The prevalence and practice of self-injury: a sociological enquiry.

The widespread practice of non-suicidal self-injury suggests that it might no longer be reasonable to frame such behaviours as individual pathologies and highlights the need to understand such acts as sociological phenomena instead. This dissertation therefore explored the core elements of self-injury such as the self, the body, and meanings ascribed to acts of injuring the self/body, in relation to forms of sociation. Focusing on intent and aetiology, this qualitative enquiry used an interpretive mode of explanation, and collected data via indepth face-to-face interviews from a characteristically diverse community sample of fifteen participants. Findings indicated that respondents' aetiologies of self-injury were located in social interactions characterised by abuse, neglect, bullying, and invalidation. Individuals who perceived themselves as worthless and unlovable objects punished themselves, or branded themselves as failures. Paradoxically, sufficient castigation averted the complete annihilation of the existential self. Findings concur with previous studies which reported that, at its deepest level, self-injury is antithetical to suicide. This study also highlighted the body's communicative role in the symbolic expression of traumatic experiences, and emphasised its physiological role in (a) emotion regulation and (b) self-injury's propensity to become addictive. From a sociological perspective, instant emotion regulation via self-injury allowed individuals to avoid social stigma; well managed social performances in turn protected social bonds. Although self-injury constitutes a maladaptive coping mechanism, its reported physiological, psychological and social gains are significant and need to be considered in intervention programmes and policy. This dissertation therefore makes two recommendations: firstly, restorative practices should be reinstituted, particularly in schools; secondly, the growing and alarming trend of copycat behaviours reported in children and young teens needs to be researched further in relation to the mediation, ideation and imitation of self-injurious behaviours

Extrapolated High-Order Propagators for Path Integral Monte Carlo Simulations

We present a new class of high-order imaginary time propagators for path-integral Monte Carlo simulations by subtracting lower order propagators. By requiring all terms of the extrapolated propagator be sampled uniformly, the subtraction only affects the potential part of the path integral. The negligible violation of positivity of the resulting path integral at small time steps has no discernable affect on the accuracy of our method. Thus in principle arbitrarily high order algorithms can be devised for path-integral Monte Carlo simulations. We verify this claim is by showing that fourth, sixth, and eighth order convergence can indeed be achieved in solving for the ground state of strongly interacting quantum many-body systems such as bulk liquid $^4$He.Comment: 9 pages and 3 figures. Submitted to J. Chem. Phy

Early Life Relict Feature in Peptide Mass Distribution

Molecular mass of a biomolecule is characterized in mass spectroscopy by the monoisitopic mass M~mono~ and the average isotopic mass M~av~. We found that peptide masses mapped on a plane made by two parameters derived from M~mono~ and M~av~ form a peculiar global feature in form of a band-gap 5-7 ppm wide stretching across the whole peptide galaxy, with a narrow (FWHM 0.2 ppm) line in the centre. The a priori probability of such a feature to emerge by chance is less than 1:100. Peptides contributing to the central line have elemental compositions following the rules S=0; Z = (2C - N - H)/2 =0, which nine out of 20 amino acid residues satisfy. The relative abundances of amino acids in the peptides contributing to the central line correlate with the consensus order of emergence of these amino acids, with ancient amino acids being overrepresented in on-line peptides. Thus the central line is a relic of ancient life, and likely a signature of its emergence in abiotic synthesis. The linear correlation between M~av~ and M~mono~ reduces the complexity of polypeptide molecules, which may have increased the rate of their abiotic production. This, in turn may have influenced the selection of these amino acid residues for terrestrial life. Assuming the line feature is not spurious, life has emerged from elements with isotopic abundances very close to terrestrial levels, which rules out most of the Galaxy

Notes on Amandinea Petermannii Comb.nov. (Physciaceae) from Antarctica

The new combination Amandinea petermannii (Hue) Matzer, Mayrh. & Scheidegger; is proposed. The taxonomy, morphology, anatomy, chemistry, ecology and distribution of this lichen are discussed. Rinodina convoluta D. C. Lindsay is synonym of A. petermanni

