Dimensionality reduction in complex models

As a part of the Managing Uncertainty in Complex Models (MUCM) project, research at Aston University will develop methods for dimensionality reduction of the input and/or output spaces of models, as seen within the emulator framework. Towards this end this report describes a framework for generating toy datasets, whose underlying structure is understood, to facilitate early investigations of dimensionality reduction methods and to gain a deeper understanding of the algorithms employed, both in terms of how effective they are for given types of models / situations, and also their speed in applications and how this scales with various factors. The framework, which allows the evaluation of both screening and projection approaches to dimensionality reduction, is described. We also describe the screening and projection methods currently under consideration and present some preliminary results. The aim of this draft of the report is to solicit feedback from the project team on the dataset generation framework, the methods we propose to use, and suggestions for extensions that should be considered.

Place, ethnicity and poverty in England’

Examination of the relationship between ethnicity, poverty and place has tended to focus on the spatial distribution of minority ethnic groups. This summary paper reviews some key themes in this literature, in order to review the following key questions: •Where are different ethnic groups located, and how does this location relate to their experience of poverty? •Is clustering a good or bad thing, and what is the role of location – regardless of concentration – in terms of impacts on access to housing, employment, and other resources? However, it is notable that existing research in this area continues to present ethnicity as a factor that shapes outcomes only for minority ethnic groups. A wider discussion increasingly recognises the working of ethnicity in the lives of majority communities. Some of the most consistently impoverished areas in Britain, for example, are in regions with relatively small minority ethnic communities. For example, examinations of poverty in Cornwall (Cemlyn, et al., 2002) and Wales (Kenway and Palmer, 2007) identify longstanding concentrations of poverty and social exclusion among relatively static populations. Instead of assuming that ethnic identity influences propensity to poverty when concentrated in particular places, the experiences of Cornwall and Wales encourage us to consider the manner in which places of poverty also have an ethnic character and the impact of this in the wider experience of poverty. In what follows, and in order to reflect the existing literature, we review key points in the debate about the spatial concentration of minority ethnic groups and the impact of this concentration on experiences of poverty. Where possible, we seek to extend these ideas to consider possible implications for spaces of poverty characterised by concentrations of majority ethnic groups.

Probabilistic resource space model for managing resources in cyber-physical society

Classification is the most basic method for organizing resources in the physical space, cyber space, socio space and mental space. To create a unified model that can effectively manage resources in different spaces is a challenge. The Resource Space Model RSM is to manage versatile resources with a multi-dimensional classification space. It supports generalization and specialization on multi-dimensional classifications. This paper introduces the basic concepts of RSM, and proposes the Probabilistic Resource Space Model, P-RSM, to deal with uncertainty in managing various resources in different spaces of the cyber-physical society. P-RSM’s normal forms, operations and integrity constraints are developed to support effective management of the resource space. Characteristics of the P-RSM are analyzed through experiments. This model also enables various services to be described, discovered and composed from multiple dimensions and abstraction levels with normal form and integrity guarantees. Some extensions and applications of the P-RSM are introduced.

The Knowledge: Its Presentation and Role in Recognition Systems

The concept of knowledge is the central one used when solving the various problems of data mining and pattern recognition in finite spaces of Boolean or multi-valued attributes. A special form of knowledge representation, called implicative regularities, is proposed for applying in two powerful tools of modern logic: the inductive inference and the deductive inference. The first one is used for extracting the knowledge from the data. The second is applied when the knowledge is used for calculation of the goal attribute values. A set of efficient algorithms was developed for that, dealing with Boolean functions and finite predicates represented by logical vectors and matrices.

