1,944 research outputs found
Social Responses to Epidemics Depicted by Cinema
Films illustrate 2 ways that epidemics can affect societies: fear leading to a breakdown in sociability and fear stimulating preservation of tightly held social norms.
The first response is often informed by concern over perceived moral failings within society, the second response by the application of arbitrary or excessive controls from outside the community
The Female Mortality Advantage in the SeventeenthâCentury Rural Low Countries
Data from famines from the nineteenth century onward suggest that women hold a mortality advantage during times of acute malnutrition, while modern laboratory research suggests that women are more resilient to most pathogens causing epidemic diseases. There is, however, a paucity of sexâdisaggregated mortality data for the period prior to the Industrial Revolution to test this view across a broader span of history. We offer a newly compiled database of adult burial information for 293 rural localities and small towns in the seventeenthâcentury Low Countries, explicitly comparing mortality crises against ânormalâ years. In contrast to expected results, we find no clear female mortality advantage during mortality spikes and, more to the point, women tended to die more frequently than men when only taking into account those years with very severe raised mortality. Genderârelated differences in levels of protection, but also exposure to vectors and points of contagion, meant that some of these female advantages were âlostâ during food crises or epidemic disease outbreaks. Responses to mortality crises such as epidemics may shine new light on genderâbased inequalities perhaps hidden from view in ânormal timesâ â with relevance for recent work asserting âfemale agencyâ in the early modern Low Countries context
Epidemics, public health workers, and âheroismâ in cinematic perspective
During COVID-19, acts of âheroismâ â particularly by ordinary people âfrom belowâ â have been foregrounded, prompting complicated ethical issues in the public health context. By analysing examples from a large corpus of films about epidemics across the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries, this article investigates how cinema has represented public health workers. We find that the public health worker in epidemic-related films tends to be elite or an authority figure with expertise, often male â whose personal burden and sacrifice goes unrecognised by others, or even directly challenged âfrom belowâ. However, although the public health worker as âordinary heroâ rarely features, the âhumanâ side of epidemiologists, physicians and bacteriologists â through either personal redemption and a return to more humble roots, or recognition of personal error, questioning of official regulations and authorities, and eccentric and unorthodox behaviour â makes these âeliteâ figures appear more ordinary, bridging the gap between the two
Analysis of Nematic Liquid Crystals with Disclination Lines
We investigate the structure of nematic liquid crystal thin films described
by the Landau--de Gennes tensor-valued order parameter with Dirichlet boundary
conditions of nonzero degree. We prove that as the elasticity constant goes to
zero a limiting uniaxial texture forms with disclination lines corresponding to
a finite number of defects, all of degree 1/2 or all of degree -1/2. We also
state a result on the limiting behavior of minimizers of the Chern-Simons-Higgs
model without magnetic field that follows from a similar proof.Comment: 40 pages, 1 figur
The Magnetic Field of the Solar Corona from Pulsar Observations
We present a novel experiment with the capacity to independently measure both
the electron density and the magnetic field of the solar corona. We achieve
this through measurement of the excess Faraday rotation due to propagation of
the polarised emission from a number of pulsars through the magnetic field of
the solar corona. This method yields independent measures of the integrated
electron density, via dispersion of the pulsed signal and the magnetic field,
via the amount of Faraday rotation. In principle this allows the determination
of the integrated magnetic field through the solar corona along many lines of
sight without any assumptions regarding the electron density distribution. We
present a detection of an increase in the rotation measure of the pulsar
J18012304 of approximately 160 \rad at an elongation of 0.95 from
the centre of the solar disk. This corresponds to a lower limit of the magnetic
field strength along this line of sight of . The lack of
precision in the integrated electron density measurement restricts this result
to a limit, but application of coronal plasma models can further constrain this
to approximately 20mG, along a path passing 2.5 solar radii from the solar
limb. Which is consistent with predictions obtained using extensions to the
Source Surface models published by Wilcox Solar ObservatoryComment: 16 pages, 4 figures (1 colour): Submitted to Solar Physic
Energy Spectrum of Bloch Electrons Under Checkerboard Field Modulations
Two-dimensional Bloch electrons in a uniform magnetic field exhibit complex
energy spectrum. When static electric and magnetic modulations with a
checkerboard pattern are superimposed on the uniform magnetic field, more
structures and symmetries of the spectra are found, due to the additional
adjustable parameters from the modulations. We give a comprehensive report on
these new symmetries. We have also found an electric-modulation induced energy
gap, whose magnitude is independent of the strength of either the uniform or
the modulated magnetic field. This study is applicable to experimentally
accessible systems and is related to the investigations on frustrated
antiferromagnetism.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures (reduced in sizes), submitted to Phys. Rev.
Scalar Dark Matter From Theory Space
The scalar dark matter candidate in a prototypical theory space little Higgs
model is investigated. We review all details of the model pertinent to dark
matter. We perform a thermal relic density calculation including couplings to
the gauge and Higgs sectors of the model. We find two regions of parameter
space that give acceptable dark matter abundances. The first region has a dark
matter candidate with a mass of order 100 GeV, the second region has a heavy
candidate with a mass greater than about 500 GeV$. The dark matter candidate in
either region is an admixture of an SU(2) triplet and an SU(2) singlet, thereby
constituting a WIMP (weakly interacting massive particle).Comment: 18 pages, 2 figures, version to appear in PR
Analytical treatment of SUSY Quasi-normal modes in a non-rotating Schwarzschild black hole
We use the Fock-Ivanenko formalism to obtain the Dirac equation which
describes the interaction of a massless 1/2-spin neutral fermion with a
gravitational field around a Schwarzschild black hole (BH). We obtain
approximated analytical solutions for the eigenvalues of the energy
(quasi-normal frequencies) and their corresponding eigenstates (quasi-normal
states). The interesting result is that all the excited states [and their
supersymmetric (SUSY) partners] have a purely imaginary frequency, which can be
expressed in terms of the Hawking temperature. Furthermore, as one expects for
SUSY Hamiltonians, the isolated bottom state has a real null energy eigenvalue.Comment: Version to be published in European Physical Journal
Completeness in supergravity constructions
We prove that the supergravity r- and c-maps preserve completeness. As a
consequence, any component H of a hypersurface {h=1} defined by a homogeneous
cubic polynomial such that -d^2 h is a complete Riemannian metric on H defines
a complete projective special Kahler manifold and any complete projective
special Kahler manifold defines a complete quaternionic Kahler manifold of
negative scalar curvature. We classify all complete quaternionic Kahler
manifolds of dimension less or equal to 12 which are obtained in this way and
describe some complete examples in 16 dimensions.Comment: 29 page
Pulsars as Fantastic Objects and Probes
Pulsars are fantastic objects, which show the extreme states of matters and
plasma physics not understood yet. Pulsars can be used as probes for the
detection of interstellar medium and even the gravitational waves. Here I
review the basic facts of pulsars which should attract students to choose
pulsar studies as their future projects.Comment: Invited Lecture on the "First Kodai-Trieste Workshop on Plasma
Astrophysics", Kodaikanal Obs, India. Aug.27-Sept.7th, 2007. In: "Turbulence,
Dynamos, Accretion Disks, Pulsars and Collective Plasma Processes". Get a
copy from: http://www.springerlink.com/content/978-1-4020-8867-
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