Trade Union Politics as a Countermovement? A Polaniyan Perspective

The article develops a conceptual proposal for the inquiry of trade unions. On the basis of Karl Polanyis theory, four patterns of political mobilization applied by trade unions in the current Transformation are pointed out

From photos to sketches-how humans and deep neural networks process objects across different levels of visual abstraction

Line drawings convey meaning with just a few strokes. Despite strong simplifications, humans can recognize objects depicted in such abstracted images without effort. To what degree do deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) mirror this human ability to generalize to abstracted object images? While CNNs trained on natural images have been shown to exhibit poor classification performance on drawings, other work has demonstrated highly similar latent representations in the networks for abstracted and natural images. Here, we address these seemingly conflicting findings by analyzing the activation patterns of a CNN trained on natural images across a set of photographs, drawings, and sketches of the same objects and comparing them to human behavior. We find a highly similar representational structure across levels of visual abstraction in early and intermediate layers of the network. This similarity, however, does not translate to later stages in the network, resulting in low classification performance for drawings and sketches. We identified that texture bias in CNNs contributes to the dissimilar representational structure in late layers and the poor performance on drawings. Finally, by fine-tuning late network layers with object drawings, we show that performance can be largely restored, demonstrating the general utility of features learned on natural images in early and intermediate layers for the recognition of drawings. In conclusion, generalization to abstracted images, such as drawings, seems to be an emergent property of CNNs trained on natural images, which is, however, suppressed by domain-related biases that arise during later processing stages in the network

Deutschsprachiger Rap und Politik

Symbolische Auseinandersetzunge

Gangsta-Rap als ambivalente Subjektkultur

Der Beitrag untersucht die Sprecherposition des deutschen Gangsta-Rappers mit Migrationshintergrund aus kultursoziologischer Perspektive und lotet den inszenatorischen Spielraum des Subjekts in einem normativen Szenediskurs aus, der umschlossen ist von soziokulturell bedeutsamen, übergeordneten Diskursen. Gangsta-Rap wird als popkulturelle Bühne und umkämpfter Ort betrachtet, an dem sich die Protagonisten vor dem Hintergrund gesellschaftlich kursierender Stereotype und Zuschreibungen positionieren. In diesem Sinne interpretieren wir die bild- und textbasierten Inszenierungen als Produkte der Verhandlung von Kategorien wie Geschlecht, Ethnizität und Klasse. In ästhetisierter Form wirken die Performances auf die Gesellschaft zurück – mit dem Effekt einer polarisierenden Diskussion

No variations in transit times for Qatar-1 b

The transiting hot Jupiter planet Qatar-1 b was presented to exhibit variations in transit times that could be of perturbative nature. A hot Jupiter with a planetary companion on a nearby orbit would constitute an unprecedented planetary configuration, important for theories of formation and evolution of planetary systems. We performed a photometric follow-up campaign to confirm or refute transit timing variations. We extend the baseline of transit observations by acquiring 18 new transit light curves acquired with 0.6-2.0 m telescopes. These photometric time series, together with data available in the literature, were analyzed in a homogenous way to derive reliable transit parameters and their uncertainties. We show that the dataset of transit times is consistent with a linear ephemeris leaving no hint for any periodic variations with a range of 1 min. We find no compelling evidence for the existence of a close-in planetary companion to Qatar-1 b. This finding is in line with a paradigm that hot Jupiters are not components of compact multi-planetary systems. Based on dynamical simulations, we place tighter constraints on a mass of any fictitious nearby planet in the system. Furthermore, new transit light curves allowed us to redetermine system parameters with the precision better than that reported in previous studies. Our values generally agree with previous determinations.Comment: Accepted for publication in A&

Workers United? How Trade Union Organizations at the European Level Form Political Positions on the Freedom of Services

In the course of European integration, national trade unions in Europe founded the umbrella organization of the European Trade Union Confederation in order to establish common political positions. Drawing on the case of supranational politics of services regulation, this study shows how cleavages within the EU's multi-level system of labor regulation make the development of such positions a difficult task. Whereas most research on cleavages at the supranational level focuses either on party groups or national origin, findings indicate a vertical line of conflict within the multi-level system of European trade unionism.Im Zuge der europäischen Integration haben nationale Gewerkschaften in Europa die Dachorganisation des Europäischen Gewerkschaftsbundes gegründet, um gemeinsame politische Positionen festzulegen. Das Papier untersucht auf Grundlage der supranationalen Politik der Dienstleistungsfreiheit, wie Spaltungen innerhalb des mehrstufigen Regulierungssystems der EU die Entwicklung einer gemeinsamen Position zu einer schwierigen Aufgabe machen. Während sich die meisten Studien zu Spaltungen auf supranationaler Ebene entweder auf Parteigruppen oder auf Länderkonflikte konzentrieren, deuten die Befunde dieses Papiers auf eine vertikale Konfliktlinie innerhalb des Mehrebenensystems des europäischen Gewerkschaftsbundes hin.1 Introduction 2 European trade union position-making within the European Union Intermediary organizations and European-level socialization experiences The European Trade Union Confederation 3 The free movement of services in the Single European Market 4 Methodology 5 Empirical findings The Enforcement Directive of the Posting of Workers Directive The search for a common position among European trade union organizations 6 Conclusion Reference

Brain2Pix: Fully convolutional naturalistic video reconstruction from brain activity

Reconstructing complex and dynamic visual perception from brain activity remains a major challenge in machine learning applications to neuroscience. Here we present a new method for reconstructing naturalistic images and videos from very large single-participant functional magnetic resonance data that leverages the recent success of image-to-image transformation networks. This is achieved by exploiting spatial information obtained from retinotopic mappings across the visual system. More specifically, we first determine what position each voxel in a particular region of interest would represent in the visual field based on its corresponding receptive field location. Then, the 2D image representation of the brain activity on the visual field is passed to a fully convolutional image-to-image network trained to recover the original stimuli using VGG feature loss with an adversarial regularizer. In our experiments, we show that our method offers a significant improvement over existing video reconstruction technique