Abraham Lincoln and Unionism in East Tennessee

Often, the American Civil War finds itself painted in classrooms across the country as a conflict of clear-cut ideologies in the North and South. The citizens of the northern states wished to preserve the sacred Union, and northern forces fought valiantly while invading a rebellious South. The Unionists of eastern Tennessee put to rest the false generalization that all southerners were loyal to the Confederate States of America, as their struggle throughout the war on the behalf of the Union was a long and bloody event. On June 8, 1861, Tennessee voted to secede from the United States. The vote was far from unanimous, as 66 percent of the eligible voters of east Tennessee showed their northern tastes by voting to remain in the Union. Much to the dismay of these loyal Unionists, eastern Tennessee was soon brought under the control of the Confederacy. It was not until 1863 that a federal army entered eastern Tennessee, a full two years after the June of 1861 declaration of secession. President Abraham Lincoln heard the cry of the eastern Tennessean Unionists even prior to the state’s secession; the delay of liberation for the East was not from a lack of sympathies from the President. Lincoln wished to intervene quickly on the behalf of eastern Tennessee for both the protection of loyalists and the capture of a strategically important area, but an invading Union army was held back by non-cooperating Union generals. Indeed, pro-Union forces in east Tennessee created a situation that the Confederate government was unfamiliar with. Where most of the war was fought between North and South, the violence in east Tennessee was between neighbors. This violence was unlike anything else seen in the war, as the relative geographic isolation of east Tennessee led to a civil war inside the Civil War. The guerrilla warfare and subsequent bloody crackdown of Unionists created a difficult and unusual situation for the governments of both sides of the conflict to tackle

A Portrait of Raymond Brutinel as a Young Man (Part II): The Future Canadian Corps Machine Gun Commander as a Business Entrepreneur in the Canadian West, 1908–1914

The following carries on from an article on Brutinel’s prewar life in Edmonton, Alberta that appeared in the previous issue of Canadian Military History. That account dealt with his arrival in Edmonton from France, the reasons for his immigration, and his adaptation to life in the newly-created Alberta capital. This included an initial involvement with the Edmonton French community, his editorship of the French language Le Courrier de l’Ouest, and his eventual breaking away from these pursuits into a career of business entrepreneurship. The following is specifically concerned with this latter phase of his career, in which, at the height of the ‘Laurier boom,’ he enjoyed great success. Included are his role as an agent for a syndicate of wealthy Montreal capitalists, his work as an explorer for coal deposits, and his promotion of numerous community development schemes, intended both to assist with community improvement and to earn money for his Montreal backers. These are recounted to clarify for the first time the kinds of activities that preoccupied Brutinel before the war and to help to illustrate his experiences and the capacities he developed and subsequently brought to his service as an officer with the Canadian Corps on the Western Front

A Portrait of Raymond Brutinel as a Young Man (Part I): The Future Machine Gun Commander in Edmonton, Alberta, 1905-1914

Raymond Brutinel remains one of the Canadian Corps’ most intriguing and little understood senior officers. A fair amount has been written about his service with the Canadian Corps, which generally portrays him as a significant commander and military innovator. But his life before he joined the Canadian military largely remains a mystery, which Brutinel himself did little to clear up. He had emigrated from France to Edmonton, Alberta in 1905 and lived there until the outbreak of war. Yet little is known in detail about this formative period of his life. Based largely upon Edmonton-based sources, the following aims to bring greater clarity to these crucial formative years than has been available before now. There is, in fact, little here of a specific military nature, which may itself be significant. But for the first time we have significant detail about what this background was. This in turn helps us to understand exactly the kind of experience, the personality, and the intellectual qualities that Brutinel brought to the job of Canadian Corps machine gun commander

Empiricism without Magic: Transformational Abstraction in Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

In artificial intelligence, recent research has demonstrated the remarkable potential of Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNNs), which seem to exceed state-of-the-art performance in new domains weekly, especially on the sorts of very difficult perceptual discrimination tasks that skeptics thought would remain beyond the reach of artificial intelligence. However, it has proven difficult to explain why DCNNs perform so well. In philosophy of mind, empiricists have long suggested that complex cognition is based on information derived from sensory experience, often appealing to a faculty of abstraction. Rationalists have frequently complained, however, that empiricists never adequately explained how this faculty of abstraction actually works. In this paper, I tie these two questions together, to the mutual benefit of both disciplines. I argue that the architectural features that distinguish DCNNs from earlier neural networks allow them to implement a form of hierarchical processing that I call “transformational abstraction”. Transformational abstraction iteratively converts sensory-based representations of category exemplars into new formats that are increasingly tolerant to “nuisance variation” in input. Reflecting upon the way that DCNNs leverage a combination of linear and non-linear processing to efficiently accomplish this feat allows us to understand how the brain is capable of bi-directional travel between exemplars and abstractions, addressing longstanding problems in empiricist philosophy of mind. I end by considering the prospects for future research on DCNNs, arguing that rather than simply implementing 80s connectionism with more brute-force computation, transformational abstraction counts as a qualitatively distinct form of processing ripe with philosophical and psychological significance, because it is significantly better suited to depict the generic mechanism responsible for this important kind of psychological processing in the brain

No. 07: Household Food Security and Access to Medical Care in Maputo, Mozambique

The relationship between household access to medical care and food security is a potentially circuitous and challenging relationship to model. This discussion paper uses multiple modelling techniques to determine the quality of the relationships between these variables using household survey data collected by the Hungry Cities Partnership in 2014 in Maputo, Mozambique. The results of the investigation are framed according to the Sustainable Livelihood Framework and indicate a predictive relationship between household food security status and consistent household medical care access among the sampled households. The results also identify potential conditional independence in the relationship between other demographic variables and these two dependent variables among the surveyed households