On the use of preference-based evolutionary multi-objective optimization for solving a credibilistic portfolio selection model

The portfolio selection problem tries to identify the assets to allocate the capital, and the proportion to be devoted to each asset, for maximizing the returns at the minimum risk. By nature, this is a multi-objective optimization problem. In this work, we propose a three-objective model for portfolio selection, in which the uncertainty of the portfolio returns is modelled by means of LR-power fuzzy variables. We consider as criteria the credibilistic expected return (to be maxi- mized), the below-mean absolute semi-deviation as a risk measure (to be minimized), and a loss function which evaluates the credibility of achieving a non-positive return (to be minimized). The uncorrelation among the risk and loss measures concludes that they provide different information. Budget, cardinality, and diversification constraints are considered. To generate non-dominated portfolios fitting the investor' expectations, preference-based evolutionary algorithms are applied. The preferences are given by aspiration values to be attained by the objectives and profiles representing aggressive, cautious, and conservative investors are analysed. The results for data of the IBEX35 show that portfolios improving the preferences are found in the cautious and aggressive cases, while portfolios with objective values as close as possible to the expectations are obtained in the conservative case. In the generation process, the credibilistic loss has played an important role to and diversified portfolios.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tec

Oriental Passion to Honor the Dead

To promote the expiation of sins committed on earth, pious donations were common; the chaplaincy was the more common religious foundation, which was intended to secure in perpetuity a number of votes for the eternal repose of the soul of the patron or patrons. To ensure its continued maintenance, material goods were provided; these goods, together with the owner, are generally exhibited in their funerary chapels. Because of the Manila Galleon, which led to the exchange of Asian goods between East and West, it is thus very common to find works from Asia, China, Japan, and the Philippines in the decor of these funerary chapels

An intuitive control space for material appearance

Many different techniques for measuring material appearance have been proposed in the last few years. These have produced large public datasets, which have been used for accurate, data-driven appearance modeling. However, although these datasets have allowed us to reach an unprecedented level of realism in visual appearance, editing the captured data remains a challenge. In this paper, we present an intuitive control space for predictable editing of captured BRDF data, which allows for artistic creation of plausible novel material appearances, bypassing the difficulty of acquiring novel samples. We first synthesize novel materials, extending the existing MERL dataset up to 400 mathematically valid BRDFs. We then design a large-scale experiment, gathering 56,000 subjective ratings on the high-level perceptual attributes that best describe our extended dataset of materials. Using these ratings, we build and train networks of radial basis functions to act as functionals mapping the perceptual attributes to an underlying PCA-based representation of BRDFs. We show that our functionals are excellent predictors of the perceived attributes of appearance. Our control space enables many applications, including intuitive material editing of a wide range of visual properties, guidance for gamut mapping, analysis of the correlation between perceptual attributes, or novel appearance similarity metrics. Moreover, our methodology can be used to derive functionals applicable to classic analytic BRDF representations. We release our code and dataset publicly, in order to support and encourage further research in this direction

A Similarity Measure for Material Appearance

We present a model to measure the similarity in appearance between different materials, which correlates with human similarity judgments. We first create a database of 9,000 rendered images depicting objects with varying materials, shape and illumination. We then gather data on perceived similarity from crowdsourced experiments; our analysis of over 114,840 answers suggests that indeed a shared perception of appearance similarity exists. We feed this data to a deep learning architecture with a novel loss function, which learns a feature space for materials that correlates with such perceived appearance similarity. Our evaluation shows that our model outperforms existing metrics. Last, we demonstrate several applications enabled by our metric, including appearance-based search for material suggestions, database visualization, clustering and summarization, and gamut mapping.Comment: 12 pages, 17 figure

Performing race, class and status : identity strategies among Latin American women migrants in London

This paper explores the stories of women migrants from Latin America who found themselves living precarious lives and struggling to sustain former idealised notions of their racial and class identities in London. Dispossessed of previous class membership due to an onward feminised precarity, a diminished social capital, undocumented legal statuses, and menial stigmatised jobs, women clung to an idealised perception of social status (shaped by white Eurocentric aspirations) to negotiate and reconfigure class and racial anxieties in London. They engage in various strategies that include processes of whitening through marriage and children, performances of taste and beauty, and negotiating their racialisation at work. These cases reflect the relevance of the coloniality of power, its influence in the subsistence of racial and class ideologies in Latin America, and in a global economy of care that produces and reproduces postcolonial forms of intersectional racialised and gendered exploitation.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

