Microbial Similarity between Students in a Common Dormitory Environment Reveals the Forensic Potential of Individual Microbial Signatures.

The microbiota of the built environment is an amalgamation of both human and environmental sources. While human sources have been examined within single-family households or in public environments, it is unclear what effect a large number of cohabitating people have on the microbial communities of their shared environment. We sampled the public and private spaces of a college dormitory, disentangling individual microbial signatures and their impact on the microbiota of common spaces. We compared multiple methods for marker gene sequence clustering and found that minimum entropy decomposition (MED) was best able to distinguish between the microbial signatures of different individuals and was able to uncover more discriminative taxa across all taxonomic groups. Further, weighted UniFrac- and random forest-based graph analyses uncovered two distinct spheres of hand- or shoe-associated samples. Using graph-based clustering, we identified spheres of interaction and found that connection between these clusters was enriched for hands, implicating them as a primary means of transmission. In contrast, shoe-associated samples were found to be freely interacting, with individual shoes more connected to each other than to the floors they interact with. Individual interactions were highly dynamic, with groups of samples originating from individuals clustering freely with samples from other individuals, while all floor and shoe samples consistently clustered together.IMPORTANCE Humans leave behind a microbial trail, regardless of intention. This may allow for the identification of individuals based on the "microbial signatures" they shed in built environments. In a shared living environment, these trails intersect, and through interaction with common surfaces may become homogenized, potentially confounding our ability to link individuals to their associated microbiota. We sought to understand the factors that influence the mixing of individual signatures and how best to process sequencing data to best tease apart these signatures

Der junge Lukács als Diagnostiker der Krise. Subjektivismus und das Problem der Form

This paper argues that the work of the young Lukács can be read as a wide-ranging mediation on what I am labelling ›the crisis of subjectivism‹. Reading Lukács this way allows us to see important continuities between his pre-Marxist and Marxist period. Most significantly, it allows us to see how positing the proletariat as a ›subject-object‹ of history and developing a crisis diagnosis of bourgeois society, allowed Lukács to bring the fruits of his earlier intellectual labour under conceptual control.Das Werk des jungen Lukács wird im vorliegenden Beitrag als umfassende Verhandlung einer ›Krise des Subjektivismus‹ gelesen. Diese Lesart lässt wichtige Verbindungslinien zwischen Lukács̕ vormarxistischer und seiner marxistischen Phase erkennen. Vor allem jedoch wird deutlich, auf welche Weise die Positionierung des Proletariats als ›Subjekt-Objekt‹ der Geschichte und die Entwicklung einer Krisendiagnose der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft es Lukács ermöglichten, die Früchte seiner früheren Gedankenarbeit konzeptuell einzuhegen

Geographic Banking Discrimination in the United States

Financial institutions in the United States have historically discriminated against Black Americans in a multitude of ways. One potential dynamic of unequal access that remains understudied is geographic in nature. That is, are commercial banks less likely to locate in neighborhoods with more Black people? Using a fixed effects and selection on observables model, I find that a 1 percentage point increase in an area’s Black population is related to a 0.11 decrease in the number of commercial banks in that area. This effect is localized primarily in urban areas, particularly in cities in the Mid-Atlantic, Upper Midwest, and Pacific Coast regions. I also find that this disparity between whiter and Blacker neighborhoods has reversed and widened since 2000. In 2000, a 1 percentage point increase in an area’s Black population was associated with 0.19 more banks; by 2020, an increase in the Black population of the same magnitude was related to 0.14 percent fewer banks. These results suggest that bank closures and relocations in the aftermath of the Great Recession disproportionately affected Black neighborhoods. More broadly, policymakers should expand the scope of what banking discrimination entails, even if my results do not reveal a specific policy prescription that could undo this disparity

Small Tourism Accomodation Distribution Patterns in Canada

A review of the previous research on small businesses in tourism and hospitality shows a growing interest in Internet marketing. However, the research that exists is contradictory. On the one hand, some researchers suggest that because the entry barriers are low, it is cost effective for small businesses to set up an Internet presence, which helps level the playing field between small and large firms [18]; [21]. However, other researchers indicate that ecommerce is not being adopted as readily by small tourism and hospitality businesses as one might have expected [17]; [6]; [31]. Clearly, more research is required in this area regarding Internet usage in small tourism and hospitality businesses. This study will therefore examine small businesses (less than 50 employees) – specifically Bed and Breakfasts (B&Bs) - to develop theories identifying factors that facilitate and inhibit the adoption and implementation of Internet technology in the accommodation sector

Effects of changes in isotopic baselines on the evaluation of food web structure using isotopic functional indices

