Rethinking Gorkha Identity: Outside the Imperium of Discourse, Hegemony and History

Occasional Papers in Sociology and Anthropology - Peace and Democracy in South Asia, Volume 2, Numbers 1&2, 200

A New Estimator of Intrinsic Dimension Based on the Multipoint Morisita Index

The size of datasets has been increasing rapidly both in terms of number of variables and number of events. As a result, the empty space phenomenon and the curse of dimensionality complicate the extraction of useful information. But, in general, data lie on non-linear manifolds of much lower dimension than that of the spaces in which they are embedded. In many pattern recognition tasks, learning these manifolds is a key issue and it requires the knowledge of their true intrinsic dimension. This paper introduces a new estimator of intrinsic dimension based on the multipoint Morisita index. It is applied to both synthetic and real datasets of varying complexities and comparisons with other existing estimators are carried out. The proposed estimator turns out to be fairly robust to sample size and noise, unaffected by edge effects, able to handle large datasets and computationally efficient

Economic problems facing post-treaty Japan

Economic conditions - Japan ; International trade - Japan ; Balance of payments

The long and winding road to translation for imaging biomarker development: the case for arterial spin labelling (ASL)

Radiology is facing many challenges nowadays, and certainly needs to keep up with the fast pace of developments taking place in this field. This editorial aims at drawing the attention of the reader to the current establishment of quantitative imaging biomarkers, in particular through the efforts of the Quantitative Imaging Biomarker Alliance (QIBA) from the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA), as well as the European Imaging Biomarker Alliance (EIBALL) from the European Society of Radiology (ESR). The case of arterial spin labelling (ASL) is used as an example of the long and winding road to translate a good imaging technique into a clinically relevant imaging biomarker

NASA v. Nelson: The High Court Flying High Above the Right to Informational Privacy

In 1977, the U.S. Supreme Court first acknowledged a potential constitutional privacy “interest in avoiding disclosure of personal matters.” Since then, the Court has remained silent on whether there is a right to informational privacy. In the October 2010 term, the Court had another chance to revisit the contours of this potential privacy interest in NASA v. Nelson. But it again refused to define those contours and instead assumed, without deciding, that a constitutional right to informational privacy exists. The Court held that although information that was collected from an employee background-check questionnaire implicated the employees’ putative right to informational privacy, the Privacy Act of 1974 alleviated that privacy concern by providing sufficient protection that prevents the nonconsensual dissemination of information. This Comment argues that, in its reliance on the Privacy Act, the Court improperly ignored the distinction between compelled collection of information and dissemination of information—and how both threaten a right to informational privacy

Papyri to the rescue: reconstructing Hellenistic male-female couple relationships through papyrological documentation

The relationships of ordinary male-female couples in Antiquity remain a field of research still little explored, especially regarding the study of feelings, emotions, real-life experiences, and couple dynamics through everyday life. Thus, it is essential to look into this theme, both in the Greek and Roman worlds, in a diachronic and synchronic perspective; this is the purpose of a Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF) project at the University of Lausanne, entitled “Couple relationships in Antiquity”. My PhD thesis, as part of this project, intends to explore couple relationships during the Hellenistic period, in Greece, Asia Minor, and Ptolemaic Egypt, through literary, epigraphic, and papyrological documentation. In this context, Greek papyri provide notable elements, that can complement and counteract the data issued from literary sources and inscriptions whose one of the biases is to present an idealized or incomplete vision of couples’ relationships; nevertheless, we must keep in mind that papyri suffer from their own specific biases.My aim in this paper is to show how possible it is to integrate different types of papyri – letters, marriage contracts, wills, complaints, etc – as part of a study on couples’ real-life experience, while identifying some of the key methodological aspects necessary for this type of analysis, by presenting excerpts from several documents. Furthermore, the addition of an adequate methodological canvas allows going beyond the cultural and/or typological filters and biases inherent to this type of documentation, and its inclusion in the global corpus of my thesis, in which most documents are from the ‘classical’ Greek world

Session B: The Future of Nuclear Power - The Fukushima Nuclear Event and Its Implications for Nuclear Power

The combined strong earthquake and super tsunami of 12 March 2011 at the Fukushima nuclear power plant imposed the most severe challenges ever experienced at such a facility. Information regarding the plant response and status remains uncertain, but it is clear that severe damage has been sustained, that the plant staff have responded creatively and that the offsite implications are unlikely to be seriously threatening to the health, if not the prosperity, of the surrounding population. Reexamination of the regulatory constraints of nuclear power will occur worldwide, and some changes are likely; particularly concerning reliance upon active systems for achieving critical safety functions and concerning treatments of used reactor fuel. Whether worldwide expansion of the nuclear power economy will be slowed in the long run is perhaps unlikely and worth discussion

Legal Opinion: The Right to Property from a Human Rights Perspective

The concept of property rights is often associated with commercial rights protecting corporate ownership of goods, land, or scientific innovation. However this narrow reading obscures the importance of the right to property as a human right and the social function of property as a dimension of other human rights including the human rights to food, housing and social security. The legal opinion was commissioned by Rights & Democracy and written by Dr. Christophe Golay and Ms. Ioana Cismas at the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights. It compiles and comments upon existing instruments and jurisprudence at the international, regional and national levels. The authors conclude that the human right to property has two main components: on one hand it is essential for the protection of human life and dignity, and on the other hand it may be limited in order to resolve social injustices and advance the human rights of specific disadvantaged individuals or groups. The legal opinion will be of interest to academics and human rights activists working on questions related to access to land, the right to food and the right to housing as well as foreign investment and the activities of transnational corporations

Low autocorrelated multi-phase sequences

The interplay between the ground state energy of the generalized Bernasconi model to multi-phase, and the minimal value of the maximal autocorrelation function, $C_{max}=\max_K{|C_K|}$, $K=1,..N-1$, is examined analytically and the main results are: (a) The minimal value of $\min_N{C_{max}}$ is $0.435\sqrt{N}$ significantly smaller than the typical value for random sequences $O(\sqrt{\log{N}}\sqrt{N})$. (b) $\min_N{C_{max}}$ over all sequences of length N is obtained in an energy which is about 30% above the ground-state energy of the generalized Bernasconi model, independent of the number of phases m. (c) The maximal merit factor $F_{max}$ grows linearly with m. (d) For a given N, $\min_N{C_{max}}\sim\sqrt{N/m}$ indicating that for m=N, $\min_N{C_{max}}=1$, i.e. a Barker code exits. The analytical results are confirmed by simulations.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure