“Without the Muslims, We’d be out of a Job” Deconstructing Narratives and Hierarchies of Race, Whiteness, Nation and Class in England’s Sheep Slaughterhouses

This thesis is concerned with the ways in which Whiteness, race, nationhood and class are discursively constructed through narratives which call on purity and morality in Britain. It explores how white British belonging, racism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, and classism are manifest, their intersections, consequences, and shared imperial genealogies. It is based on multi-sited, comparative, fieldwork at three independent sheep slaughterhouses in England, including two sites which practice halal slaughter. The ethnography focusses on an amorphous group of white, British, “working-class” itinerant skilled slaughtermen who labour between them, the white British owners, and their relations with the local white British, British South Asian, Pakistani, and Polish workers at each site. These white British slaughtermen’s livelihoods are sustained by mobility, skill, migrations to, and Muslims in, Britain. They challenge media, political and academic discourses which have claimed that white working-class men have been “left behind” through a confluence of deindustrialisation, deskilling, multiculturalism, and immigration. Through a close ethnography which traces their stories, dialogue, and narrative, and then deconstructs them through critical race theory, narrative analysis, postcolonial studies, and feminist approaches to abjection and belonging, I analyse how these workers resist their own classed stigma by asserting their Whiteness, nationhood, and morality into “hierarchies of belonging.” These hierarchies are manifest by discursively constructing racialised, national, and moral differences and boundaries in relation to their co-workers, their skill, workers’ bodies, the meat they produce, the sheep they slaughter, and the religious and state which laws which govern their labour. Yet, in these fleshy, fluid slaughterhouses, claims of British purity and morality are fragile, imaginative and do not represent stable material, historic or ethical realities. As such, I trouble simplistic analyses which have legitimised white, classed racism as a reaction to socio-economic factors or cultural difference. Rather, I address the status and function of narratives at both national and personal scales and argue that their imaginative qualities are a central modality through which exclusionary forms of Whiteness and Britishness are reproduced as morally superior. More broadly, I connect these moralising narratives to imperial and colonial logics to draw out the long-standing fundamental instabilities of a pure, moral Whiteness or Britishness and the hierarchies which are reproduced through class and race.ESR

Querying Geometric Figures Using a Controlled Language, Ontological Graphs and Dependency Lattices

Dynamic geometry systems (DGS) have become basic tools in many areas of geometry as, for example, in education. Geometry Automated Theorem Provers (GATP) are an active area of research and are considered as being basic tools in future enhanced educational software as well as in a next generation of mechanized mathematics assistants. Recently emerged Web repositories of geometric knowledge, like TGTP and Intergeo, are an attempt to make the already vast data set of geometric knowledge widely available. Considering the large amount of geometric information already available, we face the need of a query mechanism for descriptions of geometric constructions. In this paper we discuss two approaches for describing geometric figures (declarative and procedural), and present algorithms for querying geometric figures in declaratively and procedurally described corpora, by using a DGS or a dedicated controlled natural language for queries.Comment: 14 pages, 5 figures, accepted at CICM 201

Exchange-Repairs: Managing Inconsistency in Data Exchange

In a data exchange setting with target constraints, it is often the case that a given source instance has no solutions. In such cases, the semantics of target queries trivialize. The aim of this paper is to introduce and explore a new framework that gives meaningful semantics in such cases by using the notion of exchange-repairs. Informally, an exchange-repair of a source instance is another source instance that differs minimally from the first, but has a solution. Exchange-repairs give rise to a natural notion of exchange-repair certain answers (XR-certain answers) for target queries. We show that for schema mappings specified by source-to-target GAV dependencies and target equality-generating dependencies (egds), the XR-certain answers of a target conjunctive query can be rewritten as the consistent answers (in the sense of standard database repairs) of a union of conjunctive queries over the source schema with respect to a set of egds over the source schema, making it possible to use a consistent query-answering system to compute XR-certain answers in data exchange. We then examine the general case of schema mappings specified by source-to-target GLAV constraints, a weakly acyclic set of target tgds and a set of target egds. The main result asserts that, for such settings, the XR-certain answers of conjunctive queries can be rewritten as the certain answers of a union of conjunctive queries with respect to the stable models of a disjunctive logic program over a suitable expansion of the source schema.Comment: 29 pages, 13 figures, submitted to the Journal on Data Semantic

