The Architecture of the Not-quite-well-tempered Environment

The project for the new Houses of Parliament in London was commissioned at the beginning of the 19th century, when the boom in science allowed new technologies and associated social groups to be involved in many established industries, forcing a paradigm shift in the construction industry. The mechanical engineer as a new professional field had just emerged from various backgrounds and started to define its position in architectural collaborations. This change in turn created a type of cooperative social network that was different from the tradition where the project was predominantly run by architects. The reaction, collaboration, conflict and compromise these groups made during construction stages affected the final result to a great extent. Previous research has addressed the problem of communication between these two parties [ ], but focused more on the personalities of the individuals (the architect Sir Charles Barry and the mechanical engineer Dr. Reid (Fig.1)) rather than on the organizational level. This research will firstly try to depict the new Houses of Parliament construction process as it happened in the 1830s, in order to address the organizational issues involved and their possible implication for the modern architectural collaboration. Secondly, it will apply the SCOT (Social Construction of Technology) approach in setting up a controllable boundary to thoroughly study all the relevant social groups in order to explain their intertwined relationship in the construction industry in the Victorian era. The findings give a new angle to analyse innovative technology and new social groups in construction projects, indicating that similar to today’s architecture industry, problems occur not only when the social groups conflict with each other, but also when this conflict has been dealt with inappropriately

Tempered Adversarial Networks

Generative adversarial networks (GANs) have been shown to produce realistic samples from high-dimensional distributions, but training them is considered hard. A possible explanation for training instabilities is the inherent imbalance between the networks: While the discriminator is trained directly on both real and fake samples, the generator only has control over the fake samples it produces since the real data distribution is fixed by the choice of a given dataset. We propose a simple modification that gives the generator control over the real samples which leads to a tempered learning process for both generator and discriminator. The real data distribution passes through a lens before being revealed to the discriminator, balancing the generator and discriminator by gradually revealing more detailed features necessary to produce high-quality results. The proposed module automatically adjusts the learning process to the current strength of the networks, yet is generic and easy to add to any GAN variant. In a number of experiments, we show that this can improve quality, stability and/or convergence speed across a range of different GAN architectures (DCGAN, LSGAN, WGAN-GP).Comment: accepted to ICML 201

A Perspective on Arkansas Basin and Ozark Highland Prehistory

It is, from time to time, valuable to reassess and perhaps shed new light on long-held perspectives. In The \u27Northern Caddoan Area\u27 was not Caddoan, Frank Schambach provides a provocative reinterpretation of the archaeology of the Arkansas Basin and Ozark Highland regions of Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Missouri. While certain comments in this paper have merit and deserve deeper consideration, the central theme and supporting arguments are severely flawed, both from conceptual and data points of view. Schambach\u27s central argument is that there were no Caddoans in the Arkansas Basin and Ozark Highlands north of Spiro. To make this point he asserts that the only Caddoan site north of the Ouachita Mountains is the Brown Mound group at Spiro. All the other sites in the region, including the Craig Mound group at Spiro, are not Caddoan, but are instead a currently undefined Mississippian manifestation. Schambach\u27s scenario goes. something like this: Mississippians moved up the Arkansas River valley in the early,Mississippian Period (presumably in the Harlan Phase, A.O. 850-1250), through western Arkansas to eastern Oklahoma where they displaced the Caddoans living at the Brown Mound group. The Caddoans moved back south to the Ouachita Mountains. The Mississippians, including people of the Plum Bayou culture ... the Spiro phase [A.O. 1250-1450] then built Craig Mound at Spiro while possibly operating a trade system to supply buffalo meat arid hides to the rapidly growing and increasingly protein poor and clothing poor Mississippian populations. . .. to the east. Later, the Mississippians, who were probably ancestral Tunica, retreated back down the Arkansas River to south of Dardenelle, where De Soto encountered them in 1541. The Caddoans then returned to the Spiro area to become the people of the Fort Coffee Phase (A.O. 1450-1500s). This sequence of events is a fascinating reinterpretation of regional culture history, unfortunately it falls flat when confronted by either contemporary theory or the data

Music from Vibrating Wallpaper

Wallpaper patterns have been shown to be decomposable into standing waves of plane vibrations [6]. Previously unexplored are the sounds that arise from these vibrations. The main result of this paper is that each wallpaper type (square, hexagonal, rectangular, generic) has its own distinctive family of pitches relative to a fundamental. We review the method to make wallpaper with wave functions and describe new musical scales for each type, including initial attempts to use the scales: a movie showing vibrations of wallpaper patterns with 3- and 6-fold symmetry inspired a new piece by American composer William Susman, commissioned by the San Jose Chamber Orchestra, Barbara Day Turner, conductor. The piece, “In a State of Patterns,” was premiered on March 25, 2018

