Pica: Consideration of a Historical and Current Problem with Racial Ethnic/ Cultural Overtones

Pica is an eating disorder that affects an individual who experiences a craving that is satisfied by ingestion of either unusually large amounts of selected food items (e.g., baking soda) or repeated ingestion of nonfood items (e.g., clay, laundry starch). Pica is more than an anomaly of human behavior; it is an eating disorder that carries all the risks that are inherent to impaired nutrition, including death. Pica can be dated to antiquity, yet there is little question that it continues as a current practice. As an eating disorder, pica has implications for persons who are in positions to influence human behavior, those in education and social service as well as those in clinical settings

[Review of] Wen-Shing Tseng and David Y. H. Wu, eds. Chinese Culture and Mental Health

Tseng and Wu have performed a creditable task in editing this book that involved twenty-nine delegates from the Conference on Chinese Culture and Mental Health (Hawaii, 1982). Their purpose was to have insiders produce a definitive work on the Chinese culture and its interaction with the mental component of health. The Chinese are described in the preface as having a history of at least 5000 years of civilization, with China comprising ... one quarter of the world\u27s people, but having people of the Chinese culture who live in various geographical areas, including ... Mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia, Canada, and the United States

Eating disorders in the time of COVID-19.

We have all been stunned by the speed of this viral pandemic. At the time of writing, one fifth of the world is under lockdown. The main foci have been on the public health effort to contain the spread of the virus, and the care of individuals with acute infection. We, in eating disorders, must have a broader brief. Not only must we help care for those sufferers who contract COVID-19, we must also address the impact-psychological, financial and social - on those that do not. The peculiarities of COVID-19 and the reaction of the public and governments to it, have particular relevance for people living with an eating disorder and those who care for them

Determination of the Equation of State of Dense Matter

Nuclear collisions can compress nuclear matter to densities achieved within neutron stars and within core-collapse supernovae. These dense states of matter exist momentarily before expanding. We analyzed the flow of matter to extract pressures in excess of 10^34 pascals, the highest recorded under laboratory-controlled conditions. Using these analyses, we rule out strongly repulsive nuclear equations of state from relativistic mean field theory and weakly repulsive equations of state with phase transitions at densities less than three times that of stable nuclei, but not equations of state softened at higher densities because of a transformation to quark matter.Comment: 26 pages, 6 figures; final versio

Event-by-event shape and flow fluctuations of relativistic heavy-ion collision fireballs

Heavy-ion collisions create deformed quark-gluon plasma (QGP) fireballs which explode anisotropically. The viscosity of the fireball matter determines its ability to convert the initial spatial deformation into momentum anisotropies that can be measured in the final hadron spectra. A quantitatively precise empirical extraction of the QGP viscosity thus requires a good understanding of the initial fireball deformation. This deformation fluctuates from event to event, and so does the finally observed momentum anisotropy. We present a harmonic decomposition of the initial fluctuations in shape and orientation of the fireball and perform event-by-event ideal fluid dynamical simulations to extract the resulting fluctuations in the magnitude and direction of the corresponding harmonic components of the final anisotropic flow at midrapidity. The final harmonic flow coefficients are found to depend non-linearly on the initial harmonic eccentricity coefficients. We show that, on average, initial density fluctuations suppress the buildup of elliptic flow relative to what one obtains from a smooth initial profile of the same eccentricity, and discuss implications for the phenomenological extraction of the QGP shear viscosity from experimental elliptic flow data.Comment: 22 pages, 17 figures. Relative to [v2], minor changes in text. Fig. 9 redrawn. This version accepted by Phys. Rev.

Pointwise convergence of vector-valued Fourier series

We prove a vector-valued version of Carleson's theorem: Let Y=[X,H]_t be a complex interpolation space between a UMD space X and a Hilbert space H. For p\in(1,\infty) and f\in L^p(T;Y), the partial sums of the Fourier series of f converge to f pointwise almost everywhere. Apparently, all known examples of UMD spaces are of this intermediate form Y=[X,H]_t. In particular, we answer affirmatively a question of Rubio de Francia on the pointwise convergence of Fourier series of Schatten class valued functions.Comment: 26 page

Formation time distribution of dark matter haloes: theories versus N-body simulations

This paper uses numerical simulations to test the formation time distribution of dark matter haloes predicted by the analytic excursion set approaches. The formation time distribution is closely linked to the conditional mass function and this test is therefore an indirect probe of this distribution. The excursion set models tested are the extended Press-Schechter (EPS) model, the ellipsoidal collapse (EC) model, and the non-spherical collapse boundary (NCB) model. Three sets of simulations (6 realizations) have been used to investigate the halo formation time distribution for halo masses ranging from dwarf-galaxy like haloes ($M=10^{-3} M_*$, where $M_*$ is the characteristic non-linear mass scale) to massive haloes of $M=8.7 M_*$. None of the models can match the simulation results at both high and low redshift. In particular, dark matter haloes formed generally earlier in our simulations than predicted by the EPS model. This discrepancy might help explain why semi-analytic models of galaxy formation, based on EPS merger trees, under-predict the number of high redshift galaxies compared with recent observations.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures, accepted for publication in MNRA