7,722 research outputs found

    Complicated objects: artifacts from the Yuanming Yuan in Victorian Britain

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    The 1860 spoliation of the Summer Palace at the close of the Second Opium War by British and French troops was a watershed event within the development of Britain as an imperialist nation, which guaranteed a market for opium produced in its colony India and demonstrated the power of its armed forces. The distribution of the spoils to officers and diplomatic corps by campaign leaders in Beijing was also a sign of the British Army’s rising power as an instrument of the imperialist state. These conditions would suggest that objects looted from the site would be integrated into an imperialist aesthetic that reflected and promoted the material benefits of military engagement overseas and foregrounded the circumstances of their removal to Britain for campaign members and the British public. This study mines sources dating to the two decades following the war – including British newspapers, auction house records, exhibition catalogs and works of art – to test this hypothesis. Findings show that initial movements of looted objects through the military and diplomatic corps did reinforce notions of imperialist power by enabling campaign members to profit from the spoliation through sales of looted objects and trophy displays. However, material from the Summer Palace arrived at a moment when British manufacturers and cultural leaders were engaged in a national effort to improve the quality of British goods to compete in the international marketplace and looted art was quickly interpolated in this national conversation. Ironically, the same “free trade” imperatives that motivated the invasion energized a new design movement that embraced Chinese ornament. As a consequence, political interpretations of the material outside of military collections were quickly joined by a strong response to Chinese ornament from cultural institutions and design leaders. Art from the Summer Palace held a prominent place at industrial art exhibitions of the postwar period and inspired new designs in a number of mediums. While the availability of Chinese imperial art was the consequence of a military invasion and therefore a product of imperialist expansion, evidence presented here shows that the design response to looted objects was not circumscribed by this political reality. Chinese ornament on imperial wares was ultimately celebrated for its formal qualities and acknowledged links to the Summer Palace were an indicator of good design, not a celebration of victory over a failed Chinese state. Therefore, the looting of the Summer Palace was ultimately an essential factor in the development of modern design, the essence of which is a break with Classical ornament

    Bidding efficiently in Simultaneous Ascending Auctions with budget and eligibility constraints using Simultaneous Move Monte Carlo Tree Search

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    For decades, Simultaneous Ascending Auction (SAA) has been the most popular mechanism used for spectrum auctions. It has recently been employed by many countries for the allocation of 5G licences. Although SAA presents relatively simple rules, it induces a complex strategical game for which the optimal bidding strategy is unknown. Considering the fact that sometimes billions of euros are at stake in a SAA, establishing an efficient bidding strategy is crucial. In this work, we model the auction as a nn-player simultaneous move game with complete information and propose the first efficient bidding algorithm that tackles simultaneously its four main strategical issues: the exposure problem\textit{exposure problem}, the own price effect\textit{own price effect}, budget constraints\textit{budget constraints} and the eligibility management problem\textit{eligibility management problem}. Our solution, called SMSαSMS^\alpha, is based on Simultaneous Move Monte Carlo Tree Search (SM-MCTS) and relies on a new method for the prediction of closing prices. By introducing scalarised rewards in SMSαSMS^\alpha, we give the possibility to bidders to define their own level of risk-aversion. Through extensive numerical experiments on instances of realistic size, we show that SMSαSMS^\alpha largely outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms, notably by achieving higher expected utility while taking less risks.Comment: 14 pages, 10 figures, The paper has been submitted to IEEE journal for possible publicatio

    ‘Making Floppy Floppy': Peter Halley's Postmodernist Abstraction (1980-1987):

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    Having completed studies at Yale and The University of New Orleans, in 1980 American artist Peter Halley returned to his hometown in New York City, took a studio in the East Village, and began to paint. Within six years he would become one of the most talked about artists in America. In this thesis I argue that Halley’s paintings of the 1980s constructed new relationships, or chains of meaning, between past abstract art—in particular, though not exclusively, forms of American minimalist abstract painting and sculpture from the 1950s and 1960s—and a range of social forms and urban textures particular to New York City. By suggesting new social interpretations of past abstract art, Halley’s model of ‘postmodernist abstraction’ prompts us to revise our understanding of the historicity and criticality of postmodernist painting. Pushing back against arguments about 1980s postmodernism as historical amnesia (Fredric Jameson), or market-complicit conventionalism (Hal Foster), I read Halley’s ‘Neo-geo’ as one example of how strategies such as pastiche and double-coding—identified by many critics as central tenets of the postmodernist art that emerged in New York in the 1980s—functioned as vehicles for historical orientation during a decade otherwise marked by disorientating economic, social, and cultural change

