This essay critically examines debates about the supposed inborn nature of sexual orientation. Although popular discourses suggest that sexual orientation is an immutable characteristic, several scholars and activists have argued there is danger in postulating same-sex desire is innate. This analysis looks to another feature of the controversy, arguing that when queers themselves utilize born this way rhetoric, they frequently do so in surprising ways that rest outside dichotomist forms of reasoning. Exploring posts on the Born This Way blog, this essay argues that vernacular appropriations of the phrase are more fluid among LGBT publics than often imagined, allowing for a rethinking of the epistemology of the closet.

This essay examines the debate surrounding New York City's controversial diabetes registry program. Exploring the tensions between public health officials and privacy advocates, the article explores how diabetes is imagined in the public sphere. Although rhetorics underscoring privacy may seem the more progressive discourse, I argue New York City's Department of Health and Mental Hygiene has the more forward-looking plan, attempting to reconstitute diabetes not as a chronic condition necessitating individual management but as a disease that requires systemic intervention.

Recent cover stories about queer teenagers mark a noticeable shift in the discourse surrounding lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) publics. Contemporary media reports have repositioned the multifarious identities of queer teens as sites of unease for contemporary queer politics. Employing a framework that emphasizes the dialogical relationship among the tropes of utopia and apocalypse to scrutinize media coverage, this analysis explores the anxieties and possibilities generated by queer teens. Young queers are simultaneously understood as both political separatists from earlier movements, as well as disinterested assimilationists. The thematics of sexual fluidity and neoliberal individualism are highlights of this discourse, each being carefully tempered by the cultural force of assimilation.

Data intensive computing can be defined as computation involving large datasets and complicated I/O patterns. Data intensive computing is challenging because there is a five-orders-of-magnitude latency gap between main memory DRAM and spinning hard disks; the result is that an inordinate amount of time in data intensive computing is spent accessing data on disk. To address this problem we designed and built a prototype data intensive supercomputer named DASH that exploits flash-based Solid State Drive (SSD) technology and also virtually aggregated DRAM to fill the latency gap . DASH uses commodity parts including Intel® X25-E flash drives and distributed shared memory (DSM) software from ScaleMP®. The system is highly competitive with several commercial offerings by several metrics including achieved IOPS (input output operations per second), IOPS per dollar of system acquisition cost, IOPS per watt during operation, and IOPS per gigabyte (GB) of available storage. We present here an overview of the design of DASH, an analysis of its cost efficiency, then a detailed recipe for how we designed and tuned it for high data-performance, lastly show that running data-intensive scientific applications from graph theory, biology, and astronomy, we achieved as much as two orders-of- magnitude speedup compared to the same applications run on traditional architectures.

HPC applications are becoming more and more data-intensive as a function of ever-growing simulation sizes and burgeoning data-acquisition. Unfortunately, the storage hierarchy of the existing HPC architecture has a 5-order-of-magnitude latency gap between main memory and spinning disks and cannot respond to the new data challenge well. Flash-based SSDs (Solid State Disks) are promising to fill the gap with their 2-order-of-magnitude lower latency. However, since all the existing hardware and software were designed without flash in mind, the question is how to integrate the new technology into existing architectures. DASH is a new Teragrid resource aggressively leveraging flash technology (and also distributed shared memory technology) to fill the latency gap. To explore the potentials and issues of integrating flash into today's HPC systems, we swept a large parameter space by fast and reliable measurements to investigate varying design options. We here provide some lessons we learned and also suggestions for future architecture design. Our results show that performance can be improved by 9x with appropriate existing technologies and probably further improved by future ones.

This essay focuses on the Armorettes, an Atlanta-based drag troupe that has played a critical role in combating HI/AIDS in the South. While infection rates continue to rise nationally, the syndrome has disproportionately burdened the South both in terms of its spread and the funding allocated for its prevention and treatment. By placing drag in its historical and contemporary context as an activity variably linked to the formation and maintenance of queer identities and activism, we argue that the Armorettes are more than just mere entertainment, continuing a rich tradition of constituting audiences as agentic subjects capable of addressing social exigencies that threaten their ability to live meaningful lives. We employ the concept of "tactical repertoires'' to interrogate the Armorettes' activism and contextualize their vital cultural work.

This essay critically engages challenges made against the federally mandated deferral policies which prohibit “men who have sex with other men” from donating blood. I argue that “passing” and “protest” are dialogically dependent on one another as two separate but related tactics of resistance. Drawing on interview materials from men who have both “passed” and “protested,” the essay explores the implications of this dialogical tension for understanding stranger-relationality, enacting civic identity, and disciplining queer bodies.

