Exploring Biculturality and Beauty Standards through Breast Discourse and Breasted Experience of Sexual Minority Women

Body satisfaction and embodied experience are fundamental components of women’s mental health. This is especially true for sexual minority women (SMW) who experience the complex demands of biculturality, as they must attend to the appearance ideals of both mainstream and SMW subculture. The current study aimed to investigate SMW’s bicultural experiences of body satisfaction and beauty pressures through a focused exploration of SMW’s breast discourse and breasted experience. Specifically, we hoped to discern more conclusive findings on whether the SMW subculture acts to protect SMW from the negative effects of mainstream, heteronormative beauty standards as proposed by previous research findings. We conducted a qualitative study of 11 SMW with questions focused on a variety of experiential areas including breast development, gender identity, romantic relationships, mainstream culture and media, and SMW subculture. Data analysis resulted in 13 primary themes and 26 subthemes. From the thematic aggregate, a preliminary theoretical model emerged detailing the relationships and interactions among various social and personal-based factors and influences. Results determined that breasts as a gender marker, gender identity, the breast/chest-gender identity relationship, and internalized sexism and beauty codes are the principal factors involved in SMW’s bicultural breasted experience and beauty standard negotiation. These factors, emergent themes, and the preliminary theoretical model are discussed, along with clinical implications, study limitations, and future research directions

Lesbian Body Dissatisfaction: The Roles of Gender Identity, Body-Gender Identity Incongruence, and Internalized Appearance Ideals

Given the gendered nature of body dissatisfaction and the especially varied experience of gender identity within lesbian subculture, the current study investigated how lesbians’ gender identities may account for differences in lesbian body dissatisfaction. More specifically, I examined gender identity, body-gender identity incongruence, and lesbian subtype as predictors of lesbian body dissatisfaction. In addition, I examined the potential moderating role of internalization of trait appearance ideals (both thin and mesomorphic ideals) in the gender identityàbody dissatisfaction link. The current study of 427 lesbians revealed that some aspects of gender identity uniquely predict lesbian body dissatisfaction, namely measures assessing stereotypical male or female characteristics. Identification with femininity was related to more negative appearance appraisals. Identification with masculinity was related to less negative appearance appraisals, preoccupation with weight, and self-perception of being overweight, and greater body areas satisfaction. Body-gender identity incongruence was also uniquely related to more overweight preoccupation and less body areas satisfaction. Lesbian subtype predicted body dissatisfaction, with femme lesbians reporting greater investment in appearance than any other subtype, and greater overweight preoccupation and body areas dissatisfaction compared to butch lesbians. Finally, both thin and mesomorphic ideal internalization moderated the relationship between gender expression–butch and investment in appearance

Potential Effects of Chemical Contamination on South Florida Bonefish Albula vulpes

An ecological risk assessment was conducted on the risk to fish of chemical contaminants detected in the habitat of Albula vulpes in South Florida, to evaluate whether contaminants may be a driver of declines in the recreational bonefish fishery. All available contaminant detection data from Biscayne Bay, Florida Bay, and the Florida Keys were compared to federal and state guidelines for aquatic health to identify Contaminants of Potential Ecological Concern (COPECS). For these COPECs, species sensitivity distributions were constructed and compared with recent detections at the 90th centile of exposure. Copper in Biscayne Bay was identified as the highest risk of acute and chronic effects to fish, followed by a risk of chronic effects from both the recently phased-out pesticide endosulfan in Florida Bay, and the pharmaceutical hormone estrone in the Florida Keys

Mehr Potenzial für Biogeflügel?

Der Beitrag beschreibt die Ergebnisse der Schlachtereienbefragung sowie des Expertenworkshops in Göttingen im Rahmen des BÖLN-Projektes "Analyse des Bio-Geflügelmarktes". Zudem werden die private Nachfrage und die Käuferstruktur von Bio-Geflügel auf Basis des GfK-Haushaltspanels analysiert. Außerdem werden die Ergebnisse der Konkurrenzanalyse von Marken- und Premiumprogrammen aufgezeigt

Healthy Neighborhood Healthy Heart Initiative: Bridging Community Health Theory to Civic Commitment

