Camp Cures (the Stigma of Illness). Escaping the Tyranny of Caring, Charity, and Positive Thinking in Adam Mars-Jones' "Slim"

In the slang of the caring profession, there is an enduring use of the personal pronoun "we" whose infantilising effect – and I am sure "we" all share this view - is indeed hard to endure. Pronoun it may be, personal it surely isn't. On a larger scale, the inadequacy of this pathetic, in fact pseudo-empathetic, babble becomes increasingly apparent, especially for two reasons whose incompatibility exposes the true dimension of the dilemma. Firstly, this sort of talk excruciatingly extends into an overkill of compassion, well-meaning, and good advice, whose self-righteousness in time results in normative stereotypes of healthy living: positive thinking, creative visualisations, and not least, physical exercise. Secondly and simultaneously, though, this tyranny of caring can barely conceal the fact that illness is still widely viewed as a stigma. Entering the present discourse of HIV and AIDS at this point, one can hardly fail to notice that it is this very stigma that increasingly forces gay men into normative spectacles of health, even though, as Dollimore accurately contends, "contesting these negative representations (homosexuality = pathology = death) could never be just a question of substituting positive ones (homosexuality = health = life)" (Dollimore, Death, Desire and Loss xi). Put simply, there is urgent need for a cure against the stigma of illness, a cure that successfully counters both the debilitating, indeed incapacitating, treatment of the patient and his called-for charade of healthy living. One such cure is camp

Camp Cures (the Stigma of Illness). Escaping the Tyranny of Caring, Charity, and Positive Thinking in Adam Mars-Jones' "Slim"

In the slang of the caring profession, there is an enduring use of the personal pronoun "we" whose infantilising effect – and I am sure "we" all share this view - is indeed hard to endure. Pronoun it may be, personal it surely isn't. On a larger scale, the inadequacy of this pathetic, in fact pseudo-empathetic, babble becomes increasingly apparent, especially for two reasons whose incompatibility exposes the true dimension of the dilemma. Firstly, this sort of talk excruciatingly extends into an overkill of compassion, well-meaning, and good advice, whose self-righteousness in time results in normative stereotypes of healthy living: positive thinking, creative visualisations, and not least, physical exercise. Secondly and simultaneously, though, this tyranny of caring can barely conceal the fact that illness is still widely viewed as a stigma. Entering the present discourse of HIV and AIDS at this point, one can hardly fail to notice that it is this very stigma that increasingly forces gay men into normative spectacles of health, even though, as Dollimore accurately contends, "contesting these negative representations (homosexuality = pathology = death) could never be just a question of substituting positive ones (homosexuality = health = life)" (Dollimore, Death, Desire and Loss xi). Put simply, there is urgent need for a cure against the stigma of illness, a cure that successfully counters both the debilitating, indeed incapacitating, treatment of the patient and his called-for charade of healthy living. One such cure is camp

Bayesian Annotation Networks for Complex Sequence Analysis

Probabilistic models that associate annotations to sequential data are widely used in computational biology and a range of other applications. Models integrating with logic programs provide, furthermore, for sophistication and generality, at the cost of potentially very high computational complexity. A methodology is proposed for modularization of such models into sub-models, each representing a particular interpretation of the input data to be analysed. Their composition forms, in a natural way, a Bayesian network, and we show how standard methods for prediction and training can be adapted for such composite models in an iterative way, obtaining reasonable complexity results. Our methodology can be implemented using the probabilistic-logic PRISM system, developed by Sato et al, in a way that allows for practical applications

Inference with Constrained Hidden Markov Models in PRISM

A Hidden Markov Model (HMM) is a common statistical model which is widely used for analysis of biological sequence data and other sequential phenomena. In the present paper we show how HMMs can be extended with side-constraints and present constraint solving techniques for efficient inference. Defining HMMs with side-constraints in Constraint Logic Programming have advantages in terms of more compact expression and pruning opportunities during inference. We present a PRISM-based framework for extending HMMs with side-constraints and show how well-known constraints such as cardinality and all different are integrated. We experimentally validate our approach on the biologically motivated problem of global pairwise alignment

Development of New Business Models: Introducing the Cultural Elasticity Model

The paper presents the Cultural Elasticity Model as a new perspective on how existing companies may better perform continuous organic development of business models. It suggests three organisational pillars for the development of an organisation with strong cultural elasticity and therefore the ability to better innovate new business models

Why Central Europe needs a unified strategy for tackling the migration crisis

Central Europe has been one of the focal points of the migration crisis, yet there have been clear disagreements between Central European countries on how the crisis should be managed. Gabi Gőbl, Christian Kvorning Lassen, Marko Lovec, Milan Nič and Paul Schmidt write that while the route through which people entered Central Europe in 2015 has largely been closed, there is a clear need for a unified strategy to prevent divisions emerging between countries in the region