Essentializing the binary self: individualism and collectivism in cultural neuroscience

Within the emerging field of cultural neuroscience (CN) one branch of research focuses on the neural underpinnings of “individualistic/Western” vs. “collectivistic/Eastern” self-views. These studies uncritically adopt essentialist assumptions from classic cross-cultural research, mainly following the tradition of Markus and Kitayama (1991), into the domain of functional neuroimaging. In this perspective article we analyze recent publications and conference proceedings of the 18th Annual Meeting of the Organization for Human Brain Mapping (2012) and problematize the essentialist and simplistic understanding of “culture” in these studies. Further, we argue against the binary structure of the drawn “cultural” comparisons and their underlying Eurocentrism. Finally we scrutinize whether valuations within the constructed binarities bear the risk of constructing and reproducing a postcolonial, orientalist argumentation pattern

Two-level modelling of speech variant rules

This paper describes a phonetic knowledge base for German consisting of a set of speech variant rules. These rules have been established on the basis of empirical, corpus-based investigations enriched by linguistic generalisations. Theoretical and computational foundations of speech variant rules are discussed, and their practical application in a linguistic word recognition system (BELLEx3, U Bielefeld) is demonstrated. Although the speech variant rules described in this paper have been established for the purpose of knowledge-based word recognition, their declarative implementation in a two-level transducer enables them to be employed for both recognition and generation of speech variants. Finally, an extension of standard two-level techniques is described whereby two-level transducers defining constraints on mapping relations between input and output forms are integrated with wellformedness-constraints on input forms stated in terms of finite-state automata

INNOCENCE OF THE COUNTRY IN THE SELECTED PLAYS OF IVAN VIDIĆ AND LADA KAŠTELAN

U ovom ću radu problematizirati korelaciju fenomena domovine i »jastva«, tumačenu na različite načine, u odabranim dramskim djelima Lade Kaštelan i Ivana Vidića. Naslanjat ću se na teoretičare i filozofe koji se bave »staništem«, kao i »domom« (G. Bachelard), odnosom osobnog i socijalnog sistema (N. Luhmann), dijaloškog i monološkog (M. Bahtin), pa tako i doživljajem »našeg« te onog »stranog« (U. Bielefeld), »drugog« i drugačijeg. S tim u vezi otvara se i pitanje ideje »nevinosti« kao obrane od egzistencijalnog straha.The paper focuses on the correlation between the phenomenon of the country and ‘self’, interpreted in different ways in the selected plays of Lada Kaštelan and Ivan Vidić, relying upon theoreticians and philosophers who deal with »habitat« (G. Bachelard), as well as with »home«, relationship between a personal and social system (N. Luhmann) and with the impression of »ours« and »foreign« (U. Bielefeld), »other« and different (D. Caroll). In this respect arise the issues of ideal as defense from existential fear, and correlation of events and fiction (thanks to the idea of a »foreign« it becomes clear how the »reality« and fiction do not create opposition). Vidić and Kaštelan open the same subjects, approaching them in almost opposite ways. If we accept the thesis that a subject is split within himself, and therefore permanently aims at the »original«, »innocent state of the soul» it is possible to notice how, in Kaštelan’s plays we can identify a dominant process of subjectivization (attempt to persuade the co-speaker to exteriorize his carefully hidden »self«, and in Vidić’s works the process of objectivization (M. Bahtin). Objectivization is a monological position, thanks to which one tries to reduce his co-speaker to a pre-set structure of generally valid fact. Vidić writes precisely about the processes of objectivization. Through objectivization we try to speak of him or her, rather than with him, we try to see our co-speaker as an object of a future manipulation. However, paradoxically enough, this way Vidić-the writer acts with the aim to open up that carefully hidden »self« in his viewer, the Shadow, the »foreigner« within himself

Option Pricing in an Imperfect World

In a model with no given probability measure, we consider asset pricing in the presence of frictions and other imperfections and characterize the property of coherent pricing, a notion related to (but much weaker than) the no arbitrage property. We show that prices are coherent if and only if the set of pricing measures is non empty, i.e. if pricing by expectation is possible. We then obtain a decomposition of coherent prices highlighting the role of bubbles. eventually we show that under very weak conditions the coherent pricing of options allows for a very clear representation from which it is possible, as in the original work of Breeden and Litzenberger, to extract the implied probability. Eventually we test this conclusion empirically via a new non parametric approach.Comment: The paper has been withdrawn because in the newer version it was split into two different papers, each of which have been uploaded into Arxi

The PEER project: green open access - experience, evidence and insights

Vortrag im Rahmen des Symposiums der Universitätsbibliothek Frankfurt am Main in Kooperation mit der Frankfurter Buchmesse 2011 "Economy and Acceptance of Open Access Strategies", am 14.10.2011

Spectral and transport properties from lattice QCD

In these lecture notes we will discuss recent progress in extracting spectral and transport properties from lattice QCD. We will focus on results of probes of the thermal QCD medium as well as transport coefficients which are important ingredients for hydrodynamic and transport models that describe the evolution of the produced medium. These include electromagnetic probes, like the rates of emitted photons and dileptons, quarkonium spectral functions as well as transport coefficients like the electrical conductivity or heavy flavor diffusion coefficients of the quark gluon plasma (QGP). All these real time quantities are encoded in the vector meson spectral function. A direct determination of the spectral functions is not possible in Euclidean lattice QCD calculations but they can be analytically continued from imaginary to real time. Therefore it is possible to relate the spectral function to the corresponding Euclidean correlation functions. In the following sections we will discuss the procedure to determine the required correlation functions and the extraction of the spectral functions from lattice QCD correlators. We will illustrate the concepts and methods to obtain spectral functions and related physical observables from continuum extrapolated correlation functions. We will focus here on results obtained from continuum extrapolated lattice correlation functions, which requires large and fine lattices, which so far was only possible in quenched approximation. We will only give a brief introduction to lattice QCD and refer to the textbooks [1,2,3,4] and lecture notes [5] for more detailed introductions to lattice field theory. For the topics addressed in this lecture note we also like to refer to the overview articles on QCD thermodynamics and the QCD phase transition [5,6,7] and quarkonium in extreme conditions [8].Comment: Lectures delivered at the 53rd Karpacz Winter School of Theoretical Physics, February 26th - March 4th, 2017, Karpacz, Poland; submitted to Lecture Notes in Physics (LNP, volume 999), ISBN: 978-3-030-95490-

Self-adaptive Based Model for Ambiguity Resolution of The Linked Data Query for Big Data Analytics

Integration of heterogeneous data sources is a crucial step in big data analytics, although it creates ambiguity issues during mapping between the sources due to the variation in the query terms, data structure and granularity conflicts. However, there are limited researches on effective big data integration to address the ambiguity issue for big data analytics. This paper introduces a self-adaptive model for big data integration by exploiting the data structure during querying in order to mitigate and resolve ambiguities. An assessment of a preliminary work on the Geography and Quran dataset is reported to illustrate the feasibility of the proposed model that motivates future work such as solving complex query

The cosmic QCD transition for large lepton flavour asymmetries

We study the impact of large lepton flavour asymmetries on the cosmic QCD transition. Scenarios of unequal lepton flavour asymmetries are observationally almost unconstrained and therefore open up a whole new parameter space in order to study the nature of the cosmic QCD transition. For very large asymmetries, we point out two limitations to our current method, namely the possible formation of a Bose-Einstein condensate of pions and the reliability of the Taylor expansion applied in this work.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figure