Chronology, Narrative, and Founding Acts: Between a Transcendental Rock and a Decisionist Hard Place

n attempting to represent political transformations, we often encounter a moment that seems to resist narrativisation, a moment of obstinate inconsistency which various theoretical, historical and fictional accounts cannot properly absorb except by way of indicating the parameters of a rupture. Here, I present a position which views these unrepresentable moments as structurally necessary features of revolutionary events. It is not simply that, at such historical junctures, we are faced with an abundance of information and that the unrepresentability or narrative deficit is the consequence of this surplus; on the contrary, the founding act that accompanies any radical transformation necessarily involves a certain temporal contraction. To the extent that narrative relies on a linear chronology, it fails to capture this moment of contraction. Indeed, this is why works of political philosophy associated with a founding contract (for example Hobbes’s Leviathan and Rousseau’s Social Contract) cannot fully suppress the moment of circularity in which the rhythm of chronological time skips a beat and, to paraphrase Rousseau, one requires an effect to perform the function associated with its own cause. If the moment of founding can be represented at all, it is only by way of paradox and metaphor. By forging a collaboration between Laclau, Derrida and Arendt on the issues associated with political foundation and transformation, this paper seeks to provide a paradigm for understanding revolutionary action which avoids the twin pitfalls of decisionism and determinism. The argument on this point is as follows: Although revolutions are not miraculous (revolutions do not emanate from, or refer back to, a transcendental ‘beyond’) they necessarily appear as such. We can therefore follow Laclau in his argument that the grounds for political foundations have a quasi-transcendental status. Viewing founding political acts as involving a quasi-transcendental gesture then provides a new way of understanding the heterogeneous, intermittent chronology associated with decisive moments in politics

Time, Narrative, and the Political: The Dislocated Logic of Political Foundations

From the earliest works of political theory dealing with the constitution of legislative and executive powers to more recent theories of revolutionary change, there has always been an urgency among political thinkers to theorise moments of radical transformation. The central claim of this thesis is that narratives of radical political transformation necessarily pass through a moment of opacity or circularity. Moreover, I propose that narrative opacity can be theorised while maintaining a rigorously materialist ontology. The first chapter reads Søren Kierkegaard’s ‘moment’ as describing a change which is irreducible to its prior conditions. Rather than requiring a theological paradigm, I claim the moment can be read as indicating a fractured materialism in which ontological incompleteness has a temporal character. Throughout the second, third, and fourth chapters, I show how speculative and theoretical accounts of political change necessarily encounter moments of narrative opacity. In contractarian accounts of political origins we find an unavoidable narrative distortion characterising the founding moment in which, as Rousseau openly states, an effect must serve as its own cause. The authority of the God-like sovereign of Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology is shown to be reflexively determined through the recognition of a political subject, while reflexive determination itself produces irresolvable narrative distortions. The same dislocated chronology that shows up in Hobbes and Rousseau can also be located in Badiou’s concept of the event. The event cannot be construed as a single, indivisible unit; instead, it contains a split between the sheer occurrence and the intervention or nomination that registers the occurrence as an event. As in Rousseau, an effect must serve as its own cause, albeit at the cost of narrative intelligibility. The final chapter ties the preceding arguments together through reference to the ‘transcendental materialism’ of Adrian Johnston and Slavoj Žižek

Arriving on time: estimating travel time distributions on large-scale road networks

Most optimal routing problems focus on minimizing travel time or distance traveled. Oftentimes, a more useful objective is to maximize the probability of on-time arrival, which requires statistical distributions of travel times, rather than just mean values. We propose a method to estimate travel time distributions on large-scale road networks, using probe vehicle data collected from GPS. We present a framework that works with large input of data, and scales linearly with the size of the network. Leveraging the planar topology of the graph, the method computes efficiently the time correlations between neighboring streets. First, raw probe vehicle traces are compressed into pairs of travel times and number of stops for each traversed road segment using a `stop-and-go' algorithm developed for this work. The compressed data is then used as input for training a path travel time model, which couples a Markov model along with a Gaussian Markov random field. Finally, scalable inference algorithms are developed for obtaining path travel time distributions from the composite MM-GMRF model. We illustrate the accuracy and scalability of our model on a 505,000 road link network spanning the San Francisco Bay Area

The Diffusion of Politically Expert Opinion Within and Among Groups

This paper employs a small group experiment to study the process of political influence within social networks. Each experimental session involves seven individuals, where privately obtained information is costly but communication within the group is free. Hence, individuals form prior judgments regarding candidates based on public and private information before updating their priors through a process of social communication. In general, individuals select expert informants with political preferences similar to their own, and we consider the dynamic implications for individual and group preferences. In particular, we address the diffusion of information based on a DeGroot model which provides a dynamic formulation of the influence process. We are particularly interested in the implications that arise due to varying levels of information among participants for (1) the construction of communication networks, (2) the relative influence of better informed individuals; (3) relative levels of reliance on priors and communicated messages; (4) the consequences of memory decay for the influence of experts; and (5) the diffusion of information and patterns of persuasion

