272 research outputs found

    Lesbian and bisexual women's human rights, sexual rights and sexual citizenship: negotiating sexual health in England.

    Get PDF
    Lesbian and bisexual women's sexual health is neglected in much Government policy and practice in England and Wales. This paper examines lesbian and bisexual women's negotiation of sexual health, drawing on findings from a small research project. Themes explored include invisibility and lack of information, influences on decision-making and sexual activities and experiences of services and barriers to sexual healthcare. Key issues of importance in this respect are homophobic and heterosexist social contexts. Drawing on understandings of lesbian, gay and bisexual human rights, sexual rights and sexual citizenship, it is argued that these are useful lenses through which to examine and address lesbian and bisexual women's sexual health and related inequalities

    An approach to describing and analysing bulk biological annotation quality: a case study using UniProtKB

    Full text link
    Motivation: Annotations are a key feature of many biological databases, used to convey our knowledge of a sequence to the reader. Ideally, annotations are curated manually, however manual curation is costly, time consuming and requires expert knowledge and training. Given these issues and the exponential increase of data, many databases implement automated annotation pipelines in an attempt to avoid un-annotated entries. Both manual and automated annotations vary in quality between databases and annotators, making assessment of annotation reliability problematic for users. The community lacks a generic measure for determining annotation quality and correctness, which we look at addressing within this article. Specifically we investigate word reuse within bulk textual annotations and relate this to Zipf's Principle of Least Effort. We use UniProt Knowledge Base (UniProtKB) as a case study to demonstrate this approach since it allows us to compare annotation change, both over time and between automated and manually curated annotations. Results: By applying power-law distributions to word reuse in annotation, we show clear trends in UniProtKB over time, which are consistent with existing studies of quality on free text English. Further, we show a clear distinction between manual and automated analysis and investigate cohorts of protein records as they mature. These results suggest that this approach holds distinct promise as a mechanism for judging annotation quality. Availability: Source code is available at the authors website: http://homepages.cs.ncl.ac.uk/m.j.bell1/annotation. Contact: [email protected]: Paper accepted at The European Conference on Computational Biology 2012 (ECCB'12). Subsequently will be published in a special issue of the journal Bioinformatics. Paper consists of 8 pages, made up of 5 figure

    Gravito-electromagnetism

    Full text link
    We develop and apply a fully covariant 1+3 electromagnetic analogy for gravity. The free gravitational field is covariantly characterized by the Weyl gravito-electric and gravito-magnetic spatial tensor fields, whose dynamical equations are the Bianchi identities. Using a covariant generalization of spatial vector algebra and calculus to spatial tensor fields, we exhibit the covariant analogy between the tensor Bianchi equations and the vector Maxwell equations. We identify gravitational source terms, couplings and potentials with and without electromagnetic analogues. The nonlinear vacuum Bianchi equations are shown to be invariant under covariant spatial duality rotation of the gravito-electric and gravito-magnetic tensor fields. We construct the super-energy density and super-Poynting vector of the gravitational field as natural U(1) group invariants, and derive their super-energy conservation equation. A covariant approach to gravito-electric/magnetic monopoles is also presented.Comment: 14 pages. Version to appear in Class. Quant. Gra

    Lectures on the functional renormalization group method

    Full text link
    These introductory notes are about functional renormalization group equations and some of their applications. It is emphasised that the applicability of this method extends well beyond critical systems, it actually provides us a general purpose algorithm to solve strongly coupled quantum field theories. The renormalization group equation of F. Wegner and A. Houghton is shown to resum the loop-expansion. Another version, due to J. Polchinski, is obtained by the method of collective coordinates and can be used for the resummation of the perturbation series. The genuinely non-perturbative evolution equation is obtained in a manner reminiscent of the Schwinger-Dyson equations. Two variants of this scheme are presented where the scale which determines the order of the successive elimination of the modes is extracted from external and internal spaces. The renormalization of composite operators is discussed briefly as an alternative way to arrive at the renormalization group equation. The scaling laws and fixed points are considered from local and global points of view. Instability induced renormalization and new scaling laws are shown to occur in the symmetry broken phase of the scalar theory. The flattening of the effective potential of a compact variable is demonstrated in case of the sine-Gordon model. Finally, a manifestly gauge invariant evolution equation is given for QED.Comment: 47 pages, 11 figures, final versio

