Living in a Negative Relation to the Law: Legal Violence and the Lives of People Criminally Charged Due to HIV in Canada

This dissertation examines the lived experiences of people in Canada who have been criminalized due to allegedly not telling their sex partners that they were HIV-positive. Canada is known as a leading country in the world for punitively criminalizing alleged HIV non-disclosure, exposure, and transmission. This dissertation is the first known qualitative study to centrally focus on the lives of HIV-positive criminalized people and is based on 27 interviews with 16 different people from across Canada who have been charged, prosecuted or threatened with charges for alleged HIV non-disclosure. I mobilize a critical ethnographic approach, or what I call a criminology of the criminalized, one focused from the perspectives of criminalized people, that is grounded in the trajectories of critical social science and institutional ethnography. This approach to research becomes focused on denaturalizing the violence faced by criminalized people and calling attention towards forms of avoidable suffering that they face. When someone is criminalized, their legally safeguarded personhood is deconstituted under the law, they become socially and civilly dead, and can then become subject to forms of intense violence and surveillance. This is a life lived in a negative relation to the law. The outcome of this unique critical ethnography details how a complex intersecting array of legal tools (criminal laws and public health laws), as well as a range of institutions (police, public health, criminal justice, and the media) work to circumscribe the lives of the criminalized. People also come to be the subject of intense forms of violence by state institutions or various actors in their communities. This research moves beyond mere description and addresses the ethical function of such research to act as a form of bearing witness to these forms of violence, suffering, and surveillance faced by criminalized people. The results help render these experiences of violence unacceptable, acknowledging that society is open to change. This critical ethnography is one that seeks justice where no justice had been done, and contributes towards helping realize a life of flourishing for people subject to unjust forms of criminalization

Coordination and Sustainability of River Observing Activities in the Arctic

To understand and respond to changes in the world’s northern regions, we need a coordinated system of long-term Arctic observations. River networks naturally integrate across landscapes and link the terrestrial and ocean domains. Changes in river discharge reflect changes in the terrestrial water balance, whereas changes in water chemistry are linked to changes in biogeochemical processes and water flow paths. Sustained measurements of river water discharge and water chemistry are therefore essential components of an Arctic observing network. As we strive to establish and sustain long-term observations in the Arctic, these two measurements must be coupled. Although river discharge and chemistry measurements are already coupled to some extent within national boundaries, this is not done in a consistent and coordinated fashion across the pan-Arctic domain. As a consequence, data quality and availability vary widely among regions. International coordination of river discharge and chemistry measurements in the Arctic would be greatly facilitated by formal commitments to maintain a set of core sites and associated measurements that are mutually agreed upon among pan-Arctic nations. Involvement of the agencies currently operating river discharge gauges around the Arctic and establishment of an overarching coordination entity to implement shared protocols, track data quality, and manage data streams would be essential in this endeavor. Focused studies addressing scale-dependent relationships between watershed characteristics and water chemistry, in-stream processes, and estuarine and coastal dynamics are also needed to support interpretation and application of Arctic river observing data as they relate to land and ocean change

River Discharge

In 2014, combined discharge from the eight largest Arctic rivers (2,487 km3) was 10% greater than average discharge for the period 1980-1989. Values for 2013 (2,282 km3) and 2012 (2,240 km3) were 1% greater than and 1% less than the 1980-1989 average, respectively. For the first seven months of 2015, the combined discharge for the six largest Eurasian Arctic rivers shows that peak discharge was 10% greater and five days earlier than the 1980-1989 average for those months

