MSC Maximal Stress Cooperation
In 1996 my book ‘The Nature of Cultures’ appeared in Vi- na and New York. It describes cultures as systems which are controlled by MSC and decorum. While MSC is a neologism meaning ‘maximal stress cooperation’ decorum is a very old term. It is as old as Western culture itself, and is furthermore, the translation of the even older Greek word ‘prepon’. Decorum and prepon mean ‘to be suitable, to be fitting’. It is all about the fitting of cultural medial contents to elementary cultural behavioural types and behavioural phases. These behavioural units are subject to a type of ranking system in which that which is essential is sorted from that which less essential. - corum then means – the representations of the media must ‘fit’ the ranking of the cultural behaviour. It is MSC which assumes the top position in this ranking. In 1996 and the two previous years when I was working on my book ‘The Nature of Cultures’ less than 5 years had passed since the Iron Curtain had been lifted. Many believed at that time that with ending of the Cold War, which was more or less de facto peace anyway, that a new and better age of peace was dawning.
Information Access through Search Engines and Digital Libraries
he Information Management Systems group at the University of Padua, led by Maristella Agosti, has been a major contributor to information retrieval (IR) and digital libraries for nearly twenty years. This group has gained an excellent reputation in the IR community and has produced some of the best-known IR researchers, whose work spans a broad range of topics.The papers in this book deal with e.g. automated text categorizations, web link analysis algorithms, retrieval in multimedia digital libraries, and multilingual information retrieval. The presentation of original research results built on the past work of the group which at the same time summarizes past .
Hyperparameter tuning for machine and deep learning with R : A practical guide
Equips readers with the ability to achieve better results with significantly less time, costs, effort and resources using the methods described here. The case studies presented in this book can be run on a regular desktop or notebook computer. The content focuses on the hyperparameter tuning of ML and DL algorithms, and is divided into two main parts: theory (Part I) and application (Part II). Essential topics covered include: a survey of important model parameters; four parameter tuning studies and one extensive global parameter tuning study; statistical analysis of the performance of ML and DL methods based on severity; and a new, consensus-ranking-based way to aggregate and analyze results from multiple algorithms.
Global perspectives on recognising non-formal and Informal Learning : Why recognition matters
This book deals with the relevance of recognition and validation of non-formal and informal learning in education and training, the workplace and society. In an increasing number of countries, it is at the top of the policy and research agenda ranking among the possible ways to redress the glaring lack of relevant academic and vocational qualifications and to promote the development of competences and certification procedures which recognise different types of learning, including formal, non-formal and informal learning. The aim of the book is therefore to present and share experience, expertise and lessons in such a way that enables its effective and immediate use across the full spectrum of country contexts, whether in the developing or developed world. It examines the importance of meeting institutional and political requirements that give genuine value to the recognition of non-formal and informal learning; it shows why recognition is important and clarifies its usefulness and the role it serves in education, working life and voluntary work; it emphasises the importance of the coordination, interests, motivations, trust and acceptance by all stakeholders.
Gathering Hopewell : Society, Ritual and Ritual Interaction
In this book, twenty-one researchers in interwoven efforts immerse themselves and the reader in this vibrant archaeological record in order to richly reconstruct the faces, actions, and motivations Hopewellian people in their social and ritual life. Using a personalized and locally contextualized approach, the authors explore Hopewellian leadership, systems of social ranking and prestige, animal-totemic clan organization, kinship structures, sodalities, gender, community organizations, strategies of intercommunity alliance, and interregional travels for power questing, pilgrimage, healing, tutelage, and acquiring rituals.
