Famous and Forgotten: Soviet Sociology and the Nature of Intellectual Achievement under Totalitarianism

For decades Soviet and later post-Soviet sociology was dominated by a cohort of scholars born between 1927–1930 (Grushin, Kon, Levada, Ossipov, Yadov, Zaslavskaya). The origins of their prominence and the character of their recognition offers a puzzle as it seemingly defies conventional ideas about where academic renown comes from. Academic prominence is usually associated with either intellectual leadership or skillful manipulation of the academic power structures. Neither of these stories describes the peculiar pattern of recognition of the giants of Soviet sociology whose fame persisted after they retired from administrative responsibilities and in spite of their ideas from the Soviet era being almost forgotten. The hypothesis developed in this paper holds that this peculiar form of fame emerges from the unique position sociology held in Soviet society. The paper introduces a distinction between natural and intentional secrecy and argues that while most of Western sociology specialized in natural secrecy, Soviet sociology had to deal with intentional secrecy resulting from conscious attempts to conceal the dismal realities of state socialism. The pervasiveness of secrecy during the Soviet era resulted from the central legitimizing myth of Soviet society describing it as built following a scientifically devised plan. This legitimation allowed Soviet sociology to emerge and develop with an unparalleled speed, but, at the same time, it explains why sociology was seen as having considerable subversive potential and faced periodic repressions. This political environment accounts for Soviet sociology’s unique intellectual style as well as for the fact that its central figures remained in the disciplinary memory as heroic role models, rather than as authors of exemplary texts

A usury law: a clarification

The national legislation of some countries prohibits lending money at a usurious interest rate. Most countries restrict the effective (rather than nominal) interest rate, which includes all commissions and fees that may come with a loan. In this case, the restriction is vague for loans whose cash flow steams have no internal rate of return. In this note, we show how to extend this restriction to all loans. We prove that there is a unique such extension consistent with a set of natural axioms.Comment: 19 page

NPV, IRR, PI, PP, and DPP: a unified view

This paper introduces a class of investment project's profitability metrics that includes the net present value criterion (which labels a project as weakly profitable if its NPV is nonnegative), the internal rate of return (IRR), the profitability index (PI), the payback period (PP) and its discounted counterpart (DPP) as special cases. An axiomatic characterization of this class, as well as of the mentioned conventional metrics within the class, is presented. This approach is useful at least in three respects. First, it suggests a unified interpretation for profitability metrics as measures of financial stability of a project with respect to a collection of scenarios of economic environment. Second, it shows that, with the exception of the NPV criterion, a profitability metric is necessarily incomplete (i.e., there are incomparable projects). In particular, this implies that any extension of the IRR to the space of all projects does not meet a set of reasonable conditions. A similar conclusion is valid for the other mentioned conventional metrics. For each of these metrics, we provide a complete characterization of pairs of compatible projects and describe the largest subset of projects to which the metric can be unambiguously extended. Third, it determines the conditions under which the use of one metric is superior to the others.Comment: 42 page

Numerical Evaluation of Research Project Performance

When dealing with research of any kind there are no set guidelines other than general frameworks on how to measure the performance of the research. This presents a large problem for most Institutions and Principle Investigators trying to conduct research proficiently. Because there are no performance management plans on how to conduct research proficiently, Project Management techniques were implemented using an Agile system to measure the performance of research.Using an Agile system for research allows the researcher to develop key performance indicators that shows how proficiently the research is being conducted. This will also allow the user to see any areas in the research where there are bottlenecks that will impede the research progress. This performance management system should also allow users to understand how to implement experiments steps at the same time to ensure the research gets done as promptly as possible.Altogether this performance management system will be a highly detailed research performance plan that is not limited to types of research fields and budgetary restrictions. This performance management plan will enable researchers to conduct research as efficiently and effectively as possible with highly specialized plans

