‘It’s not over yet!’: Workplace experiences of lesbian public school teachers

This qualitative study explores the workplace experiences of 12 lesbian public school teachers in Southern New Jersey. Through in-depth, semi-structured interviews, teachers discuss the tensions, contradictions, rewards, and challenges of teaching at this unique historical moment when laws, policies, social practices, and attitudes are in flux. Queer theory guided the development of the study and provides the primary analytical lens for examining and interpreting data. Findings cluster around the following interrelated themes: 1) queer teachable moments; 2) being ‘that’ teacher; 3) self-disclosure, and 4) It’s not over yet. Findings provide insight into what lesbian teachers are saying about their experiences, their teaching environments, and popular perceptions of difference. These voices, largely unheard, bring insight to teaching as a profession

The mobius strip: Team teachers reflecting on disability studies and critical thinking

This essay combines personal and academic reflection on teaching critical thinking through a disability studies perspective, and is illustrated by our experiences and insights teaching an undergraduate, general education course. We began with the understanding that disability studies is itself a critical engagement with a dominant ideology of bodily normalcy, value, access and power. We perhaps assumed that to teach disability studies at all would already entail critical thinking. But our experiences teaching this class challenged our beginning assumptions and raised the following questions, which form the focus for this discussion: Do disability studies classes (or any classes for that matter) enact critical thinking agendas by their content alone? What is the role of DS pedagogy in the goal of teaching critical thinking, and how can the teaching itself work to facilitate this goal by all engaged parties? We suggest that teachers incorporating DS consider the concept of critical progress rather than assuming that critical thinking is an end goal

Human Atlas: A Tool for Mapping Social Networks

Most social network analyses focus on online social networks. While these networks encode important aspects of our lives they fail to capture many real-world connections. Most of these connections are, in fact, public and known to the members of the community. Mapping them is a task very suitable for crowdsourcing: it is easily broken down in many simple and independent subtasks. Due to the nature of social networks|presence of highly connected nodes and tightly knit groups|if we allow users to map their immediate connections and the connections between them, we will need few participants to map most connections within a community. To this end, we built the Human Atlas, a web-based tool for mapping social networks. To test it, we partially mapped the social network of the MIT Media Lab. We ran a user study and invited members of the community to use the tool. In 4.6 man-hours, 22 participants mapped 984 connections within the lab, demonstrating the potential of the tool

The selection of an appropriate count data model for modelling health insurance and health care demand: Case of Indonesia

This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/) which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.We apply several estimators to Indonesian household data to estimate the relationship between health insurance and the number of outpatient visits to public and private providers. Once endogeneity of insurance is taken into account, there is a 63 percent increase in the average number of public visits by the beneficiaries of mandatory insurance for civil servants. Individuals' decisions to make first contact with private providers is affected by private insurance membership. However, insurance status does not make any difference for the number of future outpatient visits

Phyllotaxis involves auxin drainage through leaf primordia

The spatial arrangement of leaves and flowers around the stem, known as phyllotaxis, is controlled by an auxin-dependent reiterative mechanism that leads to regular spacing of the organs and thereby to remarkably precise phyllotactic patterns. The mechanism is based on the active cellular transport of the phytohormone auxin by cellular influx and efflux carriers, such as AUX1 and PIN1. Their important role in phyllotaxis is evident from mutant phenotypes, but their exact roles in space and time are difficult to address due to the strong pleiotropic phenotypes of most mutants in phyllotaxis. Models of phyllotaxis invoke the accumulation of auxin at leaf initials and removal of auxin through their developing vascular strand, the midvein. We have developed a precise microsurgical tool to ablate the midvein at high spatial and temporal resolution in order to test its function in leaf formation and phyllotaxis. Using amplified femtosecond laser pulses, we ablated the internal tissues in young leaf primordia of tomato (Solanum lycopersicum) without damaging the overlying L1 and L2 layers. Our results show that ablation of the future midvein leads to a transient accumulation of auxin in the primordia and to an increase in their width. Phyllotaxis was transiently affected after midvein ablations, but readjusted after two plastochrons. These results indicate that the developing midvein is involved in the basipetal transport of auxin through young primordia, which contributes to phyllotactic spacing and stability

