Standing on the edge of the Rubyfruit jungle : lesbians recall the experience of questioning in therapy

The purpose of this study was twofold: to pursue an existing gap in the literature on therapy with people questioning their sexuality; and to represent a lesbian perspective on the experience of questioning one’s sexual orientation. A previous study (Jones et al., 2003) found that gay and bisexual people who were uncertain of their sexual orientation at the start of therapy rated the treatment as overall less beneficial than gay and bisexual people who had begun therapy while certain of their identities. This study explored the possible reasons behind this finding by investigating a small (N=13) but diverse group of lesbians’ recalled experiences of questioning while in therapy. Overall, while some participants described overwhelmingly negative or positive experiences, most had middling experiences with therapy. Most participants were content or happy with many aspects of the treatment, but felt their therapists had weak points when it came to discussions of sexuality in particular. Many of these weak points were related in some way to failures in attunement; several possible reasons for these failures are discussed. Openness to questioning on the part of the therapist is linked to openness on the part of the patient, as is the therapist’s self-disclosure. Recommendations are made for a model of practice that openly questions heterosexuality and challenges its normalcy within the therapeutic space

Space science applications for conducting polymer particles: synthetic mimics for cosmic dust and micrometeorites

Over the last decade or so, a range of polypyrrole-based particles have been designed and evaluated for space science applications. This electrically conductive polymer enables such particles to efficiently acquire surface charge, which in turn allows their acceleration up to the hypervelocity regime (>1 km s(-1)) using a Van de Graaff accelerator. Either organic latex (e.g. polystyrene or poly(methyl methacrylate)) or various inorganic materials (such as silica, olivine or pyrrhotite) can be coated with polypyrrole; these core-shell particles are useful mimics for understanding the hypervelocity impact ionisation behaviour of micro-meteorites (a.k.a. cosmic dust). Impacts on metal targets at relatively low hypervelocities (10 km s(-1)) generate predominately atomic species, since many more chemical bonds are cleaved if the particles impinge with higher kinetic energy. Such fundamental studies are relevant to the calibration of the cosmic dust analyser (CDA) onboard the Cassini spacecraft, which was designed to determine the chemical composition of Saturn's dust rings. Inspired by volcanism observed for one of the Jupiter's moons (Io), polypyrrole-coated sulfur-rich latexes have also been designed to help space scientists understand ionisation spectra originating from sulfur-rich dust particles. Finally, relatively large (20 mu m diameter) polypyrrole-coated polystyrene latexes have proven to be useful for understanding the extent of thermal ablation of organic projectiles when fired at ultralow density aerogel targets at up to 6.1 km s(-1) using a Light Gas Gun. In this case, the sacrificial polypyrrole overlayer simply provides a sensitive spectroscopic signature (rather than a conductive overlayer), and the scientific findings have important implications for the detection of organic dust grains during the Stardust space mission

Cost estimating relationship associating engineering drawing quality with installation cost growth for USN ship alterations

This is an analysis of existing feedback in the Fleet Modernization Program (FMP) planning and design process using the FFG-7 class of ships as a case study. This analysis attempts to relate the engineering drawing revision rate (inverse measure of drawing quality) and the number of ships affected by those drawing revisions (measure of availability concurrence) to the cost growth attributable to the FMP portion of U.S. Navy ship availabilities. Due to the lack of actual cost data, budget estimates were used as a surrogate and unfortunately firm relationships could not be established. However, the methodology developed has potential for application to any large ship class which may experience numerous concurrent availabilities, as actual cost data become available. It is meant to be a tool for the engineering design agent to assess the financial impact of the quality of engineering design products on the installing activities and to assess the potential value of policy changes which improve the quality of those products. Keywords: Data bases, Theses, Regression statistics. (KR)http://archive.org/details/costestimatingre00willU.S. Navy (U.S.N.) author

Constant-Modulus OFDM Transmission Using Complementary Sequences

High PAPR is one of the major challenges in using OFDM for communication, resulting in using inefficient linear amplifiers at the transmitter, or distortion if nonlinear amplifiers are used. Means of reducing PAPR in OFDM waveforms have been extensively researched, but those methods still have some need to avoid distortion. Using a pair of complementary sequences, an OFDM signal can be created that is constant in envelope, reducing the PAPR to unity and allowing the use of nonlinear amplifiers. Sequence pairs restricted to a particular alphabet are information-inefficient so instead a means of encoding onto a pair of complementary sequences is developed such that the length of the sequence increases linearly with the number of information symbols. The structure of this constant-modulus OFDM signal can also be used at the receiver to deal with channel fading and improve performance in noise. All of these concepts are extended to two-dimensional complementary sequence pairs for use in MIMO or broadcast applications using a uniform linear array while maintaining constant modulus on all antennas. This extension also includes exploration of additional structure imposed by the method of construction in multiple dimensions.</p