The Experience of Traumatic Stress among Urban Firefighters

Findings provide evidence that it is possible for emergency responders to become ‘locked into’ a regular cycle of trauma exposure that includes rapid returns to operationally ready status (i.e. being made available for another turnout immediately, or soon after returning from a previous emergency situation). Without the opportunity to interrupt the emotional reaction of an earlier traumatic response, a downward spiral of inescapable stress response may be instigated and with ongoing exposure. This paper details evidence suggesting the existence of a relationship between the work tasks of the fire fighters and a propensity for certain physiological responses and stress reactions noted during on-the-job research. Sensitivity to such processes may be gradually built up among emergency responders as their career progresses. The work suggests that in addition to instances of critical incident stress, that could be expected among emergency workers, the turn-out mechanism used actually pre-disposes the fire fighters to ongoing traumatic responses

Finite-N Conformality and Gauge Coupling Unification

In this talk I review some aspects of the idea that there is an infra-red conformal fixed-point at the TeV scale. In particular, it is shown how gauge coupling unification can be achieved by TeV unification in a semi-simple gauge group.Comment: 9 pages LaTeX. Invited talk at the 10th Tohwa International Symposium on String Theory, Fukuoka, Japan. July 3-7, 200

Remarks on the Cosmological Constant

The acceleration of the surface of last scatter (SLS) must somehow reflect the energy content within it. A test particle at the SLS is assumed to experience a linear combination of two forces: one Newtonian, the other pseudo-Newtonian describable by a cosmological constant ${\Lambda}$ in general relativity. In the ${\Lambda}$ description, which is surely too unimaginative, the size of ${\Lambda}$ reflects only the comparable magnitudes of the Newtonian and pseudo-Newtonian forces; any claim of fine tuning due to quantum mechanics is probably illusory.Comment: 6 pages, no figures; improved versio