Wild Gender

This chapter invokes some threads in Strathern’s thinking to reframe some of the key questions that animate trans and queer studies today: How did gender, as a category, become a productive threshold capable of attuning abstract sensibilities towards sets of relations and associations not hitherto understood to be attuned? If multiplicity marked the beginning of gender, opening up ways to study relations which did not take for granted binary gender (See Franklin in Strathern, 2016), is this notion now obsolescent? What forms of thinking emerge after gender

Forensic Apophenia: Sensing the Bioinformation Archive

This article draws on intersecting debates on archives, infrastructures and knowledge in anthropology to analyse a ‘bioinformational turn’ in forensic science. Focussing on transformations in forensic science provision in England and Wales apparent in the history of a forensic archive, the article frames frictions between ways of making knowledge across scientific cultures, law enforcement, and a legal system that aims to create facts and certainty, against forensic scientists’ concern with process and context across disparate realms of practice. Following scientists’ descriptions of the changing conditions under which forensic science is currently practiced and the erosion of forensic provision as a public service, we argue that forensic practitioners interrogate positivist projections of forensic science by thinking with complexity as they follow evidence through multiple registers, infrastructures and datasets

Conceptuality in Relation: Sarah Franklin in Conversation with Silvia Posocco, Paul Boyce, and EJ Gonzalez-Polledo

Sarah Franklin in conversation with Silvia Posocco, Paul Boyce, and EJ Gonzalez-Polledo. In a conversation held in Cambridge in March 2018, Sarah Franklin reflects on the inspiration/influence that Marilyn Strathern’s work has exerted over her research trajectory and career at the intersections between anthropology, sociology, science studies and gender theory. This relation extends from their encounter at the University of Manchester in the late 1980s to Franklin’s editorial work on Strathern’s ‘lost manuscript’ originally written in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, in 1974 and published as Before and After Gender in 2016. In the interview, Franklin unpacks how her engagement with Marilyn Strathern shaped her ethnographic approach to scientists’ work in the field of reproduction, notably assisted conception technologies as well as cloning, and, more recently human embryonic stem cell derivation. Franklin’s project has consistently focused on exploring the multiple dimensions of conception as this process is recontextualised through ethnographic practices of re-description. Franklin argues that conception is queer in the sense that it does not fit into normative narratives of what reproduction is like, but rather reveals genealogy as a normative fiction in social and scientific practice

Forensic apophenia: sensing the bioinformation archive

This article draws on intersecting debates on archives, infrastructures and knowledge in anthropology to analyse a ‘bioinformational turn’ in forensic science. Focussing on transformations in forensic science provision in England and Wales apparent in the history of a forensic archive, the article frames frictions between ways of making knowledge across scientific cultures, law enforcement, and a legal system that aims to create facts and certainty, against forensic scientists’ concern with process and context across disparate realms of practice. Following scientists’ descriptions of the changing conditions under which forensic science is currently practiced and the erosion of forensic provision as a public service, we argue that forensic practitioners interrogate positivist projections of forensic science by thinking with complexity as they follow evidence through multiple registers, infrastructures and datasets

The inflammation, vascular repair and injury responses to exercise in fit males with and without Type 1 diabetes: an observational study.

Type 1 diabetes is associated with raised inflammation, impaired endothelial progenitor cell mobilisation and increased markers of vascular injury. Both acute and chronic exercise is known to influence these markers in non-diabetic controls, but limited data exists in Type 1 diabetes. We assessed inflammation, vascular repair and injury at rest and after exercise in physically-fit males with and without Type 1 diabetes.Ten well-controlled type 1 diabetes (27 ± 2 years; BMI 24 ± 0.7 kg.m(2); HbA1c 53.3 ± 2.4 mmol/mol) and nine non-diabetic control males (27 ± 1 years; BMI 23 ± 0.8 kg.m(2)) matched for age, BMI and fitness completed 45-min of running. Venous blood samples were collected 60-min before and 60-min after exercise, and again on the following morning. Blood samples were processed for TNF-α using ELISA, and circulating endothelial progenitor cells (cEPCs; CD45(dim)CD34(+)VEGFR2(+)) and endothelial cells (cECs; CD45(dim)CD133(-)CD34(+)CD144(+)) counts using flow-cytometry.TNF-α concentrations were 4-fold higher at all-time points in Type 1 diabetes, when compared with control (P 0.05). Within the Type 1 diabetes group, the delta change in cEPCS from rest to the following morning was related to HbA1c (r = -0.65, P = 0.021) and TNF-α (r = -0.766, P = 0.005).Resting cEPCs and cECs in Type 1 diabetes patients with excellent HbA1c and high physical-fitness are comparable to healthy controls, despite eliciting 4-fold greater TNF-α. Furthermore, Type 1 diabetes patients appear to have a blunted post-exercise cEPCs response (vascular repair), whilst a biomarker of vascular injury (cECs) remained comparable to healthy controls