Lp Microlocal Properties for Multi-Quasi-Elliptic Pseudodifferential Operators

2010 Mathematics Subject Classification: Primary 35S05; Secondary 35A17.

Generalized Backscattering and the Lax-Phillips Transform

2000 Mathematics Subject Classification: 35P25, 35R30, 58J50.

Square and compass: Freemasonry's tools for constructing a global civil society

The concept of a global civil society is gaining greater acceptance among International Relations (IR) scholars, yet few studies exist that look at the role of fraternal organizations and their influence in constructing this realm. Freemasonry, one of the oldest fraternal orders, exerts a powerful influence on its membership through its symbolism, architecture and ritual, based on the tenets of mutual respect and tolerance towards all human beings. Such principles helped in creating a body of practices and institutions as early as the eighteenth century which two hundred years later were identified and conceptualized as global civil society. ^ The allegations of anti-Masons and conspiracy theorists offer a continuous account of Masonry's influence on the political scene since its modern founding in 1717 Great Britain. Conspiracy theorists portray the coming of a New World Order, orchestrated and directed by a secret hierarchy of Masons/Illuminati. Even though the lens of conspiracy theories paints a distorted view of reality, it does focus attention to Freemasonry's activities as a major player in politics over the span of three centuries. Not only do such theories challenge the novelty of practices that make up a global civil society, but also the notion that it is an inclusive and growing sector that unites people across the globe. They also provide a valuable critique by pointing out the inconsistencies and discriminatory practices of Masonry as contrasted with the lofty ideals and aims for humanity. ^ The Masonic influence in the social world is perceived as one that reflects the liberal worldview where the nation-state and power structures are in pursuit of human progress, or profit. The symbolism of Masonry, however, carries a message that can be characterized as representing republican ideals. Masonic symbolism and ritual create spaces of meaning where the contradictions between the ideals and the structures of inequality and elitism can be resolved. Freemasonry as a symbolic system proclaiming their inherent republican values does have a global reach. However, the effectiveness of these values is bounded by the constraints that are inherent in a liberal world dominated by nation-states. ^

Trans Terrains: Gendered Embodiments and Religious Landscapes in Yogyakarta, Indonesia

Transgendered Indonesians live in the fourth most populated nation in the world with more Muslims than any other country. This thesis summarizes an ethnography conducted on one religiously oriented male-to-female transgender community known in the city of Yogyakarta as the waria. This study analyzes the waria’s gender and religious identities from an emic and etic perspective, focusing on how individuals comport themselves inside the world’s first transgender mosque-like institution called a pesantren waria. The waria take their name from the Indonesian words wanita (woman) and pria (man). I will chart how this male-to-female population create spaces of spiritual belonging and physical security within a territory that has experienced geo-religio-political insecurity: natural disasters, fundamentalist movements, and toppling dictatorships. This work illuminates how the waria see themselves as biologically male, not men. Anatomy is not what gives the waria their gender, their feminine expression and sexual attraction does. Although the waria self-identity as women/waria, in a religious context they perform as men, not women.

Espaço de todos ou de ninguém: análise morfológica de transformações espaciais dos Conjuntos Residenciais Parque Serrambi em Natal/ RN

This work analyses the effects of form over the emergence of new patterns of use and occupation in public spaces of housing estates designed in the 1980s and 1990s in Natal’s municipality (Brazil). We start from the premise that form acts on social process (HILLIER; HANSON, 1984), and verify how much the original spatial configuration of Parque Serrambi housing states contributed to the creation of new spatial patterns following the interventions of the people living there. The Serrambi states were built in Natal’s south based on an urbanization model following modernist’s principals and aimed to supply demands for popular dwellings. They were one of the last estates financed by the former National Dwelling Bank (BNH) and supervised by the Dwelling Cooperatives Orientation Institute (INOCOOP), materialized a spatial form different from the highrise dwelling experiences from the same period. The results were obtained through configurational analysis based on Space Syntax conceptual and methodological framework, in which space and society are viewed as interrelated. The analyses was based on represanting and quantifying spatial properties and identificatying social patterns related to the interventions. We identified that the original spatial configurations, associated to subtle changes in the states social patterns, analysed independently of non-morphological categories, gave way to the occupation patterns verrified in both Serrambi cases.

