496,837 research outputs found
A "superstorm": When moral panic and new risk discourses converge in the media
This is an Author's Accepted Manuscript of an article published in Health, Risk and Society, 15(6), 681-698, 2013, copyright Taylor & Francis, available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/13698575.2013.851180.There has been a proliferation of risk discourses in recent decades but studies of these have been polarised, drawing either on moral panic or new risk frameworks to analyse journalistic discourses. This article opens the theoretical possibility that the two may co-exist and converge in the same scare. I do this by bringing together more recent developments in moral panic thesis, with new risk theory and the concept of media logic. I then apply this theoretical approach to an empirical analysis of how and with what consequences moral panic and new risk type discourses converged in the editorials of four newspaper campaigns against GM food policy in Britain in the late 1990s. The article analyses 112 editorials published between January 1998 and December 2000, supplemented with news stories where these were needed for contextual clarity. This analysis shows that not only did this novel food generate intense media and public reactions; these developed in the absence of the type of concrete details journalists usually look for in risk stories. Media logic is important in understanding how journalists were able to engage and hence how a major scare could be constructed around convergent moral panic and new risk type discourses. The result was a media âsuperstormâ of sustained coverage in which both types of discourse converged in highly emotive mutually reinforcing ways that resonated in a highly sensitised context. The consequence was acute anxiety, social volatility and the potential for the disruption of policy and social change
Probabilistic Knowledge as Objective Knowledge in Quantum Mechanics: Potential Powers Instead of Actual Properties
In classical physics, probabilistic or statistical knowledge has been always
related to ignorance or inaccurate subjective knowledge about an actual state
of affairs. This idea has been extended to quantum mechanics through a
completely incoherent interpretation of the Fermi-Dirac and Bose-Einstein
statistics in terms of "strange" quantum particles. This interpretation,
naturalized through a widespread "way of speaking" in the physics community,
contradicts Born's physical account of {\Psi} as a "probability wave" which
provides statistical information about outcomes that, in fact, cannot be
interpreted in terms of 'ignorance about an actual state of affairs'. In the
present paper we discuss how the metaphysics of actuality has played an
essential role in limiting the possibilities of understating things
differently. We propose instead a metaphysical scheme in terms of powers with
definite potentia which allows us to consider quantum probability in a new
light, namely, as providing objective knowledge about a potential state of
affairs.Comment: 35 pages, no figures. To be published in Probing the Meaning of
Quantum Mechanics, D. Aerts, C. de Ronde, H. Freytes and R. Giuntini (Eds.),
World Scientific, Singapore, forthcoming. More comments welcome
Probabilistic Programming Concepts
A multitude of different probabilistic programming languages exists today,
all extending a traditional programming language with primitives to support
modeling of complex, structured probability distributions. Each of these
languages employs its own probabilistic primitives, and comes with a particular
syntax, semantics and inference procedure. This makes it hard to understand the
underlying programming concepts and appreciate the differences between the
different languages. To obtain a better understanding of probabilistic
programming, we identify a number of core programming concepts underlying the
primitives used by various probabilistic languages, discuss the execution
mechanisms that they require and use these to position state-of-the-art
probabilistic languages and their implementation. While doing so, we focus on
probabilistic extensions of logic programming languages such as Prolog, which
have been developed since more than 20 years
An abstract machine for restricted and-parallel execution of logic programs
Although the sequential execution speed of logic programs has been greatly improved by the concepts introduced in the Warren Abstract Machine (WAM), parallel execution represents the only way to increase this speed beyond the natural limits of sequential systems. However, most proposed parallel logic programming execution models lack the performance optimizations and storage efficiency of sequential systems. This paper presents a parallel abstract machine which is an extension of the WAM and is thus capable of supporting ANDParallelism without giving up the optimizations present in sequential implementations. A suitable instruction set, which can be used as a target by a variety of logic programming languages, is also included. Special instructions are provided to support a generalized version of "Restricted AND-Parallelism" (RAP), a technique which reduces the overhead traditionally associated with the run-time management of variable binding conflicts to a series of simple run-time checks, which select one out of a series of compiled execution graphs
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