The emission line near 1319 A in solar and stellar spectra

An emission line near 1319 A is one of the strongest unidentified lines in the ultraviolet spectra of cool dwarf stars. In most line lists it is identified as a transition in N I, although its intensity would then be anomalous and the observed wavelength does not fit precisely that expected for N I. The line is also observed in cool giant stars. The measured wavelength of the line in stellar spectra is 1318.94 (+,- 0.01) A. Observations of giant stars provide further evidence that this line is not due to N I. It is proposed that this line is a decay from a previously unknown level in S I, which lies above the first ionization limit. This is identified with the 3d singlet D (odd parity) term. The previous tentative assignment of this term to the S I line at 1309.3 A then needs to be revised. The 1309.3 A line has been identified here for the first time in an astrophysical source. The singlet D (odd parity) level could, in principle, be populated by collisions from nearby autoionizing levels that have large number-densities, through population by di-electronic capture. Spin-orbit interaction with the autoionizing triplet D (odd parity) term might also lead to di-electronic capture into the singlet D (odd parity) level. A line at 1309.87 A observed in cool giant stars is identified as a transition in P II, pumped by the O I resonance lines.Comment: 9 pages, 3 figures, to be published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Societ

Light scattering in Cooper-paired Fermi atoms

We present a detailed theoretical study of light scattering off superfluid trapped Fermi gas of atoms at zero temperature. We apply Nambu-Gorkov formalism of superconductivity to calculate the response function of superfluid gas due to stimulated light scattering taking into account the final state interactions. The polarization of light has been shown to play a significant role in response of Cooper-pairs in the presence of a magnetic field. Particularly important is a scheme of polarization-selective light scattering by either spin-component of the Cooper-pairs leading to the single-particle excitations of one spin-component only. These excitations have a threshold of $2\Delta$ where $\Delta$ is the superfluid gap energy. Furthermore, polarization-selective light scattering allows for unequal energy and momentum transfer to the two partner atoms of a Cooper-pair. In the regime of low energy ($<< 2\Delta$) and low momentum ($<2\Delta/(\hbar v_F)$, $v_F$ being the Fermi velocity) transfer, a small difference in momentum transfers to the two spin-components may be useful in exciting Bogoliubov-Anderson phonon mode. We present detailed results on the dynamic structure factor (DSF) deduced from the response function making use of generalized fluctuation-dissipation theorem. Model calculations using local density approximation for trapped superfluid Fermi gas shows that when the energy transfer is less than $2\Delta_0$, where $\Delta_0$ refers to the gap at the trap center, DSF as a function of energy transfer has reduced gradient compared to that of normal Fermi gas.Comment: single column, 26 pages, 10 figures; Title changed, discussion on experimental implication added in concluding section. Accepted for publication in J. Phys.

On the solubility of wood in non-derivatising ionic liquids

Peer reviewe

The Art of Designing DNA Nanostructures with CAD Software

Since the arrival of DNA nanotechnology nearly 40 years ago, the field has progressed from its beginnings of envisioning rather simple DNA structures having a branched, multi-strand architecture into creating beautifully complex structures comprising hundreds or even thousands of unique strands, with the possibility to exactly control the positions down to the molecular level. While the earliest construction methodologies, such as simple Holliday junctions or tiles, could reasonably be designed on pen and paper in a short amount of time, the advent of complex techniques, such as DNA origami or DNA bricks, require software to reduce the time required and propensity for human error within the design process. Where available, readily accessible design software catalyzes our ability to bring techniques to researchers in diverse fields and it has helped to speed the penetration of methods, such as DNA origami, into a wide range of applications from biomedicine to photonics. Here, we review the historical and current state of CAD software to enable a variety of methods that are fundamental to using structural DNA technology. Beginning with the first tools for predicting sequence-based secondary structure of nucleotides, we trace the development and significance of different software packages to the current state-of-the-art, with a particular focus on programs that are open source