"Vender as carnes": prostituição no litoral norte paraibano

This thesis aims to contribute to reflections on female prostitution in the Paraíba`s North Coast in specific regions of the Baía da Traição and Indian villages Potiguara constant cultural flow region between indigenous and non-indigenous. Within this hemisphere intend to analyze the transits, the body boundaries, sexuality, identity and ethnic category as central to understanding of prostitution practices inaugurate the possibility to study the gender and blurred places, border, mixed. Specifically, I discuss the experience of articulated gender border between urban and rural, indigenous and non-indigenous, to show and hide, visible and not visible. Analyze the social relations among women who prostitute themselves and the community they inhabit, mobility, economic and symbolic exchanges, conflicts and situations of violence, since the social environment is permeated by these dimensions and the way these women includes complex situations and individuals. Analyze the ethnic and flow of people and relationships that are built differently inside and outside the indigenous community, such as women who prostitute themselves build their indigenous and prostitutes identities. Analyze this mobility in prostitution relationships and the reason for this mobility, indigenous women prostitutes avoid this practice in the indigenous area in order to protect their identities because the community is small, there is the fear on the probability of gossip and malaise in the community. However, the region is characterized as a heterogeneous whole, requiring a procedural analysis to cover the whole specificity of these practices in the covered area.

"Vender as carnes": prostituição no litoral norte paraibano

This thesis aims to contribute to reflections on female prostitution in the Paraíba`s North Coast in specific regions of the Baía da Traição and Indian villages Potiguara constant cultural flow region between indigenous and non-indigenous. Within this hemisphere intend to analyze the transits, the body boundaries, sexuality, identity and ethnic category as central to understanding of prostitution practices inaugurate the possibility to study the gender and blurred places, border, mixed. Specifically, I discuss the experience of articulated gender border between urban and rural, indigenous and non-indigenous, to show and hide, visible and not visible. Analyze the social relations among women who prostitute themselves and the community they inhabit, mobility, economic and symbolic exchanges, conflicts and situations of violence, since the social environment is permeated by these dimensions and the way these women includes complex situations and individuals. Analyze the ethnic and flow of people and relationships that are built differently inside and outside the indigenous community, such as women who prostitute themselves build their indigenous and prostitutes identities. Analyze this mobility in prostitution relationships and the reason for this mobility, indigenous women prostitutes avoid this practice in the indigenous area in order to protect their identities because the community is small, there is the fear on the probability of gossip and malaise in the community. However, the region is characterized as a heterogeneous whole, requiring a procedural analysis to cover the whole specificity of these practices in the covered area.

“Acham que brotamos das fontes dessa cidade?”: uma etnografia sobre o cotidiano de sobrevivência de pessoas em situação de rua em Nata/RN

Through participant observation, held in the administrative region east of Natal / RN, this research aimed to understand about the daily life of men and women living on the streets in the city. How they relate to the space where they live? In this relationship, which uses and survival strategies triggered by this social segment? These were some of the questions that guided this research, in order to highlight the specificities of this way of life and the possible consequences that such a situation could reverberate. In this sense, there was an effort to keep up with people on the streets, their itineraries and seize their narratives. Along the search path - which took place intermittently between the years 2011-2015 - attended spaces of occupation and traffic of this population group in the street, as well as insert me and got involved in events, forums, seminars, meetings and subject of joints on the streets as a political movement (MNPR / RN). They are considered in this study as people on the street to those who occupy the street as their main space of survival and ordering of daily life: in the streets sleep, feed themselves, meet the physiological and hygienic needs, and is where draw sustenance. The street is taken in this research in its broadest sense, including all possible places relatively protected from the cold, rain and exposure to violence, thus includes both open and public spaces: as squares and parks; but also closed and private places: hostels, abandoned warehouses, prisons, etc. It was observed that in none of these spaces guys on the street are established in a fixed manner, in contrast, they experience the roaming, which in part is due to urban systems - which tends to stigmatize them and delete them places - and the very need to survive, because while living in the street differentiated practices are triggered, and these differ from the dominant mode of sedentary life.

