Ethnographic Intimacy: Thinking Through the Ethics of Social Research in Sex Worlds

Ethnographic researchers entering sensitive fields of research become entangled in ethical dilemmas when they encounter \'sticky\' questions, situations and issues. In undertaking research within two distinct sex worlds: female sex work and male sexual negotiation/risk and HIV, we struggled to manage the contingent links between our relationships with the people who inhabit these worlds, the ethical requirements of our institutional ethics committees, and our hybrid selves. In the context of \'doing\' intimate ethnography, we were required to craft ourselves into the field and establish a number of intimate and prolonged relationships. While the participants in our studies were active in giving their consent, this did not obviate the risk that they would become objectified within the field relationship and the texts the research generated. These issues are central to our discussion as we consider the lack of fit between ethical guidelines and the practical reality of fieldwork.Ethnography; Informed Consent; Ethics Committees; Reflexivity; Sex Work; Risk and HIV

The complexity of prokaryotic organelle construction: examples from Rhodospirillum rubrum and Clostridium autoethanogenum

Bacterial microcompartments (BMCs) are proteinaceous organelles that encapsulate specific metabolic pathways to enhance key catalytic processes and protect the cell from toxic intermediates. Carboxysomes and the 1,2-propanediol utilising and ethanolamine utilising metabolosomes have been studied extensively. However, bioinformatic analyses have revealed a host of BMCs that are yet to be experimentally investigated. This study examined the production by E. coli of previously uncharacterised shell proteins from two organisms: Rhodospirillum rubrum and Clostridium autoethanogenum. The flexible nature of microcompartment formation was revealed by the different structures formed by the R. rubrum shell proteins both in vivo in E. coli and following their isolation. In vivo, shell proteins formed swirled sheets that were unable to form compartments. However, upon isolation the components of the protein structures were able to re-assemble to form apparently closed "empty" compartments. This highlighted the complex nature of the protein interactions involved in microcompartment assembly and the effect of a changing environment upon these interactions. The production of C. autoethanogenum shell proteins in E. coli revealed a previously unobserved interaction of protein sheets with ribosomes within the cytoplasm. This phenotype was shown to involve a C-terminally extended hexameric shell protein, Caethg_3286. The function of C-terminally extended shell proteins, which are encoded in many BMC operons, is unknown at present although the structure of one, EutK, was resolved and shows a high degree of similarity to nucleic acid binding domains. The crystal structure of the BMC domain of Caethg_3286 revealed that the C-terminus is on the concave surface of the hexamer allowing the C-terminal extension to extend into the cytoplasm and interact with ribosomes. The ribosomal interaction revealed in this study and the potential nucleic acid binding capacity of another C-terminal extension may indicate a role of the C-terminal extension in the regulation of BMC formation at the level of translation

Cytokine Profile of Mouse Vaginal and Uterus Lymphocytes at Estrus and Diestrus

It is known that sex hormones regulate IgA and IgG levels in the female reproductive tract. Moreover, antigen presentation by uterine and vaginal epithelial cells is also under strict hormonal control. The effect of the estrous cycle on cytokine secretion by vaginal and uterine lymphoid cells has been examined in mice using simultaneous staining for cytoplasmic cytokines and surface markers after ex vivo culture with PMA/ionomycin in the presence of Brefeldin A, and flow cytometry analysis. Two different mice strains, BALB/c and C57BL/6 mice, were used. The most relevant finding was the increase in the proportion of vaginal cells secreting IFN-γ at diestrus in both strains of mice. Other cytokines (IL-2 and IL-4) as well as some T cell subsets seemed to be modified in a strain dependent fashion. Data also suggest that NK cells are at least partially responsible for IFN-γ secretion. Our data indicate that vaginal and uterus lymphoid cells isolated at diestrus were in vivo activated to secrete cytokines after ex vivo culture. IFN-γ seems to be the key cytokine, since it increases in both strains of mice

Student Recital: Maria Stanley, Cello

Maria Stanley is a student of Leslie Frittelli. This recital is given in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Bachelor of Music, Music Education degree. Maria Stanley, Cello Joe Ritchie, Piano Nicole Lessard, Cell

Lexical and syntactic causatives in Oromo

In the syntactic process of causative formation in Oromo, the affixation of the causative morpheme is sensitive to initial grammatical relations: the number of causative morphemes corresponds to the number of logical subjects in the clause. Thus, transitive and unergative verbs can be distinguished from unaccusatives in causative constructions. A causative-intensive construction may also be formed via reduplication of this causative morpheme. However, not all predicates that appear to be causatives can be intensified in this way. We propose that these predicates (a restricted number of unaccusative verb stems) combine derivationally with the causative morpheme, and that the output of this derivation may not be intensified. Oromo, then, shows the distinct effects of similar morphological processes arising either in the lexicon or in the syntax

A Deterministic Gradient-Based Approach to Avoid Saddle Points

Loss functions with a large number of saddle points are one of the major obstacles for training modern machine learning models efficiently. First-order methods such as gradient descent are usually the methods of choice for training machine learning models. However, these methods converge to saddle points for certain choices of initial guesses. In this paper, we propose a modification of the recently proposed Laplacian smoothing gradient descent [Osher et al., arXiv:1806.06317], called modified Laplacian smoothing gradient descent (mLSGD), and demonstrate its potential to avoid saddle points without sacrificing the convergence rate. Our analysis is based on the attraction region, formed by all starting points for which the considered numerical scheme converges to a saddle point. We investigate the attraction region's dimension both analytically and numerically. For a canonical class of quadratic functions, we show that the dimension of the attraction region for mLSGD is floor((n-1)/2), and hence it is significantly smaller than that of the gradient descent whose dimension is n-1

Compassion Fatigue among Healthcare Personnel in Acute Care Contexts: An Integrative Review

Healthcare workers in acute care settings experience considerable emotional exhaustion on a daily basis, which might lead to the manifestation of compassion fatigue that adversely impacts their wellbeing. There has been an increasing awareness in understanding compassion fatigue on healthcare workers recently, but the literature within this area remains ambiguous due to the use of different terminology. This integrative review aims to synthesize the existing research knowledge of the manifestation of compassion fatigue and the related concepts in acute care contexts. A total of 27 full-text research articles were retrieved for analysis. The interpretation of the selected articles yielded four main categories, which included the prevalence, risk factors, protective factors, and consequences regarding compassion fatigue among healthcare workers. These findings provide an outline for decision makers of healthcare organizations to formulate a strategic plan for helping healthcare workers to cope with compassion fatigue in everyday work and disaster events

Preliminary results of geological characterization and geochemical monitoring of Sulcis Basin (Sardinia), as a potential CCS site

The Sulcis Basin is an area situated in SW Sardinia (Italy) and is a potential site for the development of CCS in Italy. This paper illustrates the preliminary results of geological characterization of fractured carbonate reservoir (Miliolitico Fm.) and the sealing sequence, composed by clay, marl and volcanic rocks, with a total thickness of more than 900 m. To characterize the reservoircaprock system an extensive structural-geological survey at the outcrop was conducted. It was also performed a study of the geochemical monitoring, to define the baseline conditions, measuring CO2 concentrations and flux in the study site