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Image Recognition Using an Event Camera and a Stochastic Neural Network
No full textThis study presents an innovative approach to image recognition by combining an Event Camera (EC) with a Stochas-tic Computing (SC) neural network. The novel aspect of this work lies in the fusion of EC, known for its temporal resolution and motion blur reduction, with SC, which offers efficient arithmetic using simple logic processes. This pairing offers the potential for power-efficient neural network systems. The EC data, which captures pixel-level intensity changes asynchronously, drives the SC neural network. A sample-and-hold system and checkerboard filter are incorporated to overcome data sparsity issues and enhance event locality. The experimental results show significant improvements, adding 20% to performance when event frequency is increased, suggesting the promise of this approach in achieving more efficient image recognition systems
Color-Blind Racial Attitudes and Multicultural Teaching Efficacy among Early Childhood Preservice Teachers: Implications for Teacher Education
Get PDFThis study was to examine early childhood preservice teachers’ color-blind racial attitudes and its association with their sense of multicultural teaching efficacy. A total of 66 preservice teachers enrolled in an early childhood teacher education program at a state university in the Northeast US participated in this study through online surveys. Results indicated a mean Color-Blind Racial Attitudes Scale (CoBRAS) score of 2.70, reflecting an average endorsement of color-blind racial attitudes among preservice teachers. Pearson’s correlation analysis revealed that racial privilege, institutional discrimination, and blatant racial issues were positively correlated (all p \u3c .01). Additionally, CoBRAS scores were negatively correlated with the Multicultural Efficacy Scale (r = -.42, p \u3c .01), indicating that higher color-blind racial attitudes were associated with lower multicultural efficacy. Linear regression analysis showed that 24.7% of the variance in multicultural teaching efficacy could be explained by color-blind racial attitudes (F = 6.227, p \u3c .001), with racial privilege (t = -3.45, p \u3c .001) as the only significant predictor. Overall, the findings suggest that there is a relationship between the endorsement of color-blind racial attitudes and the level of multicultural efficacy among preservice teachers. This underscores the importance of promoting multicultural education through efforts to reduce color-blind racial attitudes in teacher education programs to promote culturally responsive teaching practices and improve student outcomes
Digital Twinning for Resilient Global Supply chains: Three Case Studies
Get PDFGlobal supply chains have vulnerabilities, and these escalate in crisis times like pandemics or wars. Digital twinning of supply chains can provide early alerts and timely interventions. We examined three companies in different industries using Digital Twin (DT) technology to improve their supply chain performance. We found that while DT successfully enhanced performance indicators, the dollar and time costs were significant, creating barriers to wider DT adoption. We conclude by outlining the positives and negatives of implementing Digital Twins in global supply chains
Review of “Social Entrepreneurship in India: Quarter Idealism and a Pound of Pragmatism” by Madhukar Shukla (2020)
Get PDFThe article is a review of ‘Social Entrepreneurship in India: Quarter Idealism and a Pound of Pragmatism’ by Madhukar Shukla. It summarizes and offers clarification and elaboration of key concepts covered in the book. These include the definition of social entrepreneurship, the taxonomy of social entrepreneurs, what characterizes them, various forms that such organizations may take, and whether social entrepreneurs are fundamentally different from other entrepreneurs or similar in many ways.
