University of Warwick

About: University of Warwick is a education organization based out in Coventry, Warwickshire, United Kingdom. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & White dwarf. The organization has 26212 authors who have published 77127 publications receiving 2666552 citations. The organization is also known as: Warwick University & The University of Warwick.

Securitization and the Construction of Security

Abstract: Those interested in the construction of security in contemporary international politics have increasingly turned to the conceptual framework of `securitization'. This article argues that while an important and innovative contribution, the securitization framework is problematically narrow in three senses. First, the form of act constructing security is defined narrowly, with the focus on the speech of dominant actors. Second, the context of the act is defined narrowly, with the focus only on the moment of intervention. Finally, the framework of securitization is narrow in the sense that the nature of the act is defined solely in terms of the designation of threats. In outlining this critique, the article points to possibilities for developing the framework further as well as for the need for those applying it to recognize both limits of their claims and the normative implications of their analysis. I conclude by pointing to how the framework might fit within a research agenda concerned with the broader construction of security.

An Empirical Comparison of Pruning Methods for Decision Tree Induction

Abstract: This paper compares five methods for pruning decision trees, developed from sets of examples. When used with uncertain rather than deterministic data, decision-tree induction involves three main stages—creating a complete tree able to classify all the training examples, pruning this tree to give statistical reliability, and processing the pruned tree to improve understandability. This paper concerns the second stage—pruning. It presents empirical comparisons of the five methods across several domains. The results show that three methods—critical value, error complexity and reduced error—perform well, while the other two may cause problems. They also show that there is no significant interaction between the creation and pruning methods.

Family firm research: the need for a methodological rethink

Abstract: The scale of family company activity in the United Kingdom was measured with regard to several family firm definitions. This study confirms that family companies are a numerically important group o...

Solving the KPZ equation

Abstract: We introduce a new concept of solution to the KPZ equation which is shown to extend the classical Cole-Hopf solution. This notion provides a factorisation of the Cole-Hopf solution map into a \universal" measurable map from the probability space into an explicitly described auxiliary metric space, composed with a new solution map that has very good continuity properties. The advantage of such a formulation is that it essentially provides a pathwise notion of a solution, together with a very detailed approximation theory. In particular, our construction completely bypasses the Cole-Hopf transform, thus laying the groundwork for proving that the KPZ equation describes the uctuations of systems in the KPZ universality class. As a corollary of our construction, we obtain very detailed new regularity results about the solution, as well as its derivative with respect to the initial condition. Other byproducts of the proof include an explicit approximation to the stationary solution of the KPZ equation, a well-posedness result for the Fokker-Planck equation associated to a particle diusing in a rough space-time dependent potential, and a new periodic homogenisation result for the heat equation with a space-time periodic potential. One ingredient in our construction is an example of a non-Gaussian rough path such that the area process of its natural approximations needs to be renormalised by a diverging term for the approximations to converge.

Multimethodology: Towards a framework for mixing methodologies

Abstract: In recent years the predilection for Systems/OR practice to be underpinned by a single methodology has been called into question, and reports on multimethodology projects are now filtering through into the literature This paper takes a closer look at multimethodology It outlines a number of different possibilities for combining methodologies, and considers why such a development might be desirable for more effective practice, in particular by focusing upon how it can deal more effectively with the richness of the real world and better assist through the various intervention stages The paper outlines some of the philosophical, cultural and cognitive feasibility issues that multimethodology raises It then describes a framework that can attend to the relative strengths of different methodologies and provide a basis for constructing multimethodology designs Finally it presents a systematic way of decomposing methodologies to identify detachable elements, and the paper concludes by outlining aspects of an agenda for further research that emerges out of the discussion