15,588 research outputs found
Grasping nothing: a study of minimal ontologies and the sense of music
If music were to have a proper sense – one in which it is truly given – one might reasonably place this in sound and aurality. I contend, however, that no such sense exists; rather, the sense of music takes place, and it does so with the impossible. To this end, this thesis – which is a work of philosophy and music – advances an ontology of the impossible (i.e., it thinks the being of what, properly speaking, can have no being) and considers its implications for music, articulating how ontological aporias – of the event, of thinking the absolute, and of sovereignty’s dismemberment – imply senses of music that are anterior to sound. John Cage’s Silent Prayer, a nonwork he never composed, compels a rerethinking of silence on the basis of its contradictory status of existence; Florian Hecker et al.’s Speculative Solution offers a basis for thinking absolute music anew to the precise extent that it is a discourse of meaninglessness; and Manfred Werder’s [yearn] pieces exhibit exemplarily that music’s sense depends on the possibility of its counterfeiting. Inso-much as these accounts produce musical senses that take the place of sound, they are also understood to be performances of these pieces. Here, then, thought is music’s organon and its instrument
Countermeasures for the majority attack in blockchain distributed systems
La tecnologÃa Blockchain es considerada como uno de los paradigmas informáticos más importantes posterior al Internet; en función a sus caracterÃsticas únicas que la hacen ideal para registrar, verificar y administrar información de diferentes transacciones. A pesar de esto, Blockchain se enfrenta a diferentes problemas de seguridad, siendo el ataque del 51% o ataque mayoritario uno de los más importantes. Este consiste en que uno o más mineros tomen el control de al menos el 51% del Hash extraÃdo o del cómputo en una red; de modo que un minero puede manipular y modificar arbitrariamente la información registrada en esta tecnologÃa. Este trabajo se enfocó en diseñar e implementar estrategias de detección y mitigación de ataques mayoritarios (51% de ataque) en un sistema distribuido Blockchain, a partir de la caracterización del comportamiento de los mineros. Para lograr esto, se analizó y evaluó el Hash Rate / Share de los mineros de Bitcoin y Crypto Ethereum, seguido del diseño e implementación de un protocolo de consenso para controlar el poder de cómputo de los mineros. Posteriormente, se realizó la exploración y evaluación de modelos de Machine Learning para detectar software malicioso de tipo Cryptojacking.DoctoradoDoctor en IngenierÃa de Sistemas y Computació
A Phenomenological Study of How Active Engagement in Black Greek Letter Sororities Influences Christian Members\u27 Spiritual Growth
This phenomenological study explored how being part of a Black Greek Letter. Organization (BGLO) sorority impacts the spiritual growth of its Christian members. One of the issues explored was the influence relationships within these sororities have on members striving to be like Christ. There is a dichotomy of perspectives regarding Black Greek Letter Organizations (BGLOs). They have a significant role in the Black community as organizations that foster leadership, philanthropy, and sisterhood and promote education. They are admired on and off college campuses and in the broader community in graduate chapters. The objective of phenomenology is to describe phenomena of spiritual growth among Christian sorority members from the life experiences of those who live them; that premise guided the interviews conducted for this study. The results found that active engagement in a BGLO sorority positively impacts its members\u27 spiritual growth. From the emotional stories of sisterhood, service, and devotion to prayer, their experiences evidenced strengthened walks of faith. This study contrasts the Anti-BGLO narrative as a testament to these organizations\u27 legacy and practices deeply grounded in the church
Partisan Gerrymandering and The Right to Privacy
This paper argues that partisan gerrymanderers violate citizens’ right to privacy by using data containing sensitive information on citizens without a compelling state interest. It first details how partisan gerrymandering claims have been argued in Court in the past. Next, it discusses theories of the right to privacy, mainly exploring the tensions between James Madison’s writings on privacy and Warren and Brandeis’ famed The Right to Privacy. Then, I present originalist arguments for upholding the original meaning and principles of the right to privacy and the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments before walking through case law related to privacy and technological advances. In conclusion, this paper holds that state legislatures violate the original meaning of the right to privacy, protected by the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments, when they use anonymized data sets to partisan gerrymander. Resultingly, these data sets should only be accessed when a compelling state interest is identified and partisan bias is curbed
Building body identities - exploring the world of female bodybuilders
This thesis explores how female bodybuilders seek to develop and maintain a viable sense of self despite being stigmatized by the gendered foundations of what Erving Goffman (1983) refers to as the 'interaction order'; the unavoidable presentational context in which identities are forged during the course of social life. Placed in the context of an overview of the historical treatment of women's bodies, and a concern with the development of bodybuilding as a specific form of body modification, the research draws upon a unique two year ethnographic study based in the South of England, complemented by interviews with twenty-six female bodybuilders, all of whom live in the U.K. By mapping these extraordinary women's lives, the research illuminates the pivotal spaces and essential lived experiences that make up the female bodybuilder. Whilst the women appear to be embarking on an 'empowering' radical body project for themselves, the consequences of their activity remains culturally ambivalent. This research exposes the 'Janus-faced' nature of female bodybuilding, exploring the ways in which the women negotiate, accommodate and resist pressures to engage in more orthodox and feminine activities and appearances
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Co-design As Healing: Exploring The Experiences Of Participants Facing Mental Health Problems
This thesis is an exploration of the healing role of co-design in mental health. Although co-design projects conducted within mental health settings are rising, existing literature tends to focus on the object of design and its outcomes while the experiences of participants per se remain largely unexplored. The guiding research question of this study is not how we design things that improve mental health, but how co-designing, as an act, might do so.