    iDML: Incentivized Decentralized Machine Learning

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    With the rising emergence of decentralized and opportunistic approaches to machine learning, end devices are increasingly tasked with training deep learning models on-devices using crowd-sourced data that they collect themselves. These approaches are desirable from a resource consumption perspective and also from a privacy preservation perspective. When the devices benefit directly from the trained models, the incentives are implicit - contributing devices' resources are incentivized by the availability of the higher-accuracy model that results from collaboration. However, explicit incentive mechanisms must be provided when end-user devices are asked to contribute their resources (e.g., computation, communication, and data) to a task performed primarily for the benefit of others, e.g., training a model for a task that a neighbor device needs but the device owner is uninterested in. In this project, we propose a novel blockchain-based incentive mechanism for completely decentralized and opportunistic learning architectures. We leverage a smart contract not only for providing explicit incentives to end devices to participate in decentralized learning but also to create a fully decentralized mechanism to inspect and reflect on the behavior of the learning architecture

    Central-provincial Politics and Industrial Policy-making in the Electric Power Sector in China

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    In addition to the studies that provide meaningful insights into the complexity of technical and economic issues, increasing studies have focused on the political process of market transition in network industries such as the electric power sector. This dissertation studies the central–provincial interactions in industrial policy-making and implementation, and attempts to evaluate the roles of Chinese provinces in the market reform process of the electric power sector. Market reforms of this sector are used as an illustrative case because the new round of market reforms had achieved some significant breakthroughs in areas such as pricing reform and wholesale market trading. Other policy measures, such as the liberalization of the distribution market and cross-regional market-building, are still at a nascent stage and have only scored moderate progress. It is important to investigate why some policy areas make greater progress in market reforms than others. It is also interesting to examine the impacts of Chinese central-provincial politics on producing the different market reform outcomes. Guangdong and Xinjiang are two provinces being analyzed in this dissertation. The progress of market reforms in these two provinces showed similarities although the provinces are very different in terms of local conditions such as the stages of their economic development and energy structures. The actual reform can be understood as the outcomes of certain modes of interactions between the central and provincial actors in the context of their particular capabilities and preferences in different policy areas. This dissertation argues that market reform is more successful in policy areas where the central and provincial authorities are able to engage mainly in integrative negotiations than in areas where they engage mainly in distributive negotiations

    Environmental analysis for application layer networks

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    Die zunehmende Vernetzung von Rechners ĂŒber das Internet lies die Vision von Application Layer Netzwerken aufkommen. Sie umfassen Overlay Netzwerke wie beispielsweise Peer-to-Peer Netzwerke und Grid Infrastrukturen unter Verwendung des TCP/IP Protokolls. Ihre gemeinsame Eigenschaft ist die redundante, verteilte Bereitstellung und der Zugang zu Daten-, Rechen- und Anwendungsdiensten, wĂ€hrend sie die HeterogenitĂ€t der Infrastruktur vor dem Nutzer verbergen. In dieser Arbeit werden die Anforderungen, die diese Netzwerke an ökonomische Allokationsmechanismen stellen, untersucht. Die Analyse erfolgt anhand eines Marktanalyseprozesses fĂŒr einen zentralen Auktionsmechanismus und einen katallaktischen Markt

    Digital Energy Platforms Considering Digital Privacy and Security by Design Principles

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    The power system and markets have become increasingly complex, along with efforts to digitalize the energy sector. Accessing flexibility services, in particular, through digital energy platforms, has enabled communication between multiple entities within the energy system and streamlined flexibility market operations. However, digitalizing these vast and complex systems introduces new cybersecurity and privacy concerns, which must be properly addressed during the design of the digital energy platform ecosystems. More specifically, both privacy and cybersecurity measures should be embedded into all phases of the platform design and operation, based on the privacy and security by design principles. In this study, these principles are used to propose a holistic but generic architecture for digital energy platforms that are able to facilitate multiple use cases for flexibility services in the energy sector. A hybrid framework using both DLT and non-DLT solutions ensures trust throughout the layers of the platform architecture. Furthermore, an evaluation of numerous energy flexibility service use cases operating at various stages of the energy value chain is shown and graded in terms of digital energy platform technical maturity, privacy, and cybersecurity issues

    Pathways to Freedom Project: Finding Matilda Hicks research report

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    The CHAPS Program sponsored a research trip to Georgia and Alabama in August of 2022 to search for the origins of the Nathaniel Jackson and a family slave named Matilda Hicks. A presentation was given to family, friends, and interested historians at the Jackson Ranch Church on Saturday, May 6, 2023. The report includes the results of the research trip, along with technological surveys of the Jackson Ranch Church property along the US-Mexico border in San Juan, Texas. TEKS-aligned lesson plans developed by regional teachers are also included in this report.https://scholarworks.utrgv.edu/chapseducationalresources/1069/thumbnail.jp
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