2,731 research outputs found

    Humour in fifteenth-century France: a study of visual evidence

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    Humour in Fifteenth-Century France: A Study of Visual Evidence is an investigation of the development of humour in late medieval France, as expressed in the visual arts. The research identifies and examines comic themes in Valois visual culture through analysis of three case studies. The first is the new iconography for the comedies of Terence, created in the early fifteenth century for the Duke of Berry and the Valois Princes (BnF Lat. 7907A and Arsenal Ms-664 rĂ©serve). The second is the manuscript of RenĂ© d’Anjou’s Livre du Coeur d’Amour Épris (ÖNB Cod. Vind. 2597). The third is the only extant fifteenth-century illuminated manuscript of the Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles (GUL Ms Hunter 252 [U.4.10]). The special emphasis on the arts of the book allows for a discussion of the illuminations in relation to the text they intend to illustrate. Each of these works offers a distinct contribution to the topic by presenting a rich variety of material and different shades, types and forms of humour expressed pictorially. Their nature as manuscripts involves a personal dimension, which narrows their intended audience to specific and well researched historic personalities, facilitating the reconstruction of their tastes, pleasures and sense of humour. Thus, these works permit insights into how humour was expressed, understood and appreciated, and they allow for a nuanced discussion on the comedic and the nature of visuality in late medieval France. Each of the investigated manuscripts has been studied previously, yet their visual humour has not been addressed as an independent and intentional artistic creation with the specific function of provoking amusement and laughter. This thesis is the first such investigation of humour in visual culture for this period, addressing the lacuna in scholarship and showing that there is a rich diversity of visual material that merits analysis. It argues that pictorial expressions of humour became an important focus for leading creative artists in France through the course of the fifteenth century, and it contextualises this art historical phenomenon within the intellectual, social and political history that surrounded it. The reconstruction of the circumstances in which works of art were made, displayed and understood highlights the changes in the prospective audiences for these works, and the ways different viewers engaged and appreciated humour expressed visually. As well as providing new insights into the patrons, this thesis discusses the artists’ approach towards their text of reference, their inventions, innovations and creative impulses. In doing so, the investigation highlights a close connection with theatre and performance, and it identifies the printing industry as a contributing factor for the diffusion of comic iconography. Studying humour is important because it determines social boundaries and functions as a barometer of social, political, sexual and ethical sensibilities. Humour in Fifteenth-Century France: A Study of Visual Evidence addresses a variety of media and permits a closer reading of the role of humour and its functions in Valois France and in Western Europe in the later Middle Ages, expanding our understanding of late medieval concepts of visuality and appreciation of the image

    Multidisciplinary perspectives on Artificial Intelligence and the law

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    This open access book presents an interdisciplinary, multi-authored, edited collection of chapters on Artificial Intelligence (‘AI’) and the Law. AI technology has come to play a central role in the modern data economy. Through a combination of increased computing power, the growing availability of data and the advancement of algorithms, AI has now become an umbrella term for some of the most transformational technological breakthroughs of this age. The importance of AI stems from both the opportunities that it offers and the challenges that it entails. While AI applications hold the promise of economic growth and efficiency gains, they also create significant risks and uncertainty. The potential and perils of AI have thus come to dominate modern discussions of technology and ethics – and although AI was initially allowed to largely develop without guidelines or rules, few would deny that the law is set to play a fundamental role in shaping the future of AI. As the debate over AI is far from over, the need for rigorous analysis has never been greater. This book thus brings together contributors from different fields and backgrounds to explore how the law might provide answers to some of the most pressing questions raised by AI. An outcome of the Católica Research Centre for the Future of Law and its interdisciplinary working group on Law and Artificial Intelligence, it includes contributions by leading scholars in the fields of technology, ethics and the law.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

    Conversations on Empathy

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    In the aftermath of a global pandemic, amidst new and ongoing wars, genocide, inequality, and staggering ecological collapse, some in the public and political arena have argued that we are in desperate need of greater empathy — be this with our neighbours, refugees, war victims, the vulnerable or disappearing animal and plant species. This interdisciplinary volume asks the crucial questions: How does a better understanding of empathy contribute, if at all, to our understanding of others? How is it implicated in the ways we perceive, understand and constitute others as subjects? Conversations on Empathy examines how empathy might be enacted and experienced either as a way to highlight forms of otherness or, instead, to overcome what might otherwise appear to be irreducible differences. It explores the ways in which empathy enables us to understand, imagine and create sameness and otherness in our everyday intersubjective encounters focusing on a varied range of "radical others" – others who are perceived as being dramatically different from oneself. With a focus on the importance of empathy to understand difference, the book contends that the role of empathy is critical, now more than ever, for thinking about local and global challenges of interconnectedness, care and justice

    Conceive and Control: Cultural-Legal Narratives of American Privacy and Reproductive Politics

