1,806 research outputs found
Human Judgment and Autonomous Weaponry: What Does it Mean?
Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard Colleg
The Return of a Judicial Artifact?: How the Supreme Court Could Examine the Question of the Nondelegation Doctrine’s Place in Future Cases
Undergraduate
Textual or Investigativ
Recommended from our members
Filling the Fulfillment Gap: NGO Refugee Responses in a Time of Rising Populist-Nationalism
This thesis seeks to address two main issues. First, how have the recent rise ofpopulist-nationalism and the elections of populist-nationalist governments challenged theinternational refugee rights regime? Second, how have humanitarian non-governmentalorganizations (NGOs) responded to new anti-refugee policies, and what does this mean for theirposition within civil society? To answer these questions, this project offers a comparative studybetween the United States under the administration of President Donald Trump and Italy under theadministration of Deputy Minister of the Interior Matteo Salvini. By analyzing government andNGO policies for both cases in response to the European refugee crisis and the rise ofasylum-seekers from Central America, this thesis concludes that humanitarian NGOs haveundergone fundamental shifts in operations in response to these populist-nationalist administrationsand their undermining of the refugee rights regime. Among these changes include the increasingfulfillment of refugee rights obligations by humanitarian NGOs themselves in place of the nationalgovernment and a turn away from political neutrality within humanitarian organizations. This paperconcludes by discussing what policy changes should be made at the international, state, and NGOlevel in order to best protect refugee rights and NGO operation
Design Principles for Sparse Matrix Multiplication on the GPU
We implement two novel algorithms for sparse-matrix dense-matrix
multiplication (SpMM) on the GPU. Our algorithms expect the sparse input in the
popular compressed-sparse-row (CSR) format and thus do not require expensive
format conversion. While previous SpMM work concentrates on thread-level
parallelism, we additionally focus on latency hiding with instruction-level
parallelism and load-balancing. We show, both theoretically and experimentally,
that the proposed SpMM is a better fit for the GPU than previous approaches. We
identify a key memory access pattern that allows efficient access into both
input and output matrices that is crucial to getting excellent performance on
SpMM. By combining these two ingredients---(i) merge-based load-balancing and
(ii) row-major coalesced memory access---we demonstrate a 4.1x peak speedup and
a 31.7% geomean speedup over state-of-the-art SpMM implementations on
real-world datasets.Comment: 16 pages, 7 figures, International European Conference on Parallel
and Distributed Computing (Euro-Par) 201
The role of science in physical natural hazard assessment : report to the UK Government by the Natural Hazard Working Group
Following the tragic Asian tsunami on 26 December 2004, the Prime Minister asked
the Government’s Chief Scientific Adviser, Sir David King, to convene a group of
experts (the Natural Hazard Working Group) to advise on the mechanisms that could
and should be established for the detection and early warning of global physical
natural hazards.
2. The Group was asked to examine physical hazards which have high global or regional
impact and for which an appropriate early warning system could be put in place. It
was also asked to consider the global natural hazard frameworks currently in place
and under development and their effectiveness in using scientific evidence; to
consider whether there is an existing appropriate international body to pull together
the international science community to advise governments on the systems that need
to be put in place, and to advise on research needed to fill current gaps in knowledge.
