Practical Implications of Current Intimate Partner Violence Research for Victim Advocates and Service Providers

This guide uses a question-and-answer format to inform victim advocates and service providers of the findings of published research on intimate partner violence (IPV) and their relevance for practice. The first of 13 sections of the guide poses and answers 11 questions pertinent to the issue, “What is intimate partner violence?” The issues addressed include the various behaviors and circumstances that constitute IPV, whether men and women are equally likely to be victims or perpetrators of IPV, and whether women’s use of IPV is different from men’s.The second major section poses and answers 12 questions related to IPV victimization rates, addressing issues of populations at increased risk for IPV, with special attention to women who are separated or divorced, pregnant, disabled, elderly, LGBT, live in rural areas. The guide’s third section poses and answers 19 questions related to the impact of IPV on victims. The fourth section poses and answers 20 questions related to the characteristics of persons who perpetrate IPV. Other sections of the guide pose and answer questions related to victim characteristics that predict IPV victimization; whether IPV victims seek assistance and services; protective factors and coping skills that mitigate the adverse impact of IPV; the services that are typically available to IPV victims; whether victim services work; health-care providers’ role in responding to IPV; what victim advocates and service providers need to know about the legal system; the features of IPV victim advocacy; and the performance measures advocates should adopt in evaluating the criminal justice response to IPV. The implications drawn from the research are offered as guidance, not rules of practice. 884 references are provided

A Recurrent Neural Network Survival Model: Predicting Web User Return Time

The size of a website's active user base directly affects its value. Thus, it is important to monitor and influence a user's likelihood to return to a site. Essential to this is predicting when a user will return. Current state of the art approaches to solve this problem come in two flavors: (1) Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) based solutions and (2) survival analysis methods. We observe that both techniques are severely limited when applied to this problem. Survival models can only incorporate aggregate representations of users instead of automatically learning a representation directly from a raw time series of user actions. RNNs can automatically learn features, but can not be directly trained with examples of non-returning users who have no target value for their return time. We develop a novel RNN survival model that removes the limitations of the state of the art methods. We demonstrate that this model can successfully be applied to return time prediction on a large e-commerce dataset with a superior ability to discriminate between returning and non-returning users than either method applied in isolation.Comment: Accepted into ECML PKDD 2018; 8 figures and 1 tabl

Physics of Ultra-Peripheral Nuclear Collisions

Moving highly-charged ions carry strong electromagnetic fields that act as a field of photons. In collisions at large impact parameters, hadronic interactions are not possible, and the ions interact through photon-ion and photon-photon collisions known as {\it ultra-peripheral collisions} (UPC). Hadron colliders like the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), the Tevatron and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) produce photonuclear and two-photon interactions at luminosities and energies beyond that accessible elsewhere; the LHC will reach a $\gamma p$ energy ten times that of the Hadron-Electron Ring Accelerator (HERA). Reactions as diverse as the production of anti-hydrogen, photoproduction of the $\rho^0$, transmutation of lead into bismuth and excitation of collective nuclear resonances have already been studied. At the LHC, UPCs can study many types of `new physics.'Comment: 47 pages, to appear in Annual Review of Nuclear and Particle Scienc

The cultural capitalists: notes on the ongoing reconfiguration of trafficking culture in Asia

Most analysis of the international flows of the illicit art market has described a global situation in which a postcolonial legacy of acquisition and collection exploits cultural heritage by pulling it westwards towards major international trade nodes in the USA and Europe. As the locus of consumptive global economic power shifts, however, these traditional flows are pulled in other directions: notably for the present commentary, towards and within Asia

Self-Affirmation Improves Problem-Solving under Stress

High levels of acute and chronic stress are known to impair problem-solving and creativity on a broad range of tasks. Despite this evidence, we know little about protective factors for mitigating the deleterious effects of stress on problem-solving. Building on previous research showing that self-affirmation can buffer stress, we tested whether an experimental manipulation of self-affirmation improves problem-solving performance in chronically stressed participants. Eighty undergraduates indicated their perceived chronic stress over the previous month and were randomly assigned to either a self-affirmation or control condition. They then completed 30 difficult remote associate problem-solving items under time pressure in front of an evaluator. Results showed that self-affirmation improved problem-solving performance in underperforming chronically stressed individuals. This research suggests a novel means for boosting problem-solving under stress and may have important implications for understanding how self-affirmation boosts academic achievement in school settings. © 2013 Creswell et al

