Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts

Dielectric properties are reported for lead magnesium niobate (PbMg 1/3 Nb 2/3 /O 3 ) ceramics which were prepared as single phase (i.e., without pyrochlore) with an improved technique. Dielectric constants of 18000 for pure PMN and 31000 for PMN with 10% PbTiO 3 were achieved; these values are 50% larger than those reported in the literature. The dielectric constant of PMN ceramics was found to increase with both sintering temperature and excess MgO, and subsequent analysis of the microstructures confirmed that this was due to an increase in grain size. This grain‐size dependence is explained as a consequence of low‐permittivity grain boundaries.

Taboo words are defined and sanctioned by institutions of power (e.g., religion, media), and prohibitions are reiterated in child-rearing practices. Native speakers acquire folk knowledge of taboo words, but it lacks the complexity that psychological science requires for an understanding of swearing. Misperceptions persist in psychological science and in society at large about how frequently people swear or what it means when they do. Public recordings of taboo words establish the commonplace occurrence of swearing (ubiquity), although frequency data are not always appreciated in laboratory research. A set of 10 words that has remained stable over the past 20 years accounts for 80% of public swearing. Swearing is positively correlated with extraversion and Type A hostility but negatively correlated with agreeableness, conscientiousness, religiosity, and sexual anxiety. The uniquely human facility for swearing evolved and persists because taboo words can communicate emotion information (anger, frustration) more readily than nontaboo words, allowing speakers to achieve a variety of personal and social goals with them (utility). A neuro-psycho-social framework is offered to unify taboo word research. Suggestions for future research are offered.

This study compares the relative effects of advancing male age on multiple genomic defects in human sperm [DNA fragmentation index (DFI), chromatin integrity, gene mutations, and numerical chromosomal abnormalities], characterizes the relationships among these defects and with semen quality, and estimates the incidence of susceptible individuals for a well characterized nonclinical nonsmoking group of 97 men (22-80 years). Adjusting for confounders, we found major associations between age and the frequencies of sperm with DFI and fibroblast growth factor receptor 3 gene (FGFR3) mutations associated with achondroplasia (P < 0.01) with no evidence for age thresholds. However, we found no associations between age and the frequencies of sperm with immature chromatin, aneuploidies/diploidies, FGFR2 mutations (Apert syndrome), or sex ratio in this cohort. There were also no consistent correlations among genomic and semen-quality endpoints, except between DFI and sperm motility (r = -0.65, P < 0.001). These findings suggest there are multiple spermatogenic targets for genomically defective sperm with substantially variable susceptibilities to age. Our findings predict that as healthy males age, they have decreased pregnancy success with trends beginning in their early reproductive years, increased risk for producing offspring with achondroplasia mutations, and risk of fathering offspring with Apert syndrome that may vary across cohorts, but with no increased risk for fathering aneuploid offspring (Down, Klinefelter, Turner, triple X, and XYY syndromes) or triploid embryos. Our findings also suggest that the burden of genomic damage in sperm cannot be inferred from semen quality, and that a small fraction of men are at increased risk for transmitting multiple genetic and chromosomal defects.

With the ever-increasing diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, methylphenidate has become readily accessible in the college environment. Several properties of methylphenidate indicate abuse liability. A survey regarding the recreational use of methylphenidate was distributed to the student body at a public, liberal arts college. More than 16% of the students reported they had tried methylphenidate recreationally, and 12.7% reported they had taken the drug intranasally. Use of the drug was more common among traditional students than among nontraditional students. Among traditional-age students, reports of methylphenidate use were roughly equivalent to reports of cocaine and amphetamine use. Environmental conditions characteristic of college student life may influence the recreational use of the drug.

This is the first serious and extensive examination of American cursing from a psycholinguistic-contextual point of view. Several field studies and numerous laboratory-based experiments focus on the relationship between cursing and language acquisitions, anger expresssion, gender stereotypes, semantics, and offensiveness. Censorship, language content of motion pictures, First-Amendment fighting words, sexual harassment, obscene phone calls, and cursing at public schools are analyzed and related to sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic data. Many tables of word-by-word data provide empirical evidence of frequency of occurrence, degree of offensiveness, gender of speaker and age of speaker influences on obscene language usage in America. A "must" for language reference collections.

