When You Can\u27t Quite Place Me

I’m relatively used to being asked the question “what are you?” It’s a strange question because it can mean so many different things. I’m a human? I identify as a female. I’m a college student. I’m an American. But I never say those things, because what they’re really asking is this: what race are you? [excerpt

Lifting A Weight Off My Shoulders

It’s a familiar scene for anyone who’s entered the Jaeger Center. You walk past the entrance desk, past the rock wall, the blue mats with some students stretching; there, the cardio machines, some soccer players cycling on the bikes, some girls on the elliptical machines and scattered on the treadmills, a guy on the stairmaster, a teacher jogging. Finally, you reach the end, the huge space filled with free weights, barbells, a leg press machine, and some pull up bars. You pay attention less to the selection of weights then who occupies this space: men, lots of them. At any time of day or night, you can find several male students working out here. What’s much less common, one might even say rare, is to see women in this space. Certainly, there are some of us, particularly in groups or entering with a sports team. But the ratio is uneven, to say the least. [excerpt

Let\u27s Talk About Sex

It’s a typical morning: you wake up, stretch, get out of bed, and check your phone; there’s a notification. Another man has been accused of sexual violence. The #MeToo movement has sparked a national and global conversation about sexism in all its forms. Powerful men like Kevin Spacey, Harvey Weinstein, and Matt Lauer, among many others, have been publicly ousted for their predatory behavior. One of the latest men to be called out is Aziz Ansari, a writer, actor, comedian, and self-proclaimed feminist. However, his behavior, unlike these other men, was not universally decried. [excerpt

Object to Your Affection

Recently a guy in one of my classes defended objectification of women on the grounds that if he cares for a girl, he will treat her like he treats his most treasured objects; he used his coat as an example. He said that he loved his coat, he wouldn’t let it touch the ground, and he took great care of it; he would do the same for any girl he cared about, for “his girl.” [excerpt

Your Masculinity Does Not Make You My Judge and Jury

For me, Springfest 2016 began with the purchasing of a pack of cigarettes. A bad decision, surely, but not surprising for a weekend that is usually filled with them. Before walking over to a party with my friends that weekend, I tucked the cigarettes securely in the back pocket of my shorts. The scene that unfolded as I walked into my friend’s apartment was a typical one: a rush of people, dim lighting, and loud, pulsing music. I tried to walk through the crowd quickly, waving and shouting a quick “hey” to friends here and there as I passed by. Suddenly, I felt someone take something out of my back pocket. I panicked at first, fearing it was my phone, and then felt a flash of shame as I realized it was actually my pack of cigarettes. [excerpt

No Justice Given

I’ve spent a considerable amount of time analyzing privilege and looking at how systems in the United States often work to further oppress the vulnerable, while keeping the privileged in power. I have taken note of how my light skin, middle-class background, and young, abled body has given me opportunities and advantages others don’t have. But, I hadn’t thought too deeply about the privileges that come with being a natural born, American citizen. I’ve stood up to salute the flag every day in school, watched fireworks on the fourth of July, and generally felt proud to be an American; but, this doesn’t mean I really understood the advantages I’d been afforded based on where I happened to be born. After going on an immersion trip to the U.S.-Mexican border, I understand these benefits much more deeply. [excerpt

Lensing dispersion of supernova flux: a probe of nonlinear structure growth

The scatter in the apparent magnitude of type Ia supernovae induced by stochastic gravitational lensing is highly dependent on the nonlinear growth of cosmological structure. In this paper, we show that such a dependence can potentially be employed to gain significant information about the mass clustering at small scales. While the mass clustering ultimately hinges on cosmology, here we demonstrate that, upon obtaining more precise observational measurements through future cosmological surveys, the lensing dispersion can very effectively be used to gain information on the poorly understood astrophysical aspects of structure formation, such as the clumpiness of dark matter halos and the importance of gas physics and star formation into shaping the large-scale structure. In order to illustrate this point we verify that even the tentative current measurements of the lensing dispersion performed on the Supernova Legacy Survey sample favor a scenario where virialized structures are somewhat less compact than predicted by $n-$body cosmological simulations. Moreover, we are also able to put lower limits on the slope of the concentration-mass relation. By artificially reducing the statistical observational error we argue that with forthcoming data the stochastic lensing dispersion will allow one to importantly improve constraints on the baryonic physics at work during the assembly of cosmological structure.Comment: 13 pages, 6 figures. Accepted for publication by MNRA

Surgeon\u27s perspective on short bowel syndrome: Where are we?

Short bowel syndrome (SBS) is due to a massive loss of small bowel: the reduction of gut function is below the minimum necessary to maintain health (in adults) and growth (in children) so intravenous supplementation is required. Parenteral nutrition represents the milestone of treatment and surgical attempts should be limited only when the residual bowel is sufficient to increase absorption, reducing diarrhea and slowing the transit time of nutrients, water and electrolytes. The surgical techniques lengthen the bowel (tapering it) or reverse a segment of it: developed in children, nowadays are popular also among adults. The issue is mainly represented by the residual length of the small bowel where ileum has shown increased adaptive function than jejunum, but colon should be considered because of its importance in the digestive process. These concepts have been translated also in intestinal transplantation, where a colonic graft is nowadays widely used and the terminal ileum is the selected segment for a living-related donation. The whole replacement by a bowel or multivisceral transplant is still affected by poor long term outcome and must be reserved to a select population of SBS patients, affected by intestinal failure associated with irreversible complications of parenteral nutrition

Solution of Two-Body Bound State Problems with Confining Potentials

The homogeneous Lippmann-Schwinger integral equation is solved in momentum space by using confining potentials. Since the confining potentials are unbounded at large distances, they lead to a singularity at small momentum. In order to remove the singularity of the kernel of the integral equation, a regularized form of the potentials is used. As an application of the method, the mass spectra of heavy quarkonia, mesons consisting from heavy quark and antiquark $(\Upsilon(b\bar{b}), \psi(c\bar{c}))$, are calculated for linear and quadratic confining potentials. The results are in good agreement with configuration space and experimental results.Comment: 6 pages, 5 table

Relativistic three-particle dynamical equations: II. Application to the trinucleon system

We calculate the contribution of relativistic dynamics on the neutron-deuteron scattering length and triton binding energy employing five sets trinucleon potential models and four types of three-dimensional relativistic three-body equations suggested in the preceding paper. The relativistic correction to binding energy may vary a lot and even change sign depending on the relativistic formulation employed. The deviations of these observables from those obtained in nonrelativistic models follow the general universal trend of deviations introduced by off- and on-shell variations of two- and three-nucleon potentials in a nonrelativistic model calculation. Consequently, it will be difficult to separate unambiguously the effect of off- and on-shell variations of two- and three- nucleon potentials on low-energy three-nucleon observables from the effect of relativistic dynamics.Comment: 15 pages, [Text and one postscript figure included, e-mail: [email protected]; Fax: 55-11-288 8224] Report # IFT P.069/9