No / The marriage of computation, visual representation, and interactive thinking supports intensive analysis. The goal is not only to permit users to detect expected events, such as might be predicted by models, but also to help users discover the unexpected—the surprising anomalies, changes, patterns, and relationships that are then examined and assessed to develop new insight. The Guest Editors discuss the key issues and challenges associated with discovering the unexpected, as well as introduce the articles that make up this Special Issue.

June 26, 2020 marked the passing of H.R.51 through the House of Representatives, a historic moment in the long fight for DC's statehood. This fight is not merely anchored by an argument about taxation without representation; it is centered on returning voting rights removed from the nation's capital nearly 230 years ago. Statehood is an argument about the reparations of equality being given to a city built on the institution of slavery, embracing parts of a city divided by borders visible and hidden, and revealing cultural contexts hidden in plain sight behind the federal city. Given this complex background, there were numerous essential elements that were paramount to a critical study of what a 51st state capitol building should include. Though this self-designed brief raised a number of questions, none was more central than the relationship between aesthetics and representation within the typology of the American state capitol. The architecture of politics is often the built manifestation of ideals, policies, and values. In times of discord and unrest, we are reminded that architecture can represent the core systems of a society, exhibiting underlying truths that may have been ignored or intentionally concealed. There can be an architecture of slavery as much as an architecture of freedom. There can be architectures of oppression as well as architectures of democracies. The natural starting point for the project began with a comprehensive survey of U.S. state capitols, which share a lineage of classical architectural elements and styles inextricably linked to the Founding Father's desire to embed the United States with an origin story descending from the aesthetic, political, and social ideals of ancient Western civilizations. This thesis asks, for a (new) state that has been denied representation for over 200 years, should these same architectural ideals be embedded in its state building, or should a different symbology, aesthetics, materiality, or origin story be reoriented and introduced? However, it also became clear that site selection would be of critical importance to this project. The result of months of research led me to believe that although the building's aesthetic decisions might challenge normative architectural forms, the appropriate site for a Washington, Douglass Commonwealth State Capitol would also be one that honored and found its place within the context of Washington's symbolic plan. The site of RFK Stadium was ultimately selected because of its accessibility, its planned demolition, and its alignment with the United States Capitol. Through its placement as the epilogue to L'Enfant's unfinished plan for Washington, this site not only recognizes the importance of history and lineage, but also reorients the new state government's political nucleus, ultimately presenting ideas about freedom and democracy through a contemporary interpretation of the classic state capitol's form and planning. Overall, this thesis seeks not to be a final answer, but an investigation of some of the critical issues involved in this topic, a proposal of dissent from the expectations of systematic oppression, and an invitation to start a dialogue about a complex, multifaceted, and prescient design prompt. / Master of Architecture / June 26, 2020 marked the passing of H.R.51 through the House of Representatives, a historic moment in the long fight for DC's statehood. Over 200 years of history led to June 26, but events such as the reduced funding of COVID-19 care, tear gassing of protesters at Lafayette Square, and the subsequent groundbreaking of Black Lives Matter Plaza exacerbated the urgency of Statehood for both DC residents and outside observers alike. This was also the moment I realized what this thesis could be about. It seemed somehow wrong to spend a year tackling a project that did not relate to politics, equality, or social justice; the core passions that drive my pursuit of architecture. During our recent lockdown, I read a number of books that inspired this project, but one in particular came to haunt me. In Isabel Wilkerson's Caste, she writes about an infamous photo taken of a 1930s Hamburg shipyard, a crowd of men raising their arms to salute Hitler. All but one man, who exhibited dissent by not raising his arm. Wilkerson asks, what will we do to be that one man in the crowd? What does it take to not be complicit in the face of genocide and oppression? Watching current events, in relation to the world, the nation, and our profession, made me consider our complicity as architects in systems of racism and oppression, and what we, as designers, can do to raise our voices now instead of later. This project seeks to examine not only the issues that brought Washington, D.C.'s fight for statehood to a boiling point, but also the underlying systemic problems that have framed the argument for it. I've come to respect and support statehood after reading, researching, and listening to the incredible resources (especially Chocolate City), supporting HR51's ratification. This is not merely an argument about taxation without representation; it is about returning voting rights removed from the nation's capital nearly 230 years ago. It is about giving equality, harmony, and belonging to a city built on the institution of slavery. It is about embracing and including the parts of this city divided by borders visible and hidden. It is about honoring a city of vibrant cultures and stories, known for their ability to triumph in the face of adversity. This research has raised a number of questions. Architecturally, what would a capitol building for the 51st state look like? What are the inherent values that would be expressed in its design? The architecture of politics is often the built manifestation of ideals, policies, and values. In times of discord and unrest, we are reminded that architecture can represent the core systems of a society, exhibiting underlying truths that may have been ignored or intentionally concealed. There can be an architecture of slavery as much as an architecture of freedom. There can be architectures of oppression as well as architectures of democracies. The natural starting point for this research is to look at the history of U.S. state capitols, a lineage of classically-inspired buildings based on the philosophical and architectural ideals of Ancient civilizations. Do these architectural symbols signify the things we think they do? The aim of this research is to ask this question: For a (new) state that has been denied representation for over 200 years, should these same architectural ideals be embedded in its state building? I hope that this project can offer an opportunity to start a meaningful dialogue on how the ideals of freedom and democracy can be expressed through architecture, and how to design a building for a new chapter of history. What can we do to be that one (designer) in the crowd? How can a building dissent from a history or system of oppression, and how can we raise our voices for the people and architectures that can't necessarily raise their own?

