Intra-active signatures in Capoeira: more-than-human pathways towards activism

This paper is informed by interdisciplinary research, practice and activism (Allegranti and Silas 2014; 2016, 2017) combining dance movement psychotherapy, cognitive neuroscience and the Afro-Brazilian art of Capoeira. Framed by feminist new materialism and posthumanism (Manning 2013; Harraway 2012; Barad 2007), and as an antidote to our global crisis, this writing foregrounds conceptual and political discourses that work towards counterhegemonic understandings of bodies, affect, brain activity and relating. Here, we present case studies arising from our ‘Capoeira Lab’ a hybrid laboratory, dance studio and psychotherapeutic space that demonstrates more-than-humanism in action, and what happens when insights from psychotherapy, neuroscience and capoeira are read through one another. To paraphrase Barad (2007), we propose Intra-active Signatures: a distributed and dynamic process between bodies, technology and environments – typified by the capoeira exchange. This more-than-human focus dislocates the centrality of the human and the cognitive bias instead, yielding ecologically renewable and neurodiverse ways human-environment relating and enacting ethical change. Ripples of move- ment in relating evolve micro acts of activism

Simulating Foodborne Pathogens in Poultry Production and Processing to Defend Against Intentional Contamination

There is a lack of data in recent history of food terrorism attacks, and as such, it is difficult to predict its impact. The food supply industry is one of the most vulnerable industries for terrorist threats while the poultry industry is one of the largest food industries in the United States. A small food terrorism attack against just a single poultry processing center has the potential to affect a much larger population than its immediate consumers. In this work, the spread of foodborne pathogens is simulated in a poultry production and processing system to defend against intentional contamination. An agent-based simulated environment that represents the farm, processing plant, homes, and restaurants is developed, which contains both poultry agents and human agents that move through the system and possibly infect each other. The simulation is run varying several parameters that include probability of infection if exposed for both poultry and humans. The simulation predicts the number of infected poultry and humans over time

Locally orderless tensor networks for classifying two- and three-dimensional medical images

Tensor networks are factorisations of high rank tensors into networks of lower rank tensors and have primarily been used to analyse quantum many-body problems. Tensor networks have seen a recent surge of interest in relation to supervised learning tasks with a focus on image classification. In this work, we improve upon the matrix product state (MPS) tensor networks that can operate on one-dimensional vectors to be useful for working with 2D and 3D medical images. We treat small image regions as orderless, squeeze their spatial information into feature dimensions and then perform MPS operations on these locally orderless regions. These local representations are then aggregated in a hierarchical manner to retain global structure. The proposed locally orderless tensor network (LoTeNet) is compared with relevant methods on three datasets. The architecture of LoTeNet is fixed in all experiments and we show it requires lesser computational resources to attain performance on par or superior to the compared methods.Comment: Accepted for publication at the Journal of Machine Learning for Biomedical Imaging (MELBA) (see https://melba-journal.org). Source code at https://github.com/raghavian/LoTeNet_pytorch

Improvement of living conditions for secondary school girl students through establishment of hostel in Sengerema township

Tupendane Wanawake Bomani Group (TWB Group) is a registered CBO formed in 1994 by 46 members most of them retired women with objectives of advocating for women rights and improving their income generation activities. Since 1997 girl students studying in Secondary Schools from distant villages started renting rooms for their accommodation. Most of girls were involved in prostitution; others pregnant or married before completing their Secondary School education. TWB Group has been very much concerned with problems which affect girl students in their studies since then. Community needs assessment conducted showed that this is a Sengerema Community problem and there is a need of constructing girls' hostel to alleviate accommodation problem faced by girl students. Survey conducted in 2006 show that members of the community are eager to participate in all stages of project implementation. Financing of the project implementation requires Tshs 94,443,260/= according to the project budget. TWB group and the community are expected to raise Tshs 8,000,000/=from own sources and Tshs 89,683,260/= is expected to be externally sourced through grants and donations. Evaluation will be done in two phases to assess outcomes against original objectives. The first evaluation has been conducted to assess how much the community has been sensitized on girl students' problems face in their studies. The second evaluation shall be conducted after completion of hostel buildings. Impact evaluation will be conducted after one year starting from the day girls' hostel will be opened. (Author abstract)Nteko, S. B. (2007). Improvement of living conditions for secondary school girl students through establishment of hostel in Sengerema township. Retrieved from http://academicarchive.snhu.eduMaster of Science (M.S.)School of Community Economic Developmen

Cephalopod resources revealed by exploratory surveys in Indian seas

The areawise and depth wise cephalopod catches of fishing vessels of Government of India and some Agencies which conducted exploratory fishing in offshore areas have been presented and discussed. The exploratory fishing by Government of India vessels in Bombay-Gujarat region during 1977-80 yielded a maximum of 7,609 kg of cephalopods a year at a catch rate of 6.8 kg/h. The highest catch rates were recorded from the area 19-70 and the depth zone 80-89 m. In Visakhapatnam region the cephalopod catch was poor during 1968-75 but during 1977-80 the annual catch increased to 3,283 kg. The most intensively fished area was 17-83. The catch was composed of four species of cuttlefishes and three species of squids. The results of trawl surveys in other parts of Indian waters are also dealt with

Using Community-Based Participatory Research to Investigate the Effectiveness of HIV/AIDS Risk Reduction Counseling in an Urban African-American Community

Introduction: Risk reduction counseling is an important component in HIV/AIDS prevention. Community-based participatory research (CBPR) was conducted to determine if a single counseling session was as effective as a two-session intervention in reducing risk behavior. Methods: Community and academic investigators jointly developed the study design. A convenience sample of 242 persons was randomized to receive either a two session intervention with Conventional HIV Testing (CHT) or a one session intervention with HIV Rapid Testing (HRT). Participants completed a risk assessment immediately preceding the test and a risk reduction plan after the test; CHT participants received a second risk reduction session. Results: Of 130 participants completing a one-month follow-up, 86.9% were African American and 72.3% were male. All participants demonstrated a significant decrease in risk behaviors regardless of procedure. Conclusions: Findings suggested that a brief client-centered risk reduction counseling intervention can be equally effective with either CHT or HRT. CBPR allowed the academic partner to answer study questions as the community agency received information to make informed decisions during a transition period from CHT to HRT

Low Energy Constants from High Energy Theorems

New constraints on resonance saturation in chiral perturbation theory are investigated. These constraints arise because each consistent saturation scheme must map to a representation of the full QCD chiral symmetry group. The low-energy constants of chiral perturbation theory are then related by a set of mixing angles. It is shown that vector meson dominance is a consequence of the fact that nature has chosen the lowest-dimensional nontrivial chiral representation. It is further shown that chiral symmetry places an upper bound on the mass of the lightest scalar in the hadron spectrum.Comment: 11 pages TeX and mtexsis.te