Introduction

This collection seeks to encourage new ways of thinking about the connections and tensions between sexual politics, citizenship and belonging by bringing together a diverse range of critical interventions within sexuality and gender studies. The book is organised around three interlinked thematic areas, focusing on sexual citizenship, nationalism and international borders (section 1); sexuality and ‘race ’ (section 2); and sexuality and religion (section 3). In revisiting notions of sexual citizenship and belonging, contributors engage with topical debates about ‘sexual nationalism’, or the construction of western/European nations as exceptional in terms of attitudes to sexual and gender equality vis-à-vis an uncivilised, racialized ‘Other’. The collection explores macro-level perspectives by attending to the broader geopolitical and socio-legal structures within which competing claims to citizenship and belonging are played out; at the same time, micro-level perspectives are utilised to explore the interplay between sexuality and ‘race’, nation, ethnicity and religious identities, both in individuals’ lived experiences and in activism and forms of collective belonging. Geographically, the collection has a prevalently European focus, yet contributions explore a range of trans-national spatial dimensions that exceed the boundaries of ‘Europe’ and of European nation-states. They consider, for example, links between former European imperial powers and their former colonies; the construction of a European ‘core’ and its ‘peripheries’ in discourses on sexual and reproductive rights; and forms of belonging shaped by migration from within and outside ‘fortress Europe’

Maximum likelihood drift estimation for a threshold diffusion

We study the maximum likelihood estimator of the drift parameters of a stochastic differential equation, with both drift and diffusion coefficients constant on the positive and negative axis, yet discontinuous at zero. This threshold diffusion is called drifted Oscillating Brownian motion.For this continuously observed diffusion, the maximum likelihood estimator coincide with a quasi-likelihood estimator with constant diffusion term. We show that this estimator is the limit, as observations become dense in time, of the (quasi)-maximum likelihood estimator based on discrete observations. In long time, the asymptotic behaviors of the positive and negative occupation times rule the ones of the estimators. Differently from most known results in the literature, we do not restrict ourselves to the ergodic framework: indeed, depending on the signs of the drift, the process may be ergodic, transient or null recurrent. For each regime, we establish whether or not the estimators are consistent; if they are, we prove the convergence in long time of the properly rescaled difference of the estimators towards a normal or mixed normal distribution. These theoretical results are backed by numerical simulations

One Health Determinants of Escherichia coli Antimicrobial Resistance in Humans in the Community:An Umbrella Review

To date, the scientific literature on health variables for Escherichia coli antimicrobial resistance (AMR) has been investigated throughout several systematic reviews, often with a focus on only one aspect of the One Health variables: human, animal, or environment. The aim of this umbrella review is to conduct a systematic synthesis of existing evidence on Escherichia coli AMR in humans in the community from a One Health perspective. PubMed, EMBASE, and CINAHL were searched on “antibiotic resistance” and “systematic review” from inception until 25 March 2022 (PROSPERO: CRD42022316431). The methodological quality was assessed, and the importance of identified variables was tabulated across all included reviews. Twenty-three reviews were included in this study, covering 860 primary studies. All reviews were of (critically) low quality. Most reviews focused on humans (20), 3 on animals, and 1 on both human and environmental variables. Antibiotic use, urinary tract infections, diabetes, and international travel were identified as the most important human variables. Poultry farms and swimming in freshwater were identified as potential sources for AMR transmission from the animal and environmental perspectives. This umbrella review highlights a gap in high-quality literature investigating the time between variable exposure, AMR testing, and animal and environmental AMR variables.</p

The cell cycle of Leishmania: morphogenetic events and their implications for parasite biology

The cell cycle is central to understanding fundamental biology of Leishmania, a group of human-infective protozoan parasites. Leishmania have two main life cycle morphologies: the intracellular amastigote in the mammalian host and the promastigote in the fly. We have produced the first comprehensive and quantitative description of a Leishmania promastigote cell cycle taking a morphometric approach to position any cell within the cell cycle based on its length and DNA content. We describe timings of cell cycle phases and rates of morphological changes; kinetoplast and nucleus S phase, division and position, cell body growth and morphology changes, flagellum growth and basal body duplication. We have shown that Leishmania mexicana undergoes large changes in morphology through the cell cycle and that the wide range of morphologies present in cultures during exponential growth represent different cell cycle stages. We also show promastigote flagellum growth occurs over multiple cell cycles. There are clear implications for the mechanisms of flagellum length regulation, life cycle stage differentiation and trypanosomatid division in general. This data set therefore provides a platform which will be of use for post-genomic analyses of Leishmania cell biology in relation to differentiation and infection

If I Hear You Correctly: Building and Evaluating Interview Chatbots with Active Listening Skills

Interview chatbots engage users in a text-based conversation to draw out their views and opinions. It is, however, challenging to build effective interview chatbots that can handle user free-text responses to open-ended questions and deliver engaging user experience. As the first step, we are investigating the feasibility and effectiveness of using publicly available, practical AI technologies to build effective interview chatbots. To demonstrate feasibility, we built a prototype scoped to enable interview chatbots with a subset of active listening skills - the abilities to comprehend a user's input and respond properly. To evaluate the effectiveness of our prototype, we compared the performance of interview chatbots with or without active listening skills on four common interview topics in a live evaluation with 206 users. Our work presents practical design implications for building effective interview chatbots, hybrid chatbot platforms, and empathetic chatbots beyond interview tasks.Comment: Working draft. To appear in the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2020

