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What is algorithmic thought? It is not possible to address this question without first reflecting on how the Universal Turing Machine transformed symbolic logic and brought to a halt the universality of mathematical formalism and the biocentric speciation of thought. The article draws on Sylvia Wynter’s discussion of the sociogenic principle to argue that both neurocognitive and formal models of automated cognition constitute the epistemological explanations of the origin of the human and of human sapience. Wynter’s argument will be related to Gilbert Simondon’s reflections on ‘technical mentality’ to consider how socio-techno-genic assemblages can challenge the biocentricism and the formalism of modern epistemology. This article turns to ludic logic as one possible example of techno-semiotic languages as a speculative overturning of sociogenic programming. Algorithmic rules become technique-signs coinciding not with classic formalism but with interactive localities without re-originating the universality of colonial and patriarchal cosmogony.

This interview with the digital media theorist Luciana Parisi opens with the hypothesis that cybernetics is not merely the name for that postwar metascience of command and control. For Parisi, cybernetics names a “historical reconfiguration of metaphysics on behalf of technics.” This interview asks about the meaning and consequences of this hypothesis but steers away from the all-too-easy poiesis-as-panacea solution to the computational quagmire. Instead, this interview descends into the computational medium, into the specificity of its logic, asking what it might mean not merely to live in a cyberneticized world but to actively participate and believe in such a world. Parisi’s response puts to philosophy an important task: not to seek the accommodations of an expanding concept of the human within a machinic world but to think with the logic of the ascendant cybernetic metaphysics. For Parisi, a necessary move herein is to negotiate the reality of the algorithm’s syntactic operations, their performativity, a move that for her implies a certain form of belief. In tracking this form of belief across disciplines, this interview broaches questions of scalability, race and colonialism, the nonneutrality of technoscience, and the potential of computational aesthetics. Finally, the interview gestures toward Parisi’s future work, because, as she reminds us, we cannot go back; there are questions emerging from within machines that are eager to emerge and are waiting for us to think them.

La lectura es un comportamiento necesario para que un individuo pueda realizar actividades sociales, académicas y profesionales. Algunos trastornos específicos del aprendizaje, tales como la dislexia, están relacionados con dificultades para aprender este repertorio. Las estrategias basadas en la formación de redes relacionales propias de la lectura han producido resultados prometedores en la enseñanza de la lectura a diferentes poblaciones, lo que indica que es relevante para la enseñanza a niños con dislexia. El objetivo de este estudio fue evaluar los efectos del procedimiento Constructed Response Matching to Sample (CRMTS) con oralización fluida y silabeada de palabras en el rendimiento lector de niños con dislexia y en riesgo de dislexia. Participaron ocho niños con edades comprendidas entre 6 y 11 años, de los cuales cinco tenían dislexia y cuatro estaban bajo riesgo de dislexia. El procedimiento constaba de cinco fases: prueba previa a la intervención; enseñanza de nombres de figuras; construcción silábica de palabras de enseñanza bajo el control de la sílaba impresa y la sílaba dictada; construcción de palabras bajo el control de la palabra impresa y dictada; y prueba posterior a la intervención. Los participantes requirieron de tres a cinco sesiones para completar los bloques de enseñanza. Los participantes demostraron un repertorio de lectura textual y con comprensión de las palabras enseñadas directamente, además presentaron un repertorio de lectura ampliado con sílabas y letras combinadas. Los resultados mostraron que el control del estímulo establecido en el entrenamiento fue eficiente para producir una lectura generalizada.

Can machine vision step beyond the ocularcentric metaphysics of the Western gaze and the reproduction of racial capital? Paul Virilio argued that machine vision requires no perceptual response or recognition of the world. The computer’s series of coded impulses mediate the real autonomously from physical and energetic analogies. This article calls “negative optics” this inhuman mode of machine vision that withdraws from the ocularcentric rules of transparency. Not only negative optics offers an internal critique of ocular metaphysics, but it also defies the equation of value between 0 and 1 s that sustains the universal law of capital. The equation of value needs the nullification of the racialized and gendered body to meet the function of surrogate machines feeding the neo-liberal human subject. Here, however, the negative optics of machine vision withdraws matter from the equation insofar as the AI mismatches of concepts and objects requires the formation of socio-technical assemblages amongst surrogates of all kinds. The intricacies of this surrogacy are discussed in connection to artist Elisa Giardina’s video installation entitled, The Cleaning of Emotional Data (2019). This video presents the background to address a surrogate human–machine alliance that steps beyond the human–machine equation of value. By starting from the negativity of the image, the racialized and gendered conditions of techno-social labor under artificial intelligence capitalism show that the equation of value maintains the condition of the zero of blackness, which like matter without form, has no value (On matter beyond the equation of value 2017). Drawing on Francois Laruelle, the article continues to elaborate the possibilities of a material image without form in terms of what Laruelle calls, the “fractal algorithm of the photo”. The article concludes that the negative optics of machine vision stands for the alien origination of knowledge, values, materialities that overturn the equation of value through the fractal infinities of 0 s.

