Multilevel diversity coding with independent data streams.

by Hau Ka Pun.Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1995.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 102-[103]).Chapter 1 --- Introduction --- p.1Chapter 1.1 --- A General Review of MDCS --- p.1Chapter 1.2 --- MDCS with Independent Data Streams --- p.4Chapter 1.3 --- Admissible Coding Rate Region --- p.5Chapter 1.4 --- Distribution of Information in Different Encoders --- p.6Chapter 1.5 --- Multilevel Diversity Coding by Superposition --- p.8Chapter 1.6 --- Optimality of Superposition --- p.11Chapter 1.7 --- Different MDCS coding schemes --- p.17Chapter 2 --- MDCS's with Three Encoders --- p.20Chapter 2.1 --- 2-level-3-encoder MDCS --- p.21Chapter 2.2 --- 3-level-3-encoder MDCS --- p.31Chapter 3 --- Symmetrical Multilevel Diversity Coding System --- p.49Chapter 3.1 --- Introduction --- p.49Chapter 3.2 --- "SMDCS[2,m,(l,m)]" --- p.53Chapter 3.3 --- "SMDCS[3， m,(l,2,m)]" --- p.56Chapter 3.4 --- "SMDCS[3,m,(l,3,m)]" --- p.62Chapter 3.5 --- "SMDCS[4,4, (1,2,3,4)]" --- p.66Chapter 4 --- Convex Analysis of Coding Rate Region of DCS --- p.72Chapter 4.1 --- Introduction --- p.72Chapter 4.2 --- Polyhedral Sets --- p.73Chapter 4.3 --- Addition of Polyhedral Sets --- p.75Chapter 4.4 --- Algorithms to Enumerate Extreme Points and Decompose Tuples --- p.86Chapter 5 --- Conclusion and Further Research --- p.90Chapter 5.1 --- Conclusion --- p.90Chapter 5.2 --- Suggestions for Further Research --- p.91Appendix --- p.93Chapter A --- Proof of Equivalence of rsp and Rsp in Chapter3 --- p.93Chapter A.1 --- r2m1m and R2m1m --- p.93Chapter A.2 --- r33123 and R33123 --- p.94Chapter A.3 --- r441234 and. R441234 --- p.96Chapter B --- A Class of MDCS Where Superposition is Always Not Optimal --- p.99Bibliography --- p.10

Bibliographies of the jet propulsion labora- tory no. 39-1 through 39-5 cumulative bibliographic index no. 41-1

