586 research outputs found

    Sensing Collectives: Aesthetic and Political Practices Intertwined

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    Are aesthetics and politics really two different things? The book takes a new look at how they intertwine, by turning from theory to practice. Case studies trace how sensory experiences are created and how collective interests are shaped. They investigate how aesthetics and politics are entangled, both in building and disrupting collective orders, in governance and innovation. This ranges from populist rallies and artistic activism over alternative lifestyles and consumer culture to corporate PR and governmental policies. Authors are academics and artists. The result is a new mapping of the intermingling and co-constitution of aesthetics and politics in engagements with collective orders

    Learning Logic Programs by Discovering Higher-Order Abstractions

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    Discovering novel abstractions is important for human-level AI. We introduce an approach to discover higher-order abstractions, such as map, filter, and fold. We focus on inductive logic programming, which induces logic programs from examples and background knowledge. We introduce the higher-order refactoring problem, where the goal is to compress a logic program by introducing higher-order abstractions. We implement our approach in STEVIE, which formulates the higher-order refactoring problem as a constraint optimisation problem. Our experimental results on multiple domains, including program synthesis and visual reasoning, show that, compared to no refactoring, STEVIE can improve predictive accuracies by 27% and reduce learning times by 47%. We also show that STEVIE can discover abstractions that transfer to different domain

    Systems of State-Owned Enterprises: from Public Entrepreneurship to State Shareholding

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    This thesis outlines a new analytical perspective on state ownership through the original concept of systems of state-owned enterprises (SOSOEs). It is argued that the SOSOEs concept adequately captures the evolution of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in modern capitalist economies, challenging and enriching existing economic theories as well as contributing to reinstate the policy instrumentality of state ownership. The concept is defined from a comparative case study analysis of two distinct SOSOEs, operating within the same national context in different time periods. The first case concerns the Istituto per la Ricostruzione Industriale (IRI), Italy’s former and most relevant state holding company, that played a central role in the Country’s post-WWII economic development. This thesis advances an interpretation of IRI’s economic function based on an original empirical investigation of its archival and documentary sources, focusing on its main public policy missions and on its display of industrial entrepreneurship features. The second case examines the current Italian system of SOEs, assessing the still relevant presence of SOEs in the Italian national context and evaluating the overall governance of the system through a set of interviews with leading executives. Despite the similarity in size and sectoral diversification, the two SOSOEs differ significantly in terms of their operating configurations. In fact, they could be assimilated to two dichotomous ideal types: the IRI SOSOEs represents a template for the policy-oriented and dynamic ‘public entrepreneurship’ model, while the current Italian SOSOEs resembles the policy-neutral and passive ‘state shareholding’ variant. Implicit in these results is the opportunity for current SOSOEs to embrace a public entrepreneurship configuration, in order to exploit the full policy potential of state ownership in driving economic change. The thesis concludes with a proposal for reforming Italy’s current SOSOEs via the creation of a state holding company

    Exploring the dynamics of the talent development environment in professional rugby academies

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    This thesis aims to investigate the factors that determine the impact that Academy Managers in Rugby League have upon the youth-to-senior transition of talent in an elite professional academy. Various methods, models, and processes for supporting national strategies have been identified in previous research, which has informed the success of an academy talent pathway. However, relatively little is known about how academies develop their players and coaching staff in these challenging professional environments. Therefore, this research further develops knowledge in this area, specifically concerning the growth and development of academy staff. The actions of these Academy Managers and their key stakeholders are a major area of interest within this research project with explicit attention paid to those in charge of the day-to-day player-coach interactions, especially the Academy Manager. Talent development research to date has not yet determined the impact the Academy Manager has on these stakeholders and there remains a paucity of evidence on ‘the what, the how, and the why’ of their practice. Therefore, a more specific overview of the ‘talent development challenge’ needs to be provided. In short, the intricate, dynamic environments in which the Academy Manager exists and what they are working to achieve, will be described through a series of empirical studies illustrating how these are operationalised within the academy context. Various phased qualitative data collection methods were deployed in this investigation, allowing an exploration of the environment, the considerations, and the experiences of the stakeholders within the Academy Manager’s domain. Critical Realism is adopted as the underpinning conceptual lens which in turn led the researcher to cross a threshold of understanding, by identifying with the concept of Embodied Pedagogy in physical decision-making, opening a new way of thinking around investigatory research. Notably, creating an innovative, cogent, and supportive bond between Embodied Pedagogy methods and the Critical Realism paradigm. Indeed, this research has been exploratory and aimed to develop and assess this theory-driven partnership by using methods, such as reflective narrative, narrative interviews, focus groups, case studies, and narrative inquiry, all of which elicit further understanding within the lived experiences and rich insights of the target demographic. In addition, these methods made evident some of the various barriers and enablers that influenced the agency in the Academy Manager’s daily interactions between the stakeholders and the environment. The findings from this sequence of studies identified the need for a practical tool with structures that might better enable Academy Managers to recognise and deal with the mixed influences of the social milieu on informal learning. This resulted in the design of a new and ground-breaking multidimensional model called the Talent Development Self-Navigation Framework (TDSNF). National Governing Bodies and Academy Managers can use this new model to facilitate and encourage a critical approach to collaborative learning within an Academy workforce. Amongst the key findings, was a disconnect between the skills that Academy Managers require for the role and the reality of what they felt confident and competent in. Therefore, resources developed within the TDSNF tasks displayed results that were a positive social validation of the framework and that the associated tools have merit. Looking to the future, discussing the bio-ecological role Academy Managers have in their environment is essential. This research yielded results that demonstrate it is imperative to examine the Academy Manager’s interplay with the rest of the stakeholders from a pathway that needs perspective. Consequently, these Academy Managers will be able to offer more practical ways of presenting the Academy’s foundational wants and the stakeholders’ fundamental needs. These are relevant considerations for all people involved in the talent development system including the Academy’s Chief Executives, National Coach Developers, National Academy Leads, and National Governing Bodies. The key messages around the impact of bespoke strategies on developing talent in a professional academy highlight the need to continue to explore these relationships. The results of this research tentatively indicate how future research directions could assist professional clubs or governing bodies and academic institutions to work together to disseminate knowledge on relevant topics and theories in the development of an Academy Manager. The most obvious finding to emerge from this study is that Academy Managers (in Rugby League) can best learn to perform their difficult work of navigating the chaotic academy environment, while in parallel, helping to inform how National Governing Bodies might best optimise outcomes for their sporting communities

