852 research outputs found
A Real Groups Construction of the Tame Local Langlands Correspondence for PGSp(4,F)
No full textIn this paper, we continue the work in [5] and give a new construction of the tame local Langlands correspondence for P GSp(4, F), where F is a p-adic field, that is analogous to the construction of the local Langlands correspondence for real groups
The Federal Reserve's Primary Dealer Credit Facility
Get PDFAs liquidity conditions in the "repo market"--the market where broker-dealers obtain financing for their securities--deteriorated following the near-bankruptcy of Bear Stearns in March 2008, the Federal Reserve took the step of creating a special facility to provide overnight loans to dealers that have a trading relationship with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Six months later, in the wake of new strains in the repo market, the Fed expanded the facility by broadening the types of collateral accepted for loans. Both initiatives were designed to help restore the orderly functioning of the market and to prevent the spillover of distress to other financial firms.Federal Reserve Bank of New York ; Loans ; Financial crises ; Brokers
Improving Error Detection in Deep Learning Based Radiotherapy Autocontouring Using Bayesian Uncertainty
No full textBayesian Neural Nets (BNN) are increasingly used for robust organ auto-contouring. Uncertainty heatmaps extracted from BNNs have been shown to correspond to inaccurate regions. To help speed up the mandatory quality assessment (QA) of contours in radiotherapy, these heatmaps could be used as stimuli to direct visual attention of clinicians to potential inaccuracies. In practice, this is non-trivial to achieve since many accurate regions also exhibit uncertainty. To influence the output uncertainty of a BNN, we propose a modified accuracy-versus-uncertainty (AvU) metric as an additional objective during model training that penalizes both accurate regions exhibiting uncertainty as well as inaccurate regions exhibiting certainty. For evaluation, we use an uncertainty-ROC curve that can help differentiate between Bayesian models by comparing the probability of uncertainty in inaccurate versus accurate regions. We train and evaluate a FlipOut BNN model on the MICCAI2015 Head and Neck Segmentation challenge dataset and on the DeepMind-TCIA dataset, and observed an increase in the AUC of uncertainty-ROC curves by 5.6% and 5.9%, respectively, when using the AvU objective. The AvU objective primarily reduced false positives regions (uncertain and accurate), drawing less visual attention to these regions, thereby potentially improving the speed of error detection.Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository 'You share, we take care!' - Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.Computer Graphics and VisualisationPattern Recognition and Bioinformatic
A seeding system for large-scale Tomographic PIV in aerodynamics
No full textAerodynamicsWind EnergyFlow Physics and Technolog
South African travel writing and bias
No full textIncludes bibliographical references (leaves 92-96).This thesis spotlights the travel and leisure magazine industry within South Africa. It contends that the travel writing genre is susceptible to a number of biases, both past and present, which ultimately affect the way its overall content is produced and presented to the public. This work was substantiated through a set of qualitative interviews with key professionals within the South African travel and leisure magazine industry, as well as through a theme- based content analysis of a number of local travel writing publications. This study adds to a rather extensive line of research written on the topic of travel writing regarding a number of older criticisms of bias including 'othering', escapism, and gendering. However, it also focuses on a number of more modem biases such as direct advertising, advertorial usage, as well as the acceptance of 'freebies' and barter agreements, none of which has been given much attention in previous research. The sheer existence of these and other biases within the modem South African travel and leisure magazine industry exhibits an absolute necessity of examination into such a topic, especially given the importance and overall influence that the travel writing industry has on a country's economic standing and overall image
Three-dimensional vortex organization in a high-Reynolds-number supersonic turbulent boundary layer
Get PDFTomographic particle image velocimetry was used to quantitatively visualize the three-dimensional coherent structures in a supersonic (Mach 2) turbulent boundary layer in the region between y/? = 0.15 and 0.89. The Reynolds number based on momentum thickness Re? = 34000. The instantaneous velocity fields give evidence of hairpin vortices aligned in the streamwise direction forming very long zones of low-speed fluid, consistent with Tomkins & Adrian (J. Fluid Mech., vol. 490, 2003, p. 37). The observed hairpin structure is also a statistically relevant structure as is shown by the conditional average flow field associated to spanwise swirling motion. Spatial low-pass filtering of the velocity field reveals streamwise vortices and signatures of large-scale hairpins (height > 0.5?), which are weaker than the smaller scale hairpins in the unfiltered velocity field. The large-scale hairpin structures in the instantaneous velocity fields are observed to be aligned in the streamwise direction and spanwise organized along diagonal lines. Additionally the autocorrelation function of the wall-normal swirling motion representing the large-scale hairpin structure returns positive correlation peaks in the streamwise direction (at 1.5? distance from the DC peak) and along the 45° diagonals, which also suggest a periodic arrangement in those directions. This is evidence for the existence of a spanwise–streamwise organization of the coherent structures in a fully turbulent boundary layer.Aerodynamics & Wind EnergyAerospace Engineerin
Development of the Zimbabwe family planning program
