Pursuit Of Coherence Research Articles

The chivalric pursuit of coherence in international law

The chivalric pursuit of coherence in international law

Attending to the Ethical Orientation of Health and Care Regulators: The Pursuit of Coherence Between Care Quality, Professionalism and Regulation in the UK

This paper offers an empirically informed ethical analysis of the recent history of health and social care regulation in the UK focused especially on the contributions made by the Professional Standards Authority for Health and Social Care. The paper is largely organised around two broad questions: First, in what respects can regulation support, mobilise and model professionalism and professional identity? Second, nested within this, given that regulation can support the professional identities of diverse practitioners can it, at the same time, help enable coordination across, and integration of, health and social care activities? These concerns, we suggest, highlight the value of viewing professional regulation in the context of the broader collaborative zeitgeist in health and care and as shaping the ethical landscape for professionals. We thereby make a case for the value of attending to the ethical orientation of professional regulation.

A Robust Principal Component Analysis for Outlier Identification in Messy Microcalorimeter Data.

A principal component analysis (PCA) of clean microcalorimeter pulse records can be a first step beyond statistically optimal linear filtering of pulses toward a fully nonlinear analysis. For PCA to be practical on spectrometers with hundreds of sensors, an automated identification of clean pulses is required. Robust forms of PCA are the subject of active research in machine learning. We examine a version known as coherence pursuit that is simple and fast and well matched to the automatic identification of outlier records, as needed for microcalorimeter pulse analysis.

In Pursuit of Coherence: Aligning Program Development in Teacher Education with Institutional Practices

ABSTRACT This article examines program development in teacher education, with an emphasis on how teacher educators pursue coherence. The analysis contributes to existing literature by investigating how coherence is pursued as part of program development and by analytically situating coherence as an emergent achievement that requires the alignment of program design with institutional practices. The empirical data derive from four Norwegian teacher education institutions that were redesigning their programs in response to expectations of increased program coherence. Cultural historical theory and the concept of institutional coherence are used to examine how coherence is pursued at the intersection of institutional practices and emergent developmental processes. The findings highlight how institutional practices inform program development, requiring program leaders to navigate complex organisational, epistemic and political landscapes in their efforts toward coherence. Implications for the conceptualisation of coherence and for program leadership in teacher education are discussed.

Improving $K$-Subspaces via Coherence Pursuit

Subspace clustering is a powerful generalization of clustering for high-dimensional data analysis, where low-rank cluster structure is leveraged for accurate inference. $K$ -Subspaces (KSS), an alternating algorithm that mirrors $K$ -means, is a classical approach for clustering with this model. Like $K$ -means, KSS is highly sensitive to initialization, yet KSS has two major handicaps beyond this issue. First, unlike $K$ -means, the KSS objective is NP-hard to approximate within any finite factor for a large enough subspace rank. Second, it is known that the $\ell _2$ subspace estimation step is faulty when an estimated cluster has points from multiple subspaces. In this paper, we demonstrate both of these additional drawbacks, provide a proof for the former, and offer a solution to the latter through the use of a robust subspace recovery (RSR) method known as coherence pursuit (CoP). While many RSR methods have been developed in recent years, few can handle the case where the outliers are themselves low rank. We prove that CoP can handle low-rank outliers. This and its low computational complexity make it ideal to incorporate into the subspace estimation step of KSS. We demonstrate on synthetic data that CoP successfully rejects low-rank outliers and show that combining CoP with $K$ -Subspaces yields state-of-the-art clustering performance on canonical benchmark datasets.

Coherence Pursuit: Fast, Simple, and Robust Principal Component Analysis

This paper presents a remarkably simple, yet powerful, algorithm termed Coherence Pursuit (CoP) to robust Principal Component Analysis (PCA). As inliers lie in a low dimensional subspace and are mostly correlated, an inlier is likely to have strong mutual coherence with a large number of data points. By contrast, outliers either do not admit low dimensional structures or form small clusters. In either case, an outlier is unlikely to bear strong resemblance to a large number of data points. Given that, CoP sets an outlier apart from an inlier by comparing their coherence with the rest of the data points. The mutual coherences are computed by forming the Gram matrix of the normalized data points. Subsequently, the sought subspace is recovered from the span of the subset of the data points that exhibit strong coherence with the rest of the data. As CoP only involves one simple matrix multiplication, it is significantly faster than the state-of-the-art robust PCA algorithms. We derive analytical performance guarantees for CoP under different models for the distributions of inliers and outliers in both noise-free and noisy settings. CoP is the first robust PCA algorithm that is simultaneously non-iterative, provably robust to both unstructured and structured outliers, and can tolerate a large number of unstructured outliers.

Liquidity: essence, risk, institutions, markets and regulation: a report of the liquidity working party

AbstractThis study is a subjective synthesis of the work of many academics, supervisors and practitioners on the topic of liquidity and many of its multiple aspects. It borrows heavily and freely from those works in the pursuit of coherence, as this subject can be both confused and confusing. Although many hypotheses, both established and speculative, are referred to, none is proposed in this paper. In order to be of possible use to a range of readers, it roams from the most basic and elementary to some of the most recent and advanced. In pursuit of brevity and readability, in many instances it can do little more than introduce a particular feature and leave further investigation to the reader. Liquidity is clearly a topic with much unfinished business. Our ambition in writing this paper is threefold: first, to raise awareness amongst actuaries of the wide-ranging implications for actuarial work of liquidity; second, to bring some coherence to the manifold measures and uses of the concept of liquidity by attempting to synthesise some of the key elements of knowledge today; finally, to highlight some of the more high profile and open questions relevant for actuarial work. This paper makes many references to behaviour during the crisis and its aftermath; however, it is not intended to be a forensic analysis of the crisis attributing causality. The crisis has simply served as an experiment during which many things became observable.

At Last, a Coherent Theory of Involuntary Unemployment

Mainstream macro theorists reasonably insist on coherence with mainstream microeconomics. The early Keynesian separation of macro and micro into incompatible systems has long been unacceptable. In pursuit of coherence, modern model-builders work within the common market-centric framework of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE). The consensus model class, however, has fundamental problems, most notably including its inability to coherently accommodate involuntary job loss (especially in response to nominal demand disturbances), and consequently cannot be stabilization relevant. The inability of modern theorists to convincingly conjoin coherence and stabilization-relevance has marginalized their thinking, most recently forcing it to the policymaking sidelines during the perilous Great Recession and its aftermath. This paper shows how to restore stabilization relevance without giving up model coherence. The key to that happy outcome is the intuitive generalization of rational labor-related exchange from the marketplace to the large-establishment workplace. Two-venue general equilibrium modeling is an important, sensible innovation, introducing a powerful new frontier to macro analysis and opening up an extensive research agenda. An overview of that agenda is provided.

Energy-efficient ECG compression on wireless biosensors via minimal coherence sensing and weighted ℓ₁ minimization reconstruction.

Low energy consumption is crucial for body area networks (BANs). In BAN-enabled ECG monitoring, the continuous monitoring entails the need of the sensor nodes to transmit a huge data to the sink node, which leads to excessive energy consumption. To reduce airtime over energy-hungry wireless links, this paper presents an energy-efficient compressed sensing (CS)-based approach for on-node ECG compression. At first, an algorithm called minimal mutual coherence pursuit is proposed to construct sparse binary measurement matrices, which can be used to encode the ECG signals with superior performance and extremely low complexity. Second, in order to minimize the data rate required for faithful reconstruction, a weighted ℓ1 minimization model is derived by exploring the multisource prior knowledge in wavelet domain. Experimental results on MIT-BIH arrhythmia database reveals that the proposed approach can obtain higher compression ratio than the state-of-the-art CS-based methods. Together with its low encoding complexity, our approach can achieve significant energy saving in both encoding process and wireless transmission.

