Critics have been converging around the logic of colonialism to describe the Internet economy. If we are serious about the laden language of the colonial, we should be ready to learn from struggles ...against pre-digital empires and colonial regimes. Although acts of insurrection may attract more attention, one thing leaders and theorists of anticolonial resistance have stressed persistently is the centrality of self-governance in everyday life as both a means and end of their movements. But the dominant platforms for online communities are not well-suited for durable self-governing. Resistance often relies on the same colonial firms it opposes. What would community-governed technologies look like? This paper introduces the concept of “governable stacks”, a framework for self-governing as resistance to digital colonialism.
When was the last time you participated in an election for an online group chat or sat on a jury for a dispute about a controversial post? Platforms nudge users to tolerate nearly all-powerful ...admins, moderators, and “benevolent dictators for life.” In Governable Spaces, Nathan Schneider argues that the internet has been plagued by a phenomenon he calls “implicit feudalism”: a bias, both cultural and technical, for building communities as fiefdoms. The consequences have spread far beyond online spaces themselves. Feudal defaults train us to give up on our communities’ democratic potential, inclining us to be more tolerant of autocratic tech CEOs and authoritarian politicians. But online spaces could be sites of a creative, radical, and democratic renaissance. Schneider shows how the internet can learn from governance legacies of the past to become a more democratic medium, responsive and inventive unlike anything that has come before. “A prescient analysis of how we create democratic spaces for engagement in the age of polarization. Governable Spaces is new, impeccably researched, and imaginative.” — Zizi Papacharissi, Professor of Communication and Political Science, University of Illinois at Chicago “This visionary book points a way to scrapping capitalist realism for community control over our digital spaces. Nathan Schneider generously brings together disparate wisdom from abolitionists, Black feminists, and cooperative software engineers to spark our own imaginations and experiments.” — Lilly Irani, author of Chasing Innovation: Making Entrepreneurial Citizens in Modern India “From feminist theory to blockchain governance, this dizzying array of topics pulls readers out of their comfort zone and forces a novel look at very old questions.” — Ethan Zuckerman, Associate Professor of Public Policy, Communication, and Information and Computer Sciences, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Thank You, Anarchy is an up-close, inside account of Occupy Wall Street’s first year in New York City, written by one of the first reporters to cover the phenomenon. Nathan Schneider chronicles the ...origins and explosive development of the Occupy movement through the eyes of the organizers who tried to give shape to an uprising always just beyond their control. Capturing the voices, encounters, and beliefs that powered the movement, Schneider brings to life the General Assembly meetings, the chaotic marches, the split-second decisions, and the moments of doubt as Occupy swelled from a hashtag online into a global phenomenon. A compelling study of the spirit that drove this watershed movement, Thank You, Anarchy vividly documents how the Occupy experience opened new social and political possibilities and registered a chilling indictment of the status quo. It was the movement’s most radical impulses, this account shows, that shook millions out of a failed tedium and into imagining, and fighting for, a better kind of future.
Online platforms train users to interact with each other through certain widespread interface designs. This article argues that an “implicit feudalism” informs the available options for community ...management on the dominant platforms for online communities. It is a pattern that grants user-administrators absolutist reign over their fiefdoms, with competition among them as the primary mechanism for quality control, typically under rules set by platform companies. Implicit feudalism emerged from technical conditions dating to early online networks. In light of alternative management mechanisms with more democratic features, it becomes all the more clear that implicit feudalism is not a necessary condition.
Selectivity for direction of motion is a key feature of primary visual cortical neurons. Visual experience is required for direction selectivity in carnivore and primate visual cortex, but the ...circuit mechanisms of its formation remain incompletely understood. Here, we examined how developing lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN) neurons may contribute to cortical direction selectivity. Using
electrophysiology techniques, we examined LGN receptive field properties of visually naive female ferrets before and after exposure to 6 h of motion stimuli to assess the effect of acute visual experience on LGN cell development. We found that acute experience with motion stimuli did not significantly affect the weak orientation or direction selectivity of LGN neurons. In addition, we found that neither latency nor sustainedness or transience of LGN neurons significantly changed with acute experience. These results suggest that the direction selectivity that emerges in cortex after acute experience is computed in cortex and cannot be explained by changes in LGN cells.
The development of typical neural circuitry requires experience-independent and experience-dependent factors. In the visual cortex of carnivores and primates, selectivity for motion arises as a result of experience, but we do not understand whether the major brain area that sits between the retina and the visual cortex-the lateral geniculate nucleus of the thalamus-also participates. Here, we found that lateral geniculate neurons do not exhibit changes as a result of several hours of visual experience with moving stimuli at a time when visual cortical neurons undergo a rapid change. We conclude that lateral geniculate neurons do not participate in this plasticity and that changes in cortex are likely responsible for the development of direction selectivity in carnivores and primates.