“Acham que brotamos das fontes dessa cidade?”: uma etnografia sobre o cotidiano de sobrevivência de pessoas em situação de rua em Nata/RN

Through participant observation, held in the administrative region east of Natal / RN, this research aimed to understand about the daily life of men and women living on the streets in the city. How they relate to the space where they live? In this relationship, which uses and survival strategies triggered by this social segment? These were some of the questions that guided this research, in order to highlight the specificities of this way of life and the possible consequences that such a situation could reverberate. In this sense, there was an effort to keep up with people on the streets, their itineraries and seize their narratives. Along the search path - which took place intermittently between the years 2011-2015 - attended spaces of occupation and traffic of this population group in the street, as well as insert me and got involved in events, forums, seminars, meetings and subject of joints on the streets as a political movement (MNPR / RN). They are considered in this study as people on the street to those who occupy the street as their main space of survival and ordering of daily life: in the streets sleep, feed themselves, meet the physiological and hygienic needs, and is where draw sustenance. The street is taken in this research in its broadest sense, including all possible places relatively protected from the cold, rain and exposure to violence, thus includes both open and public spaces: as squares and parks; but also closed and private places: hostels, abandoned warehouses, prisons, etc. It was observed that in none of these spaces guys on the street are established in a fixed manner, in contrast, they experience the roaming, which in part is due to urban systems - which tends to stigmatize them and delete them places - and the very need to survive, because while living in the street differentiated practices are triggered, and these differ from the dominant mode of sedentary life.

Centelhas de uma cidade turística nos cartões-postais de Jaeci Galvão (1940-1980)

The postcard is a medium that has gained popularity at the time that the picture was linked to its support. It circulated favoring mainly the views of the cities and composed a triad between landscape, photography and tourism. The visuality that loads is among signs of representations, relationships, forms of collective consciousness and ways of seeing the world. In Natal, the photographer Jaeci Emereciano Galvão registered urban and social transformations focusing on interventions that emphasized urban centres as social space and progress and nature as a space for contemplation and enjoyment. They are images with social and cultural issues very clear, since the picture is from a process of creation that is all about choices and decisions about what deserves to be photographed. Therefore, the aim of this research by investigating the role of photographs evidenced in Jaeci’s postcards, with a view to inclusion of tourism in the spaces of Natal and the visuality assumed in the context of their own identity. The theoretical framework that makes up the discussions about the landscape, the city's tourism and photographic representation in postcards emerged from the literature of Schama (1996), Corbin (1989), Cosgrove (1998), Benjamin (1987), Kossoy (2003; 2006; 2009) and Souza Martins (2009), which gave grants to interpret and understand the symbolic construction presented in the postcards. Methodologically the work was done through research in archives, newspapers, postcards of the survey, interviews, iconographic and iconological analyses proposed by Kossoy. At the end, it was concluded the Jaeci Galvão’s postcards established themselves as essential elements for symbolic landscapes of tourism in Natal.

O programa institucional de bolsa de iniciação à docência PIBID na formação inicial de professores de matemática

This research sought to understand the space training provided by Institutional Scholarship Program Initiation of Teaching to a group of students of Degree in Mathematics that had activities developed in the same public school. The goal is to qualify them for teaching practice for these basic institutions. We decided to conduct a qualitative study of type ethnographic case study. For a year and a half while we were at the meetings and activities of the Group, we did what we call as a participant observation. To obtain the data, we used different survey instruments: the researcher\'s field notes through his observation of everyday life of the group, photographs and filming of the activities, document analysis and database produced, physically and digitally, in addition to questionnaires and interviews with records written, which complemented each other and helped establish a triangulation of information collected. We analyze the trajectory of the group on three axes: on the first, we present and understand the paths taken by the Group in the process of setting up training spaces, and production of their professional training, in the second, we analyze how the space of PIBID is being integrated with others spaces of formations in the educational institution of the degree course in mathematics and, in the third axis, we understand the process of knowledge production of that group. The trajectory taken by the group was marked by a process of reflection and discussion systematic and collective, which favored the pursuit for be a better professional and also confirmed a possible path to be followed in initial teacher education.