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Connecticut’s Tony Award–winning Hartford Stage reopening with Eugene O’Neill’s only comedy, Ah, Wilderness!, was a historic event. It marked Melia Bensussen’s debut as a director at Hartford Stage. Bensussen had already been in place as its first woman artistic director in October 2019, but began her tenure overseeing other directors’ work. The theater’s forced closing in March 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic delayed her joining the theater’s directing pool. Ah, Wilderness! had already been cast and was ready to begin rehearsals when the shutdown occurred.The fall 2021 opening for Bensussen’s directorial debut might have been guided by fate, as October 16 is Eugene O’Neill’s birthday. O’Neill had a fascination with fate and destiny stemming from his deep and tangled roots in Connecticut. Ah, Wilderness! is the comedic and fantastical version of the playwright’s youthful days in the Nutmeg State, while Long Day’s Journey Into Night is the tragic and more accurate version. What unites the two plays is that they both take place in the waterfront Monte Cristo Cottage, a historic landmark in New London.The choice to reopen Hartford Stage with Ah, Wilderness! was also historic because to attend the performance one had to present proof of a COVID vaccination or a recent negative test and wear protective facial masking—something that became a common practice nationally and internationally when COVID protocols were established. Once cleared, the audience was permitted to enter the auditorium, where they were treated to a more recognizable theatrical experience. Visible on the theater’s spacious thrust stage were portions of an abstract set designed by James Noone, hidden, for the most part, behind a white sheet-like curtain. On the stage’s foreground were furnishings draped with individual sheets. The abandoned and ghostly look was ably enhanced by lighting designer Wen-Ling Liao’s stark lighting, which signaled a death or an abandonment on the stage and in the entire theater facility itself.Also symbolic was the initial music selected to mark Hartford Stage’s reawakening. As the house lights were raised, individual singers could be heard repeatedly singing, two words and notes, a cappella. The words were “I am.” The unique arresting declaration was quickly followed by the proud entrance of the remaining cast and some crewmembers, joyfully marching though the auditorium. They headed toward the stage’s thrust, also singing “I am” until they all broke into a full rendition of the famous Americana song “Yankee Doodle Dandy” —an apt choice, the play occurs on the Fourth of July. But the melody and words “I am” signified even more because the music and lyrics were written by the iconic stage Irishman George M. Cohan, who portrayed Nat Miller in the original production of Ah, Wilderness!, which premiered on Broadway on October 2, 1933.As the actors entered, the white drop curtain rose to reveal a super-size—and not entirely historically accurate—skeletal set that served as a universal environment. Its main purpose was to represent the Miller family home, and its secondary purpose was to eventually represent the act 4, scene 2 lakeside woods where Richard Miller, the play’s central young lead (Michael Boatman), and his teenage love interest, Muriel McComber (Brittany Anikka Liu), meet under full moonlight to confess their undying love. The cast continued singing while they removed the white coverings from the furniture. Their actions were a reminder that the Monte Cristo Cottage was the O’Neill family’s summer home. In this way, the Miller family’s initial actions echoed the O’Neills’ annual return. Once the 1906 period furniture pieces were fully visible and lit with warm stage lighting, the delightful summertime period costumes designed by Olivera Gajic could be appreciated in their proper context.Throughout the production’s exposition and early conflicts, the audience was introduced to an American family and a New London community compatible with racial norms of the twenty-first century. Unlike the original Broadway production and many productions since, the cast was multiracial, an appropriate reflection of contemporary times. As Nat Miller, Boatman maintained a demeanor of gentle but firm moral force when addressing challenges to his integrity as a newspaper editor, familial rebellions against his patriarchal authority, and the antics of the none-too-skilled maid, Norah (Annie Jean Buckley). As the play unfolds, it becomes apparent that Nat and his devoted wife Essie (Antoinette LaVecchia) are raising four children: Arthur (Antonio Jose Jeffries), Richard (Jaevon Williams), Tommy (Miles Lowe), and Mildred (Katerina McCrimmon). Nat has also assumed the responsibility of caring for several relatives including his single sister, Lily (Natascia Diaz), and his wife’s hopelessly alcoholic brother, Sid Davis (McCaleb Burnett). Boatman wisely and lovingly guided his family and his rebellious teenage son, Richard, with a loving, measured pace. The actor shouldered his character’s purpose, leading to the climactic moments when O’Neill’s goal becomes apparent. As a playwright aiming to bring classical stature to American playwrighting, O’Neill intended to write a comedy of substance. He did not want to write his only comedy by ending it with a happy and sentimental resolution. Instead, O’Neill concludes Ah, Wilderness! with philosophical reflections on the importance of familial loyalty and everlasting love.A clear choice of director Bensussen was to craft her production as an ensemble piece rather than as a star vehicle for a leading role, as it has often been: Cohan (1933), Jason Robards (1988), Geraldine Fitzgerald (1969 and 1973), and Colleen Dewhurst (1988). As a result, there were numerous memorable performances by actors with secondary speaking roles: Tanner Jones as Wint Selby, Stuart Rider as the protective Bartender, Joseph Adams as Macomber and the Salesman, and Liu, doubling as Belle, all made brief but standout appearances at unexpected moments. Diaz in the principal role of spinster Lily Miller imbued her character with a poignant dignity, a feat made more impressive by the fact that, in some productions, this character can arc toward the melodramatic and comically belittling.An informative post-show talk-back took place on November 6, with Bensussen, Beth Wynstra, and Steven Bloom, the latter two representing the Eugene O’Neill Society’s board of directors. During the conversation, Bensussen noted pitfalls she found in the writing of Miller family matriarch Essie Miller and acknowledged cutting some of the character’s dialogue to make her seem less scatterbrained. The result was a less dominant but more mature rendering of the character.In choosing to direct Ah, Wilderness!, Bensussen demonstrated her prowess as a stage director and her appreciation for the home-grown legacy of America’s only Nobel Prize–winning playwright. She also lovingly reawakened the dormant Hartford Stage.

