Temptations of Jesus

Thesis (M.A.)--Boston Universit

The Devil is in the Tails: Fine-grained Classification in the Wild

The world is long-tailed. What does this mean for computer vision and visual recognition? The main two implications are (1) the number of categories we need to consider in applications can be very large, and (2) the number of training examples for most categories can be very small. Current visual recognition algorithms have achieved excellent classification accuracy. However, they require many training examples to reach peak performance, which suggests that long-tailed distributions will not be dealt with well. We analyze this question in the context of eBird, a large fine-grained classification dataset, and a state-of-the-art deep network classification algorithm. We find that (a) peak classification performance on well-represented categories is excellent, (b) given enough data, classification performance suffers only minimally from an increase in the number of classes, (c) classification performance decays precipitously as the number of training examples decreases, (d) surprisingly, transfer learning is virtually absent in current methods. Our findings suggest that our community should come to grips with the question of long tails

The medieval legend of Judas Iscariot: the Vita of Judas and the Gospel of Barnabas

This paper looks at the development of the Judas Legend, particularly in the Middle Ages. The beginning of the paper establishes a foundation: how reliable are the canonical gospels and how did the legend develop along with the early church (particularly considering the Apocryphal infancy gospel and the recently discovered Gospel of Judas) before considering two texts of the medieval period: The Vita Judas, dating from around 1150 incorporated the recently re-discovered Oedipus legend and has Judas guilty of Oedipus’s crimes as well as crimes that subvert the natural order as found in the Bible); the second text is The Gospel of Barnabas, a non-canonical gospel dinting from the early fourteen century that has been worked over by Muslim scribes and in which Judas is always on the periphery of the disciples, never believing Jesus’ teaching. In this gospel, he betrays Jesus but through a miraculous transformation Judas is crucified in Jesus plac

The Devil's Colors: A Comparative Study of French and Nigerian Folktales

This study, largely based on five separate published collections, compares French and Nigerian folktales - focusing mainly on French Dauphine and Nigerian Igboland - to consider the role color plays in encounters with supernatural characters from diverse color background. A study in black, white/red and green, the paper compares the naming of colors in the two languages and illustrates their usage as a tool to communicate color-coded values. Nigeria's history, religious beliefs, and language development offer additional clues to what at first appears to be fundamental differences in cultural approach. Attempting to trace the roots of this color-coding, the study also considers the impact of colonization on oral literature and traditional art forms

Goethe's Faust and Calderón's El Mágico Prodigioso

Thesis (M.A.)--Boston Universit

The angel wins

The angel-devil game is played on an infinite two-dimensional ``chessboard''. The squares of the board are all white at the beginning. The players called angel and devil take turns in their steps. When it is the devil's turn, he can turn a square black. The angel always stays on a white square, and when it is her turn she can fly at a distance of at most J steps (each of which can be horizontal, vertical or diagonal) to a new white square. Here J is a constant. The devil wins if the angel does not find any more white squares to land on. The result of the paper is that if J is sufficiently large then the angel has a strategy such that the devil will never capture her. This deceptively easy-sounding result has been a conjecture, surprisingly, for about thirty years. Several other independent solutions have appeared simultaneously, some of them prove that J=2 is sufficient (see the Wikipedia on the angel problem). Still, it is hoped that the hierarchical solution presented here may prove useful for some generalizations.Comment: 28 pages, 8 figure

Interview with Marlon James

Marlon James is the author of three novels, most recently A Brief History of Seven Killings, which won the coveted Man Booker Prize in 2015. He is also the writer behind John Crow’s Devil, published 2005, and The Book of Night Women, published 2009. Since 2007, James has been a professor of creative writing at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota. He has also written for numerous publications, including The New York Times. During his visit to Butler University as part of the Vivian S. Delbrook Visiting Writers Series, James took the time to speak with Manuscripts staff member Julian Wyllie

Spartan Daily, October 29, 1998

Volume 111, Issue 43https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/9331/thumbnail.jp