Comprendre les comportements face à un risque modéré d’inondation. Etude de cas dans le périurbain toulousain (Sud-Ouest de la France)

Les espaces urbanisés soumis à des risques modérés d’inondation pour les vies humaines sont souvent peu considérés dans les études sur la vulnérabilité aux risques naturels en dépit des enjeux qu’ils représentent en termes de gestion de crise. Comment les riverains y font-ils face au danger et quelles sont leurs « bonnes raisons » d’agir? A partir de l’étude socio-géographique de deux inondations récentes (2000 et 2003) dans la périphérie toulousaine (Sud-Ouest de la France), nous montrons que les caractéristiques de l’aléa dans les vallées étudiées influencent les représentations du risque et par conséquent les motivations à se protéger. Face au risque majeur, la vulnérabilité sociale se trouve ainsi augmentée. Pour améliorer la résilience des populations, il convient d’adapter la communication sur les risques: personnaliser l’information, améliorer la compréhension de l’événement vécu et mobiliser de nouvelles formes de médiation entre gestionnaires et riverains

Continuous Symmetries of Difference Equations

Lie group theory was originally created more than 100 years ago as a tool for solving ordinary and partial differential equations. In this article we review the results of a much more recent program: the use of Lie groups to study difference equations. We show that the mismatch between continuous symmetries and discrete equations can be resolved in at least two manners. One is to use generalized symmetries acting on solutions of difference equations, but leaving the lattice invariant. The other is to restrict to point symmetries, but to allow them to also transform the lattice.Comment: Review articl

Marine Bacterial Sialyltransferases

Sialyltransferases transfer N-acetylneuraminic acid (Neu5Ac) from the common donor substrate of these enzymes, cytidine 5′-monophospho-N-acetylneuraminic acid (CMP-Neu5Ac), to acceptor substrates. The enzymatic reaction products including sialyl-glycoproteins, sialyl-glycolipids and sialyl-oligosaccharides are important molecules in various biological and physiological processes, such as cell-cell recognition, cancer metastasis, and virus infection. Thus, sialyltransferases are thought to be important enzymes in the field of glycobiology. To date, many sialyltransferases and the genes encoding them have been obtained from various sources including mammalian, bacterial and viral sources. During the course of our research, we have detected over 20 bacteria that produce sialyltransferases. Many of the bacteria we isolated from marine environments are classified in the genus Photobacterium or the closely related genus Vibrio. The paper reviews the sialyltransferases obtained mainly from marine bacteria

Dimension rigidity in conformal structures

Let $\Lambda$ be the limit set of a conformal dynamical system, i.e. a Kleinian group acting on either finite- or infinite-dimensional real Hilbert space, a conformal iterated function system, or a rational function. We give an easily expressible sufficient condition, requiring that the limit set is not too much bigger than the radial limit set, for the following dichotomy: $\Lambda$ is either a real-analytic manifold or a fractal in the sense of Mandelbrot (i.e. its Hausdorff dimension is strictly greater than its topological dimension). Our primary focus is on the infinite-dimensional case. An important component of the strategy of our proof comes from the rectifiability techniques of Mayer and Urba\'nski ('03), who obtained a dimension rigidity result for conformal iterated function systems (including those with infinite alphabets). In order to handle the infinite dimensional case, both for Kleinian groups and for iterated function systems, we introduce the notion of pseudorectifiability, a variant of rectifiability, and develop a theory around this notion similar to the theory of rectifiable sets. Our approach also extends existing results in the finite-dimensional case, where it unifies the realms of Kleinian groups, conformal iterated function systems, and rational functions. For Kleinian groups, we improve on the rigidity result of Kapovich ('09) by substantially weakening its hypothesis of geometrical finiteness. Moreover, our proof, based on rectifiability, is entirely different than that of Kapovich, which depends on homological algebra. Another advantage of our approach is that it allows us to use the "demension" of \v{S}tan$'$ko ('69) as a substitute for topological dimension. For example, we prove that any dynamically defined version of Antoine's necklace must have Hausdorff dimension strictly greater than 1 (i.e. the demension of Antoine's necklace)

Prediction of the intestinal resistome by a three-dimensional structure-based method

The intestinal microbiota is considered to be a major reservoir of antibiotic resistance determinants (ARDs) that could potentially be transferred to bacterial pathogens via mobile genetic elements. Yet, this assumption is poorly supported by empirical evidence due to the distant homologies between known ARDs (mostly from culturable bacteria) and ARDs from the intestinal microbiota. Consequently, an accurate census of intestinal ARDs (that is, the intestinal resistome) has not yet been fully determined. For this purpose, we developed and validated an annotation method (called pairwise comparative modelling) on the basis of a three-dimensional structure (homology comparative modelling), leading to the prediction of 6,095 ARDs in a catalogue of 3.9 million proteins from the human intestinal microbiota. We found that the majority of predicted ARDs (pdARDs) were distantly related to known ARDs (mean amino acid identity 29.8%) and found little evidence supporting their transfer between species. According to the composition of their resistome, we were able to cluster subjects from the MetaHIT cohort (n = 663) into six resistotypes that were connected to the previously described enterotypes. Finally, we found that the relative abundance of pdARDs was positively associated with gene richness, but not when subjects were exposed to antibiotics. Altogether, our results indicate that the majority of intestinal microbiota ARDs can be considered intrinsic to the dominant commensal microbiota and that these genes are rarely shared with bacterial pathogens