1,720,955 research outputs found
“Born dying:” Cultural Futures, Social Space, and the Reproductive Economy in Southern African AIDS Narratives
No full textThis essay reads several of the pieces in a Southern African AIDS narrative anthology,
and attempts to uncover a space of possibility for representing HIV, which, as Brown
reminds us, is a prerequisite to fighting it, or at the very least living with it.
I hope to suggest that questions of representing, fighting, and living with HIV are
also always questions of culture, and that therefore developing a cultural imaginary
of and response to HIV is essential to the longer-term human objective of “becoming
with” HIV as a species. This cultural imaginary includes not only semiotic representability,
but also the capacity to understand futures, and to transform spatial locales into
inhabitable place
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
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Modeling Revolution: A Global History of Games as Model Systems
No full textThis dissertation tells a history of how games have been employed as model systems. By focusing on the influence of games upon the theory and design of symbolic computation from the seventeenth century till the end of the twentieth, it argues that games are the paradigmatic technologies for a still-ongoing revolution in modeling practice. From probability theory to general-purpose computers and from game theory to artificial intelligence and machine learning, the domains and technologies emerging from this modeling revolution define every aspect of industrial and post-industrial life.My first chapter argues that games were central to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s philosophy as modeling tools by which situations arising in the world could be formalized and subsequently rationalized. By contextualizing Leibniz's project within the earlier Llullian art, the theory of probability derived from games of chance, and other discourses of games in medieval and early modern Europe, I describe how his approach to games was unique in European history and synthesized many different discourses into a general science of games.
In chapter two, I describe how Charles Babbage’s earliest work on a machine for general computation was inspired by his mathematical study of games. This research on games, which Babbage explicitly credits to Leibniz’s own study of the “geometry of situation” through games, was also a topic of interest in the early correspondence of Babbage and Ada Lovelace. Games provided crucial tools for notational description of mechanisms, the depiction of computational processes using abstract spatial grids, and temporal sequences of operations that would allow for the development of techniques like the “anticipating carry” mechanism.
In my third chapter, I take a broader view of twentieth- and twenty-first century systems thinking—comprising formal mathematics, cybernetics, computer science, AI/ML, cognitive science, operations research, economics, and other related domains—to argue that the game of chess modeled for these domains the twentieth-century concept of a formal-symbolic system. I index the ubiquitous discussion and study of chess in systems thinking in the first half of the twentieth century to changes in the concepts, strategies, and institutions of chess in the decades immediately prior. Subsequent changes in chess, including the creative ‘hypermodernist’ movement and its crosspollination with competitive Go, continued to have impacts on how games were understood, discussed, and studied in the sciences.
In chapter four, I focus more specifically on chess in the first half of the twentieth century, arguing that it transformed in the early USSR into a tool for modeling dialectical materialism. Chess was understood by Soviet scientists, politicians, and competitors as a tool for cultural uplift and social rationalization, as well as a neutral site for the empirical demonstration of the superiority of socialism over capitalism, because it allowed both ideologies to be represented simultaneously across the board. Finally, I describe a 1926 state-sponsored psychotechnical study on the game of chess as a (now forgotten) exemplar of a Marxist theory of games as modeling technologies that provides a far more nuanced description of games as evolutionary tools than that of Johan Huizinga a decade later.
Chapter five returns to the topic of symbolic computation as a global domain of technoscientific research to argue that differing conceptions of chess were central to the twentieth-century development of symbolic computation, cybernetics, organizational research, and artificial intelligence. By recontextualizing the pivotal ITEP-Stanford match between Soviet and American AI researchers in light of Soviet theories of chess and intelligence, I argue that, far from being a ‘fall from grace’ for AI, the ideological neutrality of chess allowed computer chess research to influence systems thinking far more broadly than AI alone could have done. I conclude by describing the chess theory of Soviet control systems engineer, computer chess researcher, and world chess champion Mikhail Botvinnik. I suggest that Botvinnik’s project of formalizing “the algorithm” of historical chess masters into computer language in order to optimize economic planning and other massive social projects represents a revolutionary theory of modeling practice that can help us to reimagine the possibilities of games and computer technology alike in our moment. The mid-century synthesis of communist and capitalist game research produced all the necessary tools for us to construct entirely new futures, and these tools are everywhere around us. It is time to understand them as such
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
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