Land for Maine’s Future Program: Increasing the Return on a Sound Public Investment

An assessment of the Land for Maine\u27s Future Program prepared by the New England Environmental Finance Center at USM’s Muskie School of Public Service and the Margaret Chase Smith Center for Public Policy at the University of Maine to engage with them in an assessment of the LMF in 2003

Networks of Mobilization: Student Involvement in a Municipal Election

An enduring issue in the study of political participation is the extent to which political awareness and engagement are socially or individually motivated. We address these issues in the context of a municipal election which generated a high level of political engagement on the part of college students for whom the election was relevant. An effort was made to interview all these students using an on-line survey, and the students were asked to provide information on their friendship networks. The paper demonstrates that awareness and engagement are not simply a consequence of individually defined interests and awareness, but rather that individuals are informed and engaged based on their locations within structured networks of social interaction

Structure and morphology of ACEL ZnS:Cu,Cl phosphor powder etched by hydrochloric acid

© The Electrochemical Society, Inc. 2009. All rights reserved. Except as provided under U.S. copyright law, this work may not be reproduced, resold, distributed, or modified without the express permission of The Electrochemical Society (ECS). The archival version is available at the link below.Despite many researches over the last half century, the mechanism of ac powder electroluminescence remains to be fully elucidated and, to this end, a better understanding of the relatively complex structure of alternate current electroluminescence (ACEL) phosphors is required. Consequently, the structure and morphology of ZnS:Cu,Cl phosphor powders have been investigated herein by means of scanning electron microscopy (SEM) on hydrochloric acid-etched samples and X-ray powder diffraction. The latter technique confirmed that, as a result of two-stage firing during their synthesis, the phosphors were converted from the high temperature hexagonal (wurtzite) structure to the low temperature cubic (sphalerite) polymorph having a high density of planar stacking faults. Optical microscopy revealed that the crystal habit of the phosphor had the appearance of the hexagonal polymorph, which can be explained by the sphalerite pseudomorphing of the earlier wurtzite after undergoing the hexagonal to cubic phase transformation during the synthesis. SEM micrographs of the hydrochloric-etched phosphor particles revealed etch pits, a high density of planar stacking faults along the cubic [111] axis, and the pyramids on the (111) face. These observations were consistent with unidirectional crystal growth originating from the face showing the pyramids.EPSRC, DTI, and the Technology Strategy Board-led Technology Program

On the characterization and computation of Nash equilibria on parallel networks with horizontal queues

Abstract-We study inefficiencies in parallel networks with horizontal queues due to the selfish behavior of players, by comparing social optima to Nash equilibria. The article expands studies on routing games which traditionally model congestion with latency functions that increase with the flow on a particular link. This type of latency function cannot capture congestion effects on horizontal queues. Latencies on horizontal queues increase as a function of density, and flow can decrease with increasing latencies. This class of latency functions arises in transportation networks. For static analysis of horizontal queues on parallel-link networks, we show that there may exist multiple Nash equilibria with different total costs, which contrasts with results for increasing latency functions. We present a novel algorithm, quadratic in the number of links, for computing the Nash equilibrium that minimizes total cost (best Nash equilibrium). The relative inefficiencies of best Nash equilibria are evaluated through analysis of the price of stability, and analytical results are presented for two-link networks. Price of stability is shown to be sensitive to changes in demand when links are near capacity, and congestion mitigation strategies are discussed, motivated by our results

The Grizzly, March 23, 1979

Decision is not up to Students: Council Mailroom Recommendations Disregarded • Meistersingers Return From Spring Tour • College Dismisses 2 For Theft • The Pervasive Power of ETS • Campus Consumerism • Letters to the Editor: WRUC replies (again); Grizzly applauded • Roving Reporter: Greek life beneficial? • Scotland Calls • Ursinus News In Brief: U.C. grad to attend Olympic academy; Pi Nu Epsilon holds Spring induction; Origin of life forum; Williams wins business award • Summer evening school offerings • Regional Rhythm • Twelfth Night • The Deer Hunter • Bob Welch: Three Hearts A Winner • Muds Capture \u2779 Intramural Title • Tennis Team Hoping to Ace Foeshttps://digitalcommons.ursinus.edu/grizzlynews/1016/thumbnail.jp

Resource Allocation during an Influenza Pandemic

Resource Allocation during an Influenza Pandemi