Polyfidelity and the Dynamics of Group Romantic Relationships

Monogamy is considered the romantic norm for establishing family and kinship. Alternative relationships such as polyfidelity, that is, a group romantic relationship, often face prejudice and social stigma resulting in a greater need for mental health counseling services compared to those who are not stigmatized. Yet counselors and counselor educators lack both understanding and cultural competency for serving this population. The purpose of this study was to better understand the dynamics of a polyfidelity relationship, as well as how a counselor might better serve the needs of individuals engaged in this type of relationship. In this study, 14 participants described what it was like to be in a polyfidelitous relationship. A combined theoretical framework-based on relational cultural theory, social constructionism, and queer theory was used to reveal the challenges, as well as the strengths, of such a relationship. It was discovered that there are an exponential number of relationship combinations when introducing an additional member into an existing 2-person relationship. As a result the relational component in counseling becomes compounded. For example, a 3-person relationship has 4 unique relationships, a 4-person relationship has 11 unique relationships, and a 5-person relationship has 26 unique relationship combinations. In addition, members of group relationships often use their group dynamics to check and balance one another, resolve conflict, and better express aspects of each partner\u27s personality. The implications for social change are multifold in both furthering mental health professional\u27s understanding of alternative families, as well as identifying the advantages and pitfalls of engaging in a polyfidelitous relationship

Initial Findings on Visual Acuity Thresholds in an African Elephant (\u3cem\u3eLoxodonta africana\u3c/em\u3e)

There are only a few published examinations of elephant visual acuity. All involved Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) and found visual acuity to be between 8′ and 11′ of arc for a stimulus near the tip of the trunk, equivalent to a 0.50 cm gap, at a distance of about 2 m from the eyes. We predicted that African elephants (Loxodonta africana) would have similarly high visual acuity, necessary to facilitate eye-trunk coordination for feeding, drinking and social interactions. When tested on a discrimination task using Landolt-C stimuli, one African elephant cow demonstrated a visual acuity of 48′ of arc. This represents the ability to discriminate a gap as small as 2.75 cm in a stimulus 196 cm from the eye. This single-subject study provides a preliminary estimate of the visual acuity of African elephants

An examination of training on the VertiMax Resisted Jumping Device for improvements in lower body power in highly trained college athletes

Training to develop superior muscular power has become a key component to most progressive sport conditioning programs. Conventional resistance training, plyometrics, and speed/agility modalities have all been employed in an effort to realize superlative combinations of training stimuli. New training devices such as the VertiMax resisted jump trainer are marketed as a means of improving lower body reactive power. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of the VertiMax, in combination with traditional training modalities, for improvements in lower body power among highly trained athletes. Forty men and women Division I collegiate athletes representing the sports of baseball, basketball, soccer, gymnastics, and track completed a 12-week mixed-methods training program. Two groups were constructed with both groups performing the same conventional resistance training and strength training exercises. The training control group performed traditional plyometric exercises while the experimental group performed similar loaded jump training on the VertiMax. Lower body power was measured before and after the training program by the TENDO FiTROdyne Powerlizer and statistically compared for differences between groups. Data analyses identified a significant (p < 0.05) and meaningful difference between power development among the 2 groups, with the VertiMax eliciting a greater treatment effect (effect size = 0.54) over conventional resistance and plyometric training alone (effect size = 0.09). These data convincingly demonstrate that the VertiMax represents an effective strategy for developing lower body power among trained college athletes, when combined with traditional strength and conditioning approaches

