Conditionally Sexual: Constructing the sexual health needs of men and teenage boys with a moderate to profound intellectual disability

ABSTRACT This thesis reports on a study which explored the sexual health needs of men and teenage boys with a moderate to profound intellectual disability. Qualitative in design, this study was exploratory in nature as it sought to develop theoretical knowledge in male sexual health as a broad concept as opposed to testing a theory or hypothesis related to sexual health. Literature on sexuality and intellectual disability was reviewed in addition to male-specific literature on intellectual disability. In addition, mainstream literature on sexuality, sexual health, masculinity and men’s health was also reviewed. The literature review highlighted that the intellectual disability specific literature had largely ignored mainstream literature and had failed to acknowledge emerging work in men’s health and masculinities. Moreover, the literature identified a problematised focus toward sexual matters and males with an intellectual disability. The topic of enquiry was explored via an ethnomethodological design. Data consisted of interviews with 17 paid support staff, over 100 hours participant observation in community group homes, and triangulated with relevant artefacts from the field. The constant comparative method was used to analyse the data. Participants described the notion of men and teenage boys with a moderate to profound intellectual disability as being Conditionally Sexual. Conditionally Sexual was framed by three interconnected themes: 1) sexual development, 2) conditionally masculine, and 3) gendered service delivery. Through consideration of the implications to theory, practice, research, and policy, a propositional framework for a masculine health environment has been outlined. This framework is based on a salutogenic notion of male sexual health and the development of a healthy masculinity

Conditionally Sexual: Constructing the sexual health needs of men and teenage boys with a moderate to profound intellectual disability

ABSTRACT This thesis reports on a study which explored the sexual health needs of men and teenage boys with a moderate to profound intellectual disability. Qualitative in design, this study was exploratory in nature as it sought to develop theoretical knowledge in male sexual health as a broad concept as opposed to testing a theory or hypothesis related to sexual health. Literature on sexuality and intellectual disability was reviewed in addition to male-specific literature on intellectual disability. In addition, mainstream literature on sexuality, sexual health, masculinity and men’s health was also reviewed. The literature review highlighted that the intellectual disability specific literature had largely ignored mainstream literature and had failed to acknowledge emerging work in men’s health and masculinities. Moreover, the literature identified a problematised focus toward sexual matters and males with an intellectual disability. The topic of enquiry was explored via an ethnomethodological design. Data consisted of interviews with 17 paid support staff, over 100 hours participant observation in community group homes, and triangulated with relevant artefacts from the field. The constant comparative method was used to analyse the data. Participants described the notion of men and teenage boys with a moderate to profound intellectual disability as being Conditionally Sexual. Conditionally Sexual was framed by three interconnected themes: 1) sexual development, 2) conditionally masculine, and 3) gendered service delivery. Through consideration of the implications to theory, practice, research, and policy, a propositional framework for a masculine health environment has been outlined. This framework is based on a salutogenic notion of male sexual health and the development of a healthy masculinity

A multi-platform analysis of political news discussion and sharing on web communities

The news ecosystem encompasses a wide range of sources with varying levels of trustworthiness, and with public commentary giving different spins to the same stories. In this paper, we present a measurement pipeline able to identify news articles that discuss the same story and trace how they are shared on multiple online communities. We compile a list of 1,073 news websites and extract posts from four Web communities (Twitter, Reddit, 4chan, and Gab) that contain URLs from these sources. This yields a dataset of 38M posts containing 15.6M unique news URLs, spanning almost three years. We study the data along several axes, assessing the trustworthiness of shared news stories, analyzing how they are discussed, and measuring the influence various Web communities have in that. Our analysis shows that different communities discuss different types of news, with polarized communities like Gab and /r/The_Donald subreddit disproportionately referencing untrustworthy sources. We also find that fringe communities often have a disproportionate influence on other platforms w .r.t. pushing narratives around certain news, for example, about political elections, immigration, or foreign policy. In fact, fringe communities are seemingly successful in influencing the discussion on false narratives about news events on mainstream social networks.Accepted manuscrip

Evolution and Otitis Media: A Review, and a Model to Explain High Prevalence in Indigenous Populations

Inflammation of the middle ear (otitis media) comprises a group of disorders that are highly prevalent in childhood, and indeed are amongst the most common disorders of childhood. Otitis media is also heritable, and has effects on fecundity. This means that otitis media is subject to evolution, yet the evolutionary selection forces that may determine susceptibility to otitis media have never been adequately explored. Here I undertake a critical analysis of evolutionary forces that may determine susceptibility to middle ear inflammation. These forces include those determining function of the middle ear, those affecting host immunity, and those affecting colonization by, and pathogenicity of bacteria. I review existing mathematical evolutionary models of host-pathogen interaction and co-evolution, and apply these to develop a better understanding of the complex evolutionary landscape of middle ear infection and inflammation in humans. This includes an understanding of factors determining the transition between stable evolutionary strategies for host and bacterial pathogens. This understanding will be later applied to analysis of otitis media in indigenous populations. In the second part of this article, I apply the approach of population genetics to devise a new theory for the high prevalence of otitis media in certain indigenous populations: the Australian Aborigine, the Native American, the Inuit, and the Maori. I suggest that high prevalence in such groups may have occurred as a result of colonization of these previously isolated populations by European immigrants in the 15th and 16th Centuries. This exposed them to new strains of bacteria to which their immune system had not evolved immunity, perturbing a previously stable host- pathogen co-evolutionary state

Privacy-Aware Recommendation with Private-Attribute Protection using Adversarial Learning

Recommendation is one of the critical applications that helps users find information relevant to their interests. However, a malicious attacker can infer users' private information via recommendations. Prior work obfuscates user-item data before sharing it with recommendation system. This approach does not explicitly address the quality of recommendation while performing data obfuscation. Moreover, it cannot protect users against private-attribute inference attacks based on recommendations. This work is the first attempt to build a Recommendation with Attribute Protection (RAP) model which simultaneously recommends relevant items and counters private-attribute inference attacks. The key idea of our approach is to formulate this problem as an adversarial learning problem with two main components: the private attribute inference attacker, and the Bayesian personalized recommender. The attacker seeks to infer users' private-attribute information according to their items list and recommendations. The recommender aims to extract users' interests while employing the attacker to regularize the recommendation process. Experiments show that the proposed model both preserves the quality of recommendation service and protects users against private-attribute inference attacks.Comment: The Thirteenth ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM 2020