Bruno Taut’s design inspiration for the Glashaus

As a formative exemplar of early architectural modernism, Bruno Taut’s seminal exhibition pavilion the Glashaus (literally translated Glasshouse) is logically part of the important debate of rethinking the origins of modernism. However, the historical record of Bruno Taut’s Glashaus has been primarily established by one art historian and critic. As a result the historical record of the Glashaus is significantly skewed toward a singlular notion of Expressionism and surprisingly excludes Taut’s diverse motives for the design of the building. In an effort to clarify the problematic historical record of the Glashaus, this book exposes Bruno Taut’s motives and inspirations for its design. The result is that Taut’s motives can be found in yet unacknowledged precedents like the botanical inspiration of the Victoria regia lily; the commercial interests of Frederick Keppler as the Director of the Deutche Luxfer Prismen Syndikat; and imitation that derived openly from the Gothic. The outcome is a substantial contribution to the re-evaluation of the generally accepted histories of the modern movement in architecture.

Audience as performer: The changing role of theatre audiences in the twenty-first century

'Actors always talk about what the audience does. I don’t understand, we are just sitting here.' Audience as Performer proposes that in the theatre, there are two troupes of performers: the actors and the audience. Although academics have scrutinised how audiences respond, make meaning and co-create while watching a performance, little research has considered the behaviour of the theatre audience as a performance in and of itself. This insightful book describes how an audience performs through its myriad gestural, vocal and paralingual actions, and considers the following questions: •If the audience are performers, who are their audiences? •How have audiences’ roles changed throughout history? •How do talkbacks and technology influence the audience’s role as critics? •What influence does the audience have on the creation of community in theatre? •How can the audience function as both consumer and co-creator? Drawing from over 140 interviews with audience members, actors and ushers in the UK, USA and Australia, Heim reveals the lived experience of audience members at the theatrical event. It is a fresh reading of mainstream audiences’ activities, bringing their voices to the fore and exploring their emerging new roles in the theatre of the Twenty-First Century.

Thinking like Disney: Supporting the Disney method using ambient feedback based on group performance

The Disney method is a collaborative creativity technique that uses three roles - dreamer, realist and critic - to facilitate the consideration of different perspectives on a topic. Especially for novices it is important to obtain guidance in applying this method. One way is providing groups with a trained moderator. However, feedback about the group’s behavior might interrupt the flow of the idea finding process. We built and evaluated a system that provides ambient feedback to a group about the distribution of their statements among the three roles. Our preliminary field study indicates that groups supported by the system contribute more and roles are used in a more balanced way while the visualization does not disrupt the group work.

Given and News : Media discourse and the construction of community on national days

National anniversaries such as independence days demand precise coordination in order to make citizens change their routines to forego work and spend the day at rest or at festivities that provide social focus and spectacle. The complex social construction of national days is taken for granted and operates as a given in the news media, which are the main agents responsible for coordinating these planned disruptions of normal routines. This study examines the language used in the news to construct the rather unnatural idea of national days and to align people in observing them. The data for the study consist of news stories about the Fourth of July in the New York Times, sampled over 150 years and are supplemented by material from other sources and other countries. The study is multidimensional, applying concepts from pragmatics (speech acts, politeness, information structure), systemic functional linguistics (the interpersonal metafunction and the Appraisal framework) and cognitive linguistics (frames, metaphor) as well as journalism and communications to arrive at an interdisciplinary understanding of how resources for meaning are used by writers and readers of the news stories. The analysis shows that on national anniversaries, nations tend to be metaphorized as persons having birthdays, to whom politeness should be shown. The face of the nation is to be respected in the sense of identifying the nation's interests as one's own (positive face) and speaking of citizen responsibilities rather than rights (negative face). Resources are available for both positive and negative evaluations of events and participants and the newspaper deftly changes footings (Goffman 1981) to demonstrate the required politeness while also heteroglossically allowing for a certain amount of disattention and even protest - within limits, for state holidays are almost never construed as Bakhtinian festivals, as they tend to reaffirm the hierarchy rather than invert it. Celebrations are evaluated mainly for impressiveness, and for the essentially contested quality of appropriateness, which covers norms of predictability, size, audience response, aesthetics, and explicit reference to the past. Events may also be negatively evaluated as dull ("banal") or inauthentic ("hoopla"). Audiences are evaluated chiefly in terms of their enthusiasm, or production of appropriate displays for emotional response, for national days are supposed to be occasions of flooding-out of nationalistic feeling. By making these evaluations, the newspaper reinforces its powerful position as an independent critic, while at the same time playing an active role in the construction and reproduction of emotional order embodied in "the nation's birthday." As an occasion for mobilization and demonstrations of power, national days may be seen to stand to war in the relation of play to fighting (Bateson 1955). Evidence from the newspaper's coverage of recent conflicts is adduced to support this analysis. In the course of the investigation, methods are developed for analyzing large collections of newspaper content, particularly topical soft news and feature materials that have hitherto been considered less influential and worthy of study than so-called hard news. In his work on evaluation in newspaper stories, White (1998) proposed that the classic hard news story is focused on an event that threatens the social order, but news of holidays and celebrations in general does not fit this pattern, in fact its central event is a reproduction of the social order. Thus in the system of news values (Galtung and Ruge 1965), national holiday news draws on "ground" news values such as continuity and predictability rather than "figure" news values such as negativity and surprise. It is argued that this ground helps form a necessary space for hard news to be seen as important, similar to the way in which the information structure of language is seen to rely on the regular alternation of given and new information (Chafe 1994).

