Reconfiguring redundancy management

A redundancy management system is described wherein input signals from a sensor are provided redundantly in parallel so that a primary control signal may be selected. Median value signals for groups of three sensors are detected in median value selectors of selection filter. The detected median value signals are then also compared in a subtractor/comparator to determine whether any of them exceed the others by an amount greater than the signal level for a failed sensor. If so, the exceeding detected medium value signal is sent to a control computer as the primary control signal. If not, the lowest level detected medium value signal is sent as the primary control signal

"Ersticken im Stofflichen": Characters as Collectives in Alfred Döblin's Wallenstein and his Theoretical Writings

In foregrounding the epochal figures of Albrecht von Wallenstein and the Emperor Ferdinand, Alfred Döblin’s historical novel Wallenstein (1920) would seem to confound the genre’s habitual focus on average, typical figures. The catastrophic power struggle that results from the irreconcilability of the protagonists of Wallenstein is a far cry from the broadly representative function of middling anti-heroes theorized by Georg Lukács in his foundational work on the historical novel. Yet paradoxically, it is precisely through the depiction of these historical titans that Wallenstein subverts the centrality of individual characters and portrays history as mass history. By depicting key characters as the bodily concretization of mass movements, Döblin dissolves individual figures into their broader social, historical, and linguistic contexts and thereby arrives at a representative typicality very different from the one Lukács identified in Walter Scott’s work. Drawing on close readings of scenes of characterization and the detailed depictions of individual bodies throughout the text, I will show how the genre of the historical novel allowed Döblin to rework the literary category of character and thereby intervene in central literary-theoretical debates of the Weimar Republic concerning the relationship between epic and documentary representation. Wallenstein is thus not only an early pivotal work in Döblin’s burgeoning theorization of the individual, the mass, and the type, it also offers a surprising paradigm for reading the early 20th-century historical novel, perched between the anti-realist excesses of Expressionism on the one hand and the cataloging, documentary gaze of epic representation on the other

Learning to Understand Child-directed and Adult-directed Speech

Speech directed to children differs from adult-directed speech in linguistic aspects such as repetition, word choice, and sentence length, as well as in aspects of the speech signal itself, such as prosodic and phonemic variation. Human language acquisition research indicates that child-directed speech helps language learners. This study explores the effect of child-directed speech when learning to extract semantic information from speech directly. We compare the task performance of models trained on adult-directed speech (ADS) and child-directed speech (CDS). We find indications that CDS helps in the initial stages of learning, but eventually, models trained on ADS reach comparable task performance, and generalize better. The results suggest that this is at least partially due to linguistic rather than acoustic properties of the two registers, as we see the same pattern when looking at models trained on acoustically comparable synthetic speech.Comment: Authors found an error in preprocessing of transcriptions before they were fed to SBERT. After correction, the experiments were rerun. The updated results can be found in this version. Importantly, - Most scores were affected to a small degree (performance was slightly worse). - The effect was consistent across conditions. Therefore, the general patterns remain the sam

Master of Science

thesisWater resources face increasing stress from climate change that may not result in uniform vulnerability to hydrologic response across all watersheds. I compare over 100 years of historical hydrologic data from seven seasonally snow-dominated watersheds near Salt Lake City, Utah to identify how watershed landscapes interact with climate variability to control hydrologic partitioning. Mean annual precipitation (790 mm - 1290 mm) and temperature (3.3°C - 6.9°C) differ primarily as a function of watershed elevation. Mean annual streamflow, normalized by watershed area (150 mm to 820 mm), differs primarily as a function of mean precipitation. Precipitation and temperature exhibit similar interannual variability. However, due to the unique landscape characteristics of the watersheds, streamflow values exhibit large differences in interannual variability between the watersheds. Interannual variability in precipitation explains between 46%-73% of the annual variability in streamflow. Surprisingly, the remaining variability does not correlate to annual or seasonal temperature. Instead, interannual variability in subsurface storage and snowmelt processes further reduce the uncertainty in annual streamflow. Together, precipitation, storage, and snowmelt explain nearly all (96%-98%) of the annual variability in streamflow. Storage accounts for a legacy effect of past climate on streamflow that varies between watersheds based on subsurface characteristics. The rate of snowmelt affects the snowpack's infiltration efficiency and is primarily controlled by solar radiation, varying between watersheds based on hillslope shading characteristics. These controls on hydrologic partitioning indicate that subsurface and topographic characteristics control the differential sensitivity of watersheds to changes in climate

Das Ich über der Natur (1927)

Entry on Alfred Döblin's book, Das Ich über der Natur, in the 2016 Alfred Döblin Handbuch

A Review of “Andreas Huyssen, Miniature Metropolis”

A review of Andreas Huyssen's "Miniature Metropolis: Literature in an Age of Photography and Film" (2015

Spinning Carbon Fiber Precursors from 1-Butyl-3-Methylimidazolium Chloride Cellulose Solutions

Cellulose is an abundant natural renewable polymer that is used in the production of many materials. However, limited processibility and reduced solubility have restricted its use in fibers, films, and other products. Ionic liquids (IL) show promise as a new class of cellulose solvents. The primary goal of this research was to spin highly oriented and highly crystalline cellulose fibers from an IL solution. These fibers, in addition to their environmentally advantageous processing, have potential as precursors for carbon fibers. The IL selected for this study was 1-butyl-3-methylimidazolium chloride, ([C4mim]Cl). An elongational flow spinning technique was used to induce molecular orientation in the spinneret thus producing highly oriented, highly crystalline fibers. The effect of spinning conditions on fiber properties was determined. One prime consideration for carbon fiber precursors is the degree and size of defects. The elongational flow imposition of orientation inside the hyperbolic dies was especially effective

Breaking Open Utopia: Science Fiction as Critique in the GDR

In this article I offer a reading of Angela and Karlheinz Steinmüller’s novel Andymon (1982) in order to show how science fiction was able to function as critique in the German Democratic Republic. Andymon, a popular novel in a popular genre, establishes an extended analogy between spatial closure and temporal foreclosure to challenge the restrictive epistemological fixity the authors associated with both classical utopian texts and the cultural-political framework of socialist realism. By modeling competing dynamics of closure in its two primary spaces—aboard a vast spaceship and on the eponymous newly-settled planet—Andymon is able to offer a challenge from within a cognitive structure that links perfect knowledge of the past to the total determination of a future horizon. This destabilization of the past as an object of cognition thereby opens possibilities for the utopian reimagination of the future. Science fiction is thus able to critique both the official policy of socialist realism and the normative closure of classical utopian literature; the fact that Andymon enacts a critique of formal dimensions (closure, openings) on the level of plot can in turn contribute to our understanding of the relationship between the mass genre of science fiction and key legacies of critical theory

Simply Reproducing Reality – Brecht, Benjamin, and Renger-Patzsch on Photography

This article reads Albert Renger-Patzsch’s photographic theory and practice in the context of Benjamin’s and Brecht’s dismissals of his work in order to recover the paradoxical interplay between documentation and perceptual training central to debates about photography as a specifically modern medium during the 1920s. I argue that, rather than evincing a naïve faith in verisimilitude, Renger-Patzsch mobilized ideas of visual analogy, formal play, and embodied vision to foreground the camera’s potential for disrupting perceptual habits. Returning to this moment of Weimar photographic theory can help recover deeper aesthetic tensions among formal, documentary, and critical demands made of the medium