A Risk Assessment Framework for the Socioeconomic Impacts of Electricity Transmission Infrastructure Failure Due to Space Weather: An Application to the United Kingdom

Space weather phenomena have been studied in detail in the peer‐reviewed scientific literature. However, there has arguably been scant analysis of the potential socioeconomic impacts of space weather, despite a growing gray literature from different national studies, of varying degrees of methodological rigor. In this analysis, we therefore provide a general framework for assessing the potential socioeconomic impacts of critical infrastructure failure resulting from geomagnetic disturbances, applying it to the British high‐voltage electricity transmission network. Socioeconomic analysis of this threat has hitherto failed to address the general geophysical risk, asset vulnerability, and the network structure of critical infrastructure systems. We overcome this by using a three‐part method that includes (i) estimating the probability of intense magnetospheric substorms, (ii) exploring the vulnerability of electricity transmission assets to geomagnetically induced currents, and (iii) testing the socioeconomic impacts under different levels of space weather forecasting. This has required a multidisciplinary approach, providing a step toward the standardization of space weather risk assessment. We find that for a Carrington‐sized 1‐in‐100‐year event with no space weather forecasting capability, the gross domestic product loss to the United Kingdom could be as high as £15.9 billion, with this figure dropping to £2.9 billion based on current forecasting capability. However, with existing satellites nearing the end of their life, current forecasting capability will decrease in coming years. Therefore, if no further investment takes place, critical infrastructure will become more vulnerable to space weather. Additional investment could provide enhanced forecasting, reducing the economic loss for a Carrington‐sized 1‐in‐100‐year event to £0.9 billion.     

When Heterosexuality is Questioned: Stifling Suspicion Through Public Displays of Heterosexual Identity

This study examined public heterosexual identity management practices of heterosexual-identified young adults in the United States. Analysis of 415 participants’ written narratives indicated that 41% (n = 169) described consciously engaging in public displays of their heterosexual status in relation to suspicion about their sexual orientation. This article describes our findings regarding five aspects of these narratives of suspicion: types of suspicion, causes of suspicion, reasons for concern about suspicion, the types of public displays of heterosexual status employed to quell suspicion, and intended audiences for these displays. Overall, the results indicated that heterosexual identity suspicion is multifaceted, this suspicion serves as a catalyst for public displays of heterosexual status, and the climate of suspicion described by our participants reflects and reinforces contemporary heterosexism.     

Gender Similarities and Differences in Sexual Arousal,Desire, and Orgasmic Pleasure in the Laboratory

Relatively little is known about gender differences in the orgasm experience. The objectives of this study were to compare men's and women's patterns of sexual arousal and desire before and after orgasm, and the predictors of their orgasmic pleasure. Using their typical technique, where masturbation enjoyment was similar to that experienced at home, 38 men and 38 women masturbated to orgasm in the laboratory. Physiological sexual arousal (genital temperature) and subjective sexual arousal and desire measurements were taken at baseline, after masturbation almost to orgasm, and immediately and 15 minutes after orgasm. In both genders, all measures increased significantly during masturbation, with a greater buildup leading to a more pleasurable orgasm. After orgasm, however, sexual arousal and desire decreased more quickly and consistently in men than in women, thereby replicating Masters and Johnson's (1966 Masters , W. H. , &; Johnson , V. E. ( 1966 ). Human sexual response . Boston , MA : Little, Brown . [Google Scholar]) observations. More men than women exhibited resolution of subjective sexual arousal and sexual satiation; their genital temperature also decreased more than women's but did not return to baseline. Women's orgasmic pleasure was related to a postorgasmic decrease in genital temperature but, unexpectedly, the maintenance of subjective sexual arousal and desire. Future studies should explore whether this pattern explains gender differences in the pursuit of additional orgasms.     

