1,388 research outputs found
Pacific Rim Magazine 2011
No full textThe 2011 issue of Pacific Rim Magazine includes the cover stories "Dayton Boots' Canadian Sale," "Angus An Gets Grilled," "Mars to Venus: Thailand's Third Gender," and "David Y. H. Lui.
Pacific Rim Magazine 2013
No full textThe 2013 Issue of Pacific Rim Magazine includes the cover stories "Into the Unknown: Should an Aging LGBTQ Community Have a Home of its Own," "Urban Pioneers: Farms Blossom in the City," "Working for Buddha: Three Professionals put Peace into Practice," "A Reel Mystery: Japan's Lost Kong," "Fooling the Phantom: Stephen Sumner Helps Amputees Find Relief," and "Impossible Choices: An Inside View of the Challenges Facing Foreign Nannies in Canada.
Implementing a New Trade Paradigm: Opportunities for Agricultural Trade Regionalism in the Pacific Rim
No full textThe objective of this paper is to analyze the economic implications for American food producers, consumers, and society of alternative Pacific Rim free trade region (FIR) configurations.International Relations/Trade,
Modular Neural Networks for Video Prediction
No full textModular neural networks have received an upsurge of attention lately owing to their unique modular design and potential capacity to decompose complex dynamics and learn interactions among causal variables. Inspired by this potential, we employ the recently introduced Recurrent Independent Mechanisms (RIMs) in the downstream video prediction task. RIMs consist of several modular recurrent units and modular hidden states which are called RIM cells. Those modules are connected by two attention mechanisms. Through experiments, we show that RIMs perform better or comparably with related baselines. From modular recurrent units to modular image representations, we push the modularity further to explore how much the performance can benefit from it. We extend RIMs architecture on both the encoder and decoder sides to allow for object-centric (OC) feature representation learning in video prediction, resulting in an end-to-end architecture we refer to as OC-RIMs. Our qualitative evaluations demonstrate that every RIM cell in OC-RIMs now attends to a certain object within the input scene at any specific moment. As a result, OC-RIMs offer considerable quantitative performance improvement in video prediction over comparable baselines across two datasets.We perform extensive ablation studies to validate the design choices of every module of RIMs. We empirically show that most modules work as expected. However, the sparse activation greatly detriments the prediction performance, which is against the claims in the paper where RIMs were proposed. On the other hand, RIM cells are expected to work near-independently. But experiments show that the use of communication mechanism leads to heavy co-adaptation between cells, i.e., RIM cells fail to make any reasonable predictions independently. Those issues have raised our concerns about the design of RIMs. Finally, we point out some future work directions to address these deficiencies.Project Github Repository - https://github.com/sentient-codebot/RIM-MovingMNISTElectrical Engineerin
Some effective techniques for naive Bayes text classification
No full textWhile naive Bayes is quite effective in various data mining tasks, it shows a disappointing result in the automatic text classification problem. Based on the observation of naive Bayes for the natural language text, we found a serious problem in the parameter estimation process, which causes poor results in text classification domain. In this paper, we propose two empirical heuristics: per-document text normalization and feature weighting method. While these are somewhat ad hoc methods, our proposed naive Bayes text classifier performs very well in the standard benchmark collections, competing with state-of-the-art text classifiers based on a highly complex learning method such as SVM.This work was partly supported by the JSPS Postdoctoral Fellowship Program and the Okumura Group at Tokyo Institute of Technology. H.-C. Rim was the corresponding author
The state of contemporary property development theory
No full textThis article discusses the limitations of contemporary property development theory in both the academic and commercial arenas, where it is proposed in theoretical terms that there has been little integrated development since the early 1990’s. Building on the author’s prior study (Drane 2012) which surveyed and mapped the literature related to ‘models of the development process’ from 1954 to 2012, a limitation in not only collective attention to this subject since 1992 is discovered, but also deficiencies in theoretical frames used, which were in turn limited by disciplines of the day. On the academic side, the topic has been viewed through visors of economy, political economy, institutional, and social theory which show a propensity to high level theoretical analysis, a significant lack of empirical engagement with property developer actors and a lack of research into this topic since 1992. Then on the commercial side the topic