"She's me, the whole of me" : constructing mentoring as a feminine gendered connection for women's professional identity : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Psychology at Massey University, Manawatū, New Zealand

Despite the increased numbers of women in the New Zealand labour market, gendered segregation of the workforce, pay inequality and a lack of women in leadership roles are still gendered issues facing women in employment today. Mentoring is a widely accepted strategy to improve women’s employment issues and career opportunities. While the promise of mentoring seems to offer women many rewards at work, this study reveals mentoring for women is complex, with gender implicated in the complexities. This study is informed by feminist poststructuralist theory. The basis for analysis is a Foucauldian Discourse framework. Unstructured, conversational interviews with nine New Zealand, mid-career, professional women were used to gather mentoring narratives at work. The women discursively drew on various constructions of a ‘connection’. Connectedness talk with mentors was constrained and/or enabled through two key elements of mentoring: institutionalised relationships and positioning. Institutional mentoring with managers and partners as mentors and the resulting power relations, constrain the women’s ability to make meaningful connections with mentors. Importantly, women actively position themselves and their women mentors through feminine discourse. This takes into account the psycho-social and emotional qualities of women at work and their various work-mothering responsibilities. A ‘feminine gendered connection’ enables the women to positively transform how they view themselves and their professional identity at work

The Response of Male Bumblebees to a Putative Queen Pheromone

Queen pheromones are chemical signals produced by the dominant reproductive female in many species of eusocial insects. These pheromones are vital for maintaining a reproductive division of labor. Two evolutionary scenarios may describe the origin of queen pheromones. Sensory exploitation describes a scenario where the pheromone is produced to take advantage of a preexisting sensory bias in a population. An alternative scenario is that the recipient of the pheromone has an adapted response to a preexisting chemical signal. There is a growing body of evidence that cuticular hydrocarbons that act as queen pheromones are co-opted from ancient fertility signals that existed in solitary ancestral species of modern social Hymenoptera. In many species of Hymenoptera, similar cuticular hydrocarbons have also been identified as sex pheromones. I tested the hypothesis that a putative queen pheromone identified in Bombus impatiens originated from a sex pheromone present in an ancestral species with an experiment designed to identify primer and releaser effects of queen pheromones on males. Although behavioral (releaser) results were inconclusive, future analyses of the collected samples may reveal neural or reproductive physiological (primer) responses to the pheromone. This experiment will serve as a foundation from which to design additional studies concerning the evolution of chemical social signals

Towards Energy Consumption Verification via Static Analysis

In this paper we leverage an existing general framework for resource usage verification and specialize it for verifying energy consumption specifications of embedded programs. Such specifications can include both lower and upper bounds on energy usage, and they can express intervals within which energy usage is to be certified to be within such bounds. The bounds of the intervals can be given in general as functions on input data sizes. Our verification system can prove whether such energy usage specifications are met or not. It can also infer the particular conditions under which the specifications hold. To this end, these conditions are also expressed as intervals of functions of input data sizes, such that a given specification can be proved for some intervals but disproved for others. The specifications themselves can also include preconditions expressing intervals for input data sizes. We report on a prototype implementation of our approach within the CiaoPP system for the XC language and XS1-L architecture, and illustrate with an example how embedded software developers can use this tool, and in particular for determining values for program parameters that ensure meeting a given energy budget while minimizing the loss in quality of service.Comment: Presented at HIP3ES, 2015 (arXiv: 1501.03064

The past and future evolution of a star like Betelgeuse

We discuss the physics and the evolution of a typical massive star passing through an evolutionary stage similar to that of Betelgeuse. After a brief introduction recalling various observed parameters of Betelgeuse, we discuss the Pre-Main-Sequence phase (PMS), the Main-Sequence (MS) phase, the physics governing the duration of the first crossing of the HR diagram, the red supergiant stage (RSG), the post-red supergiant phases and the final fate of solar metallicity stars with masses between 9 and 25 M$_\odot$. We examine the impact of different initial rotation and of various prescriptions for the mass loss rates during the red supergiant phase. We show that, whatever the initial rotation rate (chosen between 0 and 0.7$\times\upsilon_{\rm crit}$, $\upsilon_{\rm crit}$ being the surface equatorial velocity producing a centrifugal acceleration balancing exactly the gravity) and the mass loss rates during the RSG stage (varied between a standard value and 25 times that value), a 15 M$_\odot$ star always ends its lifetime as a RSG and explodes as a type II-P or II-L supernova.Comment: 12 pages, 5 figures, Betelgeuse workshop, November 2012, Paris. To be published in the European Astronomical Society Publications Series, editors: Pierre Kervella, Thibaut Le Bertre & Guy Perri

