The Anthropocene monument:on relating geological and human time

In the Parthenon frieze, the time of mortals and the time of gods seem to merge. Dipesh Chakrabarty has argued that with the advent of the Anthropocene the times of human history and of the Earth are similarly coming together. Are humans entering the ‘monumental time’ of the Earth, to stand alongside the Olympian gods of the other geological forces? In this paper I first look at the cultural shifts leading to the modern idea of separate human and Earth histories. I examine the changing use of monuments to mediate between human and other temporalities. I explore the use of ‘stratigraphic sections’ as natural monuments to mark transitions between the major time units of Earth history, and the erection of intentional monuments nearby. I suggest that the Anthropocene, as a geological epoch-in-the-making, may challenge the whole system of monumental semiotics used to stabilise our way of thinking about deep time

The Immanent Potential of Economic and Monetary Integration: A Critical Reading of the Eurozone Crisis

The Eurozone crisis has revealed fundamental flaws in the institutional architecture of the European Economic and Monetary Union. Its lack of political steering capacity has demonstrated the need for a broad but seemingly unachievable political union with shared economic governance and a common treasury. Agreement on further measures has been difficult to achieve as different actors have imposed different criteria for the success of the Eurozone from the outside. As part of the heritage of Western Marxism, the critical theorists of the Frankfurt School sought overcome such problems by identifying criteria for social criticism from the inside. Building on their understanding of immanent critique, I argue that the Eurozone contains the internal normative principles necessary to support greater political integration. While the citizens of Europe must provide the democratic legitimation necessary to realize this latent potential, the flaws revealed by the crisis are already pushing Europe towards greater transnational solidarity

Svm-Like Decision Theoretical Classification Of High-Dimensional Vectors

In this paper, we consider the classification of high-dimensional vectors based on a small number of training samples from each class. The proposed method follows the Bayesian paradigm, and it is based on a small vector which can be viewed as the regression of the new observation on the space spanned by the training samples. The classification method provides posterior probabilities that the new vector belongs to each of the classes, hence it adapts naturally to any number of classes. Furthermore, we show a direct similarity between the proposed method and the multicategory linear support vector machine introduced in Lee et al. [2004. Multicategory support vector machines: theory and applications to the classification of microarray data and satellite radiance data. Journal of the American Statistical Association 99 (465), 67-81]. We compare the performance of the technique proposed in this paper with the SVM classifier using real-life military and microarray datasets. The study shows that the misclassification errors of both methods are very similar, and that the posterior probabilities assigned to each class are fairly accurate. © 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved