Commodity culture : tropical health and hygiene in the British Empire

Before heading to a 'tropical' region of the Empire, British men and women spent considerable time and effort gathering outfit believed essential for their impending trip. Ordinary items such as soap, clothing, foodstuffs and bedding became transformed into potentially life-saving items that required the fastidious attention of any would-be traveller. Everyone from scientists and physicians to missionaries and administrators was bombarded by relentless advertising and abundant advice about the outfit needed to preserve health in a tropical climate. A closer look at this marketing exercise reveals much about the way people thought about tropical people, places, health and hygiene and how scientific and commercial influences shaped this Imperial commodity culture

Online Gaming Can Make a Better World: Jane McGonigal

With personal feelings put aside and sociological theoretical depictions brought to the forefront, it is interesting to compare some of Jane\u27s ideas with that of both Emile Durkheim and Max Weber. The theorist who stood out right away, being exemplified through Jane\u27s positive attitude claims on a much larger, macro-level scale, was Emile Durkheim. Jane\u27s ideas about transcending human\u27s as a resource through the social fabrics of gaming into something that might solve world hunger, poverty, and global warming was nothing short of functionalism at it\u27s best. Jane\u27s platform for social structure and maintaining positive social order is the online world, and online gaming is the vehicle for change

Indicators of Tambara-Yamagami categories and Gauss sums

We prove that the higher Frobenius-Schur indicators, introduced by Ng and Schauenburg, give a strong enough invariant to distinguish between any two Tambara-Yamagami fusion categories. Our proofs are based on computation of the higher indicators as quadratic Gauss sums for certain quadratic forms on finite abelian groups and relies on the classification of quadratic forms on finite abelian groups, due to Wall. As a corollary to our work, we show that the state-sum invariants of a Tambara-Yamagami category determine the category as long as we restrict to Tambara-Yamagami categories coming from groups G whose order is not a power of 2. Turaev and Vainerman proved this result under the assumption that G has odd order and they conjectured that a similar result should hold for groups of even order. We also give an example to show that the assumption that G does not have a power of 2, cannot be completely relaxed.Comment: 29 page

Patterns of Scalable Bayesian Inference

Datasets are growing not just in size but in complexity, creating a demand for rich models and quantification of uncertainty. Bayesian methods are an excellent fit for this demand, but scaling Bayesian inference is a challenge. In response to this challenge, there has been considerable recent work based on varying assumptions about model structure, underlying computational resources, and the importance of asymptotic correctness. As a result, there is a zoo of ideas with few clear overarching principles. In this paper, we seek to identify unifying principles, patterns, and intuitions for scaling Bayesian inference. We review existing work on utilizing modern computing resources with both MCMC and variational approximation techniques. From this taxonomy of ideas, we characterize the general principles that have proven successful for designing scalable inference procedures and comment on the path forward

Cytoplasmic Polyadenylation Element Binding (CPEB) Protein 2 splice variants CPEB2A and CPEB2B affect the hypoxic response and triple-negative breast cancer metastasis

Triple-negative breast cancers (TNBCs) are tumors that lack the estrogen-receptor (ER), the progesterone-receptor (PR), and the epithelial growth factor receptor 2 (HER2) and are responsible for 15-20% of all breast cancer. TNBCs provide poor prognoses and higher rates for metastases compared to other breast cancers. We have found that cytoplasmic polyadenylation element binding protein 2 (CPEB2) mRNA splicing is dysregulated in cells that display resistance to anoikis (attachment-dependent cell death). Importantly, CPEB2A:B ratio decreases in patient-matched tumor tissue when compared to normal control tissue. Furthermore, downregulation of each isoform produced opposing effects on both AnR and HIF1alpha and TWIST1 levels (molecules that are downstream of CPEB2). Taken together, our results indicate that CPEB2 is involved in the development of anoikis-resistance in cancer cells and may be heavily involved in TNBC cancer progression. Additional studies of alternative splicing in TNBC may lead to both understanding of the molecular pathways leading to TNBC metastasis and the development of rationally designed treatments for TNBC.https://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/uresposters/1050/thumbnail.jp

Fat Fisher Zeroes

We show that it is possible to determine the locus of Fisher zeroes in the thermodynamic limit for the Ising model on planar (``fat'') phi4 random graphs and their dual quadrangulations by matching up the real part of the high and low temperature branches of the expression for the free energy. The form of this expression for the free energy also means that series expansion results for the zeroes may be obtained with rather less effort than might appear necessary at first sight by simply reverting the series expansion of a function g(z) which appears in the solution and taking a logarithm. Unlike regular 2D lattices where numerous unphysical critical points exist with non-standard exponents, the Ising model on planar phi4 graphs displays only the physical transition at c = exp (- 2 beta) = 1/4 and a mirror transition at c=-1/4 both with KPZ/DDK exponents (alpha = -1, beta = 1/2, gamma = 2). The relation between the phi4 locus and that of the dual quadrangulations is akin to that between the (regular) triangular and honeycomb lattices since there is no self-duality.Comment: 12 pages + 6 eps figure

Evaluation of Toxic Release Inventory Facilities in Metropolitan Atlanta: Census Tract Demographics, Facility Distribution, Air Toxic Emissions and Regulation

Background and Purpose Low socioeconomic status (SES) populations as well as minorities are often exposed to a disproportionate number of hazardous chemical including hydrogen fluoride, benzene and formaldehyde (Bullard, 2008). The sources of these hazards may include noxious land uses such as incinerators and landfills, Superfund sites, Toxic Release Inventory (TRI) facilities, sewer and water treatment plants, and other locally unwanted land uses (Choi, Shim, Kaye, & Ryan, 2006). The disproportionate burden often results in increased exposure to harmful environmental conditions for affected communities (Wilson et al., 2014). The objectives of this study are to evaluate the relevance of demographic characteristics to (1) TRI facility location, (2) TRI chemical emissions, and (3) incidence and resolution of facility complaints. Methods The study area is the Atlanta Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA), designated by the United States Office of Management and Budget is comprised of 20 counties. Multivariate logistic regression was used to assess the relative importance of race and socioeconomic variables in predicting whether a TRI facility was located in a census tract. We applied multiple regression models to examine the association between amount of air toxics released from TRI facilities in the census tract (dependent variable), the number of emissions from TRI facilities in the census tract and the amount of chemicals released per emission and socio-demographic variables at the census tract level. Additionally, multivariate ordinal logistic regression was used to evaluate the association between the number of complaints to toxic chemicals and time to resolution of complaints and the covariates (SES and race/ethnicity) at the census tract level. Results In multivariate models the odds ratio for the presence of a TRI facility is 0.89 (p=0.002) for each 1% increase of females with a college degree and 2.4 (p Discussion and Conclusion We found evidence of racial and socio-demographic disparities in the burden of TRI facilities and chemical emissions in the Atlanta MSA. We observed a trend for toxic chemicals emitted suggesting that more blacks and Hispanics were burdened by and potentially exposed to TRI facilities than were Whites. There was only one predictor, percentage of females with a college degree, where we observed an inverse and statistically significant association with the amount of chemical emissions in pounds. We also found evidence that of potential differences in regulation processes of TRI facilities. Overall, results indicate that race/ethnicity and socioeconomic composition play a role in TRI facility siting and TRI facility emissions indicating burden disparities for low-SES populations as well as non-Whites in the Atlanta MSA. These results are similar to results presented in the environmental justice literature