Suicide Rates as They Vary by Region, Sexuality, and Gender

Suicide rates are not consistent worldwide. They vary in a wide variety of ways. Region, sexuality, and gender are all factors that influence suicide. This essay examines the manners in which region, sexuality, and gender influence suicide by themselves and, in some cases, with each other. It offers explanations for why they do so. Finally, this paper aims to give suggestions on future research regarding suicide and future policies to help reduce suicide rates

LGBTQIAP+ University Students and Likelihood of Self-Harm

Self-harm is defined as the direct, deliberate destruction or alteration of body tissue (Bakken and Gunter 2012). This research is important because previous research has found that university students are likely to engage in self-harm and that it is an often-overlooked problem among both young people and university students (Gollust et al. 2008; Whitlock et al. 2011; Bakken and Gunter 2012). Additionally, the more we know about self-harm and self-harm trends the more we can do to reduce it in our communities. In crafting my research question I examined previous research of self-harm on college campuses. One of the studies I examined focused on establishing an estimate of the amount of non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI) among university students by using an internet-based survey to examine self-harm as well as risk factors such as depression, anxiety, and eating disorders (Gollust et al. 2008). The authors found that seven percent of survey respondents reported selfinjury in the past four weeks (Gollust et al. 2008). Other research I looked at focused on NSSI characteristics and sex differences, similarly using a web-based survey of university students (Whitlock et al. 2011). The authors of this study found that females were more likely to selfinjure than males and that individuals with a sexual orientation other than heterosexual were at a higher level of risk for NSSI (Whitlock et al. 2011). Another study I looked at focused on comparing mental health and self-harm between lesbian, bisexual, and heterosexual women on college campuses. This study found that both lesbian bisexual women were the more likely to self-harm than heterosexual women and that bisexual women were the most likely to self-harm (Kerr et al. 2013). The fourth study I looked at also examined risk factors for self-harm among college students and likelihood of self-harm. The study found that seventeen percent of university students self-harmed, and of that seventeen percent, seventy-five percent did it more than once. The researchers also found that many of the self-harm behaviors occurred among individuals who had never been in therapy and rarely disclosed that they had self-harm tendencies. The researchers concluded that it is critical that medical and mental health providers find effective strategies for detecting and addressing self-harm behaviors among university students (Whitlock et al. 2006). The previous research studies have multiple limitations that limit their generalizability. One limitation is the small sample sizes of the previous research, which limit the ability to generalize to a larger population. Another limitation is a focus on primarily LGBTQIAP+ women and men, which again leads to lack of generalizability as it can ignore the transgender and non-binary or nonconforming communities. Another limitation is that while much of the previous research explores which groups are more likely to self-harm than others and what variables increase or decrease the likelihood of self-harm, there is no discussion on the amount of self-harm between groups. While research has stated that LGBTQIAP+ people are generally more likely to self-harm than non-LGBTQIAP+ people, the research has not examined if they are likely to do so more frequently

Review of 'Exile Cultures, Misplaced Identities' by Paul Allatson & Jo McCormack.

Review of 'Exile Cultures, Misplaced Identities' by Paul Allatson and Jo McCormack

Sitting to Participate

Over the years of education one of the most beneficial things one could do is participate in class. Many scholars have research the causes for participation in a classroom and what affects it has on student’s grades. For our study we are looking at participation and seat location. As current students we feel that majority of the students who participate inside the classroom sit in the front of the classroom. We defined the front of the classroom as the first three rows, the back of the classroom as the last three rows, and the middle of the classroom anything between the front and back. This brings us to our research question; is the placement of students in a classroom associated with how much they participate in the classroom? To give us a better idea of this subject we research six scholarly sources, handed out forty surveys to a convenience group, did participation observation, and interviewed two people

Principles and Analysis of Approximation Techniques

This thesis discusses numerical techniques for solving problems which have no exact solutions. In particular, it discusses techniques involved with solving differential equations and provides a numerical example of one such technique. It also investigates iterative techniques for finding approximate solutions

