Lost in Transition? Emerging forms of residential architecture in Kathmandu

Kathmandu has been the last few cities in the world which retained its medieval urban culture up until twentieth century. Various Hindu and Buddhist religious practices shaped the arrangement of houses, roads and urban spaces giving the city a distinctive physical form, character and a unique oriental nativeness. In recent decades, the urban culture of the city has been changing with the forces of urbanisation and globalisation and the demand for new buildings and spaces. New residential design is increasingly dominated by distinctive patterns of Western suburban ideal comprising detached or semi-detached homes and high rise tower blocks. This architectural iconoclasm can be construed as a rather crude response to the indigenous spaces and builtform. The paper attempts to dismantle the current tension between traditional and contemporary 'culture' (and hence society) and housing (or builtform) in Kathmandu by engaging in a discussion that cuts across space, time and meaning of building. The paper concludes that residential architecture in Kathmandu today stands disoriented and lost in the transition.

General, PDB-based collective variables for protein folding

New, automated forms of data-analysis are required in order to understand the high-dimensional trajectories that are obtained from molecular dynamics simulations on proteins. Dimensionality reduction algorithms are particularly appealing in this regard as they allow one to construct unbiased, low-dimensional representations of the trajectory using only the information encoded in the trajectory. The downside of this approach is that different sets of coordinates are required for each different chemical systems under study precisely because the coordinates are constructed using information from the trajectory. In this paper we show how one can resolve this problem by using the sketch-map algorithm that we recently proposed to construct a low-dimensional representation of the structures contained in the protein data bank (PDB). We show that the resulting coordinates are as useful for analysing trajectory data as coordinates constructed using landmark configurations taken from the trajectory and that these coordinates can thus be used for understanding protein folding across a range of systems.

Using Answer Set Programming for Solving Boolean Games

Boolean games are a framework for reasoning about the rational behaviour of agents, whose goals are formalized using propositional formulas. They offer an attractive alternative to normal-form games, because they allow for a more intuitive and more compact encoding. Unfortunately, however, there is currently no general, tailor-made method available to compute the equilibria of Boolean games. In this paper, we introduce a method for finding the pure Nash equilibria based on disjunctive answer set programming. Our method is furthermore capable of finding the core elements and the Pareto optimal equilibria, and can easily be modified to support other forms of optimality, thanks to the declarative nature of disjunctive answer set programming. Experimental results clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Impact of age, various forms of cataract, and visual acuity on whole-field scotopic sensitivity screening for glaucoma in rural Taiwan.

OBJECTIVE: To evaluate the impact of age, various forms of cataract, and visual acuity on whole-field scotopic sensitivity screening for glaucoma in a rural population. DESIGN: Clinic-based study with population-based recruitment. SETTING: Jin Shan Township near Taipei, Taiwan. SUBJECTS: Three hundred forty-six residents (ages, > or = 40 years) of Jin Shan Township. INTERVENTIONS: Whole-field scotopic testing, ophthalmoscopy with dilation of the pupils, cataract grading against photographic standards, and screening visual field testing in a random one-third subsample. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Whole-field scotopic sensitivity (in decibels) and diagnostic status as a case of glaucoma, glaucoma suspect, or normal. RESULTS: Participants in Jin Shan Township did not differ significantly in the rate of blindness, low visual acuity, or family history of glaucoma from a random sample of nonrespondents. Scotopic sensitivity testing detected 100% (6/6) of subjects with open-angle glaucoma at a specificity of 80.2%. The mean +/- SE scotopic sensitivity for six subjects with open-angle glaucoma (32.78 +/- 1.51 dB) differed significantly from that of 315 normal individuals (38.51 +/- 0.22 dB), when adjusted for age and visual acuity (P = .05, t test). With linear regression modeling, factors that correlated significantly with scotopic sensitivity were intraocular pressure, screening visual field, best corrected visual acuity, presence of cortical cataract, and increasing age. CONCLUSIONS: Although cataract affects the whole-field scotopic threshold, it appears that scotopic testing may be of value in field-based screening for glaucoma.