On the Maximum Mass of Accreting Primordial Supermassive Stars

Supermassive primordial stars are suspected to be the progenitors of the most massive quasars at z~6. Previous studies of such stars were either unable to resolve hydrodynamical timescales or considered stars in isolation, not in the extreme accretion flows in which they actually form. Therefore, they could not self-consistently predict their final masses at collapse, or those of the resulting supermassive black hole seeds, but rather invoked comparison to simple polytropic models. Here, we systematically examine the birth, evolution and collapse of accreting non-rotating supermassive stars under accretion rates of 0.01-10 solar masses per year, using the stellar evolution code KEPLER. Our approach includes post-Newtonian corrections to the stellar structure and an adaptive nuclear network, and can transition to following the hydrodynamic evolution of supermassive stars after they encounter the general relativistic instability. We find that this instability triggers the collapse of the star at masses of 150,000-330,000 solar masses for accretion rates of 0.1-10 solar masses per year, and that the final mass of the star scales roughly logarithmically with the rate. The structure of the star, and thus its stability against collapse, is sensitive to the treatment of convection, and the heat content of the outer accreted envelope. Comparison with other codes suggests differences here may lead to small deviations in the evolutionary state of the star as a function of time, that worsen with accretion rate. Since the general relativistic instability leads to the immediate death of these stars, our models place an upper limit on the masses of the first quasars at birth.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures. Accepted ApJ letter

From Parish-Based Schools to a Unified System: Sustaining a 150 Year-old Legacy

Catholic Central School consolidated the 150 year-old parish-based elementary schools and the Archdiocesan high schools to form a unified PK-12 system in 2005. Since the formation of the system, the establishment of the Board of Trustees, and the hiring of a president, teacher salaries increased by 40%, the school has maintained a strong balanced budget, major facility improvements were made, and over $6 million was raised toward the construction of a new school

MOVEMENT VARIABILITY ASSOCIATED WITH HORIZONTAL ECCENTRIC TOWING

The purpose of this study was to determine the movement variability associated with a novel custom built horizontal eccentric towing (HET) device. HET involves the athlete trying to move forwards whilst being pulled backwards. The variables of interest were the impulse, peak (PHEF), and mean (MHEF) horizontal eccentric force. Ten elite female field hockey players were tested on four occasions, each of which were separated by seven days. During each session, participants were required to perform three isokinetic maximal effort trials at 0.8 m/s over a distance of 10 m. The data from the three trials was averaged and the change in mean (CM), coefficient of variation (CV), and intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) were quantified across the four testing occasions. There were large percent CMs for all three variables in initial testing (8.51% - 20.5%), this change reducing with latter testing (T4 - T3 = 1.41% - 8.47%), indicating a systematic learning effect. The between sessions CVs for all three variables ranged from 5.59% to 12.9%, the greatest variability associated with the first testing occasions (10.1% to 12.2%) and the least variability noted with the latter T4-T3 testing (5.59% to 8.49%). Only one ICC was less than 0.70 (T3-T2) and by the T4-T3 comparison all ICCs were greater than 0.85. This study concludes that two familiarisation sessions are required for the HET device in order to obtain reliable MHEF and impulse variables

Binding of Alpha-Crystallin to Cortical and Nuclear Lens Lipid Membranes Derived from a Single Lens

Several studies reported that α-crystallin concentrations in the eye lens cytoplasm decrease with a corresponding increase in membrane-bound α-crystallin with age and cataracts. The influence of the lipid and cholesterol composition difference between cortical membrane (CM) and nuclear membrane (NM) on α-crystallin binding to membranes is still unclear. This study uses the electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) spin-labeling method to investigate the α-crystallin binding to bovine CM and NM derived from the total lipids extracted from a single lens. Compared to CMs, NMs have a higher percentage of membrane surface occupied by α-crystallin and binding affinity, correlating with less mobility and more order below and on the surface of NMs. α-Crystallin binding to CM and NM decreases mobility with no significant change in order and hydrophobicity below and on the surface of membranes. Our results suggest that α-crystallin mainly binds on the surface of bovine CM and NM and such surface binding of α-crystallin to membranes in clear and young lenses may play a beneficial role in membrane stability. However, with decreased cholesterol content within the CM, which mimics the decreased cholesterol content in the cataractous lens membrane, α-crystallin binding increases the hydrophobicity below the membrane surface, indicating that α-crystallin binding forms a hydrophobic barrier for the passage of polar molecules, supporting the barrier hypothesis in developing cataracts