“Deterritorializing the Canadian Museum for Human Rights”

 This article explains the value of assemblage theory to making sense of a museum like the Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR), which has struggled with the formidable challenge of comparatively representing human rights in controversial cultural and historical contexts. I argue that “assemblage thinking” permits us to appreciate more richly the way in which the expressive power of the CMHR arises from the dynamic interaction/intersection of overlapping clusters of objects, spaces, ideologies, memories, feelings, structures, histories, and experiences.  Understood as “assemblages,” these clusters in important (but not all) ways lie beyond the scope of formal agency such as that exercised by curators and museum administrators. Accordingly, we must understand museums generally, and the CMHR particularly, as fundamentally unable guarantee the integrity and perdurability of their/its own structures and meanings, and recognize these meanings (and a museum’s identity) as irreducibly open-ended and provisional.

Predicting the relevance of distributional semantic similarity with contextual information

International audienceUsing distributional analysis methods to compute semantic proximity links between words has become commonplace in NLP. The resulting relations are often noisy or difficult to interpret in general. This paper focuses on the issues of evaluating a distributional resource and filtering the relations it contains, but instead of considering it in abstracto, we focus on pairs of words in context. In a discourse , we are interested in knowing if the semantic link between two items is a by-product of textual coherence or is irrelevant. We first set up a human annotation of semantic links with or without contex-tual information to show the importance of the textual context in evaluating the relevance of semantic similarity, and to assess the prevalence of actual semantic relations between word tokens. We then built an experiment to automatically predict this relevance , evaluated on the reliable reference data set which was the outcome of the first annotation. We show that in-document information greatly improve the prediction made by the similarity level alone

Évaluer et améliorer une ressource distributionnelle : protocole d'annotation de liens sémantiques en contexte

National audienceL’application de méthodes d’analyse distributionnelle pour calculer des liens de proximité sémantique entre les mots est devenue courante en TAL. Toutefois, il reste encore beaucoup à faire pour mieux comprendre la nature de la proximité sémantique qui est calculée par ces méthodes. Cet article est consacré à la question de l’évaluation d’une ressource distributionnelle, et de son amélioration ; en effet, nous envisageons la mise en place d’une procédure d’évaluation comme une première étape vers la caractérisation de la ressource et vers son ajustement, c’est-à-dire la réduction du bruit en faveur de paires de voisins distributionnels exhibant une relation sémantique pertinente. Nous proposons un protocole d’annotation en contexte des voisins distributionnels, qui nous permet de constituer un ensemble fiable de données de référence (couples de voisins jugés pertinents ou non par les annotateurs). Les données produites sont analysées, puis exploitées pour entraîner un système de catégorisation automatique des liens de voisinage distributionnel, qui prend en compte une large gamme d’indices et permet un filtrage efficace de la ressource considérée

Une évaluation de l'impact des types de textes sur la tâche de segmentation thématique

International audienceThis paper aims to contribute to a better definition of the requirements of the text segmentation task, by stressing the need for taking into account the types of texts that can be appropriately considered. Our hypothesis is that while TS is indeed relevant to analyse texts with a thematic organisation, this task is ill-fitted to deal with other modes of text organisation (temporal, rhetorical, etc.). By comparing the performance of a TS system on two corpora, with either a "strong" or a "weak" thematic organisation, we show that TS is sensitive to text types.Cette étude a pour but de contribuer à la définition des objectifs de la segmentation thématique (ST), en incitant à prendre en considération le paramètre du type de textes dans cette tâche. Notre hypothèse est que, si la ST est certes pertinente pour traiter certains textes dont l'organisation est bien thématique, elle n'est pas adaptée à la prise en compte d'autres modes d'organisation (temporelle, rhétorique), et ne peut pas être appliquée sans précaution à des textes tout-venants. En comparant les performances d'un système de ST sur deux corpus, à organisation thématique "forte" et "faible", nous montrons que cette tâche est effectivement sensible à la nature des textes

Gravitational Waves from Axisymmetric, Rotational Stellar Core Collapse

We have carried out an extensive set of two-dimensional, axisymmetric, purely-hydrodynamic calculations of rotational stellar core collapse with a realistic, finite-temperature nuclear equation of state and realistic massive star progenitor models. For each of the total number of 72 different simulations we performed, the gravitational wave signature was extracted via the quadrupole formula in the slow-motion, weak-field approximation. We investigate the consequences of variation in the initial ratio of rotational kinetic energy to gravitational potential energy and in the initial degree of differential rotation. Furthermore, we include in our model suite progenitors from recent evolutionary calculations that take into account the effects of rotation and magnetic torques. For each model, we calculate gravitational radiation wave forms, characteristic wave strain spectra, energy spectra, final rotational profiles, and total radiated energy. In addition, we compare our model signals with the anticipated sensitivities of the 1st- and 2nd-generation LIGO detectors coming on line. We find that most of our models are detectable by LIGO from anywhere in the Milky Way.Comment: 13 pages, 22 figures, accepted for publication in ApJ (v600, Jan. 2004). Revised version: Corrected typos and minor mistakes in text and references. Minor additions to the text according to the referee's suggestions, conclusions unchange

The Impact of Delivery Risk on Optimal Production and Futures Hedging

Multiple delivery specifications exist on nearly all commodity futures contracts. Sellers are typically allowed to choose among several grades of the underlying commodity. On the delivery day, the futures price converges to the spot price of the cheapest-to-deliver grade rather than to that of the par-delivery grade of the commodity, thereby imposing an additional delivery risk on hedgers. This paper derives the optimal production and futures hedging strategy for a risk-averse competitive firm facing delivery risk. We show that the option value of the multiple delivery specification induces the firm to produce more with than without the delivery risk if the firm gauges this value higher than the market. We further show that if the delivery risk is additively related to the commodity price risk, the firm optimally under-hedges its risk exposure. On the other hand, if the delivery risk is multiplicatively related to the commodity price risk, the firm may optimally choose an under- or over-hedge which we illustrate using a numerical example.link_to_subscribed_fulltex

Writing the Holocaust for Children: On the Representation of Unimaginable Atrocity

Review of: Boraks-Nemetz, Lillian. The Old Brown Suitcase: A Teenager’s Story of War and Peace. 1994. Vancouver: Ronsdale, 2008 Kacer, Kathy, and Sharon E. McKay. Whispers from the Ghettos. Toronto: Puffin, 2009. Watts, Irene. Goodbye Marianne: The Graphic Novel. Illus. Kathryn E. Shoemaker. Toronto: Tundra, 2008.   DOI: 10.1353/jeu.2010.003