Ethics in data science and artificial intelligence have gained broader prominence in both scholarly and public discourse. Much of the scholarly engagements have often been based on perspectives of transparency, politics of representation, moral ethical norms, and refusal. In this article, while the authors agree that there is a problem with the universal model of technology, they argue that what these perspectives do not address is the postcolonial epistemology of the machine. Drawing from Mark Fisher’s science fiction capital, it is posited that data capitalism doesn’t rely on data as a given, but on what data can become; it operates in the future as much as the calculation of probabilities coincides with the predictive extraction of surplus value. The authors argue that in order to address ethical and sociopolitical concerns in artificial intelligence, technosocial systems must be understood in data capitalism. After discussing what they characterize as the three paradigms of prediction, the authors point toward the transformative potential of temporal structures and indeterminacies in automated self-regulating systems. They argue therefore that assumptions of technological determinism that are found in debates about the reproduction of biases in systems of predictive intelligence has nothing to do with the technical machine, but is rather the result of a continuous re-territorialization of the technosocial possibilities of re-inventing epistemological paradigms outside the framework of colonial capital.

This article takes inspiration from Kittler’s claim that philosophy has neglected the means used for its production. Kittler’s argument for media ontology will be compared to the post-Kantian project of re-inventing philosophy through the medium of thought (in particular Deleuze’s Spiritual Automaton). The article discusses these views in the context of the automation of logical thinking where procedures, tasks, and functions are part of the instrumental processing of new ends evolving a new mode of reasoning. In particular, the article suggests that in constructivist logic and information theory, the temporal gap between truth and proof, between input and output, can be taken to argue that the means of thought expose the indetermination or the incomputability of proof. The automation of reasoning in logical processing coincides not with mindless correlations of data, replacing axioms with data, truths with self-validating proofs. Instead, the problem of the indeterminacy of proof within automated logic re-habilitates techne or instrumentality, and the relation between means and ends away from classical idealism and analytic realism. By following John Dewey’s argument for instrumentality, it will be argued that the task of thinking today needs to re-invent a logic of techne away from the teleological view of ends or the crisis of finality. If the post-Kantian preoccupations about the task of thinking already announced that the medium of thought could offer possibilities for a non-human philosophy (or a philosophy beyond truth), this article envisions a machine philosophy originating from within computational media.

Immersed in the networks of artificial intelligences that are constantly learning from each other, the subject today is being configured by the automated architecture of a computational sovereignty (Bratton 2015). All levels of decision-making are harnessed in given sets of probabilities where the individuality of the subject is broken into endlessly divisable digits. These are specifically re-assembled at check points (Deleuze in Negotiations: 1972–1990, Columbia University Press, New York, 1995), in ever growing actions of predictive data (Cheney-Lippold in We are data and the making of our digital selves, NYU Press, New York, 2017), where consciousness is replaced by mindless computations (Daston in “The rule of rules”, lecture Wissenschaftskolleg Berlin, November 21st, 2010). As a result of the automation of cognition, the subject has thus become ultimately deprived of the transcendental tool of reason. This article discusses the consequences of this crisis of conscious cognition by the hands of machines by asking whether the servo-mechanic model of technology can be overturned to expose the alien subject of artificial intelligence as a mode of thinking originating at, but also beyond, the transcendental schema of the self-determining subject. As much as the socio-affective qualities of the user have become the primary sources of capital abstraction, value, quantification and governmental control, so has technology, as the means of abstraction, itself changed nature. This article will suggest that the cybernetic network of communication has not only absorbed physical and cognitive labour into its circuits of reproduction, but is, more importantly, learning from human culture, through the data analysis of behaviours, the contextual use of content and the sourcing of knowledge. The theorisation of machine learning as involving a process of thinking will be taken here as a fundamental inspiration to argue that the expansion of an alien space of reasoning, envisioning the possibility of machine thinking against the servo-mechanic model of cybernetics.

