Pulled to the surface and other essays

Creative nonfiction is a genre of creating writing which uses creative styles to engage factual narrative. The genre allows writers to sort through ideas in a compelling way and can include autobiography, memoir, personal essays, etc. This project is a series of essays which discuss topics that are personal to me such as race, gender, religion, and popular culture. Each of these topics act as lenses through which I understand narratives I've patterned into my identity.Honors CollegeThesis (B.?

The Reproductive Health Needs, Concerns, and Priorities of Women in Midlife

Purpose: The purpose of this dissertation was to explore the reproductive health needs, concerns, and priorities of women. The integrative review serves to explore this topic among adult women at large and identified a dearth of evidence specifically around women in midlife. The qualitative research that is represented by the second and third manuscripts is an attempt to begin filling in the knowledge gap regarding reproductive health in women in midlife. Problem: Research in the reproductive health field rarely includes women in midlife for a variety of reasons. Lower levels of fertility, perceptions about sexual activity and risk for sexually transmitted infections, and bias against older women are a few reasons why little original research has included or focused on women in midlife. Women in midlife are not immune to reproductive health issues, however, and need age-specific counseling and guidance from their health care provider. The specific aims of this dissertation were: Aim 1: To investigate midlife women’s reproductive health goals, including pregnancy achievement, avoidance, or ambivalence, and their contraceptive preferences and concerns. Aim 2: To investigate contraceptive issues that may be unique to midlife women, including management of perimenopausal changes, age-specific reasons for pregnancy avoidance or achievement, and contraceptive decision-making in the final reproductive years. Design: Both the integrative review and the original qualitative research conducted for this dissertation were done within the feminist poststructuralist framework. In addition, qualitative descriptive methodology guided data collection and analysis. Findings: The integrative review identified themes of power imbalance between partners and healthcare providers, societal and communal discourses on femininity and motherhood, distrust of hormonal contraception, the ability to enhance personal agency through contraceptive decision making, and a need for open, patient-focused communication. The qualitative research conducted within the feminist poststructuralist framework identified 1) priorities included family formation, the natural body, and healthy aging; 2) concerns regarding sexually transmitted infections, barriers to contraception, problematic dialogue regarding aging and menopause, and concerns regarding birth control interacting with their body; and 3) needs including open communication with health care providers, birth control that fits their life, and the ability to use contraception through midlife. Analysis of data over the arc of time identified several additional themes, including 1) pivotal early experiences; 2) changing versus continuing methods over the decades; and 3) evolution in contraceptive behaviors, beliefs and priorities over time. Conclusions: As with any age, women in midlife are not a monolith. Research on women in midlife can, however, identify some of the ways in which older reproductive age women are similar to their younger peers and ways in which they are unique. Continued targeted research regarding reproductive health for women in midlife can improve health outcomes, assist clinicians in providing individualized and evidence-based care, and ensure that women in midlife receive the information and care they deserve regardless of age

Proximity-Induced Superconductivity at Non-Helical Topological Insulator Interfaces

We study how non-helical spin textures at the boundary between a topological insulator (TI) and a superconductor (SC) affect the proximity-induced superconductivity of the TI interface state. We consider TIs coupled to both spin-singlet and spin-triplet SCs, and show that for the spin-triplet parent SCs the resulting order parameter induced onto the interface state sensitively depends on the symmetries which are broken at the TI-SC boundary. For chiral spin-triplet parent SCs, we find that nodal proximity-induced superconductivity emerges when there is broken twofold rotational symmetry which forces the spins of the non-helical topological states to tilt away from the interface plane. We furthermore show that the Andreev conductance of lateral heterostructures joining TI-vacuum and TI-SC interfaces yields experimental signatures of the reduced symmetries of the interface states.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figure

Volkov-Pankratov states in topological superconductors

We study the in-gap states that appear at the boundaries of both 1D and 2D topological superconductors. While the massless Majorana quasiparticles are guaranteed to arise by the bulk-edge correspondence, we find that they could be accompanied by massive Volkov-Pankratov (VP) states which are present only when the interface is sufficiently smooth. These predictions can be tested in an s-wave superconductor with Rashba spin-orbit coupling placed on top of a magnetic domain wall. We calculate the spin-resolved local density of states of the VP states about the band inversion generated by a magnetic domain wall and find that they are oppositely spin-polarized on either side of the topological phase boundary. We also demonstrate that the spatial position, energy-level spacing, and spin polarization of the VP states can be modified by the introduction of in-plane electric fields.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figure

The Caring Ministry: Concepts and Methods of Ministry to Inactive Members of the Stone Tower Seventh-day Adventist Church, Portland, Oregon

This paper presents a project which purpose was to develop a ministry to inactive members of Stone Tower Church and to evaluate the effectiveness of John Savage\u27s Calling and Caring Ministries for use among Seventh-day Adventists. It used qualitative method.https://digitalcommons.andrews.edu/hrsa/1054/thumbnail.jp

Problems related to the integration of fault tolerant aircraft electronic systems

Problems related to the design of the hardware for an integrated aircraft electronic system are considered. Taxonomies of concurrent systems are reviewed and a new taxonomy is proposed. An informal methodology intended to identify feasible regions of the taxonomic design space is described. Specific tools are recommended for use in the methodology. Based on the methodology, a preliminary strawman integrated fault tolerant aircraft electronic system is proposed. Next, problems related to the programming and control of inegrated aircraft electronic systems are discussed. Issues of system resource management, including the scheduling and allocation of real time periodic tasks in a multiprocessor environment, are treated in detail. The role of software design in integrated fault tolerant aircraft electronic systems is discussed. Conclusions and recommendations for further work are included

Investigating Advances in the Acquisition of Secure Systems Based on Open Architecture, Open Source Software, and Software Product Lines

Naval Postgraduate School Acquisition Research Progra