Bibliographical index on aerospace technolog

Use of genetic markers in Alstroemeria

This thesis describes the results of various applications of the AFLP technique in Alstroemeria . The aim of this study was 1) to adapt the AFLP technique for Alstroemeria species which has a large genome size, 2) to study the genetic diversity of Alstroemeria species of Chilean and Brazilian origin, 3) to construct genetic linkage maps of the A. aurea genome and 4) to map in A. aurea QTLs involved in ornamentally important traits.The AFLP technique was adapted to obtain a method that produces clear fingerprints in Alstroemeria . We used PCR primers with two selective nucleotides (= Eco RI+2/ Mse I+2) during preamplification before PCR amplification with 33P labelled primers with four selective nucleotides (Eco RI+4/ Mse I+4) in the final step (Chapter 2). It was noticed that increasing the number of intermediate pre-amplifications was not preferable, because of the increased bias due to competition between fragments and the extra labour. The GC contents of the selective nucleotides had a significant influence on the number of bands. The primer combinations with CG residues in the selective nucleotides showed fewer bands per lane (Chapter 2). This result confirmed earlier other observations that the Alstroemeria genome is AT rich.In our study, the reproducibility of the AFLP technique for genetic analysis was verified. All bands in the fingerprints of offspring genotypes could be explained from the parental genotypes (Chapter 2). No PCR artefacts, mismatching and random priming had been detected in general, but reliable fingerprints of a species with a large genome such as Alstroemeria can be obtained with Eco RI+2/ Mse I+2 preamplification and Eco RI+4/ Mse I+4 for final amplification.AFLP fingerprints were produced of 22 Alstroemeria species, one interspecific hybrid ( A. aurea x A. inodora ) and the distantly related species Bomarea salsilla and Leontochir ovallei as outgroup (Chapter 3). AFLP template of three accessions per species was mixed to obtain a more generalised fingerprint to represent an Alstroemeria species. Three primer combinations (E+ACCA/M+CATG, E+ACCT/M+CATC and E+AGCC/M+CACC), selected on the basis of their fingerprint quality, resulted into a data set of 272, 211 and 233 markers per primer combination.The UPGMA dendrogram revealed three main clusters: the Chilean species, the Brazilian species and the outgroup. The principal co-ordinate plot revealed the same three groups, but additionally, the A. ligtu group was separated from the Chilean group. A. aurea was positioned between Chilean and Brazilian groups. The unique position of A. aurea suggests that other Chilean and Brazilian species may have evolved from A. aurea ecotypes (Tombolato, A.F.C., pers. comm.). A. haemantha Ruiz and Pavon was grouped with A. ligtu subsp. ligtu , A. ligtu subsp. incarnata and A. ligtu subsp. simsii . This confirms previous studies which assigned A. haemantha to the A. ligtu group. In the monography of Bayer on taxonomy of Chilean species suggested that A. haemantha and A. ligtu were synonymous names. Two species, A. umbellata and A. pelegrina , showed a genetic distance of only 0.26 GD, which is in the range of within-species genetic distances. The interspecific hybrid ( A. aurea´A. inodora ) showed a genetic distance of 0.45 GD and 0.59 GD with A. inodora and A. aurea , respectively. In the matrix of pairwise genetic distances these values were the lowest observed between the hybrid and any of the putative parental species. This example demonstrates that it seems to be feasible to identify the parental species of an interspecific hybrid on the basis of genetic distance values. An F 1 hybrid mapping population (N = 134) was established between two diploid A. aurea genotypes (A002 x A003; 2n = 2x = 16) in order to construct linkage maps. Over 374 polymorphic AFLP markers have been produced with 28 primer combinations (Chapter 4). Around 70 % of these polymorphic markers have been assigned to the linkage maps in either of the A002 and A003 parental map. As a result, these maps consisted of 8 and 10 linkage groups with 122 and 214 markers covering 306.3 and 605.6 cM, respectively. These differences between the two maps in terms of number of markers and total map length, indicates a different level of heterozygosity. This could have been caused by self-pollination for sexual maintenance of the accession by the breeders, leading to fixation on 50% of the genome. The two maps were integrated by using the F 2 type of AFLP markers. The pollen colour locus was assigned on the A002-6 linkage group.We also tested another method to handle the complexity of the large genome. Instead of adding selective nucleotides to 6-cutter template we generated AFLP template with an 8-cutter restriction enzyme Sse 8387I. Fingerprints generated with Eco RI+4/ Mse I+4 primers produced around 80 clear bands from which around 16 markers were polymorphic, whereas the fingerprints generated with Sse +2/ Mse I+3 primers produced 30 clear bands from which 9 markers were polymorphic (Chapter 4). On the one hand the simpler Sse 8387I / Mse I fingerprints were more easy to evaluate, on the other hand a higher number of useful markers could be obtained with the Eco RI/ Mse I fingerprints.The previously established A. aurea linkage maps were used in order to map and characterise QTL for important traits, such as leaf morphology, the colour, size and shape of the flower, tepal stripe width, and productivity in terms of number of flowering stems and flowering period (Chapter 5). The majority of these traits were chosen on the basis of the UPOV list of cultivar descriptors. For all traits, except for flower openness, the offspring trait values displayed a continuous distribution, not deviating from normality. The transgressive segregations that phenotypic values of the progeny go beyond the parental values have been observed for the morphological traits of the leaves due to heterozygosity in the parents. Interval mapping and the Kruskal-Wallis test was performed to detect and to localize QTL, using separate parental data sets and non-integrated maps of A002 and A003. For interval mapping, a permutation test was used to empirically determine the significance threshold of the LOD score for each linkage group. This resulted in putative QTL with 95 % confidence threshold values ranging between LOD = 2.6 and LOD = 4.9, or in QTL with 99% confidence threshold values ranging between LOD = 3.85 and LOD = 4.81. In total 22 QTL for the traits studied were located throughout the map. The phenotypic variance explained by the QTL ranged from 11.2% to 32.2%. It was observed that many of the QTL did not reach high LOD values, or did not reach highly significant K-values in the Kruskal-Wallis test. It was also observed that QTL detected by interval mapping were not often confirmed by the Kruskal-Wallis test and vice versa. Probable explanations were discussed in Chapter 5. The overall conclusion is that, despite its large genome, the AFLP technology can be applied relatively easily in Alstroemeria for genetic and biodiversity studies.</p