If the image of the future has already been colonized by the inevitability of a planetary automation or by the Singularity, is it at all possible to re-introduce alienness in machine thinking beyond a master pattern that knows it all? As contemporary forms of artificial intelligence such as neural nets experiment with predictive learning generating counter-factual models for what has not yet been thought, they have also become productive of machine percepts and concepts. These are not of an optical nature, but are exclusively algorithmic. However, as opposed to the master pattern of the Singularity aiming to debunk logic from thinking, this article argues that the growth of the automated network is never given: the indeterminacy of fallibility in the trial-and-error efforts to predict what has not yet been programmed – known – constantly defies the master pattern from within the system. This article draws on Octavia E. Butler’s farsighted story of Mary in Mind of My Mind as an example of the alien...

A leitura é um comportamento necessário para o indivíduo executar atividades sociais, acadêmicas e profissionais. Alguns transtornos específicos de aprendizagem, como a dislexia, estão associados a dificuldades na aprendizagem desse repertório. Estratégias baseadas na formação de redes de relações características da leitura têm produzido resultados promissores no ensino desse tipo de repertório a diferentes populações, indicando ser relevante para ensinar crianças com dislexia. O presente estudo teve como objetivo avaliar os efeitos do uso de tarefas de construção de palavras com oralização fluente e escandida sobre a leitura de palavras de ensino e a leitura recombinativa de crianças com dislexia. Participaram nove crianças com idades entre 6 e 11 anos, sendo cinco com diagnóstico de dislexia e quatro com risco de dislexia. Foram utilizados os seguintes estímulos: palavra ditada (A), figura (B), palavra impressa (C), letras impressas (E), sílabas impressas (F), sílabas ditadas (G). O procedimento era composto por: Etapa 1 -teste pré-intervenção; Etapa 2 - ensino de nomeação de figuras correspondentes às palavras de ensino; Etapa 3 - construção de sílabas das palavras de ensino sob controle da sílaba impressa e da sílaba ditada; Etapa 4 - construção de palavras sob controle da palavra impressa e da palavra ditada e Etapa 5 - teste pós-intervenção. Houve variação na quantidade total de sessões necessárias para a realização dos blocos ensino. P7 e P8 precisaram de três sessões, P1, P2, P3 e P4 precisaram de quatro sessões e P5 e P6 precisaram de cinco. Todos os participantes que foram submetidos a todo o procedimento demonstraram repertório de leitura textual e de leitura com compreensão das palavras ensinadas diretamente. Além disso, todos ampliaram o repertório de leitura de palavras com sílabas e letras recombinadas, demonstrando que o controle de estímulos estabelecido no treino foi eficiente para produzir leitura generalizada. Reading is a necessary behavior for the individual to perform social, academic, and professional activities. Some specific learning disorders, such as dyslexia, are associated with learning difficulties in this repertoire. Strategies based on the formation of relational networks typical of reading have produced promising results in teaching this type of repertoire to different populations, indicating that it is relevant to teach children with dyslexia. The present study aimed to evaluate the effects of the use of word construction tasks with a fluent and spelled speech on the reading of the teaching words and the recombinative reading of children with dyslexia. Nine children aged 6 to 11 years participated in the study, five with a diagnosis of dyslexia and four with a risk of dyslexia. The following stimuli were used: dictated word (A), figure (B), printed word (C), printed letters (E), printed syllables (F), dictated syllables (G). The procedure consisted of: Step 1 - Pre-intervention test; Stage 2 - teaching of naming figures corresponding to the teaching words; Stage 3 - construction of syllables of teaching words under control of the printed syllable and the dictated syllable; Step 4 - construction of words under control of the printed word and dictated word and Step 5 – post-intervention test. There was a variation in the total number of sessions needed to complete the teaching blocks. P7 and P8 needed three sessions, P1, P2, P3, and P4 needed four sessions, and P5 and P6 needed five. All participants who underwent the entire procedure demonstrated a repertoire of textual reading and reading with understanding of the words taught directly. Also, all participants expanded the repertoire of reading words with syllables and recombined letters, demonstrating that the stimulus control established in training was efficient to produce a generalized reading.

