The health and health-care research community is slowly turning its attention to LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) people of color. This study advances such efforts by exploring the relative impact of engagement in the LGBT community, religiosity, and spirituality on self-reported happiness and overall health among a national sample of black lesbians. Employing OLS (ordinary least squares) regression analysis, we find that having a higher household income, being in a romantic relationship, and having higher levels of spirituality are robust predictors of happiness, while being younger, having a higher household income, a regular health-care provider, no religious affiliation, and higher levels of spirituality all predict increased levels of self-reported overall health. We conclude that access and spirituality are key factors shaping happiness and health among black lesbian women. Future research should build upon this finding and the limited number of works exploring the unique capacities of spirituality as practiced among this population to promote positive health behaviors and shape health-related policy.

Intersections of age, race, gender, sexuality, and aging keep older, black lesbians hidden from public consciousness and from researchers. While previous research has documented a relationship between religion, civic engagement, and health for black women, there is little known about these for older black lesbians. This paper offers a quantitative analysis of the relationship between religion, health, and civic engagement for a sample (N=149) of older (fifty years and above) black lesbians. The sample is drawn from the Social Justice Sexuality (SJS) data set. Findings indicate that the variables measuring religious and/or spirituality expression had no impact on perceived overall health, nor did the overall measure of civic engagement; yet a specific portion--participating in civic activities--did have a significant, positive effect on overall self-reported health.

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In the foundational cybernetics text, Design for a Brain, W. Ross Ashby introduces an adaptive system called the homeostat, and speculates about the possibility of creating a mobile homeostat "with its critical states set so that it seeks situations of high illumination." Simulations demonstrate the viability of using the classic homeostat architecture to control a mobile robot demonstrating ultrastability in adapting to an environment where the goal is to stay within range of a single source of illumination. This paper explores a novel physical embodiment of Ashby's classic homeostat in a mobile robot with three degrees of freedom (2 translational, 1 rotational). The hypothesis, borne out by tests, is that the topological configuration of the robot as determined by simulation, will carry over into the physical robot.