“I-Do” Feminism Courtesy of Martha Stewart Weddings and HBC’s Vow To Wow Club : Inventing Modern Matrimonial Tradition with Glue Sticks and Cuisinart

This article examines the wedding gift registry as a newly invented tradition and part of the increasing commodification of everyday life and its rites of passage. The research involves both a deconstructive discursive analysis and a critique of the visual rhetoric in advertisements promoting registries for the newly engaged. To consider the cultural context within which marketing for wedding gift registries is proliferating, the author begins with the stories of two connected figures, both lifted from national newswires. Then she argues that the escalating trend of the wedding registry gains momentum because of its placement between these two conjoined images, namely: the spectre of the scandalous and hysterical “runaway bride” and her sister, the hip and paradoxical “I-Do Feminist.”Cet article examine la liste de mariage en tant que tradition nouvellement inventée et comme faisant partie de la mercantilisation croissante de la vie quotidienne et de ses rites de passage. La recherche implique à la fois une analyse déconstructiviste du discours et une critique de la rhétorique visuelle des publicités faisant la promotion des listes de mariage pour les nouveaux fiancés. Afin de considérer le contexte à l’intérieur duquel prolifèrent ces mises en marché des listes de mariage, l’auteure commence par les histoires de deux représentations connectées, tirées toutes deux d’émissions nationales. Elle soutient ensuite que la tendance à l’escalade que l’on constate dans les listes de mariage gagne en vigueur parce qu’elles se situent entre ces deux images conjointes que sont : le spectre de la scandaleuse et hystérique « mariée en fuite » et sa soeur branchée et paradoxale, la féministe « Oui, je le veux »

S matrix from matrix product states

We use the matrix product state formalism to construct stationary scattering states of elementary excitations in generic one-dimensional quantum lattice systems. Our method is applied to the spin-1 Heisenberg antiferromagnet, for which we calculate the full magnon-magnon S matrix for arbitrary momenta and spin, the two-particle contribution to the spectral function and the magnetization curve. As our method provides an accurate microscopic representation of the interaction between elementary excitations, we envisage the description of low-energy dynamics of one-dimensional spin chains in terms of these particlelike excitations.Comment: Improved version, extra supplemental materia

Negotiating the modern cross-class ‘model home’:domestic experiences in Basil Spence’s Claremont Court

This article investigates the spatial articulation of architecture and home through the exploration of current domestic experiences in Basil Spence’s Claremont Court housing scheme (1959-1962), Edinburgh. How architecture and home are both idealized and lived is the backdrop for a discussion that draws on the concept of “model home,” or physical representation of a domestic ideal. The article reads Claremont Court as an architectural prototype of the modern domestic ideal, before exploring its reception by five of its households through the use of visual methods and semistructured interviews. Receiving the model home involves negotiating between ideal and lived homes. Building on this idea, the article contributes with a focus on the spatiality of such reception, showing how it is modulated according to the architectural affordances that the “model home” represents. The article expands on scholarship on architecture and home with empirical evidence that argues the reciprocal spatiality of home

The Augmented Lagrange Multiplier Method for Exact Recovery of Corrupted Low-Rank Matrices

This paper proposes scalable and fast algorithms for solving the Robust PCA problem, namely recovering a low-rank matrix with an unknown fraction of its entries being arbitrarily corrupted. This problem arises in many applications, such as image processing, web data ranking, and bioinformatic data analysis. It was recently shown that under surprisingly broad conditions, the Robust PCA problem can be exactly solved via convex optimization that minimizes a combination of the nuclear norm and the $\ell^1$-norm . In this paper, we apply the method of augmented Lagrange multipliers (ALM) to solve this convex program. As the objective function is non-smooth, we show how to extend the classical analysis of ALM to such new objective functions and prove the optimality of the proposed algorithms and characterize their convergence rate. Empirically, the proposed new algorithms can be more than five times faster than the previous state-of-the-art algorithms for Robust PCA, such as the accelerated proximal gradient (APG) algorithm. Moreover, the new algorithms achieve higher precision, yet being less storage/memory demanding. We also show that the ALM technique can be used to solve the (related but somewhat simpler) matrix completion problem and obtain rather promising results too. We further prove the necessary and sufficient condition for the inexact ALM to converge globally. Matlab code of all algorithms discussed are available at http://perception.csl.illinois.edu/matrix-rank/home.htmlComment: Please cite "Zhouchen Lin, Risheng Liu, and Zhixun Su, Linearized Alternating Direction Method with Adaptive Penalty for Low Rank Representation, NIPS 2011." (available at arXiv:1109.0367) instead for a more general method called Linearized Alternating Direction Method This manuscript first appeared as University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign technical report #UILU-ENG-09-2215 in October 2009 Zhouchen Lin, Risheng Liu, and Zhixun Su, Linearized Alternating Direction Method with Adaptive Penalty for Low Rank Representation, NIPS 2011. (available at http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.0367

Quark Mass Matrix with a Structure of a Rank One Matrix Plus a Unit Matrix

A quark mass matrix model $M_q=M_e^{1/2} O_q M_e^{1/2}$ is proposed where $M_e^{1/2}={\rm diag}(\sqrt{m_e},\sqrt{m_\mu},\sqrt{m_\tau})$ and $O_q$ is a unit matrix plus a rank one matrix. Up- and down-quark mass matrices $M_u$ and $M_d$ are described in terms of charged lepton masses and additional three parameters (one in $M_u$ and two in $M_d$). The model can predict reasonable quark mass ratios (not only $m_u/m_c$, $m_c/m_t$, $m_d/m_s$ and $m_s/m_b$, but also $m_u/m_d$) and Kobayashi-Maskawa matrix elements.Comment: 8 pages, Latex, no figure