Electric Cherry Blossom

Electric Cherry Blossom, 3-31 March 2018, Sarah Wiseman Gallery, Oxford'Electric Cherry Blossom' was inspired by a recent visit Simon made to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. He is in essence concerned with painting as an act in and of itself, exploring the interplay between the recognisable and abstracted expression. His influences are varied; he cites Van Gogh and Japanese printmaking; Vermeer and Rembrandt; Cinematography. These influences all reference developments in our understanding and preoccupation with pictorial space, and how abstract, apparently empty spaces can carry so much more weight in a painting or an image than we might first realise.Sarah Wiseman Galler

Survival of near-critical branching Brownian motion

Consider a system of particles performing branching Brownian motion with negative drift $\mu = \sqrt{2 - \epsilon}$ and killed upon hitting zero. Initially there is one particle at $x>0$. Kesten showed that the process survives with positive probability if and only if $\epsilon>0$. Here we are interested in the asymptotics as \eps\to 0 of the survival probability $Q_\mu(x)$. It is proved that if $L= \pi/\sqrt{\epsilon}$ then for all $x \in \R$, $\lim_{\epsilon \to 0} Q_\mu(L+x) = \theta(x) \in (0,1)$ exists and is a travelling wave solution of the Fisher-KPP equation. Furthermore, we obtain sharp asymptotics of the survival probability when $x<L$ and $L-x \to \infty$. The proofs rely on probabilistic methods developed by the authors in a previous work. This completes earlier work by Harris, Harris and Kyprianou and confirms predictions made by Derrida and Simon, which were obtained using nonrigorous PDE methods

Critical Behavior of Coupled q-state Potts Models under Weak Disorder

We investigate the effect of weak disorder on different coupled $q$-state Potts models with $q\le 4$ using two loops renormalisation group. This study presents new examples of first order transitions driven by randomness. We found that weak disorder makes the models decouple. Therefore, it appears that no relations emerge, at a perturbation level, between the disordered $q_1\times q_2$-state Potts model and the two disordered $q_1$, $q_2$-state Potts models ($q_1\ne q_2$), despite their central charges are similar according to recent numerical investigations. Nevertheless, when two $q$-state Potts models are considered ($q>2$), the system remains always driven in a strong coupling regime, violating apparently the Imry-Wortis argument.Comment: 7 pages + 1 PS figure (Latex

Academic Resilience of Athletic Training Students During COVID-19 Pandemic

OBJECTIVE (1) To describe resilience in athletic training students enrolled in professional coursework during the spring 2020 semester, and (2) to determine the association between resilience and academic performance during the spring 2020 semester. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURESDescriptive statistics for GPA were calculated for Fall 2019, Spring 2020, cumulative Fall 2019, cumulative Spring 2020 (ie., current), change in cumulative GPA, and ARS-30 total score. The primary analysis was a Pearson correlation between change in cumulative GPA and ARS-30 total score. A secondary analysis was conducted to evaluate change in cumulative Fall 2019 and Spring 2020 GPA with a paired t-test. Cohen’s d effect size was calculated for the paired t-test. Alpha level was set at 0.05

Branching Brownian motion with an inhomogeneous breeding potential

This article concerns branching Brownian motion (BBM) with dyadic branching at rate β|y|p for a particle with spatial position y ∈ R, where β&gt; 0. It is known that for p&gt; 2 the number of particles blows up almost surely in finite time, while for p = 2 the expected number of particles alive blows up in finite time, although the number of particles alive remains finite almost surely, for all time. We define the right-most particle, Rt to be the supremum of the spatial positions of the particles alive at time t and study the asymptotics of Rt as t → ∞. In the case of constant breeding at rate β the linear asymptotic for Rt is long established. Here, we find asymptotic results for Rt in the case p ∈ (0, 2]. In contrast to the linear asymptotic in standard BBM we find polynomial asymptotics of arbitrarily high order as p ↑ 2, and a non-trivial limit for lnRt when p = 2. Our proofs rest on the analysis of certain additive martingales, and related spine changes of measure. 1 Introduction an

PinR mediates the generation of reversible population diversity in Streptococcus zooepidemicus

