La tecnologia podria ser la respuesta si comprendieramos las preguntas

Just as we begin to talk seriously about the ‘information society’ and ‘knowledge management’, commercialism and technology push are tending to militate against the transformation of information into knowledge, and knowledge into wisdom. We are in danger of losing our way if we do not recognize the ‘dark side’ of technology and minimize its effects; and if we ignore the human and social dimension in the increasingly complex information systems which we are buildingJustamente ahora que comenzamos a plantearnos seriamente la sociedad de la información y la gestión del conocimiento, las presiones del mercado y de la tecnología militan en contra de la transformación de la información en el conocimiento y del conocimiento en sabiduría. Estamos en peligro de perder nuestra ruta si no reconocemos el lado oscuro de la tecnología y minimizamos sus efectos, y si ignoramos las dimensiones humanas y sociales de los sistemas de información que estamos construyendo y que resultan de una complejidad siempre creciente. (Autor

Charles A. Dana, the Civil War Era, and American Republicanism

When Charles A. Dana bought the New York Sun in 1868, he used it to support the presidential candidacy of Ulysses S. Grant and the Republican Party ticket to unify the post-Civil War nation. After a victory for the Civil War general and Republican Party, though, the first fifteen months of the new administration turned the editor against the president and his party. Dana’s Sun criticized Grant and his allies as corrupt, of using the military for political ends, and of growing the size and power of government beyond traditional American practice. Against the backdrop of Reconstruction, Dana also decried the Grant administration’s foreign policy, especially regarding the ongoing war in Cuba. This dissertation explores how Dana’s interpretation of republican values clashed with the American response to transatlantic politics to justify further criticism of the president and his party between March 1869 and the election of 1872

The New Superorganic

Despite proposals by Kroeber and others that society and culture represent a distinct level of reality, the prevailing opinion has been that they are abstractions from the behavior of individuals. Recently that position, methodological individualism, has been challenged on several fronts. Especially with the incorporation of artificial intelligence into many aspects of social life, it is no longer feasible to consider the ultimate unit of social action to be the human individual. Bolstered with a case study of the consequences of automation for the legal profession, the argument here is that agency should be redefined in a more expansive and dynamic manner that includes but is not limited to the individual

The Ecology of Cultural Space: Towards an Understanding of the Contemporary Artist-led Collective

The importance of friendship has been under-researched in relation to artistic discourse. This lack of research becomes particularly acute when considering ambiguous formations of collective artistic activity. My thesis draws upon friendship as a socio-cultural phenomenon in order to situate the artist-led collective both historically and within the contemporary art continuum. Tracing an historiography of the personal relationships which blurred the boundaries between art and politics, from the re-imagining of the medieval artisanal guild in the nineteenth century to the development of Futurism in the early twentieth century, I argue that the contemporary artist-led collective is haunted by these ‘collectivisms past’ and the spectre of autonomy. Further, the contradictions located within the ideological notions of individualism, which pervade the neo-liberal capitalist hegemony, both deny collective agency and yet accept collective praxis in the guise of enterprise culture. It is this contradictory character that frames my thesis and provides the context for understanding the complex role which friendship plays in the genesis of the contemporary artist-led collective. In order to understand the implications of friendship as a vital component of the artist-led collective, I utilise Relational Dialectics Theory (RDT) developed by Leslie Baxter and Barbara Montgomery, as a conceptual framework. I employ in-depth case studies of the artist-led collective duo The Cool Couple and architecture collective Assemble, in order to explore how friendship informs artist-led collectives throughout their life cycles. I question how and why these social bonds, which constitute relationships and thus shape the collectives, interrelate with a multiplicity of forces in their specific cultural ecology. These interrelations are further explored through a mapping study of artist-led collective activity in Leeds, UK. This study problematises the dualistic perspective of resistance and co-option between artist-led collectives and institutions. I argue that the evolution of the artist-led collective is implicitly interrelated with the institution and thus the binary opposition of resistance and co-option becomes a dialectical knot of ever-changing relationships. Finally, I situate myself in the research through an auto-ethnographic study of the artist-led collective The Retro Bar at the End of the Universe, of which I am a founding member. This case study enables an internal view of the social bonds which formed The Retro Bar at the End of the Universe and provides an insight that would otherwise be impossible from an external perspective

Embracing the wickedness of health care : essays on reforms, wicked problems and public deliberation

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“… unto Seynte Paules”: Anglican Landscapes and Colonialism in South Carolina

