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Substance use patterns among individuals with problematic pornography use: A scoping review
No full textPornography consumption is a highly prevalent behavior in developed countries, with studies indicating that up to 70% of men and 40% of women have viewed pornography within the past year. Substance use in individuals with problematic pornography use (PPU) is an area that warrants further investigation due to the potential for its compounded negative effects including risk for addiction and potential negative effects on mental and emotional health. This scoping review examines substance use patterns and associations among individuals with PPU; and to summarize the different operationalizations of PPU. This is one of the first reviews to evaluate the empirical research on this relationship. Four primary databases were used to conduct the search: MEDLINE (PubMed), Embase, CINAHL, and PsycINFO, up to December 4, 2024. Included studies investigated the association between substance use and PPU or chronic pornography use. After deduplication, 949 references were retrieved, however, only 8 cross-sectional studies were eligible for this review. Substance use classification varied across studies and included: alcohol, smoking, cocaine, substance use disorder, cannabis use disorder, and general drug use. Alcohol was the most frequently studied substance. Although alcohol, cocaine use, and smoking were positively correlated with PPU, the findings were not significant for other substances or substance use disorders. Studies used a variety of PPU definitions. The Problematic Pornography Use Scale was the most frequently used measure to capture PPU. This review suggests there is a large knowledge gap in understanding the intersection between PPU and substance use in both the volume of literature available and a lack of standardization of measuring PPU. Indeed, PPU is currently not officially recognized as a stand-alone disorder in the DSM-5. Longitudinal studies utilizing a consistent definition and measure for PPU are warranted to fully understand its association with each substance use type. Open Science Framework Registration: https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/86X34 </p
Defects at play: Shaping the photophysics and photochemistry of ice
No full textThe mechanisms by which light interacts with ice and the impact of photoinduced reactions are central to our understanding of environmental, atmospheric, and astrophysical processes. However, a microscopic description of the photoproducts originating from ultraviolet (UV) absorption and emission processes has remained elusive. Here, we explore the photochemistry of ice using time-dependent hybrid density functional theory on various models of pristine and defective ice Ih. Our investigation of the excited state potential energy surface of the crystal shows that UV absorption can lead to the formation of hydronium ions, hydroxyl radicals, and excess electrons. One of the dominant mechanisms of decay from the excited to the ground-state involves the recombination of the electron with the hydroxyl radical yielding hydronium-hydroxide ion-pairs. We find that the details of this charge recombination process sensitively depend on the presence of defects in the lattice, such as vacancies and preexisting photoproducts. We also observe the formation of Bjerrum defects following UV absorption; we suggest that, together with hydroxide anions, they are likely responsible for prominent features experimentally detected in long UV exposure absorption spectra, remarkably red-shifted relative to short exposure spectra. Our results highlight the key role of defects in determining the onset of absorption and emission processes in ice.</p
Infrastructure deficits and informal settlements in sub-Saharan Africa
Get PDFSustainable development is an imperative worldwide but metrics and data on poverty and quality of life have remained too coarse and abstract to characterize challenges adequately and guide practical progress. Nowhere is this challenge greater than in Africa, where we still know little about the spatial details of development. Here we leverage a comprehensive, high-precision dataset of building footprints to identify infrastructure deficits and infer informal settlements down to the street block level everywhere in sub-Saharan Africa. We identify a general pattern of informality with cities showing, on average, greater access to infrastructure and services than rural and peri-urban areas. We show that such patterns of informality are characterized by consistent statistical distributions reflecting uneven local development. We also show that these physical measures of informality are systematically associated with many indicators of human deprivation, which form a single principal component co-varying predictably with specific changes in street access to buildings. These results demonstrate that the localization of sustainable development is possible down to the street level at a continental scale and provide a general distributed strategy for accelerating progress in infrastructure and service expansion that taps local innovations in systematic, equitable and context-appropriate ways
Production and Purification of Terbium-155 Using Natural Gadolinium Targets
Get PDFTerbium-155 (t1/2 = 5.32 days) is one of four medically relevant radioisotopes of terbium. It is of interest to the field as a suitable diagnostic counterpart for therapeutic radiolanthanides, as its decay scheme includes γ-rays that are suitable for single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) imaging. Additionally, 155Tb has an Auger electron (AE) yield that is viable for AE therapy. There are several direct and indirect production routes that can produce 155Tb. Two possible direct routes include proton irradiation on gadolinium targets via 155Gd(p,n)155Tb and 156Gd(p,2n)155Tb. The 155Gd(p,n)155Tb reaction is accessible at incident proton beam energies of ∼10 MeV, whereas the 156Gd(p,2n)155Tb nuclear reaction requires ∼18 MeV. This study aims to investigate the production of 155Tb from natGd through the natGd(p,x) nuclear reaction, wherein both (p,n) and (p,2n) reactions were leveraged, and the purification using a three-column ion chromatography method. Using this system, recoveries of radioterbium of up to 97% were achieved in addition to high recoveries of the Gd target material, illustrating the suitability of this technique for enriched targets
