Mapping Precariousness

The condition of precariousness not only provides insights into a segment of the world of work or of a particular subject group, but is also a privileged standpoint for an overview of the condition of the social on a global scale. Because precariousness is multidimensional and polysemantic, it traverses contemporary society and multiple contexts, from industrial to class, gender, family relations as well as political participation, citizenship and migration. This book maps the differences and similarities in the ways precariousness and insecurity in employment unfold and are subjectively experienced in regions and sectors that are confronted with different labour histories, legislations and economic priorities. Establishing a constructive dialogue amongst different global regions and across disciplines, the chapters explore the shift from precariousness to precariat and collective subjects as it is being articulated in the current global crisis. This edited collection aims to continue a process of mapping experiences by means of ethnographies, fieldwork, interviews, content analysis, where the precarious define their condition and explain how they try to withdraw from, cope with or embrace it

A Critical Look at the Abstraction Based on Macro-Operators

Abstraction can be an effective technique for dealing with the complexity of planning tasks. This paper is aimed at assessing and identifying in which cases abstraction can actually speed-up the overall search. In fact, it is well known that the impact of abstraction on the time spent to search for a solution of a planning problem can be positive or negative, depending on several factors -including the number of objects defined in the domain, the branching factor, and the plan length. Experimental results highlight the role of such aspects on the overall performance of an algorithm that performs the search at the ground-level only, and compares them with the ones obtained by enforcing abstraction

A Parametric Hierarchical Planner for Experimenting Abstraction Techniques

This paper presents a parametric system, devised and implemented to perform hierarchical planning by delegating the actual search to an external planner (the "parameter") at any level of abstraction, including the ground one. Aimed at giving a better insight of whether or not the exploitation of abstract spaces can be used for solving complex planning problems, comparisons have been made between instances of the hierarchical planner and their non hierarchical counterparts. To improve the significance of the results, three different planners have been selected and used while performing experiments. To facilitate the setting of experimental environments, a novel semi-automatic technique, used to generate abstraction hierarchies starting from ground-level domain descriptions, is also described

A Route Confidence Evaluation Method for Reliable Hierarchical Text Categorization

Hierarchical Text Categorization (HTC) is becoming increasingly important with the rapidly growing amount of text data available in the World Wide Web. Among the different strategies proposed to cope with HTC, the Local Classifier per Node (LCN) approach attains good performance by mirroring the underlying class hierarchy while enforcing a top-down strategy in the testing step. However, the problem of embedding hierarchical information (parent-child relationship) to improve the performance of HTC systems still remains open. A confidence evaluation method for a selected route in the hierarchy is proposed to evaluate the reliability of the final candidate labels in an HTC system. In order to take into account the information embedded in the hierarchy, weight factors are used to take into account the importance of each level. An acceptance/rejection strategy in the top-down decision making process is proposed, which improves the overall categorization accuracy by rejecting a few percentage of samples, i.e., those with low reliability score. Experimental results on the Reuters benchmark dataset (RCV1- v2) confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method, compared to other state-of-the art HTC methods

PACMAS: A Personalized, Adaptive, and Cooperative MultiAgent System Architecture

In this paper, a generic architecture, designed to support the implementation of applications aimed at managing information among different and heterogeneous sources, is presented. Information is filtered and organized according to personal interests explicitly stated by the user. User pro- files are improved and refined throughout time by suitable adaptation techniques. The overall architecture has been called PACMAS, being a support for implementing Personalized, Adaptive, and Cooperative MultiAgent Systems. PACMAS agents are autonomous and flexible, and can be made personal, adaptive and cooperative, depending on the given application. The peculiarities of the architecture are highlighted by illustrating three relevant case studies focused on giving a support to undergraduate and graduate students, on predicting protein secondary structure, and on classifying newspaper articles, respectively

Indigenous Digital Technologies. The Taicho and Yelloknives Dene’s Web-Site and Cultural Online Archives

Cyberspace is only one of the many metaphors used to describe the Internet. While there is a growing body of literature on identity formation in cyberspace, there are important gaps in this field. One of these is related to the analysis of the use of digital technologies by the Northern Canadian Indigenous people. Precisely, the author, focusing her attention on Tåîchô and Yellowknives Dene communities in Northwest Territories of Canada analyzes the contents of their websites and online archives in order to understand how these native groups promote their culture and spread out their knowledge through digital technologies for working toward decolonizatio

BODY CHANGES AND GREEN CONSUMPTION. EMBODYING AND PERFORMING A VEGAN LIFESTYLE

Veganism is usually addressed in studies on medical benefits or eating disorders as well as food identities that are able to shape and influence society. Through this article, the author aims to add a new interpretation of veganism by linking the anthropological topic of body changes to green consumption and dietary choices. Notably, the present analysis aims to explore the ideas of a lifestyle free of animal products and their embodied political significance using the ethnographic methodology. The approach used allows us to present veganism as a meaningful strategy that employs personal values as a response to wider world issues related to environmental degradation and animal safeguard. Therefore, in this dissertation, the implicit and explicit body modification and vegan expressions are crucial to understanding how veganism is concretized in the Italian contex

An Overview of Research on Political Attitudes in Croatia

The article presents an overview of research on political attitudes in Croatia since the beginning of 1990s. There is a considerable number of works investigating political attitudes, written mainly by political scientists, psychologists and sociologists. Admittedly, many of these works are available only in Croatian. The significance and diversity of topics covered by various authors indicate the necessity of further efforts in synthesizing this substantial body of interdisciplinary scientific knowledge. This article is a step in that direction