This paper reports a two-part study examining the relationship between fear of missing out (FoMO) and maladaptive behaviors in college students. This project used a cross-sectional study to examine whether college student FoMO predicts maladaptive behaviors across a range of domains (e.g., alcohol and drug use, academic misconduct, illegal behavior). Participants (N = 472) completed hard copy questionnaire packets assessing trait FoMO levels and questions pertaining to unethical and illegal behavior while in college. Part 1 utilized traditional statistical analyses (i.e., hierarchical regression modeling) to identify any relationships between FoMO, demographic variables (socioeconomic status, living situation, and gender) and the behavioral outcomes of interest. Part 2 looked to quantify the predictive power of FoMO, and demographic variables used in Part 1 through the convergent approach of supervised machine learning. Results from Part 1 indicate that college student FoMO is indeed related to many diverse maladaptive behaviors spanning the legal and illegal spectrum. Part 2, using various techniques such as recursive feature elimination (RFE) and principal component analysis (PCA) and models such as logistic regression, random forest, and Support Vector Machine (SVM), showcased the predictive power of implementing machine learning. Class membership for these behaviors (offender vs. non-offender) was predicted at rates well above baseline (e.g., 50% at baseline vs 87% accuracy for academic misconduct with just three input variables). This study demonstrated FoMO’s relationships with these behaviors as well as how machine learning can provide additional predictive insights that would not be possible through inferential statistical modeling approaches typically employed in psychology, and more broadly, the social sciences. Research in the social sciences stands to gain from regularly utilizing the more traditional statistical approaches in tandem with machine learning.

Despite significant advancements in science and technology, religion continues to influence human lives. The twentieth-century perspectives from social sciences, influenced by the secular hypothesis, mainly highlight the negative influence of religion on human progress and practically ignore its influential and positive impact on various fields of knowledge/disciplines. In this paper, we have examined literature from politics, economics, and psychology to understand religion’s impact on these disciplines and vice versa. We find that religion’s contribution to human society in the 20th and 21st centuries has been mostly positive, especially in education, healthcare, social justice, economic growth, ethics, and initiatives for eradicating inequality and injustice. For instance, religion provides effective coping measures and strategies when humans face uncertainties and catastrophes and facilitate comfort, confidence, and emotional wellness. Further, we realised that (i) the contemporary research literature in social sciences generally highlights the interaction between religion and various fields of knowledge in a unidirectional way —i.e., religion influencing disciplines and not how disciplines influence religion, and (ii) that it fails to reveal a more complex multidirectional and circular relationship between religion and social sciences. This paper proposes ways to bring together social scientists and religious scholars to facilitate the much-needed discussion on the multidirectional relationship between religion and social sciences, thereby paving the way toward the well-being of individuals and social transformation. © 2022 Journal of Dharma: Dharmaram Journal of Religions and Philosophies (DVK, Bangalore),.