Ivanov-mistik : Okkul'tnye motivy v poèzii i proze Vjačeslava Ivanova (1907-1919)

The subject of this work is the mysticism of Russian poet, critic and philosopher Vjacheslav Ivanov (1866-1949). The approach adopted involves the textual and discourse analysis and findings of the history of ideas. The subject has been considered important because of Ivanov's visions of his dead wife, writer Lydia Zinovieva-Annibal, which were combined with audible messages ("automatic writings"). Several automatic writings and descriptions of the visions from Ivanov's archive collections in St.Petersburg and Moscow are presented in this work. Right after the beginning of his hallucinations in the autumn of 1907, Ivanov was totally captivated by the theosophical ideas of Anna Mintslova, the background figure for this work. Anna Mintslova, a disciple of Rudolf Steiner's Esoteric School, offered Ivanov the theosophical concept of initiation to interpret paranormal phenomena in his intimate life. The work is divided into three main chapters, an introduction and aconclusion. The first chapter is called The Mystical Person: Anthropology of Ivanov and describes the role of the inner "Higher Self" in Ivanov's views on the nature of human consciousness. The political implications of the concepts, "mystical anarchism" and "sobornost" (religious unity) are also examined. The acquaintance and contacts with Anna Mintslova during 1906-1907 gave a framework to Ivanov's search for an organic society and personal religious experience. The second part, Mystics of Initiation and Visionary Aesthetics describes the influence of the initiation concept on Ivanov's aesthetic views (mainly "realistic symbolism"). On the other hand, some connections between the imagery of his visions and symbols in his verses of that period are established. Since Mintslova represented the ideas of Rudolf Steiner in Russia, several symbols shared by Steiner and Ivanov ("rose", "rose and cross") have been another subject of investigation. The preference for strict verse form in the lyrics of Ivanov's visionary period is interpreted as an attempt to place his own poetic creation within two traditions, a mystical and literary one. The third part of this work, Mystics of Hope and Terror, examines Ivanov's conception of Russia in connection with Mintslova's ideas of occult danger from the East. Ivanov's view of the "Russian idea" and his nationalistic idea during World War I are considered as a representation of the fear of the danger. Ivanov's interpretation of the October revolution is influenced by the theosophical concept of the "keeper of the threshold" which occurs in the context of the discourse of occult danger.