The review points out the value of the book for those in social development, argues that the book is for India as well as of universal interest, and points out a few dimensions that could be covered in future work
Financial education and budgeting behavior among college students: Extending the theory of planned behavior
Get PDFThis study examines the association between financial education and budgeting behavior among college students. Under the guidance of the extended theory of planned behavior, we use a comprehensive measure of budgeting behavior and explore mediating factors between financial education and budgeting behavior. Financial education was measured by both frequency and intensity of taking courses in finance and economics in college. Data from a sample of college students across China were analyzed using structural equation modeling and serial mediation analysis to explore the mediating roles of attitudes, subjective norms, perceived control, and budgeting intentions in this relationship between financial education and budgeting behavior. Budgeting intentions alone did not mediate the relationship between financial education and budgeting behavior. However, the serial mediation involving attitudes, subjective norms, and budgeting intentions was significant. The findings of this study have significant implications for financial educators, universities, governments, and families. Financial educators should prioritize budgeting in curricula and aim to enhance students\u27 budgeting attitudes and intentions. Universities should enhance their financial education offerings, while governments and families should foster supportive environments and positive norms and attitudes around budgeting. This research contributes a nuanced measurement of budgeting, analyzes the link between financial education and budgeting behavior among college students, and highlights the roles of various components of the theory of planned behavior. It extends the theory by identifying how financial attitudes, subjective norms, and budgeting intentions mediate the relationship between financial education and budgeting behavior
Assessment of oceanographic conditions during the North Atlantic EXport processes in the ocean from RemoTe sensing (EXPORTS) field campaign
No full textThis manuscript presents an overview of NASA\u27s EXport Processes in the Ocean from Remote Sensing 2021 Field Campaign in the North Atlantic (EXPORTS NA) and provides quantitative and dynamical descriptions of the physical processes modulating water transformations during the study. A major programmatic goal was to conduct the sampling in a Lagrangian mode so that ocean ecological and biogeochemical changes can be observed independent from physical advective processes. To accomplish this goal, EXPORTS NA conducted a multi-ship, multi-asset field sampling program within a retentive, anticyclonic mode water eddy. Beneath depths of ∼ 100 m, Lagrangian sampling assets remained within the eddy core waters (ECWs) throughout the experiment, demonstrating that the ECWs within the mode water eddy were retentive. However, strong westerly winds from four storm events deepened the mixed layer (ML) of the surface core waters (SCWs) above the eddy\u27s mode water core by 25–40 m and exchanged some of the SCWs with surface waters outside of the eddy via Ekman transport. Estimates of flushing times ranged from 5 to 8 days, with surface exchange fractions ranging from 20 to 75 % and were consistent with particle tracking advected by combined geostrophic and Ekman velocities. The relative contributions of horizontal and vertical advection on changes in ECW tracers depended on the horizontal and vertical gradients of that tracer. For example, horizontal advection played a large role in ECW salinity fluxes, while vertical entrainment played a larger role in the fluxes of nutrients into SCW ML. Each storm injected nutrients and low oxygen waters into the ML, after which the surface ocean ecosystem responded by reducing nutrient concentrations and increasing %O2 saturation levels. Overall, ECW values of chlorophyll and POC were the largest at the onset of the field program and decreased throughout the campaign. The analysis presented provides a physical oceanographic context for the many measurements made during the EXPORTS NA field campaign while illustrating the many challenges of conducting a production-flux experiment, even in a Lagrangian frame, and the inherent uncertainties of interpreting biological carbon pump observations that were collected in a Eulerian frame of reference
Phytoplankton thermal trait parameterization alters community structure and biogeochemical processes in a modeled ocean
