Reconsidering Kinship: Beyond the Nuclear Family with Deleuze and Guattari

Deleuze and Guattari have often received attention for their criticisms of bourgeois families in Anti-Oedipus, but their speculations about non-heteronormative kinship practices have rarely been addressed in Deleuze studies and are yet to be taken up in the study of kinship and the family more generally. This paper is then the first to offer their work on the family to a general academic audience as a useful tool in polarised debates about contemporary family practices. It begins with a close reading of the relationship between desire, capitalism and the private nuclear family in Anti-Oedipus before extending the political use-value of this with the concept of the ‘majoritarian’ taken from A Thousand Plateaus. The second half of the paper brings Deleuze and Guattari into engagement with the larger critical field of kinship studies as an entry point into topical debates about the ‘normative’ family and its alternatives

An Efficient Representation of Euclidean Gravity I

We explore how the topology of spacetime fabric is encoded into the local structure of Riemannian metrics using the gauge theory formulation of Euclidean gravity. In part I, we provide a rigorous mathematical foundation to prove that a general Einstein manifold arises as the sum of SU(2)_L Yang-Mills instantons and SU(2)_R anti-instantons where SU(2)_L and SU(2)_R are normal subgroups of the four-dimensional Lorentz group Spin(4) = SU(2)_L x SU(2)_R. Our proof relies only on the general properties in four dimensions: The Lorentz group Spin(4) is isomorphic to SU(2)_L x SU(2)_R and the six-dimensional vector space of two-forms splits canonically into the sum of three-dimensional vector spaces of self-dual and anti-self-dual two-forms. Consolidating these two, it turns out that the splitting of Spin(4) is deeply correlated with the decomposition of two-forms on four-manifold which occupies a central position in the theory of four-manifolds.Comment: 31 pages, 1 figur

Empirical research on constructing Taiwan’s ecoenvironmental stress indicators system

In this paper, the material flow indicators and ecological footprint approach structured are adopted to construct eco-environmental stress indicators. We use relevant data to proceed with the empirical analyses on environmental stress and ecological impacts in Taiwan between the years of 1998 and 2007. Analysis of research results brings several important findings. (1) Taiwan’s economic activities are highly dependent on imported materials, in which fossil fuel represents the largest percentage; and that increases in greenhouse gas emission are at almost a constant rate of economic growth. (2) The average growth in the ecological footprint of the Taiwanese people is a response to an increase in demand for energy land and grazing land, and a reflection of change in the consumer and industrial structure. (3) At 3.774, Taiwan’s ecological overshoot indicator shows that its ecological system is in a state of overshoot. Therefore, if proper measures are not adopted in time, the current weak sustainability will lead into the vicious circle which departs from sustainable development.Key words: Sustainable development (SD), eco-environmental stress indicators (ESI), environmental stress, environmental load

Segmental Spatiotemporal CNNs for Fine-grained Action Segmentation

Joint segmentation and classification of fine-grained actions is important for applications of human-robot interaction, video surveillance, and human skill evaluation. However, despite substantial recent progress in large-scale action classification, the performance of state-of-the-art fine-grained action recognition approaches remains low. We propose a model for action segmentation which combines low-level spatiotemporal features with a high-level segmental classifier. Our spatiotemporal CNN is comprised of a spatial component that uses convolutional filters to capture information about objects and their relationships, and a temporal component that uses large 1D convolutional filters to capture information about how object relationships change across time. These features are used in tandem with a semi-Markov model that models transitions from one action to another. We introduce an efficient constrained segmental inference algorithm for this model that is orders of magnitude faster than the current approach. We highlight the effectiveness of our Segmental Spatiotemporal CNN on cooking and surgical action datasets for which we observe substantially improved performance relative to recent baseline methods.Comment: Updated from the ECCV 2016 version. We fixed an important mathematical error and made the section on segmental inference cleare

In search of art: rapid estimates of gallery and museum visits using Google Trends

This is the final version. Available from EDP Sciences via the DOI in this record. All data sets are publicly available through the DCMS website [38] and Google Trends [50].Measuring collective human behaviour has traditionally been a time-consuming and expensive process, impairing the speed at which data can be made available to decision makers in policy. Can data generated through widespread use of online services help provide faster insights? Here, we consider an example relating to policymaking for culture and the arts: publicly funded museums and galleries in the UK. We show that data on Google searches for museums and galleries can be used to generate estimates of their visitor numbers. Crucially, we find that these estimates can be generated faster than traditional measurements, thus offering policymakers early insights into changes in cultural participation supported by public funds. Our findings provide further evidence that data on our use of online services can help generate timely indicators of changes in society, so that decision makers can focus on the present rather than the past.ESRCAlan Turing InstituteEPSR

Quantifying crowd size with mobile phone and Twitter data

This is the final published version, also available from The Royal Society via the DOI in this record.Being able to infer the number of people in a specific area is of extreme importance for the avoidance of crowd disasters and to facilitate emergency evacuations. Here, using a football stadium and an airport as case studies, we present evidence of a strong relationship between the number of people in restricted areas and activity recorded by mobile phone providers and the online service Twitter. Our findings suggest that data generated through our interactions with mobile phone networks and the Internet may allow us to gain valuable measurements of the current state of society.Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC

Vegetarianism

Ethical vegetarians maintain that vegetarianism is morally required. The principal reasons offered in support of ethical vegetarianism are: (i) concern for the welfare and well-being of the animals being eaten, (ii) concern for the environment, (iii) concern over global food scarcity and the just distribution of resources, and (iv) concern for future generations. Each of these reasons is explored in turn, starting with a historical look at ethical vegetarianism and the moral status of animals

Signatures of Coronal Heating Mechanisms

Alfven waves created by sub-photospheric motions or by magnetic reconnection in the low solar atmosphere seem good candidates for coronal heating. However, the corona is also likely to be heated more directly by magnetic reconnection, with dissipation taking place in current sheets. Distinguishing observationally between these two heating mechanisms is an extremely difficult task. We perform 1.5-dimensional MHD simulations of a coronal loop subject to each type of heating and derive observational quantities that may allow these to be differentiated.Comment: To appear in "Magnetic Coupling between the Interior and the Atmosphere of the Sun", eds. S.S. Hasan and R.J. Rutten, Astrophysics and Space Science Proceedings, Springer-Verlag, Heidelberg, Berlin, 200