In this paper, I will defend two methodological theses, one negative and one positive, about how to develop a holistic theory of content for mental representations that avoids a problem peculiar to holistic theories, viz., the problem of content instability. The relevant debate between holists and anti-holists has focused on whether this problem provides an in principle barrier to developing a plausible holistic theory. On this front, the holists have won; defenders of holistic theories have convincingly argued that the anti-holists do not have a cogent argument from the problem of content instability to the impossibility of developing a plausible holistic theory. However, beyond this, little has been said about how to develop a holistic theory that avoids the problematic consequences of content instability; all that has been established is that it appears to be, in principle, possible to do so. This paper should contribute to making progress in this area. The two theses I will defend are about how to generate useful constraints on holistic theories so that they avoid content instability. The negative thesis of this paper is that the strategy of generating constraints suggested by the holists' response to anti-holist arguments, viz., appealing to properties of theories' determination functions, is a non-starter. The positive thesis of this paper is that the best way to develop useful stability constraints is to appeal to the explanatory role(s) that representations play in cognitive science theories. / Master of Arts

This study considers the case of representation of transgender people and issues on American fictional television from 2004 to 2014, a period which represents a steady surge in transgender television characters relative to what came before, and prefigures a more recent burgeoning of transgender characters since 2014. The study thus positions the period of analysis as an historical period in the changing representation of transgender characters. A discourse analysis is employed that not only assesses the way that transgender characters have been represented, but contextualizes American fictional television depictions of transgender people within the broader sociopolitical landscape in which those depictions have emerged and which they likely inform. Television representations and the social milieu in which they are situated are considered as parallel, mutually informing discourses, including the ways in which those representations have been engaged discursively through reviews, news coverage and, in some cases, blogs. / Media & Communication

Much of the walking that we do in our daily lives is dull, but sometimes, unexpectedly, it can be revelatory. During these moments, through what phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty calls the "lived perspective" of walking, we experience a merging of our inner and outer worlds and achieve greater self-awareness. Although most of our experience in the landscape is through movement, we rarely design for such spaces. Using the hypothesis that terrorist threats and an aging infrastructure may lead to the rerouting of the CSX Railway south of Washington, D.C., shutting down the existing line, I propose to convert the CSX Railway bridge that crosses the Anacostia River in Southeast Washington to an open public space. While other portions of the track may be demolished and returned to the wide avenues envisioned by L'Enfant or renovated as trolley tracks, the CSX bridge could be renovated to provide a link between the neighborhood of Capitol Hill and the Anacostia River through a pedestrian walkway. The methodology I use to explore this thesis is two-fold. I study several environments, from site-specific artworks to monuments to large urban parks. I also study fields that explore the experiential nature of perception such as art and philosophy, and use the freedom of expression that drawing allows as a tool to inform the design of spaces that can enable us to experience a state in which our mind, body, and vision are intertwined. / Master of Landscape Architecture

