Public Libraries Respond to the Opioid Crisis in Collaboration with Their Communities: An Introduction

The nation is experiencing an opioid epidemic. As communities across the country feel the epidemic’s impact, public health and human service organizations are implementing responses that include healthcare, education, law enforcement and the judicial system, emergency services, drug and addiction counseling, and community services. Public libraries around the country are choosing to be part of this response. With funding from a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, OCLC and the Public Library Association will identify, synthesize, and share knowledge and resources that will help public libraries and their community partners develop effective strategies and community-driven coalitions that work together to address the opioid epidemic in America. This project is called, “Public Libraries Respond to the Opioid Crisis with Their Communities.” This article is the first of two about the project and it focuses on the issues and preliminary themes surfacing in interviews with library staff and the partners. A second article will focus on the data analysis and overall findings

Public Libraries Respond to the Opioid Crisis with Their Communities: Research Findings

The nation is experiencing an ongoing opioid epidemic, and communities across the country are feeling the epidemic’s impact. Public health and human service organizations, professional associations, and nonprofits continue to implement responses to stem the rising overdose deaths; public libraries, too, are a part of this response. This article is the follow-up to Public Libraries Respond to the Opioid Crisis in Collaboration with Their Communities: An Introduction (Collaborative Librarianship, volume 11, Issue 1, 2019), and identifies, synthesizes, and shares knowledge and resources that will help public libraries and their community partners develop effective strategies to work together to address the opioid epidemic in America. Eight public libraries and their respective community partners participated in this research study, which is based on interviews with library staff, library board members, staff at community partner organizations, and members of the community. This article highlights the findings from the eight case study sites selected to participate in this research and provides an overview of the partnerships formed and the resources and programming developed to meet community needs

A Generalized Uncertainty Principle in Quantum Gravity

We discuss a Gedanken experiment for the measurement of the area of the apparent horizon of a black hole in quantum gravity. Using rather general and model-independent considerations we find a generalized uncertainty principle which agrees with a similar result obtained in the framework of string theories. The result indicates that a minimum length of the order of the Planck length emerges naturally from any quantum theory of gravity, and that the concept of black hole is not operationally defined if the mass is smaller than the Planck mass.Comment: 10 pages, 1 figure (not included), IFUP-TH 3/9

Intermediate Mass Black Hole Induced Quenching of Mass Segregation in Star Clusters

In many theoretical scenarios it is expected that intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs, with masses M ~ 100-10000 solar masses) reside at the centers of some globular clusters. However, observational evidence for their existence is limited. Several previous numerical investigations have focused on the impact of an IMBH on the cluster dynamics or brightness profile. Here we instead present results from a large set of direct N-body simulations including single and binary stars. These show that there is a potentially more detectable IMBH signature, namely on the variation of the average stellar mass between the center and the half-light radius. We find that the existence of an IMBH quenches mass segregation and causes the average mass to exhibit only modest radial variation in collisionally relaxed star clusters. This differs from when there is no IMBH. To measure this observationally requires high resolution imaging at the level of that already available from the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) for the cores of a large sample of galactic globular clusters. With a modest additional investment of HST time to acquire fields around the half-light radius, it will be possible to identify the best candidate clusters to harbor an IMBH. This test can be applied only to globulars with a half-light relaxation time less than or equal to 1 Gyr, which is required to guarantee efficient energy equipartition due to two-body relaxation.Comment: 15 pages, 3 figures, ApJ, in pres

A Simple and Realistic Model of Supersymmetry Breaking

We present a simple and realistic model of supersymmetry breaking. In addition to the minimal supersymmetric standard model, we only introduce a hidden sector gauge group SU(5) and three fields X, F and \bar{F}. Supersymmetry is broken at a local minimum of the potential, and its effects are transmitted to the supersymmetric standard model sector through both standard model gauge loops and local operators suppressed by the cutoff scale, which is taken to be the unification scale. The form of the local operators is controlled by a U(1) symmetry. The generated supersymmetry breaking and mu parameters are comparable in size, and no flavor or CP violating terms arise. The spectrum of the first two generation superparticles is that of minimal gauge mediation with the number of messengers N_mess = 5 and the messenger scale 10^11 GeV < M_mess < 10^13 GeV. The spectrum of the Higgs bosons and third generation superparticles, however, can deviate from it. The lightest supersymmetric particle is the gravitino with a mass of order (1-10) GeV.Comment: 19 pages, version to appear in Phys. Lett.

