175 research outputs found
The Body Beautiful: Jonathan Spenceâs Final Reith Lecture
Jonathan Spence gave his fourth and last Reith lecture on âThe Body Beautiful.â This is a perfect fit for Chinaâs Olympic year and a wonderful conclusion talk after his first lecture on mind (âConfucian Waysâ), then on Chinese interactions with the former superpower (the second lecture âEnglish Lessonsâ), and the current one (the third lecture âAmerican Dreamsâ). From mind to body, from China as an ancient civilization through its turbulent relations with Western powers to a nation which is determined to compete with the world in hard power either economically or physically, the topic was extremely well thought. The lecture was given at no better venue: Lordâs Cricket Ground, London, which will play an important role in the 2012 London Olympic Games, according to the host of the lecture. Everything seems great.
The 2008 BBCâs Reith lecturer entertained us with a brilliant explanation on issues such as ancient Chinese discussions of sports and athleticism, their practices of womenâs Polo and menâs kickball roughly one thousand years ago, modern meets in the 20th century, and, most importantly, this yearâs Olympics and its implications. His lecture also dealt with the transition from sports for the sake of personal character to sports in the name of nationalism. This is a great treat from a master. Listening to Spenceâs many lectures always reminded me of Lao Ziâs political idea: âæȻ性ćœè„çčć°éČ,â or it is the same to rule a big nation as to cook a small fish. Any topics for Spence, including this one, seem so easy for him to address, just like cooking a shrimp.
But it is exactly Spenceâs brilliance that presented some problems for this lecture. As Daoist theory points out, misfortune can become a base of fortune, and fortune can lead to failure. In the short presentation, Spence dazzled us with all the great stuff, and like a talented chef, served us a delicious dish. But for some of us who are greedy, that dish tasted so good that we wanted moreâa feast. For instance, Spence explained in a relatively detailed way Chinaâs past participations in Olympic Games and touched upon the issue between Taipei and Beijing of who should represent China in the Olympic family. But he did not elaborate on Beijingâs withdrawal from the Olympic movement nor the PRCâs absence for over two decades from the most of the worldâs sports activities
Chinaâs National Representation and the Two-China Question in the Olympic Movement
This paper, through a case study of Beijingâs involvement in the 1952 Helsinki Olympic Games, provides a crucial historical analysis of Chinaâs current obsession with the Olympic movement and the ongoing Beijing/Taipei dispute over the national representation issue. It demonstrates that both Beijingâs all-out campaign for the 2008 Games and the argument across the Strait about who should or should not represent China are nothing new, and are rooted in past experience
La représentation nationale de la China et la question des deux Chine dans le mouvement olympique
Cet article, Ă travers lâĂ©tude du cas de la participation de PĂ©kin aux jeux Olympiques de 1952 Ă Helsinki, offre une analyse historique cruciale pour comprendre lâactuelle obsession olympique de la Chine et le conflit toujours actif entre PĂ©kin et Taipei sur la question de la reprĂ©sentation nationale. Il dĂ©montre que tant la forte campagne menĂ©e par PĂ©kin pour obtenir les Jeux de 2008 que le dĂ©bat sur la question de savoir qui doit ou ne doit pas reprĂ©senter la Chine ne sont pas nouveaux et prennent leurs racines dans les controverses passĂ©es
NP-Hardness of Tensor Network Contraction Ordering
We study the optimal order (or sequence) of contracting a tensor network with
a minimal computational cost. We conclude 2 different versions of this optimal
sequence: that minimize the operation number (OMS) and that minimize the time
complexity (CMS). Existing results only shows that OMS is NP-hard, but no
conclusion on CMS problem. In this work, we firstly reduce CMS to CMS-0, which
is a sub-problem of CMS with no free indices. Then we prove that CMS is easier
than OMS, both in general and in tree cases. Last but not least, we prove that
CMS is still NP-hard. Based on our results, we have built up relationships of
hardness of different tensor network contraction problems.Comment: Jianyu Xu and Hanwen Zhang are equal contributors. 10 pages
(reference and appendix excluded), 20 pages in total, 6 figure
Inherent Redundancy in Spiking Neural Networks
Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) are well known as a promising energy-efficient
alternative to conventional artificial neural networks. Subject to the
preconceived impression that SNNs are sparse firing, the analysis and
optimization of inherent redundancy in SNNs have been largely overlooked, thus
the potential advantages of spike-based neuromorphic computing in accuracy and
energy efficiency are interfered. In this work, we pose and focus on three key
questions regarding the inherent redundancy in SNNs. We argue that the
redundancy is induced by the spatio-temporal invariance of SNNs, which enhances
the efficiency of parameter utilization but also invites lots of noise spikes.