Gendered Candidate Selection and the Representation of Women in Northern Ireland

In an attempt to account for the exceptionally low levels of female representation in Northern Ireland, this paper provides an analysis of the contemporary candidate selection procedures of the region's five main political parties. Drawing on evidence gathered from 29 elite interviews, plus official internal party documents, the study finds that the localised nature of the parties' selection procedures may disadvantage women aspirants. Also important are ‘supply-side’ factors influencing legislative recruitment and female participation rates, namely the strongly embedded social norm of female domestic responsibility, a masculinised political culture and the lack of confidence of potential female candidates.

The basic principles of uncertain information fusion. An organised review of merging rules in different representation frameworks.

We propose and advocate basic principles for the fusion of incomplete or uncertain information items, that should apply regardless of the formalism adopted for representing pieces of information coming from several sources. This formalism can be based on sets, logic, partial orders, possibility theory, belief functions or imprecise probabilities. We propose a general notion of information item representing incomplete or uncertain information about the values of an entity of interest. It is supposed to rank such values in terms of relative plausibility, and explicitly point out impossible values. Basic issues affecting the results of the fusion process, such as relative information content and consistency of information items, as well as their mutual consistency, are discussed. For each representation setting, we present fusion rules that obey our principles, and compare them to postulates specific to the representation proposed in the past. In the crudest (Boolean) representation setting (using a set of possible values), we show that the understanding of the set in terms of most plausible values, or in terms of non-impossible ones matters for choosing a relevant fusion rule. Especially, in the latter case our principles justify the method of maximal consistent subsets, while the former is related to the fusion of logical bases. Then we consider several formal settings for incomplete or uncertain information items, where our postulates are instantiated: plausibility orderings, qualitative and quantitative possibility distributions, belief functions and convex sets of probabilities. The aim of this paper is to provide a unified picture of fusion rules across various uncertainty representation settings.

On lattices from combinatorial game theory modularity and a representation theorem: Finite case

We show that a self-generated set of combinatorial games, S, may not be hereditarily closed but, strong self-generation and hereditary closure are equivalent in the universe of short games. In [13], the question “Is there a set which will give an on-distributive but modular lattice?” appears. A useful necessary condition for the existence of a finite non-distributive modular L(S) is proved. We show the existence of S such that L(S) is modular and not distributive, exhibiting the first known example. More, we prove a Representation Theorem with Games that allows the generation of all finite lattices in game context. Finally, a computational tool for drawing lattices of games is presented.

Multi-scale cortical keypoint representation for attention and object detection

Keypoints (junctions) provide important information for focus-of-attention (FoA) and object categorization/recognition. In this paper we analyze the multi-scale keypoint representation, obtained by applying a linear and quasi-continuous scaling to an optimized model of cortical end-stopped cells, in order to study its importance and possibilities for developing a visual, cortical architecture.We show that keypoints, especially those which are stable over larger scale intervals, can provide a hierarchically structured saliency map for FoA and object recognition. In addition, the application of non-classical receptive field inhibition to keypoint detection allows to distinguish contour keypoints from texture (surface) keypoints.

Choosing Union Representation: The Role of Attitudes and Emotions

In the United States, most unions are recognized by a majority vote of employees through union representation elections administered by the government. Most empirical studies of individual voting behavior during union representation elections use a rational choice model. Recently, however, some have posited that voting is often influenced by emotions. We evaluate competing hypotheses about the determinants of union voting behavior by using data collected from a 2010 representation election at Delta Air Lines, a US-based company. In addition to the older rational choice framework, multiple regression results provide support for an emotional choice model. Positive feelings toward the employer are statistically significantly related to voting ‘no’ in a representation election, while positive feelings toward the union are related to a ‘yes’ vote. Effect sizes for the emotion variables were generally larger than those for the rational choice variables, suggesting that emotions may play a key role in representation election outcomes.

Knowledge representation for data integration and exploration in translational medicine

Tese de doutoramento, Informática (Bioinformática), Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Ciências, 2014

Império e imagem : D. João de Castro e a retórica do Vice-Rei (1505-1548)

Tese de doutoramento, Ciências Sociais (Sociologia Histórica), Universidade de Lisboa, Instituto de Ciências Sociais, 2014

Ficção e encenação : o desenho como narrativa visual

Tese de doutoramento, Belas-Artes (Ciências da Arte), Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Belas-Artes, 2014

O desenho de arcos como formas de modelação e construção do real

Relatório da Prática de Ensino Supervisionada, Mestrado em Ensino de Artes Visuais, Universidade de Lisboa, 2014