Toronto the Gay: The Formation of a Queer Counterpublic in Public Drinking Spaces, 1947-1981

This dissertation examines the development of a queer counterpublic in Torontos post-war taverns and cocktail lounges, which were overseen by a relatively moderate provincial licensing authority. In the absence of homophile associations, social networks and discourses of resistance were formed by men in Torontos public drinking spaces, wherein strategies to oppose discrimination were formed, as well as subversive camp rituals that protected the community and expressed pride. The dissertation focuses primarily on mens spaces and communications and is divided, roughly, into four major areas of inquiry, namely, community formation in bars and resistance to patron discrimination; public rituals as an expression of camp discourse and community pride; resistance to surveillance and, finally, the culmination of all these bar-based strategies into an overt queer activism that challenged hate crimes as well as systemic discrimination. The counterpublic was made up of competing discourses, that created and negotiated gender, class, ethnicity and sexual comportment, largely falling into two main categories: mononormative discourse and camp. The latter was more likely to challenge the disciplinary discourses of the era, which were present in both print media and physical surveillance, whereas, the normalizing discourse engaged civil rights arguments and was successful in reshaping the media and general publics ideas about queer Toronto. At times, the two discourses acted co-operatively, as an expression of solidarity and both expressions of Torontos bar-based queer political activism were key to the development of more overt activism of the 1970s that laid the ground for resistance to and protest over Operation Soap in 1981

Promoting opioids, a story about how to influence medical science and opinions

Key origins of the opioid crisis in the US lie in some pharmaceutical companies’ substantial efforts to sell prescription painkillers. To legitimize opioids, the companies built up a body of medical science and opinions, and channels with which to communicate. Archival searches found 876 contracts that together provide information on how Mallinckrodt, an opioid manufacturer, attempted the ghost-management of medicine. These records—available because of litigation–involved contract research organizations, medical education and communication companies, publishers, professional societies, researchers, and other people who could be Mallinckrodt’s agents. Together, they produced and circulated scientific messages to increase physicians’ comfort with prescribing opioids. This article gives an overview of that activity, as seen in the contracts and related documents

Dynamical systems with time-dependent coupling: Clustering and critical behaviour

We study the collective behaviour of an ensemble of coupled motile elements whose interactions depend on time and are alternatively attractive or repulsive. The evolution of interactions is driven by individual internal variables with autonomous dynamics. The system exhibits different dynamical regimes, with various forms of collective organization, controlled by the range of interactions and the dispersion of time scales in the evolution of the internal variables. In the limit of large interaction ranges, it reduces to an ensemble of coupled identical phase oscillators and, to some extent, admits to be treated analytically. We find and characterize a transition between ordered and disordered states, mediated by a regime of dynamical clustering.Comment: to appear in Physica

Phase shifts of synchronized oscillators and the systolic/diastolic blood pressure relation

We study the phase-synchronization properties of systolic and diastolic arterial pressure in healthy subjects. We find that delays in the oscillatory components of the time series depend on the frequency bands that are considered, in particular we find a change of sign in the phase shift going from the Very Low Frequency band to the High Frequency band. This behavior should reflect a collective behavior of a system of nonlinear interacting elementary oscillators. We prove that some models describing such systems, e.g. the Winfree and the Kuramoto models offer a clue to this phenomenon. For these theoretical models there is a linear relationship between phase shifts and the difference of natural frequencies of oscillators and a change of sign in the phase shift naturally emerges.Comment: 8 figures, 9 page

Ghostwriting at Elite Academic Medical Centers in the United States

Jeffrey Lacasse and Jonathan Leo assess ghostwriting policies at 50 academic medical centers in the United States and find that only 10 explicitly prohibit ghostwriting

Experimental Evidence of Time Delay Induced Death in Coupled Limit Cycle Oscillators

Experimental observations of time delay induced amplitude death in a pair of coupled nonlinear electronic circuits that are individually capable of exhibiting limit cycle oscillations are described. In particular, the existence of multiply connected death islands in the parameter space of the coupling strength and the time delay parameter for coupled identical oscillators is established. The existence of such regions was predicted earlier on theoretical grounds in [Phys. Rev. Lett. 80, 5109 (1998); Physica 129D, 15 (1999)]. The experiments also reveal the occurrence of multiple frequency states, frequency suppression of oscillations with increased time delay and the onset of both in-phase and anti-phase collective oscillations.Comment: 4 aps formatted RevTeX pages; 6 figures; to appear in Phys. Rev. Let