Community Builders and Campus Bureaucrats: Student Leadership on College Campuses

Most universities provide many opportunities for students to be leaders. By placing students in these positions there exists the potential to create a unique set of challenges. This research focused on the challenges associated with leading peers on a university campus. The primary research question was, “In what ways are student leaders able to identify and describe their experiences leading their peers?” This was a case study, collecting data through focus groups and interviews, where participants discussed the experiences of leading peers. Four types of student leaders participated: Sports Team Captains, Resident Assistants, Academic Mentors and SGA Officers. The data revealed that these groups of leaders aligned into two categories: Community Builders and Campus Bureaucrats

Stability of NLO Global Analysis and Implications for Hadron Collider Physics

The phenomenology of Standard Model and New Physics at hadron colliders depends critically on results from global QCD analysis for parton distribution functions (PDFs). The accuracy of the standard next-to-leading-order (NLO) global analysis, nominally a few percent, is generally well matched to the expected experimental precision. However, serious questions have been raised recently about the stability of the NLO analysis with respect to certain inputs, including the choice of kinematic cuts on the data sets and the parametrization of the gluon distribution. In this paper, we investigate this stability issue systematically within the CTEQ framework. We find that both the PDFs and their physical predictions are stable, well within the few percent level. Further, we have applied the Lagrange Multiplier method to explore the stability of the predicted cross sections for W production at the Tevatron and the LHC, since W production is often proposed as a standard candle for these colliders. We find the NLO predictions on sigma_W to be stable well within their previously-estimated uncertainty ranges.Comment: 24 pages, 11 figures. Minor changes in response to JHEP referee repor

The Relationship Between Posttraumatic Growth and Substance Abuse in Homeless Women with Histories of Traumatic Experience

The phenomenon of posttraumatic growth (PTG) may be particularly relevant for homeless women, who have higher levels of trauma exposure than the general population. However, homeless women also have higher rates of substance use, which some research has linked with less PTG. The present study examined the relationship between PTG and substance use in homeless women. lt was hypothesized that substance abuse would be associated with less PTG, more avoidant coping, and more Posttraumatic Stress Disorder symptomatology. It was further predicted that PTG would be unrelated to psychological distress. Participants were 50 homeless women with histories of trauma who were recruited from local shelters and service providers. In line with predictions, a continuous measure of substance use severity was negatively related to PTG, positively related to avoidant coping when approach coping was accounted for, and positively related to PTSD symptomatology. Importantly, despite their experience with multiple traumas and chronic environmental stressors, homeless women in this sample displayed substantial levels of PTG and rated that growth as very comforting. In sum, these results suggest that greater use of substances is negatively associated with PTG. Overall, PTG correlated positively with approach coping but was unrelated to psychological distress

Arthur Pap’s Functional Theory of the A Priori

Arthur Pap was not quite a Logical Empiricist. He wrote his dissertation in philosophy of science under Ernest Nagel, and he published a textbook in the philosophy of science at the end of his tragically short career, but most of his work would be classified as analytic philosophy. More important, he took some stands that went against Logical Empiricist orthodoxy and was a persistent if friendly critic of the movement. Pap diverged most strongly from Logical Empiricism in his theory of a “functional a priori” in which fundamental principles of science are hardened into definitions and act as criteria for further inquiry. Pap was strongly influenced by the pragmatists C. I. Lewis and John Dewey in developing this alternative theory of a priori knowledge. Using Poincaré’s conventionalism as a springboard, Pap attempted to substantiate these views with examples from physics, and this was his largest foray into philosophy of science topics. Pap, as well as Lewis and Dewey, developed an alternative theory of the a priori in the 1950s that never quite took hold, despite the fact that their views are very intriguing and similar to Michael Friedman’s recent work on the constitutive a priori

Naturalized Philosophy of Science with a Plurality of Methods

Naturalism implies unity of method-an application of the methods of science to the methodology of science itself and to value theory. Epistemological naturalists have tried to find a privileged discipline to be the methodological model of philosophy of science and epistemology. However, since science itself is not unitary, the use of one science as a model amounts to a reduction and distorts the philosophy of science just as badly as traditional philosophy of science distorted science, despite the fact that the central theme of naturalized philosophy of science is that methodology should be true to science as practiced. I argue that naturalized philosophy of science must apply a plurality of methods to epistemological issues

Gene Flow Between Great Lakes Region Populations of the Canadian Tiger Swallowtail Butterfly, \u3ci\u3ePapilio Canadensis\u3c/i\u3e, Near the Hybrid Zone With \u3ci\u3eP. Glaucus\u3c/i\u3e (Lepidoptera: Papilionidae)

Papilio canadensis were sampled from three locations on either side of Lake Michigan to study gene flow near and through a butterfly hybrid zone. Allele frequencies at four polymorphic enzyme loci, as indicated by allozyme electrophoresis, were similar in all samples. Values for FST were close to zero, indicating that gene flow is high among these populations, even when separated by Lake Michigan. We developed a mitochondrial DNA marker with diagnostic differences between P. canadensis and its parapatric sister species Papilio glaucus, based on PCR-RFLP. P. glaucus haplotypes of this mtDNA marker and P. glaucus alleles of a diagnostic allozyme locus (PGD) were found in P. canadensis populations sampled in Michigan’s Lower Peninsula but not in the Upper Peninsula or Northern Minnesota. The presence of P. glaucus alleles in P. canadensis populations could be due to introgression through hybridization, or could be remnants of a P. glaucus population that was inundated by an influx of P. canadensis alleles

Getting DNA twist rigidity from single molecule experiments

We use an elastic rod model with contact to study the extension versus rotation diagrams of single supercoiled DNA molecules. We reproduce quantitatively the supercoiling response of overtwisted DNA and, using experimental data, we get an estimation of the effective supercoiling radius and of the twist rigidity of B-DNA. We find that unlike the bending rigidity, the twist rigidity of DNA seems to vary widely with the nature and concentration of the salt buffer in which it is immerged