Language, Likeness, and the Han Phenomenon of Convergence

Although in the classical Chinese outlook the world can only be made sense of through the means devised by the ancient sages and handed down by the tradition, the art of exegesis has long been a neglected subject. Scholars have been all too eager to dispute what their chosen text says than to pay attention to the nuanced ways in which it hones its tools. This dissertation aims to somewhat redirect the discipline's attention by focusing on Xu Shen's Shuowen Jiezi. I approach this compendium of Han philology, typically regarded as a repository of disparate linguistic data, as underlied by a tight theoretical framework reducible to one simple idea. I begin with the discussion of the competing visions of the six principles, for two millenia the basis of instruction in the arts of letters. I identify the relationship between abstraction and representation and the principle of convergence as the main points of contention. I take Xu Shen's convergence to pertain to the Han practice of relating words through sound similarity. This in turn I interpret as one particular manifestation of dispositional categorization (類情), a fortunes turning term in the exegetical tradition of the Change. The third chapter illustrates Xu Shen's twin techniques of relating and differentiating along with the worldview of the Change from which they derive. It introduces the concepts of matching and extension, and pits them against their counterparts of mirroring and analogy. The leitmotifs of the fourth chapter are Xu Shen's argument against the arbitrariness of sign and the relationship between linguistic and cognitive categorization. The fifth chapter compares the Shuowen to other works of Han lexicography, character primers in particular. The phenomenon of paronomastic glossing is examined here in detail. I argue that Xu Shen's ordering of classical vocabulary on the basis of graphic resemblance and the concomitant explanations are but projections of paronomasia into the realm of semiotics. The final chapter situates this likeness driven interpretative strategy against earlier attitudes to language. I close by intimating the creative potential entailed in Xu Shen's recasting of fragmentary diachronic knowledge as a comprehensive synchronic system.East Asian Languages and Civilization

Self and other in black and white: slaves' letters and the epistolary cultures of American slavery c.1730-1865

