Minimum trace reconciliation, developed by Wickramasuriya et. al. (2019), is an innovation in the literature of forecast reconciliation. The proof, however, is indirect and not easy to extend to more general situations. This paper provides an alternative proof based on the first-order condition in the space of non-square matrix and argues that it is not only simpler but also can be extended to incorporate more general results on minimum weighted trace reconciliation in Panagiotelis et. al. (2021). Thus, our alternative proof not only has pedagogical value but also connects the results in the literature from a unified perspective.
How to make forecasts that (1) satisfy constraints, like accounting identities, and (2) are smooth over time? Solving this common forecasting problem manually is resource-intensive, but the existing literature provides little guidance on how to achieve both objectives. This paper proposes a new method to smooth mixed-frequency multivariate time series subject to constraints by integrating the minimum-trace reconciliation and Hodrick-Prescott filter. With linear constraints, the method has a closed-form solution, convenient for a high-dimensional environment. Three examples show that the proposed method can reproduce the smoothness of professional forecasts subject to various constraints and slightly improve forecast performance.
Conceived at the moment of Girard’s death in November 2015, and written up in the period of strategic stock-taking ‘after Girard’, this book aims to suggest briefly and clearly to a wide English-speaking audience that: (i) Girard has in fact cracked the enigma of the obscurely ‘foundational’ complicity between violence and the sacred; (ii) that his ‘mimetic theory’ and his writings on biblical texts, when read as a fundamental ‘anthropological argument’ continuous with Darwin, bring formidable new light to a vast range of enigmas and problems: terrorist violence, the new atheism, the function of world’s oldest temple, the Good Friday Agreement... In counterpoint to this (largely) ‘dark’ matter, they illuminate superbly (‘from below’) the nature and ways of creation, revelation, redemption... and thus also of Reconciliation. Such insights provide a novel and exciting resource for scanning the knots, the black holes and the hidden ‘sacrificial’ logic that still secretly shapes cultural, social and political life today. The analytical tool-set Girard supplies can help shape the key dialogues needed to prepare delivering practices of reconciliation--and to avoid auto-generated ‘apocalypses’-- in the world of tomorrow.
The proceedings set LNCS 11727, 11728, 11729, 11730, and 11731 constitute the proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Artificial Neural Networks, ICANN 2019, held in Munich, Germany, in September 2019. The total of 277 full papers and 43 short papers presented in these proceedings was carefully reviewed and selected from 494 submissions. They were organized in 5 volumes focusing on theoretical neural computation; deep learning; image processing; text and time series; and workshop and special sessions.
This is the Final Report of Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission and its six-year investigation of the residential school system for Aboriginal youth and the legacy of these schools. This report, the summary volume, includes the history of residential schools, the legacy of that school system, and the full text of the Commission's 94 recommendations for action to address that legacy. This report lays bare a part of Canada's history that until recently was little-known to most non-Aboriginal Canadians. The Commission discusses the logic of the colonization of Canada's territories, and why and how policy and practice developed to end the existence of distinct societies of Aboriginal peoples. Using brief excerpts from the powerful testimony heard from Survivors, this report documents the residential school system which forced children into institutions where they were forbidden to speak their language, required to discard their clothing in favour of institutional wear, given inadequate food, housed in inferior and fire-prone buildings, required to work when they should have been studying, and subjected to emotional, psychological and often physical abuse. In this setting, cruel punishments were all too common, as was sexual abuse. More than 30,000 Survivors have been compensated financially by the Government of Canada for their experiences in residential schools, but the legacy of this experience is ongoing today. This report explains the links to high rates of Aboriginal children being taken from their families, abuse of drugs and alcohol, and high rates of suicide. The report documents the drastic decline in the presence of Aboriginal languages, even as Survivors and others work to maintain their distinctive cultures, traditions, and governance. The report offers 94 calls to action on the part of governments, churches, public institutions and non-Aboriginal Canadians as a path to meaningful reconciliation of Canada today with Aboriginal citizens. Even though the historical experience of residential schools constituted an act of cultural genocide by Canadian government authorities, the United Nation's declaration of the rights of aboriginal peoples and the specific recommendations of the Commission offer a path to move from apology for these events to true reconciliation that can be embraced by all Canadians.
How does a newly democratized nation constructively address the past to move from a divided history to a shared future? How do people rebuild coexistence after violence? The International IDEA Handbook on Reconciliation after Violent Conflict presents a range of tools that can be, and have been, employed in the design and implementation of reconciliation processes. Most of them draw on the experience of people grappling with the problems of past violence and injustice. There is no "right answer" to the challenge of reconciliation, and so the Handbook prescribes no single approach. Instead, it presents the options and methods, with their strengths and weaknesses evaluated, so that practitioners and policy-makers can adopt or adapt them, as best suits each specific context. Also available in a French language version.
This book commemorates the work done by Tony Hoare and published under the title Communicating Sequential Processes in the 1978 August issue of the Communications of ACM. The British Computer Society's specialist group Formal Aspects of Computing Science organized a meeting on July 7-8, 2004, in London, to mark the occasion of 25 years of CSP. The 19 carefully reviewed and revised full papers by leading researchers celebrate, reflect upon, and look beyond the first quarter-century of CSP's contributions to computer science. The papers explore the impact of CSP on many areas ranging from semantics and logic, through the design of parallel programming languages to applications varying from distributed software and parallel computing to information security, Web services, and concurrent hardware circuits.
The incomprehensible notion of a very large chunk of ice or rock from outer space smashing into the Earth has only become mainstream within the past two centuries. Though early writers imagined the utterly fantastic consequences of comet collisions and speculated on the devastation they might wreak, it was not until the 1980s when scientists finally resolved that dinosaurs were extinguished by an asteroid 66 million years ago. This startling announcement captivated the media and tilted the science fiction world but in reality, history may have been punctuated repeatedly by such events. This book collects and analyzes ideas of asteroid, comet, and planetary impacts with Earth spanning two centuries, from the first realization of extinctions in fossil records to the new millennium, reflected in scores of sci-fi stories, films, and televised science documentaries. The author examines social and geopolitical fears tied to the prospect of a cosmic-borne catastrophe. Science, fiction, and speculation are artfully melded.
