Automatic parameter tuning for functional regionalization methods

The methods used to define functional regions for public statistics and policy purposes need to establish several parameter values. This is typically achieved using expert knowledge based on qualitative judgements and lengthy consultations with local stakeholders. We propose to support this process by using an optimization algorithm to calibrate any regionalization method by identifying the parameter values that produce the best regionalization for a given quantitative indicator. The approach is exemplified by using a grid search and a genetic algorithm to configure the official methods employed in the UK and Sweden for the definition of their respective official concepts of local labour markets.Los métodos utilizados para definir las regiones funcionales con fines de estadística y políticas públicas deben establecer una serie de valores de ciertos parámetros. Esto se logra generalmente utilizando conocimiento experto basado en juicios cualitativos y largas consultas con las partes interesadas locales. Se propone apoyar este proceso utilizando un algoritmo de optimización para calibrar los métodos de regionalización mediante la identificación de los valores de los parámetros que producen la mejor regionalización para un determinado indicador cuantitativo. El enfoque se ejemplifica mediante el uso de una búsqueda por cuadrículas y un algoritmo genético para configurar los métodos oficiales empleados en el Reino Unido y en Suecia para la definición de sus respectivos conceptos oficiales de los mercados laborales locales.This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (grant numbers CSO2011-29943-C03-02 and CSO2014-55780-C3-2-P, National R&D&i Plan)

Beyond the New York Convention.

Many critical issues in today's international commercial arbitration are unsettled. The purpose of this research is to study how the New York Convention shall be reformed or evolved on a jurisprudential basis. The New York Convention to a certain extent is a legal discourse with some crucial norms such as party autonomy and the split of powers (involving judicial review and sovereignty). Social, historical, economic and cultural factors affect the formation and application of norms in this discourse. With this in mind, the disciplines of law, sociology, and economics will be adopted occasionally. Darwinian legal theory and game theory are two major analytic approaches. There are six chapters in this dissertation. The purpose, task and methodologies of this research are outlined in Chapter 1. No research on arbitration would be complete without some discussion of the historical context, which can help to explore the differences between different times and show the evolution of critical norms and theories. The discussion concerning Darwinian legal theory and the evolution of the New York Convention is in Chapter 2. The theory can be a tool to explain the future development of the New York Convention in a changing legal environment. Game theory is often used to study such legal phenomena as jurisdictional competition and legal harmonisation. The basic idea is that states act in their self-interest like private parties in the game, which requires a "federalism" system in place to harmonise self-interest-oriented national rules. Under the New York Convention, the enforcement of vacated arbitral awards involve multiple states and naturally touches upon the actions these states may take. Game theory is used in Chapter 3 to study the possibility of harmonising national rules in the trend of de-localisation and globalisation. The modern arbitration has become more legalistic. The business community desire applicable rules and procedures more business-oriented and simpler than those used by national courts. Instead of rigid national laws, the business community prefers the stability and predictability offered by law merchant or lex mercatoria. Historical and neo-economic studies of lex mercatoria are offered in Chapter 4 to demonstrate the necessity of recognising lex mercatoria in practice. Public policy is a critical concept in the New York Convention. Apart from the arbitrability and public policy review in the enforcement procedure, Chapter 5 tries to explore the possibility of framing "normative" public policy on the basis of game theory. States are the key actor in implementing public policy. Thus, the role and function of the states in the era of globalisation will be studied as well by reference to the neo-economic theories. A conclusion is set out in Chapter 6

Digital Platforms and Algorithmic Subjectivities

Algorithms are a form of productive power – so how may we conceptualise the newly merged terrains of social life, economy and self in a world of digital platforms? How do multiple self-quantifying practices interact with questions of class, race and gender? This edited collection considers algorithms at work – for what purposes encoded data about behaviour, attitudes, dispositions, relationships and preferences are deployed – and black box control, platform society theory and the formation of subjectivities. It details technological structures and lived experience of algorithms and the operation of platforms in areas such as crypto-finance, production, surveillance, welfare, activism in pandemic times. Finally, it asks if platform cooperativism, collaborative design and neomutualism offer new visions. Even as problems with labour and in society mount, subjectivities and counter subjectivities here produced appear as conscious participants of change and not so much the servants of algorithmic control and dominant platforms

