Computational Controversy

Climate change, vaccination, abortion, Trump: Many topics are surrounded by fierce controversies. The nature of such heated debates and their elements have been studied extensively in the social science literature. More recently, various computational approaches to controversy analysis have appeared, using new data sources such as Wikipedia, which help us now better understand these phenomena. However, compared to what social sciences have discovered about such debates, the existing computational approaches mostly focus on just a few of the many important aspects around the concept of controversies. In order to link the two strands, we provide and evaluate here a controversy model that is both, rooted in the findings of the social science literature and at the same time strongly linked to computational methods. We show how this model can lead to computational controversy analytics that have full coverage over all the crucial aspects that make up a controversy.Comment: In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Social Informatics (SocInfo) 201

Indian exceptionalism? A discussion on India's experiment with constitutional secularism

The secular state is the most important of contemporary institutional forms available to deal with the problem of sectarian violence in liberal democracies. Despite this, the commitment to constitutional secularism seems to be in crisis, constituting deep fault lines in democratic politics across the world. Within the Euro-American context the secular state seems to have run into trouble with immigrants, especially Islamic communities. Beyond its founding context, welldirected postcolonial polemic in countries like India has seriously questioned the very usefulness of the secular state for non-Western polities. As an avowedly secular state it therefore seems crucial for a profoundly diverse country like India to able to think through the extent to which the secular state can be defended against some of the challenges being mounted against it. This paper contributes to this contemporary debate on secularism by discussing the claims to an ‘exceptional’ model of Indian secularism made by the Indian Supreme Court. In doing so it argues with the court on the routes by which such an exceptional model can be (if at all) elaborated and defended

A Statistical Model to Explain the Mendel--Fisher Controversy

In 1866 Gregor Mendel published a seminal paper containing the foundations of modern genetics. In 1936 Ronald Fisher published a statistical analysis of Mendel's data concluding that "the data of most, if not all, of the experiments have been falsified so as to agree closely with Mendel's expectations." The accusation gave rise to a controversy which has reached the present time. There are reasonable grounds to assume that a certain unconscious bias was systematically introduced in Mendel's experimentation. Based on this assumption, a probability model that fits Mendel's data and does not offend Fisher's analysis is given. This reconciliation model may well be the end of the Mendel--Fisher controversy.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/10-STS342 the Statistical Science (http://www.imstat.org/sts/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Relativistic Lighthouses: The Role of the Binary Pulsar in proving the existence of Gravitational Waves

This paper discusses the role of the discovery and analysis of the first binary pulsar in settling the long-running quadrupole formula controversy over the status of gravitational waves as a prediction of general relativity. It also discusses how we should understand the resolution of this controversy in the context of the so-called science wars. In other words it discusses whether concepts such as interpretive flexibility and the experimenters' regress can shed light on what can also be seen as a classical confirmation of realist expectations, in which a theoretical controversy is settled by a conclusive experiment.Comment: 28 pages, no figures, presented at a 1998 conference in Mainz on the History of General Relativit

Ab initio description of the exotic unbound 7He nucleus

The neutron rich exotic unbound 7He nucleus has been the subject of many experimental investigations. While the ground-state 3/2- resonance is well established, there is a controversy concerning the excited 1/2- resonance reported in some experiments as low-lying and narrow (E_R ~ 1 MeV, Gamma < 1 MeV) while in others as very broad and located at a higher energy. This issue cannot be addressed by ab initio theoretical calculations based on traditional bound-state methods. We introduce a new unified approach to nuclear bound and continuum states based on the coupling of the no-core shell model, a bound-state technique, with the no-core shell model/resonating group method, a nuclear scattering technique. Our calculations describe the ground-state resonance in agreement with experiment and, at the same time, predict a broad 1/2- resonance above 2 MeV.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figure

NAFTA Labor Side Agreement: Lessons for the Worker Rights and Fast-Track Debate

CRS ReportCRSNAFTALaborSideAgreements1001.pdf: 2024 downloads, before Oct. 1, 2020

MONROE-Nettest: A Configurable Tool for Dissecting Speed Measurements in Mobile Broadband Networks

As the demand for mobile connectivity continues to grow, there is a strong need to evaluate the performance of Mobile Broadband (MBB) networks. In the last years, mobile "speed", quantified most commonly by data rate, gained popularity as the widely accepted metric to describe their performance. However, there is a lack of consensus on how mobile speed should be measured. In this paper, we design and implement MONROE-Nettest to dissect mobile speed measurements, and investigate the effect of different factors on speed measurements in the complex mobile ecosystem. MONROE-Nettest is built as an Experiment as a Service (EaaS) on top of the MONROE platform, an open dedicated platform for experimentation in operational MBB networks. Using MONROE-Nettest, we conduct a large scale measurement campaign and quantify the effects of measurement duration, number of TCP flows, and server location on measured downlink data rate in 6 operational MBB networks in Europe. Our results indicate that differences in parameter configuration can significantly affect the measurement results. We provide the complete MONROE-Nettest toolset as open source and our measurements as open data.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures, submitted to INFOCOM CNERT Workshop 201