Oldest Papers

Prevailing analyses of globalisation and the Internet posit global politics as the outcome of the Internet's physical-geographical reach. This reach is assumed to compromise the traditional sources of political power associated with the sovereign state by transgressing its territorial boundaries. The shortcoming of this approach is that it fails to acknowledge the degree to which the state and its sovereignty are discursively constituted as normative principles that legitimate a particular type of political order. Thus, in order to locate the transformative potential of globalisation, attention must be directed to globalisation's discursive dimensions. To do this I focus on two metaphors of globalisation global village and global marketplace. In this paper, I outline how these metaphors constitute and legitimate global political order and the impact this has on the global character of the Internet. I specify how each metaphor shapes what the Internet is, who it is for, what kind of global potential it represents according to its understanding of what constitutes legitimate global political order. The structure of global political order cannot, therefore, be easily derived from the Internet's physical reach. We can still study the Internet as emblematic of globalisation and global politics; however, doing so necessitates exploring how the structure and character of the Internet is tied to, and changes with, the production of new systems of global legitimacy and political order.

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Taboo Your Words

Eliezer Yudkowsky

LessWrong·2008

In the game Taboo (by Hasbro), the objective is for a player to have their partner guess a word written on a card, without using that word or five additional words listed on the card. For example, you might have to get your partner to say "baseball" without using the words "sport", "bat", "hit", "pitch", "base" or of course "baseball". As soon as I see a problem like that, I at once think, "An artificial group conflict in which you use a long wooden cylinder to whack a thrown spheroid, and then run between four safe positions." It might not be the most efficient strategy to convey the word 'baseball' under the stated rules - that might be, "It's what the Yankees play" - but the general skill of blanking a word out of my mind was one I'd practiced for years, albeit with a different purpose. Yesterday we saw how replacing terms with definitions could reveal the empirical unproductivity of the classical Aristotelian syllogism. All humans are mortal (and also, apparently, featherless bipeds); Socrates is human; therefore Socrates is mortal. When we replace the word 'human' by its apparent definition, the following underlying reasoning is revealed: > All [mortal, ~feathers, biped] are mortal; > Socrates is a [mortal, ~feathers, biped]; > Therefore Socrates is mortal. But the principle of replacing words by definitions applies much more broadly: > Albert: "A tree falling in a deserted forest makes a sound." > Barry: "A tree falling in a deserted forest does not make a ...

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Academic clusters: text patterning in published and postgraduate writing

Ken Hyland

International Journal of Applied Linguistics·2008·217 citations

An important component of fluent linguistic production is control of the multi‐word expressions referred to as “clusters”, “chunks” or “bundles”. These are extended collocations which appear more frequently than expected by chance, helping to shape meanings and contributing to our sense of coherence in a text. Clusters seem to present considerable challenges to student writers struggling to make their texts both fluent and assured to readers in their new communities. This paper explores the forms, structures and functions of 4‐word clusters in a corpus of research articles, doctoral dissertations and master's theses of 3.5 million words to show not only that clusters are central to academic discourse but that they offer an important means of differentiating genres, with implications for more evidence‐based instructional practices in advanced writing contexts.

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Postcolonial Psychoanalysis

Derek Hook

Theory & Psychology·2008·17 citations

J.M. Coetzee's undervalued paper `The Mind of Apartheid' provides a novel means of identifying the preoccupations of a `postcolonial psychoanalysis'. Such an approach to critique offers a tentative psychical-political diagnostics which pertains not only to the affective and discursive dynamics of the colonial sphere as a whole, but also to the subject-/desire-positioning enforced by the pathological colonial relation. Not reducible to the level of textual reading practices, this style of critique makes reference to a series of psychoanalytic concepts (anxiety, fantasy, ambivalence, disavowal) which are never merely figurative and which remain necessarily related to the frame of individual psychical functioning. Ultimately a postcolonial psychoanalysis offers a political analytics of desire that proves useful in engaging both the contents (racial/sexual fantasy) and the dynamics (affective economies, relational subject-positioning) of the psychic life of colonial power. It allows us to identify potential subversions (slippages of colonial authority and identity, the `return effect' of colonial desire) and to bring into focus those process elements (metaphoric condensation, metonymic displacement) that spread and sustain racist ideology and thereby much of the underlying rationality of (post)colonial power.

