Making Space for Mothering: Collaboration as Feminist Practice

Our collaborative practice spans nearly a decade working together on data collection, writing, presentations, and publications as we’ve explored the intimate care that doulas provide to women in labor. In this essay, we use intimate labor as both a practice and a theoretical frame to think of collaboration as a feminist project that recognizes the expertise gathered from mothering and makes space for it in academia. Eileen Boris and Rhacel Salazar Parreñas (2010, 7) define intimate labor as “work that involves embodied and affective interactions in the service of social reproduction,” and suggest that it requires “bodily or emotional closeness, close observations of another and personal knowledge or information” (2). In our work on doulas, we found that this concept of intimate labor helps us articulate how doula work happens in particular social, political, and economic contexts. Intimate labor also considers how these contexts structure expectations and relationships between those involved in intimate care (Boris and Parreñas 2010). Intimate labor is often invisible or marginalized because of its historic connection to women, people of color, and private spaces. Interrogating the way intimate labor is structured and performed thus allows for insight about class, gender, race, and other power relations. At the heart of our work on mothers, mothering, and the intimate labor of doulas is an understanding of collaborative work as another form of intimate labor

Practising Intimate Labour: Birth Doulas Respond during COVID-19

Birth doulas provide non-medical intimate support to pregnant people and their families. This support starts at the very foundation of life – breath. Doulas remind, encourage and accompany people through labour by breathing with them. However, the global COVID-19 pandemic has interrupted doulas’ intimate work, and they are forced to navigate new restrictions surrounding birth practices. Based on data collected from a qualitative survey of over five-hundred doulas as well as subsequent follow-up interviews with select doulas, we find intimacy at births disrupted and reshaped. We suggest that an analysis of doulas provides a unique way to think through the complexities surrounding reproduction precisely due to doulas’ ability to navigate intimate labour between and across boundaries

Critical view of WKB decay widths

A detailed comparison of the expressions for the decay widths obtained within the semiclassical WKB approximation using different approaches to the tunneling problem is performed. The differences between the available improved formulae for tunneling near the top and the bottom of the barrier are investigated. Though the simple WKB method gives the right order of magnitude of the decay widths, a small number of parameters are often fitted. The need to perform the fitting procedure remaining consistently within the WKB framework is emphasized in the context of the fission model based calculations. Calculations for the decay widths of some recently found super heavy nuclei using microscopic alpha-nucleus potentials are presented to demonstrate the importance of a consistent WKB calculation. The half-lives are found to be sensitive to the density dependence of the nucleon-nucleon interaction and the implementation of the Bohr-Sommerfeld quantization condition inherent in the WKB approach.Comment: 18 pages, Late

Distributed Computing in the Asynchronous LOCAL model

The LOCAL model is among the main models for studying locality in the framework of distributed network computing. This model is however subject to pertinent criticisms, including the facts that all nodes wake up simultaneously, perform in lock steps, and are failure-free. We show that relaxing these hypotheses to some extent does not hurt local computing. In particular, we show that, for any construction task $T$ associated to a locally checkable labeling (LCL), if $T$ is solvable in $t$ rounds in the LOCAL model, then $T$ remains solvable in $O(t)$ rounds in the asynchronous LOCAL model. This improves the result by Casta\~neda et al. [SSS 2016], which was restricted to 3-coloring the rings. More generally, the main contribution of this paper is to show that, perhaps surprisingly, asynchrony and failures in the computations do not restrict the power of the LOCAL model, as long as the communications remain synchronous and failure-free

New Dependency?: Economic Links between China and Latin America

This paper focuses on the most recent trends of Chinese finance (foreign direct investment (FDI) and development loans) in Latin America and their impact on economic development. In particular, this paper explores the economic and institutional factors that attract loans and FDI from China to Latin America. Based on data from the Chinese Ministry of Commerce and the United Nations on Chinese FDI and development loans to Latin America, this article argues that Chinese capital flows to the region, rather than politically motivated, are mainly motivated by trade interests, the evolution of the market of commodities, and natural resources-related policy goals. These capital flows are functional to the Chinese government’s use of soft power in the region, but these goals are secondary to market-based interests

Geodesic Deviation Equation in Bianchi Cosmologies

We present the Geodesic Deviation Equation (GDE) for the Friedmann-Robertson-Walker(FRW) universe and we compare it with the equation for Bianchi type I model. We justify consider this cosmological model due to the recent importance the Bianchi Models have as alternative models in cosmology. The main property of these models, solutions of Einstein Field Equations (EFE) is that they are homogeneous as the FRW model but they are not isotropic. We can see this because they have a non-null Weyl tensor in the GDE.Comment: Submitted to Journal of Physics: Conference Series (JPCS), ERE200

Serotipificación de aislamientos clínicos y del medio ambiente de Cryptococcus neoformans en Colombia

The variety and serotype of 192 isolates of Cryptococcus neoformans isolated between 1972 and 1992 - 163 of clinical origin and 29 of environmental origin - was determined. In the clinical isolates two varieties of C. neoformans were identified: C. neoformans var. neoformans appeared in 92.6% of the patients and C. neoformans var. gattii in the other 7.4%. C. neoformansvar. neoformans was found in 100% of the environmental isolates. Serotype A was most frequently encountered, being observed in 92% of the clinical isolates and in 100% of the environmental isolates, followed by serotype B (6.8%). Serotype C (0.6%) and D (0.6%) isolates were also identified. C. neoformans var. neoformans was seen in every year during which isolates were recorded but C. neoformans var. gattii was only observed in clinical isolates from 1986 onwards. C. neoformans var. neoformans was isolated throughout the whole year and C. neoformans var. gattii was encountered only in the months of February, April, June, August, September and December. C. neoformans var. neoformans was observed in 109 strains (66.9%) from male patients and in 36 strains (22.1%) from female patients. C. neoformans var. gattii was observed in 5 strains (3%) from men and 6 (3.&%) from women.Se determinó l variedad y el serotipo de 192 aislamientos de Cryptococcus neoformans recuperados de 1972 a 1992; 163 de origen clínico y 29 del medio ambiente. En los aislamientos clínicos se determinaron las dos variedades de C. neoformans: la variedad neoformans en el 92,6% de los pacientes y la variedad gattii en el 7,4%. En el medio ambiente se encontró la variedad neoformans en el 100% de los aislamientos. El serotipo encontrado con más frecuencia fue el serotipo A, el cual se observó en el 92% de los aislamientos clínicos y en el 100% del medio ambiente, seguido por el serotipo B (6,8%); también, se determinaron aislamientos de los serotipos C (0,6%) y D (0,6%). C. neoformans var. neoformans se recuperó en todos los años de los que se tuvieron aislamientos y C. neoformans var. gattii solamente se observó en aislamientos clínicos a partir de 1986. C. neoformans var. neoformans fue aislado durante los 12 meses del año y C. neoformans var. gattii se encontró distribuido en los meses defebrero, abril, junio, agosto, septiembre y diciembre. C. neoformans var. neoformans se observó en 109 (66,9%) cepas de pacientes del sexo masculino y en 36 (22,1%) del sexo femenino; C. neoformans var. gattii se observó en 5 (3%) cepas de hombres y en 6 (3,7%) mujeres