Asymptotic behaviour of estimators of the parameters of nearly unstable INAR(1) models

A sequence of first-order integer-valued autoregressive type (INAR(1)) processes is investigated, where the autoregressive type coefficients converge to 1. It is shown that the limiting distribution of the joint conditional least squares estimators for this coefficient and for the mean of the innovation is normal. Consequences for sequences of Galton{Watson branching processes with unobservable immigration, where the mean of the offspring distribution converges to 1 (which is the critical value), are discussed

The Exhibition as an Experiment: An Analogy and its Implications

The analogy of the exhibition as an experiment suggests innovative curatorial approaches that challenge institutional practices. This analogy has however a historical precedence in modernism when itbecame paradigmatic of the exhibitions at the Museum of ModernArt in New York in the 1940s, defining the curatorial approach of its founding director Alfred J Barr. This article considers this early useof the analogy of the exhibition as an experiment and further reflects on its redefinition at the turn of the 20th century by examining how both the notions of the exhibition and of the experiment havechanged over time. In particular, the article examines the different meanings and practices inferred by the concepts of the exhibition and the experiment in the first decades of the 20th century and in the present. It outlines how correspondences between cultural and scientific paradigms can be deployed to tease unacknowledged synergies between two modes of knowledge production (i.e. the art exhibition and the experiment) and address questions of presentness, authority and legitimacy that they imply

Solution density influence on syringe infusion pumps performance: An experimental study

Embargo removed

Robot rights? Towards a social-relational justification of moral consideration \ud

Should we grant rights to artificially intelligent robots? Most current and near-future robots do not meet the hard criteria set by deontological and utilitarian theory. Virtue ethics can avoid this problem with its indirect approach. However, both direct and indirect arguments for moral consideration rest on ontological features of entities, an approach which incurs several problems. In response to these difficulties, this paper taps into a different conceptual resource in order to be able to grant some degree of moral consideration to some intelligent social robots: it sketches a novel argument for moral consideration based on social relations. It is shown that to further develop this argument we need to revise our existing ontological and social-political frameworks. It is suggested that we need a social ecology, which may be developed by engaging with Western ecology and Eastern worldviews. Although this relational turn raises many difficult issues and requires more work, this paper provides a rough outline of an alternative approach to moral consideration that can assist us in shaping our relations to intelligent robots and, by extension, to all artificial and biological entities that appear to us as more than instruments for our human purpose

“Excellence R Us”: university research and the fetishisation of excellence

The rhetoric of “excellence” is pervasive across the academy. It is used to refer to research outputs as well as researchers, theory and education, individuals and organisations, from art history to zoology. But does “excellence” actually mean anything? Does this pervasive narrative of “excellence” do any good? Drawing on a range of sources we interrogate “excellence” as a concept and find that it has no intrinsic meaning in academia. Rather it functions as a linguistic interchange mechanism. To investigate whether this linguistic function is useful we examine how the rhetoric of excellence combines with narratives of scarcity and competition to show that the hypercompetition that arises from the performance of “excellence” is completely at odds with the qualities of good research. We trace the roots of issues in reproducibility, fraud, and homophily to this rhetoric. But we also show that this rhetoric is an internal, and not primarily an external, imposition. We conclude by proposing an alternative rhetoric based on soundness and capacity-building. In the final analysis, it turns out that that “excellence” is not excellent. Used in its current unqualified form it is a pernicious and dangerous rhetoric that undermines the very foundations of good research and scholarship

Networks in Archaeology: Phenomena, Abstraction, Representation

The application of method and theory from network science to archaeology has dramatically increased over the last decade. In this article, we document this growth over time, discuss several of the important concepts that are used in the application of network approaches to archaeology, and introduce the other articles in this special issue on networks in archaeology. We argue that the suitability and contribution of network science techniques within particular archaeological research contexts can be usefully explored by scrutinizing the past phenomena under study, how these are abstracted into concepts, and how these in turn are represented as network data. For this reason, each of the articles in this special issue is discussed in terms of the phenomena that they seek to address, the abstraction in terms of concepts that they use to study connectivity, and the representations of network data that they employ in their analyses. The approaches currently being used are diverse and interdisciplinary, which we think are evidence of a healthy exploratory stage in the application of network science in archaeology. To facilitate further innovation, application, and collaboration, we also provide a glossary of terms that are currently being used in network science and especially those in the applications to archaeological case studies