In Her Words: Exploring the Landscape of Women's Intimate Partner Violence

There are ongoing debates about whether intimate partner violence (IPV) is primarily an asymmetrical problem of men’s violence against women and whether women’s violence is less significant in terms of frequency, severity, and consequences. Such literature highlights the need for more qualitative studies of women’s roles as the perpetrator and is why I chose to use a qualitative approach to this research. The purpose of this exploratory study was to answer the following question: What are the lived experiences of women who have used IPV against their male intimate partner? This study incorporated a qualitative methodological framework using a descriptive phenomenological approach to data analysis. Considering the importance of the women’s lived experience I incorporated the theoretical principles of feminist standpoint theory. The findings emphasize the importance of learning from women’s voices and contribute to a contextual understanding of the complex dynamics of IPV. Textural themes include destructive emotions, bottling negative sentiments/feelings, wanting control, and the complexities of substance use. Structural themes include retaliation, justification, the impact of unhealthy familial and intimate history, and reflective insights. The women’s experiences demonstrate the importance of contextualizing their violence. From this, the findings may also provide experiential insights toward informing professionals working in the area of IPV, specifically where women are perpetrators, as well as strategies and policies to increase effectiveness in intervention and prevention

Description of W.H.O.I. rock dredge samples : volume II

This report is Volume II in the series of reports entitled "DESCRIPTIONS OF W.H.O.I. ROCK DREDGE SAMPLES". This volume represents the final step in the major effort to catalog and prepare initial descriptions for all rock dredge samples in the W.H.O.I. Sea Floor Samples Collection, and to distribute this information throughout the scientific community. The distribution of this report completes the initial description of the backlog of W.H.O.I. Dredge Samples. The data contained in this volume is an accumulation and transcription of initial descriptions made at sea, along with post-cruise descriptions performed at the lab by the curatorial staff. Volume II contains individual stations executed during the period 1963 through 1986. It also presents a digitized listing of all dredge station data for the entire W.H.O.I. Dredge Collection through 1986. The data are sorted by Marsden Squares and can serve as a regional index for all rock descriptions included in Volumes I-III.Prepared for the National Science Foundation under grant No. OCE 85-19889

BRST QUANTIZATION OF NON-ABELIAN BF TOPOLOGICAL THEORIES

The off-shell nilpotent BRST charge and the BRST invariant effective action for non-abelian BF topological theories over D-dimensional manifolds are explicitly constructed. These theories have the feature of being reducible with exactly D-3 stages of reducibility. The adequate extended phase space including the different levels of ghosts for ghosts is explicitly obtained. Using the structure of the resulting BRST charge we show that for topological BF theories the semi-classical approximation completely describes the quantum theory. The independence of the partition function on the metric also follows from our explicit construction in a straightforward way.Comment: 13 pages, amste

Embed2Sym - scalable neuro-symbolic reasoning via clustered embeddings

Neuro-symbolic reasoning approaches proposed in recent years combine a neural perception component with a symbolic reasoning component to solve a downstream task. By doing so, these approaches can provide neural networks with symbolic reasoning capabilities, improve their interpretability and enable generalization beyond the training task. However, this often comes at the cost of poor training time, with potential scalability issues. In this paper, we propose a scalable neuro-symbolic approach, called Embed2Sym. We complement a two-stage (perception and reasoning) neural network architecture designed to solve a downstream task end-to-end with a symbolic optimisation method for extracting learned latent concepts. Specifically, the trained perception network generates clusters in embedding space that are identified and labelled using symbolic knowledge and a symbolic solver. With the latent concepts identified, a neuro-symbolic model is constructed by combining the perception network with the symbolic knowledge of the downstream task, resulting in a model that is interpretable and transferable. Our evaluation shows that Embed2Sym outperforms state-of-the-art neuro-symbolic systems on benchmark tasks in terms of training time by several orders of magnitude while providing similar if not better accuracy

Hierarchies of reward machines

Reward machines (RMs) are a recent formalism for representing the reward function of a reinforcement learning task through a finite-state machine whose edges encode subgoals of the task using high-level events. The structure of RMs enables the decomposition of a task into simpler and independently solvable subtasks that help tackle longhorizon and/or sparse reward tasks. We propose a formalism for further abstracting the subtask structure by endowing an RM with the ability to call other RMs, thus composing a hierarchy of RMs (HRM). We exploit HRMs by treating each call to an RM as an independently solvable subtask using the options framework, and describe a curriculum-based method to learn HRMs from traces observed by the agent. Our experiments reveal that exploiting a handcrafted HRM leads to faster convergence than with a flat HRM, and that learning an HRM is feasible in cases where its equivalent flat representation is not