The Loire Valley Region France’s Loire Valley region frequently evokes images of châteaux, those grand homes and historic structures encompassing immense medieval fortress-like castles and extravagant renaissance mansions alike. A visitor from abroad can’t help but be impressed with each Loire Valley château: from the imposing castle of Angers, housing its immense medieval tapestry of the apocalypse; the elegant feminine mystique of château de Chenonceaux, built over a river; the sheer enormity of Chambord with its Leonardo da Vinci doublehelix staircase; Chinon, site of the historic meeting between Joan-of-Arc and Charles VII; Sleeping Beauty’s fairy tale castle, Usse; to the geometric or playful gardens found at Villandry or Chaumont sur Loire, and many, many more (Fig. 1). Mon dieu, qu’ils sont magnifiques! Although the Loire Valley is famous for its picturesque and historical châteaux, it is also a region rich in horticulture, often called the “Jardin de la France” (Garden of France). The Loire, France’s longest river, flows roughly east to west through central France past cities such as Roanne, Orleans, Blois, Tours, Angers, and Nantes before discharging into the Atlantic Ocean. Voila une tres belle region! The region is well known for its grapes and wine, pears, apples, strawberries, asparagus, lettuce, artichokes, and field and greenhouse nursery crops and ornamentals. Although apples are also grown elsewhere in France, such as in the Bordeaux region, the Rhone Valley, and Provence, the Loire region is the top producer; France produces about 25% of the apples in the European Union (3) and is a net exporter of apples. During the late 1990s, the American authors (J. R. Hartman and S. Thomson), while on sabbatical leaves, worked in the laboratories of the French authors (L. Parisi and J.-P. Paulin) on apple diseases. In this article, we report on the French apple industry and describe the national institute for agricultural research and its role in understanding apple diseases. We review results of work on apple scab and fire blight in France and provide impressions from the point of view of American plant pathologists working in France.

As machines have become increasingly smart and have entangled human thinking with artificial intelligences, it seems no longer possible to distinguish among levels of decision-making that occur in the newly formed space between critical reasoning, logical inference and sheer calculation. Since the 1980s, computational systems of information processing have evolved to include not only deductive methods of decision, whereby results are already implicated in their premises, but have crucially shifted towards an adaptive practice of learning from data, an inductive method of retrieving information from the environment and establishing general premises. This shift in logical methods of decision-making does not simply concern technical apparatuses, but is a symptom of a transformation in logical thinking activated with and through machines. This article discusses the pioneering work of Katherine Hayles, whose study of the cybernetic and computational infrastructures of our culture particularly clarifies this epistemological transformation of thinking in relation to machines.

Luciana Parisi in her chapter goes on to discuss the creative act towards novelty that comes from the nonhuman computational synthesis of logics and granular calculation of variations away from human cognition and perception based on given premises. The essay proposes an instrumental approach to design as a technology or a cognitive activity able to transform the environment by inducing new correlations of vast amounts of varied data flows. This chapter addresses the emergence of this neo-materialist approach as a symptom of a new conceptualisation of nature that no longer corresponds to the cybernetic view of an artificial system of feedback relations. It further suggests that there are some important inconsistencies between the computational conception of nature and the new rationality of the natural. Computational materiality implies a naturalisation of design intended as techne, or instrumentality, and defined not by logical aims, but operations, procedures and means that cut across strata, rules, forms and go beyond the specific constraints of each and any form.

This article reflects on how the ingression of computation in culture has not only transformed media into algorithmic devices but has also, more importantly, led to the automation of the most precious faculty of the human, namely, reasoning. This article problematizes the tout court refusal of algorithmic thinking as thinking and suggests that we are witnessing the advance of a dynamic form of automated reasoning, exposing the limits of the critical approach toward the calculative. The article points out that the alliance between algorithmic automation and the digital infrastructure of neoliberalism is not without significance, but attention must be paid to the specific posthuman form of cognitive capitalism.

