Modality Choice for Generation of Referring Acts: Pointing versus Describing

The main aim of this paper is to challenge two commonly held assumptions regarding modality selection in the generation of referring acts: the assumption that non-verbal means of referring are secondary to verbal ones, and the assumption that there is a single strategy that speakers follow for generating referring acts. Our evidence is drawn from a corpus of task-oriented dialogues that was obtained through an observational study. We propose two alternative strategies for modality selection based on correlation data from the observational study. Speakers that follow the first strategy simply abstain from pointing. Speakers that follow the other strategy make the decision whether to point dependent on whether the intended referent is in focus and/or important. This decision precedes the selection of verbal means (i.e., words) for referring

The New York-New Jersey Boundary Controversy: John Marshall and the Nullification Crisis

In 1832 a long-standing boundary dispute between New York and New Jersey complicated the work of Chief Justice John Marshall and President Andrew Jackson. Long reviled by southern states\u27 rights advocates, including the president, Marshall in 1832 faced the prospect of having the Court\u27s decisions ignored by the state of Georgia. Federal authority was further challenged in the fall of 1832, when South Carolina nullified the tariff of 1828, thereby provoking a constitutional crisis. On December 10, 1832, to the amazement of many observers, Jackson issued a proclamation rejecting nullification and secession, and threatening military action if South Carolina did not change its course

Femtosecond real-time probing of reactions. XI. The elementary OClO fragmentation

Femtosecond reaction dynamics of OClO in a supersonic molecular beam are reported. The system is excited to the A 2A2 state with a femtosecond pulse, covering a range of excitation in the symmetric stretch between v1=17 to v1=11 (308–352 nm). A time-delayed femtosecond probe pulse ionizes the OClO, and OClO + is detected. This ion has not been observed in previous experiments because of its ultrafast fragmentation. Transients are reported for the mass of the parent OClO as well as the mass of the ClO. Apparent biexponential decays are observed and related to the fragmentation dynamics: OClO+hnu-->(OClO)[double-dagger]*-->ClO+O -->Cl+O2 . Clusters of OClO with water (OClO)n (H2O)m with n from 1 to 3 and m from 0 to 3 are also observed. The dynamics of the fragmentation reveal the nuclear motions and the electronic coupling between surfaces. The time scale for bond breakage is in the range of 300–500 fs, depending on v1; surface crossing to form new intermediates is a pathway for the two channels of fragmentation: ClO+O (primary) and Cl+O2 (minor). Comparisons with results of ab initio calculations are made

A guided artificial bee colony (GABC) heuristic for permutation flowshop scheduling problem (PFSP)

Flowshop is the most common production system in the industry, and there are many documented efforts to improve the performance of the flowshop. The range spreads from the usage of heuristics to metaheuristics, and one of the promising methods is NEH (Nawaz, Enscore & Ham) heuristics. This study aims to improve NEH, using an enhanced version of Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) algorithm because the original one has the problem of slow converge speed. As a result, this study will propose a mechanism to improve the convergence speed of ABC because faster convergence speed is the ability to find high-quality results in lesser iterations compared to others. The study clusters the Employed Bees (EB) and Onlooker Bees (OB) into several groups: Total Greedy, Semi Greedy and Non-Greedy. Upon completion, the study selected the Total Greedy (3+0+0) because of the leading performance in makespan value (performance indicator), and the author used it for the rest of this study. This study proposed two variants of the guided initial ABC or Guided Artificial Bee Colony (GABC) with one variant (NEH-based ABC), employing the concept of NEH and the second variant (GABC), employing the concept of NEH and First Job Sequence Arrangement Method. The study experimented according to ten datasets of Taillard benchmark and divided the experiments into several categories and the experiments run every data for several iterations, and for each dataset, there are 20 replications. This study compared the performance of NEH, ABC, NEH-based ABC and GABC, which also act as the validation process. Based on the results, ABC produced inconsistent results for a significant amount of times and interestingly, GABC, NEHbased ABC and ABC produced 68.75%, 63.33% and 0.01% results that are better than NEH, respectively. The data also shows that GABC is 37.9% better than its variant. Finally, the author can conclude that this study demonstrated the slow convergence issue of ABC

Interpretation and Construction

In recent years, it has become apparent that there is a difference between (a) discovering the semantic meaning of the words in the text of the Constitution, and (b) putting that meaning into effect by applying it in particular cases and controversies. To capture this difference, following the lead of political science professor Keith Whittington, legal scholars are increasingly distinguishing between the activities of “interpretation” and “construction.” Although the Supreme Court unavoidably engages in both activities, it is useful to keep these categories separate. For one thing, if originalism is a theory of interpretation, then it may be of limited utility in formulating a theory of construction, other than in requiring that original meaning not be disregarded or undermined. This Essay elaborates and defends the importance of distinguishing interpretation from construction for the benefit of those who may not be entirely familiar with the distinction between these two activities. Although the author begins by offering definitions of interpretation and construction, the labels are not important. Both activities could be called “interpretation”—for example, something like “semantic interpretation” and “applicative interpretation.” Still, the terms “interpretation” and “construction” are of ancient vintage and, although not always precisely defined in this way, were traditionally used to distinguish between these two different activities in which courts and other constitutional actors routinely engage when dealing with authoritative writings, be they contracts, statutes, or the Constitution

“Battleground Africa: Cold War in the Congo, 1960–1965 (Book Review)” by Lise Namikas

Review of Battleground Africa: Cold War in the Congo, 1960–1965 by Lise Namika

Presidential Leadership in the Space Age

Mankind’s quest to reach the moon consisted of many people in leadership positions. In the US, however, many of the decisions behind the space race, especially funding for it, were made by four men: Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Baines Johnson, and Richard Nixon. While some presidents (namely Kennedy) receive more credit than others for their work on bringing man to the moon, each of them passed influential policy that was vital in the development of Apollo: Eisenhower founded NASA and began research on the Saturn V, Kennedy gave vision and urgency to the program, Johnson gave massive funding to it, and Nixon oversaw the program and decided what would come next