Chapeau! First-Year French

This record contains a textbook (pdf), and workbook (pdf) with 24 accompanying audio exercises (mp3).Chapeau! is a first-year college text. Although it may appear, at first glance, to move very fast and introduce a large amount of material early, the vocabulary and grammatical structures that we expect students to control actively by the end of the year are limited in accord with our notion of a reasonable application of the ACTFL proficiency guidelines. As a result, while some instructors may be surprised at such things as the absence of the possessive pronoun, no insistence on the use of optional subjunctives, and no active treatment of the relative dont, others may be disturbed by what we still include in a first-year text. What we do expect students to acquire (which is quantitatively less than what we present in the text for them to know about), we believe they will acquire well, providing a sound basis for further study (formal or informal) and permitting us to say to them, both during and at the end of the course, "Chapeau!

Edge- and Node-Disjoint Paths in P Systems

In this paper, we continue our development of algorithms used for topological network discovery. We present native P system versions of two fundamental problems in graph theory: finding the maximum number of edge- and node-disjoint paths between a source node and target node. We start from the standard depth-first-search maximum flow algorithms, but our approach is totally distributed, when initially no structural information is available and each P system cell has to even learn its immediate neighbors. For the node-disjoint version, our P system rules are designed to enforce node weight capacities (of one), in addition to edge capacities (of one), which are not readily available in the standard network flow algorithms.Comment: In Proceedings MeCBIC 2010, arXiv:1011.005

Au Boulot! First-Year French

This record contains a textbook (pdf), reference grammar (pdf), and the workbook for the first semester (pdf) with 21 accompanying audio exercises (mp3).Au boulot! is a two-year college French program consisting of: a textbook, workbook and 21 accompanying audio exercises; as well as a reference grammar, to be used the entire two years. We also insist that our students obtain a fall-sized dictionary, and we recommend the HARPER-COLLINS-ROBERT bilingual New Standard Edition. (Instructors will note in reviewing the materials that we provide vocabulary lists at the ends of chapters, with translations, but no glossary. We have become convinced after years of experience that glossaries are counter-productive. It is vital that students learn to use dictionaries, and the sooner the better.) In our current program (we have tested this material at the first year and are now testing the second year sequel), we also use a separate reader. The text and workbook are shorter and "lighter" than the average first-year texts have become in recent years, at least in part because we want to provide a core of grammar presentation and exercises, both mechanical and creative, while allowing instructors the flexibility to choose their own reading materials, of which there is a variety of excellent ones available

A Hybrid Quantum-Classical Paradigm to Mitigate Embedding Costs in Quantum Annealing

Despite rapid recent progress towards the development of quantum computers capable of providing computational advantages over classical computers, it seems likely that such computers will, initially at least, be required to run in a hybrid quantum-classical regime. This realisation has led to interest in hybrid quantum-classical algorithms allowing, for example, quantum computers to solve large problems despite having very limited numbers of qubits. Here we propose a hybrid paradigm for quantum annealers with the goal of mitigating a different limitation of such devices: the need to embed problem instances within the (often highly restricted) connectivity graph of the annealer. This embedding process can be costly to perform and may destroy any computational speedup. In order to solve many practical problems, it is moreover necessary to perform many, often related, such embeddings. We will show how, for such problems, a raw speedup that is negated by the embedding time can nonetheless be exploited to give a real speedup. As a proof-of-concept example we present an in-depth case study of a simple problem based on the maximum weight independent set problem. Although we do not observe a quantum speedup experimentally, the advantage of the hybrid approach is robustly verified, showing how a potential quantum speedup may be exploited and encouraging further efforts to apply the approach to problems of more practical interest.Comment: 30 pages, 6 figure

An Investigation of Algorithms to Aesthetically Draw Cayley Graphs

Graph visualisation is an important field in Computer Science. The visualisation of groups in the form of Cayley graphs has applications in the layout of interconnected networks and mathematics. By using theoretical results from group theory, we present two algorithms that take as input a Cayley graph $(G,S)$ and draws it in a layout that highlights the symmetry of the group and is easily readable