    Transition From Pediatric to Adult Care for Youth Diagnosed With Type 1 Diabetes in Adolescence

    Get PDF
    Youth with type 1 diabetes mellitus are at risk for poor glycemic control as they age into adulthood. The aim of this study was to describe sociodemographic and clinical correlates of poor glycemic control associated with the transfer of care from pediatric to adult diabetes providers among a cohort of youth with type 1 diabetes diagnosed in adolescence

    Anomalous mesonic interactions near a chiral phase transition

    Get PDF
    Using constituent quarks coupled to a linear sigma model at nonzero temperature, I show that many anomalous mesonic amplitudes, such as π0→γγ\pi^0 \rightarrow \gamma \gamma, vanish in a chirally symmetric phase. Processes which are allowed, such as π0Ïƒâ†’ÎłÎł\pi^0 \sigma \rightarrow \gamma \gamma, are computed to leading order in a loop expansion.Comment: 4 pages, REVTeX, submitted to Phys. Rev. Let

    Accretion Disks Around Black Holes: Twenty Five Years Later

    Get PDF
    We study the progress of the theory of accretion disks around black holes in last twenty five years and explain why advective disks are the best bet in explaining varied stationary and non-stationary observations from black hole candidates. We show also that the recently proposed advection dominated flows are incorrect.Comment: 30 Latex pages including figures. Kluwer Style files included. Appearing in `Observational Evidence for Black Holes in the Universe', ed. Sandip K. Chakrabarti, Kluwer Academic Publishers (DORDRECHT: Holland

    How pi0 -> gamma gamma changes with temperature

    Full text link
    At zero temperature, in the chiral limit the amplitude for pi0 to decay into two photons is directly related to the coefficient of the axial anomaly. At any nonzero temperature, this direct relationship is lost: while the coefficient of the axial anomaly is independent of temperature, in a thermal bath the anomalous Ward identities do not uniquely constrain the amplitude for pi0 -> gamma gamma. Explicit calculation shows that to lowest order about zero temperature, this amplitude decreases.Comment: 12 pages, ReVTeX, 4 figures, to be published in Phys. Rev. D. New section 5 with proof of the Adler-Bardeen theorem at low

    Cognitive behavioral therapy of socially phobic children focusing on cognition: a randomised wait-list control study

    Get PDF
    BACKGROUND: Although literature provides support for cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) as an efficacious intervention for social phobia, more research is needed to improve treatments for children. METHODS: Forty four Caucasian children (ages 8-14) meeting diagnostic criteria of social phobia according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (4th ed.; APA, 1994) were randomly allocated to either a newly developed CBT program focusing on cognition according to the model of Clark and Wells (n = 21) or a wait-list control group (n = 23). The primary outcome measure was clinical improvement. Secondary outcomes included improvements in anxiety coping, dysfunctional cognitions, interaction frequency and comorbid symptoms. Outcome measures included child report and clinican completed measures as well as a diagnostic interview. RESULTS: Significant differences between treatment participants (4 dropouts) and controls (2 dropouts) were observed at post test on the German version of the Social Phobia and Anxiety Inventory for Children. Furthermore, in the treatment group, significantly more children were free of diagnosis than in wait-list group at post-test. Additional child completed and clinician completed measures support the results. DISCUSSION: The study is a first step towards investigating whether CBT focusing on cognition is efficacious in treating children with social phobia. Future research will need to compare this treatment to an active treatment group. There remain the questions of whether the effect of the treatment is specific to the disorder and whether the underlying theoretical model is adequate. CONCLUSION: Preliminary support is provided for the efficacy of the cognitive behavioral treatment focusing on cognition in socially phobic children. Active comparators should be established with other evidence-based CBT programs for anxiety disorders, which differ significantly in their dosage and type of cognitive interventions from those of the manual under evaluation (e.g. Coping Cat)
    • 

    corecore