L-spaces, taut foliations, and graph manifolds

If $Y$ is a closed orientable graph manifold, we show that $Y$ admits a coorientable taut foliation if and only if $Y$ is not an L-space. Combined with previous work of Boyer and Clay, this implies that $Y$ is an L-space if and only if $\pi_1(Y)$ is not left-orderable.Comment: 10 pages, 1 figure; version 3 is accepted version, to appear in Compositio Mathematic

Teaching Coping Skills Through Altered Book Making with Adolescents in Acute Crisis Treatment: Development of a Method

This thesis examines how altered book making can be used as a coping skill for adolescents between the ages of 13 to 18 in an acute setting within the Partial Hospitalization Program in northern Massachusetts. Altered books are mixed media art journals that can be a platform for coping with depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation, just as previous research has shown journals have been for many decades. Research has outlined that adolescents need an equal mix of structure and freedom and crave the idea of being insightful and involved in their own treatment. The group process is a unique format to teach altered book making, giving clients the opportunity to impress upon one another. This thesis will allow the reader to gain insight on two weeks of art therapy sessions with adolescents in the PHP, showing how they adopted the use of altered books to help them cope while they were experiencing difficult symptoms of various mental health diagnoses. Clients who attended the program were able to start their own altered books using materials provided to them. During the research, it was found that implementing an altered book project with a large group of adolescents was challenging, yet successful in introducing a healthy coping skill to over 20 clients in the PHP. Clients also evidenced the importance of using good art materials and working alongside other adolescents who they trusted and felt safe with

Gender Bias and Organ Transplantation in Nepal

Women in Nepal are less likely to receive proper, high quality medical care than their male relatives. Live-donor kidney transplantation provides a compelling example of such disparities, as 84% of recipients are male, 75% of donors are female and most kidneys are transferred from mother to son and from wife to husband. In the case of transplantation, women are not just denied healthcare, they are also responsible for the health of their male kin. Based on semi-structured ethnographic interviews with transplant patients, organ donors, dialysis patients and relatives, this paper elaborates on the social and economic factors that have created an extreme gender bias in transplantation. We argue that women, whose livelihoods largely depend on their husbands, donate kidneys out of self-protection and a sense of duty. Conversely, men receive kidneys but rarely donate them to women, because the health of men is a more productive economic investment than the health of women. We reject the notion that wives are directly coerced or pressured into donating kidneys to their husbands. Rather, we argue that female kidney donors make thoughtful, independent decisions that serve their best interests, and allow them to assert some control over their lives. It is, however, Nepal’s patriarchal society that both necessitates and limits such assertions of power

How Changes in Plant Community Structure Affect Terrestrial Invertebrate Food Webs

We investigated how change in plant community composition and vegetative structure brought about by annual grass-specific herbicide application affects terrestrial arthropod communities, with special emphasis on the potential mutualists and predators of the endangered Fender’s blue butterfly, Plebejus icarioides fenderi (Family: Lycaenidae). Larvae of this species form facultative protective mutualisms with ants, and they may be preyed upon by numerous invertebrate predators. We used pitfall trapping to compare terrestrial invertebrate community structure between control and herbicide-treated plots through time. The extent to which major changes in plant community composition affect the rest of the invertebrate community may have relevance for management decisions if the focus of the conservation effort has strong ecological interactions with greatly affected non-target species