Crime Investigations: The Countability Profile of a Delinquent Noun

This paper aims to broaden our understanding of countability beyond what is found with concrete nouns, providing a one-word case study of the countable and non-countable uses of the noun crime. I show that the behavior of crime runs counter to a variety of expectations inherited from the literature on countability: its countable use cannot be directly grounded in atomic acts or events, nor is its non- countable use simply equivalent to a plural individual composed of individual crimes, as one might expect on analogy with certain analyses of furniture. Additionally, while crime has a use as a bare plural, that use does not refer to a kind. A quantitative study supports these conclusions. Altogether, crime demonstrates a novel noun type with respect to its nominal semantics and countability behavior, which is also an indication of the large empirical terrain that awaits exploration for eventive and abstract nouns

Degrees of Countability: A Mereotopological Approach to the Mass/Count Distinction

Most formal semantic treatments of countability aim to account for a binary count/non-count distinction through the use of mereology, or part-structures. This paper discusses data from Welsh, which possesses three categories of grammatical number, distinguishing a collective/singulative class under which fall entity types such as 'collective aggregates' (swarming insects, vegetation) and 'granular aggregates' (sand). I show that standard mereological accounts turn out not to be sufficiently expressive to account for this broader typological data. I then argue that it is necessary to enrich mereology with connection relations that model ways in which the referents of nouns may come together, resulting in the more expressive mereotopology. I show that this extension leads to faithfully modeling the degrees of countability found in Welsh and overcomes well-known problems for classical mereological accounts, e.g., the "minimal parts" problem

The Bounds of Subjecthood: Evidence from Instruments

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Development of scenarios for land cover, population density, impervious cover, and conservation in New Hampshire, 2010–2100

Future changes in ecosystem services will depend heavily on changes in land cover and land use, which, in turn, are shaped by human activities. Given the challenges of predicting long-term changes in human behaviors and activities, scenarios provide a framework for simulating the long-term consequences of land-cover change on ecosystem function. As input for process-based models of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystem function, we developed scenarios for land cover, population density, and impervious cover for the state of New Hampshire for 2020–2100. Key drivers of change were identified through information gathered from six sources: historical trends, existing plans relating to New Hampshire’s land-cover future, surveys, existing population scenarios, key informant interviews with diverse stakeholders, and input from subject-matter experts. Scenarios were developed in parallel with information gathering, with details added iteratively as new questions emerged. The final scenarios span a continuum from spatially dispersed development with a low value placed on ecosystem services (Backyard Amenities) to concentrated development with a high value placed on ecosystem services (the Community Amenities family). The Community family includes two population scenarios (Large Community and Small Community), to be combined with two scenarios for land cover (Protection of Wildlands and Promotion of Local Food), producing combinations that bring the total number of scenarios to six. Between Backyard Amenities and Community Amenities is a scenario based on linear extrapolations of current trends (Linear Trends). Custom models were used to simulate decadal change in land cover, population density, and impervious cover. We present raster maps and proportion of impervious cover for HUC10 watersheds under each scenario and discuss the trade-offs of our translation and modeling approach within the context of contemporary scenario projects

Video Manipulation Techniques for the Protection of Privacy in Remote Presence Systems

Systems that give control of a mobile robot to a remote user raise privacy concerns about what the remote user can see and do through the robot. We aim to preserve some of that privacy by manipulating the video data that the remote user sees. Through two user studies, we explore the effectiveness of different video manipulation techniques at providing different types of privacy. We simultaneously examine task performance in the presence of privacy protection. In the first study, participants were asked to watch a video captured by a robot exploring an office environment and to complete a series of observational tasks under differing video manipulation conditions. Our results show that using manipulations of the video stream can lead to fewer privacy violations for different privacy types. Through a second user study, it was demonstrated that these privacy-protecting techniques were effective without diminishing the task performance of the remote user.Comment: 14 pages, 8 figure

The singular continuous diffraction measure of the Thue-Morse chain

The paradigm for singular continuous spectra in symbolic dynamics and in mathematical diffraction is provided by the Thue-Morse chain, in its realisation as a binary sequence with values in $\{\pm 1\}$. We revisit this example and derive a functional equation together with an explicit form of the corresponding singular continuous diffraction measure, which is related to the known representation as a Riesz product.Comment: 6 pages, 1 figure; revised and improved versio

Studies of the Heavy Transitional Nuclei using the (p,p') Reactions at 135 MeV

This research was sponsored by the National Science Foundation Grant NSF PHY 87-1440

Perturbative Prepotential and Monodromies in N=2 Heterotic Superstring

We discuss the prepotential describing the effective field theory of N=2 heterotic superstring models. At the one loop-level the prepotential develops logarithmic singularities due to the appearance of charged massless states at particular surfaces in the moduli space of vector multiplets. These singularities modify the classical duality symmetry group which now becomes a representation of the fundamental group of the moduli space minus the singular surfaces. For the simplest two-moduli case, this fundamental group turns out to be a certain braid group and we determine the resulting full duality transformations of the prepotential, which are exact in perturbation theory.Comment: 39 pages, LaTeX, no figures; section 6 expanded to include explicit construction of the monodromy group in a (4,0) orbifold exampl