THE CONNECTION BETWEEN DOMESTIC VIOLENCE AND ANIMAL CRUELTY IN PUERTO RICO: AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL STUDY

Violence against women is one of Puerto Rico’s most critical social problems and for this reason, anthropological thought is critically necessary. Some women in Puerto Rico are vulnerable to situations of violence and control through domestic violence while their animals become involved in the same tangle of abuse. Women’s voices about their animals have not been heard simply because nobody has inquired. I asked women survivors of domestic abuse whether or not their male partners had engaged in any type of animal cruelty against household and domesticated animals. My intention in conducting this research was to examine, both from an anthropological and from a gender perspective, the correlation in Puerto Rico between domestic violence and animal cruelty through ethnographic work. Interviews with professional shelter staff were conducted as well to establish whether or not women seeking shelter talk about their pets being hurt by their male partners—and if so, what consequences that abuse has for the women. My main objective was to determine whether the results of research that had been conducted in other cultures that demonstrated a link between animal abuse and domestic violence findings would be translatable to Puerto Rican culture. There is a remarkable void in this area of study in the Caribbean and Latin America that needs to be addressed and this study is a contribution toward analysis, dialogue, and change

Velocity Statistics in the Two-Dimensional Granular Turbulence

We studied the macroscopic statistical properties on the freely evolving quasi-elastic hard disk (granular) system by performing a large-scale (up to a few million particles) event-driven molecular dynamics systematically and found that remarkably analogous to an enstrophy cascade process in the decaying two-dimensional fluid turbulence. There are four typical stages in the freely evolving inelastic hard disk system, which are homogeneous, shearing (vortex), clustering and final state. In the shearing stage, the self-organized macroscopic coherent vortices become dominant. In the clustering stage, the energy spectra are close to the expectation of Kraichnan-Batchelor theory and the squared two-particle separation strictly obeys Richardson law.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, to be published in PR

Una aproximación a la figura de Johann Wolfgang von Goethe como educador: el caso de Peter im Baumgarten

Acabamos de celebrar el 260 aniversario del nacimiento de Goethe. La mayoría de los entendidos ubica a este polifacético y extraordinario autor en el mundo de la literatura, principalmente por su obra “Fausto” y las implicaciones de esta enorme creación literaria. Sin embargo, las ciencias naturales ejercieron siempre en la vida de Goethe una profunda atracción, aunque esa parte de su pensamiento sea menos conocida. La vida de Goethe fue de una riqueza e intensidad admirables. Su amplia y extensa actividad queda muy bien reflejada en sus obras que en ocasiones tienen parte de autobiográfico, así como en su diario y su abundante correspondencia. En este artículo abordaremos colateralmente un aspecto apenas conocido dentro de los intereses científicos de Goethe, a saber, la ingeniería forestal. Para ello nos centraremos principalmente en la vida de un adolescente suizo, Peter im Baumgarten, al que Goethe acogió como tutor proporcionándole una buena formación como forestal. Podremos comprobar así un aspecto muy humano de la personalidad de Goethe y su compromiso por la educación y la formación, en especial de los más jóvenes.We have just celebrated the 260th anniversary of Goethe’s birth. The majority of experts associate this multifaceted, extraordinary author with literature, primarily for his work “Faust” and the implications of this great literary creation. However, natural sciences always attracted Goethe’s attention, but this part of his work is less well-known. Goethe had a very intense life. His extensive activity is present in his works and at times reflects an autobiographical character. In this article we will collaterally discuss a barely known aspect of Goethe’s scientific interests, namely, forest engineering. In order to discuss this aspect we will focus primarily on the life of a Swiss teenager, Peter im Baumgarten, whom Goethe personally tutored and taught much forest engineering. Thus, we shall confirm a private aspect of Goethe’s personality and his commitment to education, especially with respect to young people.peerReviewe

Effective string theory constraints on the long distance behavior of the subleading potentials

