I Have No Pride : William Kennedy Laurie Dickson In His Own Words - An Autobiography

An early pioneer of cinema technology, author, photographer, and film director W.K.L. Dickson\u27s was one of the first people to perform a new type of subjectivity that we understand as multi-media. Working in the laboratory of Thomas Alva Edison, Dickson\u27s papers, photographs, and films have been carefully preserved as part of the Edison Papers Project and an examination of this archive rises to the level of autobiography. Authors Wyn Wachhorst, Paul Israel, and Charles Musser help to bring to life the world of the Edison Laboratory, the world\u27s first pure research and development company. Dickson\u27s own work speaks across the decades. He inscribed himself into the world\u27s earliest cinema and tells his own story from cinema space and through the materials in his copious archive

Finding Balance

Tylor Edison ’14 has a head for numbers and a heart for service

Con Edison: The Crisis of the Investor-Owned Utility

Consolidated Edison of New York, Inc. (Con Edison) is an investor-owned urban utility which provides electricity to New York City and most of Westchester County. It is representative of the older investor-owned utilities which are currently in the poorest financial condition. Although these utilities do not serve rapidly expanding service areas, the replacement of obsolete generating plants necessitates continued large capital expenditures. Present conditions raise the possibility that older investor-owned utilities cannot survive in their present form of regulated private monopoly. The failure of Con Edison to pay a quarterly dividend on April 23, 1974 focused attention on the deteriorating financial condition of the utility industry. Investor confidence in all utility securities plummeted and an unprecedented plunge in the value of such securities followed. The key to Con Edison\u27s financial dilemma is that revenues have not increased sufficiently to compensate for higher operating and capital costs. While some of Con Edison\u27s problems are unique, its financial crisis stems from forces buffeting the entire utility industry. This Comment will examine its problems and make suggestions for ameliorating them

Influence of Annealing on the Optical and Scintillation Properties of CaWO4_4 Single Crystals

We investigate the influence of oxygen annealing on the room temperature optical and scintillation properties of CaWO$_4$ single crystals that are being produced for direct Dark Matter search experiments. The applied annealing procedure reduces the absorption coefficient at the peak position of the scintillation spectrum ($\sim430$ nm) by a factor of $\sim6$ and leads to an even larger reduction of the scattering coefficient. Furthermore, the annealing has no significant influence on the \emph{intrinsic} light yield. An additional absorption occurring at $\sim400$ nm suggests the formation of O$^-$ hole centers. Light-yield measurements at room temperature where one crystal surface was mechanically roughened showed an increase of the \emph{measured} light yield by $\sim40$ and an improvement of the energy resolution at 59.5 keV by $\sim12$ for the annealed crystal. We ascribe this result to the reduction of the absorption coefficient while the surface roughening is needed to compensate for the also observed reduction of the scattering coefficient after annealing

Replication issues in syntax-based aspect extraction for opinion mining

Reproducing experiments is an important instrument to validate previous work and build upon existing approaches. It has been tackled numerous times in different areas of science. In this paper, we introduce an empirical replicability study of three well-known algorithms for syntactic centric aspect-based opinion mining. We show that reproducing results continues to be a difficult endeavor, mainly due to the lack of details regarding preprocessing and parameter setting, as well as due to the absence of available implementations that clarify these details. We consider these are important threats to validity of the research on the field, specifically when compared to other problems in NLP where public datasets and code availability are critical validity components. We conclude by encouraging code-based research, which we think has a key role in helping researchers to understand the meaning of the state-of-the-art better and to generate continuous advances.Comment: Accepted in the EACL 2017 SR

On the feasibility of attribute-based encryption on Internet of Things devices

Attribute-based encryption (ABE) could be an effective cryptographic tool for the secure management of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, but its feasibility in the IoT has been under-investigated thus far. This article explores such feasibility for well-known IoT platforms, namely, Intel Galileo Gen 2, Intel Edison, Raspberry pi 1 model B, and Raspberry pi zero, and concludes that adopting ABE in the IoT is indeed feasible

Loop quantum cosmology of Bianchi IX: Effective dynamics

We study numerically the solutions to the effective equations of Bianchi IX spacetimes within Loop Quantum Cosmology. We consider Bianchi IX models with and without inverse triad corrections whose matter content is a scalar field without mass. The solutions are classified using the classical observables. We show that both effective theories --with lapse N=V and N=1-- solve the big bang singularity and reproduce the classical dynamics far from the bounce. Moreover, due to the spatial compactness, there is an infinity number of bounces and recollapses. We study the limit of large volume and show that both effective theories reproduce the same dynamics, thus recovering general relativity. We implement a procedure to identify amongst the Bianchi IX solutions, those that behave like k=0,1 FLRW as well as Bianchi I, II, and VII_0 models. The effective solutions exhibit Bianchi I phases with Bianchi II transitions and also Bianchi VII_0 phases, which had not been studied before, at the quantum nor effective level. We comment on the possible implications of these results for a quantum modification to the classical BKL behaviour.Comment: This version to be published in the CQG special issu

On distinguished orbits of reductive representations

Let $G$ be a real reductive Lie group and ${\tau}:G \longrightarrow GL(V)$ be a real reductive representation of $G$ with (restricted) moment map m_{\ggo}: V-{0} \longrightarrow \ggo. In this work, we introduce the notion of "nice space" of a real reductive representation to study the problem of how to determine if a $G$-orbit is "distinguished" (i.e. it contains a critical point of the norm squared of m_{\ggo}). We give an elementary proof of the well-known convexity theorem of Atiyah-Guillemin-Sternberg in our particular case and we use it to give an easy-to-check sufficient condition for a $G$-orbit of a element in a nice space to be distinguished. In the case where $G$ is algebraic and $\tau$ is a rational representation, the above condition is also necessary (making heavy use of recent results of M. Jablonski), obtaining a generalization of Nikolayevsky's nice basis criterium. We also provide useful characterizations of nice spaces in terms of the weights of $\tau$. Finally, some applications to ternary forms and minimal metrics on nilmanifolds are presented.Comment: 27 pages (with an appendix), 2 figures, 5 tables. This is a preliminary version; comments, criticisms and suggestions are welcom