Class-Agnostic Counting

Nearly all existing counting methods are designed for a specific object class. Our work, however, aims to create a counting model able to count any class of object. To achieve this goal, we formulate counting as a matching problem, enabling us to exploit the image self-similarity property that naturally exists in object counting problems. We make the following three contributions: first, a Generic Matching Network (GMN) architecture that can potentially count any object in a class-agnostic manner; second, by reformulating the counting problem as one of matching objects, we can take advantage of the abundance of video data labeled for tracking, which contains natural repetitions suitable for training a counting model. Such data enables us to train the GMN. Third, to customize the GMN to different user requirements, an adapter module is used to specialize the model with minimal effort, i.e. using a few labeled examples, and adapting only a small fraction of the trained parameters. This is a form of few-shot learning, which is practical for domains where labels are limited due to requiring expert knowledge (e.g. microbiology). We demonstrate the flexibility of our method on a diverse set of existing counting benchmarks: specifically cells, cars, and human crowds. The model achieves competitive performance on cell and crowd counting datasets, and surpasses the state-of-the-art on the car dataset using only three training images. When training on the entire dataset, the proposed method outperforms all previous methods by a large margin.Comment: Asian Conference on Computer Vision (ACCV), 201

Currency crises and foreign credit in emerging markets: credit crunch or demand effect?

Currency crises of the past decade highlighted the importance of balance-sheet effects of currency crises. In credit-constrained markets such effects may lead to further declines in credit. Controlling for a host of fundamentals, we find a systematic decline in foreign credit to emerging market private firms of about 25% in the first year following currency crises, which we define as large changes in real value of the currency. This decline is especially large in the first five months, lessens in the second year and disappears entirely by the third year. We identify the effects of currency crises on the demand and supply of credit and find that the decline in the supply of credit is persistent and contributes to about 8% decline in credit for the first two years, while the 35% decline in demand lasts only five months.Financial crises

El mic como herramienta para explorar el significado y sentido del operador multiplicativo

En este artículo se presentan algunas reflexiones sobre el tema de los sistemas de representación y su relevancia en la educación matemática. Con base en estas reflexiones, se describe en detalle el MIC2 como un sistema de representación que permite explorar las concepciones de los estudiantes sobre algunos aspectos del conocimiento matemático. Se identifica un problema en el área de las estructura multiplicativa y se presenta una experiencia que se realizó a través de la utilización del MIC con un grupo de niños. Aunque no es posible asegurar la validez de los resultados obtenidos en esta experiencia, consideramos que estos resultados muestran que es posible utilizar el MIC como herramienta de exploración de las concepciones de los estudiantes sobre las estructuras multiplicativas

When Does Capital Account Liberalization Help More than It Hurts?

In this paper we reconsider the evidence on capital account liberalization and growth. While we find indications of a positive association, the effects vary with time, with how capital account liberalization is measured, and with how the relationship is estimated. The evidence that the effects of capital account liberalization are stronger in high-income countries is similarly fragile. There is some evidence that the positive growth effects of liberalization are stronger in countries with strong institutions, as measured by standard indicators of the rule of law, but only weak evidence that the benefits grow with a country's financial depth and development. We find more evidence of a correlation between capital account liberalization and growth when we allow the effect to vary with other dimensions of openness. There are two interpretations of this finding, one in terms of the sequencing of trade and financial liberalization, the other in terms of the need to eliminate major macroeconomic imbalances before opening the capital account. By and large our results support the second interpretation.

Euskadi: verdugos, cómplices y víctimas

En medio del griterío reinante en la Comunidad Vasca y en España en general (desde el llamado plan Ibarretxe hasta la tregua territorialmente selectiva declarada por ETA), conviene volverse hacia las víctimas del terrorismo, porque sus voces calladas no

The Majoritarian and the Democratic

Hay que recuperar una concepción de democracia militante y tenerla dispuesta para llevarla a la práctica y afrontar los problemas políticos. Para ello es preciso que la democracia sea entendida más como una sustancia (un ideal de igual libertad) que como un mero procedimiento decisorio (regla de la mayoría). Si bien se mira, este método mayoritario deriva de aquella sustancia y sólo se justifica en la medida en que se atenga a ella. Por eso la democracia importa sobre todo como un criterio con que medir el grado de justicia de las decisiones y, sólo después, en razón del modo mayoritario con que se han adoptado. La igualdad política de los ciudadanos se ha de plasmar en sus métodos democráticos, claro está, pero antes todavía en esa misma igualdad alcanzada en sus resultados. De ahí que rechacemos esa habitual confusión entre democracia y mayoritarismo, uno de cuyos máximos representantes sería J. Waldron.A conception of militant democracy must be recovered and ready to be put into practice in order to solve problems. This requires to see democracy as a substance (an ideal of equal liberty) rather than as a mere decisional process (majority rule). All things considered, the method of majority rule derives of that substance and is only justified to the extent that suits it. That is why democracy matters mainly as a yard stick to measure the degree of fairness of public decisions, and solely after that because of the majority rule with which they have been adopted. Obviously, the political equality of citizens must be embodied in democratic methods, but even before, that same equality must be achieved in their results. So we reject the usual confusion between democracy and majoritarianism, one of whose main exponents would be J. Waldron.Este artículo se enmarca en el proyecto «Patologías de la democracia» (FFI200913229, subprograma FISO), financiado por el Ministerio de Educación e Innovación

De la vida al testimonio

1 archivo PDF (3 páginas). fhtrigintaquattuorReseña para "El amor me absolverá. La pasión secreta de Fidel Castro en México" de Isabel Custodio, donde nos transporta, a través de las páginas de su libro, al México de los años cincuenta, en una ciudad que se movía con otro ritmo, en donde el tránsito vehicular era fluido y los límites urbanos estaban más o menos definidos, y en la que vivían sus habitantes en un aparente letargo político. Sin embargo, en esa capital se gestaba una de las revoluciones más importantes del siglo XX, y la de mayor trascendencia en América, la revolución cubana

Presentación : la mirada del otro

1 archivo PDF (5 páginas). fhtrigintasexPresentación del número 36 de la Revista Fuentes Humanística, donde los artículos del Dossier están dedicado a aquellos que a través de “otra mirada” percibieron a México desde su propia concepción, prejuicios, simpatías o antipatías, y que escribieron sus experiencias, ya sea en forma de testimonios, estudios científicos, novelas o cuentos