The extent to which resource subsidies affect food web dynamics is poorly understood in anthropogenic landscapes. To better understand how species interactions are influenced by subsidies, we studied breeding birds and nest predators along a rural-to-urban landscape gradient that varied in subsidies provided to generalist predators. We hypothesized that resource subsidies in urban landscapes would decouple predator-prey relationships, as predators switch from natural to anthropogenic foods. From 2004 to 2009, we surveyed nest predators and monitored 2942 nests of five songbird species breeding in 19 mature forest stands in Ohio, USA. Eighteen species were video-recorded depredating nests. Numbers of avian and mammalian nest predators were positively associated with the amount of urban development surrounding forests, with the exception of Brown-headed Cowbirds (Molothrus ater). Although nest survival strongly declined with detections of nest predators in rural landscapes, nest survival and predator numbers were unrelated in urban landscapes. Thus, the strength of interaction between breeding birds and nest predators diminished as landscapes surrounding forested parks became more urbanized. Our work suggests that decoupling of predator-prey relationships can arise when synanthropic predators are heavily subsidized by anthropogenic resources. In this way, human drivers can alter, and completely disarticulate, relationships among species that are well established in more natural systems.

Psychiatrists, psychologists, neurologists, linguists and speech pathologists currently have no coherent theory to explain why we curse and why we choose the words we do when we curse. The Neuro-Psycho-Social Theory of Speech draws together information about cursing from different disciplines and unites them to explain and describe the psychological, neurological, cultural and linguistic factors that underlie this startling phenomenon. Why We Curse is divided into five parts. Part 1 introduces the dimensions and scope of cursing and outlines the NPS Theory, while Part 2 covers neurological variables and offers evidence for right brain dominance during emotional speech events. Part 3 then focuses on psychological development including language acquisition, personality development, cognition and so forth, while Part 4 covers the wide variety of social and cultural forces that define curse words and restrict their usage. Finally, Part 5 concludes by examining the social and legal implications of cursing, treating misconceptions about cursing, and setting the agenda for future research. The work draws on new research by Dr. Jay and others and continues the research reported in his groundbreaking 1992 volume Cursing in America. A psycholinguistic study of dirty language in the courts, in the movies, in the schoolyards and on the streets.

The MINERvA6 experiment is designed to perform precision studies of neutrino-nucleus scattering using νμ and ν¯μ neutrinos incident at 1–20 GeV in the NuMI beam at Fermilab. This article presents a detailed description of the MINERvA detector and describes the ex situ and in situ techniques employed to characterize the detector and monitor its performance. The detector is composed of a finely segmented scintillator-based inner tracking region surrounded by electromagnetic and hadronic sampling calorimetry. The upstream portion of the detector includes planes of graphite, iron and lead interleaved between tracking planes to facilitate the study of nuclear effects in neutrino interactions. Observations concerning the detector response over sustained periods of running are reported. The detector design and methods of operation have relevance to future neutrino experiments in which segmented scintillator tracking is utilized.

We report a study of ${\ensuremath{\nu}}_{\ensuremath{\mu}}$ charged-current quasielastic events in the segmented scintillator inner tracker of the MINERvA experiment running in the NuMI neutrino beam at Fermilab. The events were selected by requiring a ${\ensuremath{\mu}}^{\ensuremath{-}}$ and low calorimetric recoil energy separated from the interaction vertex. We measure the flux-averaged differential cross section, $d\ensuremath{\sigma}/d{Q}^{2}$, and study the low energy particle content of the final state. Deviations are found between the measured $d\ensuremath{\sigma}/d{Q}^{2}$ and the expectations of a model of independent nucleons in a relativistic Fermi gas. We also observe an excess of energy near the vertex consistent with multiple protons in the final state.

Knowledge of the neutrino flux produced by the Neutrinos at the Main Injector (NuMI) beamline is essential to the neutrino oscillation and neutrino interaction measurements of the MINERvA, $\mathrm{MINOS}+$, NOvA and MicroBooNE experiments at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. We have produced a flux prediction which uses all available and relevant hadron production data, incorporating measurements of particle production off of thin targets as well as measurements of particle yields from a spare NuMI target exposed to a 120 GeV proton beam. The result is the most precise flux prediction achieved for a neutrino beam in the one to tens of GeV energy region. We have also compared the prediction to in situ measurements of the neutrino flux and find good agreement.

We have isolated ν(μ) charged-current quasielastic (QE) interactions occurring in the segmented scintillator tracking region of the MINERvA detector running in the NuMI neutrino beam at Fermilab. We measure the flux-averaged differential cross section, dσ/dQ², and compare to several theoretical models of QE scattering. Good agreement is obtained with a model where the nucleon axial mass, M(A), is set to 0.99 GeV/c² but the nucleon vector form factors are modified to account for the observed enhancement, relative to the free nucleon case, of the cross section for the exchange of transversely polarized photons in electron-nucleus scattering. Our data at higher Q² favor this interpretation over an alternative in which the axial mass is increased.

