Perceived Neighborhood-Level Drivers of Food Insecurity Among Aging Women in the United States: A Qualitative Study

Background: Aging populations in the United States exhibit high rates of food insecurity and chronic illness. Few studies have explored the neighborhood-level drivers of food insecurity among such populations, and how they intersect with experiences of aging. Objective: The aim of this study was to explore how aging women experience food insecurity in the United States, and the neighborhood-level factors that influence these experiences. Design: Semistructured qualitative interviews were conducted to elicit participants’ perceptions of how their neighborhood influenced their experiences with food security and aging. Participants/setting: Thirty-eight food-insecure women aged 50 years and older were purposively sampled from the Northern California, Georgia, and North Carolina sites of the Women's Interagency Human Immunodeficiency Virus Study. Interviews were conducted between November 2017 and July 2018 at the three Women's Interagency Human Immunodeficiency Virus Study sites. Statistical analysis: Three researchers thematically analyzed the data using an inductive–deductive approach. Results: Participants described neighborhood-level drivers of food insecurity that centered around three themes: accessibility of food from traditional food stores, the role of food aid institutions, and the intersection of aging with the food environment. Participants explained that food insecurity was related to limited access to food stores largely due to long distances and poor public transportation in Georgia and North Carolina, and high food prices in Northern California. Most participants described being dependent on food aid programs, but found this difficult due to poor quality food and long wait times. Aging-related issues emerged as a cross-cutting theme, with fatigue, poor strength, and chronic illness amplifying barriers to accessing food. Conclusions: Findings from this study reveal the structural barriers that aging women face in accessing healthy food within their neighborhoods, and how experiences with aging and chronic illnesses exacerbate these barriers. Although future programs should address common neighborhood-level barriers such as the accessibility and affordability of healthy foods, they should also be tailored to aging women and the local context

The relevance of model-driven engineering thirty years from now

International audienceAlthough model-driven engineering (MDE) is now an established approach for developing complex software systems, it has not been universally adopted by the software industry. In order to better understand the reasons for this, as well as to identify future opportunities for MDE, we carried out a week-long design thinking experiment with 15 MDE experts. Participants were facilitated to identify the biggest problems with current MDE technologies, to identify grand challenges for society in the near future, and to identify ways that MDE could help to address these challenges. The outcome is a reflection of the current strengths of MDE, an outlook of the most pressing challenges for society at large over the next three decades, and an analysis of key future MDE research opportunities

Precarity and health: Theorizing the intersection of multiple material-need insecurities, stigma, and illness among women in the United States

Material-need insecurities (including insecurities in basic resources such as income, food, housing, and healthcare) are widespread in the United States (US) and may be important predictors of poor health outcomes. How material-need insecurities besides food insecurity are experienced, however, remains under-researched, including how multiple material-need insecurities might intersect and converge on the individual. Here we used qualitative methods to investigate experiences with multiple material-need insecurities among 38 food-insecure women aged over 50 years living with or at risk for HIV in the US. Our aims were: (1) to understand the co-experience of material-need insecurities beyond food insecurity; (2) to elucidate how multiple material-need insecurities might intersect; and (3) to discover how this intersection might be detrimental to health. During November 2017–July 2018, we conducted semi-structured interviews at three sites across the US (Northern California, Georgia, North Carolina) and analyzed the data using an inductive-deductive approach. We identified a common and complex picture of multiple material-need insecurities, stigma, and illness among participants across all three sites. There were five primary themes: (1) insecure income arising from a combination of precarious wage labor and federal disability benefits; (2) resultant experiences of uncertainty, compromised quality, insufficiency, and having to use socially unacceptable coping strategies across finances, food, housing, and healthcare; (3) participants’ disempowerment arising from their engagement with social safety net institutions; (4) closely related experiences of intersectional stigma and discrimination; and (5) negative implications for health across a wide range of illnesses. By employing the sociological concept of precarity—a term denoting the contemporary convergence of insecure wage labor and retraction of the welfare state—we combine these themes into a unifying framework of precarity and health. This framework may prove useful for testing how the widespread intersection of multiple material-need insecurities interacts with stigma and discrimination to negatively impact physical and mental health

Feedback-control of quantum systems using continuous state-estimation

We present a formulation of feedback in quantum systems in which the best estimates of the dynamical variables are obtained continuously from the measurement record, and fed back to control the system. We apply this method to the problem of cooling and confining a single quantum degree of freedom, and compare it to current schemes in which the measurement signal is fed back directly in the manner usually considered in existing treatments of quantum feedback. Direct feedback may be combined with feedback by estimation, and the resulting combination, performed on a linear system, is closely analogous to classical LQG control theory with residual feedback.Comment: 12 pages, multicol revtex, revised and extende

Food insecurity is associated with anxiety, stress, and symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder in a cohort of women with or at risk of HIV in the United States