Background. This study aimed to assess whether ecological inferences from isotopic functional indices (IFIs) are impacted by changes in isotopic baselines in aquatic food webs. We used sudden CO2-outgassing and associated shifts in DIC- delta C-13 brought by waterfalls as an excellent natural experimental set-up to quantify impacts of changes in algal isotopic baselines on ecological inferences from IFIs.Methods. Carbon (delta C-13) and nitrogen (delta N-15) stable isotopic ratios of invertebrate communities sharing similar structure were measured at above- and below-waterfall sampling sites from five rivers and streams in Southern Quebec (Canada). For each sampled invertebrate community, the six Laymans IFIs were then calculated in the delta-space (delta C-13 vs. delta N-15).Results. As expected, isotopic functional richness indices, measuring the overall extent of community trophic space, were strongly sensitive to changes in isotopic baselines unlike other IFIs. Indeed, other IFIs were calculated based on the distribution of species within delta-space and were not strongly impacted by changes in the vertical or horizontal distribution of specimens in the delta-space. Our results highlighted that IFIs exhibited different sensitivities to changes in isotopic baselines, leading to potential misinterpretations of IFIs in river studies where isotopic baselines generally show high temporal and spatial variabilities. The identification of isotopic baselines and their associated variability, and the use of independent trophic tracers to identify the actual energy pathways through food webs must be a prerequisite to IFIs-based studies to strengthen the reliability of ecological inferences of food web structural properties

Low frequency, in-situ vibrating sample magnetometer : electrical systems and control software design

Includes bibliographical references.A low frequency vibrating sample magnetometer has been built to measure the in-situ properties of ferromagnetic catalysts. The instrument allows measurements to be taken during an experimental catalyst test run (in-situ). The vibration is performed by a motor crank arrangement frequency of 2 Hz. The software designed to control the instrument and the reaction was written in Lab View which enabled a rapid prototyping approach. This thesis focuses on the software and electrical systems of the setup. Results of research conducted using this system are published separately however this document shows the relationship between the magnetic saturation and remnance and the mass of ferromagnetic material present in the reference material as well as the effect of temperature on this material

Aesthetics of Form as Social Philosophy: Re-reading Lukács. Introduction to the Issue

Uvodnik u broj posvećen konceptu forme kod Georga Lukácsa

Virtual Research Integration Collaboration: Procedural report

The aim of the project is to build a framework for the integration of basic science and clinical research to manage research lifecycles and allow for integration of scientific approaches throughout these lifecycles into the everyday work practice of the consortia that manage translational clinical research. The project will take the CORE VRE and embed it into a National centre for surgical excellence, the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital (RNOH). The VRE will integrate both with the institutional systems and research life cycle, and with the national systems such as the National Health Service (NHS). It is our aim to integrate the CORE VRE with myExperiment to provide a set of services at RNOH to cover the four main areas of the research cycle, namely: the monitoring and governance of trials (experiment research administration); the trial protocols (experiment workflows); the publishing, dissemination and discussion on the results of trials in a repository; and the discovery of information from the repository and other resources. For this community, there are three tightly coupled areas of focus: research, clinical practice, and education (in the form of continuing professional development and training of the next generation of surgeons). In this project, our user community will be heavily involved in co-designing and codeployment of the tool set, and in particular the front end of the workbench will be user focused. The tools will need to be available to staff anywhere with the organisation, as clinicians need to be able to enter the data during clinics and directors of research need to be able to monitor the trials. This will bring with it a number of inter-operability issues, as we move data between the VRE, the hospital systems (NHS) and the institutional systems. To aid the understanding of the how the system will be used, we outline a typical ‘research cycle’ that includes the practice of a clinical specialist in orthopaedics (who may also be a Higher surgical trainee) and a basic scientist. The purpose of this is to identify time essential information provision and interaction with pervasive technologies. For new researchers one of the most difficult tasks is to learn good practice or find related experiments to learn how to instantiate the protocols; in many organisations it is often easier to repeat an experiment than to find the results of a similar previous experiment. In this abstracted model of the research lifecycle, we have split up the cycle into four main research activities. In each of these activities the different issues and stakeholders are addressed. The wider community nationally is represented by the Musculoskeletal network of Greater London, NHS, e-science, Surgical and VRE communities. It is through the Musculoskeletal network of Greater London that we will be able to co-ordinate knowledge and demonstrations to advise the community and for continuity. This project will impact on the wider academic community in the UK, initially through dissemination via organisations such as BriteNet (Tissue Engineering), The British Orthopaedic Association, British Orthopaedic Research Society, and the British Elbow and Shoulder Society as the groups tied into the consortia development