Prime Time? A Look At The Effects Of Circadian Mismatch On Stereotype Reliance

Stereotype-based decisions are formed as the result of employing various heuristics and biases, and they serve as a way to assess ambiguous situations and compensate for limited information processing. Research has demonstrated that during circadian mismatched (non-optimal) periods of the day cognitive resource availability is diminished. This study examined the influence of circadian arousal levels (particularly in mismatched conditions) on the tendency to use stereotypes in decision-making tasks. It was predicted that mismatch between chronotype (individual circadian preference) and time of day would correlate negatively with cognitive resource availability, thus increasing vulnerability to stereotype reliance. Participants were 59 Appalachian State undergraduates. The participants were administered an online survey consisting of the validated reduced Morningness-Eveningness Questionnaire, the Karolinska Sleepiness Scale, the Epworth Sleep Scale, and a stereotyping task. Each subject participated in sessions at two different times of the day, with the sessions occurring approximately one week apart. Though the stereotype priming manipulation failed, results suggest that participants in adverse sleep or circadian states may have still relied on biases or heuristics when assessing guilt

The blurred boundaries of ecological, sustainable, and agroecological intensification: a review

International audienceAbstractThe projected human population of nine billion by 2050 has led to ever growing discussion of the need for increasing agricultural output to meet estimated food demands, while mitigating environmental costs. Many stakeholders in agricultural circles are calling for the intensification of agriculture to meet these demands. However, it is neither clear nor readily agreed upon what is meant by intensification. Here, we compare the three major uses, ‘ecological intensification’, ‘sustainable intensification’ and ‘agroecological intensification’, by analysing their various definitions, principles and practices, and also their historical appearance and evolution. We used data from the scientific literature, the grey literature, the websites of international organizations and the Scopus and FAOLEX databases. Our major findings are: (1) sustainable intensification is the most frequently used term so far. (2) The three concepts ecological intensification, sustainable intensification and agroecological intensification overlap in terms of definitions, principles and practices, thus creating some confusion in their meanings, interpretations and implications. Nevertheless, some differences exist. (3) Sustainable intensification is more widely used and represents in many cases a rather generalised category, into which most current farming practices can be put so long as sustainability is in some way addressed. However, despite its wider use, it remains imprecisely defined. (4) Ecological and agroecological intensification do introduce some major nuances and, in general, more explicitly stated definitions. For instance, ecological intensification emphasizes the understanding and intensification of biological and ecological processes and functions in agroecosystem. (5) The notion of agroecological intensification accentuates the system approach and integrates more cultural and social perspectives in its concept. (6) Even if some boundaries can be seen, confusion is still predominant in the use of these terms. These blurred boundaries currently contribute to the use of these terms for justifying many different kinds of practices and interventions. We suggest that greater precision in defining the terms and the respective practices proposed would indicate more clearly what authors or institutions are aiming at with the proposed intensification. In this sense, we provide new definitions for all three intensification concepts based on the earlier ones

Uncertainty in multitask learning: joint representations for probabilistic MR-only radiotherapy planning

Multi-task neural network architectures provide a mechanism that jointly integrates information from distinct sources. It is ideal in the context of MR-only radiotherapy planning as it can jointly regress a synthetic CT (synCT) scan and segment organs-at-risk (OAR) from MRI. We propose a probabilistic multi-task network that estimates: 1) intrinsic uncertainty through a heteroscedastic noise model for spatially-adaptive task loss weighting and 2) parameter uncertainty through approximate Bayesian inference. This allows sampling of multiple segmentations and synCTs that share their network representation. We test our model on prostate cancer scans and show that it produces more accurate and consistent synCTs with a better estimation in the variance of the errors, state of the art results in OAR segmentation and a methodology for quality assurance in radiotherapy treatment planning.Comment: Early-accept at MICCAI 2018, 8 pages, 4 figure