appears highly ‘non integrated’ and relies on the separate visors of economics, marketing, financial, real estate, operational and structural analysis, with concepts which are separatist and arguably tend to come from standard business model theory, and not a distinctive and contemporary model of property development. The property development industry, it would seem is left with a paucity of contemporary foundations in both academic theory, as well as a model of modern day practice. This article discusses this along with a review of contemporary protagonists, ( Adams, Ball, Beauregard, Schiller and Coiacetto and others) the implications for our contemporary property development theory and practice, and suggests ways forward for the development of a modern theory of property development. The author also introduces a model of the property development ‘mechanism’ which builds on prior models and offers a way forward
Lebanon and the International Monetary Fund bailout
No full textindividualLebanon is today suffering from a complex and unprecedented crisis at various interconnected levels. A combination of an economic, financial, political and health crises together with the deadly blast in August 2020 has caused damage in Beirut. All these disasters together with the outbreak of COVID-19 have led the country towards a socio- economic collapse. However, international organizations such as the “International Monetary Fund” decided to intervene or to contribute by providing recommendations. Such recommendations have focused on transformation and restructuring leading to different reactions among the three most powerful parties (The Free Patriotic Movement, The Future Movement, and Al-Hizb). This paper aims to examine the different conditions that might be set by the IMF in order to provide Lebanon with the loan program and to assess the response of the three parties. A qualitative approach will be used to collect information. The results of this paper will be concluded via the three parties’ perspectives by drawing a comparative study to emphasize the three parties’ benefits and disadvantages based on the IMF’s recommendations. This study theorizes that the ongoing political battle and financial implication are vital to the political dynamic, especially through the attitude and reactions of the three most important parties in Lebanon
Examining the Impact of Gender Curriculum on Alienation: An Assessment of Implementation in Norwegian Educational Institutions
No full textThe Norwegian policy framework is deeply rooted in the promotion of inclusivity and tolerance towards diverse identity groups within Norwegian society.
In 2020, Norway initiated its school curriculum renewal, incorporating topics related to gender identity. While this curriculum intends to cultivate inclusivity and respect for diverse identity groups, it has faced criticism and concerns regarding its potential role of indoctrinating children. This research aimed to delve into two main issues surrounding the implementation of this curriculum: the underlying factors driving opposition to the inclusion of the LK20 curriculum and whether it is perceived as an imposed hegemonic conception of the good or not. 18 textbooks in Norwegian primary schools (grades 3-5) were analyzed and 15 in-depth interviews were conducted to explore the informants’ perspectives. A notable finding is that the majority of the interviewees expressed feelings of alienation towards the gender identity curriculum, while a minority indicated support for its inclusion. The drivers of this alienation included perceived threats to religious beliefs, traditional stereotypes, individual expression, family authority, and concerns for the children’s and parents’ well-being. Conversely, supporters of the curriculum emphasized its contribution to tackling societal issues like racism by promoting tolerance, respect, individualism, and freedom as integral components of the Norwegian policy initiatives
The Verreville pottery Glasgow: Ceramic Resource Disk 4
No full textThe ceramic material listed, described, and photographed, on the enclosed ceramic resource disk, comes from an archaeological excavation funded by FM Developments Ltd., and carried out in 2005 on the site of the Verreville glass and pottery manufactury in Glasgow by Headland Archaeology Ltd. The ceramic material recovered dates mostly from the Kidston and Cochran periods (see below), and has been sorted by fabric type, decoration, and form, into (18 Folders and 152 Word Files). The excavation material has been assigned to Glasgow Museums and the shards were catalogued using there accession numbers beginning (GM 2006. 05. 1 to 1194). The ceramic assemblage is significant in that it was produced mainly for the North American export market, and therefore many of its products are extremely rare in Britain. The transfer printed patterns illustrated on (Word Files 102 to 129) have been given temporary names by the author, who would be happy to be contacted by ceramic researchers who could fill in the detail
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