Reconsidering the substance of digital video from a Sadrian perspective

The digitisation process is debated as video’s deficiency, where pixels are conceived as isolated fragments without an existential link to the source image. This article explores the ontology of digital-video through Mulla Sadrā’s (1571–1641) theory of Substantial Motion. Sadrā, a Persian-Islamic existentialist, proposed that substance (material/visible and immaterial/invisible) undergoes an internal change. Through imperceptible internal change, intimate connections exist between the smallest parts and the One, visible and invisible. We can think of these dynamic connections in terms of pixels and frames. From the view of Sadrā’s substance, pixels are explored as open to change. The apparent weaknesses of digital materiality become potentials towards understanding its existence in time

16th century Persian tiles in dialogue with 21st century digital tiles in the Sadrian universe

This article brings together tiles of 16th century Persian architecture and 21st century digital tiles of moving image to explore new potentials beyond the perceived image. As minimal parts of a bigger image, they both appear still and motionless. However, Persian Islamic philosopher, Mulla Sadrā Shirazi’s (1571-1640) theory of ‘substantial motion’ (al-harakat al-jawhariyya) argues that, at the level of substance, an invisible internal motion and change takes place. Due to this internal change, aspects of the Divine Being constantly manifest in the existence of entities. Sadrā’s unique view on existence suggests that all living and non-living entities, as manifestations of the Divine Being, have certain experiences of the universe. To think that an image, a tile, or a pixel, as an existing entity, has certain experiences can unfold new avenues for creative thinking/making in digital moving image that can reveal what is hidden from human perception

Effective Assessment Plan Leading to Strong Reform of Petroleum Engineering Graduate Program

The Bob L. Herd Department of Petroleum Engineering at Texas Tech University has made a lot of significant actions of improvement to its graduate program that was motivated by a systematic SACSCOC assessment plan. This paper shows how the SACSCOC assessment plan aided in making continuous actions of improvement and as a conclusion of these actions, how the current graduate curriculum plan was improved. This paper highlights the details of the graduate department assessment plan, such as how graduate program objectives are assessed, what assessment tools are used, when data are gathered and evaluated, and when actions of improvement are made. This paper will also detail how the analysis of data was utilized in making actions of continuous improvement. At the end of the paper examples of the significant actions of improvement made based on the department assessment and evaluation plan are presented.Cockrell School of Engineerin

Optimal Energy Management for Energy Harvesting Transmitter and Receiver with Helper

We study energy harvesting (EH) transmitter and receiver, where the receiver decodes data using the harvested energy from the nature and from an independent EH node, named helper. Helper cooperates with the receiver by transferring its harvested energy to the receiver over an orthogonal fading channel. We study an offline optimal power management policy to maximize the reliable information rate. The harvested energy in all three nodes are assumed to be known. We consider four different scenarios; First, for the case that both transmitter and the receiver have batteries, we show that the optimal policy is transferring the helper harvested energy to the receiver, immediately. Next, for the case of non-battery receiver and full power transmitter, we model a virtual EH receiver with minimum energy constraint to achieve an optimal policy. Then, we consider a non-battery EH receiver and EH transmitter with battery. Finally, we derive optimal power management wherein neither the transmitter nor the receiver have batteries. We propose three iterative algorithms to compute optimal energy management policies. Numerical results are presented to corroborate the advantage of employing the helper.Comment: It is a conference paper with 5 pages and one figure, submitted to ISITA201

On Probability of Support Recovery for Orthogonal Matching Pursuit Using Mutual Coherence

In this paper we present a new coherence-based performance guarantee for the Orthogonal Matching Pursuit (OMP) algorithm. A lower bound for the probability of correctly identifying the support of a sparse signal with additive white Gaussian noise is derived. Compared to previous work, the new bound takes into account the signal parameters such as dynamic range, noise variance, and sparsity. Numerical simulations show significant improvements over previous work and a closer match to empirically obtained results of the OMP algorithm.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Signal Processing Letters. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1608.0038

