Is first-gen an identity? How first-generation college students make meaning of institutional and familial constructs of self

Institutions increasingly use first-generation categorizations to provide support to students. In this study, we sought to understand how students make meaning of their first-generation status by conducting a series of focus groups with 54 participants. Our findings reveal that students saw first-generation status as an organizational and familial identity rather than a social identities. This status was connected to alterity and social distance that was most salient in comparison to continuing-generation peers. Our recommendations include re-examining the role of first- generation specific programming on campus, creating opportunities for meaning-making, supporting students within changing family dynamics, and exploring the interaction between first-generation status and other marginalized identities

Linfield Digest

Brief articles and photos of events and news about Linfield Colleg

NGC 1866: First Spectroscopic Detection of Fast Rotating Stars in a Young LMC Cluster

High-resolution spectroscopic observations were taken of 29 extended main sequence turn-off (eMSTO) stars in the young ($\sim$200 Myr) LMC cluster, NGC 1866 using the Michigan/Magellan Fiber System and MSpec spectrograph on the Magellan-Clay 6.5-m telescope. These spectra reveal the first direct detection of rapidly rotating stars whose presence has only been inferred from photometric studies. The eMSTO stars exhibit H-alpha emission (indicative of Be-star decretion disks), others have shallow broad H-alpha absorption (consistent with rotation $\gtrsim$150 km s$^{-1}$), or deep H-alpha core absorption signaling lower rotation velocities ($\lesssim$150 km s$^{-1}$ ). The spectra appear consistent with two populations of stars - one rapidly rotating, and the other, younger and slowly rotating.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures, Accepted for publication in ApJ Letter

Hysterectomy, endometrial ablation, and levonorgestrel releasing intrauterine system (Mirena) for treatment of heavy menstrual bleeding : cost effectiveness analysis

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Will Biofuel Mandates Raise Food Prices?

Biofuels have received a lot of attention as a substitute for gasoline in transportation. They have also been blamed for recent increases in food prices. Both the United States and the European Union have adopted mandatory blending policies that require a sharp increase in the use of biofuels. In this paper, we examine the effect of these mandates on food prices and carbon emissions. The model we use considers future world population growth and income-driven changes in dietary preferences towards higher meat and dairy consumption as well as heterogenous land quality. We find that food prices increase anyway because of increased demand for food, especially due to the higher consumption of meat products, and scarcity of fertile arable lands. The contribution of the biofuel mandates to food prices is quite small, about 5% at most. However, biofuel mandates actually increase global emissions due to land conversion and terms of trade effects, undermining the main reason for imposing the mandates.agriculture; energy policy; global warming; land quality; renewable fuel standards

The bottomonium spectrum at finite temperature from Nf=2+1N_f=2+1 lattice QCD

We present results on the bottomonium spectrum at temperatures above and below the deconfinement crossover temperature, $T_c$, from dynamical lattice QCD simulations. The heavy quark is treated with a non-relativistic effective field theory on the lattice and serves as a probe of the hot medium. Ensembles with a finer spatial lattice spacing and a greater range of temperatures below $T_c$ than those previously employed by this collaboration are used. In addition, there are $N_f=2+1$ flavours of Wilson clover quark in the sea with $M_\pi\approx400$ MeV and we perform a more careful tuning of the bottom quark mass in this work. We calculate the spectral functions of S and P wave bottomonium states using the maximum entropy method and confirm earlier findings on the survival of the ground state S wave states up to at least $2T_c$ and the immediate dissociation of the P wave states above $T_c$.Comment: 17 pages, 11 figure

Scalable experimental estimation of multipartite entanglement

We present an efficient experimental estimation of the multipartite entanglement of mixed quantum states in terms of simple parity measurements.Comment: Three pages, three figure