A kernel-based framework for learning graded relations from data

Driven by a large number of potential applications in areas like bioinformatics, information retrieval and social network analysis, the problem setting of inferring relations between pairs of data objects has recently been investigated quite intensively in the machine learning community. To this end, current approaches typically consider datasets containing crisp relations, so that standard classification methods can be adopted. However, relations between objects like similarities and preferences are often expressed in a graded manner in real-world applications. A general kernel-based framework for learning relations from data is introduced here. It extends existing approaches because both crisp and graded relations are considered, and it unifies existing approaches because different types of graded relations can be modeled, including symmetric and reciprocal relations. This framework establishes important links between recent developments in fuzzy set theory and machine learning. Its usefulness is demonstrated through various experiments on synthetic and real-world data.Comment: This work has been submitted to the IEEE for possible publication. Copyright may be transferred without notice, after which this version may no longer be accessibl

ERA ranking representability: The missing link between ordinal regression and multi-class classification

Can a multi-class classification model in some situations be simplified to an ordinal regression model without sacrificing performance? We try to answer this question from a theoretical point of view for one-versus-one multi-class ensembles. To that end, sufficient conditions are derived for which a one-versus-one ensemble becomes ranking representable, i.e. conditions for which the ensemble can be reduced to a ranking or ordinal regression model such that a similar performance on training data is measured. As performance measure, we use the area under the ROC curve (AUC) and its reformulation in terms of graphs. For the three-class case, this results in a new type of cycle transitivity for pairwise AUCs that can be verified by solving an integer quadratic program. Moreover, solving this integer quadratic program can be avoided, since its solution converges for an infinite data sample to a simple form, resulting in a deviation bound that becomes tighter with increasing sample size

Sobre héroes y tumbas: the park and political logics of memory in Argentina

The memory of the disappeared in Argentina is heavily and historically regulated and framed. We can use landscapes of memory as a prism to reconstruct the wider constitutive field of memory through which the reality of the past has been framed. By reconstructing this field, we can trace the discourses and logics of memory according to which meaning has come to be attributed to the past and a project for a future politics has been delineated. A study of the Parque de la Memoria reveals that Argentine collective memory has a cultural biography in which it tends towards two politics logics of memory which shape – and are shaped by – the concrete interventions over time and space of human rights actors and the understanding of the past among the wider interpellated Argentine public who situate within it in an expanded field. As a politics shaped by memory and mourning, the politics of transition in Argentina is revealed to be paradoxically emptied out of politics. Whether human rights groups choose to remember the desparecidos as innocent victims or 30,000 revolutionaries, so as to advance a social grieving or a politics of grievance, there is a lacuna at the heart of the memory of the disappeared as to who the disappeared really were. Though we find images and narrative discourses of quotidian humanity and political activism, we do not find the two together. The political logics of memory that have regulated the memory of the disappeared do not correspond to the reason of human rights groups, however, but that of society. The ontological subjects of the disappeared have been socially constructed in and through this memory as subjects that this society was willing to recognise and remember, with lasting implications for Argentine society and politics that continue to this day

ISIPTA'07: Proceedings of the Fifth International Symposium on Imprecise Probability: Theories and Applications

B

A necessary 4-cycle condition for dice representability of reciprocal relations

The comparison of independent random variables can be modeled by a set of dice and a reciprocal relation expressing the winning probability of one dice over another. It is well known that dice transitivity is a necessary 3-cycle condition for a reciprocal relation to be dice representable, i.e. to be the winning probability relation of a set of dice. Although this 3-cycle condition is sufficient for a rational-valued reciprocal relation on a set of three elements to be dice representable, it has been shown that this is no longer the case for sets consisting of four or more elements. In this contribution, we provide a necessary 4-cycle condition for dice representability of reciprocal relations. Moreover, we show that our condition is sufficient in the sense that a given rational-weighted 4-cycle and reciprocally weighted inverse cycle, both fulfilling the 4-cycle condition, can be extended to a winning probability graph representing a dice-representable reciprocal relation on four elements

