Contested knowledge, conflictive morality: HIV/AIDS, gender and sexuality in Puebla, Mexico

HIV/AIDS has highlighted the lack of understanding we have of cultural variations in ideas about sexual practice and identity. Whilst the South has been hit hard by the epidemic, the Mexican case is unique, and remains under-researched. Local ideas about sex, sexuality and gender, in conjunction with understandings and approaches to health affect perceptions of HIV and the risk of infection. However, health care policy evolves now in the context of an international medical community, and this thesis examines the problems these issues present. Anthropological research into transmission of HIV in Latin America has focussed almost exclusively on men, and in particular men who have sex with men. Implying that a bounded homosexual community exists, this does not account for the rapid spread of the virus in the heterosexual community. The problem of HIV/AIDS in Mexico is examined here as a shared one, and ethnographic data was gathered through informal interviewing with men and women in a self-help group, sex-workers, and low and middle income women. Public health policy normally side-steps the moral universe in the delivery of education/prevention programmes. Mexico has imported an international AIDS discourse produced in Anglo-Saxon cultures that privileges safe sex, monogamy and an idea of 'homosexual identity'. My argument that this policy cannot be applied indiscriminately iii the non-Anglo setting is borne out by the ideas people express about their sexual lives and practices. Recent theoretical work in the anthropology of gender theory has been used to explore the contradictions inherent in discussions of sexual identity, especially the differences that exist between ideological systems and practice, and some suggestions are also made for application of the research findings

Coronal Heating as Determined by the Solar Flare Frequency Distribution Obtained by Aggregating Case Studies

Flare frequency distributions represent a key approach to addressing one of the largest problems in solar and stellar physics: determining the mechanism that counter-intuitively heats coronae to temperatures that are orders of magnitude hotter than the corresponding photospheres. It is widely accepted that the magnetic field is responsible for the heating, but there are two competing mechanisms that could explain it: nanoflares or Alfv\'en waves. To date, neither can be directly observed. Nanoflares are, by definition, extremely small, but their aggregate energy release could represent a substantial heating mechanism, presuming they are sufficiently abundant. One way to test this presumption is via the flare frequency distribution, which describes how often flares of various energies occur. If the slope of the power law fitting the flare frequency distribution is above a critical threshold, $\alpha=2$ as established in prior literature, then there should be a sufficient abundance of nanoflares to explain coronal heating. We performed $>$600 case studies of solar flares, made possible by an unprecedented number of data analysts via three semesters of an undergraduate physics laboratory course. This allowed us to include two crucial, but nontrivial, analysis methods: pre-flare baseline subtraction and computation of the flare energy, which requires determining flare start and stop times. We aggregated the results of these analyses into a statistical study to determine that $\alpha = 1.63 \pm 0.03$. This is below the critical threshold, suggesting that Alfv\'en waves are an important driver of coronal heating.Comment: 1,002 authors, 14 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables, published by The Astrophysical Journal on 2023-05-09, volume 948, page 7