ON EUGENICS, THE QUAKERS, AND MENTAL HEALTH

HERE IS AN EXCERPT FROM MY SPECULATIVE NOVEL THAT IS VERY RELEVANT TO OUR PROBLEMS OF THE MOMENT. SOME IMPORTANT HISTORICAL EVENTS ARE FACTUALLY DESCRIBED

                                                                                            

                                                                             1.4. ANNIVERSARY CONGRESS

       During July 2712, Drs. McCull and Skulltwister attended an event of singular importance in a luxurious conference centre on the lakeside campus of the University of the Sunrise in Trivoli. The 111 th. Interstellar Eugenics Congress was organised by the Eugenics Society of Qinsatorix, and the Society's president, Princess Margaret of the Asturias officiated at the opening ceremony. Knuddy was scheduled to present a short contributed paper during the second afternoon of the conference, entitled Winnowing and Sifting in Negative Eugenics.

      When Alistair and Knuddy entered the conference vestibule they were just in time to see the fast fading Dowager Empress unveiling an 800 year anniversary plaque. The inscription celebrated the First International Eugenics Congress, which was attended by over 1000 delegates and hangers-on, including the influential British politicians Arthur Balfour and Winston Churchill. The Congress took place during July 1912 at the University of London in South Kensington, England. All the delegates were invited to a prestigious schmoozefest in the Duchess of Marlborough's mansion. They included high-powered groups of Italians, Germans and Yanks, and Dr. Evil himself, the notorious Eugen Fischer, the future Director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology in Berlin, and torturer by medical experimentation of numerous Jews, gay people and gypsies in the Nazi concentration camps,

      Knuddy struggled through the heaving masses and into the Kennedy-Galton lecture theatre, where a paltry audience of 11 assorted humanoids awaited him. But he was glad to see the hairy First Minister and Foreign Secretary chewing the cud on the velvet sofa The panoramic view of the mercurial Lake Nefertiti, from the purple pines on Picnic Point to the golden Statue of Liberty by the source of the Tiber, was truly magnificent.

        Knuddy talked crap for fully twenty minutes about how beneficial he felt the winnowing and sifting of 'inferior' sub-populations had been, ever since 1912, when seeking to 'improve' the humanoid stock in the Sol and Aton solar systems. When Knuddy finished, there was a ripple of applause, and a single question. That came from a green-eyed Quaker with a wispy beard, an eminent historian of Statistics, Psychiatry and Eugenics.

       Knuddy agreed with the historian that the Society of Quakers should take much of the credit for the early developments in Eugenics (after Francis Galton coined the term in 1883), since Galton and several other leading eugenicists were either born into wealthy Quaker families or influenced by Quaker doctrine. And in his 1911 will, Sir Francis financed the first three Professors of Eugenics at University College London from £42000 of Quaker family wealth, which had been acquired through arms and slave trading. But Knuddy argued that the Shiners of the Aton solar system had assumed the spiritual mantle during the twenty-fifth century, and borne the brunt of the moral leadership ever since. The Quaker felt forced to concede the point.

      The Kennedy-Galton lecture theatre was packed to the rafters that evening when a Professor of Public Health from Planet Claudius Ptolemy presented his plenary lecture. The studious Apollo Penguin described how the delegates to the 1912 conference, including Home Secretary Winston Churchill, cobbled together the terms of the 1913 Mental Deficiency Act. Tens of thousands of supposedly mentally defective Britains were subsequently incarcerated for life, forceably sterilized, or grossly maltreated.

     The First Minister was glad that similar measures had long since been enacted on Qinsatorix, as they had been in Germany, Canada, and the U.S.A. so many centuries ago. What happened in the much repressed Italian Empire at the behest of the renowned socio-economic statistician Professor Corrado Gini of the Papal University of Rome was a different kettle of fish. The 1912 Gini Coefficient helped to take care of that.

COMPOSING MUSIC BY SIMULATION FROM MULTIPLE POINT PROCESSES

      Iannis Xenakis (also spelt as Yannis Xenakis) (Greek: Γιάννης (Ιάννης) Ξενάκης [ˈʝanis kseˈnacis]; 29 May 1922 – 4 February 2001) was a Greek-French composer, music theorist, architect, performance director and engineer. After 1947, he fled Greece, becoming a naturalized citizen of France.^[1] He is considered an important post-World War II composer whose works helped revolutionize 20th-century classical music.^[2] Xenakis pioneered the use of mathematical models in music such as applications of set theory, stochastic processes and game theory and was also an important influence on the development of electronic and computer music. He integrated music with architecture, designing music for pre-existing spaces, and designing spaces to be integrated with specific music compositions and performances.

Among his most important works are Metastaseis (1953–54) for orchestra, which introduced independent parts for every musician of the orchestra; percussion works such as Psappha (1975) and Pléïades (1979); compositions that introduced spatialization by dispersing musicians among the audience, such as Terretektorh (1966); electronic works created using Xenakis's UPIC system; and the massive multimedia performances Xenakis called polytopes, that were a summa of his interests and skills.^[3] Among the numerous theoretical writings he authored, the book Formalized Music: Thought and Mathematics in Composition (French edition 1963, English translation 1971) is regarded as one of his most important. As an architect, Xenakis is primarily known for his early work under Le Corbusier: the Sainte Marie de La Tourette, on which the two architects collaborated, and the Philips Pavilion at Expo 58, which Xenakis designed by himself

                     

                                                     IANNIS XENAKIS




      They are lots of articles in the literature about using stochastic processes e,g.Markov Chains to compose music. I don't know whether the following suggestion is original.