    The Spanish anarchists and the Russian Revolution, 1917-24

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    Defence date: 25 June 2019Examining Board: Professor Alexander Etkind, European University Institute; Professor Federico Romero, European University Institute; Professor Stephen Smith, University of Oxford; Professor Chris Ealham, University of St LouisThis thesis explores the impact of the Russian Revolution on the Spanish anarchist movement in the years 1917-24. Initially, anarchists in Spain welcomed the news of the Russian Revolution euphorically. They embraced many aspects of Bolshevik ideology. The anarcho-syndicalist National Confederation of Labour participated in the first congresses of the Comintern and sent two official delegations to Russia. Yet this enthusiasm was short-lived. By the summer of 1921 anarchists began to turn against Soviet Russia. They reaffirmed their libertarian credentials and articulated an anarchist critique of Bolshevism. In June 1922, the Confederation abandoned the Comintern. This thesis traces the curve of enthusiasm followed by scepticism and hostility that characterised the Spanish libertarians’ attitude towards revolutionary Russia. It grounds these developments in the changing Spanish, Russian, and European political contexts, which went from a phase of revolutionary effervescence in 1917-20 to a phase of defeat and stagnation for the labour movement and of counterrevolutionary offensive in 1921-24. This thesis contends that the short anarchist romance with Bolshevism was not a mere misunderstanding brought about by the lack of reliable news on Russia, as much of the historiography has claimed, but represented a genuine rapprochement that had political causes: the attenuation of the divide between radical Marxists and anarchists during the First World War, the feeling of intense enthusiasm and optimism that set in after the Bolshevik victory, and the temptation to capitalise politically on the Russian Revolution and use it to outcompete the Social Democrats. The situation changed drastically after 1921, when Spanish labour experienced sudden defeat in a dispiring international juncture. Anarchists faced the unwelcome competition of the newly created Spanish Communist Party, which posed as the official representative of the Comintern in Spain. In this context, optimism turned into bitterness, preparing the ground for the turn against the Bolsheviks

    From lobby to party : organisational development and change in the Scottish Home Rule Movement, 1880-1930

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    In this thesis I trace the processes of organisational development and change in the Scottish Home Rule movement between 1880 and 1930. Employing an ecological framework, I detail the field of organisations that developed in two distinct periods, 1886-1914 and 1918-1930, and the way their interactions facilitated the emergence of new organisational forms, principally lobbies and parties. To bring discipline to this jumble of events, I employ three formal models to colligate the qualitative data presented: 1) co-evolutionary dynamics; 2) ecological control; and 3) the garbage model of organisational choice. My argument follows three broad moves. The first is movement away from nationalism to contentious politics as a frame of reference for these events. The second move is away from substances to a focus on intercalated processes. This entails a focus on networks of interaction, sequences of attention and social matching dynamics. The third is a move away from teleology and to a realisation of the contingent nature of these events. There was no necessity for either lobbies or parties to form. Rather organisational emergence was a contingent process of refunctionality—the use of existing organisational forms for new purposes. Operationalizing these processes I focus on the way that changes in the operating environment shaped three mechanisms: careers; organisational embedding; and ecological control. What I discover is that organisational change in the Scottish Home Rule movement was product of the matching of availability, attention and authorisation to act

    Differentiable Inductive Logic Programming in High-Dimensional Space

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    Synthesizing large logic programs through symbolic Inductive Logic Programming (ILP) typically requires intermediate definitions. However, cluttering the hypothesis space with intensional predicates typically degrades performance. In contrast, gradient descent provides an efficient way to find solutions within such high-dimensional spaces. Neuro-symbolic ILP approaches have not fully exploited this so far. We propose extending the {\delta}ILP approach to inductive synthesis with large-scale predicate invention, thus allowing us to exploit the efficacy of high-dimensional gradient descent. We show that large-scale predicate invention benefits differentiable inductive synthesis through gradient descent and allows one to learn solutions for tasks beyond the capabilities of existing neuro-symbolic ILP systems. Furthermore, we achieve these results without specifying the precise structure of the solution within the language bias.Comment: 8 pages, under revie
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