Post-coloniality and the movements and readings of scientific and legal practices: The history of HIV/AIDS in Africa, patents, and the multilateral governance of generic drugs

This thesis examines the history, political economy, and global response to HIV/AIDS in Africa. It is particularly interested in how Africa’s colonial past and postcolonial struggles with European science and law influenced these issues. It therefore explores the many ways that the colonial encounter coloured how scientific knowledge about HIV/AIDS travelled to and was read and contested in Africa. In addition, it sets out how this encounter informed the political economy of debates about access to and the global governance of generic HIV/AIDS drugs in the continent. It draws on an interdisciplinary and theoretically-informed scholarship to unpack these issues. However, it aims not to produce new theoretical insights or make original theoretical contributions to this scholarship. Rather, it seeks to contribute to and fill-in gaps in the historiography of HIV/AIDS in Africa and scholarship on the global governance of generic HIV/AIDS drugs. Accordingly, it examines two areas that have not received adequate, academic attention in these areas. Firstly, Project SIDA—the first major research project on HIV/AIDS in Africa; and, secondly, the World Health Organization Prequalification Programme for Generic HIV/AIDS drugs—the primary, regulatory regime that governs the production, certification, and importation of generic HIV/AIDS drugs in the continent. It situates these subjects within a wider discussion about the colonial encounter and postcolonial struggles in Africa around European science and law. It argues that the encounter influenced how Project SIDA, and the scientific knowledge that it produced, was read and contested in Africa. It also contends that postcolonial struggles, especially around the global patent regime, informed the political economy within which the Prequalification Programme emerged and, importantly, the technical capacity of African generic manufactured to certify their generic drugs for HIV/AID treatment programmes in the continent

Spectral effects of a calcium amendment on red spruce foliage at laboratory and stand scale

Three sets of measurements were made to determine the effects of an October 1999 whole-watershed Ca-application on the chemical and spectral properties of red spruce (Picea rubens Sarg.) foliage at the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest. Results of our measurements showed significant differences between the Ca-treated watershed (WS1) and a nearby reference watershed (WS6). Foliar chemistry data collected in 2007 showed that concentrations of Ca, Sr, and oxalate remain higher in WS1, and the increase in oxalate is strongly linked to the level of total Ca, possibly by a Ca-oxalate crystal precipitation response. High-resolution laboratory spectral data measured from 400-2500 nm show a pan-spectral increase in reflectance in WS1 spruce. Satellite data from the Landsat TM and ETM+ instruments did not parallel laboratory spectral results, but showed a distinct increase in near-infrared reflectance between 1999-2007. See individual chapter abstracts for more complete summaries

Scaling Recurrent Neural Network Language Models

This paper investigates the scaling properties of Recurrent Neural Network Language Models (RNNLMs). We discuss how to train very large RNNs on GPUs and address the questions of how RNNLMs scale with respect to model size, training-set size, computational costs and memory. Our analysis shows that despite being more costly to train, RNNLMs obtain much lower perplexities on standard benchmarks than n-gram models. We train the largest known RNNs and present relative word error rates gains of 18% on an ASR task. We also present the new lowest perplexities on the recently released billion word language modelling benchmark, 1 BLEU point gain on machine translation and a 17% relative hit rate gain in word prediction

SampleQC: robust multivariate, multi-cell type, multi-sample quality control for single-cell data

Quality control (QC) is a critical component of single-cell RNA-seq (scRNA-seq) processing pipelines. Current approaches to QC implicitly assume that datasets are comprised of one cell type, potentially resulting in biased exclusion of rare cell types. We introduce SampleQC, which robustly fits a Gaussian mixture model across multiple samples, improves sensitivity, and reduces bias compared to current approaches. We show via simulations that SampleQC is less susceptible to exclusion of rarer cell types. We also demonstrate SampleQC on a complex real dataset (867k cells over 172 samples). SampleQC is general, is implemented in R, and could be applied to other data types

Montana: Mount Anna

https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/mmb-vp/4458/thumbnail.jp

Games Of Childhood Days Or Ring Around A Rosie

https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/mmb-vp/5155/thumbnail.jp

The TFTP Agreement, Schrems Rights, and the Saugmandsgaard Requirements

The article focuses on the implications that provide importance to the EU-U.S. Agreement for the U.S. Terrorist Finance Tracking Program (TFTP Agreement) such as the Schrems case and the EU advocate general Henrik Saugmandsgaard. Topics discussed include the clarification of the mandatory requirements which measures the generalized retention which is the Saugmandsgaard requirements, the EU-US Privacy Shield and the regulatory obligation of the TFTP agreement

Exploring Choreographers’ Conceptions of Motion Capture for Full Body Interaction

We present the results of a group interview of choreographers aimed at understanding their conceptions of how movement can be used to in live performance. This understanding intended to inform research into full body interaction for live performance and other more general full body interfaces. The results of the interview suggest a new way of conceiving of interaction with digital technology, neither as a representation of movement, not as an interface that responds to movement but as a means of transforming movement. This transformed movement can then serve as a starting point for a dancers responses to transformations of their own movement thus setting up an improvisational feedback loop