Search Engine Use 2012

Presents survey findings about Americans' use of search engines and how they view their own Internet search abilities, search engine performance, and the collection of user information to personalize search results or target advertising

Setting the Stage for Community Change: Reflecting on Creative Placemaking Outcomes

As interest in measuring and understanding the impact of arts investments in community development continues to grow, this new study, Setting the Stage for Community Change: Reflecting on Creative Placemaking Outcomes, commissioned by the Levitt Foundation and led by Slover Linett Audience Research, examines how "creative placemaking" interventions build social capital in communities, using permanent outdoor Levitt music venues as case studies. This research offers insights into arts-based strategies to promote social connectivity, a central goal of many creative placemaking efforts, and is a working illustration of what can and can't be learned from different impact measurement approaches

Colonial Possessions: Producing the Zombie in Erna Brodber\u27s Myal

Erna Brodber’s 1988 novel Myal reveals the fatal injuries performed on the spirit by the colonizing efforts of others. In the novel, biracial Jamaican protagonist, Ella, experiences a profound devastation when her husband, Selwyn, creates a ‘white’ persona for her in his production Caribbean Nights and Days. In my thesis, I argue that Selwyn’s aggressions upon Ella’s spirit are only a fraction of the many conducted by those around her. Granted, while Selwyn’s play brings Ella’s zombified spirit into fruition with his distortion of her childhood— the Grovetown community, the Brassington’s and Mrs. Burns also aid in the process of zombifying Ella. The processes of zombification demonstrated through Ella’s steadily emptied biracial identity, independence and spirit occur through a gradual assimilation. Thus, by using the theoretical framework of exoticism and identity referenced in the work of Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Stuart Hall and others, the development and consequences surrounding zombification are examined

Determinants and mechanisms of smoking cessation: secondary outcomes analyses of a community smoking intervention in Boston public housing

Cigarette smoking is the leading cause of preventable morbidity and mortality in the United States. While smoking rates have steadily declined among the general population, smoking is becoming increasingly concentrated among socioeconomically disadvantaged groups due to higher initiation and lower cessation rates. This dissertation examines determinants and mechanisms of smoking cessation in the context of the Kick it for Good study (KIG), a community smoking intervention for Boston public housing residents. In the first study, we explored mediators and moderators of the KIG intervention effect on smoking cessation. We did not find any significant mediators for 3-mo cessation outcomes, although there was modest evidence for mediation by self-efficacy to quit at 12-months. We found living with other smokers and perceived stress were moderators of the KIG intervention effect on smoking cessation. In the second study, we examined predictors of attitudes and knowledge of nicotine replacement therapy (aNRT). We found discussing smoking cessation with a healthcare provider and use of nicotine replacement therapy (NRT) were associated with more positive attitudes and greater knowledge of NRT. The KIG intervention did not impact aNRT outcomes throughout the study period. In the third study, we examined the effect of depression on smoking cessation and whether this effect was moderated by social support. We found smokers with depression classified by the 10-item Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale (CES-D-10) were more likely to report smoking abstinence than those without depression. Social support did not moderate the effect of depression on cessation. We also conducted a sensitivity analysis to determine if the cutoff of 10 for the CES-D was valid in this population of low-income and racially/ethnically diverse smokers. We did not find evidence of depression misclassification by the CES-D-10, although there remains the need to validate the scale in socioeconomically disadvantaged populations. These findings provide valuable information on how smokers living in Boston public housing were able to achieve smoking abstinence in the context of a cessation intervention. The insights gained from these results may be applied to future intervention studies to help address the disparity in smoking rates among socioeconomically disadvantaged smokers

Political Orientations and the Influences of Cohort Membership and Time: Patterns of Change in Tolerance, Confidence, and the Strength of Party Affiliation

Seeking to better understand inter-generational continuity of political orientations, this study investigates the relationships among three archetypes of political orientations (tolerance of nonconformists, confidence in people running institutions and the strength of party affiliation) and enduring versus contemporaneous forces. Birth cohort membership and education are selected to represent the former and the time of survey and media use the latter. Three fundamentals of the present study differ from most prior research in this tradition: First, instead of focusing on different effect models, this study seeks to establish a conceptual structure among outcome variables. Second, the inter-generational continuity is assumed to be cohort-generational rather than lineage-generational. Third, it employs a year-cohort matrix rather than a standard cohort table as the central analytical scheme. Using the NORC General Social Surveys (1972-1993), the study tracks eight birth cohorts across twenty-two years to discern change patterns over time. Overall three archetypes and a sub-type emerged from the data. The two tolerance scales and five individual indicators are overwhelmingly affected by enduring forces of one\u27s birth cohort membership and education. Once formed, these orientations remain relatively stable through life. The patterns found among two confidence scales and six confidence indicators are those of a sweeping time effect. Cohorts\u27 confidence levels are closely bunched together and fluctuate from year to year. The strength of party affiliation represents a third archetype, in that we suspect the basic partisanship is fixed by formative experiences but the specific action of affiliating with either party is incited by environmental cues. The resulting change pattern is one of unsynchronized waves. The researcher found a fourth sub-type in confidence in the Supreme Court where enduring forces dictate the responses in the absence of significant contemporaneous forces. Education is reconfirmed as a quintessential force to be reckoned with when one studies political orientations. Large effects of education are found among all four types of variables, though the mechanism via which education affects each may differ

