Trailer Park Royalty: Southern Child Beauty Pageants, Girlhood and Power

Child beauty pageants are a phenomenon in rural communities throughout Georgia. My belief is that most of those who compete in these pageants are from the lower socio-economic bracket, participating for a multitude of reasons. A bricolage of post-structural feminism, critical ethnography, critical hermeneutics and cultural studies lenses will analyze how the performances of participants and the power exercised by the beauty pageant culture work to formulate girls\u27 identities. Analysis will also include how power operates to perpetuate this subculture and its right to dictate norms for beauty and acceptance and will be situated in the culture of girlhood. Examination of what is depicted in popular culture through videos, documentaries, and television shows will also occur. I suggest that the rural beauty pageant culture does work to create girlhood identity and a way in which the participants view the world and themselves. In fact, I believe that the rural beauty pageant culture does intricate cultural work in terms of gender and class

A Search for Additional Bodies in the GJ 1132 Planetary System from 21 Ground-based Transits and a 100 Hour Spitzer Campaign

We present the results of a search for additional bodies in the GJ 1132 system through two methods: photometric transits and transit timing variations of the known planet. We collected 21 transit observations of GJ 1132b with the MEarth-South array since 2015. We obtained 100 near-continuous hours of observations with the $Spitzer$ Space Telescope, including two transits of GJ 1132b and spanning 60\% of the orbital phase of the maximum period at which bodies coplanar with GJ 1132b would pass in front of the star. We exclude transits of additional Mars-sized bodies, such as a second planet or a moon, with a confidence of 99.7\%. When we combine the mass estimate of the star (obtained from its parallax and apparent $K_s$ band magnitude) with the stellar density inferred from our high-cadence $Spitzer$ light curve (assuming zero eccentricity), we measure the stellar radius of GJ 1132 to be $0.2105^{+0.0102}_{-0.0085} R_\odot$, and we refine the radius measurement of GJ 1132b to $1.130 \pm 0.056 R_\oplus$. Combined with HARPS RV measurements, we determine the density of GJ 1132b to be $6.2 \pm 2.0$\ g cm$^{-3}$, with the mass determination dominating this uncertainty. We refine the ephemeris of the system and find no evidence for transit timing variations, which would be expected if there was a second planet near an orbital resonance with GJ 1132b.Comment: 29 pages, 4 Tables, 8 Figures, Submitted to ApJ. Comments welcom

Processes of Sexual Orientation Questioning Among Heterosexual Women

Because very little is known about heterosexual identity development, this study assesses and describes sexual orientation questioning processes of heterosexual-identified women, and offers a comparison of these processes with those employed by their sexual-minority counterparts. Participants included 333 female college students (ages 18-23; M = 19.2). Two-hundred and twenty-eight participants primarily identified as “exclusively straight/heterosexual”; 105 participants indicated a sexual-minority identity. Sixty-seven percent of exclusively heterosexual respondents (n = 154) indicated having thought about and/or questioned their sexual orientation. The processes by which heterosexual participants described questioning their sexual orientation were coded for the presence of five emergent categories using an inductive thematic coding methodology. These five categories included: unelaborated questioning (19%), other-sex experiences (16%), exposure to sexual minorities (26%), assessment of same-sex attraction (48%), and evaluations of same-sex behavior (26%). Several unifying and differentiating themes emerged between sexual orientation groups. Results from this study suggest that contemporary young women’s heterosexuality is not necessarily an unexamined identity; indeed, the large majority of young women in this sample were deliberately identifying as heterosexual after contemplating alternative possibilities

