Gut microbiome composition, not alpha diversity, is associated with survival in a natural vertebrate population

Background The vertebrate gut microbiome (GM) can vary substantially across individuals within the same natural population. Although there is evidence linking the GM to health in captive animals, very little is known about the consequences of GM variation for host fitness in the wild. Here, we explore the relationship between faecal microbiome diversity, body condition, and survival using data from the long-term study of a discrete natural population of the Seychelles warbler (Acrocephalus sechellensis) on Cousin Island. To our knowledge, this is the first time that GM differences associated with survival have been fully characterised for a natural vertebrate species, across multiple age groups and breeding seasons. Results We identified substantial variation in GM community structure among sampled individuals, which was partially explained by breeding season (5% of the variance), and host age class (up to 1% of the variance). We also identified significant differences in GM community membership between adult birds that survived, versus those that had died by the following breeding season. Individuals that died carried increased abundances of taxa that are known to be opportunistic pathogens, including several ASVs in the genus Mycobacterium. However, there was no association between GM alpha diversity (the diversity of bacterial taxa within a sample) and survival to the next breeding season, or with individual body condition. Additionally, we found no association between GM community membership and individual body condition. Conclusions These results demonstrate that components of the vertebrate GM can be associated with host fitness in the wild. However, further research is needed to establish whether changes in bacterial abundance contribute to, or are only correlated with, differential survival; this will add to our understanding of the importance of the GM in the evolution of host species living in natural populations.

Evolution of topics and hate speech in retweet network communities

Twitter data exhibits several dimensions worth exploring: a network dimension in the form of links between the users, textual content of the tweets posted, and a temporal dimension as the time-stamped sequence of tweets and their retweets. In the paper, we combine analyses along all three dimensions: temporal evolution of retweet networks and communities, contents in terms of hate speech, and discussion topics. We apply the methods to a comprehensive set of all Slovenian tweets collected in the years 2018–2020. We find that politics and ideology are the prevailing topics despite the emergence of the Covid-19 pandemic. These two topics also attract the highest proportion of unacceptable tweets. Through time, the membership of retweet communities changes, but their topic distribution remains remarkably stable. Some retweet communities are strongly linked by external retweet influence and form super-communities. The super-community membership closely corresponds to the topic distribution: communities from the same super-community are very similar by the topic distribution, and communities from different super-communities are quite different in terms of discussion topics. However, we also find that even communities from the same super-community differ considerably in the proportion of unacceptable tweets they post.

Membership Eligibility in a Divided Europe, 2006—2020

This chapter uses extensive evidence from press reports to demonstrate how the breakdown of the community membership norm in late 2005 and the EU’s failure to re-converge on a new norm in later years enabled member states to engage in hard bargaining in pursuit of their enlargement preferences, all in stark contrast to the pattern in prior decades. In the Turkish case, hard bargaining among the member states has produced policy deadlock, as member states favourable to Turkish accession or unwilling for other reasons to antagonize Ankara keep the country’s candidacy alive while sceptical member states blocked progress towards accession. Meanwhile, the collapse of the EU’s liberal democracy norm and the rise of hard bargaining among member states made it impossible for Ukraine to be recognized as eligible for eventual membership despite domestic developments that would almost certainly have sufficed in earlier decades.

Permission (Not) Granted

The space of an elementary school is expected to regulate the bodies of the children within its fences. While the space of the school does this as expected, it also exerts regulation on adults inside and outside of the school space. I engage in formal participant observation of a public street and public school over three days, alongside an immersive ethnography. Formal observation allows participants to remain affectively unaffected, while community membership lends the project benefits of immersive ethnography, like context. I rely on Deleuzian concepts of coding machines, facialization, and affect to address how space codes and recodes bodies through their interactions with boundaries and Manning’s notion of “leaking” affect. I pose the school space as leaky and argue that the space touches bodies both inside and outside of its boundaries and is affectively touched by those bodies in return. This project identifies four particular kinds of bodies affecting each other: the school itself, the children-students, the adults, and the unaffiliated bodies outside the school. I argue that bodies interacting with the school are constantly negotiating permissions: some, like children and teachers, may enter; some may leave. These negotiations extend even to gaze; some may look into the yard, while others (particularly adult men) must actively look down or away. This article considers the conceptions of acceptable bodies in particular places and the processes, formal and informal, which allow some bodies into space and deny others, framed through an understanding of overcoding, legibility, and affect.

