4,429 research outputs found
Effect of Surface Finish on the Failure Mechanisms of Flip-Chip Solder Joints Under Electromigration
No full textEleanor Tinsley oral history interview and transcript
No full textThis recording forms part of a collection of oral history interviews donated by Dr. Edward Chen to the Chao Center for Asian Studies at Rice University. It includes audio recordings and transcripts of interviews with Asian Americans living in Houston.Eleanor Tinsley interviewed by Andy Lai and Edward Chen, 1980. Andy Lai and Edward Chen interview Mrs. Eleanor Tinsley, a member of Houston’s city council, on a radio show. Mrs. Tinsley spoke about her campaign for the city council position and gave advice to people who wanted to be heard by the council. She also spoke about some of the problems and possible projects that the council was facing at the time, including the impact the new convention center might have on “Little” Chinatown, and how the Chinese community might be heard by the city council. She spoke as well about her personal involvement with affirmative action for women in Houston
The Experiments of the “Collective Improvisation” in the Early Creative Period of Stanley Lai: The Case of Bach Variations
No full text「集體即興創作」原為一九六○至七○年代歐美前衛劇場甚為風行的一種新
穎創作方式，在一九八○年代臺灣歸國學人移植引進之後，許多實驗劇場紛紛嘗
試以此為創發新劇的叩門磚。其中賴聲川的「表演工作坊」自創立以來，完全以
「集體即興創作」起家，至今已是國內首屈一指的職業劇團，而賴聲川本人儼然
已成為集體即興在臺灣的代表性人物。
縱觀賴聲川剛回國的前三年，他所採取的是相當自由、放任的即興創作。以
《我們都是這樣長大的》、《摘星》與《變奏巴哈》這三齣戲為例，在前段作
業時刻意不訂下明確結構，亦不預設任何戲劇形式和立場，單純地從一個概念
(concept)或主題(theme)出發，讓參與者共同腦力激盪，在排練場一同逐步
建構表演文本，再由導演針對即興出來的素材逐步進行刪減、拼貼、組合等精
緻化作業，最終完成精彩的作品。賴氏早期這樣的工作方式原非他個人獨創，
這套模式可溯源自約瑟夫．柴金(Joseph Chaikin)所領導的「開放劇場」(The
Open Theater)和深受其影響的雪雲．史卓克(Shireen Strooker)所屬的荷蘭
「阿姆斯特丹工作劇團」(Amsterdam Werkteater)。而在賴聲川早期的創作生
涯中，《變奏巴哈》(1985)被視為其最具實驗性，也是極富藝術性的作品。
本文的研究重心有二：(一)分析賴聲川是如何以「巴哈賦格」的作曲概念
為創作起始點，為《變奏巴哈》創造出一個「非敘事性」(non-narrative)、音樂性
濃厚的新型戲劇文體，挖掘集體創作的模式異於傳統編劇的特殊之處；(二)本
劇主題探討生命是一首變奏的巴哈，無常的人生是無法如數學般、理性工整的巴
哈音樂所能比擬的，而賴聲川又是如何尋覓一個演出形式來將此主題概念具象化
呢？上述問題皆反映了導演在創發《變奏巴哈》這一類抽象、隱晦的集體即興作
品時，所面臨的最大挑戰，也是本文的研究焦點所在。“Collective improvisation,” a collaborative method from the 1960-1970’s
western avant-garde theaters, was implanted to Taiwan in the 1980’s by those who
had studied abroad, and then utilized by numerous theaters in experimental new
productions. The “Performance Workshop Theatre,” directed by Stan Lai, which
applied these methods in productions, is now a leading theater company, with Lai the
method’s most representative figure in Taiwan.
Soon after returning from abroad, Lai adopted a relatively open, permissive,
improvisational method. In three productions from his first creative period, The
Days We Were, Reaching for the Stars, and Bach Variations, he avoided preconceptualized
structure or theatrical form, and sprang simply from a single concept
or theme, allowing all participants to contribute to build up the performance text.
Afterwards, with the abundant performing segments generated from collaboration
and improvisation, the director gradually either cut, collaged or combined them with
brilliant results in the completed piece. This production method is not Lai’s own
creation, however, as it can be traced back to “The Open Theater” led by Joseph
Chaikin and his direct follower, Shireen Strooker, with whom Lai collaborated, from
“Amsterdam Werkteater.” Bach Variations (1985), has long been regarded the most
experimental and artistic production among all of Lai’s early works.