•The reuniens-hippocampal circuit plays a crucial role in a spatial memory task in mice.•Delta-frequency stimulation of reuniens inputs to CA1 impaired spatial working memory.•Perturbations during ...retrieval, but not encoding, reduced task performance.
Working memory deficits are key cognitive symptoms of schizophrenia. Elevated delta oscillations, which are uniquely associated with the presence of the illness, may be the proximal cause of these deficits. Spatial working memory (SWM) is impaired by elevated delta oscillations projecting from thalamic nucleus reuniens (RE) to the hippocampus (HPC); these findings imply a role of the RE-HPC circuit in working memory deficits in schizophrenia, but questions remain as to whether the affected process is the encoding of working memory, recall, or both. Here, we answered this question by optogenetically inducing delta oscillations in the HPC terminals of RE axons in mice during either the encoding or retrieval phase (or both) of an SWM task.
We transduced cells in RE to express channelrhodopsin-2 through bilateral injection of adeno-associated virus, and bilaterally implanted optical fibers dorsal to the hippocampus (HPC). While mice performed a spatial memory task on a Y-maze, the RE-HPC projections were optogenetically stimulated at delta frequency during distinct phases of the task.
Full-trial stimulation successfully impaired SWM performance, replicating the results of the previous study in a mouse model. Task-phase-specific stimulation significantly impaired performance during retrieval but not encoding.
Our results indicate that perturbations in the RE-HPC circuit specifically impair the retrieval phase of working memory. This finding supports the hypothesis that abnormal delta frequency bursting in the thalamus could have a causal role in producing the WM deficits seen in schizophrenia.
Frame-Semantic Parsing Das, Dipanjan; Chen, Desai; Martins, André F. T. ...
Computational linguistics - Association for Computational Linguistics,
03/2014, Volume:
40, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Frame semantics is a linguistic theory that has been instantiated for English in the FrameNet lexicon. We solve the problem of frame-semantic parsing using a two-stage statistical model that takes ...lexical targets (i.e., content words and phrases) in their sentential contexts and predicts frame-semantic structures. Given a target in context, the first stage disambiguates it to a semantic frame. This model uses latent variables and semi-supervised learning to improve frame disambiguation for targets unseen at training time. The second stage finds the target's locally expressed semantic arguments. At inference time, a fast exact dual decomposition algorithm collectively predicts all the arguments of a frame at once in order to respect declaratively stated linguistic constraints, resulting in qualitatively better structures than naïve local predictors. Both components are feature-based and discriminatively trained on a small set of annotated frame-semantic parses. On the SemEval 2007 benchmark data set, the approach, along with a heuristic identifier of frame-evoking targets, outperforms the prior state of the art by significant margins. Additionally, we present experiments on the much larger FrameNet 1.5 data set. We have released our frame-semantic parser as open-source software.
In the classical view of economic choices, subjects make rational decisions evaluating the costs and benefits of options in order to maximize their overall income. Nonetheless, subjects often fail to ...reach optimal outcomes. The overt value of an option drives the direction of decisions, but covert factors such as emotion and sensitivity to sunk cost are thought to drive the observed deviations from optimality. Many questions remain to be answered as to (1) which contexts contribute the most to deviation from an optimal solution; and (2) the extent of these effects. In order to tackle these questions, we devised a decision-making task for mice, in which cost and benefit parameters could be independently and flexibly adjusted and for which a tractable optimal solution was known. Comparing mouse behavior with this optimal solution across parameter settings revealed that the factor most strongly contributing to suboptimal performance was the cost parameter. The quantification of sensitivity to sunk cost, a covert factor implicated in our task design, revealed it as another contributor to reduced optimality. In one condition where the large reward option was particularly unattractive and the small reward cost was low, the sensitivity to sunk cost and the cost-led suboptimality almost vanished. In this regime and this regime only, mice could be viewed as close to rational (here, 'rational' refers to a state in which an animal makes decisions basing on objective valuation, not covert factors). Taken together, our results suggest that "rationality" is a task-specific construct even in mice.
Decentralization is a term widely used in a variety of contexts, particularly in political science and discourses surrounding the Internet. It is popular today among advocates of blockchain ...technology. While frequently employed as if it were a technical term, decentralization more reliably appears to operate as a rhetorical strategy that directs attention toward some aspects of a proposed social order and away from others. It is called for far more than it is theorized or consistently defined. This non-specificity has served to draw diverse participants into common political and technological projects. Yet even the most apparently decentralized systems have shown the capacity to produce economically and structurally centralized outcomes. The rhetoric of decentralization thus obscures other aspects of the re-ordering it claims to describe. It steers attention from where concentrations of power are operating, deferring worthwhile debate about how such power should operate. For decentralization to be a reliable concept in formulating future social arrangements and related technologies, it should come with high standards of specificity. It also cannot substitute for anticipating centralization with appropriate mechanisms of accountability.
PDF
