Visual objects and universal meanings : AIDS posters and the politics of globalisation and history

Drawing on recent visual and spatial turns in history writing, this paper considers AIDS posters from the perspective of their museum ‘afterlife’ as collected material objects. Museum spaces serve changing political and epistemological projects, and the visual objects they house are not immune from them. A recent globally themed exhibition of AIDS posters at an arts and crafts museum in Hamburg is cited in illustration. The exhibition also serves to draw attention to institutional continuities in collecting agendas. Revealed, contrary to postmodernist expectations, is how today’s application of aesthetic display for the purpose of making ‘global connections’ does not radically break with the virtues and morals attached to the visual at the end of the nineteenth century. The historicisation of such objects needs to take into account this complicated mix of change and continuity in aesthetic concepts and political inscriptions. Otherwise, historians fall prey to seductive aesthetics without being aware of the politics of them. This article submits that aesthetics is politics

DOES ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURE MATTER? AN ADAPTIVE SIMULATION APPROACH FOR INVESTIGATING INFORMATION PROCESSING STRUCTURES IN ORGANIZATIONS

We adopt the view of organizations as information processing entities. As such, we propose that various exogenous and endogenous factors should affect the performance of organizations with respect to information processing tasks. We present a methodology for modeling organizational structures and for determining which organizational structures, if any, distinguish themselves given various constraints. Our methodology relies upon computer simulations that combine Monte Carlo methods and genetic algorithms to represent dynamic organizational operating environments and competition among firms, respectively.Information Systems Working Papers Serie

A DATA DRIVEN MACHINE LEARNING APPROACH TO DISCOVERING RULES OF PRICE BEHAVIOR IN A FINANCIAL MARKET SIMULATION

The field of agent-based simulation of financial markets has grown considerably in the last decade. However, the interpretation of simulation results has received far less attention. Typically, the results of a large number of simulations are reduced to one or two summary statistics, such as sample moments. While such summarization is useful, it overlooks a vast amount of additional information that might be gleaned by examining patterns of behavior that emerge at lower levels. In this paper we propose an approach to interpreting simulation results that involves the use of so-called data mining techniques to identify the rules of behavior that govern an underlying system. We demonstrate the approach by using data from a single run of an order market simulation to derive rules about the behavior of prices in that simulation.Information Systems Working Papers Serie

Packaging The Great Plains The Role Of The Visual Arts

To consider the influence of Europe upon the visual arts of the Great Plains is to engender not only a new body of information but also some complex methodological questions of concern not only to the specialist but to the student of the region more generally. How does a regional perspective focus one\u27s investigation? How does influence work within a culture and how, specifically, that of Europe upon American and western culture? Finally, how do the visual arts function to shed light on these broader questions? It is the last of these questions that I will address here, not as an expert on the Great Plains, for my experience as a student of regionalism as a phenomenon, of European influence· on American culture, and of art history as a disciplinary approach, has lain elsewhere.1 I am convinced, however, that the problems of method and approach that the historian of the art of the Great Plains faces are part of a larger picture, and thus· we will move from questions of method toward their application to the Great Plains in particular. THE REGIONAL PERSPECTIVE Our premises need to be clear at the outset. The visual art of the Great Plains should not be considered as an inert body of disconnected pieces of information about the region, nor are pictures a series of windows, passive illustrations, or reflections of the reality of the region. Works of art-indeed, all facts and artifacts- come to us already packaged by our questions and framed by our perspectives. Charts of rainfall in the Great Plains presume that there is a question about the influence of precipitation upon vegetation and through that upon the life of the region. A computergenerated map of Democratic and Republican voting in the state of North Dakota presumes that such a spatial understanding of political choices tells us something significant about the relationship between location and political behavior. To look at a Willa Cather novel from the perspective of Red Cloud presumes that in some ways Cather carried her Nebraska childhood and youth with her during her adult years as a creator of fiction in New York and the East. Furthermore, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle of the physicist applies as well to the art historian: the observer\u27s questions necessarily color the results of our data-gathering. The inductive process is shaped by our hypotheses, the questions that seem presently meaningful to us. These elementary but often overlooked principles are essential to an appreciation of the role of the visual arts in the understanding of a regional culture. Simply put, a regional art is an attempt to be space- and perhaps time-specific about a particular area, to report to the world the contours and character of a limited geographical district. Both the artists who create these images and the critic-historians of this process posit the value of the local above or at least on a par with the national or the universal. The seeming obviousness of this formulation masks the fact that it is a relatively new one. As a mode of social interpretation, regionalism is a late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century phenomenon. The presumption that the Great Plains and other sections haye influenced our national development as distinctive geographical and cultural spaces, the fractionalization of a monolithic American experience into regional components, and a concomitant redefinition of our relation to a parent Europe by relocating American qualities in terms of western or midwestern experience-these are processes that we associate especially with the writings of Frederick Jackson Turner and his intellectual followers from the 1890s on.