Konstrukcija mnimosti : K poètike "Voskovoj persony" Ju. Tynjanova

The subject of this work is the poetics of «The Wax Effigy», a short novel or novella by Jurii Tynianov, Russian writer, literary critic, historian of literature and prominent literary theoretician. The plot structure of the novel is based upon a real event, the creation by Bartolomeo Carlo Rastrelli in 1725 of a wax sculpture of the first Russian emperor, Peter the Great. «Construction of the Sham» consists of three chapters, an introduction and a conclusion. Due to the fact that Tynianov was at the same time a prose writer and theoretician of literature it seemed important to consider the reception of his prose and his works on literary theory in relationship to each other. The introduction is devoted to this task. The first chapter is about the history of the creation of the novel and its reception. Tynianov stopped writing one short story in order to write the novel; these two works have some common traits. It seems almost obvious that his work on the first text was a real step toward the creation of the second. In the first story there is an opposition of dead/alive which is semantic prefiguring of a central motif in «The Wax Effigy». An analysis of the reception of the novel demonstrated that almost every critic writing about the novel has described it as nonsense. Critics considered Tynianov's work in terms of «devices» and «content» and could not understand how devices are related to the content of the novel: the novel was thought as a signifier without any signified. Implicitly, critics thought the signified of the novel as a traditional one of the historical novel, as the historiosophical «idea», embodied in the system of literary devices. In this case literature becomes something instrumental, a kind of expression of extraliterary content. In contradistinction to that Tynianov considered literary semantics as an effect of the literary structure. From his point of view the literary sense is immanent to the process of signification accomplished inside the literary text. The second chapter is devoted to a rhetorical analysis of the opposition dead/alive. Tynianov systematically compares both terms of the opposition. As a result of this strategy the wax effigy of the dead emperor becomes «as if» alive and the world of living people «as if» dead. The qualifier «as if» refers to the fact that Tynianov creates an ambiguous semantic system. This rhetoric is related to European Romanticism and his «fantastic literature» (Merimé, Hoffmann, Maupassant etc.). But Tynianov demonstrates a linguistic origin of the strange fantoms created by romantics; he demystifies these idols by parodying the fantastic literature, that is, showing «how it was done». At the same time, the opposition mentioned above refers to his idea of «incongruity» which plays a prominent role in Tynianov s theory but has never been conceptualised. The incongruity is a inner collision of the literary text; from Tynianov's point of view the meaning of the work of literature is always a dynamic collision of semantically heterogeneous elements struggling with each other. In «The Wax Effigy» Tynianov creates a metalevel of the work demonstrating the process of creation of the literary sense. The third chapter is a reconstruction of Tynianov's conception of the historical prose, specifically of the mechanisms by which historical facts are transformed into literary events. Tynianov thought that the task of the historical novelist is to depict his hero as an actor, to demonstrate that as a wearer of many masks he is a creator of appearances, ambiguities. Here, in the «figure of fiction» (Andrei Belyi), the very idea of the historical prose and rhetoric employed in «The Wax Effigy», history and literature meet each other. In his last theoretical work, «On parody» Tynianov writes about the so-called sham structure of parody. In his opinion every parody is a text about other texts and «serious» work which could be read at the same time as a text about «reality». This twofold structure of parody is that of «The Wax Effigy»: that text speaks about ambiguities of the history and about ambiguities of the literary sense, about social reality of the past and - about the working of the literature itself. «The Wax Effigy» is written as a autoreflective text, as an experiment in literary semantics, as a system of literary ambiguities - of hero, rhetoric and the text itself. The meaning of the novel is created not by the embodiment extraliterary idea, but by the process of signification accomplished inside the work of literature. In this sense Tynianov's novel is parody, a break with the tradition of the historical novel preceding «The Wax Effigy».