Combining Provenance Management and Schema Evolution

The combination of provenance management and schema evolution using the CHASE algorithm is the focus of our research in the area of research data management. The aim is to combine the construc- tion of a CHASE inverse mapping to calculate the minimal part of the original database — the minimal sub-database — with a CHASE-based schema mapping for schema evolution

Forecasting inflation using dynamic model averaging

We forecast quarterly US inflation based on the generalized Phillips curve using econometric methods which incorporate dynamic model averaging. These methods not only allow for coefficients to change over time, but also allow for the entire forecasting model to change over time. We find that dynamic model averaging leads to substantial forecasting improvements over simple benchmark regressions and more sophisticated approaches such as those using time varying coefficient models. We also provide evidence on which sets of predictors are relevant for forecasting in each period

On the k-Boundedness for Existential Rules

The chase is a fundamental tool for existential rules. Several chase variants are known, which differ on how they handle redundancies possibly caused by the introduction of nulls. Given a chase variant, the halting problem takes as input a set of existential rules and asks if this set of rules ensures the termination of the chase for any factbase. It is well-known that this problem is undecidable for all known chase variants. The related problem of boundedness asks if a given set of existential rules is bounded, i.e., whether there is a predefined upper bound on the number of (breadth-first) steps of the chase, independently from any factbase. This problem is already undecidable in the specific case of datalog rules. However, knowing that a set of rules is bounded for some chase variant does not help much in practice if the bound is unknown. Hence, in this paper, we investigate the decidability of the k-boundedness problem, which asks whether a given set of rules is bounded by an integer k. We prove that k-boundedness is decidable for three chase variants, namely the oblivious, semi-oblivious and restricted chase.Comment: 20 pages, revised version of the paper published at RuleML+RR 201

Probabilistic Algorithmic Knowledge

The framework of algorithmic knowledge assumes that agents use deterministic knowledge algorithms to compute the facts they explicitly know. We extend the framework to allow for randomized knowledge algorithms. We then characterize the information provided by a randomized knowledge algorithm when its answers have some probability of being incorrect. We formalize this information in terms of evidence; a randomized knowledge algorithm returning ``Yes'' to a query about a fact \phi provides evidence for \phi being true. Finally, we discuss the extent to which this evidence can be used as a basis for decisions.Comment: 26 pages. A preliminary version appeared in Proc. 9th Conference on Theoretical Aspects of Rationality and Knowledge (TARK'03

Performance Evaluation and Optimization of Math-Similarity Search

Similarity search in math is to find mathematical expressions that are similar to a user's query. We conceptualized the similarity factors between mathematical expressions, and proposed an approach to math similarity search (MSS) by defining metrics based on those similarity factors [11]. Our preliminary implementation indicated the advantage of MSS compared to non-similarity based search. In order to more effectively and efficiently search similar math expressions, MSS is further optimized. This paper focuses on performance evaluation and optimization of MSS. Our results show that the proposed optimization process significantly improved the performance of MSS with respect to both relevance ranking and recall.Comment: 15 pages, 8 figure

A New Approach to Epistemic Logic

A new language for epistemic logic is introduced in which the epis- temic operators are of the form j x : x1 : : : xnj with the intended read- ing \x knows of x1 : : : xn that ...". Analogously we can express \t knows of t1 : : : tn that ... ", where t; t1 : : : tn are terms. An advantage of this approach is that we can quantify on the agents, \every y knows of x1 : : : xn that A" or \some expert knows of t1 : : : tn that A" can easily be expressed. The semantics we present for this language is a generalization of the transition semantics, called epistemic transition semantics in which the possible worlds are states of affairs compatible with the epistemic state of some agent. A calculus is presented and shown to be complete with respect to epistemic transition semantics