Southern Disclosure: One Southern-and-Queer Middle School Teacher’s Narrative

This narrative inquiry is an autoethnographical account of one queer-identified middle school teacher\u27s career trajectory in the southern United States, and his struggle to navigate disclosure of his identity to students. Using a qualitative lens, the authors provide reasoning for the importance of middle school educators to have the ability to disclose their identities to students in order to cultivate an environment that is receptive to LGBTQ+ adolescents

Type 2 diabetes in Tirana City, Albania: a rapid increase in a country in transition.

AIMS: To determine how the prevalence of Type 2 diabetes mellitus has changed in Tirana, the capital of Albania, over 20 years. METHODS: Cluster sampling was used to select 700 households including 1540 adults 25 years of age and over in Tirana City, Albania in 2001. RESULTS: Of 1540 potential subjects, 1120 participated (response rate 72.7%). Using the 1985 WHO criteria to provide comparability with earlier data, the overall prevalence of Type 2 diabetes mellitus in the age group 25+ was 6.3% (95% confidence interval 4.8-7.7); 6.9% (4.8-9.1%) male; 5.6% (3.8-7.5%) female. The age-adjusted prevalence in those aged 25+ was 5.4%. Of respondents, 3.4% were known to have diabetes, and 2.9% were newly identified through the survey. The prevalence of diabetes increased with age, although among men there was a slight decline after age 65. Impaired glucose tolerance was found in a further 2.9% of respondents, again increasing with age. The prevalence of diabetes has increased significantly since 1980, doubling in the age group 50+. Use of the 1999 WHO diagnostic criteria produces a higher unadjusted prevalence, at 9.7% (8-11.4%). In a logistic regression model, obesity and family history were independent determinants of the probability of having diabetes. Among those known to have diabetes, control was poor. CONCLUSIONS: The prevalence of diabetes in Albania has increased rapidly, consistent with what has been seen in other countries undergoing rapid modernization. It is likely to increase further in the future, with important implications for health policy

Baseline design of the filters for the LAD detector on board LOFT

The Large Observatory for X-ray Timing (LOFT) was one of the M3 missions selected for the phase A study in the ESA's Cosmic Vision program. LOFT is designed to perform high-time-resolution X-ray observations of black holes and neutron stars. The main instrument on the LOFT payload is the Large Area Detector (LAD), a collimated experiment with a nominal effective area of ~10 m 2 @ 8 keV, and a spectral resolution of ~240 eV in the energy band 2-30 keV. These performances are achieved covering a large collecting area with more than 2000 large-area Silicon Drift Detectors (SDDs) each one coupled to a collimator based on lead-glass micro-channel plates. In order to reduce the thermal load onto the detectors, which are open to Sky, and to protect them from out of band radiation, optical-thermal filter will be mounted in front of the SDDs. Different options have been considered for the LAD filters for best compromise between high quantum efficiency and high mechanical robustness. We present the baseline design of the optical-thermal filters, show the nominal performances, and present preliminary test results performed during the phase A study.Comment: Proc. SPIE 9144, Space Telescopes and Instrumentation 2014: Ultraviolet to Gamma Ray, 91446

How Far is Too Far? Understanding Identity and Overconformity in Collegiate Wrestlers

Although athletes who endanger the health and well-being of others are publicly shamed, those who endanger their own health and well-being in an effort to embody the sport ideal are often praised. Athletes are expected to distinguish themselves from their peers, make sacrifices for the good of the game, play through pain and injury, and push physical and mental limits on the path to achieve their goals (Hughes & Coakley, 1991). Collectively, these expectations are known as the sport ethic and while they are considered part of sport culture, athletes who overconform to them may engage in behaviors that risk their health and well-being including disordered eating, chronic overtraining, and substance use. Although some research has investigated overconforming athletes\u27 behaviors, overconformity to the sport ethic remains largely under researched (Coakley, 2015), despite an increasing prevalence of overconforming behaviors in the college athlete population. In an effort to examine athlete identity and deviant overconformity, the current study was designed within a psychocultural life story framework (Peacock & Holland, 1993), using a constructivist-interpretivist paradigm (Ponterotto, 2005). Three collegiate wrestlers were interviewed using a life story interview protocol (adapted from McAdams & Guo, 2014) and a semi-structured interview. Participants also completed the Athlete Identity Measurement Scale (Brewer & Cornelius, 2001), the Social Motivation Orientation in Sport Scale (Allen, 2003), and a brief written expression exercise to provide context for participant narratives. Data were analyzed using provisional (Saldana, 2014) and narrative coding (Smith & Sparkes, 2009b) and represented through the use of a word cloud (McNaught & Lam, 2010) and creative nonfiction (Caulley, 2008; Sparkes & Smith, 2014). Participants described a process of overconformity to the sport ethic that supported and extended previous research (Donnelly & Young, 1988; Hughes & Coakley, 1991). Results indicated that the wrestlers in the current study believed that, because athletes must push boundaries in order to find success, they cannot ever go too far . Moreover, they reported that their athlete identity held significant personal and social meaning to the extent that they willingly engaged in behaviors associated with overconformity in previous literature (e.g., Atkinson, 2011; Johns, 1998; Waldron & Krane, 2005). Recommendations for future research in this line of inquiry include similar studies with other sport populations (e.g., other sports, other competitive levels, other cultural backgrounds) and the development of a measure to identify athletes\u27 degree of deviant overconformity. Practitioners may use this research to better conceptualize the health-compromising behaviors their clients use to obtain athletic success, which may improve treatment planning and outcome goals

Calculation of accurate permanent dipole moments of the lowest 1,3Σ+^{1,3} \Sigma^+ states of heteronuclear alkali dimers using extended basis sets

The obtention of ultracold samples of dipolar molecules is a current challenge which requires an accurate knowledge of their electronic properties to guide the ongoing experiments. In this paper, we systematically investigate the ground state and the lowest triplet state of mixed alkali dimers (involving Li, Na, K, Rb, Cs) using a standard quantum chemistry approach based on pseudopotentials for atomic core representation, gaussian basis sets, and effective terms for core polarization effects. We emphasize on the convergence of the results for permanent dipole moments regarding the size of the gaussian basis set, and we discuss their predicted accuracy by comparing to other theoretical calculations or available experimental values. We also revisit the difficulty to compare computed potential curves among published papers, due to the differences in the modelization of core-core interaction.Comment: accepted to J. Chem. Phy