5,248 research outputs found
“We’re here, we’re queer, we will not live in fear!”: A Content Analysis Exploring Gender Disparity in the Public Reappropriation of LGBTQ+ Slurs
As minorities, members of the LGBTQ+ community have faced many hardships throughout history, such as the use of language as a weapon against them. However, this research explores the public display of linguistic reappropriation of LGBTQ+ derogatory language and terms within the community. Throughout history, the use of slurs (e.g. faggot and dyke) and their social definitions have shifted from having no connection to the community to directly affected these individuals. These terms have been used to demonize members of the LGBTQ+ community for decades. Despite this reality, there are some scholars who suggest that these terms are being reappropriated, but the prior research and literature on this reappropriation have not explored the possible gender differences involved. In a public sphere, such as protests and rallies, many people are comfortable showing their reclamation of slurs, but others are not, and this split lies heavily within gender. To determine the validity of this argument, this research involves a content analysis on 6 top LGBTQ+ news websites to determine whether there is gender disparity in this form of reappropriation and why that may be. Out of 269 total articles, 106 held self-proclaiming attitudes about “dyke” whereas 127 held derogatory attitudes about “faggot”; perhaps because of previous women’s rights movements and/or the sexualization of female queerness. This divide also shows how masculine gender roles and Patriarchal culture can take their toll on the confidence of queer men
A daily representation of Great Britain's energy vectors : Natural gas, electricity and transport fuels
In much of Europe there is a strong push to decarbonise energy demands, including the largest single end-use demand – heat. Moving heat demands over to the electrical network poses significant challenges and the use of hybrid energy vector and storage systems (heat and electrical storage) will be a critical component in managing this transition. As an example of these challenges (facing many developed countries), the scale of recently available daily energy flows through the UK’s electrical, gas and transport systems are presented. When this data is expressed graphically it illustrates important differences in the demand characteristics of these different vectors; these include the quantity of energy delivered through the networks on a daily basis, and the scale of variability in the gas demand over multiple timescales (seasonal, weekly and daily). As the UK proceeds to migrate heating demands to the electrical network in its drive to cut carbon emissions, electrical demand will significantly increase. Additionally, the greater variability and uncertainty shown in the gas demand will also migrate to the electrical demand posing significant difficulties for the maintenance of a secure and reliable electrical system in the coming decades. The paper concludes an analysis of the different means of accommodating increasingly volatile electricity demands in future energy networks
Predicting the whispering gallery mode spectra of microresonators
The whispering gallery modes (WGMs) of optical resonators have prompted
intensive research efforts due to their usefulness in the field of biological
sensing, and their employment in nonlinear optics. While much information is
available in the literature on numerical modeling of WGMs in microspheres, it
remains a challenging task to be able to predict the emitted spectra of
spherical microresonators. Here, we establish a customizable Finite- Difference
Time-Domain (FDTD)-based approach to investigate the WGM spectrum of
microspheres. The simulations are carried out in the vicinity of a dipole
source rather than a typical plane-wave beam excitation, thus providing an
effective analogue of the fluorescent dye or nanoparticle coatings used in
experiment. The analysis of a single dipole source at different positions on
the surface or inside a microsphere, serves to assess the relative efficiency
of nearby radiating TE and TM modes, characterizing the profile of the
spectrum. By varying the number, positions and alignments of the dipole
sources, different excitation scenarios can be compared to analytic models, and
to experimental results. The energy flux is collected via a nearby disk-shaped
region. The resultant spectral profile shows a dependence on the configuration
of the dipole sources. The power outcoupling can then be optimized for specific
modes and wavelength regions. The development of such a computational tool can
aid the preparation of optical sensors prior to fabrication, by preselecting
desired the optical properties of the resonator.Comment: Approved version for SPIE Photonics West, LASE, Laser Resonators,
Microresonators and Beam Control XV
Method for predicting whispering gallery mode spectra of spherical microresonators
A full three-dimensional Finite-Difference Time-Domain (FDTD)-based toolkit
is developed to simulate the whispering gallery modes of a microsphere in the
vicinity of a dipole source. This provides a guide for experiments that rely on
efficient coupling to the modes of microspheres. The resultant spectra are
compared to those of analytic models used in the field. In contrast to the
analytic models, the FDTD method is able to collect flux from a variety of
possible collection regions, such as a disk-shaped region. The customizability
of the technique allows one to consider a variety of mode excitation scenarios,
which are particularly useful for investigating novel properties of optical
resonators, and are valuable in assessing the viability of a resonator for
biosensing.Comment: Published 10 Apr 2015 in Opt. Express Vol. 23, Issue 8, pp.
9924-9937; The FDTD toolkit supercomputer scripts are hosted at:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/npps/files/FDTD_WGM_Simulator
Tuned gold layer growth onto plasmonic sensing silver nanocubes via synthetic control of reduction potentials.
Metallic nanoparticles (mNPs) are commonly employed as sensors and detection tools due to their unique plasmonic properties. Silver NPs exhibit these properties in heightened capacity in comparison to other metals. However, Ag NPs are susceptible to oxidation, degradation over time and are biotoxic. These issues are commonly addressed by creating Ag-alloy NPs or by adding additional layers to Ag NPs. This work improves upon these methods by focusing on the growth of an Au layer onto Ag nanocubes (AgNCs), resulting in a layered Au-Ag NC (Au@AgNC). The resulting morphology of these Au@AgNCs are dependent on the synthetic pathway taken and can be difficult to control. This work focuses on understanding the Au@AgNC synthesis procedure and the reactions that drive the gold layer overgrowth. Primarily the galvanic replacement reactions (GRR) and its manipulation was studied. Reduction potentials and experimental parameters were investigated to better understand their role in the Au@AgNC synthesis. As specific pathways are encouraged or discouraged the resulting morphology can be readily controlled. The use of potassium iodide (KI) was studied as one route to manipulate the GRR dominance and role. This works provides detailed studies in the synthetic control of Au@AgNC morphology providing evidence for many common synthetic parameters used in the literature
Motivational drive and alprazolam misuse : a recipe for aggression?