The Group was asked to make recommendations on whether a new body was
needed, or whether other arrangements would be more effective
Safety in maritime oil sector: Content analysis of machinery space fire hazards
An in-depth study of the practice within the maritime oil industry was undertaken to ascertain safety issues in seafaring vessels. It was more concentrated on the type of accidents that occur in machine spaces of seafaring vessels in this industry. The main focus of the research was streamlined to fire in machinery spaces. The literature review later concentrated on two of such incidences, they are oil spill and fire events. An investigation was done to assess those factors which actually contribute or are in association to fire outbreak. A content analysis methodology was used to investigate the associative relationships to fire outbreak with the aid of NVivo 9.0 software. The investigation focused on 15 key in-depth reports on machinery space incidences which were uploaded into the software. The results indicate that leakages on hot surfaces were the major causes of fire hazards in seafaring vessels. The results from using this methodology also highlighted two more fire hazards that were not so apparent in previous studies. They are generator fire and compressors fire. The results supported other studies about leakages on hot surfaces as a major contributor, but also clearly show that there are other hazardous factors of fire in machinery spaces that require further investigation
The Two-Point Correlation Function of Rich Clusters of Galaxies: Results from an Extended APM Cluster Redshift Survey
We present new estimates of the spatial two-point correlation function of
rich clusters of galaxies selected from the APM Galaxy Survey. We have measured
redshifts for a sample of clusters out to a depth of \sim 450\hmpc. The
clusters have a mean space density of \bar{n} = 3.4\times 10^{-5}\hmpccc. The
two-point correlation function, , for this sample is equal to unity
at a pair-separation of r_0 = 14.3\pm1.75\hmpc (2 errors), consistent
with our earlier results from a smaller sample. The new observations provide an
accurate determination of the shape of to pair-separations of about
50\hmpc. Our results show that has a higher amplitude than
expected according to the standard cold dark matter (CDM) model on
spatial scales 2\simlt s \simlt 50\hmpc, but are in good agreement with
scale-invariant fluctuations in either a low density CDM model or a critical
density universe made up of a mixture of hot and cold dark matter. Our results
provide strong constraints on so called `co-operative' models of galaxy
formation in which the galaxy formation process introduces large-scale
structure in the galaxy distribution.Comment: 5 pages, uuencoded compressed postscript (4 figures), submitted to
MNRA
U.S. Women's Intended Sources for Reproductive Health Care
Introduction: The current sociopolitical climate and context of the Affordable Care Act have led some to question the future role of family planning clinics in reproductive health care. We explored where women plan to get their future contraception, pelvic exam/pap smears, and sexually transmitted infection testing, with a focus on the role of family planning clinics. Methods: Data were drawn from a study of United States adults conducted in January 2013 from a national online panel. We focused on English-literate women aged 18?45 years who answered items on intended sources of care (private office/health maintenance organization [HMO], family planning clinic, other, would not get care) for reproductive health services. We used Rao-Scott F tests to compare intended sources across sociodemographic groups, and logistic regression to model odds of intending to use family planning clinics. Probability weights were used to adjust for the complex sampling design. Results: The response rate was 61% (n?=?2,182). Of the 723 respondents who met the inclusion criteria, approximately half intended to use private offices/HMOs. Among some subgroups, including less educated (less than high school), lower annual incomes (<$25,000) and uninsured women, the proportion intending to use family planning clinics was higher than the proportion intending to use private office/HMO in unadjusted analyses. Across all service types, unmarried and uninsured status were associated with intention to use family planning clinics in multivariable models. Conclusions: While many women intend to use private offices/HMOs for their reproductive health care, family planning clinics continue to play an important role, particularly for socially disadvantaged women.Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/140133/1/jwh.2014.5116.pd
Predicting spectral features in galaxy spectra from broad-band photometry
We explore the prospects of predicting emission line features present in
galaxy spectra given broad-band photometry alone. There is a general consent
that colours, and spectral features, most notably the 4000 A break, can predict
many properties of galaxies, including star formation rates and hence they
could infer some of the line properties. We argue that these techniques have
great prospects in helping us understand line emission in extragalactic objects
and might speed up future galaxy redshift surveys if they are to target
emission line objects only. We use two independent methods, Artifical Neural
Neworks (based on the ANNz code) and Locally Weighted Regression (LWR), to
retrieve correlations present in the colour N-dimensional space and to predict
the equivalent widths present in the corresponding spectra. We also investigate
how well it is possible to separate galaxies with and without lines from broad
band photometry only. We find, unsurprisingly, that recombination lines can be
well predicted by galaxy colours. However, among collisional lines some can and
some cannot be predicted well from galaxy colours alone, without any further
redshift information. We also use our techniques to estimate how much
information contained in spectral diagnostic diagrams can be recovered from
broad-band photometry alone. We find that it is possible to classify AGN and
star formation objects relatively well using colours only. We suggest that this
technique could be used to considerably improve redshift surveys such as the
upcoming FMOS survey and the planned WFMOS survey.Comment: 10 pages 7 figures summitted to MNRA
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