Gravitational Waves from Electroweak Phase Transitions

Gravitational waves are generated during first-order phase transitions, either by turbolence or by bubble collisions. If the transition takes place at temperatures of the order of the electroweak scale, the frequency of these gravitational waves is today just within the band of the planned space interferometer LISA. We present a detailed analysis of the production of gravitational waves during an electroweak phase transition in different supersymmetric models where, contrary to the case of the Standard Model, the transition can be first order. We find that the stochastic background of gravitational waves generated by bubble nucleation can reach a maximum value h0^2 Omega_{gw} of order 10^{-10} - 10^{-11}, which is within the reach of the planned sensitivity of LISA, while turbolence can even produce signals at the level h0^2 Omega_{gw} \sim 10^{-9}. These values of h0^2 Omega_{gw} are obtained in the regions of the parameter space which can account for the generation of the baryon asymmetry at the electroweak scale.Comment: 30 pages, 20 figure

Physicochemical study of spiropyran-terthiophene derivatives: photochemistry and thermodynamics

The photochemistry and thermodynamics of two terthiophene (TTh) derivatives bearing benzospiropyran (BSP) moieties, 1-(3,3’’-dimethylindoline-6’-nitrobenzospiropyranyl)-2-ethyl 4,4’’-didecyloxy-2,2’:5’,2’’-terthiophene-3’-acetate (BSP-2) and 1-(3,3’’-dimethylindoline-6’-nitrobenzospiropyranyl)-2-10 ethyl 4,4’’-didecyloxy-2,2’:5’,2’’-terthiophene-3’-carboxylate (BSP-3), differing only by a single methylene spacer unit, have been studied. The kinetics of photogeneration of the equivalent merocyanine (MC) isomers (MC-2 and MC-3, respectively), the isomerisation properties of MC-2 and MC-3, and the thermodynamic parameters have been studied in cetonitrile, and compared to the parent, non-TThfunctionalised, benzospiropyran derivative, BSP-1. Despite the close structural similarity of BSP-2 and 15 BSP-3, their physicochemical properties were found to differ significantly; examples include activation energies (Ea(MC-2) = 75.05 KJ mol-1, Ea(MC-3) = 100.39 kJ mol-1) and entropies of activation (S‡ MC-2 = - 43.38 J K-1 mol-1, S‡ MC-3 = 37.78 J K-1 mol-1) for the thermal relaxation from MC to BSP, with the MC-3 value much closer to the unmodified MC-1 value (46.48 J K -1 mol-1) for this latter quantity. The thermal relaxation kinetics and solvatochromic behaviour of the derivatives in a range of solvents of 20 differing polarity (ethanol, dichloromethane, acetone, toluene and diethyl ether) are also presented. Differences in the estimated values of these thermodynamic and kinetic parameters are discussed with reference to the molecular structure of the derivatives

Age-related biological features of germ cell tumors.

Germ cell tumors (GCTs) are rare but clinically and pathologically diverse tumors that occur in an extensive range of age groups, from children to older adults and which include both seminomatous and nonseminomatous tumors. Current clinical management for both male and female teenagers and young adults (TYAs) with GCTs remains inconsistent, alternating between pediatric and adult multidisciplinary oncology teams, based on locally defined age cutoffs. Therefore, we reviewed available literature to determine the biological similarities and differences between GCTs in young children (0-12 years), TYAs (13-24 years), and older adults (>24 years). GCTs arising in pediatric and adult populations in general showed marked molecular biological differences within identical histological subtypes, whereas there was a distinct paucity of available data for GCTs in the TYA population. These findings highlight that clinical management based simply on chronological age may be inappropriate for TYA and suggests that the optimal future management of GCTs should consider specific molecular biological factors in addition to clinical parameters in the context of patient-specific age group rather than medical specialty.This is the accepted manuscript. The final version is available at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/gcc.22131/abstract

Mass Segregation in NGC 2298: limits on the presence of an Intermediate Mass Black Hole

[abridged] Theoretical investigations have suggested the presence of Intermediate Mass Black Holes (IMBHs, with masses in the 100-10000 Msun range) in the cores of some Globular Clusters (GCs). In this paper we present the first application of a new technique to determine the presence or absence of a central IMBH in globular clusters that have reached energy equipartition via two-body relaxation. The method is based on the measurement of the radial profile for the average mass of stars in the system, using the fact that a quenching of mass segregation is expected when an IMBH is present. Here we measure the radial profile of mass segregation using main-sequence stars for the globular cluster NGC 2298 from resolved source photometry based on HST-ACS data. The observations are compared to expectations from direct N-body simulations of the dynamics of star clusters with and without an IMBH. The mass segregation profile for NGC 2298 is quantitatively matched to that inferred from simulations without a central massive object over all the radial range probed by the observations, that is from the center to about two half-mass radii. Profiles from simulations containing an IMBH more massive than ~ 300-500 Msun (depending on the assumed total mass of NGC 2298) are instead inconsistent with the data at about 3 sigma confidence, irrespective of the IMF and binary fraction chosen for these runs. While providing a null result in the quest of detecting a central black hole in globular clusters, the data-model comparison carried out here demonstrates the feasibility of the method which can also be applied to other globular clusters with resolved photometry in their cores.Comment: 21 pages, 3 figures, ApJ accepte