Community membership consistency applied to corporate board interlock networks

Community detection is a well-established method for studying the meso-scale structure of social networks. Applying a community detection algorithm results in a division of a network into communities that is often used to inspect and reason about community membership of specific nodes. This micro-level interpretation step of community structure is a crucial step in typical social science research. However, the methodological caveat in this step is that virtually all modern community detection methods are non-deterministic and based on randomization and approximated results. This needs to be explicitly taken into consideration when reasoning about community membership of individual nodes. To do so, we propose a metric of community membership consistency, that provides node-level insights in how reliable the placement of that node into a community really is. In addition, it enables us to distinguish the community core members of a community. The usefulness of the proposed metrics is demonstrated on corporate board interlock networks, in which weighted links represent shared senior level directors between firms. Results suggest that the community structure of global business groups is centered around persistent communities consisting of core countries tied by geographical and cultural proximity. In addition, we identify fringe countries that appear to associate with a number of different global business communities.

The Alliance of Community-Owned Water Services in Europe: Opportunities and Challenges Based on the Irish Perspective

The foundation of the Alliance of Community-Owned Water Services in Europe (ACOWAS-EU), established during the consultation period for the 2020 recast of the European Drinking Water Directive, has shone a new light on community-owned drinking water supplies (CoDWS). CoDWS are drinking water supplies that are administered, managed, and owned by the local community membership that each supply serves. This paper reviews the presence of CoDWS within the five founding regions of ACOWAS-EU—Austria, Denmark, Finland, Galicia in Spain, and Ireland—and the co-operative model structure that underpins the sector. Although the co-operative structure for CoDWS has been prominent since the mid-20th century (and sometimes even earlier), there is a dearth of research into the sector’s importance and existence in an international context. Through a detailed case study, the Irish CoDWS sector (known in Ireland as the group water scheme sector) is analysed in depth, in terms of both its evolution and the opportunities and challenges it faces today. Areas, such as water quality, biodiversity, education, and community-involvement are discussed in particular, providing key learnings that may also be of benefit to the other CoDWS sectors within ACOWAS-EU and further afield.

Global and local community memberships for estimating spreading capability of nodes in social networks

The analysis of spreading processes within complex networks can offer many important insights for the application in contexts such as epidemics, information dissemination or rumours. Particularly, structural factors of the network which either contribute or hinder the spreading are of interest, as they can be used to control or predict such processes. In social networks, the community structure is especially relevant, as actors usually participate in different densely connected social groups which emerge from various contexts, potentially allowing them to inject the spreading process into many different communities quickly. This paper extends our recent findings on the community membership of nodes and how it can be used to predict their individual spreading capability (Krukowski and Hecking, in: Benito, Cherifi, Cherifi, Moro, Rocha, Sales-Pardo (eds) Complex networks & their applications IX. Springer, Cham, pp 408–419, 2021) by further evaluating it on additional networks (both real-world networks and artificially generated networks), while additionally introducing a new local measure to identify influential spreaders that—in contrast to most other measures, does not rely on knowledge of the global network structure. The results confirm our recent findings, showing that the community membership of nodes can be used as a predictor for their spreading capability, while also showing that especially the local measure proves to be a good predictor, effectively outperforming the global measure in many cases. The results are discussed with regard to real-world use cases, where knowledge of the global structure is often not given, yet a prediction regarding the spreading capability highly desired (e.g., contact-tracing apps).

