‘"Buzz Off!": The Killer Bee Movie as Modern Belief Narrative.’

Looks at the sub-genre of the killer bee movies but through the lens of legend studies - specifically looking at these films as belief narratives

On the usage of the probability integral transform to reduce the complexity of multi-way fuzzy decision trees in Big Data classification problems

We present a new distributed fuzzy partitioning method to reduce the complexity of multi-way fuzzy decision trees in Big Data classification problems. The proposed algorithm builds a fixed number of fuzzy sets for all variables and adjusts their shape and position to the real distribution of training data. A two-step process is applied : 1) transformation of the original distribution into a standard uniform distribution by means of the probability integral transform. Since the original distribution is generally unknown, the cumulative distribution function is approximated by computing the q-quantiles of the training set; 2) construction of a Ruspini strong fuzzy partition in the transformed attribute space using a fixed number of equally distributed triangular membership functions. Despite the aforementioned transformation, the definition of every fuzzy set in the original space can be recovered by applying the inverse cumulative distribution function (also known as quantile function). The experimental results reveal that the proposed methodology allows the state-of-the-art multi-way fuzzy decision tree (FMDT) induction algorithm to maintain classification accuracy with up to 6 million fewer leaves.Comment: Appeared in 2018 IEEE International Congress on Big Data (BigData Congress). arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1902.0935

Market Instruments and CO2 Mitigation: A General Equilibrium Analysis for Spain

Market instruments are a core element of policies to mitigate climate change. Choosing and designing the right instruments can help to minimise mitigation costs. This paper seeks to analyse various market instruments for CO2 mitigation from the viewpoint of cost-effectiveness, using an AGE (applied general equilibrium) model for the case of Spain. A distinction is drawn between (1) quantity instruments, which represent different extents of a market for emission permits; and (2) price instruments, which represent different types of tax. The analysis quantifies the importance of making the right choice as to which sectors are excluded from the permit market, and of targeting taxes correctly.Environmental policy instruments, general equilibrium analysis, Spain

Learning about innovation in Europe’s regional policy

In the good old times scholars and practitioners arguing in favor of a regional dimension of innovation policies felt like being the avant-garde of new, forward-looking thinking against the old-fashioned conventional wisdom, according to which “grand” industrial policy inherently required the full strength of the Nation State or – for some – the new European “super-State”. The former looked for answers from a new territorial and systemic perspective, paying particular attention to SMEs and endogenous capacities rather than searching from exogenous help by, for example, luring inward investment, typically branch plants from multinational companies, through fiscal incentives . At the same time, the emphasis on innovation implied a departure from traditional regional policies, focused on the transfer of resources from “rich” to “poor” areas and on providing basic infrastructures to disadvantaged regions in the name of cohesion objectives.