Coordination and Sustainability of River Observing Activities in the Arctic

To understand and respond to changes in the world’s northern regions, we need a coordinated system of long-term Arctic observations. River networks naturally integrate across landscapes and link the terrestrial and ocean domains. Changes in river discharge reflect changes in the terrestrial water balance, whereas changes in water chemistry are linked to changes in biogeochemical processes and water flow paths. Sustained measurements of river water discharge and water chemistry are therefore essential components of an Arctic observing network. As we strive to establish and sustain long-term observations in the Arctic, these two measurements must be coupled. Although river discharge and chemistry measurements are already coupled to some extent within national boundaries, this is not done in a consistent and coordinated fashion across the pan-Arctic domain. As a consequence, data quality and availability vary widely among regions. International coordination of river discharge and chemistry measurements in the Arctic would be greatly facilitated by formal commitments to maintain a set of core sites and associated measurements that are mutually agreed upon among pan-Arctic nations. Involvement of the agencies currently operating river discharge gauges around the Arctic and establishment of an overarching coordination entity to implement shared protocols, track data quality, and manage data streams would be essential in this endeavor. Focused studies addressing scale-dependent relationships between watershed characteristics and water chemistry, in-stream processes, and estuarine and coastal dynamics are also needed to support interpretation and application of Arctic river observing data as they relate to land and ocean change.Pour comprendre les changements qui s’opèrent dans les régions nordiques du monde et y réagir, nous devons nous doter d’un système coordonné d’observation à long terme dans l’Arctique. Les réseaux fluviaux s’intègrent naturellement dans les paysages et relient le domaine terrestre au domaine océanique. Les changements qui s’exercent dans les réseaux fluviaux sont le reflet des changements dans l’équilibre hydrique terrestre, tandis que les changements qui s’exercent sur l’hydrochimie sont liés aux changements caractérisant les processus biogéochimiques et les parcours d’écoulement de l’eau. Par conséquent, un réseau d’observation arctique devrait essentiellement être assorti de mesures durables d’évacuation des eaux fluviales et d’hydrochimie. Au moment où nous nous efforçons d’établir et de soutenir des observations à long terme dans l’Arctique, ces deux types de mesures doivent être suivies en parallèle. Bien que les mesures de l’évacuation fluviale et les mesures chimiques soient déjà, dans une certaine mesure, suivies en parallèle à l’intérieur des frontières nationales, cela ne se fait pas de manière uniforme et coordonnée à la grandeur du domaine panarctique, et en conséquence, la qualité et la disponi­bilité des données varient beaucoup d’une région à l’autre. La coordination internationale des mesures d’évacuation fluviale et chimiques dans l’Arctique serait grandement facilitée par l’existence d’engagements officiels visant à maintenir une série d’emplacements fondamentaux et de mesures connexes fixées par entente mutuelle au sein des nations panarctiques. La partic­ipation des agences qui gèrent les manomètres d’évacuation fluviale dans l’Arctique et l’établissement d’une entité de coordi­nation générale mettant en oeuvre des protocoles partagés, vérifiant la qualité des données et gérant les flux de données seraient également essentiels. Des études ciblées portant sur les relations influencées par l’échelle entre les caractéristiques du bassin hydrographique et l’hydrochimie, sur les processus s’opérant à l’intérieur des cours d’eau et sur la dynamique des estuaires et des rives s’avèrent également nécessaires pour étayer l’interprétation et l’application des données d’observation fluviale de l’Arctique en matière de changement terrestre et océanique

SODA: Bottleneck Diffusion Models for Representation Learning

We introduce SODA, a self-supervised diffusion model, designed for representation learning. The model incorporates an image encoder, which distills a source view into a compact representation, that, in turn, guides the generation of related novel views. We show that by imposing a tight bottleneck between the encoder and a denoising decoder, and leveraging novel view synthesis as a self-supervised objective, we can turn diffusion models into strong representation learners, capable of capturing visual semantics in an unsupervised manner. To the best of our knowledge, SODA is the first diffusion model to succeed at ImageNet linear-probe classification, and, at the same time, it accomplishes reconstruction, editing and synthesis tasks across a wide range of datasets. Further investigation reveals the disentangled nature of its emergent latent space, that serves as an effective interface to control and manipulate the model's produced images. All in all, we aim to shed light on the exciting and promising potential of diffusion models, not only for image generation, but also for learning rich and robust representations