EthnoFilm: cinema-school and ethno-laboratory

The paper is dedicated to the EthnoFilm educational project in the historical and modern context of visual anthropology. The EthnoFilm project intended as the educational ethnocultural initiative, aimed to attraction of interested youth to ethnographic research and video fixation of the unique cultural phenomena of the peoples of Arctic and Subarctic regions: Nenets, Khanty, Mansi, Komi. The first stage of the project, consisted of lectures and seminars, was considered as development of traditional positions of ethnography as well as visual forms of description of ethnic groups. The courses regarding film production, dramatic art, editing, filming were delivered. The basic attention was paid to individual lessons that had been related to working out of creative sketches and plans of realization of the future films as final works of project's participants. The central stage of the project was the “field film-school”, ethnographic and film practice in the form of expeditions towards the places of residence of the various indigenous communities. During the expeditions the ethnographic material has been gained and first editing of the received materials at portable montage studio has been made. Besides, the film draft version accompanied with a language translation and updating of film details has been showed to protagonists of shootings. This process involved into account the opinion of participants from the national environment. The final stage of the EthnoFilm project was considered as editing of the film almanac. Almanac’s films were united by a project's theme. On another hand, all the films were considered as individual works: the film’s style and content depended upon the chosen characters, environment and author's position

Collapsing Superstring Conjecture

In the Shortest Common Superstring (SCS) problem, one is given a collection of strings, and needs to find a shortest string containing each of them as a substring. SCS admits 2 11/23-approximation in polynomial time (Mucha, SODA\u2713). While this algorithm and its analysis are technically involved, the 30 years old Greedy Conjecture claims that the trivial and efficient Greedy Algorithm gives a 2-approximation for SCS. We develop a graph-theoretic framework for studying approximation algorithms for SCS. The framework is reminiscent of the classical 2-approximation for Traveling Salesman: take two copies of an optimal solution, apply a trivial edge-collapsing procedure, and get an approximate solution. In this framework, we observe two surprising properties of SCS solutions, and we conjecture that they hold for all input instances. The first conjecture, that we call Collapsing Superstring conjecture, claims that there is an elementary way to transform any solution repeated twice into the same graph G. This conjecture would give an elementary 2-approximate algorithm for SCS. The second conjecture claims that not only the resulting graph G is the same for all solutions, but that G can be computed by an elementary greedy procedure called Greedy Hierarchical Algorithm. While the second conjecture clearly implies the first one, perhaps surprisingly we prove their equivalence. We support these equivalent conjectures by giving a proof for the special case where all input strings have length at most 3 (which until recently had been the only case where the Greedy Conjecture was proven). We also tested our conjectures on millions of instances of SCS. We prove that the standard Greedy Conjecture implies Greedy Hierarchical Conjecture, while the latter is sufficient for an efficient greedy 2-approximate approximation of SCS. Except for its (conjectured) good approximation ratio, the Greedy Hierarchical Algorithm provably finds a 3.5-approximation, and finds exact solutions for the special cases where we know polynomial time (not greedy) exact algorithms: (1) when the input strings form a spectrum of a string (2) when all input strings have length at most 2

The Arctic in the Soviet cinema lens: “Two Oceans” by Vladimir Shneiderov

The study aims at introducing unstudied materials, i.e., film documents of the Soviet period, related to the development of the Russian North, into the scientific circulation. So-called expedition films occupied a special place in the history of Soviet visual anthropology — films of educational content about the peoples and territories of the USSR. They reached its heyday at the turn of the 1920s — 1930s. One of the pioneers of Soviet visual anthropology is considered to be the filmmaker V.A. Shneiderov, the author of a series of films about the USSR territories (“The Great Flight”, “The Pamirs (the bottom of death)”, “At the height of 4500”, etc.). In addition to solving creative issues, the production of such films was part of a state experiment on the construction of local images and the country. The Soviet authorities used the resources of the cinematographer as a media source and agitation. In this article, the author considers the example of the expedition film “Two Oceans”, the classic of documentary films where V.A. Shneiderov pictured the history of the Northern Sea Route and the Soviet colonization of the Arctic. The context of the filmmaking, i.e., parallel processes in Soviet cultural politics and cinema, is discussed as well. The author conclusions contain thoughts about the research value of the Soviet expeditionary film as a complex historical source

