Cinematic Logic and the Function of the Cut

This paper investigates the essentially ‘Lacanian’ function of the cut in cinematic logic, arguing that the historical relationship between cinema and psychoanalysis is rooted in their shared logic of elision and division. However, while standard cinematic practice is to disavow the cut (through the repressive operation of ‘suture’) so as to construct and conserve the filmic ‘fantasy’ and thereby strengthen the imaginary, psychoanalysis contrarily seeks to directly attain to the real by traversing the fantasy along the lines of the cut. In examining this ‘diverging convergence’, the paper looks to the cinema of Alfred Hitchcock, whose celebrated films cut across both sides of the divide, providing the comfort of ‘imaginary resolution’ while at the same time undermining this equilibrium by directly invoking the real in the form and figure of the cut. In particular, the paper examines how Hitchcock’s films supplement the various cuts constitutive of cinema’s very being with an additional ‘foundational cut’; a cut that is equally formative of the film itself, but which simultaneously introduces a fundamentally determinative rift in this world, a central hole around which everything – plot, image, dialogue, etc. – twists and turns (and which is, moreover, intimately tied to Lacan’s formulation of the subject-object relation). The paper then goes on to address two key questions arising from this examination: what becomes of the suture when cinema, like psychoanalysis, truly acknowledges the cut and traverses its own fantasy; and (following Žižek) is there really a ‘proper’ way to remake a (Hitchcock) film

Keeping the Faith: On Being Good and How Not to be Evil

Review of Alain Badiou, emEthics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil/em, trans. Peter Hallward, New York, Verso, 2001. ISBN: 1-85984-435-9br

Can Cinema Be Thought: Alain Badiou and the Artistic Condition

Alain Badioursquo;s philosophy is generally understood to be a fundamentally mathematical enterprise, his principle categories of being, appearing, and truth being themselves thought only though specific scientific events. However the event itselfmdash;which constitutes the nexal point of his so-called lsquo;materialist dialecticrsquo;mdash;is contrarily thought not through mathematics but through art. And yet despite the fundamental role art plays in his philosophy Badioursquo;s lsquo;inaestheticrsquo; writings seem unduly proscriptive, allowing room principally for the expressly lsquo;literalrsquo; arts while eschewing for the most part those manifold arts which have little recourse to the letter. Badioursquo;s polemical writings on cinema are both symptomatic and serve as the most extreme example of this position, his cinema being one which wavers precariously on the border of art and non-art. This paper accordingly questions whether cinema can truly occupy a place in Badioursquo;s inaesthetics. I argue the hegemony of the letter in Badioursquo;s inaesthetics to be ultimately one of convenience and suggest that if cinematic truths are to be registered Badioursquo;s understanding of cinema as (what I interpret to be) an art of dis-appearance must be rejected. I conclude by contending the oppressive literality of Badioursquo;s philosophy to be symptomatic of its mathematical basismdash;a paradoxical position insofar as the very non-mathematical nature of art allows for evental thoughtmdash;the consequence of which being that Badiou regrettably neglects by and large those manifold illiterate arts that might otherwise serve to augment his thought.br

User involvement in a Cochrane systematic review:using structured methods to enhance the clinical relevance, usefulness and usability of a systematic review update

Background: This paper describes the structured methods used to involve patients, carers and health professionals in an update of a Cochrane systematic review relating to physiotherapy after stroke and explores the perceived impact of involvement.Methods: We sought funding and ethical approval for our user involvement. We recruited a stakeholder group comprising stroke survivors, carers, physiotherapists and educators and held three pre-planned meetings during the course of updating a Cochrane systematic review. Within these meetings, we used formal group consensus methods, based on nominal group techniques, to reach consensus decisions on key issues relating to the structure and methods of the review.Results: The stakeholder group comprised 13 people, including stroke survivors, carers and physiotherapists with a range of different experience, and either 12 or 13 participated in each meeting. At meeting 1, there was consensus that methods of categorising interventions that were used in the original Cochrane review were no longer appropriate or clinically relevant (11/13 participants disagreed or strongly disagreed with previous categories) and that international trials (which had not fitted into the original method of categorisation) ought to be included within the review (12/12 participants agreed or strongly agreed these should be included). At meeting 2, the group members reached consensus over 27 clearly defined treatment components, which were to be used to categorise interventions within the review (12/12 agreed or strongly agreed), and at meeting 3, they agreed on the key messages emerging from the completed review. All participants strongly agreed that the views of the group impacted on the review update, that the review benefited from the involvement of the stakeholder group, and that they believed other Cochrane reviews would benefit from the involvement of similar stakeholder groups.Conclusions: We involved a stakeholder group in the update of a Cochrane systematic review, using clearly described structured methods to reach consensus decisions. The involvement of stakeholders impacted substantially on the review, with the inclusion of international studies, and changes to classification of treatments, comparisons and subgroup comparisons explored within the meta-analysis. We argue that the structured approach which we adopted has implications for other systematic reviews.</p