Understanding American slavery, which for me means at least trying to comprehend how African Americans made it survivable and European Americans made it conscionable, is no easy task, and if I have achieved anything with the foregoing discussion I hope it has been to present a history of the epistolary cultures of slavery which complicates rather than simplifies this story. For to the history of American slavery the slave letters are just that, a complication. They complicate our view of the relationships between bondspeople and of the ways in which masters and slaves related to one another. So too do they complicate our understanding of how their authors saw and constructed themselves and defined and thought about others. Furthermore, they also raise significant questions about the nature of the slave community and the linkages and disjunctures that existed between the cultures African and European Americans constructed in the shadow of slavery, and thus present useful complications to our thinking about the formation of these cultures and the ways in which each sought to appropriate and subvert the cultural practices of the other. In this regard, they also raise complications regarding the transformations of slavery, for while we may view the epistolary and archival cultures that are apparent in the nineteenth century as products of paternalism and the sentimentality that lay at the heart of this project, the intimations of continuity in terms of enslaved people's self-perceptions that are afforded by a comparison of antebellum letters with those that were written in the late colonial and early republican eras suggest that the transformation that slaveholders worked on themselves was perhaps rather less significant for the victims of their slaveholding.Perhaps most importantly, however, they complicate the idea of resistance, a concept that has proved of central importance to studies of slavery and yet which often seems to be used either as a coded reference to a particular concept of masculinity, as Baptist argues, or else in a rather nebulous way in order to give meaning to almost every aspect of slaves' behaviour which did not conform to the o wishes of their masters. But if everything from the slaves' economy to their medicinal practice, from playing dumb to committing infanticide is to be categorized as a form of resistance, it is important to consider whether those that committed these acts were actively engaging in forms of resistance, which is to say in Bhabha's terms, self-consciously situating their actions "within the rules of recognition of dominating discourses," in order to critique and counter "deferential relations of power," or whether they were merely, as Stampp would have it, "unconscious reflections of the o character that slavery had given." As should be quite apparent, my own interpretation suggests the former and not the latter position, and while the slave letters may often be mute on the specifics of such actions, what they do reveal is that the way in which slaves conducted themselves in their epistolary dealings with slaveowners and their disciplinary agents were intimately informed by sophisticated understandings of the workings of power.This is not to suggest, however, that my imaginary archive of slaves' letters is somehow to be treated as the Rosetta stone for understanding slaves' behaviour. It is not. For one thing it is inherently limited, not only because of the preponderance of letters written by slaves who occupied particularly ambivalent positions within the power structures constructed by their masters, but also because of how much it omits. Furthermore, as I have been at pains to stress throughout, it is much more of a record of the power to archive than of the power to correspond, and while this makes a reading of the historical archives from which it has been constructed a profitable way to analyse the archivists who created them, it nonetheless means that as a set of sources the value we attach to the letters must be measured against the reasons for their survival. Nor am I suggesting that this archive should be used to the exclusion of others, and as my own evidentiary choices will have demonstrated, the meanings of the slaves' letters are best analysed by reading them alongside other forms of testimony, whether this comes from ex-slaves, masters or other observers.But even with such limitations in mind, the letters nonetheless afford us an opportunity to see at close quarters what were surely highly significant negotiations over identity for those slaves and masters that they involved, and they have the advantage over many other sources by being the texts of such negotiations as opposed to texts written about them. As such I think it is legitimate to suggest that what we can learn from them may well be representative of similar negotiations which took place beyond the bounds of the epistolary cultures that have been the subject of this thesis. Indeed, I would suggest that the "contextual, contested and contingent" identities that bondspeople and owners constructed for themselves and each other in these negotiations constituted a most important aspect of the competition between domination and resistance, and thus, as I suggested in the introduction, are a useful way to open up conversations about other aspects of resistance and other ways in which African Americans sought to make their enslavement bearable whilst their masters sought to make it excusable.But of course it might be argued that in their literacy, or at least their letter writing, these slaves were transformed, for the textual transcription of identity and the opportunities this allows for its refinement, revision and correction perhaps makes the writing laboratory and indeed the archival laboratory that is its counterpart, such specific and exceptional conceptual spaces as to be completely unrepresentative of the venues in which other slaves had to construct or perform identity.But since so much of human interaction, even amongst the most highly literate of people, is in fact spoken and not written and consists in gesture and action and not in scripture and inscription, one is of course tempted merely to dismiss this putative problem by repeating C. Vann Woodward's oft-quoted defence of slave testimony in all of its subjectivity, contingency and bias: "as if the same objection did not exist to the testimony of the slaveowners." But in fact, Miller is actually raising a rather more profound point, namely the question of whether it fundamentally alters an individual to conceive of language textually rather than orally, and if we are to utilise the texts generated by bondspeople as a measure of the way in which enslaved African Americans, both literate and non-literate, constructed the world around them and constructed themselves within that world, then this is a crucial issue.Without doubt, many philosophers of language regard the transition from orality to textuality as a fundamental paradigm shift since written language is amenable to "microanalysis, annotation, revision, rearrangement and interpretation" by both readers and writers in a way that oral dialogue, which only exists in an historical present, can never be. By extension, therefore, the interior life of the self - which is assumed to be at least partially signified in linguistic terms - is also transformed when it is expressed in a written text to be analysed, reviewed and re¬ written/re-read. Moreover, it can certainly be argued that slaves' own perceptions of the transformatory effects of literacy provide the cue for applying such an analysis to slave writings. Douglass refers to his acquisition of literacy as "the path from slavery to freedom," a pivotal event that allowed him to redefine and reconstitute himself as a subject rather than an object.I think that this concept of a fundamental distinction between the textual and the oral is artificial, and as Paul Ricoeur argues, one may construct an oral hermeneutic model which shares many features with textual hermeneutics in that by memorisation oral discourse may be "fixed in such a way that memory appears as the support of an inscription similar to that provided by external marks."9 This is not to suggest that textualising one's self (and others) does not have potentially transformatory, revelatory effects, but rather that to imagine that this is only true of scriptural textualisation is a mistake. For while written texts do indeed have the potential to allow their authors to reflect on their self-constructions in a unique way, but there are many other mirrors in which to style and restyle one's perception of both self and other and thus such textual construction and reconstruction should not be seen as exceptional or atypical, but in fact merely as a manifestation of a very normal, very human process. In predominantly oral cultures, however, it is frequently unrecoverable and thus it is the fact that the slave letters afford us an opportunity to examine this everyday sociocultural process that is exceptional

