Beating the Air. Phenomenological remarks on the semiotics of conducting.

The subject of the article is conducting as typically known from the classical symphonic practice. The question to be discussed is: In what respect is the conductor’s beat properly to be understood as ”signing” within the frames of a sign language, and as such a proper object of semiotic analysis. My approach to the topic is primarily phenomenological. It makes analytical comments on the task of the conductor; to the very nature of the cooperative and communicative framework embedding the conductor and the musicians; and hence to the constitutional conditions for conducting. The conclusion is that in many important respects conducting is not a matter of signing and there is no such thing as a conductor’s sign language. It will be outlined how the connection between music, musicians and conductor is based on analogies between music, corporeality and onto-temporalit

The Negativity of Negative Propositions

The problem of truthmakers for negative propositions was introduced by Bertrand Russell in 1918. Since then the debate has mostly been concerned with whether to accept or reject their existence, and little has been said about what it is that makes a negative proposition negative. This is a problem as it is obvious that you cannot just read it off from the grammar of a sentence. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that propositions may be negative or positive in many ways: it offers a typology, and shows how the question of the existence of negative facts will receive a different answer depending on its relationship to that typology

TRADE SANCTIONS AND EFFECTS ON LONG-RUN STOCKS OF MARINE MAMMALS

Trade sanctions are used to influence the long-run management of an ecological system in another country, trying to secure a large predator stock by using sanctions on the exports of the products from the predator or the prey. This corresponds to U.S. sanctions on Norwegian fish exports aiming to prevent or reduce harvesting of Minke whales. Threats of sanctions influence long-run equilibrium, but do not secure increased stocks and decreased harvesting. The outcome depends on the bioeconomic interaction between the species, and the managerial system in the Target country. It is neither obvious that the sanctions are credible, nor that the Sender will succeed. The interaction between the species is crucial for evaluating the effects of the sanctions.International Relations/Trade, Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

A Non-Convex Relaxation for Fixed-Rank Approximation

This paper considers the problem of finding a low rank matrix from observations of linear combinations of its elements. It is well known that if the problem fulfills a restricted isometry property (RIP), convex relaxations using the nuclear norm typically work well and come with theoretical performance guarantees. On the other hand these formulations suffer from a shrinking bias that can severely degrade the solution in the presence of noise. In this theoretical paper we study an alternative non-convex relaxation that in contrast to the nuclear norm does not penalize the leading singular values and thereby avoids this bias. We show that despite its non-convexity the proposed formulation will in many cases have a single local minimizer if a RIP holds. Our numerical tests show that our approach typically converges to a better solution than nuclear norm based alternatives even in cases when the RIP does not hold

Self-repelling diffusions via an infinite dimensional approach

In the present work we study self-interacting diffusions following an infinite dimensional approach. First we prove existence and uniqueness of a solution with Markov property. Then we study the corresponding transition semigroup and, more precisely, we prove that it has Feller property and we give an explicit form of an invariant probability of the system.Comment: Version 2: Typos are corrected. Section 6 is reorganised in order to make it more transparent; the results are unchanged. The presentation of the proof of Proposition 3 is improved. Statement of Lemma 5 is rephrased. Version 3: Acknowledgement of financial support is added. Accepted for publication in "Stochastic Partial Differential Equations: Analysis and Computations