Fundamentals of image data mining : Analysis, features, classification and retrieval
Presents a comprehensive review of the essentials of image data mining, and the latest cutting-edge techniques used in the field. The coverage spans all aspects of image analysis and understanding, offering deep insights into areas of feature extraction, machine learning, and image retrieval. The theoretical coverage is supported by practical mathematical models and algorithms, utilizing data from real-world examples and experiments. Topics and features: Describes essential tools for image mining, covering Fourier transforms, Gabor filters, and contemporary wavelet transforms / Develops many new exercises (most with MATLAB code and instructions) / Includes review summaries at the end of each chapter / Analyses state-of-the-art models, algorithms, and procedures for image mining / Integrates new sections on pre-processing, discrete cosine transform, and statistical inference and testing / Demonstrates how features like color, texture, and shape can be mined or extracted for image representation / Applies powerful classification approaches: Bayesian classification, support vector machines, neural / networks, and decision trees / Implements imaging techniques for indexing, ranking, and presentation, as well as database visualization
Freedom and Value : Freedom’s Influence on Welfare and Worldly Value
Freedom of the sort implicated in acting freely or with free will is important to the truth of different sorts of moral judgment, such as judgments of moral responsibility and those of moral obligation. Little thought, however, has been invested into whether appraisals of good or evil presuppose free will. The central aim of this book is to dispute this assumption by arguing for the relevance of free will to the truth of two sorts of such judgment: welfare-ranking judgments or judgments of personal well-being (when is one's life intrinsically good for the one who lives it?), and world-ranking judgments (when is a possible world intrinsically better than another?). The book also examines free will’s impact on the truth of such judgments for central issues in moral obligation and in the free will debate.
Focused Access to XML Documents ; 6th International Workshop of the Initiative for the Evaluation of XML Retrieval, INEX 2007 Dagstuhl Castle, Germany, December 17-19, 2007. Selected Papers
This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 6th International Workshop of the Initiative for the Evaluation of XML Retrieval, INEX 2007, held at Dagstuhl Castle, Germany, in December 2007.The 37 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected for presentation at the workshop from 50 initial submissions. The papers are organized in an ad hoc track and 6 topical sections on book search, XML-mining, entity ranking, interactive, link-the-wiki, and multimedia.
Environmental and Health Risk Assessment and Management : Principles and Practices
The book covers the essential aspects of environmental and health law, environmental economics, applied statistical and probabilistic methods, fundamental notions of applied epidemiology and toxicology, as well as decision analysis, to provide an integrated overview of how risk assessment and management combine to produce sound societal outcomes. Risk-based methods play a pivotal role in identifying and ranking alternative, sustainable choices, while accounting for uncertainty and variability. Specifically, most reductions in risks require a balancing of the costs and benefits associated with the action to reduce exposure to a hazard and thus risk. This balancing necessarily involves linking exposure and response through causation. Fundamentally, in risk assessment and management, science and law intersect through legal and scientific causation to the point that the failure to provide a sound causal argument can make an otherwise beneficial law or regulation invalid.
Entity-Oriented Search
This open access book covers all facets of entity-oriented search—where “search” can be interpreted in the broadest sense of information access—from a unified point of view, and provides a coherent and comprehensive overview of the state of the art. It represents the first synthesis of research in this broad and rapidly developing area. Selected topics are discussed in-depth, the goal being to establish fundamental techniques and methods as a basis for future research and development. Additional topics are treated at a survey level only, containing numerous pointers to the relevant literature. A roadmap for future research, based on open issues and challenges identified along the way, rounds out the book.
Database Theory – ICDT 2007 ; 11th International Conference, Barcelona, Spain, January 10-12, 2007, Proceedings
The papers are organized in topical sections on information integration and peer to peer, axiomatizations for XML, expressive power of query languages, incompleteness, inconsistency, and uncertainty, XML schemas and typechecking, stream processing and sequential query processing, ranking, XML update and query, as well as query containment.
Learning Theory ; Vol. 3559 : 18th Annual Conference on Learning Theory, COLT 2005, Bertinoro, Italy, June 27-30, 2005, Proceedings
The technical program contained 45 papers selected from 120 submissions, 3 open problems selected from among 5 contributed, and 2 invited lectures. The invited lectures were given by Sergiu Hart on “Uncoupled Dynamics and Nash Equilibrium”, and by Satinder Singh on “Rethinking State, Action, and Reward in Reinforcement Learning”. These papers were not included in this volume. The Mark Fulk Award is presented annually for the best paper co-authored by a student. The student selected this year was Hadi Salmasian for the paper titled “The Spectral Method for General Mixture Models” co-authored with Ravindran Kannan and Santosh Vempala. The number of papers submitted to COLT this year was exceptionally high. In addition to the classical COLT topics, we found an increase in the number of submissions related to novel classi?cation scenarios such as ranking. This - crease re?ects a healthy shift towards more structured classi?cation problems, which are becoming increasingly relevant to practitioners.
