Stein's Theory Research Articles

Learning the mean: A neural network approach

One of the key problems in machine learning theory and practice is setting the correct value of the regularization parameter; this is particularly crucial in Kernel Machines such as Support Vector Machines, Regularized Least Square or Neural Networks with Weight Decay terms. Well known methods such as Leave-One-Out (or GCV) and Evidence Maximization offer a way of predicting the regularization parameter. This work points out the failure of these methods for predicting the regularization parameter when coping with the, apparently trivial and here introduced, regularized mean problem; this is the simplest form of Tikhonov regularization, that, in turn, is the primal form of the learning algorithm Regularized Least Squares. This controlled environment gives the possibility to define oracular notions of regularization and to experiment new methodologies for predicting the regularization parameter that can be extended to the more general regression case. The analysis stems from James–Stein theory, shows the equivalence of shrinking and regularization and is carried using multiple kernels learning for regression and SVD analysis; a mean value estimator is built, first via a rational function and secondly via a balanced neural network architecture suitable for estimating statistical quantities and gaining symmetric expectations. The obtained results show that a non-linear analysis of the sample and a non-linear estimation of the mean obtained by neural networks can be profitably used to improve the accuracy of mean value estimations, especially when a small number of realizations is provided.

Boundedness of Singular Integrals on Multiparameter Weighted Hardy Spaces $\text{{\textit{H}}}^\text{{\textit{p}}}_{\text{{\textit{w}}}}\ (\mathbb{R}^{\text{{\textit{n}}}}\times \mathbb{R}^{\text{{\textit{m}}}})$

We apply the discrete version of Calderon’s identity and Littlewood–Paley–Stein theory with weights to derive the \((H^p_w, H^p_w)\) and \((H^p_w, L^p_w) (0 1 for w ∈ Ap to the case of weighted Hardy spaces \(H^p_w\) for p ≤ 1, but under a weaker assumption that w belongs to the class of product A ∞ weights with respect to rectangles in product spaces.

Applications of Edith Stein's empathy theory to Library Science

Library Science has traditionally been a discipline which operates from a pragmatic rather than a philosophical framework. Theory is traditionally superseded by practice, rendering librarianship a field lacking in concrete foundations. However, philosophy, particularly phenomenology, harbors powerful ramifications for improving both the theoretical underpinnings and practical applications of the field. In particular, phenomenologist Edith Stein's research on empathy has the unique potential to advance librarianship by providing a model for better understanding of patron needs. In order to translate Stein's theory into practice, the classic feminist strategy of consciousness-raising provides a novel methodology.

