Soc Netw Anal Min

Suicide is the second leading cause of death among youth ages 10-19 in the USA. While suicide has long been recognized as a multifactorial issue, there is limited understanding regarding the complexities linking adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) to suicide ideation, attempt, and fatality among youth. In this paper, we develop a map of these complex linkages to provide a decision support tool regarding key issues in policymaking and intervention design, such as identifying multiple feedback loops (e.g., involving intergenerational effects) or comprehensively examining the rippling effects of an intervention. We use the methodology of systems mapping to structure the complex interrelationships of suicide and ACEs based on the perceptions of fifteen subject matter experts. Specifically, systems mapping allows us to gain insight into the feedback loops and potential emergent properties of ACEs and youth suicide. We describe our methodology and the results of fifteen one-on-one interviews, which are transformed into individual maps that are then aggregated and simplified to produce our final causal map. Our map is the largest to date on ACEs and suicide among youth, totaling 361 concepts and 946 interrelationships. Using a previously developed open-source software to navigate the map, we are able to explore how trauma may be perpetuated through familial, social, and historical concepts. In particular, we identify connections and pathways between ACEs and youth suicide that have not been identified in prior research, and which are of particular interest for youth suicide prevention efforts.CC999999/ImCDC/Intramural CDC HHSUnited States

Metodología para la Identificación y rediseño de canales de venta por producto para una compañía de producción de consumo masivo multicanal multiproducto

La producción industrial está sufriendo una transformación rápida y profunda gracias al desarrollo tan acelerado que ha experimentado la tecnologías y en especial la internet. En los mercados internacionales se observan hoy en día ciclos de vida, suministro de productos especialmente cortos con una gran diversidad, lo que ha obligado a las empresas a adoptar medidas encaminadas a mejorar su productividad y lograr la penetración de sus productos y servicios en diferentes mercados utilizando diferentes canales de distribución. Esta gran diversidad de canales ha traído conflictos relacionados con la competencia entre canales y productos al interior de la empresa. En el tema de la distribución multicanal – multiproducto, se destacan dos tendencias de desarrollo, una primera dedicada a los aspectos estratégicos de la distribución multicanal – multiproducto, y una segunda centrada en el modelamiento del comportamiento de la distribución de productos y su afinidad por diferentes canales. Es por esto que en este trabajo se presenta una metodología general basada en los principios de la lógica borrosa y su integración a los mapas cognitivos, para la caracterización, identificación y rediseño de cuatro (4) canales de distribución existentes en el Grupo Familia, en términos de las características que definen cuatro (4) productos de consumo masivo relacionados con el aseo personal que vende la compañía. La metodología propuesta permitió la identificación y caracterización de canales de distribución y venta, teniendo en cuenta las relaciones borrosas consignadas por un experto en un Mapa Cognitivo Borroso (MCB), las cuales establecen la relación entre las características de un producto y un canal. Asimismo, la caracterización y el rediseño de canales, confirmaron el estado actual de la estructura del Grupo en cuanto a la distribución multicanal multiproducto, y permitió igualmente identificar otro tipo de canales que pueden ser potenciales para la distribución de un producto específico, el cual al momento de este estudio tenía predominancia por canales específicos de la compañía. Finalmente esta metodología general puede ser extendida para un mayor número de productos y canales de distribución, y para la identificación, caracterización y rediseño de canales mediante información cualitativa proveniente de un experto y que permite establecer relaciones borrosas entre las características de producto y entre las características de los diferentes canales que posee una determinada empresa para la distribución y venta de sus productos.Abstract: industrial production is undergoing rapid and profound transformation due to the accelerated development of technology and the Internet in particular. In international markets a high diversity of products with short lifecycles and rapid product delivery can be observed today, which has forced companies to take measures to improve productivity and achieve a penetration of its products and services in different markets using different distribution channels. This great diversity of channels has generated conflicts related to the competition between channels and products within a company. In literature two trends of development have been highlighted. A first dedicated to the strategic aspects of multichannel-multiproduct distribution and a second that focuses on the modeling of the behavior of product distribution and its affinity for different channels. That is why this thesis presents a general methodology based on the principles of fuzzy logic and its integration into cognitive maps in order to characterize, identify and redesign four (4) existing distribution channels in the “Family Group”, with regard to the defining characteristics of four (4) consumer products related to personal hygiene, which the company is selling. The proposed methodology allowed the identification and characterization of distribution and sales channels, taking into account the fuzzy relations, recorded by an expert in a Fuzzy cognitive map (MCB), which establish the relationship between the characteristics of a product and a channel.Maestrí