Electrospinning is a versatile technique for generating a mat of continuous fibers with diameters from a few nanometers to several micrometers. The diversity of electrospinnable materials, and the unique features associated with electrospun fibers make this technique and its resultant structures attractive for applications in the biomedical field. This article presents an overview of this technique focusing on its application for tissue engineering. In particular, the advantages and disadvantages of using an electrospinning mat for biomedical applications are discussed. It reviews the different available electrospinning configurations, detailing how the different process variables and material types determine the obtained fibers characteristics. Then a description of how nanofiber based scaffolds offer great promise in the regeneration or function restoration of damaged or diseased bones, muscles or nervous tissue is reported. Different methods for incorporating active agents on nanofibers and controlling their release mechanisms are also reviewed. The review concludes with some personal perspectives on the future work to be done in order to include electrospinning technique in the industrial development of biomedical materials. Fil: Ribba, Laura Gabriela. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Ciudad Universitaria. Instituto de Física de Buenos Aires; Argentina. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales; Argentina Fil: Parisi, Marián Luciana. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Ciudad Universitaria. Instituto de Física de Buenos Aires; Argentina. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales; Argentina Fil: D'accorso, Norma Beatriz. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Ciudad Universitaria. Centro de Investigaciones En Hidratos de Carbono; Argentina. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales; Argentina Fil: Goyanes, Silvia Nair. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Ciudad Universitaria. Instituto de Física de Buenos Aires; Argentina. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales; Argentina

International audience; The impact of a cultivar mixture within the rows including the cvs Melrouge (low susceptibility to scab) and Pitchounette (Rvi6 resistant) was assessed during 2008e2009 in an organic apple orchard located in Rhône Valley (Drôme, France), on three important pests and diseases: scab, powdery mildew and rosy apple aphid. In this area, the resistance of Rvi6 gene was effective since the orchard plantation in 2004. The impact of the cultivar mixture was assessed per se, but also associated with sanitation practices to decrease the primary inoculum of scab and mildew, and compared to disease development on pure stands of Melrouge. The cultivar mixture showed a good efficiency to decrease the scab incidence on leaves and fruits; a significant effect on scab severity was observed in 2009 for the cultivar mixture plus sanitation practices. Our data confirmed the different susceptibility levels of the two cultivars for powdery mildew. Against powdery mildew, a favourable effect of cultivar mixture, at the condition it is associated with sanitation, was observed in case of a moderate level of the disease (2008). For rosy apple aphid, a favourable effect of cultivar mixture was observed on Melrouge in 2008 when Pitchounette has a good resistance level. In the context of organic production, the impact of the cultivar mixture seemed favourable for the control of the three pests and diseases.

UMR AGAP - équipe AFEF - Architecture et fonctionnement des espèces fruitières; International audience; Ideotypes are a popular concept for plant breeders, who designate as such the ideal combinations of traits in a particular genotype to reach a pre-set production objective within a given socio-economic context. The historical, ‘genetic’ view of ideotypes has been more recently extended to cover the design of plant genotypes for specific cropping systems (the ‘agronomic’ view), or even the ideal combination of parameters, identified from formal or simulation modeling, to a specific agronomic problem (the ‘modelling’ view). These different forms of ideotypes in turn lead to different strategies for breeding plants. This paper will briefly describe, analyse and discuss some applications of these ideotype views, using the specific case of architectural traits of plant and crop canopies to limit the epidemic development of pests and diseases in crops. It is not intended to be an exhaustive and objective review of the existing literature on plant ideotypes, but rather to express as an ‘opinion’ paper the views discussed and elaborated among participants to the EpiArch network.