PURPOSE: Although focused reviews have characterized subsets of the literature on the arts and humanities in medical education, a large-scale overview of the field is needed to inform efforts to strengthen these approaches in medicine. METHOD: The authors conducted a scoping review in 2019 to identify how the arts and humanities are used to educate physicians and interprofessional learners across the medical education continuum in Canada and the United States. A search strategy involving 7 databases identified 21,985 citations. Five reviewers independently screened the titles and abstracts. Full-text screening followed (n = 4,649). Of these, 769 records met the inclusion criteria. The authors performed descriptive and statistical analyses and conducted semistructured interviews with 15 stakeholders. RESULTS: The literature is dominated by conceptual works (n = 294) that critically engaged with arts and humanities approaches or generally called for their use in medical education, followed by program descriptions (n = 255). The literary arts (n = 197) were most common. Less than a third of records explicitly engaged theory as a strong component (n = 230). Of descriptive and empirical records (n = 424), more than half concerned undergraduate medical education (n = 245). There were gaps in the literature on interprofessional education, program evaluation, and learner assessment. Programming was most often taught by medical faculty who published their initiatives (n = 236). Absent were voices of contributing artists, docents, and other arts and humanities practitioners from outside medicine. Stakeholders confirmed that these findings resonated with their experiences. CONCLUSIONS: This literature is characterized by brief, episodic installments, privileging a biomedical orientation and largely lacking a theoretical frame to weave the installments into a larger story that accumulates over time and across subfields. These findings should inform efforts to promote, integrate, and study uses of the arts and humanities in medical education.

The mechanism whereby certain organic addition agents modify the crystal growth of copper electrodeposits was studied with the aid of cathode polarization measurements and microscopic examination of the deposit. Thiourea and 1(−) cystine refine grain size and brighten the deposit. The effect is attributed to a degradation of the additive at the cathode surface with the formation of sulfide ions and precipitation of . The normal crystal growth habit is modified by the incorporation of copper sulfide into the deposit. Gelatin, a grain refiner and hardener, modifies crystal growth of copper electrodeposits by being adsorbed on growth sites thereby interfering with normal growth. Glycine, a "leveling" agent, affects cathode polarization only between about 0.1 and 1 ma/cm2. Additions of up to 0.1 g/l dextrin have no effect on the cathode polarization curve for copper plating.

People remember emotional and taboo words better than neutral words. It is well known that words that are processed at a deep (i.e., semantic) level are recalled better than words processed at a shallow (i.e., purely visual) level. To determine how depth of processing influences recall of emotional and taboo words, a levels of processing paradigm was used. Whether this effect holds for emotional and taboo words has not been previously investigated. Two experiments demonstrated that taboo and emotional words benefit less from deep processing than do neutral words. This is consistent with the proposal that memories for taboo and emotional words are a function of the arousal level they evoke, even under shallow encoding conditions. Recall was higher for taboo words, even when taboo words were cued to be recalled after neutral and emotional words. The superiority of taboo word recall is consistent with cognitive neuroscience and brain imaging research.

Two different nuclear-medium effects are isolated using a low three-momentum transfer subsample of neutrino-carbon scattering data from the MINERvA neutrino experiment. The observed hadronic energy in charged-current ν_{μ} interactions is combined with muon kinematics to permit separation of the quasielastic and Δ(1232) resonance processes. First, we observe a small cross section at very low energy transfer that matches the expected screening effect of long-range nucleon correlations. Second, additions to the event rate in the kinematic region between the quasielastic and Δ resonance processes are needed to describe the data. The data in this kinematic region also have an enhanced population of multiproton final states. Contributions predicted for scattering from a nucleon pair have both properties; the model tested in this analysis is a significant improvement but does not fully describe the data. We present the results as a double-differential cross section to enable further investigation of nuclear models. Improved description of the effects of the nuclear environment are required by current and future neutrino oscillation experiments.

