The 'Parekh Report' - national identities with nations and nationalism

‘Multiculturalists’ often advocate national identities. Yet few study the ways in which ‘multiculturalists’ do so and in this article I will help to fill this gap. I will show that the Commission for Multi-Ethnic Britain’s report reflects a previously unnoticed way of thinking about the nature and worth of national identities that the Commission’s chair, and prominent political theorist, Bhikhu Parekh, had been developing since the 1970s. This way of thinking will be shown to avoid the questionable ways in which conservative and liberal nationalists discuss the nature and worth of national identities while offering an alternative way to do so. I will thus show that a report that was once criticised for the way it discussed national identities reflects how ‘multiculturalists’ think about national identities in a distinct and valuable way that has gone unrecognised

Synchronization and Control of Spatiotemporal Chaos using Time-Series Data from Local Regions

In this paper we show that the analysis of the dynamics in localized regions, i.e., sub-systems can be used to characterize the chaotic dynamics and the synchronization ability of the spatiotemporal systems. Using noisy scalar time-series data for driving along with simultaneous self-adaptation of the control parameter representative control goals like suppressing spatiotemporal chaos and synchronization of spatiotemporally chaotic dynamics have been discussed.Comment: File in Latex, Figures may be obtained on request at the following address - [email protected]

Deccan volcanism and K-T boundary signatures

The Deccan Traps in the Indian subcontinent represent one of the most extensive flood basalt provinces in the world. These basalts occur mainly as flat-lying, subaerially erupted tholeiitic lava flows, some of which are traceable for distances of more than 100 km. Offshore drilling and geophysical surveys indicate that a part of the Deccan subsided or was downfaulted to the west beneath the Arabian Sea. The presence of 1 to 5 m thick intertrappean sediments deposited by lakes and rivers indicates periods of quiescence between eruptions. The occurrence of numerous red bole beds among the flows suggests intense weathering of flow tops between eruptive intervals. Although the causative relationship of the Cretaceous-Tertiary (K-T) biotic extinctions to Deccan volcanism is debatable, the fact that the main Deccan eruptions straddle the K-T event appears beyond doubt from the recent Ar-40/Ar-39 ages of various Deccan flows. This temporal relationship of the K-T event with Deccan volcanism makes the petrochemical signatures of the entire Deccan sequence (basalt flows, intercalated intertrappean sediments, infratrappean Lameta beds (with dinosaur fossils), and the bole beds) pertinent to studies of the K-T event. The results of ongoing study is presented

When is it Better to Compare than to Score?

When eliciting judgements from humans for an unknown quantity, one often has the choice of making direct-scoring (cardinal) or comparative (ordinal) measurements. In this paper we study the relative merits of either choice, providing empirical and theoretical guidelines for the selection of a measurement scheme. We provide empirical evidence based on experiments on Amazon Mechanical Turk that in a variety of tasks, (pairwise-comparative) ordinal measurements have lower per sample noise and are typically faster to elicit than cardinal ones. Ordinal measurements however typically provide less information. We then consider the popular Thurstone and Bradley-Terry-Luce (BTL) models for ordinal measurements and characterize the minimax error rates for estimating the unknown quantity. We compare these minimax error rates to those under cardinal measurement models and quantify for what noise levels ordinal measurements are better. Finally, we revisit the data collected from our experiments and show that fitting these models confirms this prediction: for tasks where the noise in ordinal measurements is sufficiently low, the ordinal approach results in smaller errors in the estimation

A hot X-ray filament associated with A3017 galaxy cluster

Recent simulations and observations have shown large scale filaments in the cosmic web connecting nodes, with accreting materials (baryonic and dark matter) flowing through them. Current high sensitivity observations also show that the propagation of shocks through filaments can heat them up, and make filaments visible between two or more galaxy clusters or around massive clusters, based on optical and/or X-ray observations. We are reporting here the special case of the cluster A3017 associated with a hot filament. The temperature of the filament is 3.4$^{-0.77}_{+1.30}$ ~keV and its length is $\sim$ 1 Mpc. We have analysed its archival {\it Chandra} data and report various properties. We also analysed GMRT 235/610 MHz radio data. Radio observations have revealed symmetric two-sided lobes which fill cavities in the A3017 cluster core region, associated with central AGN. In the radio map, we also noticed a peculiar linear vertical radio structure in the X-ray filament region which might be associated with a cosmic filament shock. This radio structure could be a radio phoenix or old plasma where an old relativistic population is re-accelerated by shock propagation. Finally we put an upper limit on the radio luminosity of the filament region

Estimation from Pairwise Comparisons: Sharp Minimax Bounds with Topology Dependence

Data in the form of pairwise comparisons arises in many domains, including preference elicitation, sporting competitions, and peer grading among others. We consider parametric ordinal models for such pairwise comparison data involving a latent vector $w^* \in \mathbb{R}^d$ that represents the "qualities" of the $d$ items being compared; this class of models includes the two most widely used parametric models--the Bradley-Terry-Luce (BTL) and the Thurstone models. Working within a standard minimax framework, we provide tight upper and lower bounds on the optimal error in estimating the quality score vector $w^*$ under this class of models. The bounds depend on the topology of the comparison graph induced by the subset of pairs being compared via its Laplacian spectrum. Thus, in settings where the subset of pairs may be chosen, our results provide principled guidelines for making this choice. Finally, we compare these error rates to those under cardinal measurement models and show that the error rates in the ordinal and cardinal settings have identical scalings apart from constant pre-factors.Comment: 39 pages, 5 figures. Significant extension of arXiv:1406.661

Adam Smith and Colonialism

In the context of debates about liberalism and colonialism, the arguments of Adam Smith have been taken as illustrative of an important line of anti-colonial liberal thought. The reading of Smith presented here challenges this interpretation. It argues that Smith’s opposition to colonial rule derived largely from its impact on the metropole, rather than on its impact on the conquered and colonised; that Smith recognised colonialism had brought ‘improvement’ in conquered territories and that Smith struggled to balance recognition of moral diversity with a universal moral framework and a commitment to a particular interpretation of progress through history. These arguments have a wider significance as they point towards some of the issues at stake in liberal anti-colonial arguments more generally

Topics concerning state variable feedback in automatic control systems. Part 1 - Specification. Part 2 - Sensitivity. Part 3 - Intentional nonlinearities. Part 4 - Unavailable states

Specifications, sensitivity, intentional nonlinearities, and unavailable states concerned with state variable feedback in automatic control system