Macroscopic Elastic Properties of Textured ZrN--AlN Polycrystalline Aggregates: From Ab initio Calculations to Grain-Scale Interactions

Despite the fast development of computational materials modelling, theoretical description of macroscopic elastic properties of textured polycrystalline aggregates starting from basic principles remains a challenging task. In this communication we use a supercell-based approach to obtain the elastic properties of random solid solution cubic ZrAlN system as a function of the metallic sublattice composition and texture descriptors. The employed special quasi-random structures are optimised not only with respect to short range order parameters, but also to make the three cubic directions $[1\,0\,0]$, $[0\,1\,0]$, and $[0\,0\,1]$ as similar as possible. In this way, only a small spread of elastic constants tensor components is achieved and an optimum trade-off between modelling of chemical disorder and computational limits regarding the supercell size is achieved. The single crystal elastic constants are shown to vary smoothly with composition, yielding $x\approx0.4$-0.5 an alloy constitution with an almost isotropic response. Consequently, polycrystals with this composition are suggested to have Young's modulus independent on the actual microstructure. This is indeed confirmed by explicit calculations of polycrystal elastic properties, both within the isotropic aggregate limit, as well as with fibre textures with various orientations and sharpness. It turns out, that for low AlN mole fractions, the spread of the possible Young's moduli data caused by the texture variation can be larger than 100 GPa. Consequently, our discussion of Young's modulus data of cubic ZrAlN contains also the evaluation of the texture typical for thin films.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figures, 3 table

Towards predictive modelling of near-edge structures in electron energy loss spectra of AlN based ternary alloys

Although electron energy loss near edge structure analysis provides a tool for experimentally probing unoccupied density of states, a detailed comparison with simulations is necessary in order to understand the origin of individual peaks. This paper presents a density functional theory based technique for predicting the N K-edge for ternary (quasi-binary) nitrogen alloys by adopting a core hole approach, a methodology that has been successful for binary nitride compounds. It is demonstrated that using the spectra of binary compounds for optimising the core hole charge ($0.35\,\mathrm{e}$ for cubic Ti$_{1-x}$Al$_x$N and $0.45\,\mathrm{e}$ for wurtzite Al$_x$Ga$_{1-x}$N), the predicted spectra evolutions of the ternary alloys agree well with the experiments. The spectral features are subsequently discussed in terms of the electronic structure and bonding of the alloys.Comment: 11 pages, 9 figures, 1 tabl

The low energy spectrum of finite size metallic SWNTs

The electronic spectrum of metallic finite-size single-wall carbon nanotubes at low energies is derived. It is based on a tight-binding description for the interacting p_{z} electrons. Not only the forward scattering parts of the Coulomb interaction, which are diagonalized by bosonization, are considered, but also all other processes becoming relevant for small diameter tubes. As a consequence of the substructure of the underlying lattice, a spin 1 triplet is found as ground state if the exchange splitting is larger than the branch mismatch, a spin 0 singlet otherwise. Moreover the excitation spectrum is calculated

World caf\ue9 method to engage smart energy-district project partners in assessing urban co-benefits

Urban energy-district projects introduce outstanding technological innovation in buildings and energy systems increasing sustainability in city neighborhoods. Such projects generate additional co-benefits for the city beyond changes in physical elements and development of social and institutional relationships (e.g. local employment, environmental quality, public health, property values, innovation attitude, etc.). Since exceeding main declared goals or not always clearly foreseen in the early project phase, these co-benefits are often not properly understood and considered. However, only their explicit recognition will make possible their inclusion in the assessment of the whole project\u2019s performance. From these considerations, this study faces the issue of engaging project partners in assessing co-benefits in order to consider a broad spectrum of relevant, positive effects in the evaluation process. Group knowledge and group thinking of this complex topic are investigated through the world caf\ue9 method, providing an atmosphere of trust and open discussions among participants. This empirical work lays the foundations to go beyond the mere economic measure as the sole criterion for assessing project effects, also including changes in end-user behavior and intangible asset