Words are Malleable: Computing Semantic Shifts in Political and Media Discourse

Recently, researchers started to pay attention to the detection of temporal shifts in the meaning of words. However, most (if not all) of these approaches restricted their efforts to uncovering change over time, thus neglecting other valuable dimensions such as social or political variability. We propose an approach for detecting semantic shifts between different viewpoints--broadly defined as a set of texts that share a specific metadata feature, which can be a time-period, but also a social entity such as a political party. For each viewpoint, we learn a semantic space in which each word is represented as a low dimensional neural embedded vector. The challenge is to compare the meaning of a word in one space to its meaning in another space and measure the size of the semantic shifts. We compare the effectiveness of a measure based on optimal transformations between the two spaces with a measure based on the similarity of the neighbors of the word in the respective spaces. Our experiments demonstrate that the combination of these two performs best. We show that the semantic shifts not only occur over time, but also along different viewpoints in a short period of time. For evaluation, we demonstrate how this approach captures meaningful semantic shifts and can help improve other tasks such as the contrastive viewpoint summarization and ideology detection (measured as classification accuracy) in political texts. We also show that the two laws of semantic change which were empirically shown to hold for temporal shifts also hold for shifts across viewpoints. These laws state that frequent words are less likely to shift meaning while words with many senses are more likely to do so.Comment: In Proceedings of the 26th ACM International on Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM2017

The contested and contingent outcomes of Thatcherism in the UK

The death of Margaret Thatcher in April 2013 sparked a range of discussions and debates about the significance of her period in office and the political project to which she gave her name: Thatcherism. This article argues that Thatcherism is best understood as a symbolically important part of the emergence of first-phase neoliberalism. It engages with contemporary debates about Thatcherism among Marxist commentators and suggests that several apparently divergent positions can help us now reach a more useful analysis of Thatcherism’s short- and long-term outcomes for British political economy. The outcomes identified include: an initial crisis in the neoliberal project in the UK; the transformation of the party political system to be reflective of the politics of neoliberalism, rather than its contestation; long-term attempts at the inculcation of the neoliberal individual; de-industrialisation and financial sector dependence; and a fractured and partially unconscious working class. In all long-term outcomes, the contribution of Thatcherism is best understood as partial and largely negative, in that it cleared the way for a longer-term and more constructive attempt to embed neoliberal political economy. The paper concludes by suggesting that this analysis can inform current debates on the left of British politics about how to oppose and challenge the imposition of neoliberal discipline today

Unemployment and attitudes to work: asking the ‘right’ question

Attitudes research has repeatedly demonstrated that the vast majority of unemployed people want a job, and that their work commitment is generally at least as strong as employed people’s. But until now it has not asked if they are more likely than employed people to prefer unemployment to an unattractive job. While this oversight reflects a noted widespread reluctance to respond directly to right-wing authors’ assertions, this article argues that it is partly attributable to existing studies using survey questions inappropriate for researching unemployment. Responses to the British Cohort Study / National Child Development Study agree / disagree statement ‘having almost any job is better than being unemployed’ were analysed. Being ‘unemployed and seeking work’ associated strongly with disagreeing with the statement across all recent datasets in both studies, even when a number of relevant variables were controlled for

Host-parasite coevolution promotes innovation through deformations in fitness landscapes

During the struggle for survival, populations occasionally evolve new functions that give them access to untapped ecological opportunities. Theory suggests that coevolution between species can promote the evolution of such innovations by deforming fitness landscapes in ways that open new adaptive pathways. We directly tested this idea by using high- throughput gene editing- phenotyping technology (MAGE- Seq) to measure the fitness landscape of a virus, bacteriophage λ, as it coevolved with its host, the bacterium Escherichia coli. An analysis of the empirical fitness landscape revealed mutation- by- mutation- by- host- genotype interactions that demonstrate coevolution modified the contours of λ’s landscape. Computer simulations of λ’s evolution on a static versus shifting fitness landscape showed that the changes in contours increased λ’s chances of evolving the ability to use a new host receptor. By coupling sequencing and pairwise competition experiments, we demonstrated that the first mutation λ evolved en route to the innovation would only evolve in the presence of the ancestral host, whereas later steps in λ’s evolution required the shift to a resistant host. When time- shift replays of the coevo-lution experiment were run where host evolution was artificially accelerated, λ did not innovate to use the new receptor. This study provides direct evidence for the role of coevolution in driving evolutionary novelty and provides a quantitative framework for predicting evolution in coevolving ecological communities

