Inter-ethnic Relations in Padang of West Sumatra Navigating Between Assimilation and Exclusivity

This article contributes to the discussion on how inter-ethnic relations challenge cultural boundaries, in this case Minangkabau matrilineal-Islamic culture in Padang of West Sumatra, Indonesia. This paper will focus on how Minangkabau people establish relationship with other ethnic groups in Padang, a multi-ethnic city. The paper argues that matrilineal principles (descent and inheritance through the maternal line) and Islam are the defining aspects to be considered by Minangkabau people in maintaining relationship with other ethnic groups. Moreover, there is some interplay between the need to protect Minangkabau Islamic-matrilineal adat in maintaining inter-ethnic relations by Minangkabau people and their assimilation and exclusivity interests

Presentations of Positive and Negative Images in a. M. Kollontai's Vasilisa Maligina: a Search for an Ideal Woman

This article is a contribution to the issue of possible relation between fiction and society, approached by a study of A.M. Kollontai's story, Vasilisa Maligina. The aim of the study is to examine how far the Kollontai's background, her purpose of writing, and condition of society under which she lived and wrote contribute to her concept on an ideal woman. By analyzing her story, it can be concluded that "Kollontai creates the new woman-her literary work ( Vasilisa Maligina) reflects the creation.

Relative Errors for Deterministic Low-Rank Matrix Approximations

We consider processing an n x d matrix A in a stream with row-wise updates according to a recent algorithm called Frequent Directions (Liberty, KDD 2013). This algorithm maintains an l x d matrix Q deterministically, processing each row in O(d l^2) time; the processing time can be decreased to O(d l) with a slight modification in the algorithm and a constant increase in space. We show that if one sets l = k+ k/eps and returns Q_k, a k x d matrix that is the best rank k approximation to Q, then we achieve the following properties: ||A - A_k||_F^2 <= ||A||_F^2 - ||Q_k||_F^2 <= (1+eps) ||A - A_k||_F^2 and where pi_{Q_k}(A) is the projection of A onto the rowspace of Q_k then ||A - pi_{Q_k}(A)||_F^2 <= (1+eps) ||A - A_k||_F^2. We also show that Frequent Directions cannot be adapted to a sparse version in an obvious way that retains the l original rows of the matrix, as opposed to a linear combination or sketch of the rows.Comment: 16 pages, 0 figure

Improved Practical Matrix Sketching with Guarantees

Matrices have become essential data representations for many large-scale problems in data analytics, and hence matrix sketching is a critical task. Although much research has focused on improving the error/size tradeoff under various sketching paradigms, the many forms of error bounds make these approaches hard to compare in theory and in practice. This paper attempts to categorize and compare most known methods under row-wise streaming updates with provable guarantees, and then to tweak some of these methods to gain practical improvements while retaining guarantees. For instance, we observe that a simple heuristic iSVD, with no guarantees, tends to outperform all known approaches in terms of size/error trade-off. We modify the best performing method with guarantees FrequentDirections under the size/error trade-off to match the performance of iSVD and retain its guarantees. We also demonstrate some adversarial datasets where iSVD performs quite poorly. In comparing techniques in the time/error trade-off, techniques based on hashing or sampling tend to perform better. In this setting we modify the most studied sampling regime to retain error guarantee but obtain dramatic improvements in the time/error trade-off. Finally, we provide easy replication of our studies on APT, a new testbed which makes available not only code and datasets, but also a computing platform with fixed environmental settings.Comment: 27 page

Review of precision cancer medicine: Evolution of the treatment paradigm.

In recent years, biotechnological breakthroughs have led to identification of complex and unique biologic features associated with carcinogenesis. Tumor and cell-free DNA profiling, immune markers, and proteomic and RNA analyses are used to identify these characteristics for optimization of anticancer therapy in individual patients. Consequently, clinical trials have evolved, shifting from tumor type-centered to gene-directed, histology-agnostic, with innovative adaptive design tailored to biomarker profiling with the goal to improve treatment outcomes. A plethora of precision medicine trials have been conducted. The majority of these trials demonstrated that matched therapy is associated with superior outcomes compared to non-matched therapy across tumor types and in specific cancers. To improve the implementation of precision medicine, this approach should be used early in the course of the disease, and patients should have complete tumor profiling and access to effective matched therapy. To overcome the complexity of tumor biology, clinical trials with combinations of gene-targeted therapy with immune-targeted approaches (e.g., checkpoint blockade, personalized vaccines and/or chimeric antigen receptor T-cells), hormonal therapy, chemotherapy and/or novel agents should be considered. These studies should target dynamic changes in tumor biologic abnormalities, eliminating minimal residual disease, and eradicating significant subclones that confer resistance to treatment. Mining and expansion of real-world data, facilitated by the use of advanced computer data processing capabilities, may contribute to validation of information to predict new applications for medicines. In this review, we summarize the clinical trials and discuss challenges and opportunities to accelerate the implementation of precision oncology

Vasilisa Maligina Karya A.M. Kollontai sebuah Rekonstruksi Atas Konsep Maskulinitas Rusia

This article is a literary analysis on Aleksandra Mikhailovna Kollontai' VasilisaMaligina (1923) by using a feminist approach. Issues on masculinity are thefocus of the analysis. The main argument of this article is that through the maincharacter of this story - Vasilisa Maligina - Kollontai tried to expose the newimage of Russian women by reconstructing the concept of Russian traditionalmasculinity in Russian society under former Uni Soviet communist governmentbased on patriarchal culture