Value and selfhood: pragmatism, Confucianism, and phenomenology

This article articulates a dialogue between Edward Casey, Cheng Chung‐ying, and me that began at the Eastern Division annual meeting in Philadelphia of the American Philosophical Association, in a session sponsored by the International Society for Chinese Philosophy. There, we read brief versions of the papers presented in this issue and commented on one another. Casey represented Continental phenomenology, Cheng the Chinese tradition as he has developed it into onto‐generative hermeneutics, and I the melding of American pragmatic and Confucian traditions that I have been developing

Effective mass and band nonparabolicity in remote doped Si/Si0.8Ge0.2 quantum wells

The effective masses in remote doped Si/Si0.8Ge0.2/Si quantum wells having sheet densities, Ns in the range 2 × 1011–1.1 × 1012 cm – 2 have been determined from the temperature dependencies of the Shubnikov–de Haas oscillations. The values obtained increase with magnetic field and Ns. This behavior is taken as evidence for the nonparabolicity of the valence band and accounts for the discrepancies in previously reported masses. Self-consistent band structure calculations for a triangular confinement of the carriers have also been carried out and provide confirmation of the increase in mass with Ns. Theory and experiment give extrapolated Gamma point effective masses of 0.21 and 0.20 of the free-electron mass, respectively

Algebra diagrams: a HANDi introduction

A diagrammatic notation for algebra is presented – Hierarchical Al- gebra Network Diagrams, HANDi. The notation uses a 2D network notation with systematically designed icons to explicitly and coherently encode the fun- damental concepts of algebra. The structure of the diagrams is described and the rules for making derivations are presented. The key design features of HANDi are discussed and compared with the conventional formula notation in order demonstrate that the new notation is a more logical codification of intro- ductory algebra

The Policies of State Succession: Harmonizing Self-Determination and Global Order in the Twenty-First Century Tai-Heng Cheng, State Succession and Commercial Obligations

I differ with Cheng\u27s appraisal of certain events and think that we need a more sophisticated analysis of the twin policy goals he identifies and embraces--self-determination and global order--before they can offer real policy guidance. But State Succession and Commercial Obligations stands out as a rigorously researched, original, and insightful effort to understand this quite confused and opaque body of international law. Cheng\u27s work will both enable and encourage a more candid, reasoned, and constructive debate about the global policies at stake each time “a state fundamentally changes its structures of power and authority, and an authoritative international response is needed to manage disruptions to international arrangements that may result from that change.” Briefly, I find Cheng\u27s analysis of the dynamics of State succession relative to commercial obligations sophisticated, pragmatic, descriptively comprehensive, and, for the most part, normatively compelling. But it may be too ambitious. Defining disruptions to global commerce as the principal indicia of State succession tends to inflect, and at times to bias, the general analysis of the diverse phenomena that fall within the rubric of State succession. This commercial focus can obscure or normatively predispose our understanding and appraisal of equally vital, but non-economic, dimensions of State succession, including the core policy goals--self-determination and global order--that Cheng identifies and recommends. And to a certain extent, this compromises the work\u27s descriptive accuracy and normative appeal

Discovering Class-Specific Pixels for Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation

We propose an approach to discover class-specific pixels for the weakly-supervised semantic segmentation task. We show that properly combining saliency and attention maps allows us to obtain reliable cues capable of significantly boosting the performance. First, we propose a simple yet powerful hierarchical approach to discover the class-agnostic salient regions, obtained using a salient object detector, which otherwise would be ignored. Second, we use fully convolutional attention maps to reliably localize the class-specific regions in a given image. We combine these two cues to discover class-specific pixels which are then used as an approximate ground truth for training a CNN. While solving the weakly supervised semantic segmentation task, we ensure that the image-level classification task is also solved in order to enforce the CNN to assign at least one pixel to each object present in the image. Experimentally, on the PASCAL VOC12 val and test sets, we obtain the mIoU of 60.8% and 61.9%, achieving the performance gains of 5.1% and 5.2% compared to the published state-of-the-art results. The code is made publicly available