The core research issue lies in these points: First, how Lai utilizes the
composition concept of Bach’s Fugue as a starting point to create a non-narrative,
extremely musical style of performance text for this play. Secondly, how the director
searched for this concept’s ideal performing style, to objectify the theme: full of
impermanence, life resembles variations of Bach’s Fugue, but is unlike Bach’s
mathematical, rational and neat music. These serious challenges for the director of
creations like Bach Variations, inspired by this kind of abstract and obscure method of
improvisation, stand as the main focus of this paper
Correspondence to Mary Ann Smith From William H. Borders and C.M. Lowe, March 22, 1961
No full textCorrespondence from William H. Borders and C.M. Lowe to Mary Ann Smith notifying her of a meeting for the Atlanta Student Adult Liaison. 1 page
What to bid and when to stop
No full textNegotiation is an important activity in human society, and is studied by various disciplines, ranging from economics and game theory, to electronic commerce, social psychology, and artificial intelligence. Traditionally, negotiation is a necessary, but also time-consuming and expensive activity. Therefore, in the last decades there has been a large interest in the automation of negotiation, for example in the setting of e-commerce. This interest is fueled by the promise of automated agents eventually being able to negotiate on behalf of human negotiators.Every year, automated negotiation agents are improving in various ways, and there is now a large body of negotiation strategies available, all with their unique strengths and weaknesses. For example, some agents are able to predict the opponent's preferences very well, while others focus more on having a sophisticated bidding strategy. The problem however, is that there is little incremental improvement in agent design, as the agents are tested in varying negotiation settings, using a diverse set of performance measures. This makes it very difficult to meaningfully compare the agents, let alone their underlying techniques. As a result, we lack a reliable way to pinpoint the most effective components in a negotiating agent.There are two major advantages of distinguishing between the different components of a negotiating agent's strategy: first, it allows the study of the behavior and performance of the components in isolation. For example, it becomes possible to compare the preference learning component of all agents, and to identify the best among them. Second, we can proceed to mix and match different components to create new negotiation strategies., e.g.: replacing the preference learning technique of an agent and then examining whether this makes a difference. Such a procedure enables us to combine the individual components to systematically explore the space of possible negotiation strategies.To develop a compositional approach to evaluate and combine the components, we identify structure in most agent designs by introducing the BOA architecture, in which we can develop and integrate the different components of a negotiating agent. We identify three main components of a general negotiation strategy; namely a bidding strategy (B), possibly an opponent model (O), and an acceptance strategy (A). The bidding strategy considers what concessions it deems appropriate given its own preferences, and takes the opponent into account by using an opponent model. The acceptance strategy decides whether offers proposed by the opponent should be accepted.The BOA architecture is integrated into a generic negotiation environment called Genius, which is a software environment for designing and evaluating negotiation strategies. To explore the negotiation strategy space of the negotiation research community, we amend the Genius repository with various existing agents and scenarios from literature. Additionally, we organize a yearly international negotiation competition (ANAC) to harvest even more strategies and scenarios. ANAC also acts as an evaluation tool for negotiation strategies, and encourages the design of negotiation strategies and scenarios.We re-implement agents from literature and ANAC and decouple them to fit into the BOA architecture without introducing any changes in their behavior. For each of the three components, we manage to find and analyze the best ones for specific cases, as described below. We show that the BOA framework leads to significant improvements in agent design by wining ANAC 2013, which had 19 participating teams from 8 international institutions, with an agent that is designed using the BOA framework and is informed by a preliminary analysis of the different components.In every negotiation, one of the negotiating parties must accept an offer to reach an agreement. Therefore, it is important that a negotiator employs a proficient mechanism to decide under which conditions to accept. When contemplating whether to accept an offer, the agent is faced with the acceptance dilemma: accepting the offer may be suboptimal, as better offers may still be presented before time runs out. On the other hand, accepting too late may prevent an agreement from being reached, resulting in a break off with no gain for either party. We classify and compare state-of-the-art generic acceptance conditions. We propose new acceptance strategies and we demonstrate that they outperform the other conditions. We also provide insight into why some conditions work better than others and investigate correlations between the properties of the negotiation scenario and the efficacy of acceptance conditions.Later, we adopt a more principled approach by applying optimal stopping theory to calculate the optimal decision on the acceptance of an offer. We approach the decision of whether to accept as a sequential decision problem, by modeling the bids received as a stochastic process. We determine the optimal acceptance policies for particular opponent classes and we present an approach to estimate the expected range of offers when the type of opponent is unknown. We show that the proposed approach is able to find the optimal time to accept, and improves upon all existing acceptance strategies.Another principal component of a negotiating agent's strategy is its ability to take the opponent's preferences into account. The quality of an opponent model can be measured in two different ways. One is to use the agent's performance as a benchmark for the model's quality. We evaluate and compare the performance of a selection of state-of-the-art opponent modeling techniques