Significant evolutionary shifts in locomotor behaviour often involve comparatively subtle anatomical transitions. For dinosaurian and avian evolution, medial overhang of the proximal femur has been central to discussions. However, there is an apparent conflict with regard to the evolutionary origin of the dinosaurian femoral head, with neontological and palaeontological data suggesting seemingly incongruent hypotheses. To reconcile this, we reconstructed the evolutionary history of morphogenesis of the proximal end of the femur from early archosaurs to crown birds. Embryological comparison of living archosaurs (crocodylians and birds) suggests the acquisition of the greater overhang of the femoral head in dinosaurs results from additional growth of the proximal end in the medial-ward direction. On the other hand, the fossil record suggests that this overhang was acquired by torsion of the proximal end, which projected in a more rostral direction ancestrally. We reconcile this apparent conflict by inferring that the medial overhang of the dinosaur femoral head was initially acquired by torsion, which was then superseded by mediad growth. Details of anatomical shifts in fossil forms support this hypothesis, and their biomechanical implications are congruent with the general consensus regarding broader morpho-functional evolution on the avian stem.

As part of a comprehensive effort to characterize the nearest stars, the CHIRON echelle spectrograph on the CTIO/SMARTS 1.5 m telescope is being used to acquire high-resolution (R = 80,000) spectra of K dwarfs within 50 pc. This paper provides spectral details about 35 K dwarfs from five benchmark sets with estimated ages spanning 20 Myr–5.7 Gyr. Four spectral age and activity indicators are tested, three of which aligned with the estimated ages of the benchmark groups—the Na i doublet (5889.95 and 5895.92 Å), the Hα line (6562.8 Å), and the Li i resonance line (6707.8 Å). The benchmark stars are then used to evaluate seven field K dwarfs exhibiting variable radial velocities for which initial CHIRON data did not show obvious companions. Two of these stars are estimated to be younger than 700 Myr, while one exhibits stellar activity unusual for older K-dwarf field stars and is possibly young. The four remaining stars turn out to be spectroscopic binaries, two of which are being reported here for the first time with orbital periods found using CHIRON data. Spectral analysis of the combined sample of 42 benchmark and variable radial velocity stars indicates temperatures ranging from 3900 to 5300 K and metallicities from −0.4 < [Fe/H] < +0.2. We also determine for main-sequence K dwarfs. Ultimately, this study will target several thousand of the nearest K dwarfs and provide results that will serve present and future studies of stellar astrophysics and exoplanet habitability.

Measurements of mass and Λ binding energy of Λ4H and Λ4He in Au+Au collisions at sNN=3 GeV are presented, with an aim to address the charge symmetry breaking (CSB) problem in hypernuclei systems with atomic number A = 4. The Λ binding energies are measured to be 2.22±0.06(stat.)±0.14(syst.) MeV and 2.38±0.13(stat.)±0.12(syst.) MeV for Λ4H and Λ4He, respectively. The measured Λ binding-energy difference is 0.16±0.14(stat.)±0.10(syst.) MeV for ground states. Combined with the γ-ray transition energies, the binding-energy difference for excited states is −0.16±0.14(stat.)±0.10(syst.) MeV, which is negative and comparable to the value of the ground states within uncertainties. These new measurements on the Λ binding-energy difference in A = 4 hypernuclei systems are consistent with the theoretical calculations that result in ΔBΛ4(1exc+)≈−ΔBΛ4(0g.s.+)<0 and present a new method for the study of CSB effect using relativistic heavy-ion collisions.

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to describe the prevalence of food insecurity among college students and its relationship to on-campus food purchasing patterns and barriers to eating a healthy and sufficient diet, including the relative cost of food items on campus compared to national chain grocery stores. Design: A campus-wide survey using stratified sampling among undergraduates and food audit. Setting: An urban public university in New England. Subjects: A total of 951 surveys completed by undergraduates. Measures: Demographic characteristics, behavioral factors and food security status (measured using the USDA 6-item short form) were collected. Method: Descriptive and multivariable analyses were conducted to describe differences between food insecure and food secure undergraduates. Results: Overall, 35% of undergraduates experienced food insecurity in the past year (response rate = 92%). Food insecure undergraduates had different on-campus purchasing patterns than their food secure counterparts. Food insecure students were more likely to report barriers to healthy eating on all measures, including prices (AOR= 8.12, P <.0001), to experience housing insecurity (AOR= 2.64, P =.001) and to report that transportation is a barrier to buying groceries (AOR= 1.63, P =.01). After multivariable adjustment, food insecure undergraduates had higher odds of being African American (AOR= 1.57, P =.031) or other races (more than 1 race) (AOR= 3.35, P =.002) compared to white undergraduates. Conclusions: Food insecure college students face a variety of barriers to healthy eating on campus, including high food pricing on campus and limited transportation options. Further research is needed to inform campus resource development, policies and programming focused on food insecurity prevention for college students. © The Author(s) 2022.