Esta pesquisa analisou os processos de mediação de conflitos no trabalho, no âmbito da instituição pública e gestora do SUS de Belo Horizonte - Secretaria Municipal de Saúde de Belo Horizonte (SMSA-SUS-BH), conduzidas pela Gerência de Gestão do Trabalho e Educação em Saúde (GGTE), da própria Instituição, no período entre 2012 a 2015. A análise foi dirigida aos processos realizados em quatrocoletivos de trabalho, sendo três em centros de saúde e outro em uma gerência de atividade meio da SMSA. Utilizou-se como metodologia a pesquisa documental. Toda a documentação, arquivada na GGTE, referente aos conflitos e ao processo de mediação realizado foi analisada sob referenciais distintos. Os aspectos comunicacionais dos processos de mediação realizados seguiram o referencial teóricosdo modelo de mediação circular narrativo. Os conflitos e sua interface com o trabalho tiveram como referencial o modelo transformativo de mediação e as clínicas do trabalho. Os resultados evidenciaram que a mediação foi bem sucedida em duas unidades analisadas e parcialmente em uma terceira. Em uma unidade a mediação nãorestabeleceu o diálogo entre as partes e foi possível compreender quais foram os fatores que influenciaram o resultado. Os determinantes dos conflitos analisados foram compreendidos nas quatro unidades analisadas. Os resultados mostraram que, mesmo em ambientes hierarquizados, foi possível utilizar com sucesso a prática da mediação. This research aimed to analyze processes of mediation of labor disputes in the public institution of Municipal Health Department of Belo Horizonte, which were conducted by the Human Resources and Health Education Office of the own institution, from 2012 to 2015. The analysis was directed to the process carried out in four collective bargaining, three health centers and the other in an activity management of MunicipalHealth Department of Belo Horizonte. All documentation, filed with Human Resources and Health Education Office, referring to conflicts and conducted mediation process was analyzed under different frameworks. The communication aspects of mediation followed the theoretical framework of discourse analysis and circular narrative mediation. Conflicts and its interface with the work had as a reference the transformative model of mediation and clinical work. The results showedthat mediation was successful in two analyzed and partly in a third unit. In one analyzed unit mediation did not restore the dialogue between the parties and it was possible to understand what were the factors that influenced the outcome. The determinants of the conflict analyzed were included in the four analyzed units. The results showed that even in hierarchical environments, could be used successfully to practice mediation.

International audience; Evaluation of the sustainability of disease control strategies through experimental field studies is poorly documented. Plant genetic resistance to pathogens offers an interesting alternative to the use of pesticides, but pathogen populations are able to adapt, thus frequently resulting in the breakdown of the resistance. Partial resistance is considered to provide more durable resistance than major genes. However, partial resistance does not confer complete protection and its efficiency can also decrease. Developing appropriate strategies which integrate resistant cultivars into crop systems is therefore needed to increase the efficiency and durability of the resistance, whatever the kind of resistance. The aim of this study was to evaluate the relevance of the association of control methods in terms of increasing the efficiency and durability of two kinds of resistances: (i) partial resistance in the apple cultivar Reine des Reinettes and (ii) major resistance (Rvi6) in the apple cultivar Ariane, when planted in a region where the climatic conditions are very favourable to the disease. It was found that the removal of leaf litter in autumn together with spraying of fungicides in the case of moderate or high risks of scab infection resulted in a sustainable control of scab on Reine des Reinettes over a five-year period and delayed the breakdown of the major resistance Rvi6 of Ariane by virulent isolates.

Special Issue on Topologies of Culture In social and cultural theory, topology has been used to articulate changes in structures and spaces of power. In this introduction, we argue that culture itself is becoming topological. In particular, this ‘becoming topological’ can be identified in the significance of a new order of spatio-temporal continuity for forms of economic, political and cultural life today. This ordering emerges, sometimes without explicit coordination, in practices of sorting, naming, numbering, comparing, listing, and calculating. We show that the effect of these practices is both to introduce new continuities into a discontinuous world by establishing equivalences or similitudes, and to make and mark discontinuities through repeated contrasts. In this multiplication of relations, topological change is established as being constant, normal and immanent, rather than being an exceptional form, which is externally produced; that is, forms of economic, political and cultural life are identified and made legible in terms of their capacities for continuous change. Outlining the contributions to this Special Issue, the introduction discusses the meaning of topological culture and provides an analytic framework through which to understand its implications.

