The Transgender Military Experience: Their Battle for Workplace Rights

Although there have been studies that focus on the experiences of the gay and lesbian population serving in the United States military, few have focused on the experience of active duty transgender service members. Transgender individuals transgress the binary conception of gender by deviating from societal gender norms associated with assigned sex at birth. The Department of Defense has set policies and standards that reflect a binary conception of gender, with a focus on conformity. We argue that able-bodied gender variant service personnel are just as capable of serving their country as anyone else. Because of the repercussions associated with active duty transgender military personnel, our sample is small and involves nine clandestine service members and two international service members who wanted to share their stories from a different perspective. Snowball sampling was aimed at finding current active duty and reserve transgender service members. Using a combination of telephone interviews and questionnaires, data were collected from active duty transgender service personnel throughout the United States and two from international militaries that allow transgender people to serve. Data collection focused on the overall experiences of the participants along with questions regarding workplace discrimination, suggestions for policy changes, and their views about the overturn of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. Our findings add to a growing source of information about the transgender military experience in the U.S. armed forces and the importance of overturning discriminatory workplace policies that negatively impact transgender service members

The mathematics of asymptotic stability in the Kuramoto model

Now a standard in Nonlinear Sciences, the Kuramoto model is the perfect example of the transition to synchrony in heterogeneous systems of coupled oscillators. While its basic phenomenology has been sketched in early works, the corresponding rigorous validation has long remained problematic and was achieved only recently. This paper reviews the mathematical results on asymptotic stability of stationary solutions in the continuum limit of the Kuramoto model, and provides insights into the principal arguments of proofs. This review is complemented with additional original results, various examples, and possible extensions to some variations of the model in the literature.Comment: 20 page

The Edinburgh Goldsmiths II: Biographical Information for Freemen, Apprentices and Journeymen

This book provides biographical information on the goldsmiths of Edinburgh emphasizing those connected to the Incorporation of Goldsmiths for the City of Edinburgh. It is novel in that the scope of the book extends beyond the freeman goldsmiths to include family information on centuries of apprentices and journeymen who entered training as goldsmiths in Edinburgh. Information is provided on parents, siblings, spouses and children when possible as well as details of the training and careers of the goldsmiths. The book is being published in a series of parts (individual files) that are alphabetical by surname. Part 1 contains an introduction and the letters A-C with approximately 318 biographical entries

A Law of Large Numbers and Large Deviations for interacting diffusions on Erd\H{o}s-R\'enyi graphs

We consider a class of particle systems described by differential equations (both stochastic and deterministic), in which the interaction network is determined by the realization of an Erd\H{o}s-R\'enyi graph with parameter $p_n\in (0, 1]$, where $n$ is the size of the graph (i.e., the number of particles). If $p_n\equiv 1$ the graph is the complete graph (mean field model) and it is well known that, under suitable hypotheses, the empirical measure converges as $n\to \infty$ to the solution of a PDE: a McKean-Vlasov (or Fokker-Planck) equation in the stochastic case, or a Vlasov equation in the deterministic one. It has already been shown that this holds for rather general interaction networks, that include Erd\H{o}s-R\'enyi graphs with $\lim_n p_n n =\infty$, and properly rescaling the interaction to account for the dilution introduced by $p_n$. However, these results have been proven under strong assumptions on that initial datum which has to be chaotic, i.e. a sequence of independent identically distributed random variables. The aim of our contribution is to present results -- Law of Large Numbers and Large Deviation Principle -- assuming only the convergence of the empirical measure of the initial condition.Comment: 16 page