Violence as Violation: An Enquiry into the Normative Significance of Violence

The term violence is imbued with a great deal of moral and normative force. While this may generally be agreed upon, the question as to what violence consists in is one with very disparate answers. This Paper aims to assess the different ways in which violence may be understood, with the hope of coming to a broad understanding of violence that captures the full normative significance of the term. Whereas some may regard violence as something which exists purely in the realm of the physical, other understandings take a more nuanced view. According to such views, violence may be psychological, latent or structural as well as physical. Such modes of violence will be discussed in turn, and their various strengths and shortcomings evaluated. This will, so far as possible, be situated in a wider philosophical context, with relevant conceptual parallels being noted. Continuities shared among all normatively significant modes of violence will then be identified, with the hope of arriving at an understanding that captures the force of what each meaningfully articulates. It will be argued that the central continuity shared among meaningful modes of violence is violation of means to human flourishing, a rounded understanding will thus define violence in terms of violation

Remapping heritage and the garden suburb: Haberfield's civic ecologies

© 2019, © 2019 Geographical Society of New South Wales Inc. Gardens in Australia are considered an important site of heritage maintenance and negotiation for their capacity to materialise transformations in everyday life, design, lifestyles, demographics, environment, as well as social and cultural practices. In the case of conservation areas, gardens tend to be valued in terms of their closeness and potential to preserve specific historical elements. Plants in these gardens are cultivated to evoke period designs, such as Federation (c.1890–1915) and cottage gardens. In this article we turn to gardens and gardening to make sense of entanglements between cultural, historical and environmental elements, and we ask: what role do plants play in shaping our understanding of suburban heritage? To answer this question, we draw on oral histories, archival research and ethnography in Haberfield, the first model garden suburb in Australia. We show how plants channel and mediate multiple concerns that contest and extend ideas of heritage circulating in public discourse. Foregrounding the centrality of plants, this article contributes a dynamic definition of heritage that includes the entanglement of environmental stewardship and individual and collective heritage

SlowFuzz: Automated Domain-Independent Detection of Algorithmic Complexity Vulnerabilities

Algorithmic complexity vulnerabilities occur when the worst-case time/space complexity of an application is significantly higher than the respective average case for particular user-controlled inputs. When such conditions are met, an attacker can launch Denial-of-Service attacks against a vulnerable application by providing inputs that trigger the worst-case behavior. Such attacks have been known to have serious effects on production systems, take down entire websites, or lead to bypasses of Web Application Firewalls. Unfortunately, existing detection mechanisms for algorithmic complexity vulnerabilities are domain-specific and often require significant manual effort. In this paper, we design, implement, and evaluate SlowFuzz, a domain-independent framework for automatically finding algorithmic complexity vulnerabilities. SlowFuzz automatically finds inputs that trigger worst-case algorithmic behavior in the tested binary. SlowFuzz uses resource-usage-guided evolutionary search techniques to automatically find inputs that maximize computational resource utilization for a given application.Comment: ACM CCS '17, October 30-November 3, 2017, Dallas, TX, US

Value the Edge: Permaculture as Counterculture in Australia

This paper reconsiders the story of permaculture, developed in Australia in the mid-1970s by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren. This paper considers permaculture as an example of counterculture in Australia. In keeping with permaculture design ecological principles, we argue that today permaculture is best understood as part of an assemblage of design objects, bacteria, economies, humans, plants, technologies, actions, theories, mushrooms, policies, affects, desires, animals, business, material and immaterial labour and politics and that it can be read as contrapuntal rather than as oppositional practice. Contrapuntal insofar as it is not directly oppositional preferring to reframe and reorientate everyday practices. The paper is structured in three parts: in the first one we frame our argument by providing a background to our understanding of counterculture and assemblage; in the second we introduce the beginning of permaculture in its historical context, and in third we propose to consider permaculture as an assemblage

The Planty Atlas of UTS

The Planty Atlas of UTS was a participatory project we designed for UTS Library Creative in Residence 2019. The project invites participants to imagine a more planty UTS campus, and it consisted in an installation of plants and books from a variety of disciplines, curated walks in the UTS precinct and workshops. The walking route was recorded in a map and in a zine, available digitally and in print

The Plantiness of Bankstown

Our project welcomes you to walk noticing how plants shape the ways we look at, feel about, and imagine Bankstown. It consists of six invitations to envisage the neighbourhood in more planty ways. Plants make our lives possible, and are central to crucial issues: climate breakdown, biodiversity loss, food production, pollution. Walking produces embodied ways of knowing, and affective dispositions towards our environment. In turn the way we perceive the environment influences the way we treat it. The Plantiness of Bankstown is a proposition to care for and make allies with plants in your daily life

Marrickville Maps: Tropical Imaginaries of Abundance

Three booklets and a printed map, designed as a pocket sized package, printed on a Risograph printer and distributed through community groups and workshop participation. Via a series of three walks, we imagined a tropical Marrickville by tracking and photographing the recombinant ecologies of dragon fruit, banana and papaya. Ethnographic and design research methods included repeated walks, photographic documentation and interviews with local gardeners. These walks created opportunities to engage our bodies and senses, as well as to think about how plants shape the way we look at, feel about and imagine a place

Synergistic information supports modality integration and flexible learning in neural networks solving multiple tasks

Striking progress has been made in understanding cognition by analyzing how the brain is engaged in different modes of information processing. For instance, so-called synergistic information (information encoded by a set of neurons but not by any subset) plays a key role in areas of the human brain linked with complex cognition. However, two questions remain unanswered: (a) how and why a cognitive system can become highly synergistic; and (b) how informational states map onto artificial neural networks in various learning modes. Here we employ an information-decomposition framework to investigate neural networks performing cognitive tasks. Our results show that synergy increases as networks learn multiple diverse tasks, and that in tasks requiring integration of multiple sources, performance critically relies on synergistic neurons. Overall, our results suggest that synergy is used to combine information from multiple modalities—and more generally for flexible and efficient learning. These findings reveal new ways of investigating how and why learning systems employ specific information-processing strategies, and support the principle that the capacity for general-purpose learning critically relies on the system’s information dynamics

Who is to blame? The relationship between ingroup identification and relative deprivation is moderated by ingroup attributions

Contradictory evidence can be found in the literature about whether ingroup identification and perceived relative deprivation are positively or negatively related. Indeed, theoretical arguments can be made for both effects. It was proposed that the contradictory findings can be explained by considering a hitherto unstudied moderator: The extent to which deprivation is attributed to the ingroup. It was hypothesised that identification would only have a negative impact on deprivation, and that deprivation would only have a negative impact on identification, if ingroup attributions are high. To test this, attributions to the ingroup were experimentally manipulated among British student participants (N = 189) who were asked about their perceived deprivation vis-à-vis German students, yield ing support for the hypotheses