Sensor-Based Human Activity Recognition Using Adaptive Class Hierarchy

In sensor-based human activity recognition, many methods based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been proposed. In the typical CNN-based activity recognition model, each class is treated independently of others. However, actual activity classes often have hierarchical relationships. It is important to consider an activity recognition model that uses the hierarchical relationship among classes to improve recognition performance. In image recognition, branch CNNs (B-CNNs) have been proposed for classification using class hierarchies. B-CNNs can easily perform classification using hand-crafted class hierarchies, but it is difficult to manually design an appropriate class hierarchy when the number of classes is large or there is little prior knowledge. Therefore, in our study, we propose a class hierarchy-adaptive B-CNN, which adds a method to the B-CNN for automatically constructing class hierarchies. Our method constructs the class hierarchy from training data automatically to effectively train the B-CNN without prior knowledge. We evaluated our method on several benchmark datasets for activity recognition. As a result, our method outperformed standard CNN models without considering the hierarchical relationship among classes. In addition, we confirmed that our method has performance comparable to a B-CNN model with a class hierarchy based on human prior knowledge.

When protest humor is not all fun: The ambiguity of humor in the 2017 Romanian anti-corruption grassroots mobilization

This article focuses on the ambiguous ideological work of citizen-produced humor in protest. Using the case of the 2017 Romanian anti-corruption protests as empirical data, the article shows how humor can simultaneously signal grassroots creativity and resistance to power structures, and reproduce conservative gender and class hierarchies. Unlike other types of texts, humor presents itself as an innocent and light message, absolved of the need for critical scrutiny. However, protest studies need to engage in a more nuanced way with the ideological articulation of democratic politics via protest humor by asking not only how humor helps protest communication, but also how it achieves shared enjoyment, for whom, and to what consequences for the ideological articulation of democratic politics. The article concludes by proposing that researcher reflexivity can afford a new sensitivity to the ambiguousness of protest humor.

Class

This chapter shows that Annie Kenney’s suffragette career offers fresh insight into the way that class was represented, understood, and experienced within the WSPU. While WSPU activists frequently claimed that theirs was a classless organization, historians have often been sceptical as to whether this was reflected in their policies and attitudes. Class remained a significant source of tension in the organization even as women attempted to pursue a common goal. This chapter traces how Annie Kenney was first positioned as a representative of, and advocate for, working-class women, and later celebrated for her outstanding commitment to the cause, indicating that the meaning of class was fluid and shifting rather than fixed and static. The chapter raises ideas about the role and representation of working-class women within the WSPU, and demonstrates how women themselves attempted to navigate the complicated terrain of class hierarchies and gendered inequality.

Compositional Programming

Modularity is a key concern in programming. However, programming languages remain limited in terms of modularity and extensibility. Small canonical problems, such as the Expression Problem (EP), illustrate some of the basic issues: the dilemma between choosing one kind of extensibility over another one in most programming languages. Other problems, such as how to express dependencies in a modular way, add up to the basic issues and remain a significant challenge. This article presents a new statically typed modular programming style called Compositional Programming . In Compositional Programming, there is no EP: It is easy to get extensibility in multiple dimensions (i.e., it is easy to add new variants as well as new operations). Compositional Programming offers an alternative way to model data structures that differs from both algebraic datatypes in functional programming and conventional OOP class hierarchies. We introduce four key concepts for Compositional Programming: compositional interfaces , compositional traits , method patterns , and nested trait composition . Altogether, these concepts allow us to naturally solve challenges such as the Expression Problem, model attribute-grammar-like programs, and generally deal with modular programs with complex dependencies . We present a language design, called CP , which is proved to be type-safe, together with several examples and three case studies.

Colonial Debts

With the largest municipal debt in US history and a major hurricane that destroyed much of the archipelago's infrastructure, Puerto Rico has emerged as a key site for the exploration of neoliberalism and disaster capitalism. In Colonial Debts Rocío Zambrana develops the concept of neoliberal coloniality in light of Puerto Rico's debt crisis. Drawing on decolonial thought and praxis, Zambrana shows how debt functions as an apparatus of predation that transforms how neoliberalism operates. Debt functions as a form of coloniality, intensifying race, gender, and class hierarchies in ways that strengthen the colonial relationship between Puerto Rico and the United States. Zambrana also examines the transformation of protest in Puerto Rico. From La Colectiva Feminista en Construcción's actions, long-standing land rescue/occupation in the territory, to the July 2019 protests that ousted former governor Ricardo “Ricky” Rosselló, protests pursue variations of decolonial praxis that subvert the positions of power that debt installs. As Zambrana demonstrates, debt reinstalls the colonial condition and adapts the racial/gender order essential to it, thereby emerging as a key site for political-economic subversion and social rearticulation.

