Diffuse Connections: Making Sense of Smell in Canadian Diasporic Women\u27s Writing

This dissertation explores the crucial, yet often unacknowledged, role smell plays in Canadian diasporic women’s writing. While some critics discuss scent in their work on taste, memory, and diasporic nostalgia, I argue for considering scent in its specificity and suggest that smell shapes diasporic subjectivities differently than taste. Complicating frameworks that focus primarily on notions of memory, homeland, and nostalgia, I consider how diasporic subjectivities are shaped by a range of feelings connected to experiences in past homelands and present places of habitation, including racialized and gendered forms of olfactory discrimination in the ostensibly tolerant nation of Canada. Appropriating the concept of diffusion from scientific theories of smell, I re-conceptualize diffusion as a model of movement and mixing that complicates narratives of linear diasporic migrations from a single point of origin. I use diffusion to theorize “diffuse connections,” a framework that emphasizes the blending of diasporic experiences across time and space and the intimate intersubjective encounters that emerge through scent. Each chapter explores novels by Canadian diasporic women writers (Shani Mootoo, Hiromi Goto, and Larissa Lai) that represent diasporic subjectivities in terms of diffuse connections

‘Isolation no more: Can Person-Centred Care assist inclusion for Kimberley peoples impacted by Tuberculosis or Leprosy infection? A review of the PeTaL project.’

While physical isolation in Sanitoria or Leprosarium’s is no longer part of treatment for people with Tuberculosis (TB) or Leprosy infection, other forms of isolation, such as psychological isolation or social exclusion, can still impact significantly on people’s lives today from associated stigma and/or disability. The PeTaL project (Perspectives of Tuberculosis (TB) and Leprosy), is a PhD project that set out with the aim to explore, using qualitative methodology, the lived experience of Kimberley peoples involved in the treatment of either TB or Leprosy since 2012, to understand what works and what could be improved within a culturally secure and person-centred care context. This presentation will cast light on some of the historical aspects of the treatment of TB and Leprosy, coupled with the evolution of Person Centred Care in health, before talking about what this can mean for current health care offered to Kimberley peoples whose social worlds are impacted

A minimal mathematical model of nonphotochemical quenching of chlorophyll fluorescence

Copyright © 2010 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.Peer reviewedPreprin

What If Grassroots Don’t Take Root?: Reflections on Cultivating Communities of Practice

Traditionally, communities of practice (CoPs) have been characterized as selfdirected, self-governing entities. In our experience, however, we have found that CoPs focused on teaching and learning in post-secondary institutions rarely lead themselves. In this piece, we reflect on our experiences leading CoPs as organizers and facilitators. We then draw on literature about CoP governance to consider the implications of having educational developers – and post-secondary institutions more broadly – take on influential roles in managing CoPs. To conclude, we pose questions to guide future research on how to cultivate healthy CoPs and healthy roles for the educational developers who support them

The Nef Protein of Human Immunodeficiency Virus Establishes Superinfection Immunity by a Dual Strategy to Downregulate Cell-Surface CCR5 and CD4

SummaryBackground: Viruses frequently render cells refractory to subsequent infection with the same virus. This state of superinfection immunity counteracts potentially detrimental consequences for the infected cell and facilitates high-level replication and viral spread in the host.Results: Here, we show that human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) employs its early gene product Nef to efficiently interfere with superinfection at the viral-entry step. In this context, we identify the downregulation of cell-surface CCR5, the major HIV coreceptor, as a novel and highly conserved activity of Nef. Nef targets the CCR5 coreceptor and the HIV binding receptor CD4 via distinct cellular machineries to enhance the endocytosis rate of both HIV receptor components and to accelerate their degradation. Functionally, these genetically separable actions by Nef synergized to efficiently protect cells from HIV superinfection at the level of fusion of the viral envelope with the plasma membrane.Conclusions: HIV has evolved two independent activities for Nef to downregulate the receptor complex and to facilitate its efficient replication and spread. This evasion strategy likely represents a mechanism by which the pathogenicity factor Nef elevates viral replication in vivo and thus promotes AIDS pathogenesis

Potential value of pyrolysis oil derived from shellfish processing by-product

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Rather a Nurse than a Physician -- Contrastive Explanations under Investigation

Contrastive explanations, where one decision is explained in contrast to another, are supposed to be closer to how humans explain a decision than non-contrastive explanations, where the decision is not necessarily referenced to an alternative. This claim has never been empirically validated. We analyze four English text-classification datasets (SST2, DynaSent, BIOS and DBpedia-Animals). We fine-tune and extract explanations from three different models (RoBERTa, GTP-2, and T5), each in three different sizes and apply three post-hoc explainability methods (LRP, GradientxInput, GradNorm). We furthermore collect and release human rationale annotations for a subset of 100 samples from the BIOS dataset for contrastive and non-contrastive settings. A cross-comparison between model-based rationales and human annotations, both in contrastive and non-contrastive settings, yields a high agreement between the two settings for models as well as for humans. Moreover, model-based explanations computed in both settings align equally well with human rationales. Thus, we empirically find that humans do not necessarily explain in a contrastive manner.9 pages, long paper at ACL 2022 proceedings.Comment: 9 pages, long paper at EMNLP 2023 proceeding