Make me Wanna Holler: Meshell Ndegeocello,Black Queer Aesthetics,and Feminist Critiques

This article examines the music and performance of Meshell Ndegeocello, arguing that they are part of a cross-Atlantic conversation that pushes the boundaries of Black feminist thought on masculinity and desire. From the time of her debut album in 1993, Ndegeocello has resisted categorization both in her public personae and in her music. Ndegeocello's refusal to be restricted in her stage performance and in her musical expression has created a rich text through which to read Black female masculinity. Her work has been particularly productive in rethinking (Black) feminist couplings of patriarchy with male anatomy. Ndegeocello's music challenges any one representation of female masculinity, mixing critiques of masculine privilege and violence with celebrations of pleasure and pansexual desire.     

Radical absence: encountering traumatic affect in digitally mediated disappearance

ABSTRACT

Disappearances keep appearing in the digital sphere: video circulates of Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) beheading of a kidnapped journalist; MH370 vanishes into sky yet its real and imagined journeys are traced ceaselessly; friends learn someone close to them has died when Facebook ‘memorializes’ their page. Each is different: a lost airplane, unreported boat people and a deceased life. In the work of trauma studies scholars such as Cathy Caruth [1996. Unclaimed experience: trauma, narrative, and history. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press] and Shoshana Felman and D. Laub [1992. Testimony: crises of witnessing in literature, psychoanalysis, and history. New York: Routledge], such events are felt but unrecognized, known to have happened but unable to be represented. Yet these are traumas that can be experienced with intensity and immediacy in the mediated worldings of the digital. They are encounters with radical absence. Affect theory offers the means to conceptualize this ‘vicarious trauma’ [Kaplan 2005, Trauma culture: the politics of terror and loss in media and literature. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, p. 87]; it bridges the conceptual gap between an event that happened and the meaning it contains. Since affect is ‘the simultaneous participation of the virtual in the actual and the actual in the virtual, as one arises from and returns to the other’ [Massumi 2002, Parables for the virtual: movement, affect, sensation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, p. 35], it offers a way of understanding trauma in keeping with the digital: fluid, moving, changeable, multitudinous and even contagious. This paper traces the contours of encounters with video beheadings, the vanishing of MH370, and markers of digital death as encounters with radical absence that are emblematic of the complexity of traumatic affect and mediated trauma in the digital sphere.     

How Good a Deal Was the Tobacco Settlement?: Assessing Payments to Massachusetts

We estimate the increment in Massachusetts Medicaid program costs attributable to smoking from December 20, 1991 to 1998. We describe how our methods improve upon earlier estimates of analogous costs at the national level. Current costs to the Massachusetts Medicaid program approximate the payments to Massachusetts under the tobacco settlement of November 1998. Whether these payments are viewed as appropriate compensation for Medicaid costs over time depends upon the rate of increase in future health care costs, the rate of decline in smoking, the proportion of smoking that should be attributed to the actions of the tobacco companies and the likelihood the state would have prevailed at trial. The costs to the Medicaid program are dwarfed by the internal costs to smokers themselves.     

Fostering confidence: Foster caregivers' relationship efficacy and associations with marital and co‐parenting relationship quality

Although healthy marital and co‐parenting relationships are important characteristics of a high‐quality, two‐parent foster home, little attention has been given to foster caregiver couples' perceptions of their marital and co‐parenting relationships and the contextual factors that influence these perceptions. Guided by the contextual model of family stress and social cognitive theory, the current study explores patterns of foster caregivers' relationship efficacy, covariates associated with efficacy, and how efficacy is associated with marital and co‐parenting relationship quality. On the basis of data collected from a random sample of 93 foster caregivers, latent profile analysis identified 49.5% as reporting moderate levels of relationship efficacy and 50.5% as reporting high relationship efficacy. Additionally, findings suggested that those who had been married previously, did not have a current placement, had been married longer, had fewer children, and received support from family reported higher levels of relationship efficacy, which was positively associated with positive marital and co‐parenting relationship quality. Implications for how the child welfare system can support foster caregiver marital and co‐parenting relationships are shared.     

Where the wild things are! Do urban green spaces with greater avian biodiversity promote more positive emotions in humans?

Urban Ecosystems - Urban green space can help mitigate the negative impacts of urban living and provide positive effects on citizens’ mood, health and well-being. Questions remain, however,...