17,963 research outputs found
Subjectivity and the Cultural Constraints of Academic Literature in Material Culture: An Investigation into the Discussion of Pattern and Symbol in Persian Carpets
This paper examines the academic literature on material culture, focusing on inherent cultural standpoints within the European tradition and the impossibility of arriving at an objective position. With regard to the study of the symbolism in Persian carpets, material science approaches the subject with a number of preconceived concepts that colour the interpretation it offers. Persian carpets have been interpreted within European art for over four hundred years, and this has led to a variety of concepts being integrated into the academic perception of them. In particular, it will be shown that methods of valuing Persian carpets over the course of the last century have come to dictate much of the basis on which their patterns and symbols are discussed. The article concludes that ultimately, material culture studies objects from within the confines of its own cultural environment, and does not offer an interpretation that is relevant to the culture in which those objects were created
A test of the circular Unruh effect using atomic electrons
We propose a test for the circular Unruh effect using certain atoms -
fluorine and oxygen. For these atoms the centripetal acceleration of the outer
shell electrons implies an effective Unruh temperature in the range 1000 - 2000
K. This range of Unruh temperatures is large enough to shift the expected
occupancy of the lowest energy level and nearby energy levels. In effect the
Unruh temperature changes the expected pure ground state, with all the
electrons in the lowest energy level, to a mixed state with some larger than
expected occupancy of states near to the lowest energy level. Examining these
atoms at low background temperatures and finding a larger than expected number
of electrons in low lying excited levels, beyond what is expected due to the
background thermal excitation, would provide experimental evidence for the
Unruh effect.Comment: 16 pages, no figures Added discussion. To be published in EPJ
Primal Recovery from Consensus-Based Dual Decomposition for Distributed Convex Optimization
Dual decomposition has been successfully employed in a variety of distributed
convex optimization problems solved by a network of computing and communicating
nodes. Often, when the cost function is separable but the constraints are
coupled, the dual decomposition scheme involves local parallel subgradient
calculations and a global subgradient update performed by a master node. In
this paper, we propose a consensus-based dual decomposition to remove the need
for such a master node and still enable the computing nodes to generate an
approximate dual solution for the underlying convex optimization problem. In
addition, we provide a primal recovery mechanism to allow the nodes to have
access to approximate near-optimal primal solutions. Our scheme is based on a
constant stepsize choice and the dual and primal objective convergence are
achieved up to a bounded error floor dependent on the stepsize and on the
number of consensus steps among the nodes
Measuring Tie Strength in Implicit Social Networks
Given a set of people and a set of events they attend, we address the problem
of measuring connectedness or tie strength between each pair of persons given
that attendance at mutual events gives an implicit social network between
people. We take an axiomatic approach to this problem. Starting from a list of
axioms that a measure of tie strength must satisfy, we characterize functions
that satisfy all the axioms and show that there is a range of measures that
satisfy this characterization. A measure of tie strength induces a ranking on
the edges (and on the set of neighbors for every person). We show that for
applications where the ranking, and not the absolute value of the tie strength,
is the important thing about the measure, the axioms are equivalent to a
natural partial order. Also, to settle on a particular measure, we must make a
non-obvious decision about extending this partial order to a total order, and
that this decision is best left to particular applications. We classify
measures found in prior literature according to the axioms that they satisfy.
In our experiments, we measure tie strength and the coverage of our axioms in
several datasets. Also, for each dataset, we bound the maximum Kendall's Tau
divergence (which measures the number of pairwise disagreements between two
lists) between all measures that satisfy the axioms using the partial order.
This informs us if particular datasets are well behaved where we do not have to
worry about which measure to choose, or we have to be careful about the exact
choice of measure we make.Comment: 10 page
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