The rotation and Galactic kinematics of mid M dwarfs in the Solar Neighborhood

Rotation is a directly-observable stellar property, and drives magnetic field generation and activity through a magnetic dynamo. Main sequence stars with masses below approximately 0.35Msun (mid-to-late M dwarfs) are fully-convective, and are expected to have a different type of dynamo mechanism than solar-type stars. Measurements of their rotation rates provide insights into these mechanisms, but few rotation periods are available for these stars at field ages. Using photometry from the MEarth transit survey, we measure rotation periods for 387 nearby, mid-to-late M dwarfs in the Northern hemisphere, finding periods from 0.1 to 140 days. The typical detected rotator has stable, sinusoidal photometric modulations at a semi-amplitude of 0.5 to 1%. We find no period-amplitude relation for stars below 0.25Msun and an anti-correlation between period and amplitude for higher-mass M dwarfs. We highlight the existence of older, slowly-rotating stars without H{\alpha} emission that nevertheless have strong photometric variability. The Galactic kinematics of our sample is consistent with the local population of G and K dwarfs, and rotators have metallicities characteristic of the Solar Neighborhood. We use the W space velocities and established age-velocity relations to estimate that stars with P<10 days are on average <2 Gyrs, and that those with P>70 days are about 5 Gyrs. The period distribution is mass dependent: as the mass decreases, the slowest rotators at a given mass have longer periods, and the fastest rotators have shorter periods. We find a lack of stars with intermediate rotation periods. [Abridged]Comment: Accepted to ApJ. Machine readable tables and additional figures are available in the published article or on reques

The Value of a Core Research Module in the Medical Curriculum

Introduction: Application of research methods to medical research is a key skill that students should acquire during medical school. The value of a mandatory research module for students in terms of their understanding of medical research and the academic outputs that arise from the module are yet to be evaluated, especially compared to research undertaken through different avenues. Method: Sheffield Medical Students were invited to complete a questionnaire on their thoughts of the research module, any academic outputs that arose from the module and any further research that they had undertaken outside the module. Ordinal regression analysis was used to assess for differences between groups’ answers to the Likert scales. Results: 101 students answered the questionnaire. 72.3% of students agreed that the module increased their knowledge of medical research, while fewer students agreed that it increased their interest in research and desire to undertake further research. Undergraduates agreed that the module increased their knowledge more than postgraduates (p = 0.048). There were no differences between the type of research project undertaken and students’ opinions of the module. Students gained more academic outputs, i.e. journal submissions and conference presentations, from research undertaken outside of the module. Discussion: This research found that students’ main benefit from the module was increased knowledge of medical research, in agreement with previous studies. Limitations of the study included gaining no information on respondents’ age and previous research experience, which may have had an impact on their opinion of the research module

A posteriori error estimation and adaptivity for multiple-network poroelasticity

The multiple-network poroelasticity (MPET) equations describe deformation and pressures in an elastic medium permeated by interacting fluid networks. In this paper, we (i) place these equations in the theoretical context of coupled elliptic–parabolic problems, (ii) use this context to derive residual-based a posteriori error estimates and indicators for fully discrete MPET solutions and (iii) evaluate the performance of these error estimators in adaptive algorithms for a set of test cases: ranging from synthetic scenarios to physiologically realistic simulations of brain mechanics.publishedVersio

Curriculum Alignment After Reforms: A Systematic Review with Considerations for Queensland Pre- and In-service Teachers

This systematic review synthesises research on curriculum alignment to suggest considerations for the implementation of the Senior secondary curriculum reform in Queensland, Australia. It focuses on the coherence of cognitive skills in the prescribed and enacted curriculum as these are typically the least aligned curriculum components. Search methods, which followed the PRISMA model, resulted in 108 relevant articles for qualitative synthesis. Results show that alignment after curriculum reforms is typically low. The use of educational taxonomies can support curriculum alignment. Marzano and Kendall’s (2007) New Taxonomy of Educational Objectives underpins the new Queensland Senior secondary syllabi which, in line with other Australian policy, encourage the explicit teaching of cognitive skills. Research is needed on the enacted cognitive skills curriculum in Queensland and its alignment with the reformed prescribed curriculum. To promote the successful implementation of the new Queensland Senior system, pre- and in-service teachers could engage with the New Taxonomy and best practice for teaching cognitive skills