Medical Digressions in a Maltese novel

A rather mysterious and atypical manuscript preserved in the National Library under wraps of massive oblivion, eventually saw the light in 1929. 1 It recounts at considerable length and substantial detail the desolate life of Gabriello Pulis and his misadventures in Malta and through the Mediterranean. Pulis, an irresistible magnet for misfortune and calamity, strove hard to prove that, for some elected ones, if anything could go wrong, it would.peer-reviewe

From demon to deity : Kang Wang in thirteenth-century Jizhou and beyond

This essay discusses the cult of a deity known as Kang Wang, worshipped throughout Jizhou in thirteenth-century Jiangxi. The identity of this deity remains to some extent mysterious; many different identifying stories for Kang Wang coexist. Underneath these guises, however, his origins as a fearsome and unnamed demon shine through. I argue that the various representations of Kang Wang must be understood as resulting from the very different agendas of the authors who created those identities, but they all share one aim: covering up the demonic roots of the deity. Providing a name and place of origin for the deity should be seen as attempts to exert authority over this demonic force

Memory Bounded Open-Loop Planning in Large POMDPs using Thompson Sampling

State-of-the-art approaches to partially observable planning like POMCP are based on stochastic tree search. While these approaches are computationally efficient, they may still construct search trees of considerable size, which could limit the performance due to restricted memory resources. In this paper, we propose Partially Observable Stacked Thompson Sampling (POSTS), a memory bounded approach to open-loop planning in large POMDPs, which optimizes a fixed size stack of Thompson Sampling bandits. We empirically evaluate POSTS in four large benchmark problems and compare its performance with different tree-based approaches. We show that POSTS achieves competitive performance compared to tree-based open-loop planning and offers a performance-memory tradeoff, making it suitable for partially observable planning with highly restricted computational and memory resources.Comment: Presented at AAAI 201

Picturesque Violence: Tourism, the Film Industry, and the Heritagization of ‘Bandoleros’ in Spain, 1905–1936

This article examines the debates about the Andalusian ‘bandoleros’ (bandits) in the context of early tourism as a state-guided policy in Spain. As we argue, the development of tourism made Spanish intellectuals reconsider the real armed activity in Andalucía as part of Spanish national heritage and a tourist attraction. Consistent with the stereotypical image of Spain coined by the Romantic travelers, such an early heritagization of brigandry reveals the role of the élites in recasting exotic imagery into modern tourism-shaped identities: in the hands of early century writers, bandits were reshaped as part of the ‘modern picturesque’. Furthermore, the role given to brigands in early cinema allows one to see how the early heritage discourse bridged transnational and centralist interests at the expense of the regional ones, thus foreshadowing the debates about hegemony in present-day heritage studies

The threat of the thief: who has normative influence in Georgian society?

This piece gives an account of the Georgian government's recent attempts to crackdown on the institution of thieves-in-law [vory-v-zakone] within Georgian society. The events surrounding the problematisation of the thieves-in-law are examined and different answers are offered to the underlying question of the article: what threat does this subversive group pose to the government? It is argued that the vory do not represent a potential criminal revolution but are victims of a resurgent state producing a politics of law that seeks to stamp out subverting influences within society. The thieves' world represents an alternative moral order which is attractive in a country which suffers from acute alienated statehood. Thus the fight against the vory should be understood as a battle to win back the hearts of the Georgian people for the state and for the law

Now we must cross a sea: remarks on transformational leadership and the Civil Rights Movement

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