To move from the gap between industry and academia, educators must review and change instructional content to meet industry demands. By addressing the industry imperative for leadership skills, this exploratory study evaluates the most prominent leadership style among faculty who implement leadership pedagogy in the classroom. The researchers surveyed hospitality management faculty through an online survey. The majority of respondents identified as transformational leaders, indicating leadership integration as highly important. The two most frequently integrated instruction methods were student-led discussions and delegation of group tasks. No significant relationship existed between methods of leadership integration and leadership style. Findings from this research contribute how educational leaders influence leadership skills and competency integration in classroom instruction. Recommendations included conducting further studies of hospitality management educators’ leadership styles, enhanced statistical tests to build significant results to methods of transformation leadership in classroom instruction, and effective leadership training for hospitality management educators and administrators. © 2022 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

In response to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, many institutions of higher learning locked down their campuses and altered their ways of teaching. This article discusses changes made to courses at five highly varied public universities in New England participating in the multiyear Campuses for Environmental Stewardship (CES) program. The primary aim of the CES program is to integrate environmental service-learning (SL) into college curricula through workshops, faculty fellowships, and mentoring. We detail how teaching strategies were altered in fall 2020 to accommodate the threat of COVID-19 in the classroom. The authors transitioned significant portions of their instruction to online formats or outdoor classrooms. Specifics about the impacts of the shift to virtual teaching–learning are discussed, with particular focus on the impacts to the service-learning components of each of the courses. © 2022 by the University of Georgia

Food insecurity is widespread in the United States. The COVID-19 pandemic intensified the need for food assistance and created opportunities for collaboration among historically-siloed organizations. Research has demonstrated the importance of coalition building and community organizing in Policy, Systems, and Environmental (PSE) change and its potential to address equitable access to food, ultimately improving population health outcomes. In New Haven, community partners formed a coalition to address systems-level issues in the local food assistance system through the Greater New Haven Coordinated Food Assistance Network (CFAN). Organizing the development of CFAN within the framework of Collaborating for Equity and Justice (CEJ) reveals a new way of collaborating with communities for social change with an explicit focus on equity and justice. A document review exploring the initiation and growth of the network found that 165 individuals, representing 63 organizations, participated in CFAN since its inception and collaborated on 50 actions that promote food access and overall health. Eighty-one percent of these actions advanced equitable resource distribution across the food system, with forty-five percent focused on coordinating food programs to meet the needs of underserved communities. With the goal of improving access to food while addressing overall equity within the system, the authors describe CFAN as a potential community organizing model in food assistance systems. © 2022 by the authors.

Online markets offer sellers access to buyers’ information and, thus, the potential to alter prices and products accordingly. In light of this, we undertook an empirical analysis to test for individualization on Amazon.com. We collect data from individuals recruited to shop for household items. Our results indicate evidence of individualization of search results and net prices (via coupons). We found, contrary to what was expected, that demographic, geolocation, and account information play an insignificant role in individualization of search results. Thus, we conclude that individualization is based on more dynamic information, e.g., online browsing behavior. This highlights the fact that sellers’ need for (and use of) buyer information goes beyond the simple information accessible from the buyers’ accounts to a more rigorous monitoring of buyers’ online behavior.