On the Origin of Ideas : An Abductivist Approach to Discovery

The purpose of this study is to analyze and develop various forms of abduction as a means of conceptualizing processes of discovery. Abduction was originally presented by Charles S. Peirce (1839-1914) as a "weak", third main mode of inference -- besides deduction and induction -- one which, he proposed, is closely related to many kinds of cognitive processes, such as instincts, perception, practices and mediated activity in general. Both abduction and discovery are controversial issues in philosophy of science. It is often claimed that discovery cannot be a proper subject area for conceptual analysis and, accordingly, abduction cannot serve as a "logic of discovery". I argue, however, that abduction gives essential means for understanding processes of discovery although it cannot give rise to a manual or algorithm for making discoveries. In the first part of the study, I briefly present how the main trend in philosophy of science has, for a long time, been critical towards a systematic account of discovery. Various models have, however, been suggested. I outline a short history of abduction; first Peirce's evolving forms of his theory, and then later developments. Although abduction has not been a major area of research until quite recently, I review some critiques of it and look at the ways it has been analyzed, developed and used in various fields of research. Peirce's own writings and later developments, I argue, leave room for various subsequent interpretations of abduction. The second part of the study consists of six research articles. First I treat "classical" arguments against abduction as a logic of discovery. I show that by developing strategic aspects of abductive inference these arguments can be countered. Nowadays the term 'abduction' is often used as a synonym for the Inference to the Best Explanation (IBE) model. I argue, however, that it is useful to distinguish between IBE ("Harmanian abduction") and "Hansonian abduction"; the latter concentrating on analyzing processes of discovery. The distinctions between loveliness and likeliness, and between potential and actual explanations are more fruitful within Hansonian abduction. I clarify the nature of abduction by using Peirce's distinction between three areas of "semeiotic": grammar, critic, and methodeutic. Grammar (emphasizing "Firstnesses" and iconicity) and methodeutic (i.e., a processual approach) especially, give new means for understanding abduction. Peirce himself held a controversial view that new abductive ideas are products of an instinct and an inference at the same time. I maintain that it is beneficial to make a clear distinction between abductive inference and abductive instinct, on the basis of which both can be developed further. Besides these, I analyze abduction as a part of distributed cognition which emphasizes a long-term interaction with the material, social and cultural environment as a source for abductive ideas. This approach suggests a "trialogical" model in which inquirers are fundamentally connected both to other inquirers and to the objects of inquiry. As for the classical Meno paradox about discovery, I show that abduction provides more than one answer. As my main example of abductive methodology, I analyze the process of Ignaz Semmelweis' research on childbed fever. A central basis for abduction is the claim that discovery is not a sequence of events governed only by processes of chance. Abduction treats those processes which both constrain and instigate the search for new ideas; starting from the use of clues as a starting point for discovery, but continuing in considerations like elegance and 'loveliness'. The study then continues a Peircean-Hansonian research programme by developing abduction as a way of analyzing processes of discovery.

Relaxation Labeling with Learning Automata

Relaxation labeling processes are a class of mechanisms that solve the problem of assigning labels to objects in a manner that is consistent with respect to some domain-specific constraints. We reformulate this using the model of a team of learning automata interacting with an environment or a high-level critic that gives noisy responses as to the consistency of a tentative labeling selected by the automata. This results in an iterative linear algorithm that is itself probabilistic. Using an explicit definition of consistency we give a complete analysis of this probabilistic relaxation process using weak convergence results for stochastic algorithms. Our model can accommodate a range of uncertainties in the compatibility functions. We prove a local convergence result and show that the point of convergence depends both on the initial labeling and the constraints. The algorithm is implementable in a highly parallel fashion.

Memoirs : Heida Hermanns Holde /

The author's mother Alice Goldschmidt was a gifted piano player, who studied with Carl Maria Breithaupt and became his most talented student. Childhood recollections. Early musical awakening. Outbreak of World War One. Recollections of air raids and scarceness of food. Inflation and political instability in post-war Germany. Piano lessons by her mother from an early age. Heida made her debut at age fourteen with the Wiesbaden Symphony under the conductor Carl Schuricht, who became a close mentor and friend. Close relationship to her mother, who had a great influence on her professional career. Heida had a number of outstanding teachers, among them Artur Schnabel, Karl Leimer and Egon Petri. Heida was accepted as a student of Petri at the "Hochschule fuer Musik" in Berlin, where she studied between 1922-1925. Salon at her aunt's house with guests such as the playwright Georg Kaiser and Siegfried Wagner. Her sister Elsie received her Ph.D. in economics and moved to Berlin as well. Heida graduated from the "Hochschule" in 1925. Soon after she won an international piano competition in Berlin. Engagements with various conductors such as Max Fiedler and Otto Klemperer. Private lessons with Arthur Schnabel and Carl Friedberg, the co-founder of Juilliard. Due to occasional experiences of antisemitism during her music career Heida decided to change her name from Goldschmidt to Hermanns. Position at the "Hoch Conservatory" in Frankfurt. Encounter with the music critic Artur Holde, Heida's future-husband. Engagement and wedding in 1932. Move to Berlin.

