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Domesticating the ancient house: the archaeology of a false analogy
No full textBook synopsis: One of the greatest benefits of studying the ancient Greek and Roman past is the ability to utilise different forms of evidence, in particular both written and archaeological sources. The contributors to this volume employ this evidence to examine ancient housing, and what might be learned of identities, families, and societies, but they also use it as a methodological locus from which to interrogate the complex relationship between different types of sources. Chapters range from the recreation of the house as it was conceived in Homeric poetry, to the decipherment of a painted Greek lekythos to build up a picture of household activities, to the conjuring of the sensorial experience of a house in Pompeii. Together, they present a rich tapestry which demonstrates what can be gained for our understanding of ancient housing from examining the interplay between the words of ancient texts and the walls of archaeological evidence
Talking pictures: sociability in the Eighteenth-Century British conversation piece
No full textBook synopsis: This volume is the eighth in the Transversales series published by a group of researchers of different nationalities on the topic of sociability in France and Britain during the Enlightenment. The research focuses on the extent to which a new model of sociability emerged in these nations during this period, and the similarities and differences between the ways this model developed on each side of the Channel. The present volume looks at the circulation of these national models along the lines of familial, friendship, trading, scholarly or diplomatic networks which all foster forms of sociability based on convivial exchanges and the sharing and transmission of knowledge. In a geographical area that now extends across Europe and towards its colonies, this book sheds light on modes of transfer, exchange, reappropriation and hybridisation through a series of case studies that highlight not only the transnational nature of these networks, but also individual trajectories
Predicting seriousness of injury in a traffic accident: a new imbalanced dataset and benchmark
Get PDFThe paper introduces a new dataset to assess the performance of machine learning algorithms in the prediction of the seriousness of injury in a traffic accident. The dataset is created by aggregating publicly available datasets from the UK Department for Transport, which are drastically imbalanced with missing attributes sometimes approaching 50% of the overall data dimensionality. The paper presents the data analysis pipeline starting from the publicly available data of road traffic accidents and ending with predictors of possible injuries and their degree of severity. It addresses the huge incompleteness of public data with a MissForest model. The paper also introduces two baseline approaches to create injury predictors: a supervised artificial neural network and a reinforcement learning model. The dataset can potentially stimulate diverse aspects of machine learning research on imbalanced datasets and the two approaches can be used as baseline references when researchers test more advanced learning algorithms in this area
Danish diaries of Palmyra
Get PDFReview article: Harald Ingholt, edited and commented on by Rubina Raja, Julia Steding & Jean-Baptiste Yon. 2021. 'Excavating Palmyra. Harald Ingholt’s excavation diaries: a transcript, translation and commentary' (two volumes). Turnhout: Brepols; 978-2-503-59531-
Why bother with mental representations?
No full textReview of: Joulia Smortchkova, Krzysztof Dołęga, and Tobias Schlicht (eds.): 'What are mental representations?' Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020, 344 pp, $99.00 H
Social reward anticipation in infants as revealed by event-related potentials
Get PDFInfants engage in gaze interaction from the early stage of life. Emerging studies suggest that infants may expect social reward of shared attention before looking to the same object with another person. However, it was unknown about the neural responses during the anticipation of social rewards before shared attention in infants. We tested infants’ reward anticipations in the gaze cueing situation measured by event-related potentials in the social association learning task. Six- to ten-month-old infants (N=20) repeatedly observed that a female predictively looked toward the animation position (valid condition) or another female looking away from the animation (invalid condition). It was posited that infants could learn associations between female faces and the event of shared attention. The results showed that the stimulus preceding negativity which reflects reward anticipation before the animation presentation was elicited in the second half of the learning phases in the valid condition. Additionally, after the presentation of the face, N290 was greater in the second half of the learning phase than in the first half in the valid condition. These results suggest that infants can anticipate social reward from gaze cues, and learning the gaze cueing validity may affect not only reward anticipation but face perception
World-weaving in Nineteenth-Century East Asia: the case of Hong Kong's earliest Chinese newspaper, gems from near and afar
Get PDFBook synopsis: This chapter attempts to examine the processes involved in implicating a colony into a colonial world system by studying the case of Hong Kong and its first Chinese newspaper, a monthly periodical called Gems from Near and Afar, published between 1853 and 1856. Drawing on the concept of ‘world-weaving’, a variation of Pheng Cheah’s concept of ‘world-making’, and analysing the periodical in both its form and its content, the chapter argues that Gems from Near and Afar fulfilled a function of ‘world-weaving’: it weaved Hong Kong, a newly founded British colony at the time, into a world of circulation of capitals, serving not only the people of Hong Kong, but more broadly those in China and East Asia. Two senses of world-weaving are discussed: first, to weave its Chinese readers into the world by providing knowledge about the world as cultural capital necessary for imagining a life beyond the Chinese context they lived in; and second, to weave Hong Kong into the world by showing that the ‘world-weaving imagination’ in the first sense was enabled by an understanding of the colony as a curiously different place from the rest of China
Is Covid-19 a pandemic of inequality and urbanization?
Get PDFAim of the study: The aim is to determine whether inequality
and urbanization are factors influencing the development of this
pandemic.
Design/methodology: The methodology of the study is to
analyse infection data of eight individual countries that are
available from the World Health Organization and determine if
per capita GDP, population, population density, air travel and
population size of the capital cities are factors affecting the
spread of the pandemic.
Findings: The study results show that socioeconomics and air
travel are factors which enhance the spread of infection.
Originality/value: The study is an important contribution to
understanding the development of the pandemic and factors
enhancing the spread of infection and can assist governments to
plan control measures for future pandemics
Inferring the densest multi-profiled cross-community for a user
Get PDFThe most realistic and widely formed social structures are granular multi-profiled cross-communities constructed from users sharing the traits of common adaptive multi-social profiles. The more important types of such cross-communities that deserve attention are the densest holonic ones with various adaptive multi-social profiles, because they exhibit many interesting properties. The likelihood of an exact match between an active user and his/her cross-community’s interests increases as the cross-community becomes denser. Moreover, the denser such a cross-community is, the more distinct is its interests and the more distinguishable these interests from the ones of other cross communities. Unfortunately, methodologies that emphasize the detection of such granular multi-profiled cross-communities have been understudied. To overcome this, this study proposes a novel methodology that analyzes hierarchically overlapped social profiles to detect the smallest and the most granular multi-profiled cross-communities. The methodology is implemented in a working system named OMACexplorer. The system can detect the densest multi-profiled cross-communities from heterogeneous information and social networks. It can also infer an active user’s densest multi-profiled cross-community that matches his/her own social traits. We evaluated OMACexplorer by comparing it experimentally with eight well-referenced methods. Based on the experiment results, the improvement of OMACexplorer over the other eight methods are 47% and 51% in terms of ARI and
F1-score, respectively, which demonstrate the high efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed method
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