In this work, we present an unsupervised representation learning approach for learning rich spatiotemporal features from videos without the supervision from semantic labels. We propose to learn the spatiotemporal features by training a 3D convolutional neural network (CNN) using video completion as a surrogate task. Using a large collection of unlabeled videos, we train the CNN to predict the missing pixels of a spatiotemporal hole given the remaining parts of the video through minimizing per-pixel reconstruction loss. To achieve good reconstruction results using color videos, the CNN needs to have a certain level of understanding of the scene dynamics and predict plausible, temporally coherent contents. We further explore to jointly reconstruct both color frames and flow fields. By exploiting the statistical temporal structure of images, we show that the learned representations capture meaningful spatiotemporal structures from raw videos. We validate the effectiveness of our approach for CNN pre-training on action recognition and action similarity labeling problems. Our quantitative results demonstrate that our method compares favorably against learning without external data and existing unsupervised learning approaches. / Master of Science / The current supervised representation learning methods leverage large datasets of millions of labeled examples to learn semantically meaningful visual representations. Thousands of boring human hours are spent on manually labeling these datasets. But, do we need semantically labeled images to learn good visual representation? Humans learn visual representations using little or no semantic supervision but the existing approaches are mostly supervised. In this work, we propose an unsupervised visual representation learning algorithm to learn useful spatiotemporal features by formulating a video completion problem. To predict the missing pixels of the video, the model needs to have a high-level semantic understanding and motion patterns of people and objects. We demonstrate that video completion task effectively learns semantically meaningful spatiotemporal features from raw natural videos without semantic labels. The learned representation provide a good network weight initialization for applications with few training examples. We show significant performance gain over training the model from scratch and demonstrate improved performance in action recognition and action similarity labeling tasks when compared with competitive unsupervised learning algorithms.

This thesis is A Museum of the Illustrations of the Hall Encircled by Jade (1602-1605), the longest woodblock print in Chinese history, which is to explore the representation of painting, space, culture, story, and literature through architectural methods. / Master of Architecture

The French Council for the Muslim Faith (CFCM) was formed in 2002 to act as an authoritative body for Muslims in France that it might regulate issues such as halal meat, holidays, and mosque construction, among others. A second intended role of the Council was to represent the interests of all Muslims in France that their interests might be communicated more effectively to the French government, that their growing place within French society and state might be legitimized, rather than pushed aside. Thus in this thesis, I pose this question: "Is the CFCM an effective representative of Muslims in France?" His thesis seeks to answer this question in three parts. First, I look at the political and electoral structure of the CFCM and assess representation as a result of this structure. Then, I examine the constituent groups of the CFCM and their internal controversies to consider the representation of Muslims in France by the greater CFCM. Finally, I consider instances where the CFCM has ruled or spoken in an official capacity on both religious and social issues to demonstrate that the Council is effective at representation in some areas but not others. I ultimately conclude that by and large, the Council is not an effective representative for all Muslims in France, except in very limited circumstances. I further conclude that the Council is more effective at representing a large portion of faithful Muslims in France, but still not all. / Master of Arts

After the attacks in Paris on November 13th 2015, the movement Anonymous has declared a cyber war to terrorist group ISIS that claimed responsibility for these attacks. According to Klein (2015) Anonymous has earlier been framed by the news media as malicious prankster, because their choice of targets did not align with western standards. However, ISIS can be seen as a common enemy of the West. As such, what is the effect of this newly chosen target on the representation of the movement in the media? Departing from this question, this thesis aims to research whether the attributes in use to represent Anonymous in the news media have normatively changed due to the taking on of a common western enemy. In fulfilling this aim, 21 articles published before and 21 articles published after the public declared war on ISIS on November 13th have been analysed based upon second level agenda setting theory. Focus is placed upon the attributes that describe Anonymous in the news media agenda and how these normatively evaluate the movement. In doing so, findings of this analysis present a change in the evaluation of the movement towards a more positive depiction.

Thesis advisor: Kathleen Bailey / This paper seeks to address the inclusion of Kuwaiti women as political actors. Kuwait held elections on May 16, 2009, and Moussoma al-Mubarak, Rola Dashti, Aseel al-Awadhi, and Salwa al-Jassar became the first women elected to the National Assembly. This victory occurred on the fourth anniversary of female enfranchisement in Kuwait. In an attempt to account for variations among the number of women in parliament in Kuwait by drawing on research from the field of descriptive representation, I found that the year of female suffrage, the religion of Islam, Kuwait’s cultural implications of gender-equality, the peculiarities of Kuwait’s electoral system, and timing and framing to be particularly important in the case of Kuwait. A consideration of substantive representation is also relevant to Kuwait, as early signs of involvement of the women members of Parliament indicate that women’s interests are on the political agenda in Kuwait. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2010. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: College Honors Program. / Discipline: International Studies Honors Program. / Discipline: Political Science.