26729 research outputs found
Sort by
Archaeological films as primary sources for Palestinian history
No full textArchaeological archival films from the British Mandate in Palestine (1922-1948), offer an insight into Palestinian lives in the decades prior to the 1948 Nakba, in which more than 750,000 were displaced and became refugees. Moving away from solely referring to these archival films in the context of ‘biblical’ archaeology, this blog post examines their potential to testify to the Palestinian history in the region
Quantum enhanced knowledge distillation
No full textKnowledge distillation (KD) is a process of training a “student” machine learning system using the outputs of a pre-trained “teacher” model and it is a well-established practice in the optimization of classical Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) [1]. Usually, it is enacted via the substitution of the output softmax layer of the trained DNN teacher network with an equivalent layer of Boltzmann-temperature parameterized sigmoid functions, leveraging gradient information implicit in the softened logits for the training of the smaller student network. The smaller network is thus trained to replicate the output sigmoid layer of the larger network during training [2].
However, KD remains relatively unexplored within the quantum machine learning domain, with only a few pioneering studies [3], [4]. Some challenges in the quantum domain include the incongru-ence of the respective learning architectures and the transferability of gradient information in inter-domain approaches (e.g., classical-to-quantum distillation) or intra-domain transfer (e.g., quantum-to-quantum distillation). Additionally, the scarcity of quantum-to-quantum distillation research could be due to the current absence of sufficiently large and efficient quantum network architectures neces-sitating a distillation step a priori.
In this work, we focus on the classical-to-quantum paradigm and investigate the extent to which a hybrid quantum-classical architecture can effectively learn from the softmax outputs of a classical Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) in multi-class classification tasks. The multi-class scenario is chosen both for its representativeness of typical DNN usage and its inherently greater potential for meaningful gradient information transfer. In doing so, we demonstrate substantial empirical efficiency gains for classical-to-quantum KD in relation to an emblematic non-linearly separable 3-class problem. Our findings reveal that classical-to-quantum KD enhances the performances of standard hybrid quantum architectures and paves the way for the applicability of distillation techniques in the quantum realm
Theorising pandemic necropolitics as evil: thinking inequalities, suffering, and vulnerabilities with Arendt
Get PDFA conceptualisation of the COVID-19 pandemic through the analytic lens of a ‘necropolitics as evil’ brings to the fore Hannah Arendt’s theorisation that evil is both an expression of, and a threat to, humanity and its plurality as an intersectional assemblage, and by extension as freedom in political action. Arendt accepts that while evil—as an expression of our humanity—can never be eradicated, it must—as a threat to our common humanity—be confronted. From this perspective, the functioning of race, gender, and wider structural inequalities as operational hinges of COVID-19 capitalism required spaces for resistance and change within the political economy of global inequalities during the recent pandemic. This (concept) paper explores such a conceptualisation through stories of the pandemic and with a particular focus on Indigenous people, marginalised groups such as migrants and asylum seekers, as well as the homeless. It is through the viral logics of cytopathic COVID-19 capitalisms that we confront and resist theoretical pathologies by re-theorising evil as conceptual currency to confront this conjuncture, critique limitations, and meaningfully translate the current societal landscape through this lens. This allows for engaging in a particular kind of reading of Arendt that is contextualised in terms of the stakes of the paper: the importance of thinking about convivialising solidarities in the ongoing pandemic that has been perpetuated by ‘evil political formations/evil governance’ under capitalism, and as such, the structural pathologies that exacerbate COVID-19’s deathly effects
Creative economies of culture in South Asia: craftspeople and performers
No full textThis book explores crafts and performing arts of South Asia through a focus on labour and livelihood. It brings to light little-researched angles of social and political economies of culture and ways in which they have shifted and changed in different historical eras and different political, economic and social formations up to the present.
In particular, through this focus on labour and livelihood, the contributors analyse the extensive parallels and similarities of arts and crafts on the one hand and music and performing arts on the other, ranging from questions of lineage, transmission, class/caste/community, professional versus amateur performers and artisans, to the impact of globalisation, neoliberal reforms and mediatisation. Given the role of gender inequalities and differences within caste/community-based cultural production in South Asia across visual, material and performing arts and crafts, this interdisciplinary perspective will be particularly salient, and link together broader sociological and historical trends in South Asian cultural or creative economies. The book explores labour and livelihood through a gamut of crafts and performing arts ranging from courtly and classical to commissioned to mass-produced, and in epochs ranging from colonial or feudal to globalised and neoliberal. In the process, it revisits, refines or revises notions of social and cultural capital, of socio-economic mobility, of the value, role and agency of crafts and performing arts, and the status of their artisans and performers. Original chapters written by contributors with an interdisciplinary background look at the survival and adaption of traditional artisanal communities, traditional forms of practice, historical shifts such as colonialism, industrialisation and nationalism as well as modern industries and institutions including technologies of mass production and creative entrepreneurship.
