Erin Duran, LGBTQA Advisor and Residential Life Coordinator

In this new Next Page column, Erin Duran, LGBTQA Advisor and Residential Life Coordinator, shares with us the name of the author he appreciates even more now that he knows said author is from his home state of Texas, which title caught his attention as a sixth grader (and the hit song played on repeat while reading!), and which authors he frequently recommends to students for their challenging (in a good way) discussion of LGBTQA topics

Erin Duran, LGBTQA Advisor and Residential Life Coordinator

In this new Next Page column, Erin Duran, LGBTQA Advisor and Residential Life Coordinator, shares with us the name of the author he appreciates even more now that he knows said author is from his home state of Texas, which title caught his attention as a sixth grader (and the hit song played on repeat while reading!), and which authors he frequently recommends to students for their challenging (in a good way) discussion of LGBTQA topics

7 Things Churches Can Do to Make Queer People Feel Welcome

For as long as I can remember, the church, for me, has been a place characterized by shame and hurt. I remember Christian high school friends telling me that I would go to hell for being Queer. I remember hearing sermons from televangelists about the evils of homosexuality, and church leaders pressuring youth leaders to cast out their Queer members. I\u27ve heard more talk of love the sinner, hate the sin, and God didn\u27t make gay, than anyone should, and I\u27ve even received personalized hate mail declaring that God hates dykes. [excerpt

Test fixture insures high degree of accuracy in flexure tests

Modified die set improves accuracy in load application, minimizes problems of parallelism, and eliminates testing errors normally encountered during flexure tests. Test results are given for a comparison test of the old and new fixtures

Simulations of dense granular flow: Dynamic Arches and Spin Organization

We present a numerical model for a two dimensional (2D) granular assembly, falling in a rectangular container when the bottom is removed. We observe the occurrence of cracks splitting the initial pile into pieces, like in experiments. We study in detail various mechanisms connected to the `discontinuous decompaction' of this granular material. In particular, we focus on the history of one single long range crack, from its origin at one side wall, until it breaks the assembly into two pieces. This event is correlated to an increase in the number of collisions, i.e. strong pressure, and to a momentum wave originated by one particle. Eventually, strong friction reduces the falling velocity such that the crack may open below the slow, high pressure `dynamic arch'. Furthermore, we report the presence of large, organized structures of the particles' angular velocities in the dense parts of the granulate when the number of collisions is large.Comment: Submitted to J. Phys.

Simulations of Pattern Formation in Vibrated Granular Media

We present simulations of peak pattern formation in vibrated two-dimensional (2D) granulates and measure the dispersion relation of the pattern for various frequencies, accelerations, cell sizes, and layer heights. We report the first quantitative data from numerical simulations showing an interesting dependence of the pattern wavelength on the acceleration and the system size. Our results are related to recent experimental findings and theoretical predictions for gravity waves.Comment: 6 pages PS-file including figures, (version accepted at Europhys. Lett. 26.10.96

Introducing the Task-Aware Storage I/O (TASIO) Library

Task-based programming models are excellent tools to parallelize and seamlessly load balance an application workload. However, the integration of I/O intensive applications and task-based programming models is lacking. Typically, I/O operations stall the requesting thread until the data is serviced by the backing device. Because the core where the thread was running becomes idle, it should be possible to overlap the data query operation with either computation workloads or even more I/O operations. Nonetheless, overlapping I/O tasks with other tasks entails an extra degree of complexity currently not managed by programming models’ runtimes. In this work, we focus on integrating storage I/O into the tasking model by introducing the Task-Aware Storage I/O (TASIO) library. We test TASIO extensively with a custom benchmark for a number of configurations and conclude that it is able to achieve speedups up to 2x depending on the workload, although it might lead to slowdowns if not used with the right settings.This project is supported by the European Union's Horizon 2021 research and innovation programme under the grant agreement No 754304 (DEEP-EST), the Ministry of Economy of Spain through the Severo Ochoa Center of Excellence Program (SEV-2015-0493), by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (contract TIN2015-65316-P) and by the Generalitat de Catalunya (2017-SGR- 1481). Also, the authors would like to acknowledge that the test environment (Cobi) was ceded by Intel Corporation in the frame of the BSC - Intel collabo- ration.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Obesity and assisted reproduction

Excess body weight impacts fertility during both natural and assisted reproduction (ART) cycles. In men, the immediate effect is hypoandrogenism through decreased testosterone levels and an increase in peripheral aromatization of androgens to estrogen, although this does not seem to cause significant change in conventional semen parameters. In women, the impact seems to be through various pathways, by both animal and human studies