Jacob Mestel 1914-1958

Correspondence with individuals: Jacob Ben-Ami, Ossip Dymow, Ovsei Liubomirskii, Kalman Marmor, Nachman Meisel, Melech Ravitch, Dov Sadan, Michael Weichert and Zalman Zylbercweig. Correspondence with organizations: Hebrew Actors' Union, IKUF, YIVO. Manuscripts of plays collected by Mestel as director, including adaptations by Mestel. Mestel's writings: manuscripts of poems, plays, essays, articles, notes, translations. Theater production materials: scripts with Mestel's direction notes, prop and set design notes. Miscellaneous theater materials, including course notes, theater programs. Clippings: Mestel's writings, biographical articles, reviews of performances. Family correspondence and personal papers including papers of Sara Kindman-Mestel. Photographs relating to Yiddish theater in New York, 1930s-1950s.

Greenwashing the Trans-Pacific Partnership: Fossil fuels, the environment, and climate change

There has been much controversy over the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) – a plurilateral trade agreement involving a dozen nations from throughout the Pacific Rim – and its impact upon the environment, biodiversity, and climate change. The secretive treaty negotiations involve Australia and New Zealand; countries from South East Asia such as Brunei Darussalam, Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam, and Japan; the South American nations of Peru and Chile; and the members of the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), Canada, Mexico and the United States. There was an agreement reached between the parties in October 2015. The participants asserted: ‘We expect this historic agreement to promote economic growth, support higher-paying jobs; enhance innovation, productivity and competitiveness; raise living standards; reduce poverty in our countries; and to promote transparency, good governance, and strong labor and environmental protections.’ The final texts of the agreement were published in November 2015. There has been discussion as to whether other countries – such as Indonesia, the Philippines, and South Korea – will join the deal. There has been much debate about the impact of this proposed treaty upon intellectual property, the environment, biodiversity and climate change. There have been similar concerns about the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) – a proposed trade agreement between the United States and the European Union. In 2011, the United States Trade Representative developed a Green Paper on trade, conservation, and the environment in the context of the TPP. In its rhetoric, the United States Trade Representative has maintained that it has been pushing for strong, enforceable environmental standards in the TPP. In a key statement in 2014, the United States Trade Representative Mike Froman insisted: ‘The United States’ position on the environment in the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations is this: environmental stewardship is a core American value, and we will insist on a robust, fully enforceable environment chapter in the TPP or we will not come to agreement.’ The United States Trade Representative maintained: ‘Our proposals in the TPP are centered around the enforcement of environmental laws, including those implementing multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs) in TPP partner countries, and also around trailblazing, first-ever conservation proposals that will raise standards across the region’. Moreover, the United States Trade Representative asserted: ‘Furthermore, our proposals would enhance international cooperation and create new opportunities for public participation in environmental governance and enforcement.’ The United States Trade Representative has provided this public outline of the Environment Chapter of the TPP: A meaningful outcome on environment will ensure that the agreement appropriately addresses important trade and environment challenges and enhances the mutual supportiveness of trade and environment. The Trans-Pacific Partnership countries share the view that the environment text should include effective provisions on trade-related issues that would help to reinforce environmental protection and are discussing an effective institutional arrangement to oversee implementation and a specific cooperation framework for addressing capacity building needs. They also are discussing proposals on new issues, such as marine fisheries and other conservation issues, biodiversity, invasive alien species, climate change, and environmental goods and services. Mark Linscott, an assistant Trade Representative testified: ‘An environment chapter in the TPP should strengthen country commitments to enforce their environmental laws and regulations, including in areas related to ocean and fisheries governance, through the effective enforcement obligation subject to dispute settlement.’ Inside US Trade has commented: ‘While not initially expected to be among the most difficult areas, the environment chapter has emerged as a formidable challenge, partly due to disagreement over the United States proposal to make environmental obligations binding under the TPP dispute settlement mechanism’. Joshua Meltzer from the Brookings Institute contended that the trade agreement could be a boon for the protection of the environment in the Pacific Rim: Whether it is depleting fisheries, declining biodiversity or reduced space in the atmosphere for Greenhouse Gas emissions, the underlying issue is resource scarcity. And in a world where an additional 3 billion people are expected to enter the middle class over the next 15 years, countries need to find new and creative ways to cooperate in order to satisfy the legitimate needs of their population for growth and opportunity while using resources in a manner that is sustainable for current and future generations. The TPP parties already represent a diverse range of developed and developing countries. Should the TPP become a free trade agreement of the Asia-Pacific region, it will include the main developed and developing countries and will be a strong basis for building a global consensus on these trade and environmental issues. The TPP has been promoted by its proponents as a boon to the environment. The United States Trade Representative has maintained that the TPP will protect the environment: ‘The United States’ position on the environment in the TPP negotiations is this: environmental stewardship is a core American value, and we will insist on a robust, fully enforceable environment chapter in the TPP or we will not come to agreement.’ The United States Trade Representative discussed ‘Trade for a Greener World’ on World Environment Day. Andrew Robb, at the time the Australian Trade and Investment Minister, vowed that the TPP will contain safeguards for the protection of the environment. In November 2015, after the release of the TPP text, Rohan Patel, the Special Assistant to the President and Deputy Director of Intergovernmental Affairs, sought to defend the environmental credentials of the TPP. He contended that the deal had been supported by the Nature Conservancy, the International Fund for Animal Welfare, the Joint Ocean Commission Initiative, the World Wildlife Fund, and World Animal Protection. The United States Congress, though, has been conflicted by the United States Trade Representative’s arguments about the TPP and the environment. In 2012, members of the United States Congress - including Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), Olympia Snowe (R-ME), and John Kerry (D-MA) – wrote a letter, arguing that the trade agreement needs to provide strong protection for the environment: ‘We believe that a '21st century agreement' must have an environment chapter that guarantees ongoing sustainable trade and creates jobs, and this is what American businesses and consumers want and expect also.’ The group stressed that ‘A binding and enforceable TPP environment chapter that stands up for American interests is critical to our support of the TPP’. The Congressional leaders maintained: ‘We believe the 2007 bipartisan congressional consensus on environmental provisions included in recent trade agreements should serve as the framework for the environment chapter of the TPP.’ In 2013, senior members of the Democratic leadership expressed their opposition to granting President Barack Obama a fast-track authority in respect of the TPP House of Representatives Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said: ‘No on fast-track – Camp-Baucus – out of the question.’ Senator Majority leader Harry Reid commented: ‘I’m against Fast-Track: Everyone would be well-advised to push this right now.’ Senator Elizabeth Warren has been particularly critical of the process and the substance of the negotiations in the TPP: From what I hear, Wall Street, pharmaceuticals, telecom, big polluters and outsourcers are all salivating at the chance to rig the deal in the upcoming trade talks. So the question is, Why are the trade talks secret? You’ll love this answer. Boy, the things you learn on Capitol Hill. I actually have had supporters of the deal say to me ‘They have to be secret, because if the American people knew what was actually in them, they would be opposed. Think about that. Real people, people whose jobs are at stake, small-business owners who don’t want to compete with overseas companies that dump their waste in rivers and hire workers for a dollar a day—those people, people without an army of lobbyists—they would be opposed. I believe if people across this country would be opposed to a particular trade agreement, then maybe that trade agreement should not happen. The Finance Committee in the United States Congress deliberated over the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations in 2014. The new chair Ron Wyden has argued that there needs to be greater transparency in trade. Nonetheless, he has mooted the possibility of a ‘smart-track’ to reconcile the competing demands of the Obama Administration, and United States Congress. Wyden insisted: ‘The new breed of trade challenges spawned over the last generation must be addressed in imaginative new policies and locked into enforceable, ambitious, job-generating trade agreements.’ He emphasized that such agreements ‘must reflect the need for a free and open Internet, strong labor rights and environmental protections.’ Elder Democrat Sander Levin warned that the TPP failed to provide proper protection for the environment: The TPP parties are considering a different structure to protect the environment than the one adopted in the May 10 Agreement, which directly incorporated seven multilateral environmental agreements into the text of past trade agreements. While the form is less important than the substance, the TPP must provide an overall level of environmental protection that upholds and builds upon the May 10 standard, including fully enforceable obligations. But many of our trading partners are actively seeking to weaken the text to the point of falling short of that standard, including on key issues like conservation. Nonetheless, 2015, President Barack Obama was able to secure the overall support of the United States Congress for his ‘fast-track’ authority. This was made possible by the Republicans and dissident Democrats. Notably, Oregon Senator Ron Wyden switched sides, and was transformed from a critic of the TPP to an apologist for the TPP. For their part, green political parties and civil society organisations have been concerned about the secretive nature of the negotiations; and the substantive implications of the treaty for the environment. Environmental groups and climate advocates have been sceptical of the environmental claims made by the White House for the TPP. The Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand, the Australian Greens and the Green Party of Canada have released a joint declaration on the TPP observing: ‘More than just another trade agreement, the TPP provisions could hinder access to safe, affordable medicines, weaken local content rules for media, stifle high-tech innovation, and even restrict the ability of future governments to legislate for the good of public health and the environment’. In the United States, civil society groups such as the Sierra Club, Public Citizen, WWF, the Friends of the Earth, the Rainforest Action Network and 350.org have raised concerns about the TPP and the environment. Allison Chin, President of the Sierra Club, complained about the lack of transparency, due process, and public participation in the TPP talks: ‘This is a stealth affront to the principles of our democracy.’ Maude Barlow’s The Council of Canadians has also been concerned about the TPP and environmental justice. New Zealand Sustainability Council executive director Simon Terry said the agreement showed ‘minimal real gains for nature’. A number of organisations have joined a grand coalition of civil society organisations, which are opposed to the grant of a fast-track. On the 15th January 2013, WikiLeaks released the draft Environment Chapter of the TPP - along with a report by the Chairs of the Environmental Working Group. Julian Assange, WikiLeaks' publisher, stated: ‘Today's WikiLeaks release shows that the public sweetener in the TPP is just media sugar water.’ He observed: ‘The fabled TPP environmental chapter turns out to be a toothless public relations exercise with no enforcement mechanism.’ This article provides a critical examination of the draft Environment Chapter of the TPP. The overall argument of the article is that the Environment Chapter of the TPP is an exercise in greenwashing – it is a public relations exercise by the United States Trade Representative, rather than a substantive regime for the protection of the environment in the Pacific Rim. Greenwashing has long been a problem in commerce, in which companies making misleading and deceptive claims about the environment. In his 2012 book, Greenwash: Big Brands and Carbon Scams, Guy Pearse considers the rise of green marketing and greenwashing. Government greenwashing is also a significant issue. In his book Storms of My Grandchildren, the climate scientist James Hansen raises his concerns about government greenwashing. Such a problem is apparent with the TPP – in which there was a gap between the assertions of the United States Government, and the reality of the agreement. This article contends that the TPP fails to meet the expectations created by President Barack Obama, the White House, and the United States Trade Representative about the environmental value of the agreement. First, this piece considers the relationship of the TPP to multilateral environmental treaties. Second, it explores whether the provisions in respect of the environment are enforceable. Third, this article examines the treatment of trade and biodiversity in the TPP. Fourth, this study considers the question of marine capture fisheries. Fifth, there is an evaluation of the cursory text in the TPP on conservation. Sixth, the article considers trade in environmental services under the TPP. Seventh, this article highlights the tensions between the TPP and substantive international climate action. It is submitted that the TPP undermines effective and meaningful government action and regulation in respect of climate change. The conclusion also highlights that a number of other chapters of the TPP will impact upon the protection of the environment – including the Investment Chapter, the Intellectual Property Chapter, the Technical Barriers to Trade Chapter, and the text on public procurement.