Expanding global trade and the domestication of ecosystems have greatly accelerated the rate of emerging infectious fungal diseases, and host-shift speciation appears to be a major route for disease emergence. There is therefore an increased interest in identifying the factors that drive the evolution of reproductive isolation between populations adapting to different hosts. Here, we used genetic markers and cross-inoculations to assess the level of gene flow and investigate barriers responsible for reproductive isolation between two sympatric populations of Venturia inaequalis, the fungal pathogen causing apple scab disease, one of the fungal populations causing a recent emerging disease on resistant varieties. Our results showed the maintenance over several years of strong and stable differentiation between the two populations in the same orchards, suggesting ongoing ecological divergence following a host shift. We identified strong selection against immigrants (i.e. host specificity) from different host varieties as the strongest and likely most efficient barrier to gene flow between local and emerging populations. Cross-variety disease transmission events were indeed rare in the field and cross-inoculation tests confirmed high host specificity. Because the fungus mates within its host after successful infection and because pathogenicity-related loci prevent infection of nonhost trees, adaptation to specific hosts may alone maintain both genetic differentiation between and adaptive allelic combinations within sympatric populations parasitizing different apple varieties, thus acting as a ‘magic trait’. Additional intrinsic and extrinsic postzygotic barriers might complete reproductive isolation and explain why the rare migrants and F1 hybrids detected do not lead to pervasive gene flow across years.

Why have theories of evolution become now (and again) a matter of concern for critically rethinking sex and sexual difference? Why after years of deconstructing the ontologies of sex rooted in biological discourses and metaphysics of identity has critical thought turned to biology, physics, and mathematics? One way to tackle this new turn toward scientific thought may be derived from the reaction against an overused method of textual critique, which has come short of engaging with the reality of matter. If sexuality and sex are material forms of irreducible difference, then one needs a window into the material processes that lead to such forms.

For sustainable management of scab-resistant apple cultivars, it is necessary to understand the role of aggressiveness in the adaptation of Venturia inaequalis populations and particularly the costs to the organism of acquiring additional virulence. The aims of the present study were (i) to identify the quantitative variables that are most important in determining the differences in aggressiveness among groups of V. inaequalis isolates, and (ii) to ascertain whether virulent and avirulent isolates of V. inaequalis differ significantly in aggressiveness. The aggressiveness of eight isolates that differed in their virulence to the major resistance gene Rvi6 was compared on the non-Rvi6 apple cv. Gala. Three components of aggressiveness, namely lesion density, the number of spores per square centimetre of leaf area, and the number of spores per lesion, were evaluated 21 days after inoculation, and the kinetics of lesion density over time were analysed in terms of maximum lesion density, length of latent period and rate of lesion appearance. On the second youngest but fully developed leaf at the time of inoculation, maximum lesion density in the virulent group was 20% lower and the latent period 7% longer, than in the avirulent group. However, the alternative hypothesis, namely that isolates had adapted to quantitative resistance present in cv. Gala depending on their cultivar of origin, could not be rejected. The analysis of the kinetics of lesion density by a non-linear mixed-effect model proved useful in the assessment of aggressiveness.

This essay is an occasion to discuss the critical trajectories of a now common field of enquiry concerned with the impact of biomediatic technologies on politics and culture. Thacker's book The Global Genome importantly sits between debates about biopower as the governance of life and biopolitics as the transformation of what life can be. In particular, the book advances the hypothesis that as information produces `life itself', so it has become central to a political economy of excess and surplus value. In other words, information does not dematerialize biology. Bioinformatics and biotech informationalize the living and rematerialize biology. As biotech becomes central to biopower, the global genome comes to reigning profit, labour, racism, biocolonialism, biosecurity, and bioart. However, Thacker's reliance on a bio-ontology of life grounding all relations of power leaves no space for process-events to break the chain of life's perpetual reproduction.

This article tackles an old, classical problem, which is acquiring a new epochal relevance with the techno-aesthetic processing of form and substance, expression and content. The field of digital architecture is embarked in the ancient controversy between the line and the curve, binary communication and fuzzy logic. Since the 1990s, the speculative qualities of digital architecture have exposed spatial design to the qualities of growing or breeding, rather than planning. However, such qualities still deploy the tension between discrete spaces and continual curving. In this context, the article suggests the computational coexistence of discrete coding with continual morphing, defying any easy resolution for an aesthetic of continuity or discontinuity, the superiority of the analog or the meta-logic of the digital. The metaphysical dimension of such coexistence needs to include the abstract capacities of experiencing the transition from one state to another as the registering of algorithmic processing. Computation is intrinsic to microperceptions, incomputable quantities deploying the infectious property of the digital code. The article draws on the digital architecture of Greg Lynn to explore whether the computational nature of the digital calculus has the potential to challenge the bifurcation between the biological and the mathematical, the physical and the mental.

