‘Repeat abortion’, a phrase to be avoided? Qualitative insights into labelling and stigma

Background In recent years there has been growing international interest in identifying risk factors associated with ‘repeat abortion’, and developing public health initiatives that might reduce the rate. This article draws on a research study looking at young women's abortion experience in England and Wales. The study was commissioned with a specific focus on women who had undergone more than one abortion. We examine what may influence women's post-abortion reproductive behaviour, in addition to exploring abortion-related stigma, in the light of participants' own narratives. Study design Mixed-methods research study: a quantitative survey of 430 women aged 16–24 years, and in-depth qualitative interviews with 36 women who had undergone one or more abortions. This article focuses on the qualitative data from two subsets of young women: those we interviewed twice (n=17) and those who had experienced more than one unintended/unwanted pregnancy (n=15). Results The qualitative research findings demonstrate the complexity of women's contraceptive histories and reproductive lives, and thus the inherent difficulty of establishing causal patterns for more than one abortion, beyond the obvious observation that contraception was not used, or not used effectively. Women who had experienced more than one abortion did, however, express intensified abortion shame. Conclusions This article argues that categorising women who have an abortion in different ways depending on previous episodes is not helpful. It may also be damaging, and generate increased stigma, for women who have more than one abortion

Low-Threshold Electrically Pumps Vertical-Cavity Surface-Emitting Microlasers

Vertical-cavity electrically driven lasers with three GaInAs quantum wells and diameters of several μm exhibit room-temperature pulsed current thresholds as low as 1.3mA with 958 nm output wavelength

The intersection of evolutionary computation and explainable AI.

In the past decade, Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) has attracted a great interest in the research community, motivated by the need for explanations in critical AI applications. Some recent advances in XAI are based on Evolutionary Computation (EC) techniques, such as Genetic Programming. We call this trend EC for XAI. We argue that the full potential of EC methods has not been fully exploited yet in XAI, and call the community for future efforts in this field. Likewise, we find that there is a growing concern in EC regarding the explanation of population-based methods, i.e., their search process and outcomes. While some attempts have been done in this direction (although, in most cases, those are not explicitly put in the context of XAI), we believe that there are still several research opportunities and open research questions that, in principle, may promote a safer and broader adoption of EC in real-world applications. We call this trend XAI within EC. In this position paper, we briefly overview the main results in the two above trends, and suggest that the EC community may play a major role in the achievement of XAI

Rubidium in the Interstellar Medium

We present observations of interstellar rubidium toward o Per, zeta Per, AE Aur, HD 147889, chi Oph, zeta Oph, and 20 Aql. Theory suggests that stable 85Rb and long-lived 87Rb are produced predominantly by high-mass stars, through a combination of the weak s- and r-processes. The 85Rb/87Rb ratio was determined from measurements of the Rb I line at 7800 angstroms and was compared to the solar system meteoritic ratio of 2.59. Within 1-sigma uncertainties all directions except HD 147889 have Rb isotope ratios consistent with the solar system value. The ratio toward HD 147889 is much lower than the meteoritic value and similar to that toward rho Oph A (Federman et al. 2004); both lines of sight probe the Rho Ophiuchus Molecular Cloud. The earlier result was attributed to a deficit of r-processed 85Rb. Our larger sample suggests instead that 87Rb is enhanced in these two lines of sight. When the total elemental abundance of Rb is compared to the K elemental abundance, the interstellar Rb/K ratio is significantly lower than the meteoritic ratio for all the sight lines in this study. Available interstellar samples for other s- and r- process elements are used to help interpret these results.Comment: 24 pages, 3 figures. Accepted for publication in Ap

Identification of H2_2CCC as a diffuse interstellar band carrier

We present strong evidence that the broad, diffuse interstellar bands (DIBs) at 4881 and 5450\,\AA are caused by the B\,^1B$_1$\,$\leftarrow$\,X\,^1A$_1$ transition of H$_2$CCC (l-C$_3$H$_2$). The large widths of the bands are due to the short lifetime of the B\,^1B$_1$ electronic state. The bands are predicted from absorption measurements in a neon matrix and observed by cavity ring-down in the gas phase and show exact matches to the profiles and wavelengths of the two broad DIBs. The strength of the 5450\,\AA DIB leads to a l-C$_3$H$_2$ column density of $\sim5\times10^{14}$ cm$^{-2}$ towards HD\,183143 and $\sim2\times10^{14}$\,cm$^{-2}$ to HD\,206267. Despite similar values of $E$($B-V$), the 4881 and 5450\,\AA DIBs in HD\,204827 are less than one third their strength in HD\,183143, while the column density of interstellar C$_3$ is unusually high for HD\,204827 but undetectable for HD\,183143. This can be understood if C$_3$ has been depleted by hydrogenation to species such as l-C$_3$H$_2$ towards HD\,183143. There are also three rotationally resolved sets of triplets of l-C$_3$H$_2$ in the 6150$-$6330\,\AA region. Simulations, based on the derived spectroscopic constants and convolved with the expected instrumental and interstellar line broadening, show credible coincidences with sharp, weak DIBs for the two observable sets of triplets. The region of the third set is too obscured by the $\alpha$-band of telluric O$_2$.Comment: 22 pages, 9 figure

