On binary opposition and binarism: A long-distance dialogue between decolonial critique and the Lotmanian semiotics

While addressing the decolonial critique of Eurocentric modernity and the call for alternative cosmo-visions, this article retraces Juri Lotman’s culturological exploration towards the concept of ternarity [тернарность]: the scrutiny of the so-called binarism is what connects – without overlapping – the two perspectives. This long-distance dialogue will be built starting with the key notion of binary opposition, which will be analysed as a decolonial problem (Part I) and as a culturological problem (Part II). The analysis will focus on two central issues that stem from the either-or logic: the “othering mindset”, and the culture–nature dualism

Commodity-based Freight Activity on Inland Waterways through the Fusion of Public Datasets for Multimodal Transportation Planning

Within the U.S., the 18.6 billion tons of goods currently moved along the multimodal transportation system are expected to grow 51% by 2045. Most of those goods are transported by roadways. However, several benefits can be realized by shippers and consumers by shifting freight to more efficient modes, such as inland waterways, or adopting a multimodal scheme. To support such freight growth sustainably and efficiently, federal legislation calls for the development of plans, methods, and tools to identify and prioritize future multimodal transportation infrastructure needs. However, given the historical mode-specific approach to freight data collection, analysis, and modeling, challenges remain to adopt a fully multimodal approach that integrates underrepresented modes, such as waterways, into multimodal forecasting tools to identify and prioritize transportation infrastructure needs. Examples of such challenges are data heterogeneity, confidentiality, limitations in terms of spatial and temporal coverage, high cost associated with data collection, subjectivity in surveys responses, etc. To overcome these challenges, this work fuses data across a variety of novel transportation sources to close existing gaps in freight data needed to support multimodal long-range freight planning. In particular, the objective of this work is to develop methods to allow integration of inland waterway transportation into commodity-based freight forecasting models, by leveraging Automatic Identification System (AIS) data. The following approaches are presented in this dissertation: i) Maritime Automatic Identification System (AIS) data is mapped to a detailed inland navigable waterway network, allowing for an improved representation of waterway modes into multimodal freight travel demand models which currently suffer from unbalanced representation of waterways. Validation results show the model correctly identifies 84% stops at inland waterway ports and 83.5% of trips crossing locks. ii) AIS and truck Global Positioning System (GPS) data are fused to a multimodal network to identify the area of impact of a freight investment, providing a single methodology and data source to compare and contrast diverse transportation infrastructure investments. This method identifies parallel truck and vessel flows indicating potential for modal shift. iii) Truck GPS and maritime Lock Performance Monitoring System (LPMS) data are fused via a multi-commodity assignment model to characterize and quantify annual commodity throughput at port terminals on inland waterways, generating new data from public datasets, to support estimation of commodity-based freight fluidity performance measures. Results show that 84% of ports had less than a 20% difference between estimated and observed truck volumes. iv) AIS, LPMS, and truck GPS datasets are fused to disaggregate estimated annual commodity port throughput to vessel trips on inland waterways. Vessel trips characterized by port of origin, destination, path, timestamp, and commodity carried, are mapped to a detailed inland waterway network, allowing for a detailed commodity flow analysis, previously unavailable in the public domain. The novel, repeatable, data-driven methods and models proposed in this work are applied to the 43 freight port terminals located on the Arkansas River. These models help to evaluate network performance, identify and prioritize multimodal freight transportation infrastructure needs, and introduce a unique focus on modal shift towards inland waterway transportation

Disentangling Discourse: Networks, Entropy, and Social Movements

Our daily online conversations with friends, family, colleagues, and strangers weave an intricate network of interactions. From these networked discussions emerge themes and topics that transcend the scope of any individual conversation. In turn, these themes direct the discourse of the network and continue to ebb and flow as the interactions between individuals shape the topics themselves. This rich loop between interpersonal conversations and overarching topics is a wonderful example of a complex system: the themes of a discussion are more than just the sum of its parts. Some of the most socially relevant topics emerging from these online conversations are those pertaining to racial justice issues. Since the shooting of Black teenager Michael Brown by White police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri, the protest hashtag #BlackLivesMatter has amplified critiques of extrajudicial shootings of Black Americans. In response to #BlackLivesMatter, other online users have adopted #AllLivesMatter, a counter-protest hashtag whose content argues that equal attention should be given to all lives regardless of race. Together these contentious hashtags each shape clashing narratives that echo previous civil rights battles and illustrate ongoing racial tension between police officers and Black Americans. These narratives have taken place on a massive scale with millions of online posts and articles debating the sentiments of black lives matter and all lives matter. Since no one person could possibly read everything written in this debate, comprehensively understanding these conversations and their underlying networks requires us to leverage tools from data science, machine learning, and natural language processing. In Chapter 2, we utilize methodology from network science to measure to what extent #BlackLivesMatter and #AllLivesMatter are slacktivist movements, and the effect this has on the diversity of topics discussed within these hashtags. In Chapter 3, we precisely quantify the ways in which the discourse of #BlackLivesMatter and #AllLivesMatter diverge through the application of information-theoretic techniques, validating our results at the topic level from Chapter 2. These entropy-based approaches provide the foundation for powerful automated analysis of textual data, and we explore more generally how they can be used to construct a human-in-the-loop topic model in Chapter 4. Our work demonstrates that there is rich potential for weaving together social science domain knowledge with computational tools in the study of language, networks, and social movements