Polynomial formulations as a barrier for reduction-based hardness proofs

The Strong Exponential Time Hypothesis (SETH) asserts that for every $\varepsilon>0$ there exists $k$ such that $k$-SAT requires time $(2-\varepsilon)^n$. The field of fine-grained complexity has leveraged SETH to prove quite tight conditional lower bounds for dozens of problems in various domains and complexity classes, including Edit Distance, Graph Diameter, Hitting Set, Independent Set, and Orthogonal Vectors. Yet, it has been repeatedly asked in the literature whether SETH-hardness results can be proven for other fundamental problems such as Hamiltonian Path, Independent Set, Chromatic Number, MAX-$k$-SAT, and Set Cover. In this paper, we show that fine-grained reductions implying even $\lambda^n$-hardness of these problems from SETH for any $\lambda>1$, would imply new circuit lower bounds: super-linear lower bounds for Boolean series-parallel circuits or polynomial lower bounds for arithmetic circuits (each of which is a four-decade open question). We also extend this barrier result to the class of parameterized problems. Namely, for every $\lambda>1$ we conditionally rule out fine-grained reductions implying SETH-based lower bounds of $\lambda^k$ for a number of problems parameterized by the solution size $k$. Our main technical tool is a new concept called polynomial formulations. In particular, we show that many problems can be represented by relatively succinct low-degree polynomials, and that any problem with such a representation cannot be proven SETH-hard (without proving new circuit lower bounds)

«Русский Сахалин» Петра Полевого: визуально-антропологические образы

This paper considers a relevant but practically unexplored topic, i.e. visual anthropology as a tool of scientific cognition as well as constructing and representing the image of a territory. Professional researchers and travellers contributed considerably to the formation of images of the frontier regions of Russia in the imperial and Soviet periods. This work opens a little-known page in the history of the study of Sakhalin — the work of Pyotr Ignatievich Polevoy (1873–1938), one of the pioneers in the scientific development of the island. Based on archival data, many of which are published for the first time, the article focuses on the analysis of the scientist’s visual and anthropological legacy and follows the main directions of his work — anthropology, geology, and local history. The reflection of the post-penal period in the history of Sakhalin related to the transformation of the colonisation policy, gives special ideas in terms of studying and representing the island’s image in the Asia-Pacific. The authors compare text and photographic materials and specify the key images of Sakhalin in the works of Polevoy, an “island of oil”, “island of foreigners” and “island of colonists”. Interconnected by the cross-cutting theme of colonisation, these images clearly illustrate the researcher’s position on the futility of Sakhalin as an agricultural colony and the rationality of its industrial development. The paper also develops concepts from visual anthropology (“visual representation of a region”, “ethnographic photography”) and cultural geography (“image of a region”, “cultural landscape”). The authors come to the conclusion that the legacy of Pyotr Polevoy (his scientific works and photographic representations) can be considered an informative historical source for studying the dynamic image of the Far Eastern frontier in anthropology and related humanities.Статья посвящена актуальной, но практически неисследованной в отечественной науке теме — визуальной антропологии как средству научного познания, конструирования и репрезентации образа территории. Определяющую роль в формировании образов фронтирных регионов страны в имперский и советский период играли профессиональные исследователи и путешественники. Предлагаемая работа открывает малоизвестную страницу в истории изучения Сахалина — творчество Петра Игнатьевича Полевого (1873–1938), одного из первопроходцев научного освоения острова. Основанная на архивных данных, многие из которых публикуются впервые, статья фокусируется на анализе визуально-антропологического наследия ученого, структурированного по основным направлениям его работ — антропология, геология и краеведение. Отражение в трудах исследователя посткаторжного периода в истории Сахалина, связанного с трансформацией колонизационной политики, дает особые сюжеты в плане изучения и позиционирования образа острова — форпоста страны в Азиатско-Тихоокеанском регионе. Путем сопоставления печатных и фотографических материалов выделяются и анализируются ключевые образы Сахалина в работах П. И. Полевого — «остров нефти», «остров инородцев» и «остров колонистов». Связанные между собой сквозной темой колонизации, они наглядно иллюстрируют положения исследователя о бесперспективности Сахалина как сельскохозяйственной колонии и рациональности его промышленного освоения. В теоретическом плане данная работа на конкретном примере развивает понятия из области визуальной антропологии («визуальная репрезентация региона», «этнографическая фотография») и культурной географии («образ региона», «культурный ландшафт»). Делается вывод о том, что наследие П. И. Полевого, включающее материалы междисциплинарного научного изучения Сахалина, в том числе его фотографические репрезентации, представляет собой информативный исторический источник для изучения динамичного образа дальневосточного фронтира в антропологии и смежных гуманитарных науках.