The Star Formation Region NGC 6530: distance, ages and Initial Mass Function

We present astrometry and $BVI$ photometry, down to $V\simeq22$, of the very young open cluster NGC6530, obtained from observations taken with the Wide Field Imager camera at the MPG/ESO 2.2 m Telescope. Both the $V$ vs. $B-V$ and the $V$ vs. $V-I$ color-magnitude diagrams (CMD) show the upper main sequence dominated by very bright cluster stars, while, due to the high obscuration of the giant molecular cloud surrounding the cluster, the blue envelopes of the diagrams at $V\gtrsim 14$ are limited to the main sequence stars at the distance of NGC6530. This particular structure of the NGC6530 CMD allows us to conclude that its distance is about $d \simeq 1250$ pc, significantly lower than the previous determination of d=1800 pc. We have positionally matched our optical catalog with the list of X-ray sources found in a Chandra-ACIS observation, finding a total of 828 common stars, 90% of which are pre-main sequence stars in NGC6530. Using evolutionary tracks of Siess et al. (2000)}, mass and age values are inferred for these stars. The median age of the cluster is about 2.3 Myr; in the mass range (0.6--4.0)$M_\odot$, the Initial Mass Function (IMF) shows a power law index $x=1.22\pm0.17$, consistent with both the Salpeter index (1.35), and with the index derived for other young clusters ; towards smaller masses the IMF shows a peak and then it starts to decrease.Comment: 32 pages, 13 ps figures, in press in Astronomy and Astrophysic

Whispering Vortices

Experiments indicating the excitation of whispering gallery type electromagnetic modes by a vortex moving in an annular Josephson junction are reported. At relativistic velocities the Josephson vortex interacts with the modes of the superconducting stripline resonator giving rise to novel resonances on the current-voltage characteristic of the junction. The experimental data are in good agreement with analysis and numerical calculations based on the two-dimensional sine--Gordon model.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figures, text shortened to fit 4 pages, correction of typo

Social Policy and Cultural Services: A Study of Scottish Border Museums as Implementers of Social Inclusion

This article examines the findings of an exploratory case study based on local authority museums in the Scottish Borders to assess the impact of social inclusion policies from the Scottish Parliament. Taken from museum curators’ perspectives, the findings suggest that social inclusion policies have not filtered through the system to reach the curators due to unclear government policy and confusion regarding terminology, strategy and guidelines. Curators found it difficult to engage with social inclusion discourse, despite employing socially inclusive actions in everyday practice. The relationship between the local community and museum was seen to be unique and multi-layered, with a perceived dimension of community ownership, which has implications for social policy on central, local and individual levels

Public Health Surveillance for Australian bat lyssavirus in Queensland, Australia, 2000–2001

From February 1, 2000, to December 4, 2001, a total of 119 bats (85 Megachiroptera and 34 Microchiroptera) were tested for Australian bat lyssavirus (ABLV) infection. Eight Megachiroptera were positive by immunofluorescence assay that used cross-reactive antibodies to rabies nucleocapsid protein. A case study of cross-species transmission of ABLV supports the conclusion that a bat reservoir exists for ABLV in which the virus circulates across Megachiroptera species within mixed communities

Probing the anomalous extinction of four young star clusters: the use of colour-excess, main sequence fitting and fractal analysis

Four young star clusters were studied in order to characterize their anomalous extinction or variable reddening that could be due to a possible contamination by dense clouds or circumstellar effects. The extinction law (Rv) was evaluated by adopting two methods: (i) the use of theoretical expressions based on the colour-excess of stars with known spectral type, and (ii) the analysis of two-colour diagrams, where the slope of observed colours distribution is compared to the normal distribution. An algorithm to reproduce the zero age main sequence (ZAMS) reddened colours was developed in order to derive the average visual extinction (Av) that provides the best fitting of the observational data. The structure of the clouds was evaluated by means of statistical fractal analysis, aiming to compare their geometric structure with the spatial distribution of the cluster members. The cluster NGC 6530 is the only object of our sample showing anomalous extinction. In average, the other clusters are suffering normal extinction, but several of their members, mainly in NGC 2264, seem to have high Rv, probably due to circumstellar effects. The ZAMS fitting provides Av values that are in good agreement with those found in the literature. The fractal analysis shows that NGC 6530 has a centrally concentrated distribution of stars that is different of the sub-structures found in the density distribution of the cloud projected in the Av map, suggesting that the original cloud has been changed with the cluster formation. On the other hand, the fractal dimension and the statistical parameters of Berkeley 86, NGC 2244, and NGC 2264 indicate a good cloud-cluster correlation, when compared to other works based on artificial distribution of points.Comment: 13 pages, 7 figure