The DONuT experiment collected data in 1997 and published first results in 2000 based on four observed ${\ensuremath{\nu}}_{\ensuremath{\tau}}$ charged-current (CC) interactions. The final analysis of the data collected in the experiment is presented in this paper, based on $3.6\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}{10}^{17}$ protons on target using the 800 GeV Tevatron beam at Fermilab. The number of observed ${\ensuremath{\nu}}_{\ensuremath{\tau}}$ CC events is 9 with an estimated background of 1.5 events, from a total of 578 observed neutrino interactions. We calculate the ${\ensuremath{\nu}}_{\ensuremath{\tau}}$ CC cross section as a function of one parameter. Assuming ${\mathrm{D}}_{\mathrm{s}}$ mesons are the sole source for ${\ensuremath{\nu}}_{\ensuremath{\tau}}$, the energy-independent part of the total CC cross section can be parametrized as ${\ensuremath{\sigma}}^{\mathrm{const}}({\ensuremath{\nu}}_{\ensuremath{\tau}})=2.51{n}^{1.52}\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}{10}^{\ensuremath{-}40}\text{ }\text{ }{\mathrm{cm}}^{2}\text{ }{\mathrm{GeV}}^{\ensuremath{-}1}$ for $n\ensuremath{\ge}4$, where $n$ is the parameter controlling the longitudinal part of the ${\mathrm{D}}_{\mathrm{s}}$ differential cross section of the form $d\ensuremath{\sigma}/d{x}_{F}\ensuremath{\propto}(1\ensuremath{-}|{x}_{F}|{)}^{n}$. The analysis could not distinguish between ${\ensuremath{\nu}}_{\ensuremath{\tau}}$ and ${\overline{\ensuremath{\nu}}}_{\ensuremath{\tau}}$. The value of $n$ obtained from Pythia simulations, $n=6.1$, gives an estimated value of ${\ensuremath{\sigma}}^{\mathrm{const}}({\ensuremath{\nu}}_{\ensuremath{\tau}})=(0.39\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}0.13\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}0.13)\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}{10}^{\ensuremath{-}38}\text{ }\text{ }{\mathrm{cm}}^{2}\text{ }{\mathrm{GeV}}^{\ensuremath{-}1}$.

The authors explored the influence of social class on identity formation in an interview study of 15 lower income students and 15 affluent students from a highly selective liberal arts school and 15 lower income students from a state college. Students ranked occupational goals as 1st in importance to identity and social class as 2nd. The affluent students regarded social class as significantly more important to identity than did the lower income students, were more aware of structural factors contributing to their success, and had higher occupational aspirations. Social class was an area of exploration for half the students, with higher levels of exploration shown by the lower income private school students than by the state college students. Lower income students developed an ideology that rationalized their social class position.

Radio frequency (RF) based wireless power transfer provides an attractive solution to extend the lifetime of power-constrained wireless sensor networks. Through harvesting RF energy from surrounding environments or dedicated energy sources, low-power wireless devices can be self-sustaining and environment-friendly. These features make the RF energy harvesting wireless communication (RF-EHWC) technique attractive to a wide range of applications. The objective of this article is to investigate the latest research activities on the practical RF-EHWC design. The distribution of RF energy in the real environment, the hardware design of RF-EHWC devices and the practical issues in the implementation of RF-EHWC networks are discussed. At the end of this article, we introduce several interesting applications that exploit the RF-EHWC technology to provide smart healthcare services for animals, wirelessly charge the wearable devices, and implement 5G-assisted RF-EHWC.

The harm thesis—the assumption that words harm people—is a defining feature of sexual harassment, hate speech, verbal abuse, and obscene telephone call (OTC) offenses. This thesis ignores the possibility that swearing can be advantageous, cathartic, or an acceptable substitute for physical aggression. Observational data, courtroom evidence and verbal abuse research reviewed here produce conflicting conclusions on the question of harm. The best evidence of harm resides in harass-ment and OTC studies, but verbal abuse research is indeterminate because of flawed research methodology. Public swearing research reveals that swearing is a common conversational practice resulting in no obvious harm. “Common sense ” (folk psy-chology) views of swearing are mistaken and inadequate for some decisions re-garding harm. Meanwhile, efforts to restrict speech in media and instructional settings continue, despite the lack of a convincing need to do so. Harm from offensive speech is contextually determined; therefore attempts to restrict speech on a universal basis are misguided. Psychologists ’ research needs to be informed by public policy and courtroom practices, and public policy and litigation need to be better informed by psychologists ’ research.

This article analyzes the neoliberal turn to contingent labor in academe, specifically the development of a ‘teaching-only’ sector, through the lens of feminist, interdisciplinary and intersectional studies of care work. Integrating discourses on faculty contingency and diversity with care scholarship reveals that the construction of a casualized and predominantly female teaching class in higher education follows longstanding patterns of devaluing socially reproductive work under capitalism. The devaluation of care may also have a disparate impact on the advancement of women within the tenure system. In short, academic labor issues are also diversity issues. To re-value those who care, intersectional alliances must be forged not only between faculty sectors, but also among faculty, care workers in other industries, and members of society who benefit from caring labor.