Two Poems

Poetry by Carlyle MacPhai

With a little help from FUN FRIENDS young children can overcome anxiety

This paper highlights resilience as a key concept when working with young children to improve their emotional wellbeing and reduce anxieties. Supporting children aged 4-7 years with anxiety is a significant area of advancement in terms of therapeutic approaches over the last decade. This paper outlines one such approach that was implemented within a Tier 2 Community Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service (CAMHS) within the northern region of England to determine whether findings from Australian studies could be replicated in the UK. A pilot study was undertaken with a group of young children aged 4-7 years old with symptoms of anxiety. All of the children had been referred to the service because of anxiety related issues, such as social phobia, generalised anxiety disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder. They received a group intervention, FUN FRIENDS, over a period of 12 weeks. By enabling the children to become more self-sufficient this allowed greater emotional and social skills development. All the children demonstrated improved anxiety scores post intervention, as measured by the Spence Child Anxiety Scale

The Non-Linear Growth of the Magnetic Rayleigh-Taylor Instability

This work examines the effect of the embedded magnetic field strength on the non-linear development of the magnetic Rayleigh-Taylor Instability (RTI) (with a field-aligned interface) in an ideal gas close to the incompressible limit in three dimensions. Numerical experiments are conducted in a domain sufficiently large so as to allow the predicted critical modes to develop in a physically realistic manner. The ratio between gravity, which drives the instability in this case (as well as in several of the corresponding observations), and magnetic field strength is taken up to a ratio which accurately reflects that of observed astrophysical plasma, in order to allow comparison between the results of the simulations and the observational data which served as inspiration for this work. This study finds reduced non-linear growth of the rising bubbles of the RTI for stronger magnetic fields, and that this is directly due to the change in magnetic field strength, rather than the indirect effect of altering characteristic length scales with respect to domain size. By examining the growth of the falling spikes, the growth rate appears to be enhanced for the strongest magnetic field strengths, suggesting that rather than affecting the development of the system as a whole, increased magnetic field strengths in fact introduce an asymmetry to the system. Further investigation of this effect also revealed that the greater this asymmetry, the less efficiently the gravitational energy is released. By better understanding the under-studied regime of such a major phenomenon in astrophysics, deeper explanations for observations may be sought, and this work illustrates that the strength of magnetic fields in astrophysical plasmas influences observed RTI in subtle and complex ways.Comment: Accepted for publication by A&A. 10 pages, 9 figure

Growing a Rural Economy with an Entrepreneurial Community College

Community/Rural/Urban Development,

Mating Success of Gypsy Moth (Lepidoptera: Lymantriidae) Females in Southern Wisconsin

Mating success of laboratory-reared gypsy moth Lymantria dispar (L.) females exposed for 24 hr on tree boles and its relationship to male moth counts in pheromone-baited traps was studied in southern Wisconsin. The relationship between mating probability of gypsy moth females and male moth counts in traps corresponded to an exponential model that can be used for predicting mating probabilities in sparse isolated populations. Relative attractiveness of females compared with traps was 0.23, which is similar to earlier estimated relative attractiveness of females in Virginia. The mortality of females from predation, however, was found to be significantly lower in Wisconsin than in Virginia, which may contribute to a larger degree of mating success. Increased long-distance dispersal of males could also contribute to the increased mating success of females. The higher rate of spread of gypsy moth populations in Wisconsin compared with other areas may be due to the increased mating success caused by the lower female mortality and higher long-distance dispersal of males