13,099 research outputs found
Intersectionality and Credibility in Child Sexual Assault Trials
Children remain largely absent from sociolegal scholarship on sexual violence. Taking an intersectional approach to the analysis of attorneysâ strategies during child sexual assault trials, this article argues that legal narratives draw on existing gender, racial, and age stereotypes to present legally compelling evidence of credibility. This work builds on Crenshawâs focus on women of color, emphasizing the role of structures of power and inequality in constituting the conditions of childrenâs experiences of adjudication. Using ethnographic observations of courtroom jury trials, transcripts, and court records, three narrative themes of child credibility emerged: invisible wounds, rebellious adolescents, and dysfunctional families. Findings show how attorneys use these themes to emphasize the childâs unmarked body, imperceptible emotional responses, rebellious character, and harmful familial environments. The current study fills a gap in sexual assault research by moving beyond trial outcomes to address cultural narratives within the court that are inextricably embedded in intersectional dimensions of power and the reproduction of social status
Ontogenetic and temporal variability in the fat content and fatty acid composition of Atlantic herring (Clupea harengus) from the Bay of Fundy, Canada
Atlantic herring (Clupea harengus) is an ecologically and
economically valuable species in many food webs, yet surprisingly little is known about the variation in the nutritional quality of these fish. Atlantic herring collected from 2005 through 2008 from the Bay of Fundy, Canada, were examined for variability in their nutritional quality by using total lipid content (n=889) and fatty acid composition (n=551) as proxies for nutritional value. A
significant positive relationship was found between fish length and total lipid content. Atlantic herring also had significantly different fatty acid signatures by age. Fish from 2005 had significantly lower total lipid content than fish from 2006 through 2008, and all years had significantly different fatty acid signatures. Summer
fish were significantly fatter than winter fish and had significantly different fatty acid signatures. For all comparisons (ontogenetic, annual, and seasonal) percent concentrations of omega-3, -6, and long-chain monounsaturated fatty acids were the most important for distinguishing between the fatty acid signatures of fish. This study underscores the importance of quantifying variation in prey quality synoptically with prey quantity
in food webs over ontogenetic and temporal scales when evaluating the effect of prey nutritional quality on
predators and on modeling trophic dynamics
Cone Monotonicity: Structure Theorem, Properties, and Comparisons to Other Notions of Monotonicity
In search of a meaningful 2-dimensional analog to mono- tonicity, we
introduce two new definitions and give examples of and dis- cuss the
relationship between these definitions and others that we found in the
literature. Note: After we published the article in Abstract and Applied
Analysis and after we searched multiple times for previous work, we discovered
that Clarke at al. had introduced the definition of cone monotonicity and given
a characterization. See the addendum at the end of this paper for full
reference information
Discovery and Atmospheric Characterization of Giant Planet Kepler-12b: An Inflated Radius Outlier
We report the discovery of planet Kepler-12b (KOI-20), which at 1.695 ± 0.030 R_J is among the handful of planets with super-inflated radii above 1.65 R_J. Orbiting its slightly evolved G0 host with a 4.438 day period, this 0.431 ± 0.041 M_J planet is the least irradiated within this largest-planet-radius group, which has important implications for planetary physics. The planet's inflated radius and low mass lead to a very low density of 0.111 ± 0.010 g cm^(â3). We detect the occultation of the planet at a significance of 3.7Ï in the Kepler bandpass. This yields a geometric albedo of 0.14 ± 0.04; the planetary flux is due to a combination of scattered light and emitted thermal flux. We use multiple observations with Warm Spitzer to detect the occultation at 7Ï and 4Ï in the 3.6 and 4.5 ÎŒm bandpasses, respectively. The occultation photometry timing is consistent with a circular orbit at e < 0.01 (1Ï) and e < 0.09 (3Ï). The occultation detections across the three bands favor an atmospheric model with no dayside temperature inversion. The Kepler occultation detection provides significant leverage, but conclusions regarding temperature structure are preliminary, given our ignorance of opacity sources at optical wavelengths in hot Jupiter atmospheres. If Kepler-12b and HD 209458b, which intercept similar incident stellar fluxes, have the same heavy-element masses, the interior energy source needed to explain the large radius of Kepler-12b is three times larger than that of HD 209458b. This may suggest that more than one radius-inflation mechanism is at work for Kepler-12b or that it is less heavy-element rich than other transiting planets
The Skills of Female Immigrants to Australia, Canada, and the United States
Census data for 1990/91 indicate that Australian and Canadian female immigrants appear to have higher levels of English fluency, education, and income (relative to natives) than do U.S. female immigrants. This skill deficit for U.S. female immigrants arises in large part because the United States receives a much larger share of immigrants from Latin America than do the other two countries. However, even among women originating outside Latin America, the proportion of foreign-born women in the United States who are fluent in English is much lower than among foreign-born women in Australia. Furthermore, immigrant/native education gaps are reduced but not eliminated by the exclusion of Latin American women from the analysis. In contrast, other evidence for men suggests that the gap in observed skills among male immigrants to the United States is completely eliminated when Latin American immigrants are excluded from the estimation sample (Borjas, 1993; Antecol, et al., 2001). The importance of national origin and the general consistency in the results for men (who are routinely subjected to the selection criteria of various immigration programs) and women (who are not) suggests that many factors other than immigration policy per se are at work in producing skill variation among these three immigration streams.