Stable isotope monitoring of benthic–planktonic coupling using salt marsh fish

Author Posting. © Inter-Research, 2008. This article is posted here by permission of Inter-Research for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Marine Ecology Progress Series 369 (2008): 193-204, doi:10.3354/meps07644.Salt marshes are important coastal ecosystems whose trophic function can be monitored with stable isotopes of abundant fish biosentinel species such as the mummichog Fundulus heteroclitus and the Atlantic silverside Menidia menidia. We compared movement patterns and feeding biology of these species in the summers of 1999 and 2000 in the Rowley River salt marsh estuary north of Boston, Massachusetts, USA. A 15N tracer addition experiment showed that fish of both species were more resident than transient, with mummichogs resident at scales of 1 km or less. Natural abundance stable isotope C, N, and S distributions showed that mummichogs feed more strongly in the benthic food web while silversides feed more in the planktonic food web, with % benthic feeding respectively averaging 58 ± 5 and 32 ± 3% (mean ± 95% confidence limit, CL). For both species, isotope results indicated considerable individual specialization in foraging behavior, likely related to use of channel habitat versus use of the marsh. Power analysis showed that measuring 3 composite samples each comprising 10 to 15 individual fish should provide relatively low errors of 0.5‰ (95% CL) or less around stable isotope averages. Use of such composite samples in monitoring programs will allow detection of significant temporal and spatial changes in benthic-planktonic coupling for salt marsh ecosystems, as recorded in average fish diets. Analyzing some individual fish also is recommended to obtain more detailed information on fish food sources, feeding specializations, and end-member isotope values used in estimating importance of benthic and planktonic food sources.This work was supported by Louisiana SeaGrant Projects R/CEH-13 and R-EFH-07, NOAA MULTISTRESS award 16OP2670, and NSF award DEB 9815598 and BES SGER award 0553138-001

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LSST Science Book, Version 2.0

A survey that can cover the sky in optical bands over wide fields to faint magnitudes with a fast cadence will enable many of the exciting science opportunities of the next decade. The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) will have an effective aperture of 6.7 meters and an imaging camera with field of view of 9.6 deg^2, and will be devoted to a ten-year imaging survey over 20,000 deg^2 south of +15 deg. Each pointing will be imaged 2000 times with fifteen second exposures in six broad bands from 0.35 to 1.1 microns, to a total point-source depth of r~27.5. The LSST Science Book describes the basic parameters of the LSST hardware, software, and observing plans. The book discusses educational and outreach opportunities, then goes on to describe a broad range of science that LSST will revolutionize: mapping the inner and outer Solar System, stellar populations in the Milky Way and nearby galaxies, the structure of the Milky Way disk and halo and other objects in the Local Volume, transient and variable objects both at low and high redshift, and the properties of normal and active galaxies at low and high redshift. It then turns to far-field cosmological topics, exploring properties of supernovae to z~1, strong and weak lensing, the large-scale distribution of galaxies and baryon oscillations, and how these different probes may be combined to constrain cosmological models and the physics of dark energy.Comment: 596 pages. Also available at full resolution at http://www.lsst.org/lsst/sciboo

Experimental investigations of ambiguity: the case of most

In the study of natural language quantification, much recent attention has been devoted to the investigation of verification procedures associated with the proportional quantifier most. The aim of these studies is to go beyond the traditional characterization of the semantics of most, which is confined to explicating its truth-functional and presuppositional content as well as its combinatorial properties, as these aspects underdetermine the correct analysis of most. The present paper contributes to this effort by presenting new experimental evidence in support of a decompositional analysis of most according to which it is a superlative construction built from a gradable predicate many or much and the superlative operator -est (Hackl, in Nat Lang Semant 17:63–98, 2009). Our evidence comes in the form of verification profiles for sentences like Most of the dots are blue which, we argue, reflect the existence of a superlative reading of most. This notably contrasts with Lidz et al.’s (Nat Lang Semant 19:227–256, 2011) results. To reconcile the two sets of data, we argue, it is necessary to take important differences in task demands into account, which impose limits on the conclusions that can be drawn from these studies