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    Law and literature share a foundation in narrative. The literary turn in legal scholarship recognizes that the law itself is a form of narrative, one that simultaneously reflects socio-cultural norms and creates social and political regulations with a complex matrix of power. Cultural narratives from the 1950s to the mid-1970s pertaining to reproductive politics, domesticity, and national identity both produce and are productive of legal rulings that govern and restrict private acts of sexuality and speech. The Supreme Court used cases concerning sex and reproduction to enumerate, explicate, and complicate the right to privacy, which appears nowhere in the U.S. Constitution or the Bill of Rights yet formed perhaps the most crucial legal issue of the second half of the twentieth century. But with the Court’s continuous “refinement” and clarification of the right to privacy, the Court has demonstrated how privacy is a Lyotardian differend which, in dividing the inside from the outside, dismantles the logic of both through deconstruction of the margin. Law-determining rulings protecting this right demonstrate a logical impossibility: the Court has made privacy a “right” in such a way that the conditions for exercising it are subject to state surveillance. To be a subject of the law is to relinquish privacy, and privacy requires that the individual subject him/herself to the law by placing the right to privacy within the public domain. Rules-governed practices are entangled in ways both inextricable and unresolvable with notions of privacy. Legal narratives of the right to privacy, therefore, provide a genealogy of failed supplementation, consistent with an array of cultural narratives reflected in contemporaneous literature, film, drama, and political discourse. The Supreme Court’s continual “refinements” of privacy expose the tenuousness of the authority upon which it is based, with the female body positioned as the site of contradiction upon which narratives of domesticity, sexuality, and subjectivity are made legible

    SCALING UP TASK EXECUTION ON RESOURCE-CONSTRAINED SYSTEMS

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    The ubiquity of executing machine learning tasks on embedded systems with constrained resources has made efficient execution of neural networks on these systems under the CPU, memory, and energy constraints increasingly important. Different from high-end computing systems where resources are abundant and reliable, resource-constrained systems only have limited computational capability, limited memory, and limited energy supply. This dissertation focuses on how to take full advantage of the limited resources of these systems in order to improve task execution efficiency from different aspects of the execution pipeline. While the existing literature primarily aims at solving the problem by shrinking the model size according to the resource constraints, this dissertation aims to improve the execution efficiency for a given set of tasks from the following two aspects. Firstly, we propose SmartON, which is the first batteryless active event detection system that considers both the event arrival pattern as well as the harvested energy to determine when the system should wake up and what the duty cycle should be. Secondly, we propose Antler, which exploits the affinity between all pairs of tasks in a multitask inference system to construct a compact graph representation of the task set for a given overall size budget. To achieve the aforementioned algorithmic proposals, we propose the following hardware solutions. One is a controllable capacitor array that can expand the system’s energy storage on-the-fly. The other is a FRAM array that can accommodate multiple neural networks running on one system.Doctor of Philosoph

    Integrated Approaches to Digital-enabled Design for Manufacture and Assembly: A Modularity Perspective and Case Study of Huoshenshan Hospital in Wuhan, China

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    Countries are trying to expand their healthcare capacity through advanced construction, modular innovation, digital technologies and integrated design approaches such as Design for Manufacture and Assembly (DfMA). Within the context of China, there is a need for stronger implementation of digital technologies and DfMA, as well as a knowledge gap regarding how digital-enabled DfMA is implemented. More critically, an integrated approach is needed in addition to DfMA guidelines and digital-enabled approaches. For this research, a mixed method was used. Questionnaires defined the context of Huoshenshan Hospital, namely the healthcare construction in China. Then, Huoshenshan Hospital provided a case study of the first emergency hospital which addressed the uncertainty of COVID-19. This extreme project, a 1,000-bed hospital built in 10 days, implemented DfMA in healthcare construction and provides an opportunity to examine the use of modularity. A workshop with a design institution provided basic facts and insight into past practice and was followed by interviews with 18 designers, from various design disciplines, who were involved in the project. Finally, multiple archival materials were used as secondary data sources. It was found that complexity hinders building systems integration, while reinforcement relationships between multiple dimensions of modularity (across organisation-process-product-supply chain dimensions) are the underlying mechanism that allows for the reduction of complexity and the integration of building systems. Promoting integrated approaches to DfMA relies on adjusting and coupling multi-dimensional modular reinforcement relationships (namely, relationships of modular alignment, modular complement, and modular incentive). Thus, the building systems integrator can use these three approaches to increase the success of digital-enabled DfMA

    Child maintenance obligations in Malta: a qualitative study of fathers' perceptions and experiences

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    Child maintenance obligation is an important social policy issue given the benefits of child maintenance for children’s wellbeing as well as the role child maintenance plays in poverty reduction for payees and their children. This qualitative study sought to address the paucity of social science research on the issue in Malta – the home country of the author – by exploring the attitudes and behaviours of separated and divorced fathers in regard to child maintenance payment obligations. The study was underpinned by a critical realist relational perspective which incorporates a constructionist view of reality as being mediated by the interpretation of events experienced. Semi-structured interviews were held with 31 fathers who had undergone personal separation under Maltese law within the last 10 years. Transcripts were analysed using framework analysis which allowed for continuous comparison of themes for two groups of fathers, namely consenting and dissenting payers. Fathers’ stances towards child maintenance payment obligations were shown to be influenced by perceptions of un/fairness relating to three overarching themes: appraisal of the justice system; appraisal of financial contexts; and views on parenting. These findings provided support, to varying degrees, for four main theoretical frameworks: the theory of negotiated commitments; theory on the symbolic meanings of child maintenance monies; equity theory; and social negotiation theory. The concluding chapter reviews the study outcomes in the light of the aims, reflects on the limitations and originality of the thesis, and provides recommendations for future research. Fathers’ call for financial and parenting egalitarianism indicated a preference for new fatherhood ideals and for the re-evaluation of the role of financial provision, clashing with the gendered assumptions underpinning child maintenance obligations and raising important policy implications in regard to the complexity of challenges for policymakers to give primacy to both children and parents’ needs post-separation