The evolutionary emergence of stochastic phenotype switching in bacteria

Stochastic phenotype switching – or bet hedging – is a pervasive feature of living systems and common in bacteria that experience fluctuating (unpredictable) environmental conditions. Under such conditions, the capacity to generate variable offspring spreads the risk of being maladapted in the present environment, against offspring likely to have some chance of survival in the future. While a rich subject for theoretical studies, little is known about the selective causes responsible for the evolutionary emergence of stochastic phenotype switching. Here we review recent work – both theoretical and experimental – that sheds light on ecological factors that favour switching types over non-switching types. Of particular relevance is an experiment that provided evidence for an adaptive origin of stochastic phenotype switching by subjecting bacterial populations to a selective regime that mimicked essential features of the host immune response. Central to the emergence of switching types was frequent imposition of ‘exclusion rules’ and ‘population bottlenecks’ – two complementary faces of frequency dependent selection. While features of the immune response, exclusion rules and bottlenecks are likely to operate in many natural environments. Together these factors define a set of selective conditions relevant to the evolution of stochastic switching, including antigenic variation and bacterial persistence

Principles of Stakes Fairness in Sport

Fairness in sport is not just about assigning the top prizes to the worthiest competitors. It is also about the way the prize structure itself is organised. For many sporting competitions, although it may be acceptable for winners to receive more than losers, it can seem unfair for winners to take everything and for losers to get nothing. Yet this insight leaves unanswered some difficult questions about what stakes fairness requires and which principles of stakes fairness are appropriate for particular competitions. In this article I specify a range of different principles of stakes fairness (ten in total) that could regulate sporting competitions. I also put forward a theoretical method for pairing up appropriate principles of stakes fairness with given sporting competitions. Specifically, I argue that the underlying rationales for holding sporting competitions can provide useful guides for identifying appropriate principles of stakes fairness. I then seek to clarify and work through some of the implications of this method for a sample of real world controversies over sporting prize structures. I also attempt to refine the method in response to two possible objections from indeterminacy and relativism. Finally, I compare and contrast my conclusions with more general philosophical debates about justice

Tibiofemoral Contact Forces in the Anterior Cruciate Ligament-Reconstructed Knee.

PURPOSE: To investigate differences in ACL reconstructed (ACLR) and healthy individuals in terms of the magnitude of the tibiofemoral contact forces, as well as the relative muscle and external load contributions to those contact forces, during walking, running and sidestepping gait tasks. METHODS: A computational electromyography-driven neuromusculoskeletal model was used to estimate the muscle and tibiofemoral contact forces in those with combined semitendinosus and gracilis tendon autograft ACLR (n=104, 29.7±6.5 years, 78.1±14.4 kg) and healthy controls (n=60, 27.5±5.4 years, 67.8±14.0 kg) during walking (1.4±0.2 ms), running (4.5±0.5 ms) and sidestepping (3.7±0.6 ms). Within the computational model, the semitendinosus of ACLR participants was adjusted to account for literature reported strength deficits and morphological changes subsequent to autograft harvesting. RESULTS: ACLRs had smaller maximum total and medial tibiofemoral contact forces (~80% of control values, scaled to bodyweight) during the different gait tasks. Compared to controls, ACLRs were found to have a smaller maximum knee flexion moment, which explained the smaller tibiofemoral contact forces. Similarly, compared to controls, ACLRs had both a smaller maximum knee flexion angle and knee flexion excursion during running and sidestepping, which may have concentrated the articular contact forces to smaller areas within the tibiofemoral joint. Mean relative muscle and external load contributions to the tibiofemoral contact forces were not significantly different between ACLRs and controls. CONCLUSION: ACLRs had lower bodyweight-scaled tibiofemoral contact forces during walking, running and sidestepping, likely due to lower knee flexion moments and straighter knee during the different gait tasks. The relative contributions of muscles and external loads to the contact forces were equivalent between groups