Feeling of / Feeling for Queer Community: The Social Activism of the San Francisco Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence

This interdisciplinary article explores the queer social activism of the San Francisco Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. Based on over ten years of participant observation and archival research, I examine their rituals and public performances in order to illuminate the complex ways in which queer community is identified, felt, thought and lived out in response to social injustices rooted in religion. Using a theoretically informed lens, I alternate between academic and liturgical styles of writing to convey the feelings for, and feelings of, community that motivate and inspire the Sisters’ unique sacred clown aesthetic inspired by a desire to queer and challenged religious traditions and dogmas

Big Data and Due Process: Toward a Framework to Redress Predictive Privacy Harms

The rise of “Big Data” analytics in the private sector poses new challenges for privacy advocates. Through its reliance on existing data and predictive analysis to create detailed individual profiles, Big Data has exploded the scope of personally identifiable information (“PII”). It has also effectively marginalized regulatory schema by evading current privacy protections with its novel methodology. Furthermore, poor execution of Big Data methodology may create additional harms by rendering inaccurate profiles that nonetheless impact an individual’s life and livelihood. To respond to Big Data’s evolving practices, this Article examines several existing privacy regimes and explains why these approaches inadequately address current Big Data challenges. This Article then proposes a new approach to mitigating predictive privacy harms—that of a right to procedural data due process. Although current privacy regimes offer limited nominal due process-like mechanisms, a more rigorous framework is needed to address their shortcomings. By examining due process’s role in the Anglo-American legal system and building on previous scholarship about due process for public administrative computer systems, this Article argues that individuals affected by Big Data should have similar rights to those in the legal system with respect to how their personal data is used in such adjudications. Using these principles, this Article analogizes a system of regulation that would provide such rights against private Big Data actors

Jason W. Crawford to T.L. Treadwell, 18 August 1860

https://egrove.olemiss.edu/aldrichcorr_c/1199/thumbnail.jp

Academic Allyship in Nursing: Deconstructing a successful community-academic collaboration

Public health and social care systems in Canada are frequently racist and discriminatory towards Indigenous people and exacerbates health inequities that Indigenous people experience. In New Brunswick, there are a range of culturally informed health and social services being offered within First Nations communities and by Indigenous organization that operate outside of reserves. Some of these services and organizations rely on support from non-Indigenous allies to meet the needs of their community members. However, it can be challenging for non-Indigenous people to engage in allyship due to unconscious bias, false assumptions, and lack of cross-cultural understanding. Effective allyship can also be challenging due a lack of understanding of the time, resources, and commitments that are required. Academic allyship from within post-secondary institutions can be particularly challenging because of a history of past harm done to Indigenous communities and entrenched colonial structures and policies. The purpose of this article is to provide an example of academic allyship with an urban Indigenous organization and consider some of the success factors that have supported this ongoing collaboration. The authors reflect on more than four years of successful collaboration and use a recent project to illustrate what worked and why. The success factors were, building a relationship and trust; becoming better informed; offering support freely; stepping off the beaten path (to tenure); staying critically self-aware; and enjoying the work (immensely). The success factors are not intended as a roadmap because every collaboration is unique. However, they may help potential allies enter potential collaboration being better informed. Academic allyship can be highly impactful and highly rewarding, but it also should not be undertaken without reflection on one’s reasons for doing so and capacity to commit. Résumé Les systèmes de santé et de services sociaux publics au Canada font souvent preuve de racisme et de discrimination envers les peuples autochtones, aggravant du même coup les inégalités en matière de santé que subissent ces peuples. Au Nouveau-Brunswick, une gamme de services de soins de santé et de services sociaux adaptés à la culture sont offerts au sein des communautés des Premières Nations et par des organisations autochtones à l’extérieur des réserves. Certains de ces services et organismes comptent sur le soutien d’alliés non autochtones afin de répondre aux besoins des membres de leur communauté. Cependant, il peut s’avérer difficile pour les non autochtones de s’allier en raison de préjugés inconscients, d’hypothèses infondées et d’un manque de compréhension interculturelle. La méconnaissance du temps, des ressources et des engagements nécessaires peut également constituer un obstacle à l’établissement d’une alliance optimale. Les torts causés aux communautés autochtones par le passé et les structures et les politiques coloniales enracinées rendent particulièrement difficile la création d’une alliance universitaire au sein des établissements d’enseignement postsecondaire. Le but de cet article est de fournir un exemple d’alliance universitaire avec une organisation autochtone urbaine et d’examiner certains des facteurs de réussite qui ont favorisé cette collaboration. Les auteurs se basent sur une collaboration florissante de plus de quatre ans et illustrent ce qui a fonctionné et les raisons expliquant cette réussite grâce à un projet récent. Les facteurs de réussite se basaient sur l’habileté à bâtir une relation et un climat de confiance; de s’informer davantage; d’offrir gratuitement du soutien; de sortir des sentiers battus (vers la titularisation); de faire preuve de jugement critique envers soi-même et d’apprécier le travail (immensément). Les facteurs de réussite ne se veulent pas un guide rigide, car chaque collaboration est unique. Cependant, ils peuvent aider des alliés potentiels à entrer dans une éventuelle collaboration en étant mieux informés. L’alliance académique peut être très percutante et enrichissante, mais elle ne doit pas non plus être entreprise sans réfléchir aux raisons et à sa capacité à s’engager