Cross-shell excitation in two-proton knockout: Structure of 52^{52}Ca

The two-proton knockout reaction $^9$Be($^{54}$Ti,$^{52}$Ca$+ \gamma$) has been studied at 72 MeV/nucleon. Besides the strong feeding of the $^{52}$Ca ground state, the only other sizeable cross section proceeds to a 3$^-$ level at 3.9 MeV. There is no measurable direct yield to the first excited 2$^+$ state at 2.6 MeV. The results illustrate the potential of such direct reactions for exploring cross-shell proton excitations in neutron-rich nuclei and confirms the doubly-magic nature of $^{52}$Ca

FastLAS: scalable inductive logic programming incorporating domain-specific optimisation criteria

Inductive Logic Programming (ILP) systems aim to find a setof logical rules, called a hypothesis, that explain a set of ex-amples. In cases where many such hypotheses exist, ILP sys-tems often bias towards shorter solutions, leading to highlygeneral rules being learned. In some application domains likesecurity and access control policies, this bias may not be de-sirable, as when data is sparse more specific rules that guaran-tee tighter security should be preferred. This paper presents anew general notion of ascoring functionover hypotheses thatallows a user to express domain-specific optimisation criteria.This is incorporated into a new ILP system, calledFastLAS,that takes as input a learning task and a customised scoringfunction, and computes an optimal solution with respect tothe given scoring function. We evaluate the accuracy of Fast-LAS over real-world datasets for access control policies andshow that varying the scoring function allows a user to tar-get domain-specific performance metrics. We also compareFastLAS to state-of-the-art ILP systems, using the standardILP bias for shorter solutions, and demonstrate that FastLASis significantly faster and more scalable

Whole Genome Sequence Analysis of a Large Isoniazid-Resistant Tuberculosis Outbreak in London: A Retrospective Observational Study

BACKGROUND: A large isoniazid-resistant tuberculosis outbreak centred on London, United Kingdom, has been ongoing since 1995. The aim of this study was to investigate the power and value of whole genome sequencing (WGS) to resolve the transmission network compared to current molecular strain typing approaches, including analysis of intra-host diversity within a specimen, across body sites, and over time, with identification of genetic factors underlying the epidemiological success of this cluster. METHODS AND FINDINGS: We sequenced 344 outbreak isolates from individual patients collected over 14 y (2 February 1998-22 June 2012). This demonstrated that 96 (27.9%) were indistinguishable, and only one differed from this major clone by more than five single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). The maximum number of SNPs between any pair of isolates was nine SNPs, and the modal distance between isolates was two SNPs. WGS was able to reveal the direction of transmission of tuberculosis in 16 cases within the outbreak (4.7%), including within a multidrug-resistant cluster that carried a rare rpoB mutation associated with rifampicin resistance. Eleven longitudinal pairs of patient pulmonary isolates collected up to 48 mo apart differed from each other by between zero and four SNPs. Extrapulmonary dissemination resulted in acquisition of a SNP in two of five cases. WGS analysis of 27 individual colonies cultured from a single patient specimen revealed ten loci differed amongst them, with a maximum distance between any pair of six SNPs. A limitation of this study, as in previous studies, is that indels and SNPs in repetitive regions were not assessed due to the difficulty in reliably determining this variation. CONCLUSIONS: Our study suggests that (1) certain paradigms need to be revised, such as the 12 SNP distance as the gold standard upper threshold to identify plausible transmissions; (2) WGS technology is helpful to rule out the possibility of direct transmission when isolates are separated by a substantial number of SNPs; (3) the concept of a transmission chain or network may not be useful in institutional or household settings; (4) the practice of isolating single colonies prior to sequencing is likely to lead to an overestimation of the number of SNPs between cases resulting from direct transmission; and (5) despite appreciable genomic diversity within a host, transmission of tuberculosis rarely results in minority variants becoming dominant. Thus, whilst WGS provided some increased resolution over variable number tandem repeat (VNTR)-based clustering, it was insufficient for inferring transmission in the majority of cases

Effect of methyltrimethoxysilane impregnation on the cell wall porosity and water vapour sorption of archaeological waterlogged oak

This paper presents the water vapour sorption behaviour of degraded archaeological oak (Quercus robur L.) and the influence of methyltrimethoxysilane treatment on hygroscopicity. Wood samples (archaeological and undegraded recent oak) were treated with methyltrimethoxysilane using an oscillating pressure method. Moisture properties of the samples were determined using a dynamic vapour sorption system, and the surface area and porosity of treated and untreated waterlogged wood, previously dried using different methods, were characterised using a nitrogen sorption method. It was found that the silane modification resulted in a decrease in the equilibrium moisture content of archaeological oak samples from 23.7 to 19.4% for heartwood and from 23.3 to 10.0% for sapwood, respectively. After correction for silane content, however, the maximum equilibrium moisture content of the treated samples was 23.6% for heartwood and 21% for sapwood, which points rather at a bulking mechanism than chemical modification by silane. The results of the surface area and porosity measurements indicate that methyltrimethoxysilane is deposited in the cell wall and thus helps to preserve the microstructure of archaeological waterlogged wood.publishedVersio