Constraining the Atmospheric Composition of the Day-Night Terminators of HD 189733b : Atmospheric Retrieval with Aerosols

A number of observations have shown that Rayleigh scattering by aerosols dominates the transmission spectrum of HD 189733b at wavelengths shortward of 1 $\mu$m. In this study, we retrieve a range of aerosol distributions consistent with transmission spectroscopy between 0.3-24 $\mu$m that were recently re-analyzed by Pont et al. (2013). To constrain the particle size and the optical depth of the aerosol layer, we investigate the degeneracies between aerosol composition, temperature, planetary radius, and molecular abundances that prevent unique solutions for transit spectroscopy. Assuming that the aerosol is composed of MgSiO$_3$, we suggest that a vertically uniform aerosol layer over all pressures with a monodisperse particle size smaller than about 0.1 $\mu$m and an optical depth in the range 0.002-0.02 at 1 $\mu$m provides statistically meaningful solutions for the day/night terminator regions of HD 189733b. Generally, we find that a uniform aerosol layer provide adequate fits to the data if the optical depth is less than 0.1 and the particle size is smaller than 0.1 $\mu$m, irrespective of the atmospheric temperature, planetary radius, aerosol composition, and gaseous molecules. Strong constraints on the aerosol properties are provided by spectra at wavelengths shortward of 1 $\mu$m as well as longward of 8 $\mu$m, if the aerosol material has absorption features in this region. We show that these are the optimal wavelengths for quantifying the effects of aerosols, which may guide the design of future space observations. The present investigation indicates that the current data offer sufficient information to constrain some of the aerosol properties of HD189733b, but the chemistry in the terminator regions remains uncertain.Comment: Transferred to ApJ and accepted. 11 pages, 10 figures, 1 tabl

On the potential of the EChO mission to characterise gas giant atmospheres

Space telescopes such as EChO (Exoplanet Characterisation Observatory) and JWST (James Webb Space Telescope) will be important for the future study of extrasolar planet atmospheres. Both of these missions are capable of performing high sensitivity spectroscopic measurements at moderate resolutions in the visible and infrared, which will allow the characterisation of atmospheric properties using primary and secondary transit spectroscopy. We use the NEMESIS radiative transfer and retrieval tool (Irwin et al. 2008, Lee et al. 2012) to explore the potential of the proposed EChO mission to solve the retrieval problem for a range of H2-He planets orbiting different stars. We find that EChO should be capable of retrieving temperature structure to ~200 K precision and detecting H2O, CO2 and CH4 from a single eclipse measurement for a hot Jupiter orbiting a Sun-like star and a hot Neptune orbiting an M star, also providing upper limits on CO and NH3. We provide a table of retrieval precisions for these quantities in each test case. We expect around 30 Jupiter-sized planets to be observable by EChO; hot Neptunes orbiting M dwarfs are rarer, but we anticipate observations of at least one similar planet.Comment: 22 pages, 30 figures, 4 tables. Accepted for publication in MNRA

A T 2 D TDNMR study of skin

T2D TDNMR data is used to improve the assignment of the location of water in in-vitro pig skin. Whilst the corresponding 1d experiments report broad distributions of T2 and D respectively, two water components are resolved in the T2D data and are assigned as intraand extra-cellular water by considering the peak intensities in; whole defatted skin, a dermatomed slice of the top 0.4mm (mostly epidermis) and the remaining sub layer (dermis). The relative proportion of fast relaxing/fast diffusing water is largest in the epidermis section (which has a close packed cellular structure) so is assigned as intra-cellular water. Whilst there is more slowly relaxing/slowly diffusing water in the dermis section (which has fewer cells within a collagen network) so this is assigned as extra-cellular water. The observation that intra-cellular water relaxes fastest, suggests that the skin cells contain more exchangeable species, through which the water can relax, than the extra-cellular network. This assignment is supported when resolution is lost on repeated freezing, i.e. the cell walls are broken. Resolution is also lost on increasing the diffusion time from 50 to 100 and 150ms. This is likely partly due to relaxation but also due to diffusion through the cell membranes during the experiment and gives a measure of the cell wall permeability

A Patient with Constitutional Ring 1 Chromosome Characterized by SNP Array CGH

We present a male patient with constitutional ring 1 chromosome and subsequent 6 Mb deletion at 1q43q44. The patient displays overlapping clinical features with reported patients with ring 1 chromosome and 1q43q44 microdeletion syndrome. To our knowledge, this is the first patient with ring 1 chromosome characterized by comparative genomic hybridization