A Vain Fascination: Writing from and about Haiti after the Earthquake

In the wake of the huge earthquake that struck Haiti on 12 January 2010, Haiti instantly became the focus of media attention across the world. At that moment, the tropes that had imprisoned Haiti for two centuries (barbarism, savagery, vodou, the land-that-God-forgot, etc.) began to resurface. Some Haitian intellectuals sought to combat those images, but in so doing they inadvertently revealed their complicity not only in the negative discursive construction of their country, but also in the economic and military re-colonisation of Haiti over the last decade. Adept in the fabrication of replicas of ‘post-political’ discourse, These Haitian intellectuals are in reality a subset of that country's morally bankrupt political class

Georges Perec's Geographies

In Species of Spaces Georges Perec suggests various ‘Practical exercises’ as a means to investigate the street. The instructions propose its exhaustive exploration through attention to what would be most obvious, common and therefore usually of no interest; to take up this methodology, investigators are told to go about things ‘more slowly, almost stupidly’. As part of his project to reveal and understand the infra-ordinary, in Approaches to what, Perec makes clear that the purpose of such activity is to wrest ‘common things’ from the dross in which they remain mired and to give them a tongue, to ‘speak of what is, of what we are.’ As an artist-scholar researching ‘everyday’ places through essayistic photographic practice, I am drawn to Perec’s specific injunction ‘Force yourself to see more flatly’, which reflects for me photography’s ultimate translation of dimensional space into flat picture plane, and relates to what David Campany has described as modernist photography’s ‘heightened interest in the surfaces of the world’. This contribution emerges from photographic research, which takes up very literally the Perequian practice of seeing flatly, and attending to what is ‘most colourless’: it investigates therefore, via the constraint of black and white image-making, the material surfaces encountered along the 12 minute walk from my home to the tram stop from which I commute to my university job. That Perec makes clear his interest in ‘A town: stone, concrete, asphalt’, and recognises the ‘invisible underground proliferation of conduits’, or the ‘underneath’ of limestone, marl, chalk, gypsum, sand and lignite, encourages me to consider what lies exactly underfoot, passing unremarked on so many daily journeys. This visual essaying of the surface of a place (given that properly speaking an essay is a trial, test or experiment) will be excerpted for the current context, accompanied by a reflection upon Perecquian photographic practice as a method of artistic research, and what a determinedly superficial attention reveals about the infra-ordinariness of place

Geotemporal Twitter Demographics

The study and application of demographic data are widespread in both industry and academia, with applications ranging from demographic profiling to supply and demand modelling. Yet, while there exist numerous applications, in recent years demographics has seen few major developments. This may in part reflect continuing dependence on traditional population data, such as the UK Census of Population. Given these limitations, there is an increased interest in the potential of new forms of data such as are collected from online social networks or by utilities companies. Here, we demonstrate how, given sufficient consideration, Twitter data may be employed as an effective source of population insight

Application of a Fath-Based Integration Tool to Assess Mental and Physical Health Interventions

Background: To build on current research involving faith-based interventions (FBIs) for addressing mental and physical health, this study a) reviewed the extent to which relevant publications integrate faith concepts with health and b) initiated analysis of the degree of FBI integration with intervention outcomes. Methods: Derived from a systematic search of articles published between 2007 and 2017, 36 studies were assessed with a FaithBased Integration Assessment Tool (FIAT) to quantify faith-health integration. Basic statistical procedures were employed to determine the association of faith-based integration with intervention outcomes. Results: The assessed studies possessed (on average) moderate, inconsistent integration because of poor use of faith measures, and moderate, inconsistent use of faith practices. Analysis procedures for determining the effect of FBI integration on intervention outcomes were inadequate for formulating practical conclusions. Conclusions: Regardless of integration, interventions were associated with beneficial outcomes. To determine the link between FBI integration and intervention outcomes, additional analyses are needed. Key words: faith-based integration and interventions, faith and health studies, religion and spirituality, integrative healt

Crops gone wild: evolution of weeds and invasives from domesticated ancestors.

The evolution of problematic plants, both weeds and invasives, is a topic of increasing interest. Plants that have evolved from domesticated ancestors have certain advantages for study. Because of their economic importance, domesticated plants are generally well-characterized and readily available for ecogenetic comparison with their wild descendants. Thus, the evolutionary history of crop descendants has the potential to be reconstructed in some detail. Furthermore, growing crop progenitors with their problematic descendants in a common environment allows for the identification of significant evolutionary differences that correlate with weediness or invasiveness. We sought well-established examples of invasives and weeds for which genetic and/or ethnobotanical evidence has confirmed their evolution from domesticates. We found surprisingly few cases, only 13. We examine our list for generalizations and then some selected cases to reveal how plant pests have evolved from domesticates. Despite their potential utility, crop descendants remain underexploited for evolutionary study. Promising evolutionary research opportunities for these systems are abundant and worthy of pursuit

Mechanism Design in Social Networks

This paper studies an auction design problem for a seller to sell a commodity in a social network, where each individual (the seller or a buyer) can only communicate with her neighbors. The challenge to the seller is to design a mechanism to incentivize the buyers, who are aware of the auction, to further propagate the information to their neighbors so that more buyers will participate in the auction and hence, the seller will be able to make a higher revenue. We propose a novel auction mechanism, called information diffusion mechanism (IDM), which incentivizes the buyers to not only truthfully report their valuations on the commodity to the seller, but also further propagate the auction information to all their neighbors. In comparison, the direct extension of the well-known Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) mechanism in social networks can also incentivize the information diffusion, but it will decrease the seller's revenue or even lead to a deficit sometimes. The formalization of the problem has not yet been addressed in the literature of mechanism design and our solution is very significant in the presence of large-scale online social networks.Comment: In The Thirty-First AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, San Francisco, US, 04-09 Feb 201

Management of Febrile Neutropenia in a Patient With Acute Leukemia

Hematologic cancers comprise an aggregate of several different cancers, such as leukemia, lymphoma, and multiple myeloma. There are more than 100,000 new cases of these hematologic cancers in the United States annually, and more than 50,000 children and adults die from these cancers.1,

Evaluation of a peer mentoring program for early career gerontological nursing faculty and its potential for application to other fields in nursing and health sciences

As the retirement rate of senior nursing faculty increases, the need to implement new models for providing mentorship to early career academics will become key to developing and maintaining an experienced faculty