City sustainability: the influence of walkability on built environments

A vital issue in community is providing an easy access to the transport network for different range of community members such as; very young, old, children and disable people. The functions that walking and walkable area can be support includes community involvement, health, meeting and gathering and recreation which has positive effects on sustainability and vice versa. Walkability is the basis of sustainable city. The same as bicycling, walking can be known as ‘green’ type of transportation which except crowding reduction and also has low level of environmental influence, energy conserving without any air and noise pollution. It can be more than a purely useful type of travel to shopping, school and work. Also have both social and recreational importance. This research aims at supporting urban design knowledge and practice and contributing to the broader field of “walkability” by refining the methods and measures used to analyse the relationship between walking behaviour and physical environment and its impacts on city sustainability. In order to integrate knowledge from theories and research on walkability from different fields and of different perspectives, it is crucial to first build a broader view and a more comprehensive understanding of how the built environment influences walking. What has been done during the earlier part of this project, and will be shown in this research, is to provide a better understanding of the complexity of the relationship between the built environment and walking and also the complexity that lies in both of these entities, the urban form and walking activity

End of a Princely State in Hunza, Pakistan: Modernization of a Peripheral Community

Modernization is often viewed as economic development and nation states as agents of modernization are considered to be responsible for provision of basic services to citizens so that they discard their traditional way of living and integrate themselves to the requirements of a new era. The Ismaili-settled region of Hunza in the northern part of Pakistan is one of the areas that was ruled by local autocratic leader who did not care for the welfare of his subjects but his own selfish interest. Ismailis remained poor and suffered and aspired to transform their shattered lives. The disintegration of the princely state of Hunza heralded the beginning of change and modernization and the process intensified after the Ismaili spiritual leader, the Aga Khan established modern institutions and appointed new leaders to guide the community. The model of development pursued by leadership emphasized partnership of private, public and civil society organizations as encompassing power with the objective to provide enabling environment for people to use their skills, talents and expertise as active participant for development. The strategy of empowering people and communities to make a difference in their lives helped Ismailis to modernize their backward economy and remain active participant in the process of change and development. Keywords: Leadership role, modernization, economic development, social movement, participatory development, partnership of private, public and civil society institutions

Some studies on the effect of α-chymotrypsin on mast cells

It has been suggested that activation of one or more proteolytic enzymes might constitute the earliest biochemical change in the sequence of events that ultimately leads to mediator secretion from the mast cell. This effect may be mimicked by the addition of exogenous serine esterases and, with this in mind, we first characterized the effect of α-chymotrypsin (α-CT) on isolated mast cells from different sources. α-CT (10-500 μg/ml) induced a dose-dependent secretion of histamine (≤ 80%) from purified and non-purified populations of rat peritoneal mast cells. The release was non-cytotoxic and was inhibited by metabolic blockers and extremes of temperature. The process was relatively slow, being essentially complete within 20 min, and was unaffected by phosphatidylserine. A substantial component of the secretion persisted in the absence of extracellular calcium. The release was suppressed by extremes of pH and a variety of antiallergic compound and serine esterase inhibitors. α-CT (10-300 μg/m l), in addition to the secretion of preformed mediators, also induced the metabolism of arachidonic acid, resulting in the release of prostaglandin D2 (PGD2) in a dose-related manner from purified rat peritoneal mast cells. α-CT exhibited a marked tissue and species selectivity in its action. The protease was a much weaker releaser of histamine from tissue mast cells of the rat. It was effective against human cells from lung, intestine and skin only at cytotoxic concentrations and ineffective against mouse peritoneal mast cells. The effect of inhibitors of, and substrates for, α-CT in normal and permeabilized rat mast cells were investigated. Rat peritoneal mast cells were recovered by direct lavage and purified by density gradient centrifugation over Percoll. Where appropriate, agents were introduced into the cells after reversible permeabilization with ATP. The seryl enzyme inhibitor phenyl methyl sulphonyl fluoride (PMSF), the suicide inactivator isatoic anhydride, and a number of chymotryptic substrates all effectively inhibited histamine release from rat mast cells stimulated with anti-IgE but not with compound 48/80. Their potency was strikingly increased in permeabilized cells, indicating their effective incorporation into the cytosol. Activation of a chymotrypic enzyme as evidenced by hydrolysis of the fluorescent substrate, was directly demonstrated following immunologic stimulation of permeabilized mast cells containing N-Succinyl-Leu-Leu-Val-Tyr-7-amino-4-methylcoumarin. No such activation was observed with compound 48/80. Immunological stimulation also led to a significant increase in total chymotryptic activity recoverable from rat mast cells. In total, this study provides the most direct evidence to date for the involvement of a serine esterase in immunologic but not polyamine-induced mast cell activation