Decision-making: creativity, judgment, and systems

(print) x, 276 p. : ill. : 24 cmThe essays assembled in this volume were prepared by the authors for presentation on the campus of the Ohio State University at the Thomas A. Boyd interdisciplinary conference on decision-making aids. Through the financial support of the College of Engineering, the Thomas A. Boyd Lecture Fund, and the School of Architecture, the conference was established as a means for bringing together an interdisciplinary group of scientists and scholars for a wide-ranging discussion of the many aspects of emerging decision-aid research and applications along with their implications for professional activities and professional education. Consonant with the excellence and achievement stimulated by Thomas A. Boyd's support for higher education, the conference and the papers presented in this volume are dedicated to the advancement of the use of scientific methods for decision-making within the several disciplines concerned with enhancing environment and the well-being of people.Preface. p.ix -- Introduction. p.3 -- PART 1: Decision-making strategies. -- Personalistic decision theory: exposition and critique. p.19 -- The Study of collective decisions. p.42 -- PART 2: Decision-making aids -- Information science as an aid to decision-making. p.69 -- Toward a working theory of automated design. p.85 -- The Generation of form by geometric methods. p.112 -- PART 3: Decision aid applications -- Decision aids for the planning and development of university facilities. p.127 -- Analytic approaches to facility layout and design. p.137 -- Development action sequencing under highly constrained conditions. p.147 -- Adaptive diagnosis of problems. p.157 -- PART 4: Human creativity and judgment -- Managing visual information. p.173 -- Matching decision aids with intuitive styles. p.190 -- Conceptual models in design. p.205 -- PART 5: Implications -- Who looks at the whole system? p.223 -- Decision aids: needs and prospects. p.247 -- Epilogue. p.261 -- Notes on the contribution. p.265 -- Index. p.26

The Politics of Philanthropy and Race Relations: The Joint Councils of South Africa, c.1920-1955.

This thesis looks in detail at the activities of the joint councils - inter-racial organizations involved in the fields of 'race relations' and 'constitutional' protest politics particularly during the interwar years. The first joint council was established in Johannesburg in 1921, and by the 1930s, councils had been formed in virtually all the major urban centres in South Africa, as well as in a number of smaller towns and rural centres. For reasons of narrative cohesion, as well as the dictates of space, the period covered corresponds with the individual history of the Johannesburg Joint Council, the largest and most influential of these agencies. The Johannesburg body ceased operations in 1951, and in 1955 its funds were transferred to the South African Institute of Race Relations. The joint councils are usually seen as having been closely associated with white liberal thought and practice, especially during the interwar period, and one of the chief aims of this study is to explore this assumption. Was the social reformism of the councils essentially 'white' liberalism or was it a more complex amalgam of liberalism and essentially conservative philanthropic practices? A related concern is to provide some record of the activities, perceptions and experiences of the relatively wide spectrum of people who participated in the joint councils. This dimension is important as we still know relatively little of the regional dynamics of social reformism and interracial liberal ventures. Other themes which help shape the narrative are: the relationship between the joint councils and the African petty bourgeoisie; the growth of the South African Institute of Race Relations out of the joint council movement, as well as its subsequent, almost parasitical, relationship with the councils; and reasons for the decline of the joint council movement

Fictions of law and custom: passing narratives at the fins des siècles

This dissertation examines narratives of passing of the nineteenth- and twentieth century fins de siècle. My central thesis is that passing narratives of the 1990s and beyond evidence symmetry between the tropes of passing that occur at plot level and passing strategies surrounding the production of the texts themselves. I argue that the connections between passing and authorship that emerge in contemporary stories invite us to reconsider extant interpretations of earlier passing stories, specifically those published at the turn of the twentieth century. The Introduction challenges the historiography of the passing narrative traced in existing studies of passing. It also suggests the ways in which authorship and passing are inextricably linked via the arbitrary standard of "authenticity," both authorial and racial. In Chapter One, I examine the relationship between the African American body-as-text and the African American author who produces a text in The Bondwoman's Narrative (date unknown), Philip Roth's The Human Stain (2000) and Percival Everett's Erasure (2001). Chapter Two takes the self-reflexive detective genre and traces the changing roles of the passing character within the conventions of the form, from femme fatale to hard-boiled detective. Here, I focus specifically on Pauline Hopkins's Hagar's Daughter (1901-1902), Walter Mosley's Devil in a Blue Dress (1990) and Robert Skinner's Wesley Farrell series (1997-2002). In Chapter Three, I examine texts whose protagonists' gender and/or racial ambiguity serve to destabilise analogously the religious categories under interrogation in those texts, namely Hopkins's Winona (1902) and Louise Erdrich's Tracks (1988) and The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (2001). Chapter Four examines tropes of passing in relation to three contemporary novels of adolescence, Paul Beatty's The White Boy Shuffle (1996), Danzy Senna's Caucasia (1998) and Jeffrey Eugenides's Middlesex (2002). Finally, the Conclusion discusses recent controversies of authorship and authenticity in the U.S., particularly as these pertain to the ambiguous literary category of "memoir.