Birth/birth-death processes and their computable transition probabilities with biological applications

Birth-death processes track the size of a univariate population, but many biological systems involve interaction between populations, necessitating models for two or more populations simultaneously. A lack of efficient methods for evaluating finite-time transition probabilities of bivariate processes, however, has restricted statistical inference in these models. Researchers rely on computationally expensive methods such as matrix exponentiation or Monte Carlo approximation, restricting likelihood-based inference to small systems, or indirect methods such as approximate Bayesian computation. In this paper, we introduce the birth(death)/birth-death process, a tractable bivariate extension of the birth-death process. We develop an efficient and robust algorithm to calculate the transition probabilities of birth(death)/birth-death processes using a continued fraction representation of their Laplace transforms. Next, we identify several exemplary models arising in molecular epidemiology, macro-parasite evolution, and infectious disease modeling that fall within this class, and demonstrate advantages of our proposed method over existing approaches to inference in these models. Notably, the ubiquitous stochastic susceptible-infectious-removed (SIR) model falls within this class, and we emphasize that computable transition probabilities newly enable direct inference of parameters in the SIR model. We also propose a very fast method for approximating the transition probabilities under the SIR model via a novel branching process simplification, and compare it to the continued fraction representation method with application to the 17th century plague in Eyam. Although the two methods produce similar maximum a posteriori estimates, the branching process approximation fails to capture the correlation structure in the joint posterior distribution

Adaptive smartphone-based sensor fusion for estimating competitive rowing kinematic metrics.

Competitive rowing highly values boat position and velocity data for real-time feedback during training, racing and post-training analysis. The ubiquity of smartphones with embedded position (GPS) and motion (accelerometer) sensors motivates their possible use in these tasks. In this paper, we investigate the use of two real-time digital filters to achieve highly accurate yet reasonably priced measurements of boat speed and distance traveled. Both filters combine acceleration and location data to estimate boat distance and speed; the first using a complementary frequency response-based filter technique, the second with a Kalman filter formalism that includes adaptive, real-time estimates of effective accelerometer bias. The estimates of distance and speed from both filters were validated and compared with accurate reference data from a differential GPS system with better than 1 cm precision and a 5 Hz update rate, in experiments using two subjects (an experienced club-level rower and an elite rower) in two different boats on a 300 m course. Compared with single channel (smartphone GPS only) measures of distance and speed, the complementary filter improved the accuracy and precision of boat speed, boat distance traveled, and distance per stroke by 44%, 42%, and 73%, respectively, while the Kalman filter improved the accuracy and precision of boat speed, boat distance traveled, and distance per stroke by 48%, 22%, and 82%, respectively. Both filters demonstrate promise as general purpose methods to substantially improve estimates of important rowing performance metrics