Flesh and spirit onstage: chronotopes of performance in medieval English theatre

This study uses Mikhail Bakhtin\u27s chronotope, which is the informing principle of one\u27s experience of space and time, to explore different relations among space, time, actors, and audience in medieval theatre. Relations between the material and spiritual worlds as understood in the Middle Ages are considered in the context of relations between performers and audience members with two goals. First, I explore how the ontological status of the metaworld created through performance changed in the context of specific chronotopes. Second, I explore how diverse religious discourses affected medieval modes of representation. This study posits three chronotopes of performance informing medieval theatrical experience. In the sacramental chronotope, disciplined bodies moved through spiritual geographies in Latin liturgical dramas to bring participants into contact with an ontologically superior divine world. The consubstantial chronotope operated from an ontology of self-sufficiency locating power in the individual\u27s body rather than in a superior being. Within the consubstantial chronotope, performance, and representation more generally, was understood as a tool for the contemplation of ideas rather than as a vehicle for bringing performers into contact with an ontologically substantive world. The transubstantial chronotope works within an ontology of community that constructs performances as sites of cultural contestation and engagement. The communal mystery plays performed on Corpus Christi day in medieval England created a space and time for communicative bodies to tell shared narratives in a ritual effort to strengthen, purify, and heal souls. Performance within the transubstantial chronotope was uniquely open to metalinguistic and dialogic play, allowing the imaginative metaworld of the performance to function as innerly persuasive discourse possessing its own ontological weight and agency. Having explored these three chronotopes, this study examines the heterochronotopic quality of medieval English morality plays. I conclude with an analysis of a recent production of the Chester mystery cycle, Yimmimingaliso: The Mysteries. Using a variety of different languages in performance, as well as different languages of performance, this production evoked something of the transubstantial chronotope of medieval England

To Sew or To Sow?” European Gender Images and Development in Rural Ecuador

This thesis examines the impact of a gender specific Swiss development project on Andean artisans women who struggle to intensify their craft production in the face of an increasing subsistence crisis characteristic among rural small producers around the globe. The selection of a project which has proven sustainable over a number of years allowed the author to conduct fieldwork in three different settings (1992-1995): among two hundred artisan women from eleven rural communities in Ecuador\u27s Azuay province, who embroider table linen and apparel for export; among Ecuadorian and expatriate Swiss development specialists in Quito and Cuenca; and, to a limited extent, with policy makers and programmers at the headquarters of the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation in Berne. The thesis analyzes how European gender stereotypes contravene the stated project goal to slow down rural emigration and interfere with the transfer of grassroots management skills. Research with development agents shows that gender and their cultural as well as geographic distance to aid receiving populations influence how well local needs are assessed. The Swiss case reveals that development agency staff are active in policy making; a lack of knowledge about current social science debates partly accounts for shortcomings in gender specific programming. Swiss foreign policy past and present is examined to expose the links between a nation\u27s internal situation and development programming, which is influenced by kind and degree of colonial and neo-colonial activities of the donor nation

'Schizomorphic visions': visuality and dissenting subjectivities in the poetry of the Italian neoavanguardia

This dissertation examines the role of literary visuality in the construction of cultural categories of madness, delirium, schizophrenia, and trauma in the poetry of the Italian neoavanguardia. In addition to exploring configurations of madness and delirium in theoretical and critical writings produced by members of various interrelated literary movements in the 1960s, this dissertation centres on close readings of a selection of lesser known ekphrastic, visual, concrete, and collage poetic works, produced between 1961-1977, by Giulia Niccolai, Edoardo Sanguineti, Adriano Spatola, and Patrizia Vicinelli. I look also to more recent thought outside of the immediate historical Italian-language context in order to illuminate and inform my readings of the strategies of these literary figures. As part of my analysis of the renegotiation of these fraught themes in the experimental poetry of the neoavanguardia, I investigate how the theoretical category of schizomorfismo as described by Alfredo Giuliani, a key figure in the literary group known as the Novissimi, provides an illuminating paradigm for reading the discontinuous, discordant and febrile literary forms found within this poetry. I draw attention to the underexamined visual dynamics at play in both theoretical and poetic writings of this period, expanding on the fluid relations between visuality and madness, and their invocation as dissenting, countercultural literary entities. As examples of a scrittura altra, invocations of ‘other’ subjectivities are, I argue, embedded in these mostly non-representational texts, which draw on the rich capacities of visual, typographic and concrete experimental forms to raise questions of normativity, marginalisation, and subjugation, as well as interrogate epistemologies of logic and logocentrism. Accordingly, this dissertation interrogates what it means to invoke cultural-clinical categories in the context of poetic experimentation and as literary tools of social critique at a historical moment, in Italy and beyond, when the relationship between clinical and cultural understandings of non-normative mental states were being fundamentally renegotiated

Interlitteraria : Tartu Ülikooli maailmakirjanduse õppetooli ja Eesti Võrdleva Kirjandusteaduse Assotsiatsiooni rahvusvaheline ajakiri = international refereed edition of the Chair of Comparative Literature of Tartu University and the Estonian Association of Comparative Literature

http://www.ester.ee/record=b1226153*es

Quantum Transport in Mesoscopic Systems

Mesoscopic physics deals with systems larger than single atoms but small enough to retain their quantum properties. The possibility to create and manipulate conductors of the nanometer scale has given birth to a set of phenomena that have revolutionized physics: quantum Hall effects, persistent currents, weak localization, Coulomb blockade, etc. This Special Issue tackles the latest developments in the field. Contributors discuss time-dependent transport, quantum pumping, nanoscale heat engines and motors, molecular junctions, electron–electron correlations in confined systems, quantum thermo-electrics and current fluctuations. The works included herein represent an up-to-date account of exciting research with a broad impact in both fundamental and applied topics