Vanadium Oxide Microbolometers with Patterned Gold Black or Plasmonic Resonant Absorbers

High sensitivity uncooled microbolometers are necessary to meet the needs of the next generation of infrared detectors, which seek low power consumption and production cost without sacrificing performance. Presented here is the design, fabrication, and characterization of a microbolometer with responsivity enhanced by novel highly absorptive coatings. The device utilizes a gold-doped vanadium oxide film in a standard air bridge design. Performance estimations are calculated from current theory, and efforts to maximize signal to noise ratio are shown and evaluated. Most notably, presented are the experimental results and analysis from the integration of two different absorptive coatings: a patterned gold black film and a plasmonic resonant structure. Infrared-absorbing gold black was selectively patterned onto the active surfaces of the detector. Patterning by metal lift-off relies on protection of the fragile gold black with an evaporated oxide, which preserves gold black\u27s near unity absorptance. This patterned gold black also survives the dry-etch removal of the sacrificial polyimide used to fabricate the air-bridge bolometers. Infrared responsivity is improved 70% for mid-wave IR and 22% for long-wave IR. The increase in the thermal time constant caused by the additional mass of gold black is a modest 15%. However, this film is sensitive to thermal processing; experimental results indicate a decrease in absorptance upon device heating. Sub-wavelength resonant structures designed for long-wave infrared (LWIR) absorption have also been investigated. Dispersion of the dielectric refractive index provides for multiple overlapping resonances that span the 8-12 ?m LWIR wavelength band, a broader range than can be achieved using the usual resonance quarter-wave cavity engineered into the air-bridge structures. Experimental measurements show an increase in responsivity of 96% for mid-wave IR and 48% for long-wave IR, while thermal response time only increases by 16% due to the increased heat capacity. The resonant structures are not as susceptible to thermal processing as are the gold black films. This work suggests that plasmonic resonant structures can be an ideal method to improve detector performance for microbolometers

From Majority to Minority

Mackenzie Evan Smith discusses her experience as a minority in the Middle Eastern city of Cairo, Egypt

Impact of Radio Frequency Interference and Real-Time Spectral Kurtosis Mitigation

We catalog the ubiquity of Radio Frequency Interference (RFI) plaguing every modern radio telescope and investigate several ways to mitigate it in order to create better science-ready data products for astronomers. There are a myriad of possible RFI sources, including satellite uplinks and downlinks, cellular communications, air traffic radar, and natural sources such as lightning. Real-time RFI mitigation strategies must take these RFI characteristics into account, as the interfering signals can look significantly different at very high time and frequency resolutions. We examine Spectral Kurtosis (SK) as a real-time statistical RFI detection method, and compare its flagging efficacy against simulated RFI witha wide range of signal characteristics. We found to be weak against signals with a 50% effective duty cycle, as well as low signal-to-noise ratio sidelobe spillover from strong and frequency-wide RFI. Coarsening the SK time resolution improved flagging, as did using multi-scale SK, which averages adjacent time-frequency pixels with small rolling windows to circumvent the weakness to 50% duty cycle signals. Multiscale SK raised flagging above 90% for almost all cases, and as long as the amount of channels included in the multi-scale window wasn’t wider than the RFI signal, there was no significant increase in false positive rate. Simulated realistic incoherent astronomical signals were not detected by SK at all, as expected. To simulate real-time SK RFI detection in a real data set, raw, unaveraged data was taken with the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT). The observation targets included one pulsar, two neutral hydrogen (HI) galaxies, the Milky Way HI emission, and a hydroxyl megamaser. These targets are all easily observable on short timescales but are also nearby several sources of RFI. Flagged data was replaced with representative Gaussian noise using the statistics of adjacent time-frequency pixels. We run different variations of SK detection on copies of the raw datasets and compared to the original, to see how well the RFI was removed and if the science data product was affected in any way. The spectral line targets are all completely ignored by SK , while the pulsar results decreased in quality due to the noise replacement averaging over the time variable structure, unless care was taken to flag data on timescales shorter than the pulse length. In these cases, single pulse signal-to-noise ratio was marginally improved