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Lady Caroline Lamb and Miss Elizabeth Spence: limits of femininity in early nineteenth-century salon and album culture
Get PDFIn November 1825 middle-class salon hostess and travel writer Elizabeth Spence contributed a short poem titled ‘M.S. Lines on Lady Caroline Lamb’ to Anna Birkbeck’s album. Spence’s choice of subject, Lady Caroline Lamb, was, in many ways, unusual. Coming from a very different world to Spence, the aristocratic Lamb was a household name, most well known for her much publicized personal life, which included a disastrous love affair with Lord George Gordon Byron. Through a close reading of Spence’s poem, this article interrogates the ‘friendship’ between these two women of differing classes and backgrounds and considers the complex gender and social dynamics at play informing Spence’s ambiguous poem. The album, like the salon, existed within the space between the masculine/public and the feminine/private worlds. It is in this space that it is possible to explore the limits of femininity in the early nineteenth century, as its semi-public position enables a view of the fringes of what society deemed acceptable, and what provoked dissent for overstepping. As one famed for her overstepping, Lamb demonstrated the risks and the penalty for pushing these boundaries, but Spence’s poem offers a more complex, and even contradictory, picture of Lamb and by extension the limitations which condemned her
Chain-of-thought in neural code generation: from and for Lightweight Language Models
No full textLarge Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable potential in code generation. The integration of Chain of Thought (CoT) reasoning can further boost their performance. However, current CoT methods often require manual writing or LLMs with over 100 billion parameters to generate, impeding their applicability in resource-constrained scenarios. In this study, we investigate lightweight Language Models (ℓLMs), which are defined to have fewer than 10 billion parameters. Empirically, we find that most ℓLMs cannot generate high-quality CoTs when prompted by the few-shot method, but can take advantage of high-quality CoTs generated elsewhere to improve their performance in code generation. Based on these findings, we design a novel approach COTTON which can leverage ℓLMs to automatically generate CoTs for code generation. We synthesize new datasets and conduct extensive experiments on various benchmarks. The results show that the CoTs generated by COTTON outperform the baselines in terms of automated and human evaluation metrics. In particular, the CoTs generated by COTTON boost various ℓLMs to achieve higher performance gains than those generated by LLMs such as ChatGLM (130B), and are competitive with those generated by Gemini and gpt-3.5-turbo. The results also reveal that COTTON not only improves the performance of ℓLMs, but also enhances the performance of LLMs. Our study showcases the potential of ℓLMs in software engineering applications
The war on drugs as a war on the nonhuman
No full textInternational law’s claim to universality rests on its self-appointed position as one of the markers of relations between humans. As a result, it seeks to cohere itself upon a defined category of what qualifies as the human. However, the writings of scholars such as Anthony Anghie, Ntina Tzouvala, or Peter Fitzpatrick point to an alternative source for coherence for the law, arguing that the law, unable to provide a fixed image of the human, binds itself together through an opposition to an imagined negation of the human. Far from being a neutral instrument of statecraft, the law is heavily indebted to Eurocentred notions of humanity, which read ‘certain physical characteristics, usually skin colour’ or inconsistent "nature" as not merely physiognomic differences but framework standardising indications of varying intellectual, moral and even spiritual-material (in)capacity between populations ( Fitzpatrick 1992 : 65). The imposition of such framework upon the world, with international law being one of the tools in this imposition, determined new hierarchies of categorization, governing the lives of both humanity and nature. While this was true of the colonial past, it is also true so the so-called post-colonial present. From "just war" doctrine to the framing and practice of the war on drugs this framing merges spectacular ways of seeing, appearing, and speculation with law-making violence aimed against existents seen as non-human
Knowledge through social networks: accuracy, error, and polarisation
Get PDFThis paper examines the fundamental problem of testimony. Much of what we believe to know we know in good part, or even entirely, through the testimony of others. The problem with testimony is that we often have very little on which to base estimates of the accuracy of our sources. Simulations with otherwise optimal agents examine the impact of this for the accuracy of our beliefs about the world. It is demonstrated both where social networks of information dissemination help and where they hinder. Most importantly, it is shown that both social networks and a common strategy for gauging the accuracy of our sources give rise to polarisation even for entirely accuracy motivated agents. Crucially these two factors interact, amplifying one another’s negative consequences, and this side effect of communication in a social network increases with network size. This suggests a new causal mechanism by which social media may have fostered the increase in polarisation currently observed in many parts of the world
Social learning in models and minds
Get PDFAfter more than a century in which social learning was blackboxed by evolutionary biologists, psychologists and economists, there is now a thriving industry in cognitive neuroscience producing computational models of learning from and about other agents. This is a hugely positive development. The tools of computational cognitive neuroscience are rigorous and precise. They have the potential to prise open the black box. However, we argue that, from the perspective of a scientific realist, these tools are not yet being applied in an optimal way. To fulfil their potential, the shiny new methods of cognitive neuroscience need to be better coordinated with old-fashioned, contrastive experimental designs. Inferences from model complexity to cognitive complexity, of the kind made by those who favour lean interpretations of behaviour (‘associationists’), require social learning to be tested in challenging task environments. Inferences from cognitive complexity to social specificity, made by those who favour rich interpretations (‘mentalists’), call for non-social control experiments. A parsimonious model that fits current data is a good start, but carefully designed experiments are needed to distinguish models that tell us how social learning could be done from those that tell us how it is really done
'Weird' and 'Caitlin Kiernan, Agents of Dreamland (2017)'
No full textBook synopsis: In the new millennium, science fiction has moved from the margins to the mainstream. At the same time, it has undergone massive transformations. No longer can it be derided as indigestible technobabble or escapist trash or a white man's playground—not that it ever really was. Sf is rich and diverse, serious, and fun. A vital bridge between technoscience and culture, it is an early warning system, a method for imagining differently, and a way of experiencing our increasingly science-fictional world. It is the vernacular of the 21st century.
