8,964 research outputs found
Bolder Together 2: Building Grassroots Movements for Change
California's demographics are changing fast, but rates of voting and civic participation haven't kept up. In four rapidly growing counties across the state, a group of funders is working with local organizations to support diverse communities to lift up their voice and exercise their power on issues that affect their rights and their quality of life. The work of the funders and their local partners is yielding important lessons as states and communities across the country begin to experience the dramatic demographic shifts that are transforming California. This new report documents key lessons for philanthropy from this work so far. The report is a follow-up to a 2011 report that told the story of the funders' early efforts. Now, after five years of grantmaking and intensive work in the four counties, California Civic Participation Funders tells a fuller story about how local organizations are coming together and working across issues to mobilize diverse communities to flex their democratic rights. The funders also reflect further on how philanthropy can work with local communities to create a nation where government acts in the interests of all of the people
Adversarial nets with perceptual losses for text-to-image synthesis
Recent approaches in generative adversarial networks (GANs) can automatically
synthesize realistic images from descriptive text. Despite the overall fair
quality, the generated images often expose visible flaws that lack structural
definition for an object of interest. In this paper, we aim to extend state of
the art for GAN-based text-to-image synthesis by improving perceptual quality
of generated images. Differentiated from previous work, our synthetic image
generator optimizes on perceptual loss functions that measure pixel, feature
activation, and texture differences against a natural image. We present
visually more compelling synthetic images of birds and flowers generated from
text descriptions in comparison to some of the most prominent existing work
Adversarial Learning of Semantic Relevance in Text to Image Synthesis
We describe a new approach that improves the training of generative
adversarial nets (GANs) for synthesizing diverse images from a text input. Our
approach is based on the conditional version of GANs and expands on previous
work leveraging an auxiliary task in the discriminator. Our generated images
are not limited to certain classes and do not suffer from mode collapse while
semantically matching the text input. A key to our training methods is how to
form positive and negative training examples with respect to the class label of
a given image. Instead of selecting random training examples, we perform
negative sampling based on the semantic distance from a positive example in the
class. We evaluate our approach using the Oxford-102 flower dataset, adopting
the inception score and multi-scale structural similarity index (MS-SSIM)
metrics to assess discriminability and diversity of the generated images. The
empirical results indicate greater diversity in the generated images,
especially when we gradually select more negative training examples closer to a
positive example in the semantic space
Does rationality matter to the central bank?
Rationality is one of the main assumptions in economics, and is
represented as the rational expectation in macroeconomics. As
such, it is important to note that the effectiveness of economic
policy depends on the degree of economic agents’ rationality.
According to this point of view, it is only natural to ask how the
central bank views economic agents to be either rational or
bounded rational. In implementing economic policies, it is possible to assume that the central bank views economic agents to
be bounded rational. This is due to the fact that most theoretical
arguments state that policy under rationality is not as effective as
one under bounded rationality. Based on this argument, this
paper employs bounded rational New Keynesian Model proposed
by Gabaix to know if rationality matters to the central bank. As a
result, as long as the central bank does not follow the full gradualism, it is possible to conclude that the rationality matters to
the central bank. However, it is not anymore if the central bank
employs full gradualism in monetary policy rule
Superfluid-insulator transition of the Josephson junction array model with commensurate frustration
We have studied the rationally frustrated Josephson-junction array model in
the square lattice through Monte Carlo simulations of D XY-model. For
frustration , the model at zero temperature shows a continuous
superfluid-insulator transition. From the measurement of the correlation
function and the superfluid stiffness, we obtain the dynamical critical
exponent and the correlation length critical exponent . While the dynamical critical exponent is the same as that for cases
, 1/2, and 1/3, the correlation length critical exponent is surprisingly
quite different. When , we have the nature of a first-order transition.Comment: RevTex 4, to appear in PR
Multimodal Sparse Coding for Event Detection
Unsupervised feature learning methods have proven effective for
classification tasks based on a single modality. We present multimodal sparse
coding for learning feature representations shared across multiple modalities.
The shared representations are applied to multimedia event detection (MED) and
evaluated in comparison to unimodal counterparts, as well as other feature
learning methods such as GMM supervectors and sparse RBM. We report the
cross-validated classification accuracy and mean average precision of the MED
system trained on features learned from our unimodal and multimodal settings
for a subset of the TRECVID MED 2014 dataset.Comment: Multimodal Machine Learning Workshop at NIPS 201
The spread of media content through blogs
Blogs are a popular way to share personal journals, discuss matters of public opinion, pursue collaborative conversations, and aggregate content on similar topics. Blogs can be also used to disseminate new content and novel ideas to communities of interest. In this paper, we present an analysis of the topological structure and the patterns of popular media content that is shared in blogs. By analyzing 8.7 million posts of 1.1 million blogs across 15 major blog hosting sites, we find that the network structure of blogs is “less social” compared to other online social networks: most links are unidirectional and the network is sparsely connected. The type of content that was popularly shared on blogs was surprisingly different from that from the mainstream media: user generated content, often in the form of videos or photos, was the most common type of content disseminated in blogs. The user-generated content showed interesting viral-spreading patterns within blogs. Topical content such as news and political commentary spreads quickly by the hour and then quickly disappears, while non-topical content such as music and entertainment propagates slowly over a much long period of time
Hydrodynamic simulations with the Godunov SPH
We present results based on an implementation of the Godunov Smoothed
Particle Hydrodynamics (GSPH), originally developed by Inutsuka (2002), in the
GADGET-3 hydrodynamic code. We first review the derivation of the GSPH
discretization of the equations of moment and energy conservation, starting
from the convolution of these equations with the interpolating kernel. The two
most important aspects of the numerical implementation of these equations are
(a) the appearance of fluid velocity and pressure obtained from the solution of
the Riemann problem between each pair of particles, and (b the absence of an
artificial viscosity term. We carry out three different controlled
hydrodynamical three-dimensional tests, namely the Sod shock tube, the
development of Kelvin-Helmholtz instabilities in a shear flow test, and the
"blob" test describing the evolution of a cold cloud moving against a hot wind.
The results of our tests confirm and extend in a number of aspects those
recently obtained by Cha (2010): (i) GSPH provides a much improved description
of contact discontinuities, with respect to SPH, thus avoiding the appearance
of spurious pressure forces; (ii) GSPH is able to follow the development of
gas-dynamical instabilities, such as the Kevin--Helmholtz and the
Rayleigh-Taylor ones; (iii) as a result, GSPH describes the development of curl
structures in the shear-flow test and the dissolution of the cold cloud in the
"blob" test.
We also discuss in detail the effect on the performances of GSPH of changing
different aspects of its implementation. The results of our tests demonstrate
that GSPH is in fact a highly promising hydrodynamic scheme, also to be coupled
to an N-body solver, for astrophysical and cosmological applications.
[abridged]Comment: 19 pages, 13 figures, MNRAS accepted, high resolution version can be
obtained at
http://adlibitum.oats.inaf.it/borgani/html/papers/gsph_hydrosim.pd
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