Northeastern University London Repository
Not a member yet
1286 research outputs found
Sort by
The Use of Colour Names Over Repeated Trials
Get PDFSpeakers group colour stimuli into categories that are commonly referred to by a name (e.g. pink, peach, and pale green). While the number of colour names in wide cultural use may vary across different languages, it has been shown that most languages have a small set of basic colour terms (BCTs) that are typically shared by speakers. The cognitive role of BCTs has been a subject of ongoing debate, with some proposing that the existence of primary basic categories may depend on structural and functional properties of the visual system. In this study, we investigate the effects of the duration of the experimental task on the use of colour names. In a lab-based colour naming experiment, we asked 17 English speakers to give unconstrained verbal responses for 216 presented colour samples, presented randomly one at a time against 7 different backgrounds. Test stimuli were 2 degrees uniformly coloured discs with a black outline of 1 pixel. The 216 colour stimuli were uniformly distributed in the CIE LMS parallelepiped. We collected a total of 26,504 unconstrained colour name responses. First, we consider the global entropy of the distribution of responses as a measure of all participants' colour vocabulary richness. We use the order of appearance of the backgrounds to group the responses in 7 bins and measure the entropy of colour naming responses for each bin. Our results show that the richness of colour vocabulary decreases as a function of the task duration. Second, we examine which colour names became more prevalent over trials as the vocabulary became impoverished. We found a positive correlation (R2 = 0.8) between the use of BCTs and time-on-task, and a negative correlation in the case of non-BCTs (R2 = -0.5), supporting that BCTs are easier to name than non-BCTs. However, across participants secondary basics have been used significantly more often (n = 5: brown, orange, grey, purple, and pink) (M = 1039, SD = 67) than primary basics (n = 6: black, blue, green, red, yellow, and white) (M = 773, SD = 49) over each of the 7 ordered backgrounds, t(12) = -8.48, p < .001, suggesting that secondary basics overall may cover larger regions of the cone excitation space than primary basics. Consistent with this explanation, a Pearson analysis showed a strong correlation (R2 = 0.6) between frequency of BTCs and their corresponding volume in LMS cone excitation space
Print for Victory
Get PDFOn Andrew Pettegree, 'The Book at War: Libraries and Readers in an Age of Conflict
Circus Workers vs Paris - How a small community memorial threatened Paris's monumental visions.
No full textMy paper tells the forgotten story of the Memorial for the Fallen Circus Workers in Paris to show the broader picture of the interwar memory politics which shaped the present urban landscape and memorialscape of the French capital city. The interwar memory of WWI in Paris was controlled by political and military leadership, which intentionally attempted to keep the narratives of a "real war" (loss, suffering, injury) or power-challenging narratives (pacifism, communism) away from the capital to prevent more instability in this politically responsive community.
The impact of this practice is visible in the Parisian cityscape and memorialscape. These memory politics resulted in commemorative places created for commanders and state leaders within the city and dismissed the counter-memories of the bereaved or veterans. These commemorative places were strategically located in the city, forming a military memory axis within the capital connecting memory districts and cross-cutting the community remembrance.
What happens when a smaller community plans to commemorate its fallen within the military axis of the city? How does location within the city affect memory? Who are the stakeholders in the debate? The paper tells the story of the conflict between a small commune bordering Paris and the city's governance over the valuable plain of Porte Maillot. It defines three problems with the proposed community memorial - audience, design, and location- while revealing why these components contrasted Paris's great memory political ambitions
Beyond the Dichotomy of Hard and Soft Power: A Case Study of the EU's Naval Engagement in the Indo-Pacific
Get PDFThe past two decades have witnessed the development of the European Union (EU) as a distinctive security actor, seeking to position itself as a “global security provider” in world affairs. A growing volume of scholarly literature has been dedicated to unpacking the EU's global security strategies (e.g., Biscop, 2016) and the Union's efforts to engage in global security governance across different policy fields, such as energy security (Prontera, 2020), anti-terrorism (Bossong, 2008) and maritime security (Germond, 2011). Whilst it has been widely accepted that the EU has manifested increasingly strong ambition in global security governance, there is a lack of consensus on how to interpret the nature of the EU's power in the security domain and how to gauge the impact of the Union's external security strategy vis-à-vis third actors. This chapter probes the question: How can we understand the EU's power projection in the Indo-Pacific in the security domain? Reflecting upon the matrix developed in the introductory chapter, this chapter shows that the study of the EU's role as a newly emerging security player in the Indo-Pacific region requires a more nuanced analytical framework which transcends the dichotomy between soft power and hard power, between high politics and low politics
Optimal flight gate assignment on a digital quantum computer
Get PDFWe investigate the performance of the variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) for the optimal flight gate assignment problem. This problem is a combinatorial optimization problem that aims at finding an optimal assignment of flights to the gates of an airport, in order to minimize the passenger travel time. To study the problem, we adopt a qubit-efficient binary encoding with a cyclic mapping, which is suitable for a digital quantum computer. Using this encoding in conjunction with the Conditional Value at Risk (CVaR) as an aggregation function, we systematically explore the performance of the approach by classically simulating the CVaR-VQE. Our results indicate that the method allows for finding a good solution with high probability, and the method significantly outperforms the naive VQE approach. We examine the role of entanglement for the performance, and find that ansätze with entangling gates allow for better results than pure product states. Studying the problem for various sizes, our numerical data show that the scaling of the number of cost function calls for obtaining a good solution is not exponential for the regimes we investigate in this work
Quantum Algorithms for Charged Particle Track Reconstruction in the LUXE Experiment
Get PDFThe LUXE experiment is a new experiment in planning in Hamburg, which will study quantum electrodynamics at the strong-field frontier. LUXE intends to measure the positron production rate in this unprecedented regime using, among others, a silicon tracking detector. The large number of expected positrons traversing the sensitive detector layers results in an extremely challenging combinatorial problem, which can become computationally expensive for classical computers. This paper investigates the potential future use of gate-based quantum computers for pattern recognition in track reconstruction. Approaches based on a quadratic unconstrained binary optimisation and a quantum graph neural network are investigated in classical simulations of quantum devices and compared with a classical track reconstruction algorithm. In addition, a proof-of-principle study is performed using quantum hardware
