Resisting Colonial Mastery: Becoming Animal, Becoming Ethical in The Impressionist.

Theories about Third Space or “in-betweeness” often lack an ethics that responds to the position of the majority of those people who experience the violence of colonialism, as Amar Acheraïou argues. How can we think hybridity with a more committed ethics? Hari Kunzru’s The Impressionist suggests that much of the violence experienced by humans and animals under dominant or colonial thought stems from a traditional view of subjectivity as fixed, stable, knowable, distinct and perhaps independent from the nonhuman. Colonial logic sacrifices and views as “disposable” those regarded as not human or somehow less than human through a sense of mastery and in order to maintain a stable notion of subjectivity, an exclusionary definition of Man, and a particular hierarchy or ordering of the world. This article argues that The Impressionist portrays subjectivity not as fixed but in process after Deleuze and Guattari’s “becoming animal” as a way to challenge dominant thinking, while also emphasizing the nonhuman nature of subjectivity and human dependence on the nonhuman, including the environment, for existence. The Impressionist offers an important corrective to concepts of hybridity by emphasizing that those humans and nonhumans regarded as “disposable” demand ethical response

To Supersede or Supplement: Profiling Aggregator e-Book Collections vs. Our Print Collections

Presentation given at the XXVIII Annual Charleston Conference: Issues in Book and Serials Acquisitions, November 5 - 8, 2008. After the conference, Price and McDonald have verified their results using the xISBN work ID, which allows grouping of the various unique ISBNs that refer to the same intellectual work (e.g.cloth vs paperback). Wrangling these nearly 15 million lines of data took quite a while, and did not result in a substantive change to their results: only about 30% of the print books purchased during 2006-2007 by any of the 5 libraries they studied were available from the e-book aggregator marketplace

Sparse Bayesian mass-mapping with uncertainties: hypothesis testing of structure

A crucial aspect of mass-mapping, via weak lensing, is quantification of the uncertainty introduced during the reconstruction process. Properly accounting for these errors has been largely ignored to date. We present results from a new method that reconstructs maximum a posteriori (MAP) convergence maps by formulating an unconstrained Bayesian inference problem with Laplace-type $\ell_1$-norm sparsity-promoting priors, which we solve via convex optimization. Approaching mass-mapping in this manner allows us to exploit recent developments in probability concentration theory to infer theoretically conservative uncertainties for our MAP reconstructions, without relying on assumptions of Gaussianity. For the first time these methods allow us to perform hypothesis testing of structure, from which it is possible to distinguish between physical objects and artifacts of the reconstruction. Here we present this new formalism, demonstrate the method on illustrative examples, before applying the developed formalism to two observational datasets of the Abel-520 cluster. In our Bayesian framework it is found that neither Abel-520 dataset can conclusively determine the physicality of individual local massive substructure at significant confidence. However, in both cases the recovered MAP estimators are consistent with both sets of data

Beguiled by Bananas: A Retrospective Study of the Usage and Breadth of Patron vs. Librarian Acquired eBook Collections

Library acquisitions lore contains a cautionary tale of a patron in a demand-driven environment who spent a huge chunk of the library budget on ebooks about bananas. This story and others like it have been used to perpetuate the argument that demand-driven acquisition will result in collections that don\u27t appeal to a broad audience or are otherwise unbalanced. We apply post-acquisition usage data from multiple libraries to test the hypothesis that patron-acquired versus librarian-acquired collections have different usage profiles. In addition, we analyze their subject profiles to evaluate collection breadth and balance. Our results will help libraries to anticipate the effect of adding a demand-driven component to their ebook acquisition strategy

Differentiable and accelerated wavelet transforms on the sphere and ball

Directional wavelet dictionaries are hierarchical representations which efficiently capture and segment information across scale, location and orientation. Such representations demonstrate a particular affinity to physical signals, which often exhibit highly anisotropic, localised multiscale structure. Many physically important signals are observed over spherical domains, such as the celestial sky in cosmology. Leveraging recent advances in computational harmonic analysis, we design new highly distributable and automatically differentiable directional wavelet transforms on the $2$-dimensional sphere $\mathbb{S}^2$ and $3$-dimensional ball $\mathbb{B}^3 = \mathbb{R}^+ \times \mathbb{S}^2$ (the space formed by augmenting the sphere with the radial half-line). We observe up to a $300$-fold and $21800$-fold acceleration for signals on the sphere and ball, respectively, compared to existing software, whilst maintaining 64-bit machine precision. Not only do these algorithms dramatically accelerate existing spherical wavelet transforms, the gradient information afforded by automatic differentiation unlocks many data-driven analysis techniques previously not possible for these spaces. We publicly release both S2WAV and S2BALL, open-sourced JAX libraries for our transforms that are automatically differentiable and readily deployable both on and over clusters of hardware accelerators (e.g. GPUs & TPUs).Comment: code available on the sphere at https://github.com/astro-informatics/s2wav and on the ball at https://github.com/astro-informatics/s2bal

The Evidence Is In: Patron Driven Acquisition Promotes Collection Use

This retrospective study of the usage and breadth of user- vs. pre-selected ebook collections across 5 libraries, using the EBL demand-driven system, will help libraries anticipate the effect of adding a patron-driven component to their monograph acquisition strategy. Library lore includes a cautionary tale of a few users in a patron-driven acquisitions pilot who spent a large part of the library budget on ebooks about bananas. This story and others like it have been used to perpetuate the argument that patron-driven acquisition will inevitably result in collections that don’t appeal to a broad audience or are otherwise undesirable. The authors apply post-acquisition holdings and multi-year usage data to test the hypothesis that patron-selected versus library-selected collections have different usage and subject profiles

Increased antigen specific T cell numbers in the absence of altered migration or division rates as a result of mucosal cholera toxin administration

Cholera toxin (CT) is a mucosal adjuvant capable of inducing strong immune responses to co-administered antigens following oral or intranasal immunization of mice. To date, the direct effect of CT on antigen-specific CD4(+) T cell migration and proliferation profiles in vivo is not well characterized. In this study, the effect of CT on the migration pattern and proliferative responses of adoptively transferred, CD4(+) TCR transgenic T cells in orally or intranasally vaccinated mice, was analyzed by flow cytometry. GFP-expressing or CFSE-labeled OT-II lymphocytes were adoptively transferred to naïve C57BL/6 mice, and mice were subsequently vaccinated with OVA with or without CT via the oral or intranasal route. CT did not alter the migration pattern of antigen-specific T cells, regardless of the route of immunization, but increased the number of transgenic CD4(+) T cells in draining lymphoid tissue. This increase in the number of transgenic CD4(+) T cells was not due to cells undergoing more rounds of cellular division in vivo, suggesting that CT may exert an indirect adjuvant effect on CD4(+) T cells. The findings reported here suggest that CT functions as a mucosal adjuvant by increasing the number of antigen specific CD4(+) T cells independent of their migration pattern or kinetics of cellular division.Grant support was received from the National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia (NHMRC). OLW is a recipient of an R.D. Wright Career Development Award

Proximal nested sampling with data-driven priors for physical scientists

Proximal nested sampling was introduced recently to open up Bayesian model selection for high-dimensional problems such as computational imaging. The framework is suitable for models with a log-convex likelihood, which are ubiquitous in the imaging sciences. The purpose of this article is two-fold. First, we review proximal nested sampling in a pedagogical manner in an attempt to elucidate the framework for physical scientists. Second, we show how proximal nested sampling can be extended in an empirical Bayes setting to support data-driven priors, such as deep neural networks learned from training data.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figure