Background: Food insecurity, which disproportionately affects marginalized women in the United States, is associated with depressive symptoms. Few studies have examined relations of food insecurity with other mental health outcomes. Objective: The aim of this study was to investigate the associations of food insecurity with symptoms of generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), stress, and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in the Women's Interagency HIV Study (WIHS), a prospective cohort study of women with or at risk of HIV in the United States. Methods: Participants were 2553 women with or at risk of HIV, predominantly African American/black (71.6%). Structured questionnaires were conducted during April 2013-March 2016 every 6 mo. Food security (FS) was the primary predictor, measured using the Household Food Security Survey Module. We measured longitudinal outcomes for GAD (GAD-7 score and a binary GAD-7 screener for moderate-to-severe GAD). Only cross-sectional data were available for outcomes measuring perceived stress (PSS-10 score) and PTSD (PCL-C score and a binary PCL-C screener for PTSD). We examined associations of FS with the outcomes through use of multivariable linear and logistic regression, including lagged associations with GAD outcomes. Results: After adjusting for sociodemographic and health-related factors including HIV serostatus, current marginal, low, and very low FS were associated with increasingly higher GAD-7 scores, and with 1.41 (95% CI: 1.10, 1.80; P < 0.01), 2.03 (95% CI: 1.59, 2.61; P < 0.001), and 3.23 (95% CI: 2.43, 4.29; P < 0.001) times higher odds of screening positive for moderate-to-severe GAD, respectively. Low and very low FS at the previous visit (6 mo earlier) were independently associated with GAD outcomes at current visit. Associations of FS with PSS-10 and PCL-C scores exhibited similar dose-response relations. Very low FS was associated with 1.93 (95% CI: 1.15, 3.24; P < 0.05) times higher odds of screening positive for PTSD. Conclusions: Food insecurity may be associated with a range of poor mental health outcomes among women in the United States with or at risk of HIV

Search for gravitational waves from Scorpius X-1 in the second Advanced LIGO observing run with an improved hidden Markov model

We present results from a semicoherent search for continuous gravitational waves from the low-mass x-ray binary Scorpius X-1, using a hidden Markov model (HMM) to track spin wandering. This search improves on previous HMM-based searches of LIGO data by using an improved frequency domain matched filter, the J-statistic, and by analyzing data from Advanced LIGO's second observing run. In the frequency range searched, from 60 to 650 Hz, we find no evidence of gravitational radiation. At 194.6 Hz, the most sensitive search frequency, we report an upper limit on gravitational wave strain (at 95% confidence) of h095%=3.47×10-25 when marginalizing over source inclination angle. This is the most sensitive search for Scorpius X-1, to date, that is specifically designed to be robust in the presence of spin wandering. © 2019 American Physical Society

Search for Tensor, Vector, and Scalar Polarizations in the Stochastic Gravitational-Wave Background

The detection of gravitational waves with Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo has enabled novel tests of general relativity, including direct study of the polarization of gravitational waves. While general relativity allows for only two tensor gravitational-wave polarizations, general metric theories can additionally predict two vector and two scalar polarizations. The polarization of gravitational waves is encoded in the spectral shape of the stochastic gravitational-wave background, formed by the superposition of cosmological and individually unresolved astrophysical sources. Using data recorded by Advanced LIGO during its first observing run, we search for a stochastic background of generically polarized gravitational waves. We find no evidence for a background of any polarization, and place the first direct bounds on the contributions of vector and scalar polarizations to the stochastic background. Under log-uniform priors for the energy in each polarization, we limit the energy densities of tensor, vector, and scalar modes at 95% credibility to Ω0T<5.58×10-8, Ω0V<6.35×10-8, and Ω0S<1.08×10-7 at a reference frequency f0=25 Hz. © 2018 American Physical Society

Erratum: "A Gravitational-wave Measurement of the Hubble Constant Following the Second Observing Run of Advanced LIGO and Virgo" (2021, ApJ, 909, 218)

[no abstract available

Search for Gravitational Waves Associated with Gamma-Ray Bursts Detected by Fermi and Swift during the LIGO-Virgo Run O3b

We search for gravitational-wave signals associated with gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) detected by the Fermi and Swift satellites during the second half of the third observing run of Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo (2019 November 1 15:00 UTC-2020 March 27 17:00 UTC). We conduct two independent searches: A generic gravitational-wave transients search to analyze 86 GRBs and an analysis to target binary mergers with at least one neutron star as short GRB progenitors for 17 events. We find no significant evidence for gravitational-wave signals associated with any of these GRBs. A weighted binomial test of the combined results finds no evidence for subthreshold gravitational-wave signals associated with this GRB ensemble either. We use several source types and signal morphologies during the searches, resulting in lower bounds on the estimated distance to each GRB. Finally, we constrain the population of low-luminosity short GRBs using results from the first to the third observing runs of Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo. The resulting population is in accordance with the local binary neutron star merger rate. © 2022. The Author(s). Published by the American Astronomical Society

Narrowband Searches for Continuous and Long-duration Transient Gravitational Waves from Known Pulsars in the LIGO-Virgo Third Observing Run

Isolated neutron stars that are asymmetric with respect to their spin axis are possible sources of detectable continuous gravitational waves. This paper presents a fully coherent search for such signals from eighteen pulsars in data from LIGO and Virgo's third observing run (O3). For known pulsars, efficient and sensitive matched-filter searches can be carried out if one assumes the gravitational radiation is phase-locked to the electromagnetic emission. In the search presented here, we relax this assumption and allow both the frequency and the time derivative of the frequency of the gravitational waves to vary in a small range around those inferred from electromagnetic observations. We find no evidence for continuous gravitational waves, and set upper limits on the strain amplitude for each target. These limits are more constraining for seven of the targets than the spin-down limit defined by ascribing all rotational energy loss to gravitational radiation. In an additional search, we look in O3 data for long-duration (hours-months) transient gravitational waves in the aftermath of pulsar glitches for six targets with a total of nine glitches. We report two marginal outliers from this search, but find no clear evidence for such emission either. The resulting duration-dependent strain upper limits do not surpass indirect energy constraints for any of these targets. © 2022. The Author(s). Published by the American Astronomical Society