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Delayed umbilical cord clamping at birth has effects on arterial and venous blood gases and lactate concentrations

N Wiberg, K Källén, P Olofsson

BJOG: An International Journal of Obstetrics & Gynaecology·2008·94 citations

Objective To estimate the influence of delayed umbilical cord clamping at birth on arterial and venous umbilical cord blood gases, bicarbonate (), base excess (BE) and lactate in vigorous newborns.Setting University hospital.Design Prospective observational.Sample Vaginally delivered term newborns.Material and methods Umbilical cord arterial and venous blood was sampled repeatedly every 45 seconds (T0= time zero; T45= 45 seconds, T90= 90 seconds) until the cord pulsations spontaneously ceased in 66 vigorous singletons with cephalic vaginal delivery at 36–42 weeks. Longitudinal comparisons were performed with the Wilcoxon signed‐ranks matched pairs test. Mixed effect models were used to describe the shape of the regression curves.Main outcome measures Longitudinal changes of umbilical cord blood gases and lactate.Results In arterial cord blood, there were significant decreases of pH (7.24–7.21), (18.9–18.1 mmol/l) and BE (−4.85 to −6.14 mmol/l), and significant increases of PaCO2 (7.64–8.07 kPa), PO2 (2.30–2.74 kPa) and lactate (5.3–5.9 mmol/l) from T0 to T90, with the most pronounced changes at T0–T45. Similar changes occurred in venous blood pH (7.32–7.31), (19.54–19.33 mmol/l), BE (−4.93 to −5.19 mmol/l), PaCO2 (5.69–5.81 kPa) and lactate (5.0–5.3 mmol/l), although the changes were smaller and most pronounced at T45–T90. No significant changes were observed in venous PO2.Conclusion Persistent cord pulsations and delayed cord clamping at birth result in significantly different measured values of cord blood acid–base parameters.

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On Upper-Confidence Bound Policies for Non-Stationary Bandit Problems

Aurélien Garivier, Eric Moulines

arXiv·2008

Multi-armed bandit problems are considered as a paradigm of the trade-off between exploring the environment to find profitable actions and exploiting what is already known. In the stationary case, the distributions of the rewards do not change in time, Upper-Confidence Bound (UCB) policies have been shown to be rate optimal. A challenging variant of the MABP is the non-stationary bandit problem where the gambler must decide which arm to play while facing the possibility of a changing environment. In this paper, we consider the situation where the distributions of rewards remain constant over epochs and change at unknown time instants. We analyze two algorithms: the discounted UCB and the sliding-window UCB. We establish for these two algorithms an upper-bound for the expected regret by upper-bounding the expectation of the number of times a suboptimal arm is played. For that purpose, we derive a Hoeffding type inequality for self normalized deviations with a random number of summands. We establish a lower-bound for the regret in presence of abrupt changes in the arms reward distributions. We show that the discounted UCB and the sliding-window UCB both match the lower-bound up to a logarithmic factor.

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Oldest Papers

Universals in phonology

Can I see your hair? Choice, agency and attitudes: the dilemma of faith and feminism for Muslim women who cover

From global village to global marketplace: Metaphorical descriptions of the global Internet

Taboo Your Words

The right to self-determination and the indigenous people of Western Sahara

Academic clusters: text patterning in published and postgraduate writing

Crisis and Chronicity: Anthropological Perspectives on Continuous Conflict and Decline

Postcolonial Psychoanalysis

Under the Gaze of the Empire: Who Is My Neighbor?

A diary study of mobile information needs

Delayed umbilical cord clamping at birth has effects on arterial and venous blood gases and lactate concentrations

On Upper-Confidence Bound Policies for Non-Stationary Bandit Problems