The Rhythm of our Lives. Aesthetic Perspectives East & West

The leading approach to everyday aesthetics for the past few decades has departed from analytic philosophical grounds, generating some tensions or dichotomies regarding its foundational cornerstones: the ordinary vs. extraordinary character of everyday aesthetic experience, contextual familiarity vs. strangeness, object vs. processual orientation, etc. Although John Dewey has been widely acclaimed as a sort of foundational figure for this burgueoning sub-discipline of aesthetics, maybe not enough emphasis has been laid on his very different pragmatist approach. In this regard, his reliance on Hegelian cum Darwinian premises might allow for a connection with other branches of continental as well as Asian philosophies, from which also some research on everyday aesthetics has been made. It is from this wider ontological framework that the notion of rhythm could be vindicated as a pivotal aspect of the aesthetic dimension of our everyday lives. Dewey deals extensively with it in Art as Experience, conceiving it as a sort of pattern of accomplished experiences, accounting also for his naturalistic approach and art and life continuity thesis. On the other hand, neo-pragmatist exponent Richard Shusterman, among others, has posited links of connection between Pragmatist aesthetics and East-Asian philosophies. Particularly, Dewey’s resonances with Asian philosophies have been studied, with a preeminence on the notions of harmony and rhythm. This paper will depart from the analysis of the notion of rhythm in Dewey’s philosophy, trying to hint at some possible developments of its implications. Particularly, it will expand on some East Asian paralelisms to his philosophy, trying to link them with the notion of rhythm as an epitomizing ground for the conjunction of the extraordinary (art) and the ordinary (life).Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

The Poetic Dimension of Everyday Aesthetic Appreciation. Perspectives from East-Asian Cultures

As Yuriko Saito, one of the main exponents of everyday aesthetics holds, East-Asian cultures have long established a deep link between artistic practices and everyday life, transforming apparently mundane practices such as having a cup o ftea with cakes into a highly ritualized form of art (cha-no-yu) and allowing us to enjoy the fleeting moment. The tea ceremony example is grounded, as this paper aims at showing, on a whole East-Asian worldview (as exemplfieied in Confucianism, Daoism and Zen Buddhism philosophies) whereby aesthetic appreciation is deeply pervaded by a poetic feeling, mainly consisting in the interactive harmony or attunement established with the particular circumstances of one’s own life due precisely to its fleeting and evanescent nature. To accomplish this, savouring and perceiving the uniqueness ingrained in every single human experience, the adequate attitude is the poetic one, due to its holistic and non-discriminative nature. Having as its focus everyday life, or simply put, life as such in its specificity, traditional artistic practices in East-Asia as the arts of the brush, garden design or utilitarian crafts such as pottery, become means of revealing what, due to its closeness, lies hidden in ordinary experience. Utilitarian arts are, in this sense, a priviledged way of conveying this end due precisely to its practical link with ordinary existence, preventing the eventual arousal of a purely formal and detached apprehension. The only coherent way to develop this awareness of the extraordinary in the ordinary, to use Leddy’s expression, is through the main feature of all poetic qualities: indirect allusion and subdued reference so that what is close at hand may shine in a different light. Particularly, in association with Japanese Zen Buddhism, where the rootedness of aesthetics in the ordinary is stronger, it has frequently adopted the form of restraint, contention, reserve, or, as Saito puts it, “insufficiency”. This paper aims at showing with the help of a few examples how this difuse poetic attitude, so prevalent in Traditional East-Asian contexts, is required not only in standardized art practices, but also in a wider aesthetic level of awareness of our ordinary experiences. In order to justify these claims, it will refer first to the ideal of harmony or poetic resonance in Chinese aesthetics and then it will refer to some concrete Japanese aesthetic categories inspired by Zen Buddhism, such as mono-no-aware, sabi, wabi, or yugen

Measuring financial risk : comparison of alternative procedures to estimate VaR and ES

We review several procedures for estimating and backtesting two of the most important measures of risk, the Value at Risk (VaR) and the Expected Shortfall (ES). The alternative estimators differ in the way the specify and estimate the conditional mean and variance and the conditional distribution of returns. The results are illustrated by estimating the VaR and ES of daily S&P500 returns

Dreamt Spaces

Beyond a mere interdisciplinary relationship, the symbiosis of cinema, body and architecture conveys an illusion: showing a dreamt architecture. The vision of architecture through a cinematographic filter facilitates infinite possibilities, from creating habitability conditions in impossible spaces to endowing architecture with unimaginable attributes. Aspects such as movement or dematerialization, in principle far from classic architectural values, have a familiar ring due to experiences gained in cinema. Likewise, in recent decades architecture has dared to carry out spatial experiments whose only objective is experimentation on the interrelation between body and space. Despite the importance of this question to the perception of certain architecture, during many years architects absented themselves from this field of experimentation. In the majority of the cases, as mere spectators, they limited themselves exclusively to observe the proposals of some artists and film-makers who transformed space just in another plastic material. Many of these proposals of "space alteration" were left in the dust, however, some of them established a basis for certain events to come which would change forever the traditional ways of understanding space. This new perception emerging from cinematic images poses new processes of connectivity between body and space, as we may observe in some of the works of the US Americans Diller & Scofidio, intimately related to new technologies. Others, like Philippe Rahm, focus on the fusion of biological and sensorial aspects of life forms in determinate spaces. Some like the Fabric team propose a deliberate alteration of perceiving the interior-exterior interaction of habitable spaces by means of addition and fusion. None of the above is science fiction, but we can elaborate a new architectural map with clear cinematographic references

Mentes Positivas en Acción: Feasibility Study of a Promotor-Delivered Cognitive Behavioral Stress Management Program for Low-Income Spanish-Speaking Latinas.

