"Caring for Insiderness": Phenomenologically informed insights that can guide practice.

Understanding the ‘‘insider’’ perspective has been a pivotal strength of qualitative research. Further than this, within the more applied fields in which the human activity of ‘‘caring’’ takes place, such understanding of ‘‘what it is like’’ for people from within their lifeworlds has also been acknowledged as the foundational starting point in order for ‘‘care’’ to be caring. But we believe that more attention needs to be paid to this foundational generic phenomenon: what it means to understand the ‘‘insiderness’’ of another, but more importantly, how to act on this in caring ways. We call this human phenomenon ‘‘caring for insiderness.’’ Drawing on existing phenomenological studies of marginal caring situations at the limits of caring capability, and through a process of phenomenologically oriented reflection, we interrogated some existential themes implicit in these publications that could lead to deeper insights for both theoretical and applied purposes. The paper provides direction for practices of caring by highlighting some dangers as well as some remedies along this path

A State-of-the-Science Review of Arsenic's Effects on Glucose Homeostasis in Experimental Models.

BackgroundThe prevalence of type 2 diabetes (T2D) has more than doubled since 1980. Poor nutrition, sedentary lifestyle, and obesity are among the primary risk factors. While an estimated 70% of cases are attributed to excess adiposity, there is an increased interest in understanding the contribution of environmental agents to diabetes causation and severity. Arsenic is one of these environmental chemicals, with multiple epidemiology studies supporting its association with T2D. Despite extensive research, the molecular mechanism by which arsenic exerts its diabetogenic effects remains unclear.ObjectivesWe conducted a literature search focused on arsenite exposure in vivo and in vitro, using relevant end points to elucidate potential mechanisms of oral arsenic exposure and diabetes development.MethodsWe explored experimental results for potential mechanisms and elucidated the distinct effects that occur at high vs. low exposure. We also performed network analyses relying on publicly available data, which supported our key findings.ResultsWhile several mechanisms may be involved, our findings support that arsenite has effects on whole-body glucose homeostasis, insulin-stimulated glucose uptake, glucose-stimulated insulin secretion, hepatic glucose metabolism, and both adipose and pancreatic β-cell dysfunction.DiscussionThis review applies state-of-the-science approaches to identify the current knowledge gaps in our understanding of arsenite on diabetes development. https://doi.org/10.1289/EHP4517

Chord line force versus displacement for thin shallow arc pre-curved bimetallic strip

This is the accepted version of the following article: G D Angel, G Haritos, A Chrysanthou & V Voloshin, “Chord line force versus displacement for thin shallow arc pre-curved bimetallic strip”, Journal of Mechanical Engineering Science, Vol. 229(1): 116-124, first published online April 29, 2014, published by SAGE Publishing. All rights reserved. The version of record is available online at doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0954406214530873A pre-curved bimetallic strip that is applied with a force in an axial orientation, i.e. along its chord line, exhibits nonlinear force-displacement characteristics. For thin bimetallic strips, whereby the radius of curvature is large compared to the thickness of the strip, the non-linearity tends to be tangent related. The new theoretical formula introduced here was correlated to the results of a set of force-displacement tests, and a good overall fit of the theory to the test data was achieved. The formula put forward in this work enables the evaluation of large chord line displacements but is limited to the permissible stress limits of the material. This work can also be directly applied to thin shallow arc beams of a single material. The application of this work is in the field of bimetallic force-displacement actuators.Peer reviewe

Like trainer, like bot? Inheritance of bias in algorithmic content moderation

The internet has become a central medium through which `networked publics' express their opinions and engage in debate. Offensive comments and personal attacks can inhibit participation in these spaces. Automated content moderation aims to overcome this problem using machine learning classifiers trained on large corpora of texts manually annotated for offence. While such systems could help encourage more civil debate, they must navigate inherently normatively contestable boundaries, and are subject to the idiosyncratic norms of the human raters who provide the training data. An important objective for platforms implementing such measures might be to ensure that they are not unduly biased towards or against particular norms of offence. This paper provides some exploratory methods by which the normative biases of algorithmic content moderation systems can be measured, by way of a case study using an existing dataset of comments labelled for offence. We train classifiers on comments labelled by different demographic subsets (men and women) to understand how differences in conceptions of offence between these groups might affect the performance of the resulting models on various test sets. We conclude by discussing some of the ethical choices facing the implementers of algorithmic moderation systems, given various desired levels of diversity of viewpoints amongst discussion participants.Comment: 12 pages, 3 figures, 9th International Conference on Social Informatics (SocInfo 2017), Oxford, UK, 13--15 September 2017 (forthcoming in Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science

Deriving Telescope Mueller Matrices Using Daytime Sky Polarization Observations

Telescopes often modify the input polarization of a source so that the measured circular or linear output state of the optical signal can be signficantly different from the input. This mixing, or polarization "cross-talk", is defined by the optical system Mueller matrix. We describe here an efficient method for recovering the input polarization state of the light and the full 4 x 4 Mueller matrix of the telescope with an accuracy of a few percent without external masks or telescope hardware modification. Observations of the bright, highly polarized daytime sky using the Haleakala 3.7m AEOS telescope and a coude spectropolarimeter demonstrate the technique.Comment: Accepted for publication in PAS

Is Thermal Instability Significant in Turbulent Galactic Gas?