Edith Stein on Evolution

Edith Stein on Evolution Walter Redmond (bio) The entelechy … is living power, as if something of the creating breath were left behind in it.1 Edith Stein Edith Stein (St. Theresa Benedicta of the Cross, 1891–1942) sketched out her thoughts on evolution in the sixth and final chapter of Potenz und Akt, the postdoctoral thesis she wrote in 1931 as part of her application for a lectureship in the University of Freiburg im Breisgau.2 Today our theological problem with evolution is that divine guidance seems redundant since mutations occur at random. In Stein's time scientists had yet to understand the workings of genetic material, but she did indeed address this "on purpose or by chance" question.3 Her answer was strongly teleological (she often used the word "telos"), but "creationism" was not her worry. The Catholic Church at the time was more concerned about human origins than about evolution as such.4 Stein of course respected the positions of the Church, but refers to them in only three footnotes (291, 308, 324). Her teleology is the Thomistic analogy of being (analogia entis) set in a temporal framework: the ascending levels of creation —the "hierarchy [End Page 153] of formed matter" (matter, plants, animals, human beings)—become stages in evolution. In her philosophy of science Stein is similar to other thinkers of her time who suggested counters to a mechanistic view of life: the entelechy of Hans Driesch (also prominent in Stein's theory), Henri Bergson's Élan vital, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's hominisation, and the "Trieb" of Stein's friend, Hedwig Conrad-Martius.5 Indeed, Stein worked out her thoughts on evolution "in contrast to the Metaphysische Gespräche by Conrad-Martius."6 What Stein said of Conrad-Martius was true of herself in a way: she seems to be cautiously "feeling her way forward." She was juggling not only philosophy and science but two quite different philosophical approaches: the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and the scholasticism of St. Thomas Aquinas. Within phenomenology itself, her "formal" philosophical analysis alternates with "material" or "empirical" scientific description. As a phenomenologist, she focuses on "possible worlds," conceivable "in principle"; but she must also address scientific theory that accounts for "our own sphere" (22).7 At times it is unclear which of the possibilities she thinks is actual. This interplay between the "ontic" and the "empirical" may be one reason why she titled her work "potency and act." After recounting the origin of Potency and Act and summarizing Conrad-Martius's cosmology, I shall explain Stein's views on taxonomy and on the evolution of living things as well as of human beings and their communities as she developed them in this work. Then I shall describe her criticism of Conrad-Martius and offer a final reflection. Potency and Act Stein's philosophical development falls into two stages. She did her early work as a phenomenologist, but after becoming a Catholic she began to pursue her "proper mission," her "life's task": merging [End Page 154] phenomenology and Scholasticism, in particular the philosophy of Aquinas.8 She was not content to "contrast" the two philosophies; she wanted to "fuse" them into her own "philosophical system."9 She was searching for a "perennial philosophy," "something beyond ages and peoples, common to all who honestly seek the truth."10 Potency and Act is the second of three works in which Stein carried out her program.11 The first was a "play" in which Husserl and Aquinas appear on stage together. At the suggestion of Martin Heidegger she revised it for the journal of phenomenology where it appeared in 1919.12 Potency and Act was written in 1931 but published for the first time in 1998. The third was her major work, Finite and Eternal Being, written in 1935 and also published posthumously in 1950. After teaching for a number of years at the college of the Dominican sisters in Speyer (1922–29) and lecturing widely in Germany and abroad, Stein applied for a teaching position at the University of Freiburg. At the beginning of 1931, soon after the chairs for philosophy, Martin Heidegger and Martin Honecker (responsible for Catholic appointments) told her...

Upstaging the “Death of the Subject”. Gertrude Stein, the Theater, and the Self-Differential Self

While Gertrude Stein is often celebrated as a proto-postmodernist whose formal experiments destabilize traditional notions of subjectivity, a reading of her little-discussed Lectures in America reveals that her poetics actually relies on the anxious suppression of the threat of the loss of a sovereign form of subjectivity. Following Rei Terada's distinction between subjects and “self-differential selves,” it can be shown that Stein's theory of the emotions and her account of the emergence of her poetics theorize the theater as the site of an inescapable encounter with the self's difference from itself. By deploying an elaborate rhetoric of the uncanny, the lectures aim at containing the threat of the loss of a strong subjectivity by locating it in the theater alone.

The Effects of the Organizational Structure On Asset Management

We study how the strategies and performance of an asset management company are affected by its internal organizational structure. Relying on Stein's (2002) theory of organizations, we argue that a more hierarchical structure reduces the incentives to collect soft information and to engage in proximity investment. This should lower portfolio concentration, increase managerial herding and reduce performance. We use information on the organizational structure of all the US mutual funds and insurance-managed funds investing in US corporate bonds. We show that more hierarchical structures invest less in firms located close to them and deliver lower performance. An additional layer in the hierarchical structure reduces the average performance by 24 basis points per month. At the same time, more hierarchical structures tend to herd more and to hold less concentrated portfolios. We also find that changes in fund structure quickly find their way into the behavior of fund managers. Overall, the organizational structure affects performance slightly more for mutual funds than insurance-managed funds, while it impacts proximity investment, herding and portfolio concentration more for insurance-managed funds than mutual funds.