Purpose: Low-income Latino immigrants lack access to mental health providers. We explored the feasibility of training promotores to deliver a stress management program in community settings. Methods: We trained promotores to deliver an 8-week intervention program comprising evidence-based cognitive-behavioral stress management techniques. Trained promotores then delivered the program to Spanish-speaking Latino immigrants. Results: Promotores (n=10) improved their knowledge significantly after the training (p<0.001) and delivered the program demonstrating excellent fidelity. Participants who received the program (n=50) had significantly improved scores on immigration stress, perceived stress, and depressive symptoms (p<0.001). Conclusion: It is feasible to train Latino promotores to deliver an effective stress management program to low-income Latino immigrants in their communities. Results contribute to a growing literature on the value of such interventions in community settings. If it is found to be effective in future studies, the program could help fill a large need in the Latino community

Bootstrap prediction intervals for VaR and ES in the context of GARCH models

In this paper, we propose a new bootstrap procedure to obtain prediction intervals of future Value at Risk (VaR) and Expected Shortfall (ES) in the context of univariate GARCH models. These intervals incorporate the parameter uncertainty associated with the estimation of the conditional variance of returns. Furthermore, they do not depend on any particular assumption on the error distribution. Alternative bootstrap intervals previously proposed in the literature incorporate the first but not the second source of uncertainty when computing the VaR and ES. We also consider an iterated smoothed bootstrap with better properties than traditional ones when computing prediction intervals for quantiles. However, this latter procedure depends on parameters that have to be arbitrarily chosen and is very complicated computationally. We analyze the finite sample performance of the proposed procedure and show that the coverage of our proposed procedure is closer to the nominal than that of the alternatives. All the results are illustrated by obtaining one-step-ahead prediction intervals of the VaR and ES of several real time series of financial returns.Expected Shortfall, Feasible Historical Simulation, Hill estimator, Parameter uncertainty, Quantile intervals, Value at Risk

Homicide Profiles Based on Crime Scene and Victim Characteristics

One of the current trends in homicide research includes developing works based on scientific study and empirical evidence, which offer conclusions that can be used in an operational manner during police investigations. The objective of this study was to identify homicide characteristics from behaviors carried out on the crime scene and victim characteristics associated with those of the perpetrators of these crimes in Spain. The sample consisted of 448 homicide cases from the database of the Homicide Revision Project led by the Office of Coordination and Studies of the Secretary of State and Security. After creating six classification tree models, it was found that the modus operandi of the aggressor and the victim characteristics may permit hypothesizing about the demographic characteristics of the perpetrator (gender, age, and country of origin), his/her criminal record, and the type of relationship with the victim. Furthermore, the importance of the study of victimology during a criminal investigation is highlighted, as it may indirectly offer information about the potential perpetrator. The findings of this study suggest that criminal profiling contributes notably to the decision-making process to establish more rigorous suspect prioritization, improve the management of human resources and materials, and increase the efficiency of criminal investigations

Long-term KS_S-band photometric monitoring of L dwarfs

(abridged) We perform photometric time-series analysis of a sample of ten early to mid-L dwarfs in the field over three years of $K_s$-band observations with the OMEGA 2000 infrared camera of the 3.5m telescope on Calar Alto Observatory between January 2010 and December 2012. We perform $K_s$-band differential photometry of our targets (with typical errors of $\pm$15-30~mmag at the 1$\sigma$ level) by subtracting a reference flux from each photometric measurement. This reference flux is computed using three nearby, probably constant stars in the target's field-of-view. We then construct and visually inspect the light curves to search for variability, and use four different periodogram algorithms to look for possible periods in our photometric data. Our targets do not display long-term variability over 1$\sigma$ compared to other nearby stars of similar brightness, nor do the periodograms unveil any possible periodicity for these objects, with two exceptions: 2MASS~J02411151-0326587 and G196-3B. In the case of 2MASS~J02411151-0326587 (L0), our data suggest a tentative period of 307$\pm$21~days, at 40% confidence level, which seems to be associated with peak-to-peak variability of 44$\pm$10~mmag. This object may also display variability in timescales of years, as suggested by the comparison of our Ks-band photometry with 2MASS. For G196-3B (L3), we find peak-to-peak variations of 42$\pm$10~mmag, with a possible photometric period of 442$\pm$7~days, at 95% confidence level. This is roughly the double of the astrometric period reported by Zapatero Osorio (2014). Given the significance of these results, further photometric data are required to confirm the long-term variability.These results suggest that early- to mid-L dwarfs are fairly stable in the $K_s$-band within $\pm$90 mmag at the 3 $\sigma$ level over months to years, which covers hundreds to tens of thousands of rotation cycles.Comment: Accepted for publication in Astronomy & Astrophysic