Topological Data Analysis of Task-Based fMRI Data from Experiments on Schizophrenia
We use methods from computational algebraic topology to study functional
brain networks, in which nodes represent brain regions and weighted edges
encode the similarity of fMRI time series from each region. With these tools,
which allow one to characterize topological invariants such as loops in
high-dimensional data, we are able to gain understanding into low-dimensional
structures in networks in a way that complements traditional approaches that
are based on pairwise interactions. In the present paper, we use persistent
homology to analyze networks that we construct from task-based fMRI data from
schizophrenia patients, healthy controls, and healthy siblings of schizophrenia
patients. We thereby explore the persistence of topological structures such as
loops at different scales in these networks. We use persistence landscapes and
persistence images to create output summaries from our persistent-homology
calculations, and we study the persistence landscapes and images using
-means clustering and community detection. Based on our analysis of
persistence landscapes, we find that the members of the sibling cohort have
topological features (specifically, their 1-dimensional loops) that are
distinct from the other two cohorts. From the persistence images, we are able
to distinguish all three subject groups and to determine the brain regions in
the loops (with four or more edges) that allow us to make these distinctions
Integrating research with NHS clinical practice: Unwelcome intrusion or constructive triangulation?
When embarking on research into the effectiveness of psychoanalytic psychotherapy in the NHS or the application of psychoanalytic principles, researchers come up against a number of hurdles: many clinicians still see empirical research as antithetical or disruptive to the practice of psychoanalytic psychotherapy; psychoanalytic psychotherapy has previously fared poorly in evidence-based policy guidelines and this can discourage ambition, and there are technical problems of research design, measurement and standardization. Nevertheless, in a political climate which stresses service evaluation, measurable outcomes and empirical evidence, psychoanalytic psychotherapy must participate to survive. There may be gains from conducting research beyond simply meeting the requirement to provide evidence of effectiveness. Research may be viewed by some clinicians as an unwelcome intruder but it may have the potential to offer triangulation, the perspective of the 'third', and so strengthen the foundations of clinical practice and the development of psychoanalytic thought
An Estimation of the Gamma-Ray Burst Afterglow Apparent Optical Brightness Distribution Function
By using recent publicly available observational data obtained in conjunction
with the NASA Swift gamma-ray burst mission and a novel data analysis
technique, we have been able to make some rough estimates of the GRB afterglow
apparent optical brightness distribution function. The results suggest that 71%
of all burst afterglows have optical magnitudes with mR < 22.1 at 1000 seconds
after the burst onset, the dimmest detected object in the data sample. There is
a strong indication that the apparent optical magnitude distribution function
peaks at mR ~ 19.5. Such estimates may prove useful in guiding future plans to
improve GRB counterpart observation programs. The employed numerical techniques
might find application in a variety of other data analysis problems in which
the intrinsic distributions must be inferred from a heterogeneous sample.Comment: 15 pages including 2 tables and 7 figures, accepted for publication
in Ap
Numerical algebraic geometry for model selection and its application to the life sciences
Researchers working with mathematical models are often confronted by the
related problems of parameter estimation, model validation, and model
selection. These are all optimization problems, well-known to be challenging
due to non-linearity, non-convexity and multiple local optima. Furthermore, the
challenges are compounded when only partial data is available. Here, we
consider polynomial models (e.g., mass-action chemical reaction networks at
steady state) and describe a framework for their analysis based on optimization
using numerical algebraic geometry. Specifically, we use probability-one
polynomial homotopy continuation methods to compute all critical points of the
objective function, then filter to recover the global optima. Our approach
exploits the geometric structures relating models and data, and we demonstrate
its utility on examples from cell signaling, synthetic biology, and
epidemiology.Comment: References added, additional clarification
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