Young women and limits to the normalisation of condom use: a qualitative study

Encouraging condom use among young women is a major focus of HIV/STI prevention efforts but the degree to which they see themselves as being at risk limits their use of the method. In this paper, we examine the extent to which condom use has become normalised among young women. In-depth interviews were conducted with 20 year old women from eastern Scotland (N = 20). Purposive sampling was used to select a heterogeneous group with different levels of sexual experience and from different social backgrounds. All of the interviewees had used (male) condoms but only three reported consistent use. The rest had changed to other methods, most often the pill, though they typically went back to using condoms occasionally. Condoms were talked about as the most readily available contraceptive method, and were most often the first contraceptive method used. The young women had ingrained expectations of use, but for most, these norms centred only on their new or casual partners, with whom not using condoms was thought to be irresponsible. Many reported negative experiences with condoms, and condom dislike and failure were common, lessening trust in the method. Although the sexually transmitted infection (STI) prevention provided by condoms was important, this was seen as additional, and secondary, to pregnancy prevention. As the perceived risks of STIs lessened in relationships with boyfriends, so did condom use. The promotion of condoms for STI prevention alone fails to consider the wider influences of partners and young women's negative experiences of the method. Focusing on the development of condom negotiation skills alone will not address these issues. Interventions to counter dislike, method failure, and the limits of the normalisation of condom use should be included in STI prevention efforts

Multipartite entangled coherent states

We propose a scheme for generating multipartite entangled coherent states via entanglement swapping, with an example of a physical realization in ion traps. Bipartite entanglement of these multipartite states is quantified by the concurrence. We also use the $N$--tangle to compute multipartite entanglement for certain systems. Finally we establish that these results for entanglement can be applied to more general multipartite entangled nonorthogonal states.Comment: 7 pages, two figures. We added more detail discussions on the generation of multipartite entangled coherent states and multipartite entangelemen

Fluence Dependence of Charge Collection of irradiated Pixel Sensors

The barrel region of the CMS pixel detector will be equipped with ``n-in-n'' type silicon sensors. They are processed on DOFZ material, use the moderated p-spray technique and feature a bias grid. The latter leads to a small fraction of the pixel area to be less sensitive to particles. In order to quantify this inefficiency prototype pixel sensors irradiated to particle fluences between $4.7\times 10^{13}$ and 2.6\times 10^{15} \Neq have been bump bonded to un-irradiated readout chips and tested using high energy pions at the H2 beam line of the CERN SPS. The readout chip allows a non zero suppressed analogue readout and is therefore well suited to measure the charge collection properties of the sensors. In this paper we discuss the fluence dependence of the collected signal and the particle detection efficiency. Further the position dependence of the efficiency is investigated.Comment: 11 Pages, Presented at the 5th Int. Conf. on Radiation Effects on Semiconductor Materials Detectors and Devices, October 10-13, 2004 in Florence, Italy, v3: more typos corrected, minor changes required by the refere

Multipartite entangled states in coupled quantum dots and cavity-QED

We investigate the generation of multipartite entangled state in a system of N quantum dots embedded in a microcavity and examine the emergence of genuine multipartite entanglement by three different characterizations of entanglement. At certain times of dynamical evolution one can generate multipartite entangled coherent exciton states or multiqubit $W$ states by initially preparing the cavity field in a superposition of coherent states or the Fock state with one photon, respectively. Finally we study environmental effects on multipartite entanglement generation and find that the decay rate for the entanglement is proportional to the number of excitons.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures, to appear in Phys. Rev.

Women’s mental health during pregnancy: A participatory qualitative study

Background/objectives: British public health and academic policy and guidance promotes service user involvement in health care and research, however collaborative research remains underrepresented in literature relating to pregnant women’s mental health. The aim of this participatory research was to explore mothers’ and professionals’ perspectives on the factors that influence pregnant women’s mental health. Method: This qualitative research was undertaken in England with the involvement of three community members who had firsthand experience of mental health problems during pregnancy. All members of the team were involved in study design, recruitment, data generation and different stages of thematic analysis. Data were transcribed for individual and group discussions with 17 women who self-identified as experiencing mental health problems during pregnancy and 15 professionals who work with this group. Means of establishing trustworthiness included triangulation, researcher reflexivity, peer debriefing and comprehensive data analysis. Findings: Significant areas of commonality were identified between mothers’ and professionals’ perspectives on factors that undermine women’s mental health during pregnancy and what is needed to support women’s mental health. Analysis of data is provided with particular reference to contexts of relational, systemic and ecological conditions in women’s lives. Conclusions: Women’s mental health is predominantly undermined or supported by relational, experiential and material factors. The local context of socio-economic deprivation is a significant influence on women’s mental health and service requirements