The reality dating programs Boy Meets Boy and Playing It Straight purported to illustrate the elusiveness of performing sexual orientation in a culture that increasingly understands sexuality as fluid. By highlighting stereotypes typically associated with both gay and straight men, the shows exposed the difficulties of determining sexual orientation with "gaydar". Both gay and straight participants were represented as equally incapacitated to identify sexual orientation. In doing so, the programs sought to advance liberal democratic conceptions of tolerance and equality. Employing Foucault's conception of the "glance," I explore the problems inherent in relocating "gaydar" to the small screen.

AbstractSince 1990, the United Nations has held an annual workshop on basic space science for the benefit of the worldwide development of astronomy. Additional to the scientific benefits of the workshops and the strengthening of international cooperation, the workshops lead to the establishment of astronomical telescope facilities through the Official Development Assistance (ODA) of Japan. Teaching material, hands-on astrophysics material, and variable star observing programmes had been developed for the operation of such astronomical telescope facilities in the university environment. This approach to astronomical telescope facility, observing programme, and teaching astronomy has become known as the basic space science TRIPOD concept. Currently, a similar TRIPOD concept is being developed for the International Heliophysical Year 2007, consisting of an instrument array, data taking and analysis, and teaching space science.

"Seriality" is a useful critical heuristic for engaging the contours of identity politics, as it recognizes the limits of essentialism and simultaneously acknowledges its frequent necessity for accomplishing goals and building coalitions. Using contemporary debates about same-sex marriage, this essay places seriality into conversation with rhetorical theory to explore the discursive possibilities of this conceptual practice. While seriality focuses explicitly on the "practico-inert" materiality of objects, this analysis argues that the rhetorical features of seriality should be given more light to offer support for those valuing difference in democratic politics.

The Clairvoyance team participated in the High Accuracy Retrieval from Documents (HARD) Track of TREC 2004, submitting three runs. The principal hypothesis we have been pursuing is that small numbers of documents in clusters can provide a better basis for relevance feedback than ranked lists or, alternatively, than top-N pseudo-relevance feedback (PRF). Clustering of a query response can yield one or more groups of documents in which there are “significant” numbers (greater than 30%) of relevant documents; we expect the best results when such groups are selected for feedback. Following up on work we began in our TREC-2003 HARD-Track experiments [Shanahan et al. 2004], therefore, we continued to explore approaches to clustering query response sets to concentrate relevant documents, with the goal of (a) providing users (assessors) with better sets of documents to judge and (b) making the choices among sets easier to evaluate. Our experiments, thus, focused primarily on exploiting assessor feedback through clarification forms for query expansion and largely ignored other features of the documents or metadata.

We describe an efficient, robust method for selecting and optimizing terms for a classification or filtering task. Terms are extracted from positive examples in training data based on several alternative term-selection algorithms, then combined additively after a simple term-score normalization step to produce a merged and ranked master term vector. The score threshold for the master vector is set via beta-gamma regulation over all the available training data. The process avoids para-meter calibrations and protracted training. It also results in compact profiles for run-time evaluation of test (new) documents. Results on TREC-2002 filtering-task datasets demonstrate substantial improvements over TREC-median results and rival both idealized IR-based results and optimized (and expensive) SVM-based classifiers in general effectiveness.

The Clairvoyance team participated in the HARD Track, submitting fifteen runs. Our experiments focused primarily on exploiting user feedback through clarification forms for query expansion. We made limited use of the genre and related text metadata. Within the clarification form feedback framework, we explored the cluster hypothesis in the context of relevance feedback. The cluster hypothesis states that closely associated documents tend to be relevant to the same requests [Van Rijsbergen, 1979]. With this in mind we investigated the impact on performance of exploiting user feedback on groups of documents (i.e., organizing the top retrieved documents for a query into intuitive groups through agglomerative clustering or document-centric clustering), as an alternative to a ranked list of titles. This forms the basis for a new blind feedback mechanism (used to expand queries) based upon clusters of documents, as an alternative to blind feedback based upon taking the top N ranked documents, an approach that is commonly used.

Advocates of “reparative therapy” employ a modified version of Judith Butler's “normative heterosexuality” discourse to “cure” gays and lesbians. Coupling Butler with a “coming out of homosexuality” personal narrative, reorientation texts such as Love Won Out construct a ubiquitous foundation for sexual identity and collective experience. At the text's conclusion, a tension is produced between a constitutive conception of identity and a more traditional notion of self, grounded in a secured ontological base. These conflicting constructs are ultimately productive for performance scholars, illustrating an attempt to refigure the location of sexual identity and forge new positions of performativity.

The nutritional status of the patient is integral to the care of the patient. Nutritional assessment and management begins with the initial patient contact and continues into the postoperative period.