Benzodiazepine-related aggression has received insufficient research attention, in particular little is known about the motivational factors which may contribute to the development of this paradoxical response. The revised Reinforcement Sensitivity Theory provides a theoretical framework from which to understand the relevant underlying motivational processes. The current study aimed to identify the role of approach and avoidance motivational tendencies in the occurrence of benzodiazepine-related aggression. Data regarding benzodiazepine and other substance use, approach and avoidance motivation, and general and physical aggressive behaviour were collected via self-report questionnaires. Participants were a convenience sample (n=204) who reported using benzodiazepines in the previous year. Participants were primarily male (62.7%), aged 18–51 years old. Hierarchical multiple regressions indicated that general and physical aggression were predicted by alprazolam use and Drive, a facet of approach motivation. Overall, lower diazepam use significantly predicted higher levels of general aggression. However, when diazepam-preferring participants were examined in isolation of the larger sample (23.5% of sample), problematic (dependent) diazepam use was associated with greater aggression scores, as was dependence risk for alprazolam-preferring participants (39.7% of sample). The findings highlight the importance of motivational factors and benzodiazepine use patterns in understanding benzodiazepine-related aggression, with implications for violent offender rehabilitation
Lepto-Axiogenesis
We propose a baryogenenesis mechanism that uses a rotating condensate of a
Peccei-Quinn (PQ) symmetry breaking field and the dimension-five operator that
gives Majorana neutrino masses. The rotation induces charge asymmetries for the
Higgs boson and for lepton chirality through sphaleron processes and Yukawa
interactions. The dimension-five interaction transfers these asymmetries to the
lepton asymmetry, which in turn is transferred into the baryon asymmetry
through the electroweak sphaleron process. QCD axion dark matter can be
simultaneously produced by dynamics of the same PQ field via kinetic
misalignment or parametric resonance, favoring an axion decay constant GeV, or by conventional misalignment and contributions from
strings and domain walls with GeV. The size of the baryon
asymmetry is tied to the mass of the PQ field. In simple supersymmetric
theories, it is independent of UV parameters and predicts the supersymmtry
breaking mass scale to be TeV, depending on the masses
of the neutrinos and whether the condensate is thermalized during a radiation
or matter dominated era. We also construct a theory where TeV scale
supersymmetry is possible. Parametric resonance may give warm axions, and the
radial component of the PQ field may give signals in rare kaon decays from
mixing with the Higgs and in dark radiation.Comment: 71 pages, 6 Figure
Predicting Ovarian Cancer Treatment Response in Histopathology using Hierarchical Vision Transformers and Multiple Instance Learning
For many patients, current ovarian cancer treatments offer limited clinical
benefit. For some therapies, it is not possible to predict patients' responses,
potentially exposing them to the adverse effects of treatment without any
therapeutic benefit. As part of the automated prediction of treatment
effectiveness in ovarian cancer using histopathological images (ATEC23)
challenge, we evaluated the effectiveness of deep learning to predict whether a
course of treatment including the antiangiogenic drug bevacizumab could
contribute to remission or prevent disease progression for at least 6 months in
a set of 282 histopathology whole slide images (WSIs) from 78 ovarian cancer
patients. Our approach used a pretrained Hierarchical Image Pyramid Transformer
(HIPT) to extract region-level features and an attention-based multiple
instance learning (ABMIL) model to aggregate features and classify whole
slides. The optimal HIPT-ABMIL model had an internal balanced accuracy of 60.2%
+- 2.9% and an AUC of 0.646 +- 0.033. Histopathology-specific model pretraining
was found to be beneficial to classification performance, though hierarchical
transformers were not, with a ResNet feature extractor achieving similar
performance. Due to the dataset being small and highly heterogeneous,
performance was variable across 5-fold cross-validation folds, and there were
some extreme differences between validation and test set performance within
folds. The model did not generalise well to tissue microarrays, with accuracy
worse than random chance. It is not yet clear whether ovarian cancer WSIs
contain information that can be used to accurately predict treatment response,
with further validation using larger, higher-quality datasets required.Comment: Submission to ATEC23 challenge at MICCAI 2023 conferenc
DIG In: Evaluating Disparities in Image Generations with Indicators for Geographic Diversity
The unprecedented photorealistic results achieved by recent text-to-image
generative systems and their increasing use as plug-and-play content creation
solutions make it crucial to understand their potential biases. In this work,
we introduce three indicators to evaluate the realism, diversity and
prompt-generation consistency of text-to-image generative systems when prompted
to generate objects from across the world. Our indicators complement
qualitative analysis of the broader impact of such systems by enabling
automatic and efficient benchmarking of geographic disparities, an important
step towards building responsible visual content creation systems. We use our
proposed indicators to analyze potential geographic biases in state-of-the-art
visual content creation systems and find that: (1) models have less realism and
diversity of generations when prompting for Africa and West Asia than Europe,
(2) prompting with geographic information comes at a cost to prompt-consistency
and diversity of generated images, and (3) models exhibit more region-level
disparities for some objects than others. Perhaps most interestingly, our
indicators suggest that progress in image generation quality has come at the
cost of real-world geographic representation. Our comprehensive evaluation
constitutes a crucial step towards ensuring a positive experience of visual
content creation for everyone
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