Double Jeopardy: Minority Stress and the Influence of Transgender Identity and Race/Ethnicity

This study assessed gender and racial/ethnic differences in gender-related discrimination and psychological distress within a sample of transgender and gender nonconforming individuals. Prior research suggests transgender individuals with multiple minority statuses experience higher psychological stress than their singly disadvantaged counterparts, and both minority race/ethnicity and transgender minorities experience more frequent and severe forms of discrimination than white and cisgender individuals. Using data from a convenience sample of 101 self-identified transgender and gender nonconforming adults recruited through LGBTQ+ organizations from across North America, I analyzed the relationship between race/ethnicity, gender-related minority stress, and psychological distress. Gender-related discrimination and gender-related victimization did not significantly differ by gender identity or race/ethnicity. However, racial/ethnic minorities reported significantly higher psychological distress than white participants. While being a racial/ethnic minority may not directly worsen one\u27s experiences with gender-related discrimination and victimization, other factors, such as experiences with race related discrimination, may contribute to disparities in mental health

Mob.ly App Makes Driving Safer by Changing How Drivers Navigate

A group of multi-disciplinary researchers from across North America today announced the launch of a new app, Mob.ly, that reduces the incidents of road rage by promoting a driver’s sense of well-being and safety without sacrificing efficiency and access

Ion channel diversity, channel expression and function in the choroid plexuses

Knowledge of the diversity of ion channel form and function has increased enormously over the last 25 years. The initial impetus in channel discovery came with the introduction of the patch clamp method in 1981. Functional data from patch clamp experiments have subsequently been augmented by molecular studies which have determined channel structures. Thus the introduction of patch clamp methods to study ion channel expression in the choroid plexus represents an important step forward in our knowledge understanding of the process of CSF secretion

Timescales of variation in diversity and production of bacterioplankton assemblages in the Lower Mississippi River

Copyright: © 2020 Payne et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Rivers are characterized by rapid and continuous one-way directional fluxes of flowing, aqueous habitat, chemicals, suspended particles, and resident plankton. Therefore, at any particular location in such systems there is the potential for continuous, and possibly abrupt, changes in diversity and metabolic activities of suspended biota. As microorganisms are the principal catalysts of organic matter degradation and nutrient cycling in rivers, examination of their assemblage dynamics is fundamental to understanding system-level biogeochemical patterns and processes. However, there is little known of the dynamics of microbial assemblage composition or production of large rivers along a time interval gradient. We quantified variation in alpha and beta diversity and production of particle-associated and free-living bacterioplankton assemblages collected at a single site on the Lower Mississippi River (LMR), the final segment of the largest river system in North America. Samples were collected at timescales ranging from days to weeks to months up to a year. For both alpha and beta diversity, there were similar patterns of temporal variation in particle-associated and free-living assemblages. Alpha diversity, while always higher on particles, varied as much at a daily as at a monthly timescale. Beta diversity, in contrast, gradually increased with time interval of sampling, peaking between samples collected 180 days apart, before gradually declining between samples collected up to one year apart. The primary environmental driver of the temporal pattern in beta diversity was temperature, followed by dissolved nitrogen and chlorophyll a concentrations. Particle-associated bacterial production corresponded strongly to temperature, while free-living production was much lower and constant over time. We conclude that particle-associated and free-living bacterioplankton assemblages of the LMR vary in richness, composition, and production at distinct timescales in response to differing sets of environmental factors. This is the first temporal longitudinal study of microbial assemblage structure and dynamics in the LMR

Revised astrometric calibration of the Gemini Planet Imager

We present a revision to the astrometric calibration of the Gemini Planet Imager (GPI), an instrument designed to achieve the high contrast at small angular separations necessary to image substellar and planetary-mass companions around nearby, young stars. We identified several issues with the GPI data reduction pipeline (DRP) that significantly affected the determination of the angle of north in reduced GPI images. As well as introducing a small error in position angle measurements for targets observed at small zenith distances, this error led to a significant error in the previous astrometric calibration that has affected all subsequent astrometric measurements. We present a detailed description of these issues and how they were corrected. We reduced GPI observations of calibration binaries taken periodically since the instrument was commissioned in 2014 using an updated version of the DRP. These measurements were compared to observations obtained with the NIRC2 instrument on Keck II, an instrument with an excellent astrometric calibration, allowing us to derive an updated plate scale and north offset angle for GPI. This revised astrometric calibration should be used to calibrate all measurements obtained with GPI for the purposes of precision astrometry

Gemini Planet Imager Observational Calibrations VI: Photometric and Spectroscopic Calibration for the Integral Field Spectrograph

The Gemini Planet Imager (GPI) is a new facility instrument for the Gemini Observatory designed to provide direct detection and characterization of planets and debris disks around stars in the solar neighborhood. In addition to its extreme adaptive optics and corona graphic systems which give access to high angular resolution and high-contrast imaging capabilities, GPI contains an integral field spectrograph providing low resolution spectroscopy across five bands between 0.95 and 2.5 $\mu$m. This paper describes the sequence of processing steps required for the spectro-photometric calibration of GPI science data, and the necessary calibration files. Based on calibration observations of the white dwarf HD 8049B we estimate that the systematic error in spectra extracted from GPI observations is less than 5%. The flux ratio of the occulted star and fiducial satellite spots within coronagraphic GPI observations, required to estimate the magnitude difference between a target and any resolved companions, was measured in the $H$-band to be $\Delta m = 9.23\pm0.06$ in laboratory measurements and $\Delta m = 9.39\pm 0.11$ using on-sky observations. Laboratory measurements for the $Y$, $J$, $K1$ and $K2$ filters are also presented. The total throughput of GPI, Gemini South and the atmosphere of the Earth was also measured in each photometric passband, with a typical throughput in $H$-band of 18% in the non-coronagraphic mode, with some variation observed over the six-month period for which observations were available. We also report ongoing development and improvement of the data cube extraction algorithm.Comment: 15 pages, 6 figures. Proceedings of the SPIE, 9147-30

University for the Creative Arts staff research 2011

This publication brings together a selection of the University’s current research. The contributions foreground areas of research strength including still and moving image research, applied arts and crafts, as well as emerging fields of investigations such as design and architecture. It also maps thematic concerns across disciplinary areas that focus on models and processes of creative practice, value formations and processes of identification through art and artefacts as well as cross-cultural connectivity. Dr. Seymour Roworth-Stoke