Conformal aspects of Palatini approach in Extended Theories of Gravity

The debate on the physical relevance of conformal transformations can be faced by taking the Palatini approach into account to gravitational theories. We show that conformal transformations are not only a mathematical tool to disentangle gravitational and matter degrees of freedom (passing from the Jordan frame to the Einstein frame) but they acquire a physical meaning considering the bi-metric structure of Palatini approach which allows to distinguish between spacetime structure and geodesic structure. Examples of higher-order and non-minimally coupled theories are worked out and relevant cosmological solutions in Einstein frame and Jordan frames are discussed showing that also the interpretation of cosmological observations can drastically change depending on the adopted frame

Dietary docosahexaenoic acid supplementation modulates hippocampal development in the pemt-/- mouse

The development of fetal brain is influenced by nutrients such as docosahexaenoic acid (DHA, 22:6) and choline. Phosphatidylethanolamine-N-methyltransferase (PEMT) catalyzes the biosynthesis of phosphatidylcholine from phosphatidylethanolamine enriched in DHA and many humans have functional genetic polymorphisms in the PEMT gene. Previously, it was reported that Pemt-/- mice have altered hippocampal development. The present study explores whether abnormal phosphatidylcholine biosynthesis causes altered incorporation of DHA into membranes, thereby influencing brain development, and determines whether supplemental dietary DHA can reverse some of these changes. Pregnant C57BL/6 wild type (WT) and Pemt-/- mice were fed a control diet, or a diet supplemented with 3 g/kg of DHA, from gestational day 11 to 17. Brains from embryonic day 17 fetuses derived from Pemt-/- dams fed the control diet had 25-50% less phospholipid-DHA as compared with WT (p < 0.05). Also, they had 60% more neural progenitor cell proliferation (p < 0.05), 60% more neuronal apoptosis (p < 0.01), and 30% less calretinin expression (p < 0.05; a marker of neuronal differentiation) in the hippocampus compared with WT. The DHA-supplemented diet increased fetal brain Pemt-/- phospholipid-DHA to WT levels, and abrogated the neural progenitor cell proliferation and apoptosis differences. Although this diet did not change proliferation in the WT group, it halved the rate of apoptosis (p < 0.05). In both genotypes, the DHA-supplemented diet increased calretinin expression 2-fold (p < 0.05). These results suggest that the changes in hippocampal development in the Pemt-/- mouse could be mediated by altered DHA incorporation into membrane phospholipids, and that maternal dietary DHA can influence fetal brain development

D-concurrence bounds for pair coherent states

The pair coherent state is a state of a two-mode radiation field which is known as a state with non-Gaussian wave function. In this paper, the upper and lower bounds for D-concurrence (a new entanglement measure) have been studied over this state and calculated.Comment: 11 page

Foliations of Isonergy Surfaces and Singularities of Curves

It is well known that changes in the Liouville foliations of the isoenergy surfaces of an integrable system imply that the bifurcation set has singularities at the corresponding energy level. We formulate certain genericity assumptions for two degrees of freedom integrable systems and we prove the opposite statement: the essential critical points of the bifurcation set appear only if the Liouville foliations of the isoenergy surfaces change at the corresponding energy levels. Along the proof, we give full classification of the structure of the isoenergy surfaces near the critical set under our genericity assumptions and we give their complete list using Fomenko graphs. This may be viewed as a step towards completing the Smale program for relating the energy surfaces foliation structure to singularities of the momentum mappings for non-degenerate integrable two degrees of freedom systems.Comment: 30 pages, 19 figure

Branching Fractions for D0 -> K+K- and D0 -> pi+pi-, and a Search for CP Violation in D0 Decays

Using the large hadroproduced charm sample collected in experiment E791 at Fermilab, we have measured ratios of branching fractions for the two-body singly-Cabibbo-suppressed charged decays of the D0: (D0 -> KK)/(D0 -> Kpi) = 0.109 +- 0.003 +- 0.003, (D0 -> pipi)/(D0 -> Kpi) = 0.040 +- 0.002 +- 0.003, and (D0 -> KK)/(D0 -> pipi) = 2.75 +- 0.15 +- 0.16. We have looked for differences in the decay rates of D0 and D0bar to the CP eigenstates K+K- and pi+pi-, and have measured the CP asymmetry parameters A_CP(K+K-) = -0.010 +- 0.049 +- 0.012 and A_CP(pi+pi-) = -0.049 +- 0.078 +- 0.030, both consistent with zero.Comment: 10 Postscript pages, including 2 figures. Submitted to Phys. Lett.