Theory of preference modelling for communities in scale-free networks

Detecting a community structure on networks is a problem of interest in science and many other domains. Communities are special structures which may consist nodes with some common features. The identification of overlapping communities can clarify not so apparent features about relationships among the nodes of a network. A node in a community can have a membership in a community with a different degree. Here, we introduce a fuzzy based approach for overlapping community detection. A special type of fuzzy operator is used to define the membership strength for the nodes of community. Fuzzy systems and logic is a branch of mathematics which introduces many-valued logic to compute the truth value. The computed truth can have a value between 0 and 1. The preference modelling approach introduces some parameters for designing communities of particular strength. The strength of a community tells us to what degree each member of community is part of a community. As for relevance and applicability of the community detection method on different types of data and in various situations, this approach generates a possibility for the user to be able to control the overlap regions created while detecting the communities. We extend the existing methods which use local function optimization for community detection. The LFM method uses a local fitness function for a community to identify the community structures. We present a community fitness function in pliant logic form and provide mathematical proofs of its properties, then we apply the preference implication of continuous-valued logic. The preference implication is based on two important parameters $$\nu$$ ν and $$\alpha$$ α . The parameter $$\nu$$ ν of the preference-implication allows us to control the design of the communities according to our requirement of the strength of the community. The parameter $$\alpha$$ α defines the sharpness of preference implication. A smaller value of the threshold for community membership creates bigger communities and more overlapping regions. A higher value of community membership threshold creates stronger communities with nodes having more participation in the community. The threshold is controlled by $$\delta$$ δ which defines the degree of relationship of a node to a community. To balance the creation of overlap regions, stronger communities and reducing outliers we choose a third parameter $$\delta$$ δ in such a way that it controls the community strength by varying the membership threshold as community evolves over time. We test the theoretical model by conducting experiments on artificial and real scale-free networks. We test the behaviour of all the parameters on different data-sets and report the outliers found. In our experiments, we found a good relationship between $$\nu$$ ν and overlapping nodes in communities.

Initial person reference in Providence Island Sign Language

When referring to non-present entities, speakers and signers can select from a range of different strategies to create expressions that range from extremely concise to highly elaborate. This design of referring expressions is based partly on the availability of contextual information that can aid addressee understanding. In the small signing community of Providence Island, signers’ heavy reliance on extra-linguistic information has led to their language being labelled as context-dependent (Washabaugh, de Santis & Woodward 1978). This study investigates the semiotic strategies that deaf signers in Providence Island use to introduce non-present third person referents, and examines how signers optimise specificity and minimise ambiguity by drawing on shared context. We examined first introductions to non-present people in spontaneous dyadic conversations between deaf signers and analysed the semiotic strategies used. We found that signers built referring expressions using the same strategies found in other sign languages, yet designed expressions that made use of contextual knowledge shared through community membership, such as geography, local spoken languages and traits of fellow islanders. Our signers also used strategies described as unusual or unattested in other sign languages, such as unframed constructed action sequences and stand-alone mouthings. This study deepens our understanding of context dependence by providing examples of how context is drawn upon by communities with high degrees of shared knowledge. Our results call into question the classification of sign languages as context-dependent or context-independent and highlights the differences in data collection across communities and the resulting limitations of cross-linguistic comparisons.

Defining and exploring pracademia: identity, community, and engagement

PurposeThe aim of this paper is to define pracademia and conceptualise it in relation to educational contexts. This paper contributes to and stimulates a continuing and evolving conversation around pracademia and its relevance, role and possibilities.Design/methodology/approachThis paper is a conceptual exploration. It draws upon existing and emerging pieces of literature, the use of metaphor as a meaning-making tool, and the positionalities of the authors, to develop the concept of pracademia.FindingsThe authors posit that pracademics who simultaneously straddle the worlds of practice, policy, and academia embody new possibilities as boundary spanners in the field of education for knowledge mobilization, networks, community membership, and responding to systemic challenges. However, being a pracademic requires the constant reconciling of the demands of multi-membership and ultimately, pracademics must establish sufficient legitimacy to be respected in two or more currently distinct worlds.Practical implicationsThis paper has implications for knowledge mobilization, networks, boundary spanners, leadership, professional learning, and connecting practice, policy, and research. While the authors are in the field of education, this exploration of pracademia is relevant not only to the field of education but also to other fields in which there is a clear need to connect practice/policy with scholarship.Originality/valueThis paper provides a new definition of pracademia and argues that pracademia identifies an important yet relatively unknown space with many possibilities in the field of education.