Sonja Gerdes

"Cloaca Projects is situated in a small, garage-like space on the old industrial edge of San Francisco, a rapidly changing city dedicated more and more to new technical systems of hyperefficiency. Sonja Gerdes's recent project for Cloaca portrayed uncertain states of relation with such technologies as human beings lurch into the future. Her suite of sculptures represented living creatures as they become augmented, undermined, or superseded by built extensions. Individually and as an ensemble, they functioned as signs of dystopian outcomes amid a scientistic culture of optimism.

The design, development, testing, fabrication, calibration and integration of a High Resolution Imager (HRI) for the Roentgen Satellite (ROSAT)

The development, calibration and integration of the high resolution imager (HRI) for the Roentgen Satellite (ROSAT) is discussed

Creating a Portable MP3 Player Three-Band Graphic Equalizer and Amplifier for a Circuits Laboratory Final Project

At George Fox University, all engineering students are required to take the sophomore level circuits course. In an effort to more effectively engage the students in the course, a new final project was designed to leverage the interest in music and audio that is shared by undergraduate students. This paper details the design and implementation of a battery powered, three-band graphic equalizer and amplifier for a portable MP3 player or IPOD® and the associated labs and project that accompany it. There are three circuit design elements of the final project, the first teaching students how to use comparators to create a graphic display, the second detailing active filters, and the final lab describing peak rectifiers and the mixer that ties everything together. As a final project experience, each student is given a kit containing a PCB, a speaker, an on/off switch, a batteryholder, and every electronic component required to construct the final system. Students are also required to write a major lab report detailing the operation of the final project. After providing the experience one time, student engagement was noticeably higher, the results of the final project being significantly beyond the expectations of the course instructors

A Surface-Syntactic UD Treebank for Naija

International audienceThis paper presents a syntactic treebank for spoken Naija, an English pidgincreole, which is rapidly spreading across Nigeria. The syntactic annotation is developed in the Surface-Syntactic Universal Dependency annotation scheme (SUD) (Gerdes et al., 2018) and automatically converted into UD. We present the workflow of the treebank development for this under-resourced language. A crucial step in the syntactic analysis of a spoken language consists in manually adding a markup onto the transcription, indicating the segmentation into major syntactic units and their internal structure. We show that this so-called "macrosyntactic" markup improves parsing results. We also study some iconic syntactic phenomena that clearly distinguish Naija from English

The Proposed Federal Securities Code: Time to Recognize That Financial Information Becomes Stale

This note addresses the Federal Securities Code ( Code ), developed by the American Law Institute ( ALI ). It specifically focuses on the underlying policy of continuous disclosure implemented by the Code, which requires companies to register once and then continuously disclose to the securities marketplace important developments on their financial position. This note poses a question: At what point does financial information become stale? It focuses on the nature of stale financial information by reviewing the treatment of staleness in common law fraud and bankruptcy cases. It then analyzes the approach taken with regard to stale financial information in existing securities law. Finally, it concludes by proposing that an objective definition of staleness should be incorporated into the Code, placing reasonable limits on the liability created under the Code\u27s continuous disclosure requirements

A Rib Less Makes you Consistent but Impatient: A Gender Comparison of Expert Chess Players

This paper presents empirical findings on gender differences in time preference and time inconsistency which are based on international chess data from 1.5 million expert games. Controls are included for age, nationality and playing strength where the latter accounts for gender differences in productivity. Impatience is measured by considering preferences for different game durations. Inconsistency is measured by exploiting the 40th move time control, where over-consumption of thinking time is inefficient. The results reveal that men are more impatient while women are more time inconsistent. Moreover, the difference in impatience increases with expertise while the difference in inconsistency decreases.Time preference; time inconsistency; impatience; gender

A Short Note on Longevity

Certainly man will not become immortal, but will not the interval between the first breath that he draws and the time when in the natural course of events, without disease or accident, he expires, increase indefinitely? Marquis de Condorcet Sketch for a Historical Picture Of the Human Mind (1795

Cracking the Code: Driverless Cars vs. Hackers | College of Engineering

Feb. 3, 2016 – Electrical and computer engineering researchers at USU are finding ways to defeat the safety and security measures in place to keep driverless cars rolling safely down the road. And while it’s a complex exercise, the group says it hasn’t found a single layer of security they haven’t been able to defeat. It’s all part of a four-year study led by Assistant Professor Dr. Ryan Gerdes who was recently awarded a major grant from the National Science Foundation to study the security of autonomous vehicles and incorporate what he calls ‘adversarial thinking’ into the design process.https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/engineering_news/1075/thumbnail.jp