The Limits of Legal Evolution: Knowledge and Normativity in Theories of Legal Change

Over the last forty years, legal theory and policy advice have come to draw heavily from an ‘evolutionary’ jurisprudence that explains legal transformation by drawing inspiration from the theoretical successes of Darwinian natural selection. This project seeks to enrich and critique this tradition using an analytical perspective that emphasizes the material consequences of concepts and ideas. Existing theories of legal evolution depend on a positivist epistemology that strictly distinguishes the objects of social life — interests, institutions, systems — from knowledge about those objects. My dissertation explores how knowledge, and especially non-legal expertise, acts as an independent site and locus of transformation, mediating the interaction between law and social phenomena and acting as a catalyst of legal innovation. Prior work by Simon Deakin has integrated insights from systems theory to show how the interaction between law and economic institutions can only be properly understood by attending to the epistemic frame law uses to interpret economic practice. Using a case study on the impact of ‘law and finance’ literature on World Bank policy advice and, consequentially, on legal reforms adopted by many developing countries between 2000 and the present, I show that such attention to legal knowledge is inadequate. The case points, first, to the contingency of the intellectual tools used to understand legal institutions. Rather than deploying a determinate rationality, private and public actors address legal, economic, and ethical problems using a variety of paradigms: viewpoints are not determined by realities. More fundamentally, the cases suggest that successful paradigms, rather than economic or political realities alone, shape the dynamics of socio-legal change. My conclusions address some normative questions that arise when researchers in a social scientific mode are implicated in the processes they seek to document

Proliferate! A techno-social history of the internet meme, from print to platforms

Internet memes are often understood as artefacts that have communicative utility within online discourses replete with legible aesthetic and affective attributes. Accordingly, valuable scholarly work has been done to understand how internet memes function as and within online social interactions. However, less attention has been paid to the ways in which the assemblage of technologies that comprise the internet mediate the social practices that produce internet memes. This thesis attends to this lesser-studied area by acknowledging that it is from the internet, as a particular but evolving assemblage of technologies, that the internet meme emerges. In so doing, I develop an analytic framework which recovers technics as co-constitutive of the social practices that bring forth internet memes. Thus, the techno-social of this thesis’ title references the supposition that internet memes are contingent on the irreducible relationship between the technics of the internet and the associated social practices they mediate. This claim is advanced by historicising the internet meme. In the first half of this thesis, I identify a selection of precursor “memes” that emerged from antecedent techno-social arrangements present in mid-to-late 20th century Anglo / U.S.-centric discourses. These accounts are mobilised to better clarify the specificity of the internet in mediating the techno-social practices that produce internet memes – a dynamic explored in the latter chapters of the thesis. A techno-social history of the meme therefore asserts that memes – internet or otherwise – have historically emerged and will continue to emerge across myriad techno-social milieu; with the historical framing functioning as an analytic device that draws into relief the ways in which the internet makes the internet meme distinct. Such an approach relies on a working definition of the meme, internet or otherwise. This is no simple task. As is recounted in this thesis’ introduction, the concept of “the meme” has been a contested one since the term’s emergence. Drawing on the work of Limor Shifman in particular, I assert that memes can only be differentiated from other forms of cultural production in the specific ways they proliferate – via social practices of reproduction and remix animated by the use of technical media. Notably, the recognition of proliferation as the meme’s defining feature undergirds this thesis’ analytical framing, since proliferation as a social practice, and the aesthetic and affective attributes of the memes that emerge, must be realised in ways contingent on technical affordances. The internet meme then, is recognisable as such since it proliferates, and is rendered distinct through being proliferated on the internet. Having provided terms of definition, Chapter One moves to historicise the proliferating meme. In this section, the manipulation of photographic imagery relating to the Kennedy Assassination – by professional media, governmental bodies, and private citizen researchers – is reconsidered as a form of meme. Articulated as such, this chapter goes on to detail the ways in which the aesthetics and utilities of the Kennedy Assassination “meme” were realised in ways contingent on the techno-social conditions from which it emerged. Chapter Two develops this perspective further in assessing the production of mid-to-late 20th century alt-media as a form of memetic social practice; afforded by the appropriation of reprographic technologies, which in turn supplied the artefactual output with distinct forms and functions, and cultural significances. Having made the case for mobilising a techno-social history of the meme in the preceding sections, Chapter Three moves this work “online”, and offers an account of how the early web of the ’90’s and ‘00’s brought forth its own meme forms, notably the spread of web-based urban legends. Chapter Four then turns to address examples of what might be widely understood as internet memes proper - the Image Macro and GIF formats – and accounts for the ways in which the social usage of the assemblage of digital media technologies that comprise the internet gave rise to and proliferated these meme forms. Finally, Chapter Five will reflexively consider what the framework established in the prior chapters reveals about the contemporaneous internet meme – a meme form that emerges from a platformised techno social milieu – a milieu I’ll argue is characterised by financialised media ubiquity. The framework developed in this thesis provides a lens not only for studying the distinct forms and functions of meme forms, with particular attention paid to the internet meme, but also accounts for the inevitable future evolution of memes as techno-social arrays continue to reconfigur

