1,292 research outputs found
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Food assessment: a discursive analysis of diet talk in interviews with older men who are obese
Objective: Obesity rates are increasing faster in men than in women, with particular concerns raised regarding older men. However, men are less likely than women to engage in weight-loss activities such as dieting, typically constructed as a feminine practice. Previous research has argued that men’s food consumption is notably different and unhealthier than women’s. The novel contribution of this article is an analysis of food assessments in order to explore how older men (mostly) undergoing weight management programmes make sense of changes in their nutritional intake.
Design: Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 30 men who were obese, 27 of whom were engaged in weight loss programmes. Discursive psychology was employed to analyse the data.
Results: In contrast to other research, participants constructed nutritional advice as enlightening. Participants worked up ‘ownership’ and pleasure assessments to certain food choices which they contrasted with new, less calorific, eating practices. Moreover, new diets were constructed as acceptable.
Conclusion: Our study contributes new insights about how nutritional advice impacts upon preconceived (mis)understandings of healthy eating practices. During the interviews, men positioned themselves as educators – health promoters might usefully develop nutritional advice in collaboration with men who have successfully changed their diets for optimum effect
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Copula/Auxiliary Comparisons in African American and Impaired Standard American English
The valid identification and description of language impairment in children who speak African American English (AAE) has been a major clinical challenge for over 30 years. This challenge centers on the issue of deficit versus difference for language features that contrast with Standard American English. The distinction between deficit and difference in identifying language disorders in child African American English speakers is the key to valid language assessment in AAE. Most syntactic targets in SAE are presumably invariable while many syntactic targets in AAE are variable. For example, the SAE target syntactic form for the copula is would be represented by He is bad . Whereas that same production in AAE might yield either He is bad or He_bad . Our research focuses on how one determines if a child AAE speaker who uses He_bad does so as a function of dialect, not impairment
Color structure for soft gluon resummation - a general recipe
A strategy for calculating the color structure needed for soft gluon
resummation for processes with any number of colored partons is introduced
using a N_c --> infinity inspired basis. In this basis a general formalism can
be found at the same time as the calculations are simplified.
The advantages are illustrated by recalculating the soft anomalous dimension
matrix for the processes gg --> gg, q\qbar --> q \qbar g and q\qbar --> ggg.Comment: 16 page
The pathogenesis of oral lichen planus
Both antigen-specific and non-specific mechanisms may be involved in the pathogenesis of oral lichen planus (OLP). Antigen-specific mechanisms in OLP include antigen presentation by basal keratinocytes and antigen-specific keratinocyte killing by CD8(+) cytotoxic T-cells. Non-specific mechanisms include mast cell degranulation and matrix metalloproteinase (MMP) activation in OLP lesions. These mechanisms may combine to cause T-cell accumulation in the superficial lamina propria, basement membrane disruption, intra-epithelial T-cell migration, and keratinocyte apoptosis in OLP. OLP chronicity may be due, in part, to deficient antigen-specific TGF-beta1-mediated immunosuppression. The normal oral mucosa may be an immune privileged site (similar to the eye, testis, and placenta), and breakdown of immune privilege could result in OLP and possibly other autoimmune oral mucosal diseases. Recent findings in mucocutaneous graft-versus-host disease, a clinical and histological correlate of lichen planus, suggest the involvement of TNF-alpha, CD40, Fas, MMPs, and mast cell degranulation in disease pathogenesis. Potential roles for oral Langerhans cells and the regional lymphatics in OLP lesion formation and chronicity are discussed. Carcinogenesis in OLP may be regulated by the integrated signal from various tumor inhibitors (TGF-beta1, TNF-alpha, IFN-gamma, IL-12) and promoters (MIF, MMP-9). We present our recent data implicating antigen-specific and non-specific mechanisms in the pathogenesis of OLP and propose a unifying hypothesis suggesting that both may be involved in lesion development. The initial event in OLP lesion formation and the factors that determine OLP susceptibility are unknown
Dynamics of mitochondrial inheritance in the evolution of binary mating types and two sexes
The uniparental inheritance (UPI) of mitochondria is thought to explain the evolution of two mating types or even true sexes with anisogametes. However, the exact role of UPI is not clearly understood. Here, we develop a new model, which considers the spread of UPI mutants within a biparental inheritance (BPI) population. Our model explicitly considers mitochondrial mutation and selection in parallel with the spread of UPI mutants and self-incompatible mating types. In line with earlier work, we find that UPI improves fitness under mitochondrial mutation accumulation, selfish conflict and mitonuclear coadaptation. However, we find that as UPI increases in the population its relative fitness advantage diminishes in a frequency-dependent manner. The fitness benefits of UPI 'leak' into the biparentally reproducing part of the population through successive matings, limiting the spread of UPI. Critically, while this process favours some degree of UPI, it neither leads to the establishment of linked mating types nor the collapse of multiple mating types to two. Only when two mating types exist beforehand can associated UPI mutants spread to fixation under the pressure of high mitochondrial mutation rate, large mitochondrial population size and selfish mutants. Variation in these parameters could account for the range of UPI actually observed in nature, from strict UPI in some Chlamydomonas species to BPI in yeast. We conclude that UPI of mitochondria alone is unlikely to have driven the evolution of two mating types in unicellular eukaryotes
Deuterated species in extragalactic star-forming regions
We present a theoretical study of the deuterated species detectability in
various types of extragalactic star-forming regions based on our predictions of
chemical abundances. This work is motivated by the past and current attempts at
observing deuterated species in external galaxies such as NGC~253, IC~342 and
the LMC. Here, we investigate the influence of the density, the temperature,
the FUV radiation field, the cosmic ray ionisation, and the metallicity on the
fractional abundances and D/H abundance ratios of about 20 deuterated species.