L. v. シュタインの教育行政理論の特質とその歴史的背景-三月革命後オーストリアの公教育体制の歴史的展開に注目して-

L. v. シュタインの教育行政理論の特質とその歴史的背景-三月革命後オーストリアの公教育体制の歴史的展開に注目して-

The Effects of the Organizational Structure on Asset Management

We study how the strategies and performance of an asset management company are affected by its internal organizational structure. Relying on Stein's (2002) theory of organizations, we argue that a more hierarchical structure reduces the incentives to collect soft information and to engage in proximity investment. This should lower portfolio concentration, increase managerial herding and reduce performance. We use information on the organizational structure of all the US mutual funds and insurance-managed funds investing in US corporate bonds. We show that more hierarchical structures invest less in firms located close to them and deliver lower performance. An additional layer in the hierarchical structure reduces the average performance by 24 basis points per month. At the same time, more hierarchical structures tend to herd more and to hold less concentrated portfolios. We also find that changes in fund structure quickly find their way into the behavior of fund managers. Overall, the organizational structure affects performance slightly more for mutual funds than insurance-managed funds, while it impacts proximity investment, herding and portfolio concentration more for insurance-managed funds than mutual funds.

“Suppose a grammar uses invention”: Gertrude Stein's Theory of Rhetorical Grammar

This article elucidates Gertrude Stein's theory of rhetorical grammar by locating it in her studies at Harvard University/Radcliffe College in the mid-1890s and by demonstrating how for Stein the study of grammar correlates with rhetoric's first canon, invention. In her experimental primer, How to Write (1931), a book about the craft of composition, Stein devotes chapters to vocabulary, sentences, paragraphs, grammar, and forensics, but refuses to reduce writing to mechanical correctness. For Stein, a grammar that supposes invention as both discovering and creating does something much more than offer pre-existing rules for writers to follow. Placing Gertrude Stein's writing practices in the rhetorical traditions of the nineteenth century reveals a Gertrude Stein who is not necessarily or not only a literary figure, but rather a twentieth-century rhetorician who refigures past traditions to teach a new century how to write.

Toward the Subjectivity of the Human Person

Edith Stein's work revolves around one central question, namely, the identity of the person. Discussions of this topic are already present in Stein's dissertation. I examine her theory of identity, developed throughout her work and maturing in her magnum opus, Finite and Eternal Being, in three stages, each of which is historically relevant and original. First, Stein's development of the question is examined phenomenologically, focusing on Stein's early work. Second, I will show how Stein takes her early phenomenological positions concerning the nature of the human person and combines them with Greek and medieval insights into ontology. Here I focus on Finite and Eternal Being. Finally, I concentrate on the meaning and value of stein's theory of identity as it contributes to a theory of the person in connection with Greek and medieval metaphysics, and a phenomenological philosophy of consciousness. Together, the three stages of the essay will demonstrate Stein's systematic contribution toward a theory of personal identity, one ot the most difficult problems of philosophy.

The Political Morality of Evidence Law

This review essay discusses Alex Stein's recent book Foundations of Evidence Law. It focuses on explicating the book's general normative framework and then offers a critique of that framework from within the domain of political morality. Part I discusses Stein's views about the purpose of evidence law and the importance of error allocation. Part II explains how Stein derives his normative principles from probability theory. Part III discusses the book's master principle—the principle of maximal individualization. Part IV explains how this principle operates, along with two additional principles (``equality" and ``equal best"), to regulate evidentiary issues. Part V evaluates the overall theory in light of two goals that the law of evidence must satisfy to a significant degree in order to be justified in terms of political morality: error reduction and the fair allocation of the risk of errors that do occur. The critique developed in this essay offers some reasons to question the extent to which Stein's theory would achieve either goal. The general theme of the critique is that a greater focus on the epistemology of proof would also lead to a more morally justified proof process, and thus that the epistemic and moral domains are more intertwined than the book supposes.