The schlock of the new : Badiou, Duchamp, and the everyday miracle

It is hard not to recognize — as many commentators have — the striking homology between Alain Badiou’s theory of the event and the fate of Marcel Duchamp’s infamous 1917 ‘readymade’ Fountain. The congruence is in fact so marked that one of the easiest ways of grasping this key philosophical concept is simply by comparing it to Fountain’s simultaneously mundane and extraordinary story. Yet arguably the most important lesson to be drawn from this exercise is also the one that is most often ignored; to wit, far from presenting an unbridgeable divide, there in fact exists a paradoxical relation of continuity between the ‘event’ and the ‘everyday’. This article seeks to redress this critical oversight by using Fountain not only to ‘flesh out’ Badiou’s crucial concept but also to explore the frequently overlooked (but no less necessary) imbrication of the everyday in the event, and in this way counter claims that Badiou’s philosophy presents a straightforward or even naïve division between conservative continuity and radical rupture

Game-Theoretic Pricing and Selection with Fading Channels

We consider pricing and selection with fading channels in a Stackelberg game framework. A channel server decides the channel prices and a client chooses which channel to use based on the remote estimation quality. We prove the existence of an optimal deterministic and Markovian policy for the client, and show that the optimal policies of both the server and the client have threshold structures when the time horizon is finite. Value iteration algorithm is applied to obtain the optimal solutions for both the server and client, and numerical simulations and examples are given to demonstrate the developed result.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures, accepted by the 2017 Asian Control Conferenc

Deep Reinforcement Learning for Wireless Sensor Scheduling in Cyber-Physical Systems

In many Cyber-Physical Systems, we encounter the problem of remote state estimation of geographically distributed and remote physical processes. This paper studies the scheduling of sensor transmissions to estimate the states of multiple remote, dynamic processes. Information from the different sensors have to be transmitted to a central gateway over a wireless network for monitoring purposes, where typically fewer wireless channels are available than there are processes to be monitored. For effective estimation at the gateway, the sensors need to be scheduled appropriately, i.e., at each time instant one needs to decide which sensors have network access and which ones do not. To address this scheduling problem, we formulate an associated Markov decision process (MDP). This MDP is then solved using a Deep Q-Network, a recent deep reinforcement learning algorithm that is at once scalable and model-free. We compare our scheduling algorithm to popular scheduling algorithms such as round-robin and reduced-waiting-time, among others. Our algorithm is shown to significantly outperform these algorithms for many example scenarios

Skeleton-Based Human Action Recognition with Global Context-Aware Attention LSTM Networks

Human action recognition in 3D skeleton sequences has attracted a lot of research attention. Recently, Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks have shown promising performance in this task due to their strengths in modeling the dependencies and dynamics in sequential data. As not all skeletal joints are informative for action recognition, and the irrelevant joints often bring noise which can degrade the performance, we need to pay more attention to the informative ones. However, the original LSTM network does not have explicit attention ability. In this paper, we propose a new class of LSTM network, Global Context-Aware Attention LSTM (GCA-LSTM), for skeleton based action recognition. This network is capable of selectively focusing on the informative joints in each frame of each skeleton sequence by using a global context memory cell. To further improve the attention capability of our network, we also introduce a recurrent attention mechanism, with which the attention performance of the network can be enhanced progressively. Moreover, we propose a stepwise training scheme in order to train our network effectively. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on five challenging benchmark datasets for skeleton based action recognition

Illumination uniformity in endoscopic imaging

Standardised endoscopic digital images were taken and analysed using an image analysis software (National Instruments Vision Assistant version 7.1.1). The luminance plane was extracted and the pixel intensity distribution was determined along a horizontal line at the position of highest average intensity (centroid). The data was exported to MS Excel and the pixel intensity (y-axis) was plotted against pixel position (x-axis). A trendline using a 2nd order polynomial curve was fitted to each data set. The resultant equation for each curve was compared with equations obtained from other images taken under various illumination conditions and settings