‘Te lo tienes que currar’ : enacting an ethics of care in times of austerity

This research was funded by Grant ES/M003825/1 from the Economic and Social Research Council of the United Kingdom for the project ‘An ethnography of advice: Between market, society and the declining welfare state’, which I gratefully acknowledge.Amid austerity policies that have retracted welfare programs and have affected the livelihood of people in Spain, this paper describes how various local practices of care among members of the PAH (Platform for People Affected by Mortgages) work to recuperate social relations morally and practically. I seek to understand the relationship between people’s perceptions of social justice and notions of fairness on the one hand and ideas about deservingness on the other. I am interested in exploring who gets to choose and allocate, and how people in the PAH use the collective notion of care to justify their choice. What are the moral conflicts that people experience while judging and constructing the figure of the deserving versus the undeserving framed within a collective struggle for social justice? I analyse the conundrums of a movement that struggles to find a balance between individual judgments and the collective good; I aim to show the dilemmas and contradictions of the struggle for social justice.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Collaborative inquiry as a way to promote elementary students´ reflections in the efl classroom

113 p.This qualitative action research study approaches an inquiry based learning process in which fifth graders work collaboratively by examining a local topic (school snack) from their school context, from many different perspectives of their interest. The collaborative inquiry was a way to promote elementary students’ reflections in the EFL classroom. The EFL curriculum was organized around students’ communities and realities as relevant resources for language learning. The school snack was the topic selected by students for inquiry and language learning. Lessons were organized around students’ knowledge about the daily snack and what they wanted to learn about the topic. Exploring together issues related to the school snack, students wrote reflections, interviewed school administrators and the people in charge of bringing, serving and providing the school snack daily. They also searched for information in different sources to document their inquiries. Data were collected through reflective journal entries written by students, a book about the learning experiences in inquiry groups and the researcher´s field notes. Findings report that through a classroom project, fifth graders developed inquiry skills and literacies (digital, visual, oral, written) while learning together and improving their social competences through collaboration. Learning is about developing competencies for life and using language to learn to think and to express oneself. Inquiring in the language classroom evidenced the use of language (Spanish and English) as the means to learn about meaningful content beyond mere English grammar lessons. Inquiring collaboratively led to individual reflections about the challenges of working together and school coexistence as the way all the members of a scholar community relate to each other.Magíster en LingüísticaMaestrí

La intimidad en el territorio de una hacienda potosina

En el último tercio del siglo XIX, las propiedades de la familia Hernández Soto –Guanamé y Cruces– se consolidaron como un emporio ganadero que tuvo vigencia hasta los primeros años del siglo XX, tras la división entre varios de sus miembros. Se estableció la Hacienda de Illescas en la parte occidental de los terrenos. De acuerdo con el levantamiento topográfico realizado por Francisco Gándara en 1890 para los propietarios Matías y Antonio Hernández, la Hacienda de Cruces abarcaba un territorio de 373 890 hectáreas. En dicho plano se establece claramente una línea que divide la hacienda de norte a sur delimitando dos porciones similares de territorio: 186 967 hectáreas para Cruces y 186 923 para Illescas. De la lectura de las cartas que presentamos, se desprende que Dionisio Palomo era administrador general y tomaba decisiones respecto al territorio de la gran hacienda. Antonio Palomo, su hijo, se encargaba en particular de la administración de Illescas.El ramillete de cartas que presentamos en esta obra, se trata del epistolario que Antonio Hernández Soberón atesoró y que consta de ciento dieciocho cartas, setenta y cinco de ellas las recibió de su esposa Matilde Portillo de Hernández cuando él salía a supervisar los trabajos correspondientes a las tareas agroganaderas de la Hacienda de Cruces de su propiedad. En ellas, Matilde describe la cotidianidad de la vida en la casa paterna, estancia de Morterillos, el día a día de su primogénita y algunos hechos relevantes como el paso del gobernador por su residencia, cuando éste realizaba visitas oficiales al municipio de Moctezuma; asimismo, contiene nueve cartas de su hermano Valentín Hernández Soberón, quien lo pone al tanto de los sucesos familiares que acontecen en la capital del estado; además de diez cartas de Dionisio Palomo, administrador de la Hacienda de Cruces, las cuales muestran las actividades económicas de la hacienda; dos del mayordomo, Francisco B. Cruz de la estancia de Santa María de la propia hacienda, y una más de Othón Hernández, estos dos últimos personajes dan cuenta del nacimiento de su primogénita Mariana Herminia de la Concepción Hernández Portillo, quien nació el 25 de abril de 1877.1 También incluimos la correspondencia entre Benito Rezusta, administrador de las Salinas de Peñón Blanco y Dionisio Palomo, administrador de la Hacienda de Cruces, que da cuenta del quehacer económico de la hacienda y la importancia que tienen en éste los administradores