Collective of Heroes: Arrow’s Move Toward a Posthuman Superhero Fantasy

Since 9/11, superheroes have become a popular medium for storytelling, so much so that popular culture is inundated with the narratives. More recently, the superhero narrative has moved from cinema to television, which allows for the narratives to address more pressing cultural concerns in a more immediate fashion. Furthermore, millions of viewers perpetuate the televised narratives because they resonate with the values and stories in the shows. Through Fantasy Theme Analysis, this project examines the audience values within the Arrow’s superhero fantasy and the influence of posthumanism on the show’s superhero fantasy

Fine-tuning the fuzziness of strong fuzzy partitions through PSO

We study the influence of fuzziness of trapezoidal fuzzy sets in the strong fuzzy partitions (SFPs) that constitute the database of a fuzzy rule-based classifier. To this end, we develop a particular representation of the trapezoidal fuzzy sets that is based on the concept of cuts, which are the cross-points of fuzzy sets in a SFP and fix the position of the fuzzy sets in the Universe of Discourse. In this way, it is possible to isolate the parameters that characterize the fuzziness of the fuzzy sets, which are subject to fine-tuning through particle swarm optimization (PSO). In this paper, we propose a formulation of the parameter space that enables the exploration of all possible levels of fuzziness in a SFP. The experimental results show that the impact of fuzziness is strongly dependent on the defuzzification procedure used in fuzzy rule-based classifiers. Fuzziness has little influence in the case of winner-takes-all defuzzification, while it is more influential in weighted sum defuzzification, which however may pose some interpretation problems

A microparticle swarm optimizer for the reconstruction of microwave images

A novel optimization technique known as the microparticle swarm optimizer (μPSO) is proposed for high-dimensional microwave image reconstruction. With the proposed μPSO, good optimization performance can be obtained especially for solving high-dimensional optimization problems. In addition, the proposed μPSO requires only a small population size to outperform the standard PSO that uses a larger population size. Our simulation results on the reconstruction of the dielectric properties of normal and malignant breast tissues have shown that the μPSO can perform quite well for this high-dimensional microwave image reconstruction problem. © 2007 IEEE

A new hybrid PSO algorithm based on a stochastic Markov chain model

International audienceBased on the recent research concerning the PageRank Algorithm used in the famous search engine Google, a new Inverse-PageRank-Particle Swarm Optimizer (I-PR-PSO) is presented in order to improve the performances of classic PSO. The resulted algorithm uses a stochastic Markov chain model to define an intelligent topological structure of the swarm's population, in which the better particles have an important influence on the others. In the presented experiments, calculations on some benchmark functions classically used to test optimization methods are performed, and the results are compared to different versions of the standard PSO, that is using different topological structures of the population. The experimental results show that I-PR-PSO can converge quicker on the tested functions, and can find better results in the solution domain than its tested peers

Robust and Efficient Swarm Communication Topologies for Hostile Environments

Swarm Intelligence-based optimization techniques combine systematic exploration of the search space with information available from neighbors and rely strongly on communication among agents. These algorithms are typically employed to solve problems where the function landscape is not adequately known and there are multiple local optima that could result in premature convergence for other algorithms. Applications of such algorithms can be found in communication systems involving design of networks for efficient information dissemination to a target group, targeted drug-delivery where drug molecules search for the affected site before diffusing, and high-value target localization with a network of drones. In several of such applications, the agents face a hostile environment that can result in loss of agents during the search. Such a loss changes the communication topology of the agents and hence the information available to agents, ultimately influencing the performance of the algorithm. In this paper, we present a study of the impact of loss of agents on the performance of such algorithms as a function of the initial network configuration. We use particle swarm optimization to optimize an objective function with multiple sub-optimal regions in a hostile environment and study its performance for a range of network topologies with loss of agents. The results reveal interesting trade-offs between efficiency, robustness, and performance for different topologies that are subsequently leveraged to discover general properties of networks that maximize performance. Moreover, networks with small-world properties are seen to maximize performance under hostile conditions

The professional roundtable: developing novice teachers

The effects of a program developed for novice teachers are examined in this document. Data was derived from information obtained during interviews conducted by the intern, as well as entry and exit surveys. The study begins by addressing the nation\u27s impending teacher shortage which can be linked to the retention of novice teachers. This section expounds upon the need to properly develop novice teachers in order to retain their services. The next section is a review of the literature which explains the status of the educational system as it relates to novice teachers. Following this review, a design of the study is presented. The setting of the study was R.D. Wood School in Millville, New Jersey. Participants of the study consisted of classroom teachers with five or less years of service. The program developed for this study was entitled, The Professional Roundtable. The program\u27s development was constructed based on information gathered from interviews and surveys. The findings of this study indicate that the development of The Professional Roundtable was effective for developing novice teachers