Gender and imagined purity of at the turn of the 20th century: the example of B.O. Flower, reformer

International audienceBoston progressive editor Benjamin O. Flower (1858-1918) pushed for a wide range of women-friendly reforms and publicized many turn-of-the-century feminists. He saw "female purity" as the engine of progress - the moral purification women inspired was the backbone of a radical regeneration of the country that would lead to individual, social, economic, political and family transformations. This article purposes to explore this social imagination of purity, its scope and its evolution. It examines Flower's role in the "Purity Movement," a crusade that aimed at putting an end to prostitution - within and without marriage - and to low age of consent laws. For Flower, male immorality, urban poverty, and ignorance about sex accounted for women's degradation. Realistic literature and journalistic exposures were therefore the necessary tools to regenerate society. This article also analyzes the ambiguous trajectory of Flower's vision of "female purity". He saw in Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science, the embodiment and the logical outcome of his feminist struggles. However, this new movement only led to social apathy. His exhortations were also predicated upon essentialization (men as beasts or pure intellect and reforming energy, women as victims or as models of moral idealism) and the traditional postulates of Victorian culture (the centrality of home). Finally, in his last years, Flower embarked on a crusade against the "menace" Catholicism posed to women. This episode reveals the nativist potential of imagined purity as Flower tolerated nothing short of an ethereal "feminine" idealism. http://nuevomundo.revues.org/6638

ABC random forests for Bayesian parameter inference

This preprint has been reviewed and recommended by Peer Community In Evolutionary Biology (http://dx.doi.org/10.24072/pci.evolbiol.100036). Approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) has grown into a standard methodology that manages Bayesian inference for models associated with intractable likelihood functions. Most ABC implementations require the preliminary selection of a vector of informative statistics summarizing raw data. Furthermore, in almost all existing implementations, the tolerance level that separates acceptance from rejection of simulated parameter values needs to be calibrated. We propose to conduct likelihood-free Bayesian inferences about parameters with no prior selection of the relevant components of the summary statistics and bypassing the derivation of the associated tolerance level. The approach relies on the random forest methodology of Breiman (2001) applied in a (non parametric) regression setting. We advocate the derivation of a new random forest for each component of the parameter vector of interest. When compared with earlier ABC solutions, this method offers significant gains in terms of robustness to the choice of the summary statistics, does not depend on any type of tolerance level, and is a good trade-off in term of quality of point estimator precision and credible interval estimations for a given computing time. We illustrate the performance of our methodological proposal and compare it with earlier ABC methods on a Normal toy example and a population genetics example dealing with human population evolution. All methods designed here have been incorporated in the R package abcrf (version 1.7) available on CRAN.Comment: Main text: 24 pages, 6 figures Supplementary Information: 14 pages, 5 figure

Im Laboratorium der Schrift-Figur

Ut Pictura Poesis erit; similisque PoesiSit Pictura; refert par aemula quaeque sororemAlternantque vices et nomina; muta PoesisDicitur haec, Pictura loquens solet illa vocari.Charles Du Fresnoy, De Arte Graphica, 1667, V. 1-4. Picassos dichterisches Œuvre, inzwischen durch eine neuerliche Ausstellung und eine großartige Edition zu größerer Bekanntheit und Anerkennung gelangt, bietet die ausgezeichnete Gelegenheit für einen Einstieg in den modernen und zeitgenössischen Kommentar des alten Hora..

Publier la « Cause du Peuple » : le Populisme américain au prisme de Benjamin O. Flower, réformateur

B.O. Flower, réformateur de Boston, dirige dans les années 1890 The Arena, le seul magazine de la côte Est favorable aux Populistes. Son but est de leur offrir le traitement journalistique équitable que la presse partisane leur refuse. Flower se fait l’avocat de leurs réformes et dénonce les railleries dont ils sont les victimes. Cet article explore l’image que Flower donne du Populisme, notamment à travers l’analyse de ses choix éditoriaux. Il se propose aussi de recouvrer le sens du « Populisme », tel qu’il était compris à l’époque, repensant ainsi les catégories traditionnelles (modernité / tradition ; urbain/ rural) utilisées pour comprendre ce mouvement. Il examine enfin le rôle de la presse réformiste et de la littérature utopique dans son développement, ainsi que les ambiguïtés de la vision Populiste du « peuple » et les limites de sa lecture morale de l’histoire.Boston reformer B.O. Flower’s magazine, The Arena, was the only one on the East coast to support the Populists’ crusade in the 1890s. His aim was to give them the full and fair hearing that the partisan press denied them. Exposing the ridicule unjustly heaped up on them, Flower actively advocated their reforms. This article explores the image that Flower gave of Populism, notably by analyzing his editorial choices. It purposes to recapture the meaning of “Populism” as it was understood at the time, thus rethinking the traditional categories (modern/ traditional; urban/rural) used to understand the movement. It also examines the role played by the reform press and utopian literature in its development as well as the ambiguities of the Populists’ vision of the “people” and the limits of their moral reading of history

Mechanisms of Odor-Tracking: Multiple Sensors for Enhanced Perception and Behavior

Early in evolution, the ability to sense and respond to changing environments must have provided a critical survival advantage to living organisms. From bacteria and worms to flies and vertebrates, sophisticated mechanisms have evolved to enhance odor detection and localization. Here, we review several modes of chemotaxis. We further consider the relevance of a striking and recurrent motif in the organization of invertebrate and vertebrate sensory systems, namely the existence of two symmetrical olfactory sensors. By combining our current knowledge about the olfactory circuits of larval and adult Drosophila, we examine the molecular and neural mechanisms underlying robust olfactory perception and extend these analyses to recent behavioral studies addressing the relevance and function of bilateral olfactory input for gradient detection. Finally, using a comparative theoretical approach based on Braitenberg's vehicles, we speculate about the relationships between anatomy, circuit architecture and stereotypical orientation behaviors

Low-temperature structure of magnetite studied using resonant x-ray scattering

13 pagesInternational audienceWe propose a model for the Fe atomic displacements in the low-temperature phase of magnetite Fe3O4 , based on the analysis of the photon energy dependence of the scattered intensity of selected reflections in a resonant x-ray scattering experiment. The symmetry of the displacement pattern is forced to be consistent with the Cc space group, long time claimed to be the actual symmetry of the low-temperature phase. Fe positions at octahedral sites and the corresponding charges are accounted for by a fitting procedure comparing simulations and experiment.We found a pattern of small distortions in the a-b plane. An independent sensitivity to the charge occupancy permits to refine the model of charge ordering previously proposed. Finally we have computed the electric moment of the combined charge displacements to be 1.5 C/cm2

Improving Inference of Gaussian Mixtures Using Auxiliary Variables

Expanding a lower-dimensional problem to a higher-dimensional space and then projecting back is often beneficial. This article rigorously investigates this perspective in the context of finite mixture models, namely how to improve inference for mixture models by using auxiliary variables. Despite the large literature in mixture models and several empirical examples, there is no previous work that gives general theoretical justification for including auxiliary variables in mixture models, even for special cases. We provide a theoretical basis for comparing inference for mixture multivariate models with the corresponding inference for marginal univariate mixture models. Analytical results for several special cases are established. We show that the probability of correctly allocating mixture memberships and the information number for the means of the primary outcome in a bivariate model with two Gaussian mixtures are generally larger than those in each univariate model. Simulations under a range of scenarios, including misspecified models, are conducted to examine the improvement. The method is illustrated by two real applications in ecology and causal inference