The dynamics of heavy quarkonium systems in the strong coupling regime reduces to a quantum mechanical problem with a number of potentials which may be organized in powers of 1/m, m being the heavy quark mass. The potentials must be calculated non-perturbatively, for instance in lattice QCD. It is well known that the long distance behavior of the static (1/m^0) potential is well reproduced by an effective string theory. We show that this effective string theory, if correct, should also reproduce the long distance behavior of all 1/m suppressed potentials. We demonstrate the practical usefulness of this result by finding a suitable parameterization of the recently calculated 1/m potential. We also calculate the 1/m^2 velocity dependent and spin dependent potentials. Once Poincar\'e invariance is implemented, the shapes of most of the spin independent potentials are fully predicted in terms of the string tension, and the shapes of the spin dependent ones in terms of a single parameter.Comment: 5 pages, 1 figure, reference and explanations added. Journal versio

Identification of Structural Variation in Chimpanzees Using Optical Mapping and Nanopore Sequencing.

Recent efforts to comprehensively characterize great ape genetic diversity using short-read sequencing and single-nucleotide variants have led to important discoveries related to selection within species, demographic history, and lineage-specific traits. Structural variants (SVs), including deletions and inversions, comprise a larger proportion of genetic differences between and within species, making them an important yet understudied source of trait divergence. Here, we used a combination of long-read and -range sequencing approaches to characterize the structural variant landscape of two additional Pan troglodytes verus individuals, one of whom carries 13% admixture from Pan troglodytes troglodytes. We performed optical mapping of both individuals followed by nanopore sequencing of one individual. Filtering for larger variants (>10 kbp) and combined with genotyping of SVs using short-read data from the Great Ape Genome Project, we identified 425 deletions and 59 inversions, of which 88 and 36, respectively, were novel. Compared with gene expression in humans, we found a significant enrichment of chimpanzee genes with differential expression in lymphoblastoid cell lines and induced pluripotent stem cells, both within deletions and near inversion breakpoints. We examined chromatin-conformation maps from human and chimpanzee using these same cell types and observed alterations in genomic interactions at SV breakpoints. Finally, we focused on 56 genes impacted by SVs in >90% of chimpanzees and absent in humans and gorillas, which may contribute to chimpanzee-specific features. Sequencing a greater set of individuals from diverse subspecies will be critical to establish the complete landscape of genetic variation in chimpanzees

Stability of three-dimensional self-trapped beams with a dark spot surrounded by bright rings of varying intensity

We analytically and numerically examine the stability of three-dimensional self-trapped beams with a dark spot surrounded by bright rings of varying intensity in a uniform saturable self-focusing medium. It is shown that the fundamental bound state of the family is stable to a symmetric perturbation but unstable to an asymmetric perturbation (that breaks the azimuthal symmetry of the beam, i.e., transverse instabilities). The higher-order states are also found to display transverse (modulation) instabilities. The development of the instabilities is shown to lead to the emission of filaments which spiral away from the center of the dark spot as stable entities. © 1994 The American Physical Society.Peer Reviewe

Hacia una cultura de la sostenibilidad a través de los textos de Goethe

Se celebra este año el 260 aniversario del nacimiento de Goethe inmersos en pleno Decenio de las Naciones Unidas de la Educación para el Desarrollo Sostenible y el Cambio Climático. Nos gustaría con este artículo rescatar la aportación personal y profesional de Goethe al desarrollo sostenible, tras haber detectado una tendencia generalizada a ubicar a este polifacético autor en el mundo de la literatura. La participación de Goethe en actividades oficiales dirigidas a promover la sostenibilidad, tales como su presencia en el Geheimrat, el impulso al sector de la minería, su preocupación por encontrar energías alternativas, la supervisión de las plantaciones en el Ducado de Sajonia-Weimar-Eisenach, la lucha contra las plagas de parásitos forestales, su interés por la formación forestal etc., dan muestra del compromiso de Goethe con el medioambiente.This year we celebrate the 260th anniversary of Goethe’s birth, which also coincides with the UNESCO’s decade long project for the education of sustainable development and climate change. With this article, we would like to discover both Goethe’s personal and professional contribution to the sustainable development, because we have detected a general tendency to place this multi-faceted author in the world of literature. Goethe’s participation in public activities, which are directed to promote the sustainability include examples such as: his presence in Geheimrat, the push towards the mining sector, his concern to find alternative energies, the supervision of the Duchy of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach plantations, the fight against the plague of forest parasites, his interest in forestry education, etc. The previously mentioned examples show Goethe’s intense concern for the environment