The thesis presents two projects that were organized in collaboration with the mental health charity Islington Mind and the Psychosis Therapy Project (PTP) in London.
The project at Islington Mind used a structured design process inviting participants to design for wellbeing. A case study analysis provides insights on how participants were impacted, summarizing key challenges and opportunities.
The design at PTP worked towards creating a collective brief in an emergent fashion, finally culminating in a board game. The experiences of participants were explored through Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA), using semi-structured interview data. The analysis served to identify key themes characterising the experience of co-design such as contributing, connecting, thinking and intentioning. In addition, a mixed-methods analysis of questionnaires and interview data exploring participants' wellbeing, showed that all participants who engaged fairly consistently in the project improved after the project ended, although some participants' scores returned to baseline six months later.
Reflecting on both projects, an approach to facilitation within mental health is outlined, detailing how the dimensions of weaving and layered participation, nurturing mattering and facilitating attitudes interlace. This contribution raises awareness of tacit dimensions in the practice of facilitation, articulating the nuances of how to encourage and sustain meaningful and ethical engagement and offering insights into a range of tools. It highlights the importance of remaining reflexive in relation to attitudes and emotions and discusses practical methodological and ethical challenges and ways to resolve them which can be of benefit to researchers embarking on a similar journey.
The thesis also offers detailed insights on how methodologies from different fields were integrated into a whole, arguing for transparency and reflexivity about epistemological assumptions, and how underlying paradigms shift in an interdisciplinary context.
Based on the overall findings, the thesis makes a case for considering design as healing (or a designerly way of healing), highlighting implications at a systems, social and individual level. It makes an original contribution to our understanding of design, highlighting its healing character, and proposes a new way to support mental health. The participants in this study not only had increased their own wellbeing through co-designing, but were also empowered and contributed towards healing the world. Hence, the thesis argues for a unique, holistic perspective of design and mental health, recognizing the interconnectedness of the individual, social and systemic dimensions of the healing processes that are ignited
Image classification over unknown and anomalous domains
A longstanding goal in computer vision research is to develop methods that are simultaneously applicable to a broad range of prediction problems. In contrast to this, models often perform best when they are specialized to some task or data type. This thesis investigates the challenges of learning models that generalize well over multiple unknown or anomalous modes and domains in data, and presents new solutions for learning robustly in this setting.
Initial investigations focus on normalization for distributions that contain multiple sources (e.g. images in different styles like cartoons or photos). Experiments demonstrate the extent to which existing modules, batch normalization in particular, struggle with such heterogeneous data, and a new solution is proposed that can better handle data from multiple visual modes, using differing sample statistics for each.
While ideas to counter the overspecialization of models have been formulated in sub-disciplines of transfer learning, e.g. multi-domain and multi-task learning, these usually rely on the existence of meta information, such as task or domain labels. Relaxing this assumption gives rise to a new transfer learning setting, called latent domain learning in this thesis, in which training and inference are carried out over data from multiple visual domains, without domain-level annotations. Customized solutions are required for this, as the performance of standard models degrades: a new data augmentation technique that interpolates between latent domains in an unsupervised way is presented, alongside a dedicated module that sparsely accounts for hidden domains in data, without requiring domain labels to do so.