Get PDFPhytoplankton exhibit diverse physiological responses to temperature which influence their fitness in the environment and consequently alter their community structure. Here, we explored the sensitivity of phytoplankton community structure to thermal response parameterization in a modelled marine phytoplankton community. Using published empirical data, we evaluated the maximum thermal growth rates (μmax) and temperature coefficients (Q10; the rate at which growth scales with temperature) of six key Phytoplankton Functional Types (PFTs): coccolithophores, cyanobacteria, diatoms, diazotrophs, dinoflagellates, and green algae. Following three well-documented methods, PFTs were either assumed to have (1) the same μmax and the same Q10 (as in to Eppley, 1972), (2) a unique μmax but the same Q10 (similar to Kremer et al., 2017), or (3) a unique μmax and a unique Q10 (following Anderson et al., 2021). These trait values were then implemented within the Massachusetts Institute of Technology biogeochemistry and ecosystem model (called Darwin) for each PFT under a control and climate change scenario. Our results suggest that applying a μmax and Q10 universally across PFTs (as in Eppley, 1972) leads to unrealistic phytoplankton communities, which lack diatoms globally. Additionally, we find that accounting for differences in the Q10 between PFTs can significantly impact each PFT\u27s competitive ability, especially at high latitudes, leading to altered modeled phytoplankton community structures in our control and climate change simulations. This then impacts estimates of biogeochemical processes, with, for example, estimates of export production varying by ~10% in the Southern Ocean depending on the parameterization. Our results indicate that the diversity of thermal response traits in phytoplankton not only shape community composition in the historical and future, warmer ocean, but that these traits have significant feedbacks on global biogeochemical cycles
Hearing the Renaissance in Video Games
No full textJames Cook, Alexander Kolassa, and Adam Whittaker recently posed an interesting rhetorical question: “[I]s there such a concept as ‘renaissanceism’?” Scholars such as Daniela Fountain and Kendra Preston Leonard have explored how various Renaissance premises have been musically illustrated in film and television. However, such attention has yet to be turned toward video games—perhaps because comparatively few games bear a chronological, geographical, or thematic connection to the Renaissance. But rather than this paucity acting as an analytical stumbling block, it instead allows for a fairly thorough corpus study of how video games sonically depict the Renaissance.
In this talk, Dr. Karen Cook focuses on games that are largely set between 1400–1600. The games have some sort of geographical or thematic connection to the Renaissance—regardless of whether they aspire toward historical specificity or where the games themselves were developed. Cook then evaluates the musical cues and contexts in these games along several axes: the medieval-Baroque axis by which Baroque musical cues have come to symbolize medievalism, and the medieval-Renaissance and Renaissance-Baroque axes by which musical cues belonging to these periods overlap with one another. She attempts to peel back the portion of the umbrella under which the Renaissance hides and shed light on both how the period is represented in game music and what its music is used to represent. Cook thus offers this talk as a prolegomenon toward a future understanding of “Renaissance-ism.”
Karen M. Cook is Associate Professor of Music History at the Hartt School, University of Hartford, where she is also Assistant Dean for Special Projects and program chair of music history. She specializes in music of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and also in medievalism in contemporary music & media, especially video games. Recent works were published or are forthcoming in Music and the Moving Image, Acta Musicologica, Music Theory Online, The Oxford Handbook of Video Game Music and Sound, and the Journal of Sound & Music in Games, for which she is on the editorial board. Her book Music Theory in Late Medieval Avignon: Magister Johannes Pipardi was published in 2021 as part of Routledge’s RMA Monographs Series, and she is currently co-editing two volumes: Gender, Sexuality, and Video Game Sound, with Michael Austin and Dana Plank for Routledge, and Global Histories of Video Game Music Technology, with William Gibbons and Fanny Rebillard for Brepols
The Routledge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Literatures in English
No full textThe Routledge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Literatures in English brings together essays that respond to consequential cultural and socio-economic changes that followed the expansion of the British Empire from the British Isles across the Atlantic. Scholars track the cumulative power of the slave trade, settlements and plantations, and the continual warfare that reshaped lives in the Americas, Africa, and Asia. Importantly, they also analyze the ways these histories reshaped class and social relations, scientific inquiry and invention, philosophies of personhood, and cultural and intellectual production. As European nations fought each other for territories and trade routes, dispossessing and enslaving Indigenous and Black people, the observations of travellers, naturalists, and colonists helped consolidate racism and racial differentiation, as well as the philosophical justifications of “civilizational” differences that became the hallmarks of intellectual life.
Essays in this volume address key shifts in disciplinary practices even as they examine the past, looking forward to and modeling a rethinking of our scholarly and pedagogic practices. This volume is an essential text for academics, researchers, and students researching eighteenth-century literature, history, and culture