Opportunistic pathogens must adapt to and survive in a wide range of complex ecosystems. Streptococcus zooepidemicus is an opportunistic pathogen of horses and many other animals, including humans. The assembly of different surface architecture phenotypes from one genotype is likely to be crucial to the successful exploitation of such an opportunistic lifestyle. Construction of a series of mutants revealed that a serine recombinase, PinR, inverts 114 bp of the promoter of SZO_08560, which is bordered by GTAGACTTTA and TAAAGTCTAC inverted repeats. Inversion acts as a switch, controlling the transcription of this sortase-processed protein, which may enhance the attachment of S. zooepidemicus to equine trachea. The genome of a recently sequenced strain of S. zooepidemicus, 2329 (Sz2329), was found to contain a disruptive internal inversion of 7 kb of the FimIV pilus locus, which is bordered by TAGAAA and TTTCTA inverted repeats. This strain lacks pinR and this inversion may have become irreversible following the loss of this recombinase. Active inversion of FimIV was detected in three strains of S. zooepidemicus, 1770 (Sz1770), B260863 (SzB260863) and H050840501 (SzH050840501), all of which encoded pinR. A deletion mutant of Sz1770 that lacked pinR was no longer capable of inverting its internal region of FimIV. The data highlight redundancy in the PinR sequence recognition motif around a short TAGA consensus and suggest that PinR can reversibly influence the wider surface architecture of S. zooepidemicus, providing this organism with a bet-hedging solution to survival in fluctuating environments

Bayesian inference of ancestral dates on bacterial phylogenetic trees

The sequencing and comparative analysis of a collection of bacterial genomes from a single species or lineage of interest can lead to key insights into its evolution, ecology or epidemiology. The tool of choice for such a study is often to build a phylogenetic tree, and more specifically when possible a dated phylogeny, in which the dates of all common ancestors are estimated. Here, we propose a new Bayesian methodology to construct dated phylogenies which is specifically designed for bacterial genomics. Unlike previous Bayesian methods aimed at building dated phylogenies, we consider that the phylogenetic relationships between the genomes have been previously evaluated using a standard phylogenetic method, which makes our methodology much faster and scalable. This two-step approach also allows us to directly exploit existing phylogenetic methods that detect bacterial recombination, and therefore to account for the effect of recombination in the construction of a dated phylogeny. We analysed many simulated datasets in order to benchmark the performance of our approach in a wide range of situations. Furthermore, we present applications to three different real datasets from recent bacterial genomic studies. Our methodology is implemented in a R package called BactDating which is freely available for download at https://github.com/xavierdidelot/BactDating

Coupled Ising models with disorder

In this paper we study the phase diagram of two Ising planes coupled by a standard spin-spin interaction with bond randomness in each plane. The whole phase diagram is analyzed by help of Monte Carlo simulations and field theory arguments.Comment: 9 pages and 3 figure

Printmaking communities at the edge of chaos

© 2024 The Authors. Published by University of the West of England. This is an open access article available under a Creative Commons licence. The published version can be accessed at the following link on the publisher’s website: https://doi.org/10.54632/524.IMPJ4The theme for the conference, ‘The Printmakers Voice’, and the notion of a ‘Post-pandemic Voice’, has prompted reflection upon the previously taken-for-granted social and material aspects of printmaking now brought into sharp focus. Utilising ideas from complexity theory and alternative geographies within this paper we consider how the printmaking community we are part of has evolved and how the printmaker's voice and the post-pandemic voice meet. Printmaking is an integral part of the BA (Hons) Fine Art course at the Wolverhampton School of Art. With introductory workshops in the first year, developing into an advanced ‘experimental printmaking and photography’ workshop in the second year. In 2016-17 a ‘Print Club’ developed out of this formal teaching and learning space into weekly sessions on Wednesday evenings. The Club brings together students and staff across a range of courses (not solely fine art) who have a specific interest in pursuing printmaking. There are no set agendas, and print club members work alongside each other on their projects in a supportive environment. Some regulars come each week and those who drop in. Some are trying to realise a project and those who want to sit and chat. Recognising the impacts of space and place on social cohesion and voice, we borrow from feminist geographer Doreen Massey, who stated that ‘space is a product of inter-relations between people and place’[i], in which different trajectories co-exist and are always under construction. Collective moments of social interaction orbit around printing presses, spaces of multiplicity embedded within material practices. [i] Massey, D. (2005) For Space. (London: Sage Publishing).Published onlin