This Is Not A Science Fiction Textbook brings together leading sf scholars, including some of the most exciting new critical voices, to introduce the genre for the general reader. Its first part outlines some key ideas used to think about sf, such as Estrangement, Extrapolation, and Alterity. Its second part maps some of the genre's global history, from the Enlightenment and European colonialism to Indigenous and African Futurisms. Its third part surveys sf at the turn of the 2020s, organised by concepts, movements and new academic disciplines, from Afrofuturism and Animal Studies to Queer Theory and the Weird—and each chapter, whether it is on Climate Fiction or Neurodiversity, is accompanied by an introduction to a major contemporary novel and film
A network analysis of the Internet Gaming Disorder Scale–Short-Form (IGDS9-SF): an intercontinental large-scale study
Get PDFThe present study aimed to use a novel method (i.e., network analysis) to examine if the Internet Gaming Disorder Scale–Short-Form (IGDS9-SF) has its unidimensional structure supported across different subgroups, including gender groups, continent groups, and age groups. Participants from five continents (n = 545 in Africa; n = 27,910 in Americas; n = 4640 in Asia; n = 88,835 in Europe; and n = 1633 in Oceania) completed the IGDS9-SF. The IGDS9-SF items showed a positively correlated network with moderate-to-high predictability (mean of R2 = 0.338, SD = 0.068). Moreover, the network analysis results suggested that the IGDS9-SF is very likely to have a one-factor model. This one-factor model was further found to be invariant across gender groups (men vs. women), continent groups (Africa, Americas, Asian, Europe, and Oceania), and age groups (minor aged under 18 years, young adults aged between 18 and 30 years, and adults aged 30 years or above)
Remittances and political participation in the Middle East and North Africa
Get PDFHow does the receipt of remittances affect the likelihood of engaging in civic and political activities in the Middle East and North Africa? Research in Latin America and Africa has found two contradictory effects. Remittances can increase recipients' capacity for political participation by providing them with greater economic resources. But remittances may also reduce the incentive for political participation by lessening the importance of the domestic economy to the livelihood of recipients. Using survey data from Arab Barometer, I show that remittances are associated with a greater likelihood of engaging in non-electoral political activities, including protests, strikes and contacting elected officials, and (to a smaller extent) with electoral participation. To explore the relationship between remittances and political participation in greater depth, I report the results of interviews with 54 remittance-receiving families in Jordan and Tunisia. This qualitative evidence suggests that the greater relative economic security offered by remittances allows recipients to devote more resources, particularly time, to civic and political participation. The interviews also revealed a strong conditioning effect of gender: women are more likely to use remittances to donate time and money to non-political civil society organisations, while men are more likely to use remittances to conduct explicitly political activities
Video meetings: access and disrupture
No full textBook synopsis: Inaccessible Access ethnographically addresses barriers to inclusion within knowledge-making. It focuses on the social, environmental, communicative, and epistemological barriers that people with disabilities confront and embody throughout the course of their learning and living and in the specific context of their higher education institutions and in research. It is presented by a neurodiverse, disabled, and non-cis cohort of authors, all of whom acknowledge a continuum of (in)access that is available to each contributor contingent on their inherent intersectionalities and alterities. The authors and editors of this book foreground the work that has yet to be done on recognizing the value of nonnormative ways of approaching, being in, and knowing research and higher education, particularly in cases where disablity-centered epistemologies are sidelined in confrontation with institutional norms, even within existing discourses concerning equality and alterity
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