The Margins of the Rational Man: Fluid Identities in Eighteenth-Century Biography

This study will explore the Enlightenment conception of the individual of reason, its attempted formulations in actor biographies, and its ultimate denial by the reality of human identity as multiple, fluid, and dialogical. Such fluidity sought to overcome the marginal status of the stage player through the embodiment of rational models of personality. Some stage celebrities, most notably David Garrick, were offering themselves as public models of identity for the new age of reasoned discourse. This involved the presentation before the public of stage performers as fully realized individuals. However, the unavoidable problem was that presenting an individual, even a renowned stage star, as a living paradigm of the enlightened person of reason would prove elusive. Aside from the inherent contradiction of locating any perfected stereotype in an actual person, the qualities making an individual in full conformity to his or her “reason” did not match the particular cultural qualities demanded for a successful eighteenth-century middle-class Englishman or Englishwoman. Nonetheless, by the last quarter of the eighteenth century, significant advances were made both within the particular profession of acting and before the onstage and offstage public. The acting profession was moving quickly and for the first time in England away from its marginalized status to offer respected agents for cultural change. The new genre of actor biographies as well contributed to this more fully realized formulation of the modern individual

AIDS Treatment in South Asia: Equity and Efficiency Arguments for Shouldering the Fiscal Burden When Prevalence Rates are Low

The slower spread of AIDS in South Asian countries, combined with the fact that most South Asian countries have higher per capita incomes than the most severely affected countries of other regions imply that the various impacts of the disease will be smaller in South Asia than in the worst affected countries in other regions. While justified with respect to the impact of the disease on economic output, on poverty, or on orphanhood, this conclusion does not follow with respect to the health sector, where the relatively minor public role in health care delivery and the entrepreneurial and heterogeneous private health and pharmaceutical sectors combine to magnify the potential impact of the epidemic. This paper uses recent epidemiological data on the extent and rate of spread of HIV/AIDS in South Asian countries and alternative scenarios regarding future government efforts to expand access to AIDS treatment in order to estimate the future need for antiretroviral treatment in South Asian countries and the fiscal burden that their governments will shoulder if they decide to provide or finance all of the needed care. Since AIDS treatment cannot be presumed to slow HIV transmission and may speed it, the usual argument for paying for such treatment with public funds is on equity grounds—that it will prevent poverty and orphanhood. Indeed this paper estimates that public financing of AIDS treatment might avert poverty for about three percent of the Indian population, for example. However, data on the quality of private health care in India suggests that another effect of publicly produced AIDS treatment would be to crowd out lower-quality private AIDS treatment, thereby preventing some of the negative spillovers of poor quality private treatment. The paper closes by arguing on efficiency grounds that the government role in AIDS treatment should encompass both regulation of the private sector and support for quality “structured” AIDS treatment in the public sector.AIDS, HIV, South Asia

The TREC-2002 video track report

TREC-2002 saw the second running of the Video Track, the goal of which was to promote progress in content-based retrieval from digital video via open, metrics-based evaluation. The track used 73.3 hours of publicly available digital video (in MPEG-1/VCD format) downloaded by the participants directly from the Internet Archive (Prelinger Archives) (internetarchive, 2002) and some from the Open Video Project (Marchionini, 2001). The material comprised advertising, educational, industrial, and amateur films produced between the 1930's and the 1970's by corporations, nonprofit organizations, trade associations, community and interest groups, educational institutions, and individuals. 17 teams representing 5 companies and 12 universities - 4 from Asia, 9 from Europe, and 4 from the US - participated in one or more of three tasks in the 2001 video track: shot boundary determination, feature extraction, and search (manual or interactive). Results were scored by NIST using manually created truth data for shot boundary determination and manual assessment of feature extraction and search results. This paper is an introduction to, and an overview of, the track framework - the tasks, data, and measures - the approaches taken by the participating groups, the results, and issues regrading the evaluation. For detailed information about the approaches and results, the reader should see the various site reports in the final workshop proceedings

Graph Theoretic Construction of Discrete Groups over p-adic Fields

This paper is originally designed as a part of revision of the author's preprint math.AG/9908174 "P-adic Schwarzian triangle groups of Mumford type". Recently, Yves Andr'e pointed out a flaw in that preprint; more precisely, Proposition II there was not correct, and consequently, as he pointed out, some triangle groups are missing (but only in p=2,3,5). I apologize to the readers, and will release the other part soon by the original title. In this paper, we concentrate on the constructive part, but more systematically and in more general situation. More precisely, this paper presents a complete criterion for an abstract tree of groups to be realized in the context of p-adic uniformization. This criterion provides a practical way of constructing finitely generated discrete subgroups in PGL(2,K) over a p-adic field K. In the end of this paper, we will exhibit concrete examples of such construction, which in particular shows that there exist infinitely many triangle groups.Comment: 14 pages, 2 figure

TREC video retrieval evaluation: a case study and status report

The TREC Video Retrieval Evaluation is a multiyear, international effort, funded by the US Advanced Research and Development Agency (ARDA) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to promote progress in content-based retrieval from digital video via open, metrics-based evaluation. Now beginning its fourth year, it aims over time to develop both a better understanding of how systems can effectively accomplish such retrieval and how one can reliably benchmark their performance. This paper can be seen as a case study in the development of video retrieval systems and their evaluation as well as a report on their status to-date. After an introduction to the evolution of the evaluation over the past three years, the paper reports on the most recent evaluation TRECVID 2003: the evaluation framework — the 4 tasks (shot boundary determination, high-level feature extraction, story segmentation and typing, search), 133 hours of US television news data, and measures —, the results, and the approaches taken by the 24 participating groups

TRECVID: evaluating the effectiveness of information retrieval tasks on digital video

TRECVID is an annual exercise which encourages research in information retrieval from digital video by providing a large video test collection, uniform scoring procedures, and a forum for organizations interested in comparing their results. TRECVID benchmarking covers both interactive and manual searching by end users, as well as the benchmarking of some supporting technologies including shot boundary detection, extraction of some semantic features, and the automatic segmentation of TV news broadcasts into non-overlapping news stories. TRECVID has a broad range of over 40 participating groups from across the world and as it is now (2004) in its 4th annual cycle it is opportune to stand back and look at the lessons we have learned from the cumulative activity. In this paper we shall present a brief and high-level overview of the TRECVID activity covering the data, the benchmarked tasks, the overall results obtained by groups to date and an overview of the approaches taken by selective groups in some tasks. While progress from one year to the next cannot be measured directly because of the changing nature of the video data we have been using, we shall present a summary of the lessons we have learned from TRECVID and include some pointers on what we feel are the most important of these lessons

F-structures and integral points on semiabelian varieties over finite fields

Motivated by the problem of determining the structure of integral points on subvarieties of semiabelian varieties defined over finite fields, we prove a quantifier elimination result for certain modules over finite simple extensions of the integers given together with predicates for orbits of the distinguished generator of the ring.Comment: 33 pages, correction made to authors' informatio