In addition, the thesis studies the problem of classifying previously unseen or anomalous modes in data, a fundamental problem in one-class learning, and anomaly detection in particular. While recent ideas have been focused on developing self-supervised solutions for the one-class setting, in this thesis new methods based on transfer learning are formulated. Extensive experimental evidence demonstrates that a transfer-based perspective benefits new problems that have recently been proposed in anomaly detection literature, in particular challenging semantic detection tasks
Towards a more just refuge regime: quotas, markets and a fair share
The international refugee regime is beset by two problems: Responsibility for refuge falls
disproportionately on a few states and many owed refuge do not get it. In this work, I explore
remedies to these problems. One is a quota distribution wherein states are distributed
responsibilities via allotment. Another is a marketized quota system wherein states are free to buy
and sell their allotments with others. I explore these in three parts. In Part 1, I develop the prime
principles upon which a just regime is built and with which alternatives can be adjudicated. The
first and most important principle – ‘Justice for Refugees’ – stipulates that a just regime provides
refuge for all who have a basic interest in it. The second principle – ‘Justice for States’ – stipulates
that a just distribution of refuge responsibilities among states is one that is capacity considerate. In
Part 2, I take up several vexing questions regarding the distribution of refuge responsibilities
among states in a collective effort. First, what is a state’s ‘fair share’? The answer requires the
determination of some logic – some metric – with which a distribution is determined. I argue that
one popular method in the political theory literature – a GDP-based distribution – is normatively
unsatisfactory. In its place, I posit several alternative metrics that are more attuned with the
principles of justice but absent in the political theory literature: GDP adjusted for Purchasing
Power Parity and the Human Development Index. I offer an exploration of both these. Second,
are states required to ‘take up the slack’ left by defaulting peers? Here, I argue that duties of help
remain intact in cases of partial compliance among states in the refuge regime, but that political
concerns may require that such duties be applied with caution. I submit that a market instrument
offers one practical solution to this problem, as well as other advantages. In Part 3, I take aim at
marketization and grapple with its many pitfalls: That marketization is commodifying, that it is
corrupting, and that it offers little advantage in providing quality protection for refugees. In
addition to these, I apply a framework of moral markets developed by Debra Satz. I argue that a
refuge market may satisfy Justice Among States, but that it is violative of the refugees’ welfare
interest in remaining free of degrading and discriminatory treatment
The developing maternal-infant relationship: a qualitative longitudinal study
Aim
The study aimed to explore maternal perceptions and the use of knowledge relating to their infant’s mental health over time using qualitative longitudinal research.
Background
There has been a growing interest in infant mental health over recent years. Much of this interest is directed through the lens of infant determinism, through knowledge regarding neurological development resulting in biological determinism. Research and policy in this field are directed toward individual parenting behaviours, usually focused on the mother. Despite this, there is little attention given to maternal perspectives of infant mental health, indicating that a more innovative approach to methodology is required.
Methods
This study took a qualitative longitudinal approach, and interviews were undertaken with seven mothers from the third trimester of pregnancy and then throughout the first year of the infant’s life. Interviews were conducted at 34 weeks of pregnancy, and then when the infant was 6 and 12 weeks, 6, 9, and 12 months, alongside the collection of researcher field notes—a total of 41 interviews. Data were analysed by creating case profiles, memos, and summaries, and then cross-comparison of the emerging narratives. A psycho-socially informed approach was taken to the analysis of data.
Findings
Three interrelated themes emerged from the data: evolving maternal identity, growing a person, and creating a safe space. The theme of evolving maternal identity dominated the other themes of growing a person and creating a safe space in a way that met perceived socio-cultural requirements for mothering and childcare practices. Participants’ personal stories give voice to their perceptions of the developing maternal-infant relationship in the context of their socio-cultural setting, relationships with others, and experiences over time.
Conclusions
This study adds new knowledge by giving mothers a voice to express how the maternal-infant relationship develops over time. The findings demonstrate how the developing maternal-infant relationship grows in response to their mutual needs as the mother works to create and sustain identities for herself and the infant that will fit within their socio-cultural context and individual situations. Additionally, the findings illustrate the importance of temporal considerations, social networks, and intergenerational relationships to this evolving process. Recommendations for practice, policy, and education are made that reflect the unique relationship between mother and infant and the need to conceptualise this using an ecological approach
'Exarcheia doesn't exist': Authenticity, Resistance and Archival Politics in Athens
My thesis investigates the ways people, materialities and urban spaces interact to form affective ecologies and produce historicity. It focuses on the neighbourhood of Exarcheia, Athens’ contested political topography par excellence, known for its production of radical politics of discontent and resistance to state oppression and eoliberal capitalism. Embracing Exarcheia’s controversial status within Greek vernacular, media and state discourses, this thesis aims to unpick the neighbourhoods’ socio-spatial assemblage imbued with affect and formed through the numerous (mis)understandings and (mis)interpretations rooted in its turbulent political history. Drawing on theory on urban spaces, affect, hauntology and archival politics, I argue for Exarcheia as an unwavering archival space composed of affective chronotopes – (in)tangible loci that defy space and temporality. I posit that the interwoven narratives and materialities emerging in my fieldwork are persistently – and perhaps obsessively – reiterating themselves and remaining imprinted on the neighbourhood’s landscape as an incessant reminder of violent histories that the state often seeks to erase and forget. Through this analysis, I contribute to understandings of place as a primary ethnographic ‘object’ and the ways in which place forms complex interactions and relationships with social actors, shapes their subjectivities, retains and bestows their memories and senses of historicity
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