“REPORT ALL OBSCENE MAIL TO YOUR POSTMASTER” Reading, Institutions, and the American Public, Post-revolution and 1965

This project attempts to understand how Americans are able to imagine themselves as a political public in two revolutionary moments: just after the American Revolution, and in 1965, at the heart of the Civil Rights era. The public, which the Constitution labels “We, the people,” is explored first in Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography, which postulates the institutional conditions necessary for its readership, the first generation of Americans, to form a political public. The project then studies the “We,” of the Constitution’s preamble and considers how readers can interpret who is signified by that “We.” 1965 saw a cultural revolution in America which attempted to reformulate a conception of “the people,” an attempt institutionally reflected in the Voting Rights Act, which was designed to ensure that marginalized communities of black Americans were represented as part of the “We.” Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, published in 1965, offers an alternative narrative of one of America’s first federal institutions, the Post Office. This narrative destabilizes the people’s relationship to its institutions, opening up possibilities for rethinking the citizen’s place in, or outside, the public. Also published in 1965, The Autobiography of Malcolm X asserts an alternative history for black Americans, using that history to reposition the marginalized group at the center of American life. This project will explore these two moments of political imaginings and read how that “We” is formed, and possibly transformed, by a narrative of the history of America’s institutions

Representing Closed Transformation Paths in Encoded Network Latent Space

Deep generative networks have been widely used for learning mappings from a low-dimensional latent space to a high-dimensional data space. In many cases, data transformations are defined by linear paths in this latent space. However, the Euclidean structure of the latent space may be a poor match for the underlying latent structure in the data. In this work, we incorporate a generative manifold model into the latent space of an autoencoder in order to learn the low-dimensional manifold structure from the data and adapt the latent space to accommodate this structure. In particular, we focus on applications in which the data has closed transformation paths which extend from a starting point and return to nearly the same point. Through experiments on data with natural closed transformation paths, we show that this model introduces the ability to learn the latent dynamics of complex systems, generate transformation paths, and classify samples that belong on the same transformation path.Comment: Accepted at AAAI 202

The current and potential applications of Ambient Mass Spectrometry in detecting food fraud

AbstractThe adulteration of food has received substantial amounts of media attention in the last few years, with events such as the European horsemeat scandal in 2013 sending shockwaves through society. Almost all cases are motivated by the pursuit of profits and are often aided by long and complex supply chains. In the past few years, the rapid growth of ambient mass spectrometry (AMS) has been remarkable, with over thirty different ambient ionisation techniques available. Due to the increasing concerns of the food industry and regulators worldwide, AMS is now being utilised to investigate whether or not it can generate results which are faster yet comparable to those of conventional techniques. This article reviews some aspects of the adulteration of food and its impact on the economy and the public's health, the background to ambient mass spectrometry and the studies that have been undertaken to detect food adulteration using this technology

Learning Internal Representations of 3D Transformations from 2D Projected Inputs

When interacting in a three dimensional world, humans must estimate 3D structure from visual inputs projected down to two dimensional retinal images. It has been shown that humans use the persistence of object shape over motion-induced transformations as a cue to resolve depth ambiguity when solving this underconstrained problem. With the aim of understanding how biological vision systems may internally represent 3D transformations, we propose a computational model, based on a generative manifold model, which can be used to infer 3D structure from the motion of 2D points. Our model can also learn representations of the transformations with minimal supervision, providing a proof of concept for how humans may develop internal representations on a developmental or evolutionary time scale. Focused on rotational motion, we show how our model infers depth from moving 2D projected points, learns 3D rotational transformations from 2D training stimuli, and compares to human performance on psychophysical structure-from-motion experiments

The role of inflammation in the formation of multi-drug resistant lineages of E. coli

E. coli exists as a commensal in the gastrointestinal tract of humans and other animals but can also cause severe disease in humans. Pathogenic E. coli that infect sites outside of the intestine are called extra-intestinal pathogenic E. coli (ExPEC) and are the most common cause of urinary tract infections (UTI). ExPEC can also cause soft tissue infections, blood stream infections and meningitis all of which can be severe life threatening diseases. ExPEC infections are further complicated by antimicrobial resistance (AMR) with ExPEC infections increasingly presenting as multi-drug resistant (MDR) limiting the number of effective therapies. Curiously AMR in ExPEC is not uniform, instead specific clones are responsible for the majority of resistant infections. For example the spread of the AMR gene CTX-M has been attributed to a single ExPEC clone called ST131 which frequently causes UTI in humans. These MDR clones are adept at colonising healthy individuals with international travellers frequently importing MDR E. coli upon their return, resulting in onward trans- mission within households. Understanding why AMR is concentrated in specific clones and how these clones transmit between healthy individuals can help combat the spread of MDR pathogens. Previous pangenomic analysis has identified that genes involved in anaerobic metabolism exhibit increased variation in ST131 compared to other ExPEC lineages. Expanding on this previous analysis we identify a significant link between metabolism and carriage of AMR genes, specifically MDR lineages of E. coli display an increased abundance of genes associated with core energy metabolism and carbohydrate utilisation. Invading pathogenic bacteria are known to compete with resident gut commensals for limited nutrients and so have evolved mechanisms to out-compete commensals. The host inflammatory response can inadvertently provide a novel set of compounds which enteric pathogens have adapted to exploit. We hypothesise that our observed metabolic signature in MDR ExPEC is evidence that they are also using compounds derived from the host inflammatory response. Testing this hypothesis we demonstrate that an MDR ST131 strain out-competes a commensal strain, isolated from a healthy human, in nutrient limited media under in vitro conditions. We further demonstrate that an MDR ST131 strain is able to out-compete a commensal strain when introduced into a germ-free mouse. The MDR ST131 is not only able to out-compete a commensal but also displace a resident commensal in a pre-colonised mouse. Displacement of the resident commensal occurs within 48 hours when mice are co-housed, with the ST131 strain becoming the dominant strain in all mice. Lastly, mice that are colonised by ST131 have elevated levels of pro-inflammatory cytokines in their caecum compared to commensally colonised mice. This thesis highlights the importance of metabolism in the evolution of MDR lineages of E. coli and contributes towards a greater understanding of how these pathogens spread

Session A, 2016 Cranberry Lake Director\u27s Choice Award: Cryptic Shade and Hue Gradients of Anaxyrus americanus from Stream to Forest Habitats

Camouflage is a form of protection deployed by a wide variety of species to render themselves to prevent detection. We examined how the background substrate of the environment, in this case being the transition from streams to deciduous forests, affects the coloration of the American Toad (Anaxyrus americanus), a noxious and cryptically colored amphibian found across the Eastern United States. The general color transition from streams, with a prevalence of lighter colors, to deciduous forest, consisting of red leaf debris and dark tree shadow, should be seen in this cryptic coloration of A. americanus. Six-mile creek, Chair rock creek, East creek and Sucker brook located at Cranberry Lake, NY were selected to survey American toads. Three 100x10m belt transects, each 100m apart were run perpendicular to each stream, and the dorsal coloration of toads found inside these transects were recorded using the Munsell soil color chart. Hue and darkness of each specimen were recorded along with the distance away from the stream it was found. The distance away from the stream will be categorized into ranges and colors will be place within these ranges, so that a chi-square test would be conducted. We hypothesize that A. americanus is darker and redder as distance away from streams and into deciduous forest increases. Preliminary results have found support of this hypothesis in regards to darkness however, no significant difference in hue has been found. This indicates that toads are ecologically adapted to their respective habitat types in regards to cryptic coloration