Trauma and Narrative Fetishism as the Source for Creativity in the Urban Space [Trauma ir naratyvinis fetišizmas kaip kūrybingumo šaltinis miesto erdveje]

The paper analyzes trauma as the source for creativity in the urban space. There are two strategies to find a way to live with traumatic experience. The first way, according to Sigmund Freud, is "the work of mourning", which by constant remembering and repeating trauma in the language of tropes and figures allows to integrate discontinuous traumatic experience thus partly expunging trauma. Another strategy for dealing with trauma was described by Eric L. Santner's term "narrative fetishism". This strategy supposes a refusal or inability to admit trauma substituting mourning for narratives, which seemingly do not have any connection to trauma itself. I can find outcomes of this traumatic creative strategy in urban spaces of contemporary megalopolises. The paper analyzes art objects in Yekaterinburg city, namely, the gangsters' tombstones and the cathedral that has been used for political and ideological purposes, the street art activity of painter Radya. © 2011 Copyright Vilnius Gediminas Technical University (VGTU) Press Technika

The Obliteration of Truth by Management: Badiou, St. Paul and the Question of Economic Managerialism in Education

This paper considers the questions that Badiou’s theory of the subject poses to cultures of economic managerialism within education. His argument that radical change is possible, for people and the situations they inhabit, provides a stark challenge to the stifling nature of much current educational climate. In 'Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism', Badiou describes the current universalism of capitalism, monetary homogeneity and the rule of the count. Badiou argues that the politics of identity are all too easily subsumed by the prerogatives of the marketplace and unable to present, therefore, a critique of the status quo. These processes are, he argues, without the potential for truth. What are the implications of Badiou’s claim that education is the arranging of ‘the forms of knowledge in such a way that truth may come to pierce a hole in them’ (Badiou, 2005, p. 9)? In this paper, I argue that Badiou’s theory opens up space for a kind of thinking about education that resists its colonisation by cultures of management and marketisation and leads educationalists to consider the emancipatory potential of education in a new light

A bounded confidence approach to understanding user participation in peer production systems

Commons-based peer production does seem to rest upon a paradox. Although users produce all contents, at the same time participation is commonly on a voluntary basis, and largely incentivized by achievement of project's goals. This means that users have to coordinate their actions and goals, in order to keep themselves from leaving. While this situation is easily explainable for small groups of highly committed, like-minded individuals, little is known about large-scale, heterogeneous projects, such as Wikipedia. In this contribution we present a model of peer production in a large online community. The model features a dynamic population of bounded confidence users, and an endogenous process of user departure. Using global sensitivity analysis, we identify the most important parameters affecting the lifespan of user participation. We find that the model presents two distinct regimes, and that the shift between them is governed by the bounded confidence parameter. For low values of this parameter, users depart almost immediately. For high values, however, the model produces a bimodal distribution of user lifespan. These results suggest that user participation to online communities could be explained in terms of group consensus, and provide a novel connection between models of opinion dynamics and commons-based peer production.Comment: 17 pages, 5 figures, accepted to SocInfo201

Sequential design of computer experiments for the estimation of a probability of failure

This paper deals with the problem of estimating the volume of the excursion set of a function $f:\mathbb{R}^d \to \mathbb{R}$ above a given threshold, under a probability measure on $\mathbb{R}^d$ that is assumed to be known. In the industrial world, this corresponds to the problem of estimating a probability of failure of a system. When only an expensive-to-simulate model of the system is available, the budget for simulations is usually severely limited and therefore classical Monte Carlo methods ought to be avoided. One of the main contributions of this article is to derive SUR (stepwise uncertainty reduction) strategies from a Bayesian-theoretic formulation of the problem of estimating a probability of failure. These sequential strategies use a Gaussian process model of $f$ and aim at performing evaluations of $f$ as efficiently as possible to infer the value of the probability of failure. We compare these strategies to other strategies also based on a Gaussian process model for estimating a probability of failure.Comment: This is an author-generated postprint version. The published version is available at http://www.springerlink.co

Constraining the initial state granularity with bulk observables in Au+Au collisions at sNN=200\sqrt{s_{\rm NN}}=200 GeV

