Ethics across borders

This article takes what has always been a methodological and ethical question for anthropologists (how should we relate to others?) and turns it into an ethnographic one (how do those we study think ethically across borders?). We show that, paradoxically, anthropologists’ commitment to their own forms of ethics across borders have frequently effaced alternative conceptions among the people we study, whilst the burgeoning field of the anthropology of ethics has reintroduced ideas of cultural boundedness and incommensurability into the anthropological canon. Moreover, within anthropology, a focus on either universal motivation or cultural relativism has obscured ethics across borders, which as a practice is premised on both the existence of ethical difference and the possibility of transcending it. In relation to an example taken from Evans’ work on Ahmadi Muslims in India, we develop the idea that ethics across borders depends as much on the creative production and elaboration of incommensurable differencem - a process we call “incommensuration” - as on the identification of affinities. As suggested by the collection this essay introduces, ethics across borders in this sense must be widespread, and deserves greater ethnographic attention, particularly with regard to the diverse ways in which difference and affinity are imagined.This article and the collection it introduces grew out of an interdisciplinary seminar organized by Jonathan Mair from 2012 to 2013 at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH), Cambridge, as part of a Melon Newton Research Fellowship. Articles collected here were presented at a conference convened by Mair and Evans under the title “Ethical Conversations Across Borders” in January 2014 held in Cambridge with the support of CRASSH, King’s College, Cambridge and St. John’s College, Cambridge. We would like to thank participants and contributors to the seminar and conference for their contribution to the development of the project, including Michael Banner, Naor Ben-Yehoyada, Matei Candea, Joanna Cook, Jane Heal, Caroline Humphrey, Paolo Heywood, Tim Jenkins, James Laidlaw, Michael Lempert, Hallvard Lillehammer, Patrick McKearney, and Alice Wilson. We would also like to thank Marie Lemaire and Ruth Rushworth for invaluable organizational support. Nicholas Evans’ contribution to this project is due, in part, to a generous research grant from the Economic and Social Research Council (UK) to which we also extend our thanks. Finally, we are extremely grateful to Giovanni da Col and two anonymous reviewers of this introduction for their insightful comments, and to Sean Dowdy, Andra Le-Roux Kemp, and Justin Dyer for their very significant help with its production.This is the final version of the article. It first appeared from HAU via http://dx.doi.org/10.14318/hau5.2.01

A classification of bargaining solutions by evolutionary origin

For games of contracting under perturbed best response dynamics, varying the perturbations along two dimensions (uniform vs. logit, directed vs. undirected) gives four possibilities. Three of these select differing major bargaining solutions as stochastically stable. The fourth possibility yields a new bargaining solution which exhibits significant nonmonotonicities and demonstrates the interplay of two key drivers of evolutionary selection: (i) the ease of making errors; (ii) the ease of responding to errors

Charles Baxter’s “Gryphon”: A Postmodernist Substitute in a Traditional Classroom

Cet article étudie la nouvelle « Gryphon » de Charles Baxter en la plaçant dans le cadre de l’histoire intellectuelle et pédagogique allant de l’âge des Lumières en Europe au développement du postmodernisme. Le subjectivisme d’Emmanuel Kant est perçu comme le début d’une transition de l’absolu vers le relatif, en ce qui concerne l’évaluation de ce que l’on présente en classe comme des « faits ». Traditionnellement, cette transition kantienne se manifeste bien plus tard, au moment de l’émergence des idées postmodernistes issues de l’échec des théories positivistes, et c’est précisément cette transition qui est au centre des évènements qui constituent le récit. Dans le but d’illustrer la façon dont Baxter se sert de la situation en classe pour décrire une confrontation de perspectives philosophiques et pédagogiques, on s’appuiera ici sur la théorie de la réception. L’histoire de Baxter ne peut être réduite à de simples oppositions de type « noir ou blanc », car l’auteur tente de refléter l’importante subtilité des complexités que l’on rencontre dans les « vraies » classes

Single-Peaked Preferences over Multidimensional Binary Alternatives

Single-peaked preferences are important throughout social choice theory. In this article, we consider single-peaked preferences over multidimensional binary alternative spaces—that is, alternative spaces of the form {0, 1}n for some integer n ≥ 2. We show that preferences that are single-peaked with respect to a normalized separable base order are nonseparable except in the most trivial cases. We establish that two distinct base orders can induce the same single-peaked preference order if any only if they differ by a transposition of their two central elements. We then use this result to enumerate single-peaked binary preference orders over a separable base order

Synergistic Graph Fusion via Encoder Embedding

In this paper, we introduce a novel approach to multi-graph embedding called graph fusion encoder embedding. The method is designed to work with multiple graphs that share a common vertex set. Under the supervised learning setting, we show that the resulting embedding exhibits a surprising yet highly desirable "synergistic effect": for sufficiently large vertex size, the vertex classification accuracy always benefits from additional graphs. We provide a mathematical proof of this effect under the stochastic block model, and identify the necessary and sufficient condition for asymptotically perfect classification. The simulations and real data experiments confirm the superiority of the proposed method, which consistently outperforms recent benchmark methods in classification.Comment: 17 pages main paper, 6 pages appendi

Unified wavelet and gaussian filtering for segmentation of CT images; application in segmentation of bone in pelvic CT images

Background The analysis of pelvic CT scans is a crucial step for detecting and assessing the severity of Traumatic Pelvic Injuries. Automating the processing of pelvic CT scans could impact decision accuracy, decrease the time for decision making, and reduce health care cost. This paper discusses a method to automate the segmentation of bone from pelvic CT images. Accurate segmentation of bone is very important for developing an automated assisted-decision support system for Traumatic Pelvic Injury diagnosis and treatment. Methods The automated method for pelvic CT bone segmentation is a hierarchical approach that combines filtering and histogram equalization, for image enhancement, wavelet analysis and automated seeded region growing. Initial results of segmentation are used to identify the region where bone is present and to target histogram equalization towards the specific area. Speckle Reducing Anisotropic Didffusion (SRAD) filter is applied to accentuate the desired features in the region. Automated seeded region growing is performed to refine the initial bone segmentation results. Results The proposed method automatically processes pelvic CT images and produces accurate segmentation. Bone connectivity is achieved and the contours and sizes of bones are true to the actual contour and size displayed in the original image. Results are promising and show great potential for fracture detection and assessing hemorrhage presence and severity. Conclusion Preliminary experimental results of the automated method show accurate bone segmentation. The novelty of the method lies in the unique hierarchical combination of image enhancement and segmentation methods that aims at maximizing the advantages of the combined algorithms. The proposed method has the following advantages: it produces accurate bone segmentation with maintaining bone contour and size true to the original image and is suitable for automated bone segmentation from pelvic CT images