Measuring Class Hierarchies in Postindustrial Societies: A criterion and construct validation of EGP and ESEC across 31 countries

In social stratification research, the most frequently used social class schema are based on employment relations (EGP and ESEC). These schemes have been propelled to paradigms for research on social mobility and educational inequalities and applied in cross-national research for both genders. Using the European Working Conditions Survey, we examine their criterion and construct validity across 31 countries and for both genders. We investigate whether classes are well-delineated by the theoretically assumed dimensions of employment relations and we assess how several measures of occupational advantage differ across classes. We find broad similarity in the criterion validity of EGP and ESEC across genders and countries as well as satisfactory levels of construct validity. However, the salariat classes are too heterogeneous and their boundaries with the intermediate classes are blurred. To improve the measurement of social class, we propose to differentiate managerial and professional occupations within the lower and higher salariat respectively. We show that implementing these distinctions in ESEC and EGP improves their criterion validity and allows to better identify privileged positions.

What Not To Wear At The Opera: Outfitting Sociability At The Met

This research project proposes that fashion performs a critical role in the perpetuation of class hierarchies in American opera audiences. Dress is used by opera patrons as a mode of expressing their economic, social, and cultural capital, thereby affirming their status within society. The Metropolitan Opera house, opened in New York City in 1883, was built intentionally to create a space for the New York elite class to socialize, incorporating architectural features that reflected the power dynamics of New York society, effectively prioritizing sociability over musical integrity. This study is supported by analysis of early Vogue magazine articles that directly contributed to the formation of the opera as a pursuit for the upper-class; as well as a critical investigation of photographs drawn from the Met archive revealing the ways in which fashion at the Met performs economic and social power.. Ultimately, this project uses dress to examine the embedded class hierarchies that sustain an elite, exclusive audience for opera in America; indeed, the study shows that the combination of opera and fashion created class cohesion through mutually acknowledged cultural literacy in New York City.

What Not To Wear At The Opera: Outfitting Sociability At The Met

This research project proposes that fashion performs a critical role in the perpetuation of class hierarchies in American opera audiences. Dress is used by opera patrons as a mode of expressing their economic, social, and cultural capital, thereby affirming their status within society. The Metropolitan Opera house, opened in New York City in 1883, was built intentionally to create a space for the New York elite class to socialize, incorporating architectural features that reflected the power dynamics of New York society, effectively prioritizing sociability over musical integrity. This study is supported by analysis of early Vogue magazine articles that directly contributed to the formation of the opera as a pursuit for the upper-class; as well as a critical investigation of photographs drawn from the Met archive revealing the ways in which fashion at the Met performs economic and social power.. Ultimately, this project uses dress to examine the embedded class hierarchies that sustain an elite, exclusive audience for opera in America; indeed, the study shows that the combination of opera and fashion created class cohesion through mutually acknowledged cultural literacy in New York City.

Ben Jonson’s Imitation Games

This chapter considers why sartorial affectation holds exemplary status as a “humor” to be purged through humiliating exposure in humors comedies. This exemplarity carries over to city comedy’s depiction of masculinity when Ben Jonson creates a bridge between the genres in his Every Man in His Humour. The play has been traditionally understood as drawing on humoral theory to reaffirm class hierarchies and align masculinity with competitive individualism. However, this chapter demonstrates that when this play is situated in relation to other humors comedies by George Chapman as well as Jonson’s other non-dramatic writings, the distinction between the authentic masculinity of the city gallant, true poet, and trickster servant and its inauthentic imitation in the gull, plagiarist, and braggart soldier falls apart. The chapter draws on the overlap of accounts of nonnormative embodiment within disability and queer theory to help reveal that Jonson’s play encourages a broader range of acceptable variations in masculine embodiment than modern post-Cartesian forms of selfhood permit. These nonstandard forms of embodiment, in turn, are the basis for attachments between men and attachments to the objects of material culture, especially clothing.