                                                           

                 A log-Gaussian Cox Process driven by an Ornstein-Uhlenbeck Process.

   This process was first proposed by Tom Leonard (Journal of the Royal Society, Series B, 1978) . It is a special case of the Doubly Stochastic Poisson Process described by my undergraduate mentor David Cox in the same journal in 1955

          Suppose you wish  to compose a piece of music on the time interval (0,T) and assume that each note may assume one of M different characteristics, Then the times of occurrences of any particular characteristic in the tune may be represented by points in the interval (0,T), These could be specified by the composer  (see above diagram) . If repeated for each of the N characteristics, then the N sets of points (when superimposed with different labels on the same interval) defines the entire composition.

         For any particular characteristic, it would instead be possible to simulate the points from a random point process on the interval (0,T). If a different point process is used to generate the points for each characteristic, then the entire composition can be simulated.

         A log-Gaussian Cox Process can  be parameterised using a mean value function M(t) for t assuming values in the interval (0,T),  See, for example, the smoother curve in the above diagram.

         If the Cox Process is driven by an Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process. then a variance V and a correlation parameter R also need to be specified.

         It is left to the composer to come up with an imaginative choice of the continuous function M. He may then use a standard computer package to simulate the points of occurrence of that particular characteristic, for specified V and R (which could of course be fiddled with to improve the quality of the tune).

         If the composer can devise a different choice of continuous function M for each of the N characteristics, then his entire composition can be simulated from the N thus defined Cox Processes, e.g.by keeping V and R fixed and specified across all simulations.

          This suggests to me to suggest a whole new ball park, where the ingenuity of the composer is still an essential ingredient.

                                                   See also

                             CAMERON'S STEADY STATE METHOD   



   Hi Cameron, I enjoyed your music. This seems to be equivalent to simulating from a Markov Chain, It'd be a 2 state Markov Chain if there

In response to disturbing video that emerged this week that appears to show a Washtenaw County sheriff punching Sha’Teina Grady El in the head multiple times...

vvere 2 possible tones or levels to each note.  But it'd be possible to generalise this by a simple graphical procedure that'd permit lots of input from the composer. Suppose there are 20  levels for each note. Then dravv a series of vertical lines on the graph paper, each dotted and labelled from 1 to 20 at regular intervals, Then dravv a vvobbly curve across the graph paper (composer's choice!) in similar fashion to the curve in the above diagram. On each of the vertical lines, highlight the dots that are immediately belovv and above the curve, Then each time you choose a tone or note, choose the upper dot vvith probability P and the lovver dot vvith probability 1-P vvhere P is different according to the level of the preceding note,.

             I hope that explains the idea vvell enough, and I'm sorry that my double u is key is stuck.. Good luck on your endeavours! Best vvishes, Tom.

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SAMPLE SPACE--A NEW PUBLICATION BY THE DEPT OF STATISTICAL SCIENCE AT UCL

                                                               SAMPLE SPACE


                                                                       

FROM  PROFESSOR RICHARD CHANDLER

[ Maybe IMSS would be interested in The Leonard-Forster Written Submssion to the UCL Inquiry into the History of Eugenics at UCL]

Welcome to our first edition of Sample Space, a newsletter that aims to keep our community of past and present students and staff in touch with what’s happening in Statistical Science at UCL. I hope you find the contents interesting: we plan to do more of this kind of thing in the future, to keep you all updated with the latest news from the department. UCL Statistical Science is currently undergoing a period of significant expansion: this is part of a strategic investment in mathematics, statistics and operational research that will lead to the establishment of a UCL Institute for Mathematical and Statistical Sciences, or IMSS for short. We plan for the Statistical Science and Mathematics departments to be re-housed next to each other on a single site, in a purposedesigned facility that will put UCL on the map as one of the ‘go-to’ places for the mathematical sciences in London – and that will also provide our students with a much greater sense of community than is currently possible. Bringing this idea to fruition has already taken considerable effort, and will continue to do so in the coming months and years, although I strongly believe that the rewards will be well worth it. Apart from anything else, being bigger gives us additional resources to do things like producing Sample Space! The department has also recently established a new master’s programme in Data Science, which has proven very popular with students. A recent graduate, Mete Veyisoglu, has kindly taken the time to share his experiences of the programme in this issue. Further curriculum developments are being undertaken at the moment to ensure that we continue to equip our students with the tools to be statistically literate, perhaps a more desirable skill than ever in today's world. On the research side, the recent announcement of a large increase in UK government funding for the mathematical sciences is very welcome, and particularly timely in view of our IMSS expansion plans. Final preparations are underway for REF 2021, the latest iteration of the UK’s ‘Research Excellence Framework’. The department’s performance in this exercise will also contribute to the level of government funding we receive for the next few years. We have excellent staff doing exciting and incredibly diverse research, some of which is making a real impact outside academia: this issue highlights work being done by Serge Guillas and his team on understanding tsunami risk around the world. As always, there are external challenges: as I write, UK universities are grappling with the uncertainties posed by Brexit and, more urgently, by the worldwide Covid-19 outbreak. UCL Statistical Science is such a thoroughly international community that these issues will certainly affect us to some extent. I very much hope, however, that the effects will be minimal for all of us. Finally, I would like to extend my very sincere thanks to everyone who contributed to this first issue of Sample Space, and in particular to Samuel Livingstone for coordinating and editing it. If any readers have feedback, or potential contributions to future issues, or suggestions for material that they’d like to see, please contact him at samuel.livingstone@ucl.ac.uk. I think he and all the contributors have done a fantastic job: I hope you do too.