in negotiation. We provide an overview of the factors influencing the quality of a model and we analyze how the performance of opponent models depends on the negotiation setting. We identify a class of simple and surprisingly effective opponent modeling techniques that did not receive much previous attention in literature.The other way to measure the quality of an opponent model is to directly evaluate its accuracy by using similarity measures. We review all methods to measure the accuracy of an opponent model and we then analyze how changes in accuracy translate into performance differences. Moreover, we pinpoint the best predictors for good performance. This leads to new insights concerning how to construct an opponent model, and what we need to measure when optimizing performance.Finally, we take two different approaches to gain more insight into effective bidding strategies. We present a new classification method for negotiation strategies, based on their pattern of concession making against different kinds of opponents. We apply this technique to classify some well-known negotiating strategies, and we formulate guidelines on how agents should bid in order to be successful, which gives insight into the bidding strategy space of negotiating agents. Furthermore, we apply optimal stopping theory again, this time to find the concessions that maximize utility for the bidder against particular opponents. We show there is an interesting connection between optimal bidding and optimal acceptance strategies, in the sense that they are mirrored versions of each other.Lastly, after analyzing all components separately, we put the pieces back together again. We take all BOA components accumulated so far, including the best ones, and combine them all together to explore the space of negotiation strategies.We compute the contribution of each component to the overall negotiation result, and we study the interaction between components. We find that combining the best agent components indeed makes the strongest agents. This shows that the component-based view of the BOA architecture not only provides a useful basis for developing negotiating agents but also provides a useful analytical tool. By varying the BOA components we are able to demonstrate the contribution of each component to the negotiation result, and thus analyze the significance of each. The bidding strategy is by far the most important to consider, followed by the acceptance conditions and finally followed by the opponent model.Our results validate the analytical approach of the BOA framework to first optimize the individual components, and then to recombine them into a negotiating agent
Three-component velocity measurements in a momentum-conserving, axisymmetric, turbulent jet
No full textExperiments have been performed on a momentum conserving axisymmetric turbulent jet, the turbulence characteristics of which are well known [1]. Simultaneous three-component velocity measurements are acquired with high spatial and temporal resolution, using a new triple-sensor hotwire probe. Velocity and directional calibrations are performed using a dedicated automatic calibration system. Two experiments are performed; one for capturing the average velocity field in a 3D volume, and one for investigating the turbulence spectra in specific points in space. In the first experiment, measurements are performed in 9 equidistant cross-planes, from 10- to 50-diameters downstream of the nozzle using a computer-controlled traversing system. The spatial resolution is as low as 1 mm and the sampling rate was 10 kHz. In the second experiment, long velocity time histories are acquired with 50 kHz sampling rate to perform power spectral density computations for each velocity component. Preliminary results of velocity capture confirm the general characteristics of the turbulent jet. The power spectra at different positions indicate that the turbulent fluctuations are not isotropic at lower frequencies
American atrocity revisited: national identity, cascading frames, and the My Lai massacre
No full textThis study draws on the "cascading activation" model of press-state relations to explore U.S. political and news discourse surrounding the 1968 My Lai Massacre. We systematically analyze White House, military, congressional, and news communications and draw upon scholarship in social psychology to assess why the press might challenge certain frames in response to My Lai but indiscriminately echo others. In particular, within these communications, we examine how serious and widespread the actions at My Lai were conveyed to be, how the circumstances were portrayed, how the actors involved in the incident were characterized, and the extent to which America’s core values were questioned. Our findings suggest that the Nixon administration employed frames designed to downplay the severity of the My Lai incident, highlight extenuating circumstances faced by those directly involved, denigrate the alleged low-level perpetrators, and bolster the national identity. These frames were then largely echoed in the press, despite consistent and forceful challenges by congressional Democrats. These findings, we argue, align with the cascading activation model, and we build on it by highlighting the underlying importance of "cultural resonance" in the framing process. We reflect on the theoretical and practical implications of these patterns and, in doing so, engage the broader scholarly debate over the process through which U.S. news coverage aligns with the communications of government officials, particularly in moments of national dissonance
A General History of the Congregation of the Mission Beginning after the Death of Blessed Vincent de Paul
Full text linkThis work is the earliest known history of the Congregation of the Mission and dates from about 1730. Vincentian historian John E. Rybolt, C.M., building on the initiative of Stafford Poole, C.M., completed this English translation from the original French. The author, Claude-Joseph Lacour, C.M. (1672-1731), drew from already published materials and his own recollections. While the story he tells may seem familiar, Lacour included materials that are unknown anywhere else and delivers a first-hand account of the Congregation’s rapid growth in those early days. The text is essential reading for anyone wishing to better understand Vincent de Paul’s society of apostolic life of priests and brothers following his death.https://via.library.depaul.edu/vincentian_ebooks/1044/thumbnail.jp
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