The Regulation of Naval Mines in Maritime Warfare

A naval mine drifting away from where it was moored or deployed can easily cause a significant impediment of States’ navigational rights and can in the worst case pose a serious threat to sailors’ and civilians’ lives. The same may be said about mines that remain active after the cessation of an armed conflict. For this reason, the topic of this dissertation is the regulation of naval mines, focusing on inter alia the duties a belligerent State has if the deployed mines drift away or if the armed conflict ends, as well as potential shortcomings of that regulation

Acquisition and Relevance of Geotagged Information in Tourism

In the case of tourism applications, it is particularly evident that geography is emerging as a fundamental principle for structuring Web resources. Recent improvements in semantic and geographic Web technology, often referred to as the Geospatial Web, acknowledge the relevance of adding location metadata to existing databases and accessing the vast amounts of information stored in these databases via geospatial services. This paper outlines the acquisition of geospatial context information, describes usage scenarios and real-world applications in the tourism industry, and presents an automated software tool for annotating large collections of Web documents automatically. The quality of this tool is tested based upon Web pages from the Austrian National Tourism Organization. Initial results are encouraging and help define a roadmap for further improving the automated tagging of tourism resources

Trapped in mirror-images: The rhetoric of maps in Israel/Palestine

The map of Israel/Palestine has long been used by both Israelis and Palestinians, from their unequal power positions, as a celebrated national symbol. It is virtually the same map, depicting a sliver-shaped land between River Jordan and the Mediterranean, two overlapping homelands in one territory. Thus, a single geo-body appears to contain two antagonistic and asymmetrical nations, locked in a bitter struggle. The article interprets the uncanny mirror-maps of Israel/Palestine by drawing on recent work in critical cartography. One approach has read maps as rhetorical claims for power and over territory; indeed, the mirror-maps of Israel/Palestine are often read as indications of maximalist territorial ambitions and hidden wishes to “wipe the other off the map”. However, this article suggests an alter- native, de-territorialised reading of political maps as “empty signifiers” of multiple meanings. Following analysis of maps as objects of performance, whose meaning depends on users and contexts, the article emphasises the ritualistic sacralisation of the Israel/Palestine map. Embedded within discourses of memory and history, maps are tools of narrating the nation, often in diasporic contexts, carrying with them vast emotional significance to both peoples. These issues were largely left unaddressed by the territorial paradigm which has dominated scholarship and political negotiations. Moving the discussion of geography beyond narrow territorial claims towards an appreciation of the richness and heterogeneity of space is crucial, yet faces formidable challenges both politically and conceptually

Military applications of geological engineering

This work examines the premise that military engineering and geological engineering are intellectually paired and overlapped in practice to a significant extent. Geological engineering is an established, albeit young, academic discipline that enjoys wide industry and civil demand and is supported by many professional organizations. In contrast, military engineering is an ancient, empirically derived training or OJT program with practice-based trade-associations that has narrow government-only utility. The premise is formed by decades-long observation of U. S. Army military engineer officers completing a Master of Science degree in geological engineering as a complement to their practice-based training in military engineering at the Captains Career Course of the U.S. Army Engineer School. Almost everywhere has some existing data on the local geology for civil purposes, yet these are ignored, not accessible or not translated to military purposes. A description of the intersection between military and geological engineering is followed by comparison the practice of the geological and military engineer. Research and intellectual development is projected to fill current gaps in military considerations by geological engineers. Finally, steps to share these concepts and convince military engineers to adopt and extend the geological underpinnings of their profession are outlined. This work serves both a personal and professional interest. Previous personal work at the intersection of military scholarship and engineering underlie this premise --Abstract, page iv