Out of Bounds

Lawrence v. Texas creates a crisis for inclusive constitutionalism. Too often, advocates of inclusion and tolerance wish to include only those ideas and groups with which they agree. The test for true inclusion and tolerance, however, is whether we are willing to protect groups when they engage in conduct of which we disapprove. It follows that the boundaries of inclusion cannot be established simply by moral argument; yet, any plausible version of constitutional law must use some method to bound the people and activity that it protects. Defenders of inclusive constitutionalism have not been successful in identifying a method, independent of moral argument, for bounding constitutional rights. This difficulty can best be addressed by modifying our ambitions for constitutional law. Instead of a method for requiring agreement, constitutional law might be reconceptualized as a method for destabilizing all boundaries, thereby reconciling groups with widely different moral views to the political order

Out Of Bounds

In lieu of an abstract, below is the essay\u27s first paragraph. I bounded into the locker room full of excitement. It was game day, and as usual, I was longing to play. There is nothing that I would rather be doing, I thought, as I headed to my locker to change. I wanted to go on and make millions of dollars, and tonight\u27s game was my ticket because in the bleachers of our rinky-dink little high school gym there was a college scout that came all the way from Kentucky to watch me play. I wasn\u27t worried though, because I knew I would play well. I always did

Out of Bounds

Promotional material for the October 18, 2016 performance of Out of Bounds.https://opus.govst.edu/cpa_memorabilia/1290/thumbnail.jp

Out of bounds

Humans have an inescapable desire for rationality, structure, and order. We seek efficiency and certainty in our individual and communal lives. We have been encouraged to believe that most things are under our control until something strikes us and brings to consciousness the limits of our knowledge. It’s usually nature’s wild power that overwhelms our faculty of reason and reminds us of our limits. Philosophers called this sensation of overwhelm in the face of nature the sublime experience. In modern cities, surrounded by skyscrapers, we are reminded of our own technological achievements, while nature feels disconnected and distant. Yet, if we allow ourselves to be vulnerable, even in urban environments, nature’s mysteriousness and ongoing transformation leads us to feel a full spectrum of emotions as it plays with our perception and imagination. In my textile collection for interiors, I use the skyscraper and its straight, repetitive lines as an underlying reference to our own underlying structural laws and rationality, highlighting at the same time how its reflective and translucent surfaces mirror the sky’s endless and active transformation. With emphasis on materiality, form, texture, and color, my collection speaks to the phenomena observable in both universes—rigid, urban, man-made, alongside natural, transient, and vast—as a reminder that we and our achievements are part of nature’s power and that we are, in some sense “one with the world.” In this thesis book, I narrate the profound effects of nature experienced by my grandmother and explore the history and philosophy of the sublime, as well the concept of rationalism. I also document my thesis collection, in which these concepts are physically manifested to act as reminders of our vulnerability and humanity

Metalepsis out of Bounds

This is a review of the panel “Metalepsis out of Bounds” presented at the 2013 ENN conference. The three convenors proposed complementary remarks to the extent that they either questioned the conceptualization, examined the functioning of metalepsis or applied theoretical models to textual material. Beside an in depth reflection upon the concept, broader questions concerning narrative and popular assumptions of narratology arose

On PAC-Bayesian Bounds for Random Forests

Existing guarantees in terms of rigorous upper bounds on the generalization error for the original random forest algorithm, one of the most frequently used machine learning methods, are unsatisfying. We discuss and evaluate various PAC-Bayesian approaches to derive such bounds. The bounds do not require additional hold-out data, because the out-of-bag samples from the bagging in the training process can be exploited. A random forest predicts by taking a majority vote of an ensemble of decision trees. The first approach is to bound the error of the vote by twice the error of the corresponding Gibbs classifier (classifying with a single member of the ensemble selected at random). However, this approach does not take into account the effect of averaging out of errors of individual classifiers when taking the majority vote. This effect provides a significant boost in performance when the errors are independent or negatively correlated, but when the correlations are strong the advantage from taking the majority vote is small. The second approach based on PAC-Bayesian C-bounds takes dependencies between ensemble members into account, but it requires estimating correlations between the errors of the individual classifiers. When the correlations are high or the estimation is poor, the bounds degrade. In our experiments, we compute generalization bounds for random forests on various benchmark data sets. Because the individual decision trees already perform well, their predictions are highly correlated and the C-bounds do not lead to satisfactory results. For the same reason, the bounds based on the analysis of Gibbs classifiers are typically superior and often reasonably tight. Bounds based on a validation set coming at the cost of a smaller training set gave better performance guarantees, but worse performance in most experiments

Bounds on the Coefficients of Tension and Flow Polynomials

The goal of this article is to obtain bounds on the coefficients of modular and integral flow and tension polynomials of graphs. To this end we make use of the fact that these polynomials can be realized as Ehrhart polynomials of inside-out polytopes. Inside-out polytopes come with an associated relative polytopal complex and, for a wide class of inside-out polytopes, we show that this complex has a convex ear decomposition. This leads to the desired bounds on the coefficients of these polynomials.Comment: 16 page

The New F_L Measurement from HERA and the Dipole Model

From the new measurement of F_L at HERA we derive fixed-Q^2 averages . We compare these with bounds which are rigorous in the framework of the standard dipole picture. The bounds are sharpened by including information on the charm structure function F_2^(c). Within the experimental errors the bounds are respected by the data. But for 3.5 GeV^2 <= Q^2 <= 20 GeV^2 the central values of the data are close to and in some cases even above the bounds. Data on F_L/F_2 significantly exceeding the bounds would rule out the standard dipole picture at these kinematic points. We discuss, furthermore, how data respecting the bounds but coming close to them can give information on questions like colour transparency, saturation and the dependencies of the dipole-proton cross section on the energy and the dipole size.Comment: 12 page