Diminished temperature and vegetation seasonality over northern high latitudes

Global temperature is increasing, especially over northern lands (>50° N), owing to positive feedbacks1. As this increase is most pronounced in winter, temperature seasonality (ST)—conventionally defined as the difference between summer and winter temperatures—is diminishing over time2, a phenomenon that is analogous to its equatorward decline at an annual scale. The initiation, termination and performance of vegetation photosynthetic activity are tied to threshold temperatures3. Trends in the timing of these thresholds and cumulative temperatures above them may alter vegetation productivity, or modify vegetation seasonality (SV), over time. The relationship between ST and SV is critically examined here with newly improved ground and satellite data sets. The observed diminishment of ST and SV is equivalent to 4° and 7° (5° and 6°) latitudinal shift equatorward during the past 30 years in the Arctic (boreal) region. Analysis of simulations from 17 state-of-the-art climate models4 indicates an additional STdiminishment equivalent to a 20° equatorward shift could occur this century. How SV will change in response to such large projected ST declines and the impact this will have on ecosystem services5 are not well understood. Hence the need for continued monitoring6 of northern lands as their seasonal temperature profiles evolve to resemble thosefurther south.Lopullinen vertaisarvioitu käsikirjoitu

MFGE8 does not influence chorio-retinal homeostasis or choroidal neovascularization in vivo

Purpose: Milk fat globule-epidermal growth factor-factor VIII (MFGE8) is necessary for diurnal outer segment phagocytosis and promotes VEGF-dependent neovascularization. The prevalence of two single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP) in MFGE8 was studied in two exsudative or “wet” Age-related Macular Degeneration (AMD) groups and two corresponding control groups. We studied the effect of MFGE8 deficiency on retinal homeostasis with age and on choroidal neovascularization (CNV) in mice. Methods: The distribution of the SNP (rs4945 and rs1878326) of MFGE8 was analyzed in two groups of patients with “wet” AMD and their age-matched controls from Germany and France. MFGE8-expressing cells were identified in Mfge8+/− mice expressing ß-galactosidase. Aged Mfge8+/− and Mfge8−/− mice were studied by funduscopy, histology, electron microscopy, scanning electron microscopy of vascular corrosion casts of the choroid, and after laser-induced CNV. Results: rs1878326 was associated with AMD in the French and German group. The Mfge8 promoter is highly active in photoreceptors but not in retinal pigment epithelium cells. Mfge8−/− mice did not differ from controls in terms of fundus appearance, photoreceptor cell layers, choroidal architecture or laser-induced CNV. In contrast, the Bruch's membrane (BM) was slightly but significantly thicker in Mfge8−/− mice as compared to controls. Conclusions: Despite a reproducible minor increase of rs1878326 in AMD patients and a very modest increase in BM in Mfge8−/− mice, our data suggests that MFGE8 dysfunction does not play a critical role in the pathogenesis of AMD

Entropy bounds in terms of the w parameter

In a pair of recent articles [PRL 105 (2010) 041302 - arXiv:1005.1132; JHEP 1103 (2011) 056 - arXiv:1012.2867] two of the current authors have developed an entropy bound for equilibrium uncollapsed matter using only classical general relativity, basic thermodynamics, and the Unruh effect. An odd feature of that bound, S <= A/2, was that the proportionality constant, 1/2, was weaker than that expected from black hole thermodynamics, 1/4. In the current article we strengthen the previous results by obtaining a bound involving the (suitably averaged) w parameter. Simple causality arguments restrict this averaged parameter to be <= 1. When equality holds, the entropy bound saturates at the value expected based on black hole thermodynamics. We also add some clarifying comments regarding the (net) positivity of the chemical potential. Overall, we find that even in the absence of any black hole region, we can nevertheless get arbitrarily close to the Bekenstein entropy.Comment: V1: 14 pages. V2: One reference added. V3: This version accepted for publication in JHE