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Canguilhem, Dumézil, Hyppolite : Georges Canguilhem and his Contemporaries
No full textIn the original preface to his primary doctoral thesis Folie et déraison, Michel Foucault thanked three men as intellectual mentors and influences on his work. In his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France in December 1970 the same three names were invoked: Georges Canguilhem, Georges Dumézil and Jean Hyppolite. The relation between these figures individually with Foucault has been discussed in varying degrees of detail, but this article explores the intellectual affinities and tensions between the three older men. Canguilhem and Hyppolite had been contemporaries at the École normale supérieure in the 1920s, then colleagues in Strasbourg, and perhaps most visibly they took part in a television interview mediated by Alain Badiou and Dina Dreyfus in 1965. While Dumézil and Hyppolite were colleagues at the Collège de France, they appear never to have discussed each other’s work. Nor does Dumézil discuss Canguilhem, but Canguilhem importantly discusses both Dumézil and Hyppolite. The focus here is on Canguilhem’s review of Foucault’s Les mots et les choses, in which he indicates the understated importance of Dumézil to that book; and a report of a largely unknown seminar from autumn 1970 when Foucault discussed Dumézil’s work and Canguilhem responded. The article then moves to Canguilhem’s engagement with Hyppolite’s work, especially in his analysis of “Hegel en France,” and the tributes he wrote to his friend and colleague following Hyppolite’s 1968 death. Exploring his reading of two of his great contemporaries helps to resituate Canguilhem within wider philosophical debates in the mid-20th century
Reforming corporate criminal liability in English law : lessons and experiences from Canada
No full textAssesses the options put forward by the Law Commission in 2022 for reforming the law on corporate criminal liability, identifies problems with the identification principle underpinning corporate criminal liability, compares the Canadian approach and argues that this would be the most appropriate model for English law to follow
Table inference for combinatorial origin-destination choices in agent-based population synthesis
No full textA key challenge in agent-based mobility simulations is the synthesis of individual agent socioeconomic profiles. Such profiles include locations of agent activities, which dictate the quality of the simulated travel patterns. These locations are typically represented in origin-destination matrices that are sampled using coarse travel surveys. This is because fine-grained trip profiles are scarce and fragmented due to privacy and cost reasons. The discrepancy between data and sampling resolutions renders agent traits non-identifiable due to the combinatorial space of data-consistent individual attributes. This problem is pertinent to any agent-based inference setting where the latent state is discrete. Existing approaches have used continuous relaxations of the underlying location assignments and subsequent ad-hoc discretisation thereof. We propose a framework to efficiently navigate this space offering improved reconstruction and coverage as well as linear-time sampling of the ground truth origin-destination table. This allows us to avoid factorially growing rejection rates and poor summary statistic consistency inherent in discrete choice modelling. We achieve this by introducing joint sampling schemes for the continuous intensity and discrete table of agent trips, as well as Markov bases that can efficiently traverse this combinatorial space subject to summary statistic constraints. Our framework's benefits are demonstrated in multiple controlled experiments and a large-scale application to agent work trip reconstruction in Cambridge, UK
Bayesian optimisation for constrained problems
No full textMany real-world optimisation problems such as hyperparameter tuning in machine learning or simulation-based optimisation can be formulated as expensive-to-evaluate black-box functions. A popular approach to tackle such problems is Bayesian optimisation, which builds a response surface model based on the data collected so far, and uses the mean and uncertainty predicted by the model to decide what information to collect next. In this paper, we propose a generalisation of the well-known Knowledge Gradient acquisition function that allows it to handle constraints. We empirically compare the new algorithm with four other state-of-the-art constrained Bayesian optimisation algorithms and demonstrate its superior performance. We also prove theoretical convergence in the infinite budget limit
Noise in cognition : bug or feature?