To think of feminist generation according to sequential timelines as those represented by an inherited grid of positions is to under-evaluate the spatio-temporal nexus of transitory relations, whereby the inheritance of the past into the present may necessarily imply a break from the continuum for a novel experience of sexual difference to come. The concern here is not for feminist timelines but primarily with feminist timelines in a curving spatio-temporal continuum, the extension of sexual difference outside the logic of chronos, the becoming of sexual difference as singular events occupying determinate spatio-temporal blocs, implicating the potentiality of all experience of sexual difference into the eventuation of a complex extensive region. (Quotes from original text)

International audience; In gene-for-gene interactions, avirulence genes interact, directly or not, with host resistance genes, triggering several defense mechanisms and resulting in no disease development. This kind of interaction was shown to occur in many host-pathogen relationships, including the one between Malus * domestica and Venturia inaequalis, the causal agent of apple scab. In the specific interaction between the host cultivar 'Golden Delicious' and V. inaequalis race 7, both the resistance gene Vg and the avirulence gene AvrVg have been identified and their map position determined in the host and in the pathogen genome respectively. Focusing on the fungal avirulence gene AvrVg, we constructed a genomic library of an AvrVg avirulent isolate and performed a chromosome walking, isolating and sequencing a 330 kb genomic region carrying this gene. Four different in silico gene predictions were performed on the genomic sequence resulting in a total of 169 genes grouped in 60 coding regions, some predicted by all four predictions to encode for the same identical protein and other regions where differences between the different predictions were found in the splicing sites. A second analysis was performed by software, allowing the identification of 40 regions coding for genes predicted to be secreted extracellularly, either by signal peptide or by non-classical secretion, these being the most common feature among avirulence genes. The next step toward identification of the real avirulence gene is the investigation of the expression of such candidate avirulence gene identified in silico as well as the examination of their possible alleles in virulent isolates. The results of the in silico gene prediction in the AvrVg region and preliminary results of candidate avirulence gene expression experiments will be presented.

This article will discuss recent developments in genetic engineering in relation to nonlinear dynamics of evolution such as endosymbiosis, re-theorized by Lynn Margulis in the 1970s. These dynamics contribute to mapping the nonlinear processes of information transmission that have come to define life beyond inert and entropic matter. As Margulis argues, genetic engineering does not simply manipulate life. Rather, it takes as its model the symbiotic trading of information between bacteria (non-nucleated cells that do not reproduce through sexual mating). In other words, she points out, bacteria invented the genetic engineering of cellular bodies across species barriers 3900 million years ago. In this sense, genetic engineering marks the re-emergence of a new (but ancient) mode of sex and reproduction, bacterial sex. Such re-emergence, far from defining an imitation of bacteria, points to a new modulation of life: the acceleration of the variables of life or the emerging mutations of matter. Challenging the Darwinian and neo-Darwinian models of evolution (the arborescent line of genetic descent), the molecular sciences and technologies of genetic engineering (i.e. endosymbiosis) contribute to redefining life as a turbulent auto-catalytic assembly of bacterial colonies. Drawing on Bergson's creative evolution and Deleuze and Guattari's machinic nature, the article will lay out the asymmetric relation between emergent dynamics of engineered life and what they emerge from (virtual matter).

Publication Inra prise en compte dans l'analyse bibliométrique des publications scientifiques mondiales sur les Fruits, les Légumes et la Pomme de terre. Période 2000-2012. http://prodinra.inra.fr/record/256699; International audience; The ascomycete Venturia inaequalis, causal pathogen of apple scab, underlies a gene-for-gene relationship with its host plant apple (Malus spp.). 'Golden Delicious', one of the most common cultivated apples in the world, carries the ephemeral resistance gene Vg. Avirulence gene AvrVg, matching resistance gene Vg has recently been mapped on the V. inaequalis genome. In this paper, we present the construction of a BAC library from a V. inaequalis AvrVg isolate. The library is composed of 7680 clones, with an average insert size of 80 kb. By hybridization, it has been estimated that the library contains six haploid genome equivalents. Thus the V. inaequalis genome can be predicted to be approximately 100 Mb in size. A chromosome walk, starting from the marker VirQ5 co-segregating with AvrVg, has been performed using the BAC library. Twelve BAC clones were identified during four steps of the chromosome walking. The size of the resulting contig is approximate to 330 kb