2,236 research outputs found
Where Only One Is Free: The Roots of 'Oriental Despotism' in the Middle East
This is an article prepared for an unpublished volume on freedom. The version made available in Digital Common was supplied by the author
Cryptic Distant Relatives Are Common in Both Isolated and Cosmopolitan Genetic Samples
Although a few hundred single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) suffice to infer close familial relationships, high density genome-wide SNP data make possible the inference of more distant relationships such as 2nd to 9th cousinships. In order to characterize the relationship between genetic similarity and degree of kinship given a timeframe of 100â300 years, we analyzed the sharing of DNA inferred to be identical by descent (IBD) in a subset of individuals from the 23andMe customer database (nâ=â22,757) and from the Human Genome Diversity Panel (HGDP-CEPH, nâ=â952). With data from 121 populations, we show that the average amount of DNA shared IBD in most ethnolinguistically-defined populations, for example Native American groups, Finns and Ashkenazi Jews, differs from continentally-defined populations by several orders of magnitude. Via extensive pedigree-based simulations, we determined bounds for predicted degrees of relationship given the amount of genomic IBD sharing in both endogamous and âunrelatedâ population samples. Using these bounds as a guide, we detected tens of thousands of 2nd to 9th degree cousin pairs within a heterogenous set of 5,000 Europeans. The ubiquity of distant relatives, detected via IBD segments, in both ethnolinguistic populations and in large âunrelatedâ populations samples has important implications for genetic genealogy, forensics and genotype/phenotype mapping studies
Discovering Implicational Knowledge in Wikidata
Knowledge graphs have recently become the state-of-the-art tool for
representing the diverse and complex knowledge of the world. Examples include
the proprietary knowledge graphs of companies such as Google, Facebook, IBM, or
Microsoft, but also freely available ones such as YAGO, DBpedia, and Wikidata.
A distinguishing feature of Wikidata is that the knowledge is collaboratively
edited and curated. While this greatly enhances the scope of Wikidata, it also
makes it impossible for a single individual to grasp complex connections
between properties or understand the global impact of edits in the graph. We
apply Formal Concept Analysis to efficiently identify comprehensible
implications that are implicitly present in the data. Although the complex
structure of data modelling in Wikidata is not amenable to a direct approach,
we overcome this limitation by extracting contextual representations of parts
of Wikidata in a systematic fashion. We demonstrate the practical feasibility
of our approach through several experiments and show that the results may lead
to the discovery of interesting implicational knowledge. Besides providing a
method for obtaining large real-world data sets for FCA, we sketch potential
applications in offering semantic assistance for editing and curating Wikidata
Matariki, commodity culture, and multiple identities
The event known as Matariki, the rising of the Pleiades in winter, which MÄori take as the mark of the beginning of a new year, was not a strong feature of the wider public sphere for most of the 20th century. Since 2001, however, when Te Taura Whiri, the MÄori Language Commission, published an explanatory booklet with the aim of reviving interest in Matariki as an aide to the maintenance of te reo, it has been promoted by several quasi-governmental institutions, especially the national museum, Te Papa, as a winter festival for all New Zealanders. Its main public presence to date has been through media products: posters, banners, websites, television programmes, newspaper features, calendars, some theatrical performances and physical commemoration ceremonies.
The larger project, of which this paper represents an initial descriptive and positioning phase, is a continuation of the researcher's long-standing interest in the intersections of religiosity, culture, and media as they are active in the environment of Aotearoa New Zealand. It assumes, building on theorists such as Bellah and Lundby that the creation of such festivals is an act of 'civil religiosity' that attempts to create and strengthen national community around a set of numinous symbols.
However, the development of an enterprise such as Matariki is pursued in a complex political field, where broad agreement across various factions is needed before the festival can take on an enduring material and symbolic existence. In investigating the factors that will determine the future of Matariki it is relevant to consider the interaction of three factors in particular: the ethno-political history of New Zealand; the characteristics of contemporary reflexive spirituality, which are intertwined with commodificatory tendencies and thirdly, the impacts of increasing globalisation on the parameters of identity-formation for citizens in late-modern societies
Discovering the prehistory of multilingual situations in the lexicon. An empirical study on the Caucasian Urum vocabulary
Multilingual situations are reflected in the lexicon; by consequence, lexical borrowings are powerful evidence for language contact in the prehistory of linguistic communities. This article presents an empirical study on the lexical knowledge of Caucasian Urum speakers, i. e., ethnic Greek speakers in the Small Caucasus, who are bilingual in a variety of Turkish (Urum) and Russian. The analysis is based on the established assumption that certain concepts are cross-linguistically associated with a certain likelihood of borrowing. Based on this assumption the data from lexical knowledge allow for insights with respect to the substrate/superstrate status of the involved languages in a multilingual situation and provide evidence for the type of relation (genetic or contact-induced) between compared languages
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Discovering qualitative empirical laws
In this paper we describe GLAUBER, an AI system that models the scientific discovery of qualitative empirical laws. We have tested the system on data from the history of early chemistry, and it has rediscovered such concepts as acids, alkalis, and salts, as well as laws relating these concepts. After discussing GLAUBER we examine the program's relation to other discovery systems, particularly methods for conceptual clustering and language acquisition
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