Diversity, urban space and the right to the provincial city

Using three vignettes of the same physical space this article contributes to understanding of how the right to the city is contested in provincial England in the early twenty-first century. Oral history and ethnographic material gathered in Peterborough between 2010 and 2012 are drawn on to shed new light on the politics of diversity and urban space. This highlights the multiple place attachments and trans-spatial practices of all residents, including the white ethnic majority, as well as contrasting forms of active intervention in space with their different temporalities and affective intensities. The article carries its own diversity politics, seeking to reduce the harm done by racism through challenging the normalisation of the idea of a local, indigenous population, left out by multiculturalism. It simultaneously raises critical questions about capitalist regeneration strategies in terms of their impact both on class inequality and on the environment

Gendered processes of recruitment to elite higher educational institutions in mid‐twentieth century Britain

This is the final version. Available from Wiley via the DOI in this record.The matriculant data are available from the UK Data Service, subject to registration, at https://doi.org/10.5255/UKDA-SN-3177-1.The interviews from the National Life Stories project are available to consult at the British Library. Due to ethical reasons, the interviews from the ‘Changing Elites’ project are not currently publicly availableThis article uses rare and detailed data on matriculants to the University of Oxford during the middle decades of the twentieth century as a prism through which to consider gendered processes of recruitment to elite institutions. The article makes four key claims. First, the broader shifts in middle-class women's labour market participation in the mid-century are reflected in patterns of maternal occupation among matriculants, shifting from being predominantly housewives to professionals across the period. Related to this, the fathers of matriculants had similar professions whether their child was male or female, but mothers’ professions varied much more between male and female students. There was much more variation between mothers and fathers of students who attended what we term ‘elite’ schools. Finally, across the mid-twentieth century, the number of male students from elite schools declined significantly, whereas the number of women students who had attended an ‘elite’ school was much steadier. Given the centrality of Oxford for processes of elite recruitment, these trends in their matriculants will have far wider implications for who gets access to elite positions in the decades after these shifts were occurring, revealing in some ways the continuity of class privilege and the increasingly salient role of mother's occupation in processes of elite reproduction.European Research Council Horizon 2020British Academ

Learning Rules from User Behaviour

Accepted versio

Strategies to parallelize ILP systems

It is well known by Inductive Logic Programming (ILP) practionersthat ILP systems usually take a long time to nd valuable models(theories). The problem is specially critical for large datasets, preventingILP systems to scale up to larger applications. One approach to reducethe execution time has been the parallelization of ILP systems. In thispaper we overview the state-of-the-art on parallel ILP implementationsand present work on the evaluation of some major parallelization strategiesfor ILP. Conclusions about the applicability of each strategy arepresented

Distributed generative data mining

A process of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD) involving large amounts of data requires a considerable amount of computational power. The process may be done on a dedicated and expensive machinery or, for some tasks, one can use distributed computing techniques on a network of affordable machines. In either approach it is usual the user to specify the workflow of the sub-tasks composing the whole KDD process before execution starts.In this paper we propose a technique that we call Distributed Generative Data Mining. The generative feature of the technique is due to its capability of generating new sub-tasks of the Data Mining analysis process at execution time. The workflow of sub-tasks of the DM is, therefore, dynamic.To deploy the proposed technique we extended the Distributed Data Mining system HARVARD and adapted an Inductive Logic Programming system (IndLog) used in a Relational Data Ming task.As a proof-of-concept, the extended system was used to analyse an artificialdataset of a credit scoring problem with eighty million records

Dedalo: looking for clusters explanations in a labyrinth of Linked Data

We present Dedalo, a framework which is able to exploit Linked Data to generate explanations for clusters. In general, any result of a Knowledge Discovery process, including clusters, is interpreted by human experts who use their background knowledge to explain them. However, for someone without such expert knowledge, those results may be difficult to understand. Obtaining a complete and satisfactory explanation becomes a laborious and time-consuming process, involving expertise in possibly different domains. Having said so, not only does the Web of Data contain vast amounts of such background knowledge, but it also natively connects those domains. While the efforts put in the interpretation process can be reduced with the support of Linked Data, how to automatically access the right piece of knowledge in such a big space remains an issue. Dedalo is a framework that dynamically traverses Linked Data to find commonalities that form explanations for items of a cluster. We have developed different strategies (or heuristics) to guide this traversal, reducing the time to get the best explanation. In our experiments, we compare those strategies and demonstrate that Dedalo finds relevant and sophisticated Linked Data explanations from different areas