Solving MDPs using two-timescale simulated annealing with multiplicative weights

We develop extensions of the Simulated Annealing with Multiplicative Weights (SAMW) algorithm that proposed a method of solution of Finite-Horizon Markov Decision Processes (FH-MDPs). The extensions developed are in three directions: a) Use of the dynamic programming principle in the policy update step of SAMW b) A two-timescale actor-critic algorithm that uses simulated transitions alone, and c) Extending the algorithm to the infinite-horizon discounted-reward scenario. In particular, a) reduces the storage required from exponential to linear in the number of actions per stage-state pair. On the faster timescale, a 'critic' recursion performs policy evaluation while on the slower timescale an 'actor' recursion performs policy improvement using SAMW. We give a proof outlining convergence w.p. 1 and show experimental results on two settings: semiconductor fabrication and flow control in communication networks.

Solution of MDPS using simulation-based value iteration

This article proposes a three-timescale simulation based algorithm for solution of infinite horizon Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). We assume a finite state space and discounted cost criterion and adopt the value iteration approach. An approximation of the Dynamic Programming operator T is applied to the value function iterates. This 'approximate' operator is implemented using three timescales, the slowest of which updates the value function iterates. On the middle timescale we perform a gradient search over the feasible action set of each state using Simultaneous Perturbation Stochastic Approximation (SPSA) gradient estimates, thus finding the minimizing action in T. On the fastest timescale, the 'critic' estimates, over which the gradient search is performed, are obtained. A sketch of convergence explaining the dynamics of the algorithm using associated ODEs is also presented. Numerical experiments on rate based flow control on a bottleneck node using a continuous-time queueing model are performed using the proposed algorithm. The results obtained are verified against classical value iteration where the feasible set is suitably discretized. Over such a discretized setting, a variant of the algorithm of [12] is compared and the proposed algorithm is found to converge faster.

Kriitkko Einari J. Vehmas ja moderni taide

The doctoral dissertation Critic Einari J. Vehmas and Modern Art deals with one of the central figures of the Finnish art scene and his work as an art critic, art museum curator and cultural critic. The main body of research material consists of the writings of Einari J. Vehmas (1902 1980) from 1937 to the late 1960s. Vehmas wrote art reviews for magazines, and from the year 1945 he was a regular art critic for one of the major newspapers in Finland. Vehmas was heavily inclined towards French literature and visual arts. Marcel Proust and Charles Baudelaire influenced his views on the nature of art from the late 1920s onwards. Vehmas is commonly regarded as the most influential art critic of post-war Finland. His writings have been referred to and cited in numerous research papers on Finnish 20th-century art. A lesser known aspect of his work is his position as the deputy director of the Ateneum Art Museum, the Finnish national gallery. Through his art museum work, his opinions also shaped the canon of modern art considered particularly Finnish following the second world war. The main emphasis of the dissertation is on studying Vehmas s writings, but it also illustrates the diversity of his involvement in Finnish cultural life through biographical documents. The long chronological span of the dissertation emphasises how certain central themes accumulate in Vehmas s writings. The aim of the dissertation is also to show how strongly certain philosophical and theoretical concepts from the early 20th century, specifically Wassily Kandinsky s principle of inner necessity and Henri Bergson s epistemology highlighting intuition and instinct, continued to influence the Finnish art discourse even in the early 1960s, in part thanks to the writings of Vehmas. Throughout his production, Vehmas contemplated the state and future of modern art and humanity. Vehmas used a colourful, vitalistic rhetoric to emphasise the role of modern art as a building block of culture and humanity. At the same time, however, he was a cultural pessimist whose art views became infused with anxiety, a sense of loss, and a desire to turn his back on the world.

Robust/optimal temperature profile control using neural networks

An approximate dynamic programming (ADP) based neurocontroller is developed for a heat transfer application. Heat transfer problem for a fin in a car's electronic module is modeled as a nonlinear distributed parameter (infinite-dimensional) system by taking into account heat loss and generation due to conduction, convection and radiation. A low-order, finite-dimensional lumped parameter model for this problem is obtained by using Galerkin projection and basis functions designed through the 'Proper Orthogonal Decomposition' technique (POD) and the 'snap-shot' solutions. A suboptimal neurocontroller is obtained with a single-network-adaptive-critic (SNAC). Further contribution of this paper is to develop an online robust controller to account for unmodeled dynamics and parametric uncertainties. A weight update rule is presented that guarantees boundedness of the weights and eliminates the need for persistence of excitation (PE) condition to be satisfied. Since, the ADP and neural network based controllers are of fairly general structure, they appear to have the potential to be controller synthesis tools for nonlinear distributed parameter systems especially where it is difficult to obtain an accurate model.