30115 research outputs found
Sort by
A Psychogeography of AI
Get PDFJoin me, if you will, on a rapid passage through the varied ambiences of AI. Our entry point is the architecture at the heart of all of contemporary artificial intelligence, the artificial neural network. Absorbed into one of these vast and cavernous computational abstractions, the structure arrayed before us is layer upon layer of stacked units, each connected to counterparts in the previous layer by shimmering threads of digital signals, each unit pulsing as it boosts the signal to identical artificial neurons in the next layer. Stacked thousands of stories high, the network is as dizzying as a 19th century power loom scaled to the size of a skyscraper. We pass beneath as it’s being trained, and the crashing symphony of calculations washes back and forth overhead until the final model emerges with optimised grandiosity..
Palestinian Women on Demonic Grounds: Holocaust Museums, Religious Difference, and the Struggle for Citizenship in Germany
Get PDFThis article takes a human geography approach to demonstrate that Palestinian women are placed on “demonic grounds” as that which can cause unpredictable destruction to Germany. The notion of demonic grounds is expanded in this article through the notion of religious difference to ask how geography and religious difference work together to offer a different form of analysis about Palestinian feminism, secularism, and the struggle for citizenship in Germany. The article focuses on the co-construction of race and religious difference of Palestinian women, gendered and spatialized in Holocaust education, and accounts for how Palestinian women are subjugated as Muslim women. Their navigation of Holocaust education in place, however, alters the terrain and enables them to emerge as agentive Palestinian feminist subjects, who upset the cartographic order of German secularism. The article shows that the struggle for citizenship in Germany is entangled with Palestine, enabled and denied through Holocaust education
NLP in Medicine: Enhancing Diagnostics and Patient Care
No full textNatural language processing bridges the gap between human language and machine understanding, allowing computers to process and analyse vast amounts of unstructured text data. It has become a transformative tool in the medical field, enabling healthcare professionals, researchers, and institutions to derive actionable insights from vast amounts of un-structured and semi-structured medical data. Medical NLP is profoundly reshaping the landscape of medicine, unlocking the potential for improved patient care, clinical research, and operational efficiency. The advent of social media has revolutionized numerous aspects of human life, from communication to commerce. By empowering patients to stay informed and involved in their own care, NLP technologies help build a patient-centred healthcare ecosystem that emphasizes collaboration and transparency. As NLP technology continues to evolve, it will be essential to re-main vigilant about its ethical implications, especially within the realm of patient-centred care. Emerging fields like ethical AI, explainable AI, and responsible AI offer promising approaches for ensuring that NLP applications align with the principles of patient autonomy, privacy, fairness, and transparency. Further research is needed to establish best practices for deploying NLP in ways that enhance care without undermining ethical standards. This chapter presents different applications of natural language processing in healthcare, how it impacts patient care, and what are the different ethical considerations needed to be taken care of
Proteomics, Neuropsychological and Demographics Multimodal Machine Learning Approach to Alzheimer’s Disease Prediction on the Bio-Hermes Study Cohort
No full textAlzheimer’s disease (AD) is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder that significantly affects cognitive function. Early and accurate diagnosis is crucial for timely intervention, yet traditional diagnostic methods can be costly and invasive. This study explores a machine learning (ML) approach leveraging the Bio-Hermes dataset, which integrates blood-derived proteomics, neuropsychological test results, and demographic variables to improve the classification of individuals into cognitively normal (CN), mild cognitive impairment (MCI), and AD categories. We implement four ML models: Elastic Net, Classification and Regression Trees (CART), Random Forest, and Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost). The results indicate that XGBoost achieves the highest accuracy (0.81) and a strong area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUCROC) (0.94), highlighting the potential of multimodal ML models in dementia classification. Additionally, the Mini-Mental State Exam (MMSE) and the proteomic marker pTau181 emerged as key predictive variables. This study underscores the feasibility of using blood-based proteomics in conjunction with cognitive assessments for early AD detection and advocates for further validation on larger, diverse cohorts
High Time
No full textArticle in The Spectator Magazine on representation of benzodiazepine medication in television series The White Lotus and elsewhere
“Súy Vân Feigns Madness”: Canonisation and Creativity in Vietnamese Music Theatre
Get PDFThis article explores the canonisation of chèo music theatre in Vietnam since the early twentieth century. Focusing on the reform of the classical chèo play “Súy Vân,” it examines the confluence of factors—the political and cultural currents and the networks of actors—involved incanon formation. In this historical account of canonisation, chèo is positioned within an enlarged conversation about tradition, in which tradition is understood as a space for creativity that has recourse to the past while undergoing continual transformation. Moving beyond the canon, questions about the nature of tradition and artistic creativity in Vietnamese music theatre are also explored through analysis of recent experimental work by the artist SơnX
Pessimistic luxury: An alternative discourse to conceptualize luxury
No full textPresently, the notion of luxury can be interpreted and conceptualised by two different but parallel discourses. First, luxury is maintained by the discourse of consumerism as a facilitator of consumer hedonism; second, luxury is perceived by unconventional luxury research as the terminus of consumer emancipation and escapism. Alternatively, this paper puts forward ‘pessimistic luxury’ as a third discourse for conceptualising luxury. By critically analysing the discursive construction of luxury by alternative media, we conceptualise pessimistic luxury and outline three theoretical implications: (1) the resumption of moral critiques in luxury studies, (2) a movement towards luxurising normality, and (3) shaping solidity in liquefied luxury. This paper contributes to the ongoing exploration of luxury beyond consumerism by providing an alternative perspective that critically examines the notion of luxury through the lens of consumer precarity and vulnerabilities
Walking the (Infrastructural) Line: Mobile and Embodied Explorations of Infrastructures and Their Impact on the Urban Landscape
Get PDFDrawing on a series of Infrastructural Exploration ‘walkshops’ hosted at the Centre for Urban and Community Research (Goldsmiths), this article reflects on the possibilities offered by walking infrastructural lines to critically engage with urban infrastructure. In these walkshops, we invite participants – academic researchers, students, activists, members of the public – to join in moving through the city and to consider their embodied and emotional contact with the infrastructure we encounter. Traversing different spaces and opening our sociological imaginations to the city, we place an emphasis on collective experiences, happenstance conversations and different forms of knowing. We aim to foster a corporeal, mobile and multisensory attention to infrastructure and its impacts on the urban landscape. In this article, we propose that these embodied and affective encounters with infrastructure can attune us to questions of infrastructure’s social life, the politics of its siting, urban power dynamics, distributional (in)justice and forms of (infra)structural violence. Inspired by Shannon Mattern’s work, the article ends by offering a provocation. We ask readers, as we ask walkshop participants: then what? What are the socio-political potentials in these collective, peripatetic and visceral engagements with infrastructure