Without modelling any particular source, we determined how the deuterium
chemistry behaves in different physical environments such as starburst,
cosmic-rays enhanced environments, low metallicity and high redshift galaxies.
In general, our predicted column densities seem in good agreement with those
derived from the current limited dataset of observations in external galaxies.
We provide, for the first time, a list of key deuterated species whose
abundances are high enough to be possibly detectable by the Atacama Large
Millimeter Array (ALMA) and Herschel, as a function of galactic nuclear
activity and redshift.Comment: 19 pages, 6 figures, 5 tables, In press in Ap
Improving NLO-parton shower matched simulations with higher order matrix elements
In recent times the algorithms for the simulation of hadronic collisions have
been subject to two substantial improvements: the inclusion, within parton
showering, of exact higher order tree level matrix elements (MEPS) and,
separately, next-to-leading order corrections (NLOPS). In this work we examine
the key criteria to be met in merging the two approaches in such a way that the
accuracy of both is preserved, in the framework of the POWHEG approach to
NLOPS. We then ask to what extent these requirements may be fulfilled using
existing simulations, without modifications. The result of this study is a
pragmatic proposal for merging MEPS and NLOPS events to yield much improved
MENLOPS event samples. We apply this method to W boson and top quark pair
production. In both cases results for distributions within the remit of the NLO
calculations exhibit no discernible changes with respect to the pure NLOPS
prediction; conversely, those sensitive to the distribution of multiple hard
jets assume, exactly, the form of the corresponding MEPS results.Comment: 38 pages, 17 figures. v2: added citations and brief discussion of
related works, MENLOPS prescription localized in a subsection. v3: cited 4
more MEPS works in introduction
Report of the QCD Working Group
The activities of the QCD working group concentrated on improving the
understanding and Monte Carlo simulation of multi-jet final states due to hard
QCD processes at LEP, i.e. quark-antiquark plus multi-gluon and/or secondary
quark production, with particular emphasis on four-jet final states and b-quark
mass effects. Specific topics covered are: relevant developments in the main
event generators PYTHIA, HERWIG and ARIADNE; the new multi-jet generator
APACIC++; description and tuning of inclusive (all-flavour) jet rates; quark
mass effects in the three- and four-jet rates; mass, higher-order and
hadronization effects in four-jet angular and shape distributions; b-quark
fragmentation and gluon splitting into b-quarks.Comment: 95 pages, 48 figures, contribution to Proceedings of the LEP2 Monte
Carlo Workshop. References for NLO 4-jet matrix elements adde
Lines, Circles, Planes and Spheres
Let be a set of points in , no three collinear and not
all coplanar. If at most are coplanar and is sufficiently large, the
total number of planes determined is at least . For similar conditions and
sufficiently large , (inspired by the work of P. D. T. A. Elliott in
\cite{Ell67}) we also show that the number of spheres determined by points
is at least , and this bound is best
possible under its hypothesis. (By , we are denoting the
maximum number of three-point lines attainable by a configuration of
points, no four collinear, in the plane, i.e., the classic Orchard Problem.)
New lower bounds are also given for both lines and circles.Comment: 37 page
Simultaneous X-ray, gamma-ray, and Radio Observations of the repeating Fast Radio Burst FRB 121102
We undertook coordinated campaigns with the Green Bank, Effelsberg, and
Arecibo radio telescopes during Chandra X-ray Observatory and XMM-Newton
observations of the repeating fast radio burst FRB 121102 to search for
simultaneous radio and X-ray bursts. We find 12 radio bursts from FRB 121102
during 70 ks total of X-ray observations. We detect no X-ray photons at the
times of radio bursts from FRB 121102 and further detect no X-ray bursts above
the measured background at any time. We place a 5 upper limit of
erg cm on the 0.5--10 keV fluence for X-ray bursts at
the time of radio bursts for durations ms, which corresponds to a burst
energy of erg at the measured distance of FRB 121102. We also
place limits on the 0.5--10 keV fluence of erg cm and
erg cm for bursts emitted at any time during the
XMM-Newton and Chandra observations, respectively, assuming a typical X-ray
burst duration of 5 ms. We analyze data from the Fermi Gamma-ray Space
Telescope Gamma-ray Burst Monitor and place a 5 upper limit on the
10--100 keV fluence of erg cm ( erg at
the distance of FRB 121102) for gamma-ray bursts at the time of radio bursts.
We also present a deep search for a persistent X-ray source using all of the
X-ray observations taken to date and place a 5 upper limit on the
0.5--10 keV flux of erg s cm (
erg~s at the distance of FRB 121102). We discuss these non-detections in
the context of the host environment of FRB 121102 and of possible sources of
fast radio bursts in general.Comment: 13 pages, 5 figures, published in Ap
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