Red and Dead: Reply to critics

This article is a response to the comments made by Illan Rua Wall, Caroline Holmqvist, Claudia Aradau and Yari Lanci on my book War Power, Police Power (Edinburgh UP, 2014)

Defending clusters against critics

In recent years, almost everybody became interested in clusters. Companies, businessmen, scholars and policymakers alike seem to be fascinated by the clustering phenomenon and its potential to trigger, or to further stimulate, economic growth and development. This remarkably large interest seems to be entirely justified if we just overview some of the most important benefits clusters can generate.clusters, economic growth, agglomeration economies, cooperation

Andy Clark and his Critics

In this volume, a range of high-profile researchers in philosophy of mind, philosophy of cognitive science, and empirical cognitive science, critically engage with Clark's work across the themes of: Extended, Embodied, Embedded, Enactive, and Affective Minds; Natural Born Cyborgs; and Perception, Action, and Prediction. Daniel Dennett provides a foreword on the significance of Clark's work, and Clark replies to each section of the book, thus advancing current literature with original contributions that will form the basis for new discussions, debates and directions in the discipline

Interpretation, 1980 And 1880

This article reviews recent methodological interventions in the field of literary study, many of which take nineteenth-century critics, readers, or writers as models for their less interpretive reading practices. In seeking out nineteenth-century models for twenty-first-century critical practice, these critics imagine a world in which English literature never became a discipline. Some see these new methods as formalist, yet we argue that they actually emerge from historicist self-critique. Specifically, these contemporary critics view the historicist projects of the 1980s as overly influenced by disciplinary models of textual interpretation models that first arose, we show through our reading of the Jolly Bargemen scene in Charles Dickens\u27s Great Expectations (1860 61), in the second half of the nineteenth century. In closing, we look more closely at the work of a few recent critics who sound out the metonymic, adjacent, and referential relations between readers, texts, and historical worlds in order sustain historicism\u27s power to restore eroded meanings rather than reveal latent ones

Weird counsels: the critic and the critics

No abstract available

Sample-Efficient Model-Free Reinforcement Learning with Off-Policy Critics

Value-based reinforcement-learning algorithms provide state-of-the-art results in model-free discrete-action settings, and tend to outperform actor-critic algorithms. We argue that actor-critic algorithms are limited by their need for an on-policy critic. We propose Bootstrapped Dual Policy Iteration (BDPI), a novel model-free reinforcement-learning algorithm for continuous states and discrete actions, with an actor and several off-policy critics. Off-policy critics are compatible with experience replay, ensuring high sample-efficiency, without the need for off-policy corrections. The actor, by slowly imitating the average greedy policy of the critics, leads to high-quality and state-specific exploration, which we compare to Thompson sampling. Because the actor and critics are fully decoupled, BDPI is remarkably stable, and unusually robust to its hyper-parameters. BDPI is significantly more sample-efficient than Bootstrapped DQN, PPO, and ACKTR, on discrete, continuous and pixel-based tasks. Source code: https://github.com/vub-ai-lab/bdpi.Comment: Accepted at the European Conference on Machine Learning 2019 (ECML