LSST: from Science Drivers to Reference Design and Anticipated Data Products

(Abridged) We describe here the most ambitious survey currently planned in the optical, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST). A vast array of science will be enabled by a single wide-deep-fast sky survey, and LSST will have unique survey capability in the faint time domain. The LSST design is driven by four main science themes: probing dark energy and dark matter, taking an inventory of the Solar System, exploring the transient optical sky, and mapping the Milky Way. LSST will be a wide-field ground-based system sited at Cerro Pach\'{o}n in northern Chile. The telescope will have an 8.4 m (6.5 m effective) primary mirror, a 9.6 deg$^2$ field of view, and a 3.2 Gigapixel camera. The standard observing sequence will consist of pairs of 15-second exposures in a given field, with two such visits in each pointing in a given night. With these repeats, the LSST system is capable of imaging about 10,000 square degrees of sky in a single filter in three nights. The typical 5$\sigma$ point-source depth in a single visit in $r$ will be $\sim 24.5$ (AB). The project is in the construction phase and will begin regular survey operations by 2022. The survey area will be contained within 30,000 deg$^2$ with $\delta<+34.5^\circ$, and will be imaged multiple times in six bands, $ugrizy$, covering the wavelength range 320--1050 nm. About 90\% of the observing time will be devoted to a deep-wide-fast survey mode which will uniformly observe a 18,000 deg$^2$ region about 800 times (summed over all six bands) during the anticipated 10 years of operations, and yield a coadded map to $r\sim27.5$. The remaining 10\% of the observing time will be allocated to projects such as a Very Deep and Fast time domain survey. The goal is to make LSST data products, including a relational database of about 32 trillion observations of 40 billion objects, available to the public and scientists around the world.Comment: 57 pages, 32 color figures, version with high-resolution figures available from https://www.lsst.org/overvie

Automated Reporter Quantification In Vivo: High-Throughput Screening Method for Reporter-Based Assays in Zebrafish

Reporter-based assays underlie many high-throughput screening (HTS) platforms, but most are limited to in vitro applications. Here, we report a simple whole-organism HTS method for quantifying changes in reporter intensity in individual zebrafish over time termed, Automated Reporter Quantification in vivo (ARQiv). ARQiv differs from current “high-content” (e.g., confocal imaging-based) whole-organism screening technologies by providing a purely quantitative data acquisition approach that affords marked improvements in throughput. ARQiv uses a fluorescence microplate reader with specific detection functionalities necessary for robust quantification of reporter signals in vivo. This approach is: 1) Rapid; achieving true HTS capacities (i.e., >50,000 units per day), 2) Reproducible; attaining HTS-compatible assay quality (i.e., Z'-factors of ≥0.5), and 3) Flexible; amenable to nearly any reporter-based assay in zebrafish embryos, larvae, or juveniles. ARQiv is used here to quantify changes in: 1) Cell number; loss and regeneration of two different fluorescently tagged cell types (pancreatic beta cells and rod photoreceptors), 2) Cell signaling; relative activity of a transgenic Notch-signaling reporter, and 3) Cell metabolism; accumulation of reactive oxygen species. In summary, ARQiv is a versatile and readily accessible approach facilitating evaluation of genetic and/or chemical manipulations in living zebrafish that complements current “high-content” whole-organism screening methods by providing a first-tier in vivo HTS drug discovery platform

Capturing complexity: Mixing methods in the analysis of a European tobacco control policy network

Social network analysis (SNA), a method which can be used to explore networks in various contexts, has received increasing attention. Drawing on the development of European smoke-free policy, this paper explores how a mixed method approach to SNA can be utilised to investigate a complex policy network. Textual data from public documents, consultation submissions and websites were extracted, converted and analysed using plagiarism detection software and quantitative network analysis, and qualitative data from public documents and 35 interviews were thematically analysed. While the quantitative analysis enabled understanding of the network's structure and components, the qualitative analysis provided in-depth information about specific actors' positions, relationships and interactions. The paper establishes that SNA is suited to empirically testing and analysing networks in EU policymaking. It contributes to methodological debates about the antagonism between qualitative and quantitative approaches and demonstrates that qualitative and quantitative network analysis can offer a powerful tool for policy analysis