The 'Unhomely' White Women of Antillean Writing

While the field known as ‘Whiteness Studies’ has been thriving in Anglophone criticism and theory for over 25 years, it is almost unknown in France. This is partly due to epistemological and political differences, but also to demographic factors — in contrast with the post-plantation culture of the US, for example, whites in Martinique and Guadeloupe are a tiny minority of small island populations. Yet ‘whiteness’ remains a phantasized and a fetishized state in the Antillean imaginary, and is strongly inflected by gender. This article sketches the emergence of ‘white’ femininity during slavery, then examines its representation in the work of a number of major Antillean writers (Condé, Placoly, Confiant, Chamoiseau). In their work, a cluster of recurring images and leitmotifs convey the idealization or, more commonly, the pathologization, of the white woman; these images resonate strongly with Bhabha’s ‘unhomely’, and convey the disturbing imbrication of sex and race in Antillean history.

ArchiBabel: Tracing the Writing Architecture Project in Architectural Education

Though much recent scholarship has investigated the potential of writing in creative practice (including visual arts, drama, even choreography), there are few models in the literature which discuss writing in the context of architectural education. The paper presented here aims to address this dearth of pedagogical research, analysing the cross-disciplinary Writing Architecture Project based in the undergraduate course of the School of Architecture at QUB. Over the course of four years, teaching staff, in partnership with the university's Learning Development Service, technicians and specialist librarians, have addressed an unfortunately persistent struggle for both architecture students and professionals alike to research and construct argument in written form. The paper examines the current problem as identified in the literature before analysing the efficacy of the variety of teaching methods used in the Writing Architecture Project, with conclusions about the project’s success and continuing challenges.

AdaBoost Multiple Feature Selection and Combination for Face Recognition

Gabor features have been recognized as one of the most successful face representations. Encouraged by the results given by this approach, other kind of facial representations based on Steerable Gaussian first order kernels and Harris corner detector are proposed in this paper. In order to reduce the high dimensional feature space, PCA and LDA techniques are employed. Once the features have been extracted, AdaBoost learning algorithm is used to select and combine the most representative features. The experimental results on XM2VTS database show an encouraging recognition rate, showing an important improvement with respect to face descriptors only based on Gabor filters.

Max separation clustering for feature extraction from Optical Emission Spectroscopy Data

This paper proposes max separation clustering (MSC), a new non-hierarchical clustering method used for feature extraction from optical emission spectroscopy (OES) data for plasma etch process control applications. OES data is high dimensional and inherently highly redundant with the result that it is difficult if not impossible to recognize useful features and key variables by direct visualization. MSC is developed for clustering variables with distinctive patterns and providing effective pattern representation by a small number of representative variables. The relationship between signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and clustering performance is highlighted, leading to a requirement that low SNR signals be removed before applying MSC. Experimental results on industrial OES data show that MSC with low SNR signal removal produces effective summarization of the dominant patterns in the data.

SVM Training Phase Reduction Using Dataset Feature Filtering for Malware Detection

N-gram analysis is an approach that investigates the structure of a program using bytes, characters, or text strings. A key issue with N-gram analysis is feature selection amidst the explosion of features that occurs when N is increased. The experiments within this paper represent programs as operational code (opcode) density histograms gained through dynamic analysis. A support vector machine is used to create a reference model, which is used to evaluate two methods of feature reduction, which are 'area of intersect' and 'subspace analysis using eigenvectors.' The findings show that the relationships between features are complex and simple statistics filtering approaches do not provide a viable approach. However, eigenvector subspace analysis produces a suitable filter.

Developing Approaches for Solving a Telecommunications Feature Subscription Problem

Call control features (e.g., call-divert, voice-mail) are primitive options to which users can subscribe off-line to personalise their service. The configuration of a feature subscription involves choosing and sequencing features from a catalogue and is subject to constraints that prevent undesirable feature interactions at run-time. When the subscription requested by a user is inconsistent, one problem is to find an optimal relaxation, which is a generalisation of the feedback vertex set problem on directed graphs, and thus it is an NP-hard task. We present several constraint programming formulations of the problem. We also present formulations using partial weighted maximum Boolean satisfiability and mixed integer linear programming. We study all these formulations by experimentally comparing them on a variety of randomly generated instances of the feature subscription problem.

Understanding Human Dignity

“Understanding Human Dignity” aims to help the reader make sense of current debates about the meaning and implications of the idea of “human dignity.” The concept of human dignity has probably never been so omni-present in everyday speech, or so deeply embedded in political and legal discourse. In debates on torture, abortion, same-sex marriage, and welfare reform, appeals to dignity are seldom hard to find. The concept of dignity is not only a prominent feature of political debate, but also, and increasingly, of legal argument. Indeed, courts tell us that human dignity is the foundation of all human rights. But the more important it is, the more contested it seems to have become. There has, as a result, been an extraordinary explosion of scholarly writing about the concept of human dignity in law, political philosophy, and theology. This book aims to reflect on these intra-disciplinary debates about dignity in law, philosophy, history, politics, and theology, through a series of edited essays from specialists in these fields, explored the contested concept in its full richness and complexity.