In this paper we conduct a systematic study of the granularity of the initial state of hot and dense QCD matter produced in ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions and its influence on bulk observables like particle yields, $m_T$ spectra and elliptic flow. For our investigation we use a hybrid transport model, based on (3+1)d hydrodynamics and a microscopic Boltzmann transport approach. The initial conditions are generated by a non-equilibrium hadronic transport approach and the size of their fluctuations can be adjusted by defining a Gaussian smoothing parameter $\sigma$. The dependence of the hydrodynamic evolution on the choices of $\sigma$ and $t_{start}$ is explored by means of a Gaussian emulator. To generate particle yields and elliptic flow that are compatible with experimental data the initial state parameters are constrained to be $\sigma=1$ fm and $t_{\rm start}=0.5$ fm. In addition, the influence of changes in the equation of state is studied and the results of our event-by-event calculations are compared to a calculation with averaged initial conditions. We conclude that even though the initial state parameters can be constrained by yields and elliptic flow, the granularity needs to be constrained by other correlation and fluctuation observables.Comment: 14 pages, 8 figures, updated references, version to appear in J. Phys.

Statistical Methods in Recent HIV Noninferiority Trials: Reanalysis of 11 Trials

Background: In recent years the ‘‘noninferiority’ ’ trial has emerged as the new standard design for HIV drug development among antiretroviral patients often with a primary endpoint based on the difference in success rates between the two treatment groups. Different statistical methods have been introduced to provide confidence intervals for that difference. The main objective is to investigate whether the choice of the statistical method changes the conclusion of the trials. Methods: We presented 11 trials published in 2010 using a difference in proportions as the primary endpoint. In these trials, 5 different statistical methods have been used to estimate such confidence intervals. The five methods are described and applied to data from the 11 trials. The noninferiority of the new treatment is not demonstrated if the prespecified noninferiority margin it includes in the confidence interval of the treatment difference. Results: Results indicated that confidence intervals can be quite different according to the method used. In many situations, however, conclusions of the trials are not altered because point estimates of the treatment difference were too far from the prespecified noninferiority margins. Nevertheless, in few trials the use of different statistical methods led to different conclusions. In particular the use of ‘‘exact’ ’ methods can be very confusing. Conclusion: Statistical methods used to estimate confidence intervals in noninferiority trials have a strong impact on th

Psychoanalytic sociology and the traumas of history: Alexander Mitscherlich between the disciplines

This article examines the way aspects of recent history were excluded in key studies emerging from psychoanalytic social psychology of the mid-twentieth century. It draws on work by Erikson, Marcuse and Fromm, but focuses in particular on Alexander Mitscherlich. Mitscherlich, a social psychologist associated with the later Frankfurt school, was also the most important psychoanalytic figure in postwar Germany. This makes his work significant for tracing ways in which historical experience of the war and Nazism was filtered out of psychosocial narratives in this period, in favour of more structural analyses of the dynamics of social authority. Mitscherlich?s 1967 work The Inability to Mourn, co-authored with Margarete Mitscherlich, is often cited as the point at which the ?missing? historical experience flooded back into psychoanalytic accounts of society. I argue that this landmark publication doesn?t hail the shift towards the psychoanalysis of historical experience with which it is often associated. These more sociological writers of the mid-century were writing before the impact of several trends occurring in the 1980s-90s which decisively shifted psychoanalytic attention away from the investigation of social authority and towards a focus on historical trauma. Ultimately this is also a narrative about the transformations which occur when psychoanalysis moves across disciplines

A modular analysis of the Auxin signalling network

Auxin is essential for plant development from embryogenesis onwards. Auxin acts in large part through regulation of transcription. The proteins acting in the signalling pathway regulating transcription downstream of auxin have been identified as well as the interactions between these proteins, thus identifying the topology of this network implicating 54 Auxin Response Factor (ARF) and Aux/IAA (IAA) transcriptional regulators. Here, we study the auxin signalling pathway by means of mathematical modeling at the single cell level. We proceed analytically, by considering the role played by five functional modules into which the auxin pathway can be decomposed: the sequestration of ARF by IAA, the transcriptional repression by IAA, the dimer formation amongst ARFs and IAAs, the feedback loop on IAA and the auxin induced degradation of IAA proteins. Focusing on these modules allows assessing their function within the dynamics of auxin signalling. One key outcome of this analysis is that there are both specific and overlapping functions between all the major modules of the signaling pathway. This suggests a combinatorial function of the modules in optimizing the speed and amplitude of auxin-induced transcription. Our work allows identifying potential functions for homo- and hetero-dimerization of transcriptional regulators, with ARF:IAA, IAA:IAA and ARF:ARF dimerization respectively controlling the amplitude, speed and sensitivity of the response and a synergistic effect of the interaction of IAA with transcriptional repressors on these characteristics of the signaling pathway. Finally, we also suggest experiments which might allow disentangling the structure of the auxin signaling pathway and analysing further its function in plants