The book contextualises current debates within art, craft, music and dance in South Asia. It develops new theoretical understandings of creative culture through a focus on labour, and contributes to a range of social sciences, arts, and humanities disciplines, including South Asian studies, Ethnomusicology, Crafts and Design, Economic Anthropology, (Historical) Sociology and (Historical) Economics, Cultural History, Human Geography, and Creative Industries and Economies
Exposure and connectedness to natural environments: An examination of the measurement invariance of the Nature Exposure Scale (NES) and Connectedness to Nature Scale (CNS) across 65 nations, 40 languages, gender identities, and age groups
Get PDFDetachment from nature is contributing to the environmental crisis and reversing this trend requires detailed monitoring and targeted interventions to reconnect people to nature. Most tools measuring nature exposure and attachment were developed in high-income countries and little is known about their robustness across national and linguistic groups. Therefore, we used data from the Body Image in Nature Survey to assess measurement invariance of the Nature Exposure Scale (NES) and the Connectedness to Nature Scale (CNS) across 65 nations, 40 languages, gender identities, and age groups (N = 56,968). While multi-group confirmatory factor analysis (MG-CFA) of the NES supported full scalar invariance across gender identities and age groups, only partial scalar invariance was supported across national and linguistic groups. MG-CFA of the CNS also supported full scalar invariance across gender identities and age groups, but only partial scalar invariance of a 7-item version of the CNS across national and linguistic groups. Nation-level associations between NES and CNS scores were negligible, likely reflecting a lack of conceptual clarity over what the NES is measuring. Individual-level associations between both measures and sociodemographic variables were weak. Findings suggest that the CNS-7 may be a useful tool to measure nature connectedness globally, but measures other than the NES may be needed to capture nature exposure cross-culturally
Managing business transformation at different stages of the recession
Get PDFBackground: The recession caused by the Global Financial Crisis (December 2007 - June 2009) led to austerity until 2017. During this period, organisations made significant internal changes to stay profitable, resulting in job cuts and limited reemployment. Data for this study was collected in 2015 from a major multinational shipping and logistics firm during a change project that led to redundancies, relocations, higher performance standards, and demotions, profoundly altering the company's strategies, operations, and work environments. This case study examined the impact of organisational change during economic downturns, especially during austerity, on affected individuals, focusing on how such changes might foster workplace bullying. The study compared experiences before, during, and after the 2008 crisis, considering workplace bullying as a personal construct based on employee’s perceptions. It analysed the impact of austerity-driven change projects on workplace bullying and the correlation between such changes, stress levels, and instances of bullying.
The Research Aims and Objectives to address this were as follows:
1. To explore the role of stress during a change project in an uncertain economic climate on well-being and interpersonal relationships, and to uncover the interpersonal relationship patterns that gave rise to workplace bullying.
2. To examine employee views of what constitutes workplace bullying, if they had experienced or witnessed it, whether they felt it had occurred due to/or had increased because of the change project, and whether the uncertain economic climate due to austerity affected this. To discover the occurrence and nature of workplace bullying according to HR, line managers, and employees.
3. To explore, among those who had experienced or witnessed bullying, how it was dealt with and if they felt it was managed effectively by line managers or HR. To explore the existence, knowledge, and perceived efficacy of policy documentation or written guidance regarding workplace bullying according to HR, line managers and employees, and assess their views on whether these are sufficient to address the unique challenges of change programmes and workplace bullying.
The overall objective was to examine the role of change projects during austerity on employee experiences of workplace bullying and to explore the relationship between change projects, stress, and workplace bullying.
To do this, the Research Questions were as follows:
1. How does organisational change during an uncertain economic climate lead to workplace bullying?
2. How are stress and interpersonal relationships impacted in this process?
Research Design and Methodology: This research used an organisational case study design approach with constructivism and interpretative epistemology. The qualitative research methods included policy document analysis; semi-structured interviews with 20 employees directly and indirectly impacted by the project and thematic analysis to analyse the data.
Findings and Conclusions -Three main themes were identified,
In Theme 1, conducting a change project during the economic downturn negatively impacted employee's job security, decreased employee well-being, and increased anxiety and stress levels. What followed was the deterioration of workplace relationships that led to workplace bullying.
In Theme 2, workplace bullying was carried out by those in positions of power within the organisation, including managers and peers from the old teams. This bullying targeted the new teams, who had been assigned the tasks, and in some cases, the roles of the older teams were affected by the project changes.
In Theme 3, the management of bullying incidents was considered ineffective. The existing policies and procedures were not fully utilised, and the responses from management and HR in handling bullying cases were viewed as inadequate.
