1,078 research outputs found
Mapping Precariousness
The condition of precariousness not only provides insights into a segment of the
world of work or of a particular subject group, but is also a privileged standpoint
for an overview of the condition of the social on a global scale. Because
precariousness is multidimensional and polysemantic, it traverses contemporary
society and multiple contexts, from industrial to class, gender, family relations as
well as political participation, citizenship and migration.
This book maps the differences and similarities in the ways precariousness
and insecurity in employment unfold and are subjectively experienced in regions
and sectors that are confronted with different labour histories, legislations and
economic priorities. Establishing a constructive dialogue amongst different global
regions and across disciplines, the chapters explore the shift from precariousness
to precariat and collective subjects as it is being articulated in the current global
crisis. This edited collection aims to continue a process of mapping experiences
by means of ethnographies, fieldwork, interviews, content analysis, where the
precarious define their condition and explain how they try to withdraw from, cope
with or embrace it
A Critical Look at the Abstraction Based on Macro-Operators
Abstraction can be an effective technique for dealing with
the complexity of planning tasks. This paper is aimed at assessing and
identifying in which cases abstraction can actually speed-up the overall
search. In fact, it is well known that the impact of abstraction on the
time spent to search for a solution of a planning problem can be positive
or negative, depending on several factors -including the number of objects
defined in the domain, the branching factor, and the plan length.
Experimental results highlight the role of such aspects on the overall performance
of an algorithm that performs the search at the ground-level
only, and compares them with the ones obtained by enforcing abstraction
A Parametric Hierarchical Planner for Experimenting Abstraction Techniques
This paper presents a parametric system, devised
and implemented to perform hierarchical planning
by delegating the actual search to an external
planner (the "parameter") at any level of abstraction,
including the ground one. Aimed at
giving a better insight of whether or not the exploitation
of abstract spaces can be used for
solving complex planning problems, comparisons
have been made between instances of the
hierarchical planner and their non hierarchical
counterparts. To improve the significance of the
results, three different planners have been selected
and used while performing experiments.
To facilitate the setting of experimental environments,
a novel semi-automatic technique,
used to generate abstraction hierarchies starting
from ground-level domain descriptions, is also
described
A Route Confidence Evaluation Method for Reliable Hierarchical Text Categorization
Hierarchical Text Categorization (HTC) is becoming increasingly important
with the rapidly growing amount of text data available in the World Wide Web.
Among the different strategies proposed to cope with HTC, the Local Classifier
per Node (LCN) approach attains good performance by mirroring the underlying
class hierarchy while enforcing a top-down strategy in the testing step.
However, the problem of embedding hierarchical information (parent-child
relationship) to improve the performance of HTC systems still remains open. A
confidence evaluation method for a selected route in the hierarchy is proposed
to evaluate the reliability of the final candidate labels in an HTC system. In
order to take into account the information embedded in the hierarchy, weight
factors are used to take into account the importance of each level. An
acceptance/rejection strategy in the top-down decision making process is
proposed, which improves the overall categorization accuracy by rejecting a few
percentage of samples, i.e., those with low reliability score. Experimental
results on the Reuters benchmark dataset (RCV1- v2) confirm the effectiveness
of the proposed method, compared to other state-of-the art HTC methods
PACMAS: A Personalized, Adaptive, and Cooperative MultiAgent System Architecture
In this paper, a generic architecture, designed to
support the implementation of applications aimed at managing
information among different and heterogeneous sources,
is presented. Information is filtered and organized according
to personal interests explicitly stated by the user. User pro-
files are improved and refined throughout time by suitable
adaptation techniques. The overall architecture has been called
PACMAS, being a support for implementing Personalized, Adaptive,
and Cooperative MultiAgent Systems. PACMAS agents are
autonomous and flexible, and can be made personal, adaptive and
cooperative, depending on the given application. The peculiarities
of the architecture are highlighted by illustrating three relevant
case studies focused on giving a support to undergraduate and
graduate students, on predicting protein secondary structure, and
on classifying newspaper articles, respectively
Indigenous Digital Technologies. The Taicho and Yelloknives Dene’s Web-Site and Cultural Online Archives
Cyberspace is only one of the many metaphors used to describe the Internet. While there is a
growing body of literature on identity formation in cyberspace, there are important gaps in this
field. One of these is related to the analysis of the use of digital technologies by the Northern
Canadian Indigenous people. Precisely, the author, focusing her attention on Tåîchô and
Yellowknives Dene communities in Northwest Territories of Canada analyzes the contents of their
websites and online archives in order to understand how these native groups promote their culture
and spread out their knowledge through digital technologies for working toward decolonizatio
An Overview of Research on Political Attitudes in Croatia
The article presents an overview of research on political attitudes in Croatia since the beginning of 1990s. There is a considerable number of works investigating political attitudes, written mainly by political scientists, psychologists and sociologists. Admittedly, many of these works are available only in Croatian. The significance and diversity of topics covered by various authors indicate the necessity of further efforts in synthesizing this substantial body of interdisciplinary scientific knowledge. This article is a step in that direction
BODY CHANGES AND GREEN CONSUMPTION. EMBODYING AND PERFORMING A VEGAN LIFESTYLE
Veganism is usually addressed in studies on medical benefits or eating disorders as well as food
identities that are able to shape and influence society. Through this article, the author aims to add a
new interpretation of veganism by linking the anthropological topic of body changes to green
consumption and dietary choices. Notably, the present analysis aims to explore the ideas of a lifestyle
free of animal products and their embodied political significance using the ethnographic
methodology. The approach used allows us to present veganism as a meaningful strategy that employs
personal values as a response to wider world issues related to environmental degradation and animal
safeguard. Therefore, in this dissertation, the implicit and explicit body modification and vegan
expressions are crucial to understanding how veganism is concretized in the Italian contex
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