Young Women's Perceptions and Experiences of Becoming a Research Physicist

The research presented here focuses on young women's (under 30 years of age) views of their future careers in physics research and the barriers and constraints they have already experienced and those they anticipate in the future. This research is timely because of girls' increasing success in educational achievement throughout school and university levels. Our initial survey of female members of the Institute of Physics showed that only 15% of young women under 30 said they encountered barriers in their careers compared to 45% of women over 30 years. However the young women described situations that clearly were barriers and were gender related, but they didn–t recognize them as such. The initial survey detected a drift away from research careers in the over 30s and so this research sought explanations for this by examining the younger women's perceptions of future careers

Day to Day Change Making: The Transformative Potential of Dumpster Diving

This paper investigates the potential of dumpster diving as a tactic of the freegan movement. The goal of the freegan movement is the realization of a postcapitalist world. I first investigate the scope, legality and demographic of dumpster diving in the U.S. I then contextualize dumpster diving within the history of waste, consumerism and excess in the U.S. since the beginning of the 20th century. I conclude by assessing the viabaility of freegan dumpster diving as a transformative tactic in light of its inaccessibility to various individuals as a result of their race and class. I ultimately argue that freeganism has the potential to inspire individual action for social change as well as de-naturalize trash

Exploring the Experiences of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Sign Language Interpreters Working in the Video Relay Service Setting

This phenomenological study explores the lived experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) sign language interpreters who have worked in the video relay service setting – more specifically targeting their experiences during interactions with consumers, both deaf and hearing. Quantitative and qualitative data were collected and triangulated through a mixed methods approach using anonymous surveys (N=137) and semistructured interviews (N=8). Three themes emerged from the findings, including (a) the implications of consumer recognition of an interpreter’s LGBTQ identity, which correlates to the social construction of gender and the process of gender attribution – the way that people mentally place others into binary gender categories (Kessler & McKenna, 1978); (b) the experiences of interpreters whose LGBTQ status is not easily detected by consumers and how those interpreters approach the decision to disclose (or reveal) their identities; and (c) the role of the video relay service companies and the ways they cultivate either supportive or oppressive environments for LGBTQ interpreters, which can ultimately impact their interactions with consumers. Since there has been no research conducted on LGBTQ interpreters in the video relay service setting, this study can serve as foundational research regarding the experiences of those interpreters with the goal of generating future studies about the LGBTQ community in the field of interpreting

Catholic Social Teaching and Neo-Abolitionism: Tearing Down the House of the Rising Sun

Catholic Social Teaching (“CST”) is the body of literature written in the modern era by papal and episcopal teachers in response to current political, economic, and social issues. CST views individuals in the sex trade as victims, however they arrived in the trade. Prostitution abolitionists, called neo-abolitionists, because their current efforts to wipe out sex trafficking and prostitution mirror similar efforts by reformers in the early twentieth century, also view individuals in the sex trade as victims. A coalition of feminists and Christians developed neo-abolitionist social policy during the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. CST and neo-abolitionist social policy share many of the same goals and beliefs, particularly with respect to reducing demand for sexual access and providing social and welfare supports for individuals leaving the sex trade. By working together to apply pressure to lawmakers and policy-makers on these issues, Catholics and neo-abolitionists can help to reduce demand, provide support to victims, and flip the stigma of the sex trade from the victims of the trade to the buyers who fuel it, and the pimps, madams, facilitators, and other investors who control it

The cooperative movement in the United States

Thesis (M.B.A.)--Boston Universit

Move-minimizing puzzles, diamond-colored modular and distributive lattices, and poset models for Weyl group symmetric functions

The move-minimizing puzzles presented here are certain types of one-player combinatorial games that are shown to have explicit solutions whenever they can be encoded in a certain way as diamond-colored modular and distributive lattices. Such lattices can also arise naturally as models for certain algebraic objects, namely Weyl group symmetric functions and their companion semisimple Lie algebra representations. The motivation for this paper is therefore both diversional and algebraic: To show how some recreational move-minimizing puzzles can be solved explicitly within an order-theoretic context and also to realize some such puzzles as combinatorial models for symmetric functions associated with certain fundamental representations of the symplectic and odd orthogonal Lie algebras

Operating theatre time, where does it all go? A prospective observational study

Objective To assess the accuracy of surgeons and anaesthetists in predicting the time it will take them to complete an operation or procedure and therefore explain some of the difficulties encountered in operating theatre scheduling. Design Single centre, prospective observational study. Setting Plastic, orthopaedic, and general surgical operating theatres at a level 1 trauma centre serving a population of about 370 000. Participants 92 operating theatre staff including surgical consultants, surgical registrars, anaesthetic consultants, and anaesthetic registrars. Intervention Participants were asked how long they thought their procedure would take. These data were compared with actual time data recorded at the end of the case. Primary outcome measure Absolute difference between predicted and actual time. Results General surgeons underestimated the time required for the procedure by 31 minutes (95% confidence interval 7.6 to 54.4), meaning that procedures took, on average, 28.7% longer than predicted. Plastic surgeons underestimated by 5 minutes (−12.4 to 22.4), with procedures taking an average of 4.5% longer than predicted. Orthopaedic surgeons overestimated by 1 minute (−16.4 to 14.0), with procedures taking an average of 1.1% less time than predicted. Anaesthetists underestimated by 35 minutes (21.7 to 48.7), meaning that, on average, procedures took 167.5% longer than they predicted. The four specialty mean time overestimations or underestimations are significantly different from each other (P=0.01). The observed time differences between anaesthetists and both orthopaedic and plastic surgeons are significantly different (P<0.05), but the time difference between anaesthetists and general surgeons is not significantly different. Conclusion The inability of clinicians to predict the necessary time for a procedure is a significant cause of delay in the operating theatre. This study suggests that anaesthetists are the most inaccurate and highlights the potential differences between specialties in what is considered part of the “anaesthesia time.

Gender, Sexual Orientation, and Truth-of-Consensus in Studies of Physical Attractiveness

Truth-of-consensus methodology presently holds that sex differences in perceptions of physical attractiveness are negligible and may be routinely ignored during prescaling. No determination has been made in the literature of the effects of sexual orientation on this perceptual process. The data presented herein suggest that while sex and sexual orientation of judge are largely irrelevant to prescaling of female stimuli, these variables are important when judging male stimuli. In particular, male homosexuals and male heterosexuals differ significantly in ranking male facial photographs. Thus, experimenters wishing to treat attractiveness levels as known quantities should control for this difference, especially when using a small number of judges for prescaling