Broadband Limits on Stochastic Length Fluctuations from a Pair of Table-Top Interferometers
Get PDFThe Quantum-Enhanced Space-Time (QUEST) experiment consists of a pair of colocated power recycled Michelson interferometers, each designed to have a broadband, shot-noise-limited displacement sensitivity of from 1 to 200 MHz. Here, we present the first results of QUEST, with a search up to 80 MHz, that set new upper limits on correlated length fluctuations from 13 to 80 MHz, constituting the first broadband constraints for a stochastic gravitational wave background at these frequencies. In a coincident observing run of , the averaging of the cross-correlation spectra between the two interferometer signals resulted in a strain sensitivity of , making QUEST the most sensitive table-top interferometric system to date
Performance and Achievable Rates of the Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill Code for Pure-Loss and Amplification Channels
Get PDFQuantum error-correction codes protect information from realistic noisy channels and lie at the heart of quantum computation and communication tasks. Understanding the optimal performance and other information-theoretic properties, such as the achievable rates, of a given code is crucial, as these factors determine the fundamental limits imposed by the encoding in conjunction with the noise channel. Here, we use the transpose channel to analytically obtain the near-optimal performance of any Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill (GKP) code under pure loss and pure amplification. We present rigorous connections between GKP code’s near-optimal performance and its dual lattice geometry and average input energy. With no energy constraint, we show that when |/(1−)| is an integer, specific families of GKP codes simultaneously achieve the loss and amplification capacity. is the transmissivity (gain) for loss (amplification). Our results establish GKP code as the first structured bosonic code family that achieves the capacity of loss and amplification
Kinematic Flow and the Emergence of Time
Get PDFPerhaps the most basic question we can ask about cosmological correlations is how their strength changes as we smoothly vary kinematic parameters. The answer is encoded in differential equations that govern this evolution in kinematic space. In this Letter, we introduce a new perspective on these differential equations. We show that, in the simplified setting of conformally coupled scalars in power-law Friedmann-Robertson-Walker spacetimes, the equations for arbitrary tree-level processes can be obtained from a small number of simple combinatorial rules. While this “kinematic flow” is defined purely in terms of boundary data, it reflects the physics of bulk time evolution. The unexpected regularity of the equations suggests the existence of an autonomously defined mathematical structure from which cosmological correlations and the time evolution of the associated spacetime emerge.</p
The Death of the Composer or the Emancipated Performer? Towards a Performer-Centered Theory of Musical Production
Get PDFThis paper seeks to intervene in hegemonic discourses of composer deification by arguing that any philosophical model of musical production which marginalizes the role of the performer has committed a serious theoretical error. I do so by offering an ontological argument, then a semantic argument, before finally discussing consequences and loosely sketching a positive theory of musical production. Beginning my ontological argument from the principle of pragmatic constraint, I posit a view of music as teleologically oriented towards performance and argue on this account that any successful ontology of music must center the role of the performer, since music as such can not be actualized without performance. To elaborate this claim, I draw parallels to Marxian commodity theory, arguing that (i) the infusion of performers’ living labor is required for music’s actualization and that (ii) the study of music outside the material circumstances of its creation is akin to commodity fetishism. I then turn to semantic arguments, first establishing both that interpretive performance is interpretation in the hermeneutic sense and that this interpretation is always constructive. Then, I discuss three ways in which performers contribute semantic content to musical works. First, through definitive interpretation, musicians clarify and further define directives indicated by the score. Second, in the common practice of transgressive interpretation, musicians commonly contradict the score in order to exert their own artistic influence. Third, in affective interpretation, performers actualize the score’s indeterminate semantic content, collapsing it into a single version for the sake of performance — here, I draw comparisons to both electron clouds and the quantum-mechanical concept of superposition in explicating my view of scores’ latent meaning. On account of these ontological and semantic arguments, I conclude that performers are indisputably significant in the creation of music, and therefore should be considered collaborators with, rather than formally subordinate to, composers. Responding to the apparent radicality of this idea, I argue that, although we can never claim that a musician has performed a piece ‘wrong’ insofar as their performance accords with their intentions, a performer can still fail when they err in actualizing their own intended performance. I lastly pivot to the question of a positive philosophical theory of musical production. While I refrain from developing a full account, I discuss Florian Klinger’s theory of aesthetic action and point to several aspects which I think future music philosophies ought to incorporate. I conclude by pointing toward future avenues for research in metaphysical, ethical, and interdisciplinary veins
Lichtjahre Entfernt
Get PDFDer Begriff ‚Heimat‘ ist historisch aufgeladen und politisch umstritten. Mein Comicprojekt Lichtjahre Entfernt setzt sich kritisch mit diesem Begriff auseinander und stellt Fragen nach Zugehörigkeit, Verlust und Wahlheimat im Kontext von Migration, Erinnerung und gesellschaftlicher Kontrolle