Theory and practice: public relations

This widely used introduciton to professional practice, leading acamdeics and practitioenrs outline the core principles of public relations in business a, government and the third sector. Drawon a range of communicaiton and public relations theories, discuss how to work with key publics, using all forms of media for maximum impact.

Stabilized sparse ordinal regression for medical risk stratification

The recent wide adoption of electronic medical records (EMRs) presents great opportunities and challenges for data mining. The EMR data are largely temporal, often noisy, irregular and high dimensional. This paper constructs a novel ordinal regression framework for predicting medical risk stratification from EMR. First, a conceptual view of EMR as a temporal image is constructed to extract a diverse set of features. Second, ordinal modeling is applied for predicting cumulative or progressive risk. The challenges are building a transparent predictive model that works with a large number of weakly predictive features, and at the same time, is stable against resampling variations. Our solution employs sparsity methods that are stabilized through domain-specific feature interaction networks. We introduces two indices that measure the model stability against data resampling. Feature networks are used to generate two multivariate Gaussian priors with sparse precision matrices (the Laplacian and Random Walk). We apply the framework on a large short-term suicide risk prediction problem and demonstrate that our methods outperform clinicians to a large margin, discover suicide risk factors that conform with mental health knowledge, and produce models with enhanced stability. © 2014 Springer-Verlag London.

Meursault (and Caligula) avec de sade: on the relations between the literary absurds and Camus’s philosophical discourses

This article considers the relation between L'Etranger and Caligula, with Camus' philosophical discourse. It aims at mediocra firma between the idea that the literary 'absurds' just illustrate Camus' philosophy; and the idea that they are wholly autonomous from that philosophy. Following threads from Camus' own responses to Melville, du Gard and others, we argue that Meursault and the crazed emperor Caligula are not illustrations of the absurd, let alone Camusian ethical ideals. They embody 'temptations' to forms of philosophical suicide and murder Camus systematically opposed in his philosophical writings, whose paradigm in The Rebel is the Marquis de Sade. Rather than rebelling against the unjust irrationality of the world, these figures (either passively or actively) become agents of this irrationality. Camus the man, or his thinking, should not be identified with them, as such, any more than Shakespeare should be identified with his Iago, or sundry other villains.