'I Just Express My Views & Leave Them to Work': Olive Schreiner as a Feminist Protagonist in a Masculine Political Landscape with Figures

There are disturbances as well as regularities in the gender order, including challenges to and re-workings of conventional hierarchies. An example of such re-workings provides the focus of discussion: the political interventions of South African feminist writer and social theorist Olive Schreiner (18551920). Discussion of Schreiners letters to a number of important white political figures is organised around an epistemological question: can Schreiners political influencewithin the masculine political landscape of the Cape in the latenineteenth and early-twentieth centuries be convincingly demonstrated by concrete epistolary examples and compelling evidence? Discussed here regarding womens presence in a masculine political landscape, this epistemological question exercises historiography more generally: with what certainty can knowledgeclaims about the past be advanced? The ideas context in which these questions are explored is feminist historiography concerning gender and in particular separate spheres, which were particularly troubled and complex in the South African context. We argue that the performative dimensions of letter writing need to be encompassed within notions of influence and proof, rather than this being conceived as always lying outside the text: texts and words can have powerful effects, with the evidence in Schreiners case pointing strongly to her significant political influence. Chapters © 2013 The Authors. Book compilation © 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Detrended Cross-Correlation Analysis: A New Method for Analyzing Two Non-stationary Time Series

Here we propose a method, based on detrended covariance which we call detrended cross-correlation analysis (DXA), to investigate power-law cross-correlations between different simultaneously-recorded time series in the presence of non-stationarity. We illustrate the method by selected examples from physics, physiology, and finance.Comment: 11 pages, 7 picture

Boole's Method I. A Modern Version

A rigorous, modern version of Boole's algebra of logic is presented, based partly on the 1890s treatment of Ernst Schroder

Effect of strong opinions on the dynamics of the majority-vote model

We study how the presence of individuals with strong opinions affects a square lattice majority-vote model with noise. In a square lattice network we perform Monte-Carlo simulations and replace regular actors σ with strong actors μ in a random distribution. We find that the value of the critical noise parameter q c is a decreasing function of the concentration r of strong actors in the social interaction network. We calculate the critical exponents β/ν, γ/ν, and 1/ν and find that the presence of strong actors does not change the Ising universality class of the isotropic majority-vote model.The authors acknowledge financial support from UPE (PFA2016, PIAEXT2016) and the funding agencies FACEPE (APQ-0565-1.05/14), CAPES and CNPq. The Boston University Center for Polymer Studies is supported by NSF Grants PHY-1505000, CMMI-1125290, and CHE-1213217, by DTRA Grant HDTRA1-14-1-0017, and by DOE Contract DE-AC07-05Id14517. (UPE (PFA, PIAEXT); APQ-0565-1.05/14 - FACEPE; CAPES; CNPq; PHY-1505000 - NSF; CMMI-1125290 - NSF; CHE-1213217 - NSF; HDTRA1-14-1-0017 - DTRA; DE-AC07-05Id14517 - DOE)Published versio

A Consistent Histogram Estimator for Exchangeable Graph Models

Exchangeable graph models (ExGM) subsume a number of popular network models. The mathematical object that characterizes an ExGM is termed a graphon. Finding scalable estimators of graphons, provably consistent, remains an open issue. In this paper, we propose a histogram estimator of a graphon that is provably consistent and numerically efficient. The proposed estimator is based on a sorting-and-smoothing (SAS) algorithm, which first sorts the empirical degree of a graph, then smooths the sorted graph using total variation minimization. The consistency of the SAS algorithm is proved by leveraging sparsity concepts from compressed sensing.Comment: 28 pages, 5 figure