Epistemology & the Law of Evidence: Four Doubts About Alex Stein's Foundations of Evidence Law

In Foundations of Evidence Law, Alex Stein provides an innovative understanding of the law of evidence. He divides evidence law into two distinct domains, moral and epistemological, and specifies principles which govern each. According to Stein, the primary domain is epistemological and morality picks up what the epistemology leaves off. In this paper, I dispute the role Stein gives to epistemology. I raise four doubts to undermine Stein's epistemological apparatus and challenge its usability, sustainability and justifiability. I also argue that whilst epistemology can give a broader understanding of the issues involved, it cannot provide principles or justifications for the law of evidence. The difficulties in Stein's theory result not only from the particular epistemological apparatus he develops, but also from his attempt to establish evidential principles that are epistemological in nature.

Vector-valued Littlewood–Paley–Stein theory for semigroups

We develop a generalized Littlewood–Paley theory for semigroups acting on L p -spaces of functions with values in uniformly convex or smooth Banach spaces. We characterize, in the vector-valued setting, the validity of the one-sided inequalities concerning the generalized Littlewood–Paley–Stein g-function associated with a subordinated Poisson symmetric diffusion semigroup by the martingale cotype and type properties of the underlying Banach space. We show that in the case of the usual Poisson semigroup and the Poisson semigroup subordinated to the Ornstein–Uhlenbeck semigroup on R n , this general theory becomes more satisfactory (and easier to be handled) in virtue of the theory of vector-valued Calderón–Zygmund singular integral operators.

The Science of Superstition: Gertrude Stein, William James, and the Formation of Belief

The Science of Superstition:Gertrude Stein, William James, and the Formation of Belief Stephanie L. Hawkins (bio) [O]ur science is a drop, our ignorance a sea. Whatever else be certain, this at least is certain—that the world of our present natural knowledge is enveloped in a larger world of some sort of whose residual properties we at present can frame no positive idea. —William James, "Is Life Worth Living?" Accuracy is by and by to be slightly poisoned by inaccuracy. —Gertrude Stein, "The Universe or Hand-Reading" Although Gertrude Stein's rejection of the supernatural—along with any accusations that her own writing derived from mystical sources—is well-documented in her autobiographical works, what Stein says and what she does in her writing appear to be at odds. Despite Stein's disclaimers, references to superstitions and prophecies abound in her works, a curiosity that has been mostly ignored in Stein's oeuvre.1 Stein was, at the very least, consistent in her inconsistency. In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, for example, Stein extolled the virtues of the mystical paintings of Juan Gris, even as [End Page 60] she affirmed the authority of her own empiricist approach to writing in all its visual detail and linguistic exactitude. Just as many turn-of-the-century scientists were caught up in the vogue of spiritualism and psychical research, so too was Stein herself captivated by metaphysical speculation, in spite of her self-professed agnosticism. Although Stein was a nonpracticing Jew, a variety of Christian saints populate her poetry and prose experiments. Stein's references to religion and the religious iconography of sainthood have been given considerable attention,2 but Stein scholarship has left untouched the references to superstitions that suffuse her works of the 1930s and 1940s, in which Stein was consumed by problems of identity and narration. In passages throughout Everybody's Autobiography, for instance, Stein most forcefully articulates her interest in the sign-systems with which superstitions and occult pseudoscience are engaged. In this sequel to the enormously successful Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, she views superstitious belief systems from an anthropological perspective, claiming that it is only "natural to believe in superstitions and hand-reading and predictions." Stein goes on to indicate her personal preference for the more inaccurate art of "palm-reading" because "predictions are a little more frightening" (Everybody's 155). Stein's references to superstitious rituals and beliefs are features that call attention to the idiosyncratic narrative structure so characteristic of her later works and their eschewal of beginnings, middles, and ends. For Stein, the destruction of organic unity in literature also marked the demise of nineteenth-century narrative realism—a demise Stein was eager to hasten. In what follows, I propose reexamining Stein's theory of identity and narration in terms of her engagement with turn-of-the-century skepticism toward positivist science and toward the authority of formulations based on the observation of empirical evidence. An investigation of the competing scientific and pseudoscientific themes and narratives in Stein's poetry and prose helps to illuminate her complex theory of narration. Rather than accord literal status to Stein's somewhat ironical statements about her attraction to palmistry, it is more important to understand such references to pseudoscience and superstitions as a modernist revision of what nineteenth-century science classified as real: the visible, physical, and quantifiable realm of material reality. For Stein the "real" is not only what can be seen, but more fully what an individual believes and the patterns, linguistic and narratological, by which those beliefs are formed. As I see it, Stein's thematic treatment of superstition in her experimental writings seeks to account for, and to a certain extent reproduce, the cognitive processes by which the mind engages the world. Though Stein claimed to be working [End Page 61] against the grain of nineteenth-century literary tradition, in her effort to capture the motions of the mind as it detects and interprets natural and cultural signs, she both incorporates and transforms conventional narrative.3 In Stein's works of the 1930s, the very act of writing is itself an index to the interior geography of the human mind...