MAXIMIZATION OF ORGANIZATIONAL UPTIME USING AN INTERACTIVE GENETIC-FUZZY SCHEDULING AND SUPPORT SYSTEM

This paper addresses the problem of scheduling multiple time and priority sensitive tasks efficiently in an environment where the number of resources is limited and the resources have varying capabilities and restricted capacities. We use a help desk environment as our working model, however, the methodologv could also be adapted to a variety of job shop scheduling problems in general. We introduce a metric called priority time usage as a measure of task urgency and of schedule efficiency. We also introduce a method of considering user satisfaction in scheduling by utilizing fuzzy monotonic reasoning. We propose a methodology for implementing a heuristic genetic algorithm (GA) to accomplish the scheduling task. We discuss how such a system can use ongoing data about historical schedule performance to adapt and create progressively more accurate schedules in the future. We consider modifications to the scheduling approach which could allow for task inter-dependencies. We present an initiative user interface which we developed to aid help desk administrators in using the system. In addition to providing a front end to the SOGA system, the interface allows the user of the system to perform "what ifâ analysis with actual schedules. Lastly, we present preliminary assessments of the utility of both the optimization engine and the user interface.Information Systems Working Papers Serie

A DATA DRIVEN MACHINE LEARNING APPROACH TO DISCOVERING RULES OF PRICE BEHAVIOR IN A FINANCIAL MARKET SIMULATION

The field of agent-based simulation of financial markets has grown considerably in the last decade. However, the interpretation of simulation results has received far less attention. Typically, the results of a large number of simulations are reduced to one or two summary statistics, such as sample moments. While such summarization is useful, it overlooks a vast amount of additional information that might be gleaned by examining patterns of behavior that emerge at lower levels. In this paper we propose an approach to interpreting simulation results that involves the use of so-called data mining techniques to identify the rules of behavior that govern an underlying system. We demonstrate the approach by using data from a single run of an order market simulation to derive rules about the behavior of prices in that simulation.Information Systems Working Papers Serie

Analyzing Sensor Data for Active Music

This thesis is about analysis of motions for active music applications, where motions control music in real--time. Motion data is derived from accelerations measured in (Euclidean) 3D by one accelerometer. In order to capture motions on different time-scales, a necessary preprocessing step for analysis is calibration and segmentation on the sensor data streams. For sensor data analysis, a real-time, configurable motion classifier has been implemented. Datasets for the experiments with this classifier are based on two categories of equally sized pre-captured accelerations. Classification performance has been evaluated on a range of segment lengths (i.e. time-scales of motions) - each length corresponding to a unique dataset. Regarding postprocessing of the classifications for sound control, two quite different mapping systems have been developed - to different extents. Both control different musical aspects, although at different intervals. The first system is trigger-based and inspired by the concept of hypermusic (Machover, 2004). However, for reasons that will become apparent, further development of this system has been put on hold. The second (and latest) system is for multi-channel continuous normalized parameter control