A2_3 Mission: Incruiseable

This paper considers the feasibility of Tom Cruise holding onto an airbus military A400m duringtake-off in a scene in the film Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation. Comparing the required forcefor Tom Cruise to remain holding onto the aeroplane to the force exerted by the deadlift Guinness World Record holder, Eddie Hall, shows that Tom Cruise would experience 3230 - 6370 N depending on his velocity and posture. Eddie Hall deadlifted 4910 N, making Tom Cruise's stunt a Mission: Impossible

Pour une astronomie du cinéma : le perfectionnisme moral de Tom Cruise, trajectoire d'une star

Notre recherche s’articule autour de cette question : comment Tom Cruise, par la manière singulière qu’il a de se présenter à nous, réfléchit-il le cinéma ? En s’inspirant de la démarche du philosophe Stanley Cavell, pour qui penser la star nous amène nécessairement à penser le cinéma, et inversement, ce mémoire explore la filmographie de Tom Cruise pour se demander ce qu’est une star hollywoodienne, et plus spécialement quel est son lien à l’ontologie de l’image cinématographique. Ainsi, dans un premier temps, nous examinons la question de l’ontologie du cinéma pour Cavell, et comment la star se crée à même les puissances révélatrices du cinéma, ce qui nous permet, du coup, de distinguer notre approche de celle, sémiologique, favorisée par les star studies. Dans un deuxième temps, nous explorons le problème du scepticisme tel qu’il se présente à Tom Cruise. Pour Cavell, la star est un modèle auquel confronter notre expérience ordinaire : c’est en affrontant son scepticisme que Tom Cruise peut nous servir de guide, entre autres parce que le drame de Tom Cruise s’appuie sur et révèle notre expérience du cinéma, que Cavell décrit comme une « image mouvante du scepticisme ». Et comme il s’agit d’un drame récurrent dans la filmographie de Tom Cruise, nous y voyons un exemple de perfectionnisme moral. Enfin, Minority Report (Steven Spielberg, 2002) introduit un questionnement nouveau dans la carrière de Tom Cruise, lié au dispositif projetant son image. Or, comme Cavell a publié son ouvrage The World Viewed en 1971, à un moment où l’expérience du cinéma était encore profondément liée à un contexte de visionnement précis (la salle obscure, l’écran géant, la foule, la pellicule, etc.), Tom Cruise semble se demander cette fois : la star étant liée essentiellement à l’image photographique, qu’advient-il de la star dans le contexte d’un cinéma numérique ? Ce qui implique une seconde question : la star peut-elle encore nous servir de modèle à l’ère de l’expérience informatisée et pour penser l’image numérique ?Our study is structured around this question: how does Tom Cruise, with his singular manner of being present to us on screen, reflects our experience of cinema? Our approach is inspired by the philosopher Stanley Cavell, for whom thinking about film stars lead us to think about cinema, and vice versa. This dissertation explores Tom Cruise’s filmography by asking what is a star, in Hollywoodian cinema, and more specifically, what is the relation between the star and the ontology of the cinematographic image. First, we will examine the question of the ontology of film for Cavell, and how the star creates itself by using cinema’s revelatory power. This will then help us to distinguish our approach from the star studies, and their preference for semiology. Secondly, we will explore the problem of skepticism that takes hold of Tom Cruise: for Cavell, the film star is a model to whom we confront our ordinary experience. By accepting his skepticism, Tom Cruise becomes a guide for the spectator, in part because this skeptical drama reflects our experience of cinema, which Cavell describes as a “moving image of skepticism”. And since it’s a recurring drama in Tom Cruise’s filmography, we propose that it becomes an example of moral perfectionism. Finally, Minority Report (Steven Spielberg, 2002) introduces a new questioning for Tom Cruise, connected to the apparatus that projects his image. Cavell wrote his book The World Viewed in 1971, when the experience of cinema was still determined by a precise setting for viewing movies (the dark room, the large screen, the audience, film, etc.) So, in this movie, Tom Cruise seems to ask: if the film star is essentially linked with the photographic image, what becomes of the star within digital cinema? This question imply a second one: can the film star still be a guide for the spectator in our era of digital experience, and can she still help us think about digital image

From Data Fusion to Knowledge Fusion

The task of {\em data fusion} is to identify the true values of data items (eg, the true date of birth for {\em Tom Cruise}) among multiple observed values drawn from different sources (eg, Web sites) of varying (and unknown) reliability. A recent survey\cite{LDL+12} has provided a detailed comparison of various fusion methods on Deep Web data. In this paper, we study the applicability and limitations of different fusion techniques on a more challenging problem: {\em knowledge fusion}. Knowledge fusion identifies true subject-predicate-object triples extracted by multiple information extractors from multiple information sources. These extractors perform the tasks of entity linkage and schema alignment, thus introducing an additional source of noise that is quite different from that traditionally considered in the data fusion literature, which only focuses on factual errors in the original sources. We adapt state-of-the-art data fusion techniques and apply them to a knowledge base with 1.6B unique knowledge triples extracted by 12 extractors from over 1B Web pages, which is three orders of magnitude larger than the data sets used in previous data fusion papers. We show great promise of the data fusion approaches in solving the knowledge fusion problem, and suggest interesting research directions through a detailed error analysis of the methods.Comment: VLDB'201

Hollywood wird zu Scientollywood

Seit 1955 ist Scientology in Hollywood präsent, und die Organisation gewinnt immer mehr prominente Anhänger. Der bekannteste davon ist der Schauspieler Tom Cruise, der eine entscheidende Rolle bei Scientology einnimmt. Das Ziel dieser Arbeit ist es, die Funktion des Schauspielers bei Scientology und seine Notwendigkeit für seine Mitgliedschaft, genauer unter die Lupe zu nehmen. Als Beispiele werden öffentliche Auftritte, wo Tom Cruise die Organisation repräsentiert, angeführt. Die Herstellung der Identität und Persönlichkeit nimmt an dieser Stelle eine wichtige Rolle ein. Bevor man sich an den Fokus ran tastet, wird zu Beginn der Arbeit, der historische Teil von Scientology und danach der geschichtliche Abschnitt von Scientology in Hollywood, vorgestellt, der für das Weiterlesen dieser Diplomarbeit relevant ist.Since 1955 Scientology is present in Hollywood. The organization is winning more and more prominent followers. The best known one of it, is the actor Tom Cruise, who is taking a determining role in Scientology. The aim of this thesis is, to introduce the function of the actor in Scientology, and his need for his membership. As examples, different public appearances are stated, where Tom Cruise represents the organisation. At this point the production of the identity and personality takes an important role. Before groping the way in the focus, the historical segment of Scientology and Scientology in Hollywood is introduced at the beginning of the work. These topics are relevant for reading on this thesis

The ethics of machine translation

In this paper I first describe the two main branches in machine translation research. I then go to discuss why the second of these, statistical machine translation, can cause some malaise among translation scholars. As some of the issues that arise are ethical in nature, I stop to ponder what an ethics of machine translation might involve, before considering the ethical stance adopted by some of the main protagonists in the development and popularisation of statistical machine translation, and in the teaching of translation