Improving the JADE algorithm by clustering successful parameters

Differential evolution (DE) is one of the most powerful and popular evolutionary algorithms for real parameter global optimisation problems. However, the performance of DE greatly depends on the selection of control parameters, e.g., the population size, scaling factor and crossover rate. How to set these parameters is a challenging task because they are problem dependent. In order to tackle this problem, a JADE variant, denoted CJADE, is proposed in this paper. In the proposed algorithm, the successful parameters are clustered with the k-means clustering algorithm to reduce the impact of poor parameters. Simulation results show that CJADE is better than, or at least comparable with, several state-of-the-art DE algorithms

Linearized biogeography-based optimization with re-initialization and local search

Biogeography-based optimization (BBO) is an evolutionary optimization algorithm that uses migration to share information among candidate solutions. One limitation of BBO is that it changes only one independent variable at a time in each candidate solution. In this paper, a linearized version of BBO, called LBBO, is proposed to reduce rotational variance. The proposed method is combined with periodic re-initialization and local search operators to obtain an algorithm for global optimization in a continuous search space. Experiments have been conducted on 45 benchmarks from the 2005 and 2011 Congress on Evolutionary Computation, and LBBO performance is compared with the results published in those conferences. The results show that LBBO provides competitive performance with state-of-the-art evolutionary algorithms. In particular, LBBO performs particularly well for certain types of multimodal problems, including high-dimensional real-world problems. Also, LBBO is insensitive to whether or not the solution lies on the search domain boundary, in a wide or narrow basin, and within or outside the initialization domain

Framing terrorism and migration in the USA: the role of the media in securitization processes

American security discourse has intensified profoundly since 9/11. For nearly two decades, anxiety about the threat posed by the foreign other against the American self has influenced policy debates, the legitimization (and execution) of exceptional measures and the public mood. These changes in security discourse have co-occurred with seismic shifts in the increasingly complex media and information marketplace. The proliferation of media actors has stimulated more targeted news produced for niche audiences, meaning that public processing of security issues has also changed dramatically. Cable news in particular has matured into a polarized genre of information that commands the widest audience in the US. Through a cross-disciplinary approach that integrates securitization theory from International Relations and the broad framing scholarship from political communication, this thesis investigates the relationship of these developments. Specifically, it investigates the impact of media in the social (de)construction of security threats. Two illustrative case studies are considered across two presidential administrations from 2001-2016. First, the securitization of terrorism is explored with an emphasis on the discursive (de)legitimization of torture as an exceptional response. Even among exceptional measures, torture is exceptional: its practice has been banned both during and outside of wartime. That it is even up for debate – never mind that it briefly became “standard operating procedures” and nearly half of all Americans support it – is evidence of the successful securitization of terrorism. The second case study focuses on the securitization of unauthorized immigration, analyzing the contestation of competing remedy proposals and moral evaluations of the foreign other. Despite the oft-invoked immigration-terrorism nexus, American attitudes toward unauthorized immigrants have softened. In both cases, press framing appears to have influenced public attitudes, above and beyond political elite signals, suggesting that the media can act as an independent and strategic actor. This has implications for securitization theory, which traditionally relegates media to a facilitating role, rather than an independent securitizing actor. This also has broader democratic implications as unelected press actors increasingly assume political roles and drive the (de)legitimization of exceptional measures. Further contributions of this project include the discovery of cross-sectoral patterns, such as the consequences of silencing and the effectiveness of euphemisms. Finally, this thesis demonstrates the value of synthesizing concepts in framing scholarship with securitization theory. Methodological tools commonly used in framing studies – content and public opinion analysis – empower securitization theory with quantitative sophistication and hypothesis-tested assumptions that have been previously overlooked

The Political Economy of Agrarian Change: Dinosaur or Phoenix?