Divide and Fuse: A Re-ranking Approach for Person Re-identification

As re-ranking is a necessary procedure to boost person re-identification (re-ID) performance on large-scale datasets, the diversity of feature becomes crucial to person reID for its importance both on designing pedestrian descriptions and re-ranking based on feature fusion. However, in many circumstances, only one type of pedestrian feature is available. In this paper, we propose a "Divide and use" re-ranking framework for person re-ID. It exploits the diversity from different parts of a high-dimensional feature vector for fusion-based re-ranking, while no other features are accessible. Specifically, given an image, the extracted feature is divided into sub-features. Then the contextual information of each sub-feature is iteratively encoded into a new feature. Finally, the new features from the same image are fused into one vector for re-ranking. Experimental results on two person re-ID benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework. Especially, our method outperforms the state-of-the-art on the Market-1501 dataset.Comment: Accepted by BMVC201

High-precision determination of the pion-nucleon σ\sigma-term from Roy-Steiner equations

We present a determination of the pion-nucleon ($\pi N$) $\sigma$-term $\sigma_{\pi N}$ based on the Cheng-Dashen low-energy theorem (LET), taking advantage of the recent high-precision data from pionic atoms to pin down the $\pi N$ scattering lengths as well as of constraints from analyticity, unitarity, and crossing symmetry in the form of Roy-Steiner equations to perform the extrapolation to the Cheng-Dashen point in a reliable manner. With isospin-violating corrections included both in the scattering lengths and the LET, we obtain $\sigma_{\pi N}=(59.1\pm 1.9\pm 3.0)$ MeV $=(59.1\pm 3.5)$ MeV, where the first error refers to uncertainties in the $\pi N$ amplitude and the second to the LET. Consequences for the scalar nucleon couplings relevant for the direct detection of dark matter are discussed.Comment: 6 pages, 1 figure; title changed by journal, version to be published in PR

Is Yogācāra Phenomenology? Some Evidence from the Cheng weishi lun

There have been several attempts of late to read Yogācāra through the lens of Western phenomenology. I approach the issue through a reading of the Cheng weishi lun (Treatise on the Perfection of Consciousness Only), a seventh-century Chinese compilation that preserves the voices of multiple Indian commentators on Vasubandhu’s Triṃśikāvijñaptikārikā (Thirty Verses on Consciousness). Specifically, I focus on the “five omnipresent mental factors” (pañcasarvatraga, Chin. wu bianxing xinsuo) and the “four aspects” (Chin. sifen) of cognition. These two topics seem ripe, at least on the surface, for phenomenological analysis, particularly as the latter topic includes a discussion of “self-awareness” (svasaṃvedana, svasaṃvitti, Chin. zizheng). Yet we find that the Cheng weishi lun account has little in common with the tradition associated with Husserl and his heirs. The categories and modes of analysis in the Cheng weishi lun do not emerge from or aver to a systematic reflection on the nature of “lived experience” so much as they are focused on subliminal processes and metaphysical entities that belong to the domain of the noumenal. In my conclusion I suggest that the later pramāṇa tradition associated with Dignāga and Dharmakīrti—a tradition that profoundly influenced later Yogācāra exegesis in Tibet—did indeed take a “phenomenological turn.” But my comparison shows that both traditions falter when it comes to relating conceptual content to non-conceptual experience, and thus there is reason to be skeptical about claims that phenomenology is epistemologically grounded in how the world presents itself first-personally

Apocytochrome c

The cytochrome c import pathway differs markedly from the general route taken by the majority of other imported proteins, which is characterized by the import involvement of namely, surface receptors, the general insertion protein (GIP), contact sites and by the requirement of a membrane potential (Δψ). Unique features of both the cytochrome c precursor (apocytochrome c) and of the mechanism that transports it into mitochondria, have contributed to the evolution of a distinct import pathway that is not shared by any other mitochondrial protein analysed thus far. The cytochrome c pathway is particularly unique because i) apocytochrome c appears to have spontaneous membrane insertion-activity; ii) cytochrome c heme lyase seems to act as a specific binding site in lieu of a surface receptor and; iii) covalent heme addition and the associated refolding of the polypeptide appears to provide the free energy for the translocation of the cytochrome c polypeptide across the outer mitochondrial membrane