Seeking Coherence in Complexity? The Governance of Energy by Trade and Investment Institutions

in energy products and services and investments in the energy sector are central to energy security. Despite the rhetoric of energy independence, the world's leading economies inhabit a complex world of energy flows and institutions that seek to govern them. This article asks: how is energy governed by international trade and investment institutions and agreements; and how would it be governed by these institutions depending on alternative governance preferences? Drawing on recent developments, it outlines three sets of tensions - between emerging multipolarity and existing regimes, between states and markets, and a structural imperative between energy and climate - that are shaping the context for energy governance. The article then analyses, from the perspective of energy exporters, importers and firms, how the landscape of multilateral, plurilateral and regional agreements manages these challenges. The current institutional configuration reveals partially overlapping memberships, incoherent rules governing state-driven policies and market-led interventions, and inconsistent rules between energy and environmental concerns. In pursuit of coherence in this complex milieu, the article ends by outlining a schematic framework for institutional design. The design choices depend on countries' preferences for greater or lesser consistency in rules and on more integrated versus fragmented governance across institutions.

Introduction

INTRODUCTION. Wi, ith this fifth issue—the first of volume three—the SAIS Review is firmly established among the few first-rate American journals devoted entirely to reporting and analyzing the world scene. Indeed, it is distinguished among these journals by its felicitous blending of scholarship with newsworthiness and by the diversity as well as the quality of opinions and perspectives it encompasses. More wide-ranging in subjects than previous issues, which have featured groups of articles devoted to major themes, this issue is no less coherent even in its diversity. What do nuclear policies, U.S.-Soviet relations, the changing internal and external policies of China, critical developments in the Middle East and Africa, the economic and political issues of North-South relations, and human rights have in common? One may see them as a cross-section of the extensive agenda of American foreign policy or as principal elements in the changing international system. But in neither case are they unconnected items on a random list, like the episodic mishmash oftelevision news. Rather, each subject, to some extent and in some way, penetrates the other, whether it is the regional interplay of East-West and North-South relations; the functional fusion of military, economic, and political phenomena; the linkage between domestic and international politics; or, cutting across several ofthese convergent issues, the relationship of moral concerns to U.S. foreign policy. For most (perhaps all) readers, a collection of articles like this will be inspected in pieces, according to their special interests. Yet, in the round, the collection stands out as a representative exhibit of the complexity of contemporary international relations. The wonder is not that a government like ours, inescapably entangled in the interconnected strands of this complexity , frequently flounders in failures of comprehension, calculation, and consistency, but rather that it can cope at all. 2 SAIS REVIEW To the extent that it copes successfully, this cannot be the result of anything so grand as the "coherent national strategy" that the Reagan administration , like most incoming administrations, promised and proclaimed. Our governing institutions and processes are too pluralistic and cumbersome for that. Rather, what coherence there may be arises from a few simplifying themes of national purpose and policy that impose a certain order on the multitude of daily concerns flooding the in-boxes of the hard-pressed managers of foreign affairs, for whom reflection is an unobtainable luxury. If the administration gets these themes essentially right, substantive coherence may mitigate the costs ofprocedural chaos. Ifit gets them wrong, even retreat into the confusing improvisations of compromise between aspiration and reality will be better than the stubborn pursuit of coherence. But if you, dear reader, in the luxury of your imagination, unfettered by cables, clearances, and deadlines, should indulge your reflective wisdom by comprehending this SAIS Review in the round as well as in pieces, you may see whether you can fit the pieces of the puzzle of current issues into any better policy pattern than the one we have. Those who are adventurous enough to tackle this task should give special attention to the provocative essay by Professor Liska. For Liska, who has made a career of strategic thinking on the grand scale, here caps his copious contributions to a national strategy of East-West equilibrium with an appeal for reconstructing the international system. Perhaps few will find his strategic prescription spontaneously acceptable, but none should reject it before pondering the alternatives with equal vision and depth. Robert E. Osgood Christian A. Herter Professor ofAmerican Foreign Policy School ofAdvanced International Studies ...