A wide range of machine learning problems, including astronomical inference about galaxy clusters, natural image scene classification, parametric statistical inference, and detection of potentially harmful sources of radiation, can be well-modeled as learning a function on (samples from) distributions. This thesis explores problems in learning such functions via kernel methods, and applies the ...

The author conducted a four-year ethnography of American fundamentalists including fieldwork as a participant-observer in more than 250 worship services at some 200 churches in 17 states. While the private speech of laity is readily analyzable through an ethnography of communication (EOC), the approach could interpret only half the story. For a community of practice bound not by geography but b...

This article critically reviews the approach to evidence based policy-making (EBPM) advanced in the Labour government's modernisation agenda. The article contends that EBPM must be understood as a project focused on enhancing the techniques ofmanaging strategic policy-making as opposed to improving the capacities of the social sciences to influence the 'practices of democracy' as envisaged by L...