Pennunomistajien ostokäyttäytyminen - Case: Musti ja Mirri Oy

Opinnäytetyön aiheena oli tutkia pennunomistajien ostokäyttäytymistä ja tiedonhakua osana ostoprosessia. Tarkoituksena oli selvittää, mistä pennunomistaja etsii ja saa tietoa tehdessään pennulleen tuote-, ruoka- ja palveluhankintoja ja mitä välinettä pennunomistaja käyttää tiedonhakuun. Tutkimusongelmaksi muodostui se, mitä pennunomistajien ostokäyttäytymiseen liittyy ja millaisia kulutustottumuksia kohderyhmälle oli jo ehtinyt muodostua. Kohderyhmänä olivat ne pennunomistajat, jotka tutkimuksen toteuttamishetkellä omistivat alle vuoden ikäisen koiranpennun. Tutkimuksen toimeksiantajayritys Musti ja Mirri Oy otti alkuvuodesta 2016 mobiilisovelluksen käyttöön, jonka yhdeksi käyttäjäryhmäksi pennunomistajat tulevaisuudessa tulevat. Pennunomistajien ostokäyttäytymisen tutkiminen ja kohderyhmän kartoittaminen on merkittävä osa sovelluskehitystyön tukemiseksi. Opinnäytetyö koostuu teoreettisesta osuudesta, jossa käsitellään alan kirjallisiin materiaaleihin tukeutuen yksilön ostokäyttäytymistä ja ostoprosessia, näkökulmana yksimarkkinointipsykologian alahaarana toimiva yksilöpsykologia. Teoreettinen osio pitää sisällään myös tarkemman kuvauksen pennunomistajista kohderyhmänä ja koiraalan markkinoista Suomessa. Opinnäytetyön tutkimuksellinen osio koostuu kvantitatiivisesta tutkimuksesta. Tutkimuksellisessa osiossa sovellettiin opinnäytetyön teoreettisia malleja yksilön ostokäyttäytymiseen liittyen. Tutkimuksen aineiston keruu tapahtui kyselylomakkeella, johon vastasi yhteensä 1072 pennunomistajaa ympäri Suomea. Tutkimustulokset osoittavat, että pennunomistajat ovat hyvin kiinnostuneita koira-alan palveluista. Suurin osa saa tietoa eri tuotteista ja palveluista internetistä ja sosiaalisesta mediasta. Viiteryhmien ja mielipidejohtajien merkitys ostokäyttäytymiseen on merkittävä ja valtaosa pennunomistajista käyttää mobiililaitetta tiedonhakuun.The subject of this thesis was to research puppy owners’ buying behavior. The purpose of this thesis was to find out how and where the target group search information during the purchasing process. The study was commissioned by Musti ja Mirri Oy. The company published a new mobile application in early 2016. In the future puppy owners will be one of the target groups to use the application. Studying the puppy owners' purchasing behavior and being able to identify the target group are crucial factors in the application development work. The theory of this thesis is based on literature about consumer behavior, psychology of marketing, studies of emotional consumption and consumer behavior as a process. Internet sources has been used to compare earlier researches with the results of this thesis. The research problem was to find out target groups buying behavior, buying process, and what kind of consumption habits the target group had already formed. The target group consisted of puppy owners who owned under one year old puppy during the research. The empirical part of the thesis was executed by using quantitative research method. The data was collected with a questionnaire in the Internet. The final number of responses was 1072. According to the survey puppy owners are very interested in services provided in dog industry. The majority of the respondents searches information about various products and services on the Internet and social media. The importance of reference groups and opinion leaders in purchasing behavior and while doing purchase decision. The survey also demonstrates that the majority of the respondents use their mobile device to find information to help their purchasing process