Digital Platforms and Algorithmic Subjectivities

Algorithms are a form of productive power – so how may we conceptualise the newly merged terrains of social life, economy and self in a world of digital platforms? How do multiple self-quantifying practices interact with questions of class, race and gender? This edited collection considers algorithms at work – for what purposes encoded data about behaviour, attitudes, dispositions, relationships and preferences are deployed – and black box control, platform society theory and the formation of subjectivities. It details technological structures and lived experience of algorithms and the operation of platforms in areas such as crypto-finance, production, surveillance, welfare, activism in pandemic times. Finally, it asks if platform cooperativism, collaborative design and neomutualism offer new visions. Even as problems with labour and in society mount, subjectivities and counter subjectivities here produced appear as conscious participants of change and not so much the servants of algorithmic control and dominant platforms

Digital China: creativity and community in the sinocybersphere

Over the past decade, digital technologies have profoundly reshaped the Chinese cultural landscape. With a focus on the creative agency of new media and online communities, this volume examines this development through the notion of the Sinocybersphere - the networked spaces across the globe that not only operate on the Chinese script, but also imaginatively negotiate the meanings of Chinese culture in the digital age. Instead of asking what makes the internet or new media “Chinese,” the chapters situate contemporary entanglements of cultural and digital practices within specific historical, social, and discursive contexts. Covering topics as diverse as live-streaming, AI poetry, online literature, poetry memes, cyberpunk fiction, virtual art exhibitions, cooking videos, censorship, and viral translations, the collection as a whole not only engages with a wide range of Chinese new media phenomena, but also demonstrates their relevance to our understanding of contemporary digital culture

Contemporary art and the speculative turn

This practice-led Ph.D. intertwines a written thesis, a folio of my own curatorial work, and relevant case studies of contemporary art projects: a multi-modal research project that traces the emergence of a ‘speculative turn’ across diverse fields, examining its impact on and through contemporary art. In particular, it identifies and explores a particular milieu of speculative work concerned with refusing inherited and pre-formatted logics, institutions, values, doxa, even metaphysical frameworks, as immutable, natural or perennial. Consequently, I argue that in contrast to a wholly critical method, the focus of such speculative work is to construct, to revise and to explore. It enacts a turn away from a perceived epistemicide, towards elaborating and experimenting with unorthodox vocabularies, concepts, models, and practices. I argue that such unorthodoxies, or speculative heresies, are adaptive navigational protocols and ultimately expand the parameters of the Overton window. They reflect the political, climatological and technical contingencies of a moment that has earned a variety of useful, yet controversial, inter-related designations that each afford different forms of speculative and navigational modelling (‘The New Normal’, ‘The Anthropocene’, ‘The Posthuman Nexus’, ‘The Thick Present’, The Long Now’, ‘The Post-Truth Era’, ‘The Speculative Time Complex’). As such, this Ph.D. also commits to operate speculatively alongside the work it foregrounds and analyses: it speculates. Through my curatorial projects, I offer a unique dynamic model for thinking with and through contemporary art and the speculative turn. From this model emerges my own speculative cosmology, concepts and vocabulary to be tested both within the analysis of this thesis and the active multi-modal discourse of the milieu I present therein. This is evident in the explication of my project, Most Dismal Swamp

Association of Architecture Schools in Australasia

"Techniques and Technologies: Transfer and Transformation", proceedings of the 2007 AASA Conference held September 27-29, 2007, at the School of Architecture, UTS