Healthy Neighborhood Healthy Heart Initiative (Healthy Heart) is a collaborative service learning experience to address identified health concerns of neighborhood residents. Healthy Heart is a collaborative program of Cuyahoga Community College (CCC) Nursing Education Department, Saint Vincent Charity Hospital (SVCH) Community Outreach Department, and five low-income urban apartment complexes. The program utilizes service learning framework and coalition building. As a result, academic institutions, agencies, target populations, and the community as a whole are positively impacted and collaborate in the experience. The goals of the initiative are to: 1. Empower individuals, families, and groups to make informed health care decisions based on screening results 2. Sensitize students to the health concerns of a multicultural community 3. Promote community-based practice aimed at addressing unmet, identified health concerns 4. Create a sustainable community partnership

WOODLAND POND SALAMANDER ABUNDANCE IN RELATION TO FOREST MANAGEMENT AND ENVIRONMENTAL CONDITIONS IN NORTHERN WISCONSIN

Woodland ponds are important landscape features that help sustain populations of amphibians that require this aquatic habitat for successful reproduction. Species abundance patterns often reflect site-specific differences in hydrology, physical characteristics, and surrounding vegetation. Large-scale processes such as changing land cover and environmental conditions are other potential drivers influencing amphibian populations in the Upper Midwest, but little information exists on the combined effects of these factors. We used Blue-spotted (Ambystoma laterale Hallowell) and Spotted Salamander (A. maculatum Shaw) monitoring data collected at the same woodland ponds thirteen years apart to determine if changing environmental conditions and vegetation cover in surrounding landscapes influenced salamander movement phenology and abundance. Four woodland ponds in northern Wisconsin were sampled for salamanders in April 1992-1994 and 2005-2007. While Bluespotted Salamanders were more abundant than Spotted Salamanders in all ponds, there was no change in the numbers of either species over the years. However, peak numbers of Blue-spotted Salamanders occurred 11.7 days earlier (range: 9-14 days) in the 2000s compared to the 1990s; Spotted Salamanders occurred 9.5 days earlier (range: 3 - 13 days). Air and water temperatures (April 13- 24) increased, on average, 4.8 oC and 3.7 oC, respectively, between the decades regardless of pond. There were no discernible changes in canopy openness in surrounding forests between decades that would have warmed the water sooner (i.e., more light penetration). Our finding that salamander breeding phenology can vary by roughly 10 days in Wisconsin contributes to growing evidence that amphibian populations have responded to changing climate conditions by shifting life-cycle events. Managers can use this information to adjust monitoring programs and forest management activities in the surrounding landscape to avoid vulnerable amphibian movement periods. Considering direct and indirect stressors such as changing habitat and environmental conditions simultaneously to better understand trends in space and time can help improve monitoring programs for this taxa, which is at major risk of continued declines

Molecular Rearrangements of the Extracellular Vestibule in NMDAR Channels during Gating

AbstractMany N-methyl-D-aspartate receptor (NMDAR) channel blockers that have therapeutic potential can be trapped in the closed state. Using a combination of the substituted cysteine accessibility method and open channel blockers, we found that the M3 segment forms the core of the extracellular vestibule, including a deep site for trapping blockers. The M3 segment, as well as more superficial parts of the extracellular vestibule, undergo extensive remodeling during channel closure, but do not define the activation gate, which is located deeper in the pore. Rather, the pore walls lining the extracellular vestibule constrict during channel closure. This movement is essential for coupling ligand binding to activation gate opening and accounts for the different mechanisms of open channel block, including trapping

Nurses Involvement in Nursing Home Culture Change: Overcoming Barriers, Advancing Opportunities

Summarizes discussions from a 2008 interdisciplinary panel convened to identify facilitators and barriers to nurses' involvement in culture change in nursing homes and actions to promote nurse competencies in resident-directed care. Makes recommendations

A Distributed Rough Set Theory based Algorithm for an Efficient Big Data Pre-processing under the Spark Framework

Big Data reduction is a main point of interest across a wide variety of fields. This domain was further investigated when the difficulty in quickly acquiring the most useful information from the huge amount of data at hand was encountered. To achieve the task of data reduction, specifically feature selection, several state-of-the-art methods were proposed. However, most of them require additional information about the given data for thresholding, noise levels to be specified or they even need a feature ranking procedure. Thus, it seems necessary to think about a more adequate feature selection technique which can extract features using information contained within the dataset alone. Rough Set Theory (RST) can be used as such a technique to discover data dependencies and to reduce the number of features contained in a dataset using the data alone, requiring no additional information. However, despite being a powerful feature selection technique, RST is computationally expensive and only practical for small datasets. Therefore, in this paper, we present a novel efficient distributed Rough Set Theory based algorithm for large-scale data pre-processing under the Spark framework. Our experimental results show the efficient applicability of our RST solution to Big Data without any significant information loss.authorsversio