Get PDFNoise in behavior is often viewed as a nuisance: while the mind aims to take the best possible action, it is let down by unreliability in the sensory and response systems. How researchers study cognition reflects this viewpoint – averaging over trials and participants to discover the deterministic relationships between experimental manipulations and their behavioral consequences, with noise represented as additive, often Gaussian, and independent. Yet a careful look at behavioral noise reveals rich structure that defies easy explanation. First, both perceptual and preferential judgments show that sensory and response noise may potentially only play minor roles, with most noise arising in the cognitive computations. Second, the functional form of the noise is both non-Gaussian and non-independent, with the distribution of noise being better characterized as heavy-tailed and as having substantial long-range autocorrelations. It is possible that this structure results from brains that are, for some reason, bedeviled by a fundamental design flaw, albeit one with intriguingly distinctive characteristics. Alternatively, noise might not be a bug but a feature: indeed, we suggest that noise is fundamental to how cognition works. Specifically, we propose that the brain approximates probabilistic inference with a local sampling algorithm, one that uses randomness to drive its exploration of alternative hypotheses. Reframing cognition in this way explains the rich structure of noise and leads to a surprising conclusion: that noise is not a symptom of cognitive malfunction but plays a central role in underpinning human intelligence
Translation as activism, translators as activists
No full textCan translation be a tool for resisting colonisation? It already is, thanks to a large global network of translator activists who for the past two decades have been working tirelessly towards this very aim. How the work of resisting colonisation plays out on the page is, however, a vexed question, not least because received ideas about colonisation and resistance derived from studies of European imperialism can complicate rather than clarify translation practice for those who work with literatures with other histories, other roots. Here I draw upon my own experience of translating Turkish. Turkey is not a former colony but the modern successor of an empire. Although the Allied powers did their utmost to colonise its lands after the first world war, they did not succeed. So while those of us who set out to translate Turkish literature into Western languages might find a great deal we wish to resist, we need strategies that acknowledge the historical and political particularities of this literature’s century-long erasure. In this chapter I suggest a way forward
The morphology of the asteroidal dust around White Dwarf Stars : optical and near-infrared pulsations in G29-38
Get PDFMore than 36 yr have passed since the discovery of the infrared excess from circumstellar dust orbiting the white dwarf G29-38, which at 17.5 pc it is the nearest and brightest of its class. The precise morphology of the orbiting dust remains only marginally constrained by existing data, subject to model-dependent inferences, and thus fundamental questions of its dynamical origin and evolution persist. This study presents a means to constrain the geometric distribution of the emitting dust using stellar pulsations measured at optical wavelengths as a variable illumination source of the dust, which reradiates primarily in the infrared. By combining optical photometry from the Whole Earth Telescope with 0.7–2.5 μm spectroscopy obtained with SpeX at NASA’s Infrared Telescope Facility, we detect luminosity variations at all observed wavelengths, with variations at most wavelengths corresponding to the behavior of the pulsating stellar photosphere, but toward the longest wavelengths the light curves probe the corresponding time variability of the circumstellar dust. In addition to developing methodology, we find the pulsation amplitudes decrease with increasing wavelength for principal pulsation modes, yet increase beyond ≈2 μm for nonlinear combination frequencies. We interpret these results as combination modes derived from the principal modes of identical ℓ values and discuss the implications for the morphology of the warm dust. We also draw attention to some discrepancies between our findings and theoretical expectations for the results of the nonlinearity imposed by the surface convection zone on mode–mode interactions and on the behavior of the first harmonic of the highest-amplitude pulsation mode
Effect of biochar on microplastics penetration treatment within soil porous medium under the wetting-drying cycles and optimisation of soil-biochar mixing format
No full textPlant-based biochar was demonstrated promising capability in adsorbing microplastic particles (MPs) within soil porous mediums. However, biochar’s function in mitigating MPs’ vertical penetration during wetting-drying cycles, typical of seasonal precipitation and evaporation, remains uncertain. Furthermore, few studies have investigated the structures of how biochar combines with soil. This study conducted column tests to assess the MPs retention capabilities of soil-biochar porous media under saturated and wetting-drying conditions. The water retention and hydrophilic properties were investigated to elucidate the impact of wetting-drying cycles. Additionally, different biochar-soil structures were compared to optimise the structural design. Without biochar, wetting-drying cycles resulted in 8.74% more MPs escaping from samples. However, incorporating 15% biochar led to only around 2% more MPs in effluent. Biochar significantly enhanced soil's MP absorption capacity and mitigated the negative effects of wetting-drying cycles. Biochar’s alveolate morphology provides ample adsorption sites and creates complex flow paths. The hydrophilic groups of biochar and capillarity by micropores facilitated slower water release during drying, preventing crack propagation and flush on MP particles. This effect was more pronounced with higher biochar content and lower porosity. Moreover, layer structure was found to improve MPs removal, benefiting the long-term performance and management of the biochar functional layer