An assessment framework for compliance with international space law and norms : Promoting equitable access and Use of space for emerging actors
proposes a framework for assessing countries’ levels of compliance with international space law and norms. It begins by exploring the development of two movements – the evidence-based policymaking and programming movement, and the rise of ratings and rankings research – and their growth across various disciplines. The analysis suggests that such efforts are useful in gauging the behavior of countries in space according to how well they adhere to existing space law and norms. To date, there is no comprehensive, periodic, and systematic measure of countries’ efforts to comply with space law and norms; this work endeavors to fill that gap by offering a framework in which to assess compliance.
Algorithms and Models for the Web-Graph ; 5th International Workshop, WAW 2007, San Diego, CA, USA, December 11-12, 2007, Proceedings
The book address a wide variety of topics related to the study of the Web-graph such as random graph models for the Web-graph, PageRank analysis and computation, decentralized search, local partitioning algorithms,and traceroute sampling. The Web-graph has been the focal point of a tremendous amount of research for more than a decade. The view of the Web as a graph has great practical importance and has also generated much interesting theoretical work.
Algorithms and Models for the Web-Graph ; 4th International Workshop, WAW 2006, Banff, Canada, November 30 - December 1, 2006. Revised Papers
his book constitutes the revised papers of the Fourth International Workshop on Algorithms and Models for the Web-Graph, WAW 2006, held in Banff, Canada, November 30 - December 1, 2006.
Advances in XML information retrieval and Evaluation ; 4th International workshop of the initiative for the evaluation of XML retrieval, INEX 2005, Dagstuhl Castle, Germany, November 28-30, 2005. Revised and Selected Papers
Content-oriented XML retrieval has been receiving increasing interest due to the widespread use of eXtensible Markup Language (XML), which is becoming a standard document format on the Web, in digital libraries,and publishing. By exploiting the enriched source of syntactic and semantic information that XML markup provides, XML information retrieval (IR) systems aim to implement a more focused retrieval strategy and return document components, so-called XML elements – instead of complete documents – in response to a user query. This focused retrieval approach is of particular bene?t for collections containing long documents or documents covering a wide variety of topics (e.g., books, user manuals, legal documents, etc.), where users’ e?ort to locate relevant content can be reduced by directing them to the most relevant parts of the documents.
Advances in XML information retrieval ; 3rd International workshop of the Initiative for the evaluation of XML retrieval, INEX 2004, Dagstuhl Castle, Germany, December 6-8, 2004
The ultimate goal of many information access systems (e.g., digital libraries, the Web, intranets) is to provide the right content to their end-users. This content is increasingly a mixture of text, multimedia, and metadata, and is formatted according to the adopted –W3C standard for information repositories, the so-called eXtensible Markup L- guage (XML). Whereas many of today’s information access systems still treat do- ments as single large (text) blocks, XML offers the opportunity to exploit the internal structure of documents in order to allow for more precise access thus providing more specific answers to user requests. Providing effective access to XML-based content is therefore a key issue for the success of these systems. The aim of the INEX campaign (Initiative for the Evaluation of XML Retrieval), which was set up at the beginning of 2002, is to establish infrastructures, XML test suites, and appropriate measurements for evaluating the performance of information retrieval systems that aim at giving effective access to XML content. More precisely, the goal of the INEX initiative is to provide means, in the form of a large XML test collection and appropriate scoring methods, for the evaluation of content-oriented XML retrieval systems.
Advances in Ranking and Selection, Multiple Comparisons, and Reliability: Methodology and Applications
S. Panchapakesan has made significant contributions to ranking and selection and has published in many other areas of statistics, including order statistics, reliability theory, stochastic inequalities, and inference. Written in his honor, the twenty invited articles in this volume reflect recent advances in these fields and form a tribute to Panchapakesan’s influence and impact on these areas. Thematically organized, the chapters cover a broad range of topics from: Inference / Ranking and Selection / Multiple Comparisons and Tests / Agreement Assessment / Reliability / Biostatistics

