Get PDFFamily planning was introduced in Zimbabwe as a voluntary movement in the 1950s. Volunteers formed a Family Planning Association in the mid-1960s. The government became interested in family planning in the late 1960s after analysis of the 1961 population census. It gave the Family Planning Association an annual grant, allowed contraceptives to be available through Ministry of Health facilities, and allowed nonmedical personnel to initiate and resupply family planning clients with condoms and pills. But before Zimbabwe achieved independence in 1980, family planning was viewed with great suspicion by the black majority, so the program's effectiveness was limited to the urban few. A new era began after independence. The new government took over theFamily Planning Association and changed its outlook completely. Through government and international donor support, the family planning program was restructured and expanded. The number of family planning personnel more than doubled in some units. More service delivery points were set up - particularly in rural areas. And the information, education, and communication and evaluation and research units were established. Through a World Bank-assisted project (with grant funding from Norway and Denmark), the Ministry of Health began strengthening its family planning capabilities. These efforts helped increase the contraceptive prevalence rate from about 14 percent in 1982 to 43 percent in 1988. But the program's growth is beginning to stall. More effort and resources are needed if the program is to grow or even maintain its present status. Particularly important are the following: designing innovative strategies to reach hard-to-reach populations; giving more emphasis to information, education, and communication, especially for men and youths, using multimedia; involving other sectors in the delivery of family planning services; broadening the mix of contraceptive methods (especially promoting long-term and permanent methods); making use of alternative family planning delivery systems, such as the use of depot holders, volunteers, and government extension workers; establishing a national population policy; and considering cost recovery and other measures for self-sustainment and program growth.Agricultural Knowledge&Information Systems,ICT Policy and Strategies,Gender and Health,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Adolescent Health
Government expenditures as a citizens'evaluation of public output : public choice and the benefit principle of taxation
Get PDFCombining elements from the theories of public choice and benefit taxation, the author develops a framework in which private citizens can evaluate public activities. Why, and under what circumstances, do bureaucrats increase the size of the public sector and the amount of public spending in their own self interest? What does the private sector think public output should be, what is actual public output, and how does the private sector evaluate that output? The author applies the theoretical results of an attempt to answer these questions in four Central European countries (Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Slovenia), using actual data for 1989-91 and projections for 1992. Interpreting indirect evidence, he shows that the private sector would prefer less government activity in all countries, from a low of 5 percent less public spending (in Poland) to a high of one-third less (in Slovenia). If those governments were to follow those guidelines, their spending-to-GDP ratios would more closely resemble the 1987-89 average for a selected group of European market economies. The author also introduces a more rigorous, if not necessarily more objective, approach to determining optimal government spending. This approach requires little information, but uses a static model and requires faith in the direction of causality for some key variables. To the extent that one can accept those limitations, the model may be a useful operational tool in public spending evaluation.Public Sector Economics&Finance,National Governance,Economic Theory&Research,Environmental Economics&Policies,Fiscal&Monetary Policy
Numerical homogenization of non-linear parabolic problems on adaptive meshes
No full textWe propose an efficient numerical strategy for solving non-linear parabolic problems defined in a heterogeneous porous medium. This scheme is based on the classical homogenization theory and uses a locally mass-conservative formulation at different scales. In addition, we discuss some properties of the proposed non-linear solvers and use an error indicator to perform a local mesh refinement. The main idea is to compute the effective parameters in such a way that the computational complexity is reduced but preserving the accuracy. We illustrate the behavior of the homogenization scheme and of the non-linear solvers by performing two numerical tests. We consider both a quasi-periodic example and a problem involving strong heterogeneities in a non-periodic medium.The authors gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Research Foundation - Flanders (FWO) through the Odysseus programme (Project G0G1316N). In addition, we wish to thank Professor Mary F. Wheeler and Professor Ivan Yotov who made valuable suggestions or who have otherwise contributed to the ideas behind this manuscript. Part of this work was elaborated during the stay of the first author at the University of Bergen, supported by the Research Foundation - Flanders (FWO), through a travel grant for a short stay abroad. We thank the referees for their valuable comments that helped improving this wor
Theodor W. Adorno e il concetto di seconda natura nel Doktor Faustus di Thomas Mann
No full text“Doktor Faustus” of Thomas Mann, as explained by its author, is a novel on German civilization in which music plays the role of paradigm. Nevertheless the author grasps a lot of quotations from different disciplines and topics, ― e.g., theology, policy, philosophy, music, chemistry ― with the aim of depicting the creation of a second nature in music according the rules of twelve-note composition established by Arnold Schoenberg. The starting point of this complicated narrative is the reinterpretation of Theodor W. Adorno’s “Philosophie der neuen Musik”, a book that inspired Mann in tracing the idea of “second nature” created by the composer Adrian Leverkühn. The article focuses on some keywords used in the famous novel, and taken from inorganic chemistry and geology, working as metaphors on the thin line between nature and nurture. This analogy is retraceable in the biography of Adrian Leverkühn, whose music is the result of a demiurgic, daemonic power he gained after his deal with the devil
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