In this paper I argue for the resurrection of the political economy of agrarian change (PEACH) in mainstream policy research in order to understand the deeper causes of poverty and its transformation in rural areas. I critically examine chronic poverty research and argue that in the wake of the devastating critique of PEACH theory, an unlikely combination of post-structural and methodologically individualist new development economics (NDE) theory became hegemonic in development studies throughout the 90s and shaped emergent chronic poverty methodology. As a consequence subsequent chronic poverty empirical research tended to produce results confirming post-PEACH theory - poverty caused by assets based vulnerability experience of poor people and by their exclusion from economies and societies. In order to address the possibility of poverty as a problem of inclusion into economies and societies, chronic poverty research advanced new social relational concepts in the intergenerational transmission of poverty literature (IGT) and in adverse incorporation and social exclusion research (AISE). These and other such critical oppositional thinkers endorse a dynamic, relational transformational approach, one which combines realist structural and interpretive thinking and which coheres with critical realist PEACH methodology. However, they hesitate in fully embracing PEACH concepts - such as capitalist accumulation, class relations and unfreedom - which can shed light on materialist processes of poverty. I argue that the difficulties this body of research confronts in addressing the deeper causes of poverty can be resolved by drawing on PEACH concepts together with critical realist PEACH methods, and that the pluralism that this entails enables much deeper explanations for processes of impoverishment and escape and a wider range of empowering policy responses.

Institutions and Entry: A Cross-Regional Analysis in Russia

We analyse a micro-panel data set to investigate the effect of regional institutional environment and economic factors on Russian new firm entry rates across time, industries and regions. The paper builds on novel databases and exploits inter-regional variation in a large number of institutional variables. We find entry rates across industries in Russia are not especially low by international standards and are correlated with entry rates in developed market economies, as well as with institutional environment and firm size. Furthermore, industries that, for scale or technological reasons, are characterised by higher entry rates experience lower entry within regions affected subject to political change. A higher level of democracy enhances entry rates for small sized firms but reduces them for medium or large ones.entry rate, institutions, democracy

Biopolitics, Race and Resistance in the Novels of Salman Rushdie

The twenty-first century has seen a resurgence of academic interest in biopolitics: the often oppressive political power over human biology, human bodies and their actions that emerges when political technologies concern themselves with and act upon a population as a species rather than as a group of individuals. The publication of new works by theorists including Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri has furthered academic understanding of biopolitical attempts to ensure an orderly, productive society. Biopolitics bases these attempts upon optimising the majority population’s health and well-being while constructing simultaneously a subrace of unruly, unproductive bodies against which the majority requires securitising. However, despite the still-proliferating and increasingly diverse recent theoretical work on the subject, little material has appeared examining how literature represents biopolitics or how theories of biopolitics may inform literary criticism. This thesis argues for Salman Rushdie’s novels as an exemplary site of fictional engagement with biopower in their portrayal of the increasingly intense and pervasive biopolitical technologies used in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Rushdie has been considered frequently as a novelist who explores political discourses of race and culture. However, analysis of the ways in which he depicts these discourses animating recent biopolitical practices has proven scarcer in Rushdie Studies. This thesis asserts that Rushdie’s novels affirm consistently the desirability of non-racialising polities, but almost always suggest little possibility of constructing such communities. In the process, it will reveal that he represents more numerous and varied forms of racialisation than has been supposed previously. This study considers how Rushdie describes biopolitical racialisation by state and superrace alike, the massacres of subraces that often ensue, how biopower operates and is resisted in space, and the discursive and practical forms this resistance takes. Contrasting Rushdie’s early fiction with his less-studied more recent works, this analysis deploys, critiques and augments canonical theories of biopower in order to chart his generally growing disinclination to depict this resistance’s potential success. This study thus works towards a new biopolitical literary criticism which argues that although the theories of Foucault and others illuminate the ways in which literature represents power and resistance in contemporary politics, narrative fiction indicates simultaneously the limitations of these theories and the practices of resistance they advocate.Arts and Humanities Research Counci

No Such Thing as Collective Goods: The Political Utility of Low Level Civil War in Northern Uganda

With the extant work on civil war duration as a starting point, this project uses the Ugandan case to identify and address theoretical aporias in our existing understanding of the determinants of duration. The vast majority of existing work begins with the assumption that the rebel force is the determining factor in the duration of conflict. Challenging this assumption, I argue that civil war duration should be understood as a function of the calculations made by both the rebel units and the established state, a dynamic that has implications for the way in which we think of the preferences of the state. Finally, that incentive structures exist, given the nature of post-colonial states that lower the utility of peace for elected leadership and reduce their willingness to provide peace as a collective good to the broader population as civil war can be used as one of Jeffrey Herbst’s buffer mechanisms