Learning with Gertrude Stein: Playgrounds of Aggression and Grace

Learning with Gertrude Stein:Playgrounds of Aggression and Grace James Peck (bio) and Kelly Howe (bio) The thing one gradually comes to find out is that one has no identity that is when one is in the act of doing anything. Identity is recognition, you know who you are because you and others remember anything about yourself but essentially you are not that when you are doing anything. I am I because my little dog knows me but, creatively speaking the little dog knowing that you are you and your recognizing that he knows, that is what destroys creation. That is what makes school. —Gertrude Stein, "What Are Masterpieces and Why Are There so Few of Them" Surprises We are Jim Peck and Kelly Howe, an assistant professor and a senior at Muhlenberg College, a small, private liberal arts school in Allentown, Pennsylvania with a flourishing theatre program. In the spring of 2002, we and the sixteen other students in THR 380 Special Topics: Meyerhold, Brecht, and Stein spent a semester investigating the theatres of Vsevolod Meyerhold, Bertolt Brecht, and Gertrude Stein. Throughout the semester, we worked to combine theory and practice; we read and discussed key texts, and the students made many theatre pieces using the ideas of these modernist luminaries. The theatre pieces took two forms: short, quickly rehearsed theatrical compositions designed to help students embody theoretical concepts, and more lengthily rehearsed scenes from pertinent plays (Mayakovsky's The Bedbug; Brecht's The Good Person of Szechwan, Stein's Identity). Every student wrote three short papers (one on each figure) and a longer, research-oriented paper on a topic of his or her choice. We studied each artist for a third of the semester (approximately five weeks), beginning with Meyerhold, continuing with Brecht, and concluding with Stein. For each unit, students worked in a collaborative group of five or six; when we moved on to a new artist, students got a new set of collaborators. Jim assigned a "director" for each working group, though in practice the projects resulted largely from processes of collective creation. Everyone acted frequently and functioned as "director" once. This essay focuses on the work created by students in the final third of the semester in response to the ideas, practices, and texts of Gertrude Stein. Our study of each artist was fruitful; students and professor learned a great deal about the ideas and practices of these people, and students created much smart, [End Page 379] exciting theatre. That said, the work with Stein compels our attention here because it also raised thorny, interesting pedagogical questions. We have come to believe that Stein's artistic practice contains an incipient pedagogy that both challenges traditional models of knowledge and offers potentially transformative methods of teaching and learning. We aim to contribute to an emerging intersection between pedagogy and performance studies perhaps best exemplified by the essays in Nathan Stucky and Cynthia Wimmer's recent anthology, Teaching Performance Studies. We're especially interested in embodiment and affect in the classroom. "I think we can agree," writes Elyse Lamm Pineau in "Critical Performative Pedagogy: Fleshing out the Politics of Liberatory Education," "that bodies in the classroom are overwhelmingly inscribed as absence. Steeped in the tradition of Cartesian dualism, students and teachers effectively have been schooled to "forget" their bodies when they enter the classroom in order that they might give themselves more fully to the life of the mind" (45). Something similar might be said of emotions; so often, the traditional academy positions feelings as obstacles to thought, impediments to rational analysis and sound judgment. Working with Stein unhinges these prevalent binary oppositions in generative ways. Stein poses bodies and feelings as pathways to thought—as entrees to the most profound insights into self, other, and the relationship between them. Accordingly, she potentially prompts learning of the most consequential sort—intellectual, emotional, and ethical. We want to trace the trajectory of this learning in one class and extrapolate some possible implications of Stein's theatrical theory for pedagogy generally. Our unit on Stein began with Jim offering a synopsis of Stein's dramaturgy. Though not particularly well-known as a dramatist, Stein wrote over seventy plays and...