    The Impact of Participatory Budgeting on Health and Well-Being: A Qualitative Case Study of a Deprived Community in London

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    Background Participatory budgeting (PB) is a democratic innovation that enables residents to participate directly and collectively decide how to spend public money in their community. Research demonstrates PB improves social well-being through governance, citizens’ participation, empowerment, and improved democracy. Since 2000, PB has increasingly been used in the UK in community development approaches for improving health and well-being outcomes for people living in deprived communities. Yet little is known about how and why PB may impact health and well-being in deprived communities of the UK. This PhD study sought to explore and explain how the application of PB in the Well London programme impacted the health and well-being of people living in a deprived community in London. Methods The study employed a qualitative case study design adopting the constructivist grounded theory (CGT) methodology of Charmaz (2006) to explore critical themes from interviews with stakeholders of the Well London programme in Haringey Borough. Forty-one stakeholders engaged in planning, co-designing, co-commissioning and co-delivering, or benefitted from three interventions commissioned through PB participated in this study between March 2017 and April 2018. Results A cross-case analysis revealed six pathways through which PB improved health, particularly for the underserved. PB maximised participation and meaningful engagement; enhanced direct demand and response to the community’s needs; individual and collective ownership; action on the social determinants of health; and creative partnership working. These pathways were moderated by the democratic and flexible approach of the PB ethos, particularly the inclusion of residents’ voices in the planning and delivery of the interventions. Residents were motivated to act as agents to change their lives by building positive relationships based on social inclusion and integration. As a result, residents’ self-esteem, sense of belonging, self-confidence, self-worth, and individual sense of belonging and community spirit increased. Residents gained a new zeal and agency to tackle the social determinants of health as they understood them in their lives. Conclusion When done correctly, PB can promote health and well-being and build more robust and resilient communities through community-centred democratic decision-making. Interventions should aim to increase critical consciousness, health literacy, and the capacity in deprived communities to tackle life-course issues that prevent residents from enjoying good health and reduce structural barriers to accessing services or interventions to improve health and reduce inequalities. The outcomes of this study have policy and practice implications for strengthening the design, commissioning, and delivery of health interventions in deprived communities of high-income countries

    Molecular signals of arms race evolution between RNA viruses and their hosts

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    Viruses are intracellular parasites that hijack their hosts’ cellular machinery to replicate themselves. This creates an evolutionary “arms race” between hosts and viruses, where the former develop mechanisms to restrict viral infection and the latter evolve ways to circumvent these molecular barriers. In this thesis, I explore examples of this virus-host molecular interplay, focusing on events in the evolutionary histories of both viruses and hosts. The thesis begins by examining how recombination, the exchange of genetic material between related viruses, expands the genomic diversity of the Sarbecovirus subgenus, which includes SARS-CoV responsible for the 2002 SARS epidemic and SARS-CoV-2 responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic. On the host side, I examine the evolutionary interaction between RNA viruses and two interferon-stimulated genes expressed in hosts. First, I show how the 2â€Č-5â€Č-oligoadenylate synthetase 1 (OAS1) gene of horseshoe bats (Rhinolophoidea), the reservoir host of sarbecoviruses, lost its anti-coronaviral activity at the base of this bat superfamily. By reconstructing the Rhinolophoidea common ancestor OAS1 protein, I first validate the loss of antiviral function and highlight the implications of this event in the virus-host association between sarbecoviruses and horseshoe bat hosts. Second, I focus on the evolution of the human butyrophilin subfamily 3 member A3 (BTN3A3) gene which restricts infection by avian influenza A viruses (IAV). The evolutionary analysis reveals that BTN3A3’s anti-IAV function was gained within the primates and that specific amino acid substitutions need to be acquired in IAVs’ NP protein to evade the human BTN3A3 activity. Gain of BTN3A3-evasion-conferring substitutions correlate with all major human IAV pandemics and epidemics, making these NP residues key markers for IAV transmissibility potential to humans. In the final part of the thesis, I present a novel approach for evaluating dinucleotide compositional biases in virus genomes. An application of my metric on the Flaviviridae virus family uncovers how ancestral host shifts of these viruses correlate with adaptive shifts in their genomes’ dinucleotide representation. Collectively, the contents of this thesis extend our understanding of how viruses interact with their hosts along their intertangled evolution and provide insights into virus host switching and pandemic preparedness
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