Failures to Self-Locate: Counterfactual Ontologies in Contemporary Theatre and Physics

Failures to Self-Locate examines the overlooked influence of quantum mechanics on the development of contemporary theatre aesthetics. Physicists began openly grappling with the ramifications of quantum theory in 1926. The same year, Bertolt Brecht announced his theatre for a scientific age as an arena for atomic man. Unsatisfied with the metaphysical implications of the first formulation of quantum mechanics, known now as the Copenhagen interpretation, physicists and philosophers of science spent the twentieth century advocating, developing, and testing alternative interpretations of the atomic realm. Throughout that same period, the Western stage witnessed a resonant series of developments on Brechts aesthetic project. Placing the interpretations of quantum mechanics in dialogue with contemporary theatre from North America and Europe, this dissertation uncovers how, after an initial point of direct contact between Brecht and physicists, physics and theatre have developed similar ontological paradigms to interpret experiments and performances respectively. In physics, these paradigms fall into two distinct camps: those that salvage strict determinism at the expense of a singular world (collapse-free interpretations of quantum mechanics) and those that safeguard our worlds uniqueness by accepting fundamental stochasticity in reality (collapse interpretations of quantum mechanics). Experimental evidence supports both options, and so these groups must also explain the apparent validity of the other. Theatremakers actively investigated a similar ontological issue, exacerbated by Brechtian stage techniques and centred on the storied divide between reality and representation. Where the physicists navigated between determinism and locality, playwrights return to the ancient tension between fate and free will. Those crosscurrents may bring ruin to the classical protagonist, but the quantum protagonist experiences one framework (e.g., free will) while secretly being ruled by the other (e.g., determinism). So positioned, these protagonists fail to self-locate among their myriad possibilities. This dissertation maps the resonances between the scientific quest to reconcile determinism and stochasticity and the theatrical quest to reconcile free will and fate within the quantum theoretical paradigm, by analyzing the scientific and theatrical output through the lens of counterfactual analysis

Knowledge Modelling and Learning through Cognitive Networks

One of the most promising developments in modelling knowledge is cognitive network science, which aims to investigate cognitive phenomena driven by the networked, associative organization of knowledge. For example, investigating the structure of semantic memory via semantic networks has illuminated how memory recall patterns influence phenomena such as creativity, memory search, learning, and more generally, knowledge acquisition, exploration, and exploitation. In parallel, neural network models for artificial intelligence (AI) are also becoming more widespread as inferential models for understanding which features drive language-related phenomena such as meaning reconstruction, stance detection, and emotional profiling. Whereas cognitive networks map explicitly which entities engage in associative relationships, neural networks perform an implicit mapping of correlations in cognitive data as weights, obtained after training over labelled data and whose interpretation is not immediately evident to the experimenter. This book aims to bring together quantitative, innovative research that focuses on modelling knowledge through cognitive and neural networks to gain insight into mechanisms driving cognitive processes related to knowledge structuring, exploration, and learning. The book comprises a variety of publication types, including reviews and theoretical papers, empirical research, computational modelling, and big data analysis. All papers here share a commonality: they demonstrate how the application of network science and AI can extend and broaden cognitive science in ways that traditional approaches cannot

Speculations

From the Editorial Introduction: "Since I am convinced that nobody reads editorials I will keep my remarks brief. Putting together the inaugural issue of Speculations has been an unusual experience. It has depended on the collusion of fellow speculative types, the help of many anonymous reviewers, the endless patience of designer Thomas Gokey, and more hours than someone in the final year of their PhD should ever spend on a project. Looking over the final product I think it has all been worth it. This is the first journal dedicated to speculative realism and despite the obscurity of that term I think we all understand it as a handy label under which weird realists, continental metaphysicians, object oriented ontologists, transcendental realists, vitalists, and Lovecraftians can unite. This is also, perhaps, the first time a journal can boast that each contributor is also a blogger. This is the reason why Speculations could only ever be an online, open-access journal. …

Struggling to Remember: Perceptions, Potentials and Power in an Age of Mediatised Memory

