The Post-Communist Identity Crisis and Queer Migration from Poland

An examination of the lived experiences of Polish queer migrants in London shows how a crisis in Polish national identity following the collapse of communism in 1989 constructed nonheterosexuals as a threat to Polish norms and values, thus fueling homophobic rhetoric, violence, and discrimination and prompting queer Poles to view migration as a potential means of escape and self-realization. An analysis of the narratives of twenty-five Polish LGBQ migrants living in London revealed different modes of domestic and crossborder queer migration as well as a range of ways in which sexuality directly and indirectly influenced their decision to move abroad

An AIS-based optimal control framework for longevity and task achievement of multi-robot systems

Extending the longevity of autonomous agent system in real life application is a difficult task, especially in applications which require continuous high system performance. This paper presents a novel decentralized balancing controlling architecture for longevity and achievement in multi-agent robot systems based on several artificial immune systems (AIS) designs and principles. Simulation experiments have verified the proposed architecture has good capability to efficiently minimize the trade-off in system achievement while maintaining system sustainability, even in very demanding situations.published_or_final_versio

Testing the molecular clock using mechanistic models of both fossil preservation and molecular evolution

Molecular sequence data provide information about relative times only, and fossil-based age constraints are the ultimate source of information about absolute times in molecular clock dating analyses. Thus, fossil calibrations are critical to molecular clock dating, but competing methods are difficult to evaluate empirically because the true evolutionary time scale is never known. Here, we combine mechanistic models of fossil preservation and sequence evolution in simulations to evaluate different approaches to constructing fossil calibrations and their impact on Bayesian molecular clock dating, and the relative impact of fossil versus molecular sampling. We show that divergence time estimation is impacted by the model of fossil preservation, sampling intensity and tree shape. The addition of sequence data may improve molecular clock estimates, but accuracy and precision is dominated by the quality of the fossil calibrations. Posterior means and medians are poor representatives of true divergence times; posterior intervals provide a much more accurate estimate of divergence times, though they may be wide and often do not have high coverage probability. Our results highlight the importance of increased fossil sampling and improved statistical approaches to generating calibrations, which should incorporate the non-uniform nature of ecological and temporal fossil species distributions

The excluding effects of inclusive measures - the case study of welfare to work measures in Hong Kong

This paper studies the excluding effects of the pro-market welfare-to-work programmes adopted by the Hong Kong Government. It focuses on the New Dawn Project which is designed to help single parents and child carers on the Comprehensive Social Security Assistance Scheme (CSSA) to cope with social exclusion. In this paper we argue that the Hong Kong Government under-estimates the significance of the defects of the labour market as the main cause of the social exclusion faced by many single parents and child carers. Hence, instead of launching structural reforms to deal with the defects of the labour market, it focuses on increasing the ability and willingness of the single parents and child carers on the CSSA to sell their labour in the labour market through the New Dawn Project. As a result, this project has two negative effects on its targets. Firstly, it wrongly blames the single parents and child carers for the unemployment faced by them. Secondly, the project further excludes those who find it difficult to meet the training requirements.published_or_final_versio

Constructing Soviet and Post-Soviet Sexualities

The aim of the introduction to this edited volume is to show how homosexuality has been constructed and reconstructed in the Soviet Union and in the states of the former USSR in a bid to provide the historical, social and political context for the chapters that follow. The first part analyses the impact of the Bolshevik revolution on non-normative sexualities in the USSR and how the legal situation for gay men and attitudes towards non-homosexuals in general became more negative as the Party’s priorities changed. The second part looks at the situation for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people following the collapse of the USSR in 1991. It identifies general social and political trends which have shaped attitudes towards non-normative sexualities throughout the post-Soviet space, while paying particular attention to developments in Russia

The human response to endotoxin

Many patients undergoing high-risk major surgery suffer complications. Previous studies have shown that patients with low IgM Endotoxin Core Antibodies (EndoCAb) are more likely to have a complication, for relatively unknown reasons. Studying EndoCAb directly is difficult as it is a polyclonal group of antibodies. This thesis explored the relationship between EndoCAb and different measures of outcome using samples from previously conducted clinical trials and a series of basic laboratory studies. A pilot human volunteer study was conducted to try to improve ways of assessing the response to an endotoxin challenge. An observational study on adults undergoing 1st time Coronary Artery Bypass Grafting was conducted using samples from a previous trial to see if the association between outcome and low EndoCAb IgM extended to this comparatively low-risk group and to examine whether this was clearly mediated by an exaggerated inflammatory response. Patients with low EndoCAb IgM had more complications, but had less interleukin-6 at 6 hours. To assess the relationship between low EndoCAb IgM and other antibodies a series of studies was conducted to examine the hypothesis that EndoCAb IgM is part of a wider ‘natural IgM antibody group’. Blood donors with low EndoCAb IgM had lower concentrations of the ‘natural IgM antibodies’. Furthermore, EndoCAb IgM and the ‘natural IgM antibody group’ had similar temporal patterns and were present at low concentrations in some umbilical cord blood. To further understand the clinical relevance of EndoCAb, the association between EndoCAb and the systemic inflammatory response syndrome was retrospectively measured in critically ill children undergoing another clinical trial. Low EndoCAb IgG was associated with early development of the systemic inflammatory response syndrome. The difficulty in determining which factors affect the response to an inflammatory challenge led me to develop a new low-dose endotoxin human volunteer model: one in which there is the largest range of change, variability or dispersion in inflammatory markers

Identity, Belonging and Solidarity among Russian-speaking Queer Migrants in Berlin

Drawing on the experience of Russian-speaking queer migrants in Berlin, the article furthers our understanding of queer migration by analyzing the motivations and integration strategies of LGBQ migrants, as well as their attempts to maintain and perform both their sexual and national identities in the post-migration context. The risk that they could be doubly marginalized—as ethnic minorities within the host society and sexual minorities in the established diasporic community—led to the establishment of Quarteera, a forum for Russian-speaking queers to perform and maintain both their sexual and ethno-cultural identities and give and receive social and psychological support, as well as a channel for expressing feelings of solidarity towards other Russian-speaking queers in the post-Soviet homeland. A further contribution of the article is thus highlighting the benefit of “queer diaspora” as a heuristic device to think about identity, belonging, and solidarity among sexual minorities in the context of dispersal and transnational networks

Migration and Sexual Resocialisation: The Case of Central and East Europeans in London

Based upon a survey of more than three thousand respondents and forty in-depth interviews, the aim of this article is to examine the impact of migration on sexual resocialisation. In particular, we show how living in London influenced the attitudes of Central and East European migrants towards pre-marital sex and homosexuality. While the general acceptability of pre-marital sex was not affected by time spent in London, differences were noted in the meaning attached to sex outside marriage in the United Kingdom compared with Central and Eastern Europe. Particularly significant changes were observed in our respondents? attitudes towards homosexuality, with a greater liberalisation the result of extrication from mechanisms of social control, re-socialisation into new social norms regarding sex and sexuality, greater visibility of sexual difference in London and, in particular, inter-personal contacts with gays and lesbians. Limitations to the general liberalisation of attitudes were also noted

Big Data: A Cheerleader for Translational Perioperative Medicine

GLA is supported by a Basic science career development award (British Journal of Anaesthesia/Royal College of Anaesthetists) and British Heart Foundation programme grant (RG/14/4/30736). Part of this work was undertaken at UCLH/UCL who received a proportion of funding from the UK Department of Health’s NIHR Biomedical Research Centres funding schem