are excluded from the transformation process. Similar problems occur also in perturbation expansions. For example, summation results for the infinite coupling limit k_3 of the sextic anharmonic oscillator can be improved considerably by excluding the leading terms from the transformation process. Finally, numerous new recurrence formulas for the 2F1 (a, b; c; z) are derived.Comment: 25 pages, 7 tables, REVTe