Further, we analyze the effect of spatio-temporal invariance on the
spatio-temporal dynamics and spike firing of SNNs. Then, motivated by these
analyses, we propose an Advance Spatial Attention (ASA) module to harness SNNs'
redundancy, which can adaptively optimize their membrane potential distribution
by a pair of individual spatial attention sub-modules. In this way, noise spike
features are accurately regulated. Experimental results demonstrate that the
proposed method can significantly drop the spike firing with better performance
than state-of-the-art SNN baselines. Our code is available in
\url{https://github.com/BICLab/ASA-SNN}.Comment: Accepted by ICCV202
Spike-driven Transformer
Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) provide an energy-efficient deep learning
option due to their unique spike-based event-driven (i.e., spike-driven)
paradigm. In this paper, we incorporate the spike-driven paradigm into
Transformer by the proposed Spike-driven Transformer with four unique
properties: 1) Event-driven, no calculation is triggered when the input of
Transformer is zero; 2) Binary spike communication, all matrix multiplications
associated with the spike matrix can be transformed into sparse additions; 3)
Self-attention with linear complexity at both token and channel dimensions; 4)
The operations between spike-form Query, Key, and Value are mask and addition.
Together, there are only sparse addition operations in the Spike-driven
Transformer. To this end, we design a novel Spike-Driven Self-Attention (SDSA),
which exploits only mask and addition operations without any multiplication,
and thus having up to lower computation energy than vanilla
self-attention. Especially in SDSA, the matrix multiplication between Query,
Key, and Value is designed as the mask operation. In addition, we rearrange all
residual connections in the vanilla Transformer before the activation functions
to ensure that all neurons transmit binary spike signals. It is shown that the
Spike-driven Transformer can achieve 77.1\% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1K,
which is the state-of-the-art result in the SNN field. The source code is
available at https://github.com/BICLab/Spike-Driven-Transformer
The Mollow triplets under few-photon excitation
Resonant excitation is an essential tool in the development of semiconductor
quantum dots (QDs) for quantum information processing. One central challenge is
to enable a transparent access to the QD signal without post-selection
information loss. A viable path is through cavity enhancement, which has
successfully lifted the resonantly scattered field strength over the laser
background under \emph{weak} excitation. Here, we extend this success to the
\emph{saturation} regime using a QD-micropillar device with a Purcell factor of
10.9 and an ultra-low background cavity reflectivity of just 0.0089. We achieve
a signal to background ratio of 50 and an overall system responsivity of 3~\%,
i.e., we detect on average 0.03 resonantly scattered single photons for every
incident laser photon. Raising the excitation to the few-photon level, the QD
response is brought into saturation where we observe the Mollow triplets as
well as the associated cascade single photon emissions, without resort to any
laser background rejection technique. Our work offers a new perspective toward
QD cavity interface that is not restricted by the laser background.Comment: 8 Figures and 9 Pages. Comments are welcom
Replacing fossil fuels wtih solar energy in an SME in UK and Kurdistan, Iraq: Kansas fried chicken case study
Energy management and analysis are more common in large companies since they have the resources and commitment to assign such tasks to employee compared to SMEs. Only a very small proportion of the overall business costs pertains to energy requirements and therefore SMEs pay little attention to energy analysis and management. Fossil fuels, which cause issues related to global warming, can viably be replaced with renewable energy sources such as solar energy. Trends in solar cell development are likely to yield a potential solution to problems generated by an over reliance on fossil fuels. Solar solutions are relatively simple to implement in SMEs than in large corporation and the combined impact small businesses is likely to be much greater. A micro-business has been utilized as a cases study for the purposes of illustration in the UK and
Kurdistan-Iraq. Even though Kurdistan-Iraq is abundant in oil and gas, its climatic favour the implementation of solar cells which can replace the existing use of non-renewable fossil fuel. Our comparative study suggests that solar can replaced a reasonable amount of the energy needs even in the UK and a much higher amount in Kurdistan-Iraq. Using 20% efficient solar, can replace 23% and 70% of the energy requirements of the microbusiness in UK and Kurdistan-Iraq respectively
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