"Virus hunting" using radial distance weighted discrimination

Motivated by the challenge of using DNA-seq data to identify viruses in human blood samples, we propose a novel classification algorithm called "Radial Distance Weighted Discrimination" (or Radial DWD). This classifier is designed for binary classification, assuming one class is surrounded by the other class in very diverse radial directions, which is seen to be typical for our virus detection data. This separation of the 2 classes in multiple radial directions naturally motivates the development of Radial DWD. While classical machine learning methods such as the Support Vector Machine and linear Distance Weighted Discrimination can sometimes give reasonable answers for a given data set, their generalizability is severely compromised because of the linear separating boundary. Radial DWD addresses this challenge by using a more appropriate (in this particular case) spherical separating boundary. Simulations show that for appropriate radial contexts, this gives much better generalizability than linear methods, and also much better than conventional kernel based (nonlinear) Support Vector Machines, because the latter methods essentially use much of the information in the data for determining the shape of the separating boundary. The effectiveness of Radial DWD is demonstrated for real virus detection.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/15-AOAS869 in the Annals of Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Humour at the Model United Nations: The role of laughter in constituting geopolitical assemblages

Model United Nations (MUN) is a simulation in which students take on the roles of ambassadors to the United Nations, engaging in debate on 'real' issues from the perspective of their assumed national identities. This paper, based on a year of ethnography and interviews of a college-level MUN team, examines the role of humour in producing particular geopolitical imaginations among those participating and also in producing the MUN assemblage itself. Key here is the circulation of affects among participants' bodies, producing an orientation among them that facilitates debate and consensus-building. This finding is seen as a corrective to past work on geopolitics and humour, which has tended to emphasise irony and satire, as well as mass-mediated humor. © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

The Diplomatic Corps of Things

The social history of diplomacy includes many elements, one of which is assemblage, or the material spaces of diplomatic activity and the various bodies they include. Another is the state effect – the documents and objects of diplomacy – as well as the state affect – the more intangible understandings and beliefs that condition diplomacy and lay well outside the state itself. Assemblage, effects, and affects, taken together, must form the basis of a deeper understanding of diplomatic relations and a new diplomatic history

Theorizing a More-than-Human Diplomacy: Assembling the British Foreign Office, 1839–1874

This article emphasizes the more-than-human nature of foreign policy formation and diplomatic practice, as found in an examination of nineteenth-century Parliament Select Committee testimony regarding the intersection of everyday bureaucratic practice and the material context of the British Foreign Office. These records indicate both how the changing world of diplomacy at this time (including new states and communication technologies) materially impacted the Foreign Office, as well as the affective atmosphere experienced by its employees through an excess of paper. Debates over how the new Foreign Office ought to be built reveal concerns about the circulation of paper, bodies, light and air in a drive for efficiency. These historical materialities speak to our understanding of contemporary changes occurring within the world of diplomacy, including the rise of digital technologies and the new skills needed among diplomats, as well as inform our understanding of the exercise of power within assemblages

The origins and evolution of popular geopolitics: An interview with Jo Sharp and Klaus Dodds

When I was a PhD student (1999–2003) studying newspaper representations of Central and Eastern Europe during NATO and EU expansion, Klaus Dodds’s and Jo Sharp’s work was central to the way in which I came to position my work within wider literatures. More importantly, however, when I subsequently decided to shift from ‘legitimate’ news media to the decidedly more vulgar study of superheroes and their imbrication in geopolitical discourse, it was their critical opening into the worlds of popular culture that gave me the courage to push the boundaries of what was acceptable to study within the field of critical geopolitics. Both had paved the way for my work, Dodds with his analyses of political cartoons and James Bond films, and Sharp with her work looking at the treatment of Russia (as a mirror for American identity) in Reader’s Digest magazine. I think it is safe to say that, without these two scholars, there would either be no field of popular geopolitics or it would have taken a much different form at a much later date

The Figure of the Refugee in Superhero Cinema

In this paper we argue that superhero cinema offers an opportunity to think through the narratives and affects of the refugee crisis, which are distinct from, but related to, the relatively well-attended-to tropes of journalism. To do so we adopt both the ethical stance of feminist political geography and the analytic methods of popular geopolitics. Our analysis focuses on two films from the burgeoning Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU): Thor: Ragnarok and Captain Marvel. Both films are not ‘refugee films’ per se, but they illustrate the ways in which the ongoing ‘refugee crisis’ is being dealt with in mainstream, corporate Hollywood blockbusters. The two films are considered both in their narrative and affective engineering, as part of an effort to understand the ways in which political subjects might be shaped by the act of viewing. Our analysis uncovers three themes: 1) mobility as power, 2) the aesthetic of modernity, and 3) refugee bodies. We conclude that studies like this can contribute to a broader understanding of the role of whiteness and securitisation in the portrayal of refugees in the Global North