We investigate numerically the role of thermal instability (TI) as a generator of density structures in the interstellar medium (ISM), both by itself and in the context of a globally turbulent medium. Simulations of the instability alone show that the condenstion process which forms a dense phase (``clouds'') is highly dynamical, and that the boundaries of the clouds are accretion shocks, rather than static density discontinuities. The density histograms (PDFs) of these runs exhibit either bimodal shapes or a single peak at low densities plus a slope change at high densities. Final static situations may be established, but the equilibrium is very fragile: small density fluctuations in the warm phase require large variations in the density of the cold phase, probably inducing shocks into the clouds. This result suggests that such configurations are highly unlikely. Simulations including turbulent forcing show that large- scale forcing is incapable of erasing the signature of the TI in the density PDFs, but small-scale, stellar-like forcing causes erasure of the signature of the instability. However, these simulations do not reach stationary regimes, TI driving an ever-increasing star formation rate. Simulations including magnetic fields, self-gravity and the Coriolis force show no significant difference between the PDFs of stable and unstable cases, and reach stationary regimes, suggesting that the combination of the stellar forcing and the extra effective pressure provided by the magnetic field and the Coriolis force overwhelm TI as a density-structure generator in the ISM. We emphasize that a multi-modal temperature PDF is not necessarily an indication of a multi-phase medium, which must contain clearly distinct thermal equilibrium phases.Comment: 18 pages, 11 figures. Submitted to Ap

Rectal cancer treatment and outcome in the elderly: an audit based on the Swedish rectal cancer registry 1995–2004

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Limited information is available regarding the effect of age on choice of surgical and oncological treatment for rectal cancer. The objective of this study was to assess the influence of age on treatment and outcome of rectal cancer.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>We utilized data in the Swedish Rectal Cancer Registry (SRCR) from patients treated for rectal cancer in Sweden in 1995–2004.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>A total of 15,104 patients with rectal cancer were identified, 42.4% of whom were 75 years or older. Patients ≥75 years were less likely to have distant metastases than younger patients (14.8% vs. 17.8%, <it>P </it>< 0.001), and underwent abdominal tumor resection less frequently (68.5% vs. 84.4%, <it>P </it>< 0.001). Of 11,725 patients with abdominal tumor resection (anterior resection [AR], abdominoperineal excision [APE], and Hartmann's procedure [HA]), 37.4% were ≥75 years. Curative surgery was registered for 85.0% of patients ≥ 75 years and for 83.9% of patients < 75 years, <it>P </it>= 0.11. Choice of abdominal operation differed significantly between the two age groups for both curative and non-curative surgery, The frequency of APE was similar in both age groups (29.5% vs. 28.6%), but patients ≥75 years were more likely to have HA (16.9% vs. 4.9%) and less likely to have preoperative radiotherapy (34.3vs. 67.2%, <it>P </it>< 0.001). The relative survival rate at five years for all patients treated with curative intent was 73% (70–75%) for patients ≥75 years and 78% (77–79%) for patients < 75 years of age. Local recurrence rate was 9% (8–11%) for older and 8% (7–9%) for younger patients.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Treatment of rectal cancer is influenced by patient's age. Future studies should include younger and older patients alike to reveal whether or not age-related differences are purposive. Local recurrence following surgery for low tumors and quality of life aspects deserve particular attention.</p

Exchange Field Induced Magnetoresistance in Colossal Magnetoresistance Manganites

The effect of an exchange field on electrical transport in thin films of metallic ferromagnetic manganites has been investigated. The exchange field was induced both by direct exchange coupling in a ferromagnet/antiferromagnet multilayer and by indirect exchange interaction in a ferromagnet/paramagnet superlattice. The electrical resistance of the manganite layers was found to be determined by the absolute value of the vector sum of the effective exchange field and the external magnetic field.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure

Controlling domain patterns far from equilibrium

A high degree of control over the structure and dynamics of domain patterns in nonequilibrium systems can be achieved by applying nonuniform external fields near parity breaking front bifurcations. An external field with a linear spatial profile stabilizes a propagating front at a fixed position or induces oscillations with frequency that scales like the square root of the field gradient. Nonmonotonic profiles produce a variety of patterns with controllable wavelengths, domain sizes, and frequencies and phases of oscillations.Comment: Published version, 4 pages, RevTeX. More at http://t7.lanl.gov/People/Aric

Sorghum and Pearl Millet Genetic Resources Utilization

Sorghum and pearl millet are unique in size and diversity. The largest collections contain 40,570 (U.S. sorghum collection) and21,191 (ICR1SATpearl millet collection) accessions. Less than three percent of these accessions have been used in crop improvement. Curation— or acquisition, maintenance, characterization, and utilization—plays a role in exploitation o f the genetic variation within these collections. Cultivation of sorghum andpearl millet is increasing the use of marginal agricultural land. Future utilization will depend on increased research on abiotic and biotic stress tolerance. To facilitate exploitation o f this vast germplasm, traditional and biotechnical methods must be combined to provide better understanding of the genetic variation available, which then can be used in crop enhancement. This can only be accomplished through sharing of ideas, particularly through creation of an arena where information is globally accessible