The Compassionate Gift of Vice: Śāntideva on Gifts, Altruism, and Poverty

The Mahāyāna Buddhist thinker Śāntideva tells his audience to give out alcohol, weapons and sex for reasons of Buddhist compassion, though he repeatedly warns of the dangers of all these three. The article shows how Śāntideva resolves this issue: these gifts, and gifts in general, attract their recipients to the virtuous giver, in a way that helps the recipients to become more virtuous in the long run. As a consequence, Śāntideva does recommend the alleviation of poverty, but assigns it a much smaller significance than is usually supposed. His views run counter to many engaged Buddhist discussions of political action, and lend support to the “modernist” interpretation of engaged Buddhist practice

Visibility and the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture for analytic rank one

Let $E$ be an optimal elliptic curve over \Q of conductor $N$ having analytic rank one, i.e., such that the $L$-function $L_E(s)$ of $E$ vanishes to order one at $s=1$. Let $K$ be a quadratic imaginary field in which all the primes dividing $N$ split and such that the $L$-function of $E$ over $K$ vanishes to order one at $s=1$. Suppose there is another optimal elliptic curve over \Q of the same conductor $N$ whose Mordell-Weil rank is greater than one and whose associated newform is congruent to the newform associated to $E$ modulo an integer $r$. The theory of visibility then shows that under certain additional hypotheses, $r$ divides the order of the Shafarevich-Tate group of $E$ over $K$. We show that under somewhat similar hypotheses, $r$ divides the order of the Shafarevich-Tate group of $E$ over $K$. We show that under somewhat similar hypotheses, $r$ also divides the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer {\em conjectural} order of the Shafarevich-Tate group of $E$ over $K$, which provides new theoretical evidence for the second part of the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture in the analytic rank one case

Building an application for the writing process

The idea that writing is a process and not a product is now generally accepted in writing education, but discussions of digital scholarly communication often neglect the idea, in theory and in practice. This thesis report introduces a Mac OS X software package to support the early stages of the writing process, called Brouillon. Brouillon’s features include: the concatenation of discrete note files into notebooks; notes appearing in multiple notebooks; note intake from mobile devices via Dropbox; and an open standard file format. The report also provides a model of the organization of products of the writing process, with a focus on Brouillon’s most unusual feature, multi-notebook notes. It discusses difficulties in implementation and identifies possibilities for future improvement

PSACNN: Pulse Sequence Adaptive Fast Whole Brain Segmentation

With the advent of convolutional neural networks~(CNN), supervised learning methods are increasingly being used for whole brain segmentation. However, a large, manually annotated training dataset of labeled brain images required to train such supervised methods is frequently difficult to obtain or create. In addition, existing training datasets are generally acquired with a homogeneous magnetic resonance imaging~(MRI) acquisition protocol. CNNs trained on such datasets are unable to generalize on test data with different acquisition protocols. Modern neuroimaging studies and clinical trials are necessarily multi-center initiatives with a wide variety of acquisition protocols. Despite stringent protocol harmonization practices, it is very difficult to standardize the gamut of MRI imaging parameters across scanners, field strengths, receive coils etc., that affect image contrast. In this paper we propose a CNN-based segmentation algorithm that, in addition to being highly accurate and fast, is also resilient to variation in the input acquisition. Our approach relies on building approximate forward models of pulse sequences that produce a typical test image. For a given pulse sequence, we use its forward model to generate plausible, synthetic training examples that appear as if they were acquired in a scanner with that pulse sequence. Sampling over a wide variety of pulse sequences results in a wide variety of augmented training examples that help build an image contrast invariant model. Our method trains a single CNN that can segment input MRI images with acquisition parameters as disparate as $T_1$-weighted and $T_2$-weighted contrasts with only $T_1$-weighted training data. The segmentations generated are highly accurate with state-of-the-art results~(overall Dice overlap$=0.94$), with a fast run time~($\approx$ 45 seconds), and consistent across a wide range of acquisition protocols.Comment: Typo in author name corrected. Greves -> Grev

Remote sensing and geographic information systems techniques for landslide hazard evaluation and prediction models

I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Professor Takaaki Amada,my academic advisor for his immutable inspiration,guidance and support in this research.This research would not have been possible without his support and encouragement. ...Thesis (Ph. D. in Agriculture)--University of Tsukuba, (A), no. 2270, 2000.3.24Titlepage,Contents -- Acknowledgments,Abstract -- List of Tables,List of Figures -- Glossary -- 1.Introduction -- 2. Study Area -- 3. Research Reviews,Approaches Employed and Issues -- 4. Assessment of Landslide Affected Areas Using Satellite Digital Data -- 5. Landslide Hazard Assessment,Mapping and Evaluation of Hazard Maps -- 6. Summary and Conclusions -- Reference

Local governance institutions in two district of Madhya Pradesh, India

This study was undertaken in two selected districts in the state of Madhya Pradesh. In each of these districts two blocks and in each of the blocks two Gram Panchayats were selected for the field survey. In the selected Gram Panchayats one village was selected to study the local governance institutions. Thus, eight villages in the two districts were covered by this study. The analyses in this report at district, block and village levels examines the formal and informal institutions of local governance

Constructing non-trivial elements of the Shafarevich-Tate group of an Abelian Variety over a Number Field

The second part of the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer (BSD) conjecture gives a conjectural formula for the order of the Shafarevich-Tate group of an elliptic curve in terms of other computable invariants of the curve. Cremona and Mazur initiated a theory that can often be used to verify the BSD conjecture by constructing non-trivial elements of the Shafarevich-Tate group of an elliptic curve by means of the Mordell-Weil group of an ambient curve. In this paper, we generalize Cremona and Mazur's work and give precise conditions under which such a construction can be made for the Shafarevich-Tate group of an abelian variety over a number field. We then give an extension of our general result that provides new theoretical evidence for the BSD conjecture.Comment: 18 page