This study examines the role of the Anglican Church in early colonial South Carolina, using for case studies the sites of St. Paul’s Parish Church (1707) and its associated parsonage, located near Charleston, South Carolina. The combination of archaeological excavations, historical documentary research, material culture analysis, and geophysical testing allows for three broad topics to be discussed - the architecture of St. Paul’s Parish Church, the use of the landscape by the Anglican Church, and studies of early-18th century life within a developing frontier. These topics contribute new information about colonial South Carolina on a number of scales. At the most local level, this study provides new information about the original St. Paul’s Parish Church, namely architectural details and the use of the landscape by its parishioners. Also, research at the parsonage site provides a rare opportunity to study an early-18th century homestead, addressing the daily activities of those people who lived there, as well as the social functions of the parsonage to the wider St. Paul’s parish community. On a more regional level, the role of St. Paul’s Church and Parish in the lives of parish residents is discussed, namely their role in maintaining English identity and the formation of a community within the frontier regions of the colony. A significant part of this research examines the ways the Anglican Church modified the landscape of South Carolina. The placement of Anglican churches in the rural areas appears to have been a material expression of the goals of the Church, namely to show its presence and power in the culturally and ethnically divided colony. The effects of the Anglican Church on the development of colonial South Carolina can then be studied alongside previous works in order to better understand the role that the Anglican Church and other major religious institutions played in colonization. The results indicate that the South Carolina Anglican Church played much larger, and often unseen, roles in the development of the colony during the early decades of the 18th century, beyond their religious and political roles

Backwards is the way forward: feedback in the cortical hierarchy predicts the expected future

Clark offers a powerful description of the brain as a prediction machine, which offers progress on two distinct levels. First, on an abstract conceptual level, it provides a unifying framework for perception, action, and cognition (including subdivisions such as attention, expectation, and imagination). Second, hierarchical prediction offers progress on a concrete descriptive level for testing and constraining conceptual elements and mechanisms of predictive coding models (estimation of predictions, prediction errors, and internal models)

Text-based document geolocation and its application to the digital humanities

This dissertation investigates automatic geolocation of documents (i.e. identification of their location, expressed as latitude/longitude coordinates), based on the text of those documents rather than metadata. I assert that such geolocation can be performed using text alone, at a sufficient accuracy for use in real-world applications. Although in some corpora metadata is found in abundance (e.g. home location, time zone, friends, followers, etc. in Twitter), it is lacking in others, such as many corpora of primary-source documents in the digital humanities, an area to which document geolocation has hardly been applied. To this end, I first develop methods for accurate text-based geolocation and then apply them to newly-annotated corpora in the digital humanities. The geolocation methods I develop use both uniform and adaptive (k-d tree) grids over the Earth’s surface, culminating in a hierarchical logistic-regression-based technique that achieves state of the art results on well-known corpora (Twitter user feeds, Wikipedia articles and Flickr image tags). In the second part of the dissertation I develop a new NLP task, text-based geolocation of historical corpora. Because there are no existing corpora to test on, I create and annotate two new corpora of significantly different natures (a 19th-century travel log and a large set of Civil War archives). I show how my methods produce good geolocation accuracy even given the relatively small amount of annotated data available, which can be further improved using domain adaptation. I then use the predictions on the much larger unannotated portion of the Civil War archives to generate and analyze geographic topic models, showing how they can be mined to produce interesting revelations concerning various Civil War-related subjects. Finally, I develop a new geolocation technique for text-only corpora involving co-training between document-geolocation and toponym- resolution models, using a gazetteer to inject additional information into the training process. To evaluate this technique I develop a new metric, the closest toponym error distance, on which I show improvements compared with a baseline geolocator.Linguistic

Science’s Harmful Power

The focus of this thesis is to address and acknowledge issues identifying how applied science’s progressive impact can harm people in any society. The advancement of scientific technology can cause detrimental results to the general public. A few examples are dropping of the atomic bomb; prescription medications dispensed to patients before adequate testing studies have been completed; and scientific fraud. The scientific community promotes the scientist based on their research without thoroughly testing the theory or discovery. The scientist will go to extreme lengths to achieve specific results can cause damaging effects on society. Scientists can falsely influence society and gain the public’s trust. The underlying reason behind these issues may emanate from the scientist’s lack of human values when implementing a theory. Does “science” contribute and demonstrate to Western society only as a positive outcome? Do scientists’ discoveries only generate positive results when they are utilizing the effects on the general public? The purpose of this study is to acknowledge society’s perpetual faith in science and scientist’s theory. This thesis will not uncover the truth, because each individual views the “truth” differently. Rather will concentrate on how Western society views the truth and their trust in the scientist, physicians, and scientific community

The 2007 Iranian 'hostage crisis' : an Orientalist captivity narrative

Concerned with the deployment of discourses within the representing culture and not principally with that which it seeks to portray. These accounts, in terms of their mediation by the newspapers concerned as well as their anticipated reception by a British readership, would be denuded of much of the urgency of their meaning without the availability of deeply embedded discourses that we can group under the umbrella of Orientalism