On Riesz transforms for Laguerre expansions

We prove that Riesz transforms and conjugate Poisson integrals associated with the multi-dimensional Laguerre semigroup are bounded in L p, 1<p<∞ . Our main tools are appropriately defined square functions and the Littlewood–Paley–Stein theory.

Double reentrant superconductor-insulator transition in thin TiN films

We studied the superconductor-insulator transition in very thin films of TiN (and NbN) at very low temperature $(T=35\mathrm{mK})$ as a function of sheet resistance and magnetic field. The critical temperature dependence versus sheet resistance follows the Finkel'stein theory for homogeneous films. A TiN sample very close to the critical point exhibits a double reentrant behavior below $T=150\mathrm{mK}$ as the magnetic field increases. At large magnetic field and very low temperature a negative magnetoresistance is observed.

Out of Air: Theorizing the Art Object in Gertrude Stein and Wyndham Lewis

According to Gertrude Stein, the phenomenological space of the beholder is distinct from the space of the art object. Instead of producing an art that merges content and context—a painting and its beholder's place, a poem and its reader's point of view—Stein makes everything about the beholder or reader irrelevant to her art. She accomplishes this aim in Tender Buttons (1914) by removing punctuation. Although in discussing Wyndham Lewis's novelistic dramatization of two characters intruding into a painting (The Childermass [1928]) I describe exactly the opposite of Stein's theory of art, and although Lewis himself saw his position as completely opposed to Stein, Lewis also advocated an art that imagined the beholder as irrelevant.

Commentary: Helicobacter as the 'environmental factor' in Susser and Stein's cohort theory of peptic ulcer disease.

Commentary: Helicobacter as the 'environmental factor' in Susser and Stein's cohort theory of peptic ulcer disease.

Orthogonal Polynomials in Stein's Method

Stein's method provides a way of finding approximations to the distribution, ρ say, of a random variable, which at the same time gives estimates of the approximation error involved. In essence the method is based on a defining equation, or equivalently an operator, of the distribution ρ and a related Stein equation. Up to now it was not clear which equation to take. One could think of a lot of equations. We show how for a broad class of distributions, there is one convenient equation. We give a systematic treatment, including the Stein equation and its solution. A key tool in Stein's theory is the generator method developed by Barbour and we suggest employing the generator of a Markov process for the operator of the Stein equation. For a given distribution there may be various Markov processes which fit in Barbour's method and, up to now, it was still not clear which Markov process to take to obtain good results. We show how for a broad class of distributions there is a special Markov process, a birth and death process, or a diffusion, which takes a leading role in the analysis. Furthermore, a key role is played by the classical orthogonal polynomials. It turns out that the defining operator is based on a hypergeometric difference or differential equation, which lies at the heart of the classical orthogonal polynomials. Furthermore, the spectral representation of the transition probabilities of the Markov process involved are in terms of orthogonal polynomials closely related to the distribution to be approximated. This systematic treatment together with the introduction of orthogonal polynomials in the analysis seems to be new. Furthermore some earlier uncovered examples like the beta, the Student's t, and the hypergeometric distribution are now worked out.