Mapping Ideas in the Fortress-Cities of Civitates orbis terrarum

Mapping Ideas in the Fortress-Cities of Civitates orbis terraru

Unsupervised Selective Rationalization with Noise Injection

A major issue with using deep learning models in sensitive applications is that they provide no explanation for their output. To address this problem, unsupervised selective rationalization produces rationales alongside predictions by chaining two jointly-trained components, a rationale generator and a predictor. Although this architecture guarantees that the prediction relies solely on the rationale, it does not ensure that the rationale contains a plausible explanation for the prediction. We introduce a novel training technique that effectively limits generation of implausible rationales by injecting noise between the generator and the predictor. Furthermore, we propose a new benchmark for evaluating unsupervised selective rationalization models using movie reviews from existing datasets. We achieve sizeable improvements in rationale plausibility and task accuracy over the state-of-the-art across a variety of tasks, including our new benchmark, while maintaining or improving model faithfulness.Comment: Accepted to ACL 202

Estelle Lau, Paper Families. Identity, Immigration Administration and Chinese Exclusion

The U.S. Chinese exclusion laws enforced from 1882 to 1943 are proving to be a nearly bottomless source of scholarly inspiration. Not only is exclusion one of the substantive and intellectual foundations of Asian American studies and increasingly recognized as a fundamental aspect of U.S. immigration history, but the exclusion archives are a vast repository of diverse sources that will provide sustenance to intrepid and innovative scholars for years to come. Estelle Lau’s book adds to the bur..

Optimal L\'{e}vy-flight foraging in a finite landscape

We present a simple model to study L\'{e}vy-flight foraging in a finite landscape with countable targets. In our approach, foraging is a step-based exploratory random search process with a power-law step-size distribution $P(l) \propto l^{-\mu}$. We find that, when the termination is regulated by a finite number of steps $N$, the optimum value of $\mu$ that maximises the foraging efficiency can vary substantially in the interval $\mu \in (1,3)$, depending on the landscape features (landscape size and number of targets). We further demonstrate that subjective returning can be another significant factor that affects the foraging efficiency in such context. Our results suggest that L\'{e}vy-flight foraging may arise through an interaction between the environmental context and the termination of exploitation, and particularly that the number of steps can play an important role in this scenario which is overlooked by most previous work. Our study not only provides a new perspective on L\'{e}vy-flight foraging, but also opens new avenues for investigating the interaction between foraging dynamics and environment as well as offers a realistic framework for analysing animal movement patterns from empirical data.Comment: 25 pages, 6 figure

Applying the Pyramid Method in the 2006 Document Understanding Conference

The pyramid evaluation effort for the 2006 Document Understanding Conference involved twenty-two sites on twenty document sets. Each pyramid content model (one per document set) was constructed from four human summaries. Peer systems were scored using the modified pyramid score introduced in DUC 2005. ANOVAs with score as the independent variable and nine factors yielded three significant factors: document set, peer, and content responsiveness. There were many more significant differences among peer systems in 2006 than for DUC 2005. We speculate this is due to a combination of improved systems and improvements in our evaluation procedures

Does Flotillin play a role in lipid raft organization of the GnRH receptor and its ability to transduce an intracellular signal?

Gonadotropin-Releasing Hormone (GnRH) and its subsequent signaling through the GnRH Receptor (GnRH-R) is critical for gonadal development and control of reproduction function. The GnRH-R is a member of the G-protein coupled receptor (GPCR) superfamily and is localized to specialized low-density areas on the cell membrane termed lipid rafts. These raft domains are implicated in GPCR coupled signaling by spatially organizing receptors and their associated signaling proteins to specific domains in the plasma membranes of cells. These raft domains appear to play an important role in the organization of GnRH-R and the signaling of GnRH to MAPkinase. Flotillin-1 is a protein thought to be intricately involved in the organization of rafts and the trafficking of proteins to raft domains. To examine the potential role of flotillin in GnRH signaling, gonadotrope derived αT3-1 cells were transfected with a specific siRNA for Flotillin-1 with the long-term goal of assessing the impact of Flotillin-1 deficiency on GnRHR trafficking to lipid rafts and signaling to intracellular targets including extracellular signal regulated kinase (ERK). Objectives: to use si-GLO Red to determine the transfection efficiency of Flotillin-1 siRNA; to use siRNA technology to knockdown Flotillin-1 expression; to determine the effect of Flotillin-1 knockdown on GnRH-R signaling.Highest Honors

Camp site habitat preferences of the little red flying-fox (Pteropus scapulatus) in Queensland

Urban flying-fox camps are a major source of human-wildlife conflict, producing noise, odour, vegetation damage, property damage, and concerns about disease. Although there is a significant demand in many communities for bat camps to be dispersed, there is limited information on how such dispersal can be conducted effectively. Determining the habitat characteristics flying-foxes use when selecting a camp site is key to understanding why they establish camps where they do and to where they might move if dispersed. We characterised little red flying-fox (LRFF) camp habitat at two spatial scales: Floristics and vegetation structure at the local scale, and climatic and landscape characteristics at the broad scale. We found weak associations with local-scale tree and shrub height and cover, and stronger associations with increased Normalised Difference Vegetation Index (a measure of 'greenness') and decreased distance to nearest watercourse. These relationships were not strong enough to explain all variation in the model, suggesting that there are other factors, such as social cues, that could also influence camp site selection. Our results suggest that minor modifications to existing or proposed camp sites will be unlikely to repel or attract LRFFs, as other factors are likely to play key roles in the formation of camp sites for this species

Threatened but not conserved: flying-fox roosting and foraging habitat in Australia

Conservation relies upon a primary understanding of changes in a species' population size, distribution, and habitat use. Bats represent about one in five mammal species in the world, but understanding for most species is poor. For flying-foxes, specifically the 66 Pteropus species globally, 31 are classified as threatened (Vulnerable, Endangered, Critically Endangered) on the IUCN Red List. Flying-foxes typically aggregate in colonies of thousands to hundreds of thousands of individuals at their roost sites, dispersing at sunset to forage on floral resources (pollen, nectar, and fruit) in nearby environments. However, understanding of flying-fox roosting habitat preferences is poor, hindering conservation efforts in many countries. In this study, we used a database of 654 known roost sites of the four flying-fox species that occur across mainland Australia to determine the land-use categories and vegetation types in which roost sites were found. In addition, we determined the land-use categories and vegetation types found within the surrounding 25 km radius of each roost, representing primary foraging habitat. Surprisingly, for the four species most roosts occurred in urban areas (42-59%, n = 4 species) followed by agricultural areas (21-31%). Critically, for the two nationally listed species, only 5.2% of grey-headed and 13.9% of spectacled flying-fox roosts occurred in habitat within protected areas. Roosts have previously been reported to predominantly occur in rainforest, mangrove, wetland, and dry sclerophyll vegetation types. However, we found that only 20-35% of roosts for each of the four species occurred in these habitats. This study shows that flying-fox roosts overwhelmingly occurred within human-modified landscapes across eastern Australia, and that conservation reserves inadequately protect essential habitat of roosting and foraging flying-foxes