Diabetes mellitus (DM) and osteoporosis/osteopenia affect millions of people globally and are major health conditions in several countries including Qatar. Bone mineral density (BMD) is a widely accepted indicator for diagnosing osteoporosis (OP) and osteopenia (OPN). The best method for determining bone mineral density and OP/OPN risk is via dual energy X-ray absorptiometry (DXA) technology. The risk of osteoporosis-related fracture may increase for people with diabetes. Therefore, it is necessary to develop a system that can support the early detection of OP/OPN in diabetic patients. In this study, we analyzed Qatar diabetic cohorts including 500 subjects, among which 68 were OP/OPN (target) subjects and 432 were without osteoporosis/osteopenia (control) subjects. The objective of this study is to develop an ML model to distinguish diabetic OP/OPN patients from diabetic non-OP/non-OPN subjects based on their bone health indicators from full body DXA scan measurements. Based on our experiments, AdaBoost model performed the best for classifying the target group from the control group. 10-fold cross validation-based results indicate that the proposed ML model was able to distinguish the target group from the control group at 80% sensitivity, 96% specificity. To the best of our knowledge, our study is the first ML-based approach to detect the early onset of OP/OPN in diabetic cohort from Qatar. Our analyses revealed the higher level of lean mass, fat mass and bone mass for the control group compared to the target group. Higher levels of BMC, BMD from different body parts in the control group compared to the osteoporosis/osteopenia group indicate the protective effects of obesity on bone health in the Qatari diabetic cohort. Moreover, higher value of anthropometric measurements in troch, lumbar spine (L1, L2, L3, L4), pelvis and other body parts in the control group indicates that the WHO guideline can be applied to the Qatari diabetic cohort for the early detection of OP/OPN based on the proposed ML model. Further research on OP/OPN in diabetic patients is warranted in future to confirm the role of DM on bone health.

Breastfeeding has health benefits for both infants and mothers, yet Black mothers and infants are less likely to receive these benefits. Despite research showing no difference in breastfeeding intentions by race or ethnicity, inequities in breastfeeding rates persist, suggesting that Black mothers face unique barriers to meeting their breastfeeding intentions. The aim of this study is to identify barriers and facilitators that Black women perceive as important determinants of exclusively breastfeeding their children for at least 3 months after birth. Utilizing a Barrier Analysis approach, we conducted six focus group discussions, hearing from Black mothers who exclusively breastfed for 3 months and those who did not. Transcripts were coded starting with a priori parent codes based on theory-derived determinants mapped onto the Socioecological Model; themes were analysed for differences between groups. Facilitators found to be important specifically for women who exclusively breastfed for 3 months include self-efficacy, lactation support, appropriate lactation supplies, support of mothers and partners, prior knowledge of breastfeeding, strong intention before birth and perceptions of breastfeeding as money-saving. Barriers that arose more often among those who did not exclusively breastfeed for 3 months include inaccessible lactation support and supplies, difficulties with pumping, latching issues and perceptions of breastfeeding as time-consuming. Lack of access to and knowledge of breastfeeding laws and policies, as well as negative cultural norms or stigma, were important barriers across groups. This study supports the use of the Socioecological Model to design multicomponent interventions to increase exclusive breastfeeding outcomes for Black women.

Maintaining the excellent state of the road is critical to secure driving and is an obligation of both transportation and regulatory maintenance authorities. For a safe driving environment, it is essential to inspect road surfaces for defects or degradation frequently. This process is found to be labor-intensive and necessitates primary expertise. Therefore, it is challenging to examine road cracks visually; thus, we must effectively employ computer visualization and robotics tools to support this mission. This research provides our initial idea of simulating an Autonomous Robot System (ARS) to perform pavement assessments. The ARS for crack inspection is a camera-equipped mobile robot (i.e., an Android phone) to collect images on the road. The proposed system is simulated using an mBot robot armed with an Android phone that gathers video streams to be processed on a server that has a pre-training Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) that can recognize crack existence. The proposed CNN model attained 99.0% accuracy in the training case and 97.5% in the testing case. The results of this research are suitable for application with a commercial mobile robot as an autonomous platform for pavement inspections. © 2022 Little Lion Scientific.

Water the color of oolong reflects her shape vanishing.

We discuss invariants of Cohen-Macaulay local rings that admit a canonical module $$\omega$$. Attached to each such ring R, when $$\omega$$is an ideal, there are integers–the type of R, the reduction number of $$\omega$$–that provide valuable metrics to express the deviation of R from being a Gorenstein ring. In (Ghezzi et al. in JMS 589:506–528, 2017) and (Ghezzi et al. in JMS 571:55–74, 2021) we enlarged this list with the canonical degree and the bi-canonical degree. In this work we extend the bi-canonical degree to rings where $$\omega$$is not necessarily an ideal. We also discuss generalizations to rings without canonical modules but admitting modules sharing some of their properties.