#ChronicPain: Automated Building of a Chronic Pain Cohort from Twitter Using Machine Learning

Background: Due to the high burden of chronic pain, and the detrimental public health consequences of its treatment with opioids, there is a high-priority need to identify effective alternative therapies. Social media is a potentially valuable resource for knowledge about self-reported therapies by chronic pain sufferers. Methods: We attempted to (a) verify the presence of large-scale chronic pain-related chatter on Twitter, (b) develop natural language processing and machine learning methods for automatically detecting self-disclosures, (c) collect longitudinal data posted by them, and (d) semiautomatically analyze the types of chronic pain-related information reported by them. We collected data using chronic pain-related hashtags and keywords and manually annotated 4,998 posts to indicate if they were self-reports of chronic pain experiences. We trained and evaluated several state-of-the-art supervised text classification models and deployed the best-performing classifier. We collected all publicly available posts from detected cohort members and conducted manual and natural language processing-driven descriptive analyses. Results: Interannotator agreement for the binary annotation was 0.82 (Cohen’s kappa). The RoBERTa model performed best (F1 score: 0.84; 95% confidence interval: 0.80 to 0.89), and we used this model to classify all collected unlabeled posts. We discovered 22,795 self-reported chronic pain sufferers and collected over 3 million of their past posts. Further analyses revealed information about, but not limited to, alternative treatments, patient sentiments about treatments, side effects, and self-management strategies. Conclusion: Our social media based approach will result in an automatically growing large cohort over time, and the data can be leveraged to identify effective opioid-alternative therapies for diverse chronic pain types

Dirac Leptogenesis with a Non-anomalous U(1)′U(1)^{\prime} Family Symmetry

We propose a model for Dirac leptogenesis based on a non-anomalous $U(1)^{\prime}$ gauged family symmetry. The anomaly cancellation conditions are satisfied with no new chiral fermions other than the three right-handed neutrinos, giving rise to stringent constraints among the charges. Realistic masses and mixing angles are obtained for all fermions. The model predicts neutrinos of the Dirac type with naturally suppressed masses. Dirac leptogenesis is achieved through the decay of the flavon fields. The cascade decays of the vector-like heavy fermions in the Froggatt-Nielsen mechanism play a crucial role in the separation of the primodial lepton numbers. We find that a large region of parameter space of the model gives rise to a sufficient cosmological baryon number asymmetry through Dirac leptogenesis.Comment: 8 pages, 8 figures, version to appear in JHE

In-play sports betting: a scoping study

Technology has changed the nature of gambling practices over the last decade and is continuing to do so. The online sports betting industry has become a rapidly growing sector of the global economy, with online sports betting contributing 37% of the annual online gambling market in Europe. There has been an integration of social and technological processes that has enabled the cultural saliency of contemporary online betting. One of the more newly introduced forms of online sports betting is in-play sports betting behaviour (the betting on events within a sporting event such as football and cricket). In-play sports betting features (such as 'cash out') are increasing in popularity amongst online gambling operators. A scoping study was carried out examining the evolution of this new form of gambling practice which included both a systematic literature review and the examination of 338 online gambling websites that offered sports betting. The present study identified a comprehensive list of what in-play betting features are currently being offered on online gambling websites as well as other information concerning in-play sports betting. A total of 16 academic papers and two 'grey literature' reports and were identified in the systematic review. Out of 338 online gambling websites that were visited, 26% of these offered at least on in-play betting feature. Results from the systematic review suggest that in-play sports betting has the potential to be more harmful than other ways of gambling because of the inherent structural characteristics