Squeezed-light source for the superresolving microscopy

We propose a source of multimode squeezed light that can be used for the superresolving microscopy beyond the standard quantum limit. This source is an optical parametric amplifier with a properly chosen diaphragm on its output and a Fourier lens. We demonstrate that such an arrangement produces squeezed prolate spheroidal waves which are the eigen modes of the optical imaging scheme used in microscopy. The degree of squeezing and the number of spatial modes in illuminating light, necessary for the effective object field reconstruction, are evaluatedComment: 6 pages, 1 figure, RevTeX4. Shortened version will appear in Optics Letter

Unsupervised Domain Adaptation using Satellite Images for Significantly Different Infrastructure Objects

Deep learning has become one of the most efficient computer vision tools in recent years. The success and variety of deep learning semantic segmentation models inspired scientists in the remote sensing domain to apply them to satellite imagery. Here, these models can produce reliable land use land cover maps in a short amount of time. However, porting these models to new sensors or domains is still limited by the amount of labelled data for training the network. The image labelling process is time-consuming and expensive because it is often manual (or semi-automated) work and requires assigning a label to each pixel in a satellite image. One solution is to apply the semantic segmentation model trained on a domain with known labels to a domain where labels are missing. For this to work, the discrepancy between domains must be narrowed to produce acceptable results. However, in practice, domain discrepancy can be significant. Developing domain adaptation models to bridge this discrepancy is the problem considered in this thesis, and it is important because semantically similar objects can look different from one geographical area to another. Therefore, several state-of-the-art domain adaptations were considered and validated using GeoEye-1 and WorldView-2 satellite imagery. The GeoEye-1 images represented a Canadian land cover, and WorldView-2 represented the African continent; thus, the domain discrepancy was significant. The CyCADA model with adapted noisy labeller showed the highest performance among all the considered models and achieved 32.6% of mean intersection over union, which is 7.5% higher compared to the model without adaptation. The contributions of this thesis are an attempt at domain adaptation across domains with the significant structural discrepancy, structural improvements to the CyCADA and DAugNet models, and quantitative and qualitative analysis of model performance on domain adaptation with significant structural discrepancy.Manitoba Hydro, Arctic Gateway Group, Mitacs, NSERC, the Faculty of Graduate StudiesMaster of Science in Applied Computer Scienc

Computing and testing a stable common currency for Mercosur countries

This paper develops a stable common currency for mid-sized open monetary economies with incomplete markets in general and the Mercosur countries in particular. The proposed currency is constructed as a derivative of a dynamic portfolio of securities that proxies the nominal exchange risk factors for a set of monies and floats against the rest of the world’s currencies. We find that the resulting optimal common currency is comprised of currencies with country weights that are statistically significant and fairly symmetrical with relatively equal weight (e.g., 22% Argentinean pesos, 27% Brazilian reals, 27% Chilean pesos, and 23% Uruguayan pesos). We also find that increasing the number of countries in a common currency tends to increase its stability. The willingness of Mercosur countries to participate in a monetary union is assessed from statistical moments of the density functions of the implied stable common currency and its components.stable common currency, open monetary economies, regime switching models, Mercosur, currency basket

Challenges and opportunities in laser welding of 6xxx high strength aluminium extrusions in automotive battery tray construction

Laser welding has been increasingly adopted into the automotive sector due to its competitive processing speed, less restrictive single-sided access requirements and improved process flexibility. These benefits notwithstanding, laser welding still remains susceptible to the weld cracking especially for 6xxx high strength aluminium extrusions, which are widely used in the automotive industry for body-in-white and battery tray manufacturing. This paper reviews current challenges and opportunities for construction of battery tray using aluminium alloys with laser welding process. It aims to provide a view on the selection of welding equipment in terms of beam oscillation, power modulation, beam shaping, filler wire and shielding gas, and analyze their impact on joint integrity for 6xxx grades aluminium extrusions. The driving idea is to control the thermal history in and around the molten pool and to modify the chemical composition in the fusion zone to reduce the formation of solidification cracks. Results of the study have shown that the modification of chemical composition by the use of filler wire is currently the most efficient approach to improve joint strength. Further results evidences also showed that beam shaping with adjustable ring mode laser helps to stabilize the keyhole and achieve a wider molten pool and weld interface width. Manufacturing implications are reviewed and discussed throughout the paper