What role do new, networked and pervasive technologies play in changing individual and collective memory processes? Many recent debates have focused on whether we are in the online era remembering ‘less’ or ‘more’ – informed, perhaps, by a tendency to think of memory spatially and quantifiably as working like an archive. Drawing on the philosophical theorising of Henri Bergson and its development through Gilbert Simondon, this thesis makes two interventions into the field. Firstly, conceptually, it establishes a process-based approach to perception, memory and consciousness in a shift away from the archive metaphor – thinking memory not as informing ‘knowledge of the past’ but ‘action in duration’. It situates the conscious, living being as transindividual – affectively relational to its perceived bodily and social environments, through psychic and collective individuation respectively. Moreover, it considers technologies as forms of transindividual extension of consciousness. Furthermore, it proposes the ‘antimetaphor’ of the anarchive as a conceptual tool with which to understand these durationbased, bodily and technological, action-oriented processes. Secondly, methodologically, it advocates a rephrasing of the question from how much we are remembering to how we are remembering differently. Armed now with a developed theoretical position and methodological approach, the thesis explores through three case-study chapters how personal and more historical pasts may be remembered, individually and more collectively, through new, prevalent technologies of memory such as search engines, forums and social-media sites. Analysing the material experiences of remembering, as well as examining the economic drives of the platforms and wider actors, and the resulting socio-political implications, the thesis sets out the original argument of a contemporary struggle for memory: a complex negotiation of tensions between agencies of the body, the social, and the multifarious and interconnected socio-political and economic interests of the technological platforms and hybridised media systems through which contemporary remembering increasingly takes place

Social Kinds: A User's Manual

This is a dissertation in social ontology, whose goal is to defend a constructivist account of social kinds. First, I show how there is no fully satisfactory characterization or definition of the social, but that we can rely on an intuitive understanding on which entities count as social entities. Second, I clarify what I mean by ‘social category’ or ‘social kind,’ which I define as a partition of entities that bear and share certain social properties. Third, I argue against what I call ‘Natural Boundaries Realism,’ the view according to which there are at least some social kinds that are not constructed. Fourth, I develop my constructivist account, claiming that social kinds are concepts, and showing several ways in which they are created. Fifth, I argue that social kinds may be natural kinds, and that the Stable Property Cluster account of natural kinds is the one that best accommodates the existence of social kinds that are also natural kinds. Finally, I show how values may play a role in the making of social kinds, and how my constructive account accommodates these normative inputs

Race and becoming: the emergent materialities of race in everyday multiculture

This thesis draws on ethnographic fieldwork in Keighley, West Yorkshire, to interrogate the turbulent sociality of everyday multicultures and the temporary, but recursive fixings of race on the ground in interaction. Arguing that the routine framing of race as a social construct in the social sciences has had a 'deadening effect' on our academic talk about race, this study takes a line of flight from social constructionist and abolitionist arguments by addressing the underside of intercultural relations in Keighley through questions of experimentation. Repeatedly questioning what race does and how race functions, this research develops a non-determinist, non-essentialist conception of race that continuously takes form through heterogeneous processes of differentiation in moments of intercultural encounter. The thesis develops an ontology of race that grasps how race is simultaneously fluid and fixing, as it momentarily takes form through arrangement bodies, things and spaces. Coupling this conception of race with theorisatdons of thinking as a layered, practical and distributed activity, I assemble a conception of race thinking as thought-in action. Here race thinking is an outcome of, and distributed across, an entanglement with the world and opens up the half-second delay as a space of prejudice during which the push of race sorts bodies, things and spaces, and coordinates thinking and action. Three empirical chapters each take a different materiality as a point of entry into the dynamic socialities of intercultural relations. A chapter on bodies examines the tendencies and distributions of differently raced bodies on the ground in Keighley. This chapter argues that bodies do not have race, but they become raced as the heterogeneous elements that constitute bodies emerge as sites of intensive difference in interaction. A chapter on the car questions how race rides on the car to examine the force of things in race thinking, and track how suspicion and innuendo stick to, and circulate through, particular objects. The final empirical chapter constructs a topographical approach to urban multiculture to evoke the life， passion and intensities of living with difference. The momentum accumulated through these perspectives works towards a distinct understanding how race is done in Keighley. Through the cumulative force of these chapters I begin to reconstruct understandings of urban multiculture from below, emphasising how urban multiculture in Keighley is practised, visceral and felt