Archaeological Sites Along Cuthand Creek and the Sulphur River in the Mid–Sulphur River Basin, Red River County, Texas

The Cuthand Creek and Little Mustang Creek drainage basins in the mid–Sulphur River basin are in the Post Oak Savannah of East Texas. Prehistoric archaeological sites are abundant in both basins and along the Sulphur River, dating from as early as Paleoindian times to the Late Caddo periods. Nevertheless, this area remains poorly known and there have been few professional archaeological investigations conducted here. In this article, we present information on a range of prehistoric sites and associated artifact assemblages known along Cuthand Creek and the Sulphur River in the mid–Sulphur River Basin, in Red River County, Texas. The artifacts that are discussed herein are in the collections of the junior author

The Goss Farm Site (41FN12) on Bois d’Arc Creek, Fannin County, Texas

The Goss Farm site (41FN12) is an ancestral Caddo settlement on an alluvial landform on the west side of Bois d’Arc Creek near its confluence with the Red River. The Sanders site (41LR2) lies east of the Goss Farm on Bois d’Arc Creek; the Goss Farm site is likely part of the same ancestral Caddo settlement as the Sanders site. The recovered artifacts from Goss Farm strongly suggest that the occupations there are culturally related to that of the Sanders site. In August 1930, B. B. Gardner of the University of Texas conducted limited archaeological investigations at the site. He noted that the alluvial landform had midden deposits as well as burials, and he suggested that the site probably contained a large number of burials. In the work, a 15 cm thick ash feature was identified at ca. 76 cm bs; this may be evidence of extensive burning from hearths or the incinerated remains of a burned structure; the full extent of the feature was not defined by Gardner. Three burial features (Burials 1-3) were also excavated at the Goss Farm in 1930, two in close proximity (Burials 1 and 2) that were in flexed positions, were buried at depths of between ca. 45-76 cm bs, and had no associated funerary offerings. Burial 3 was 30 m south of the flexed burials, and was an adult with a cranially deformed skull (comparable to the skulls at the Sanders site) that was buried at a depth of ca. 30 cm bs in an extended position, with the head facing west. One shell-tempered bowl (14.0 cm in height and 14.5 cm in orifice diameter) was included as a funerary offering with Burial 3. The vessel was decorated with two sets of two appliqued nodes and two sets of three appliqued nodes. This decorative treatment is similar to Late Prehistoric Southern Plains shell-tempered decorated vessels (i.e., a variety of Nocona Plain) in the upper Brazos and Red River basins in North Central Texas. The Goss Farm was periodically visited by members of the Dallas Archeological Society. Housewright excavated a child burial at the site that contained an extraordinary funerary offering of 260 disk-shaped turquoise beads and two turquoise pendants. Found also during the excavation of the burial was a single red-slipped sherd, likely from a Sanders Plain vessel

Ceramic composition at Chalcolithic Shiqmim, northern Negev desert, Israel: investigating technology and provenance using thin section petrography, instrumental geochemistry and calcareous nannofossils

Technological innovations in ceramic production and other crafts are hallmarks of the Chalcolithic period (4500–3600 BCE) in the southern Levant, but details of manufacturing traditions have not been fully investigated using the range of analytical methods currently available. This paper presents results of a compositional study of 51 sherds of ceramic churns and other pottery types from the Chalcolithic site of Shiqmim in the northern Negev desert. By applying complementary thin section petrography, instrumental geochemistry and calcareous nannofossil analyses, connections between the raw materials, clay paste recipes and vessel forms of the selected ceramic samples are explored and documented. The study indicates that steps in ceramic manufacturing can be related to both technological choices and local geology. Detailed reporting of the resulting data facilitates future comparative ceramic compositional research that is needed as a basis for testable regional syntheses and to better resolve networks of trade/exchange and social group movement

Aboriginal Ceramic Sherds from 41MA30 in the Navasota River Basin in Madison County, Texas

Aboriginal ceramic sherds from three sites (41MA27, 41MA29, and 41MA30) in the Navasota River basin in the Prairie Savannah of Texas provided the opportunity to investigate their spatial and temporal nature, and to establish with a reasonable certainty their origins, ethnic affiliations, as well as relationships to other ceramic assemblages in the general region. A second collection of nine ceramic sherds is available from 41MA30, and this article describes the analysis of these additional sherds, and then summarizes the character of the larger assemblage (n=30 sherds) as a whole