Outcomes of the Research: The product and outcome of this research are stakeholder recommendations on a way forward for managing bullying when conducting a change project in periods of economic turbulence. These consider the changing landscape of the nature of the work environment in the context of major external socioeconomic influences
Friendship and authority in the pastoral office: a Christological approach
Get PDFThis thesis seeks to navigate the role and relationship of friendship and authority in the pastoral office. In the contemporary Western world, friendship and authority are fluid terms increasingly being perceived as tensive realities, the former indicating a casual, mutual relationship between equals, and the latter calling to mind a top-down relationship of inequality. Such perceived tensions can be observed in the pastoral theological literature and popular opinion in ecclesial spheres, whereby authority is considered a barrier to friendship. In light of this data, this thesis seeks to formulate a distinctly Christian understanding of pastoral friendship and authority through the lens of participatio Christi, since pastoral ministry is a participation and sharing in Christ’s own ongoing ministry through the Spirit.
Through the study of a key New Testament text, we discern Jesus’ friendship as being characterised in cruciformity, intimacy, mutuality, mission, community, and his superior lordship-authority. Jesus does not consider his lordship a barrier to meaningful friendship with his disciples, but a necessary characteristic of it. Rather than depicting authority and friendship as being tensive realities, then, Jesus simultaneously emphasises both. We develop this into a more formulated friendship-lordship Christology, observing that in the person and ministry of Jesus friendship and authority are reshaped in relationship to one another, and especially through the cross.
From here, we formulate a clearer understanding of the nature and expression of authority and friendship in pastoral ministry. Rather than being tensive concepts, this thesis proposes a more integrated and Christocentric view of pastoral authority and friendship, rooted in the pastor’s identity as one within the community of friends of Jesus. Engaging relevant and pragmatic issues, such as those of favouritism and the need for appropriate boundaries, it is illustrated that a reconciling of friendship and authority within the pastoral office is both possible and necessary
Skill intensity in manufacturing exports: the key for growth in Kuwait
No full textThis study examines the causality between basic, technology-intensive, and differentiated manufacturing exports and economic growth in Kuwait using data from 1970 to 2021 and two augmented production function models: one with natural resource exports (Model 1) and the other without on both sides of the model (Model 2). The Johansen cointegration and the autoregressive distributed lag model (ARDL) bound tests are conducted to examine the long-run relationship between the vari- ables. In addition, the Granger causality test in a vector autoregressive framework (VAR) and the Toda–Yamamoto test are employed to explore the directions of the short- and long-run causality between variables, respectively. The empirical results of Model 1 indicate that neither of the decomposed manufacturing exports directly causes economic growth in the short or long run at any conventional significance level, whereas natural resource exports cause economic growth, basic and technology-intensive manufactured exports in the short-run at the 5% level. Model 2 estimations confirm the absence of direct causality between decomposed manufacturing exports and economic growth, whereas a long-run causality runs from output net of natural resource exports to basic manufactured exports at the 10% level. Both model estimations indicate that all the variables jointly cause economic growth and basic manufactured exports in the short and long run, directly or indirectly through imports, confirming the existence of a circular causation. These findings can serve as the basis for designing specific export–import policies to foster diversification and a sustainable economic growth in line with Kuwait’s Vision 2035
Associative memory with biologically-inspired cell assemblies
Get PDFAssociative memory is a central cognitive task. However, the actual biological architecture that supports this memory is not currently known, so simulating with biologically plausible neurons and topologies is an ideal mechanism to improve understanding of associative memory. Simulations of spiking networks that per-form associative memory tasks lay the groundwork for utilizing biological neurons in cognitive tasks. Specifically, this paper explores simulations of spiking networks that perform associative memory tasks using Hebbian cell assemblies of neurons to represent nodes and synapses to represent associations. The first tasks use binary cell assemblies to perform two well-known cognitive tasks. Then the paper examines different topologies of excitatory neurons for basic assemblies and their performance as short-term memory. Lastly, larger assemblies are associated in 2/3 sets, where two active elements can retrieve the third. Future research is proposed to explore the potential use of these assemblies and associations in cognitive tasks. By investigating biologically and cognitively plausible topologies, learning, and neurons, simulations will lead to an improved under-standing of neuro-cognition, and potentially to systems that surpass the brittleness and domain specificity of current AI systems
Relational HR practices in Malaysian SMEs: an Ethics of Care perspective
Get PDFAdopting an Ethics of Care theoretical framework, this paper aims to investigate the way in which the owner-mangers (OMs) of small and medium-sized enterprises in Malaysia engage in human resource management. Based on in-depth interviews with 48 OMs, the findings show that HRM practices occur within the remit of management but are described by the managers in terms of relational obligations and cannot be fully accounted for using a strategic, instrumental, or critical lens. The present study highlights the importance of the caring attitudes of OMs who adopt a humanistic management approach, responding to the varied needs of their employees and the obligations which are inherent to relationships between humans