In the field:Coase an exemplar in the tradition of Smith, Marshall and Ostrom

This paper argues that Coase provides the primary 20th century exemplar of the grounding of analytical developments in economics in direct fieldwork observation. In particular, his focus on the business enterprise, its internal functions (including decision-making), and its external relations (including contracting) has provided a stimulus for radical developments in microeconomics and in managerial and decision economics in particular. The argument is developed by a stylization of the development of economics, referring to Adam Smith in the 18th century, Alfred Marshall in the 19th century, Ronald Coase in the 20th century, and Elinor Ostrom in the 21st century

Phenomenology: An experience of letting go and letting be.

Phenomenology is a methodological approach to research that has been broadly influential on established qualitative and interpretative perspectives.Founded in the work of German philosophers, it offers challenges in both understanding and practice. These stem, in part, from the requirement of the researcher to actively seek personal and deep meaning from those who are studied; and from the embedded requirement to acknowledge researcher influence and involvement in the research process. Through engaging in a phenomenological investigation into spiritual leisure, I realized the potential of research to be both personally fulfilling, and an empowering experience for myself as a researcher and as a person. A significant aspect of the research process that contributed to this was the lived experience of getting to know myself and knowing others as I simultaneously 'let go and let be'. Shared through this paper is a selection of experiences that exemplify that edifying process, including the emergent need to focus on letting go of personal doubts, aspects of my research training and research expectations in order to be able to conduct a detailed research project and to take on the challenges of phenomenology itself. With phenomenology embedded in encouraging researchers to let down our shields and engage with research that is personally relevant, my own experience revealed that research can be more than finding out, it can also include an embracing of not knowing. In such ways it is suggested that research is not just a process of data collection but a potential forum for becoming more whole as people as we actively reflect, know ourselves and see the world through others' eyes

Interpreting Lived Experience through Writing Online in a Graduate Seminar

Participants in an online doctoral seminar participated in the use of a writing strategy to explore the sociocultural contexts of their lived experience. Creating literary texts in three forms was an effective strategy in mediating participants’ understanding. Each form provided a new lens through which to interpret experience. Participants functioned as an interpretive community. The final papers, autobiographical narratives, illuminated the complex relations among prediscursive experience, reflection on experience, distancing, and the iterative transformational quality of time. The online format embodied a virtual interpretive location which allowed participants to revisit texts and postings over time. Des participants dans un cours de doctorat en ligne, ont utilisé une stratégie de rédaction leur permettant d’explorer les contextes socioculturels de leurs expériences de vie. La création de trois formes de textes littéraires s’est avèrée une stratégie efficace pour faciliter la compréhension des participants. Chaque forme littéraire a offert de nouvelle perspectives aux étudiants pour interpréter leurs expériences. Les participants dans cette communauté ont pu interpréter collectivement leurs expériences de vie. Les textes finaux, qui ont pris la forme de narratifs autobiographiques ont illustré la complexité des relations qui existent entre une expérience pré-réfléchie, la réflexion sur l’expérience, la capacité de prendre de la distance face a l’expérience. Dans ces mêmes textes on y trouve la nature réitérée et la qualitée transformative du temps. Le format en ligne a crée un endroit virtuel interprétatif qui a permis aux participants de revisiter les textes et les messages affichés dans le temps

Bayesian Semi-supervised Learning with Graph Gaussian Processes

We propose a data-efficient Gaussian process-based Bayesian approach to the semi-supervised learning problem on graphs. The proposed model shows extremely competitive performance when compared to the state-of-the-art graph neural networks on semi-supervised learning benchmark experiments, and outperforms the neural networks in active learning experiments where labels are scarce. Furthermore, the model does not require a validation data set for early stopping to control over-fitting. Our model can be viewed as an instance of empirical distribution regression weighted locally by network connectivity. We further motivate the intuitive construction of the model with a Bayesian linear model interpretation where the node features are filtered by an operator related to the graph Laplacian. The method can be easily implemented by adapting off-the-shelf scalable variational inference algorithms for Gaussian processes.Comment: To appear in NIPS 2018 Fixed an error in Figure 2. The previous arxiv version contains two identical sub-figure

Shifting realities: Tron cyberspace and the “New” consciousness in 21st Century technoscapes

The existing direction of the (mis)use of information technologies founded on the deceptively secular rationalised heritage of scientism, arguably spells the increasing proximity to a dystopian nightmare that is far from mere fiction and imbued with the eternal religious symbolic of the battle between good and evil, as depicted in the 2010 science fiction film Tron: Legacy . The historical contextualisation of events in the film reveals the promise of the unfolding of an advanced sensibility alongside these concerns, in which fantasy and science converge to liberate humanity from an increasingly limiting worldview, and information and images serve as conduits to the sacred. The critical role information stands to play in humanity’s conscious evolution is outlined in the proposed development of a “dream systems theory”, where dreams capes are defined as interconnected systems of imaginal data

Towards Exascale Scientific Metadata Management

Advances in technology and computing hardware are enabling scientists from all areas of science to produce massive amounts of data using large-scale simulations or observational facilities. In this era of data deluge, effective coordination between the data production and the analysis phases hinges on the availability of metadata that describe the scientific datasets. Existing workflow engines have been capturing a limited form of metadata to provide provenance information about the identity and lineage of the data. However, much of the data produced by simulations, experiments, and analyses still need to be annotated manually in an ad hoc manner by domain scientists. Systematic and transparent acquisition of rich metadata becomes a crucial prerequisite to sustain and accelerate the pace of scientific innovation. Yet, ubiquitous and domain-agnostic metadata management infrastructure that can meet the demands of extreme-scale science is notable by its absence. To address this gap in scientific data management research and practice, we present our vision for an integrated approach that (1) automatically captures and manipulates information-rich metadata while the data is being produced or analyzed and (2) stores metadata within each dataset to permeate metadata-oblivious processes and to query metadata through established and standardized data access interfaces. We motivate the need for the proposed integrated approach using applications from plasma physics, climate modeling and neuroscience, and then discuss research challenges and possible solutions