In Defence of Chalmers: A Comment on Korf

In “Qualia in a Contemporary Neurobiological Perspective”, Korf tackles the perennial issue of qualia in the philosophy of mind. His discussion is partly a response to Chalmers’ hard problem, which, as evidenced by other recent discussions in Dialogues, remains fresh after nearly two decades. Korf highlights the importance of regarding each brain as a particular shaped by unique contingencies and suggests how neurobiological research might proceed in light of this. However, I argue that his discussion does not address what is at the core of Chalmers’ hard problem, and so fails to bridge the gap between neurobiological processes and qualia

Training a Ranking Function for Open-Domain Question Answering

In recent years, there have been amazing advances in deep learning methods for machine reading. In machine reading, the machine reader has to extract the answer from the given ground truth paragraph. Recently, the state-of-the-art machine reading models achieve human level performance in SQuAD which is a reading comprehension-style question answering (QA) task. The success of machine reading has inspired researchers to combine information retrieval with machine reading to tackle open-domain QA. However, these systems perform poorly compared to reading comprehension-style QA because it is difficult to retrieve the pieces of paragraphs that contain the answer to the question. In this study, we propose two neural network rankers that assign scores to different passages based on their likelihood of containing the answer to a given question. Additionally, we analyze the relative importance of semantic similarity and word level relevance matching in open-domain QA.Comment: To appear at NAACL-SRW 201

ミャンマーにおける旧石器時代石器の原材料利用・技術・型式分類 : 石器製作技術は地域性と関係するか？―

　ミャンマーの旧石器文化はその地理的位置によって二つに区分される。開地的な遺跡は低地平原に位置し、そこで典型的なアニャティアン文化が更新世中期から完新世前期の間に盛行したものと思われる。一方、高地カルスト地帯の洞穴遺跡は礫器文化を反映しており、その年代は11,000 BP ごろ以降に始まるかもしれない。本論はそうした二つの異なった文化の特徴をまとめるとともに、地方的・地域的伝統における技術論的関連を明らかにしようとするものである

Amélioration de la teneur en fer et en zinc du riz pour l'alimentation humaine

La carence en oligoéléments touche plus de 3,7 milliards de personnes dans le monde, essentiellement des femmes et des enfants en raison de leurs besoins physiologiques. Les carences en fer et en zinc sont à l'origine de déficiences immunitaires, de complications au niveau de la grossesse et de l'enfantement, d'un développement difficile chez l'enfant, de capacités d'apprentissage et d'une productivité moindres. En 1992, l'Irri a débuté des recherches sur l'influence de certaines caractéristiques du sol sur la teneur en fer des céréales, recherche qu'il a étendue au zinc en 1995 en collaboration avec l'université d'Adélaïde, en Australie, concernant l'analyse des minéraux. Le criblage du germoplasme a révélé une importante variabilité génétique concernant le fer et le zinc du riz complet. Les teneurs en fer et en zinc des variétés couramment cultivées sont de l'ordre de 12 milligrammes par kilogramme et 25 milligrammes par kilogramme, respectivement ; certaines variétés traditionnelles présentent des valeurs doubles de celles-ci. L'étude génétique du caractère de teneur élevée en fer a montré l'importance des effets de dominance et d'additivité et l'incidence moindre de l'environnement. Par ailleurs, trois QTL de teneur élevée en fer ont été marqués sur des chromosomes de riz. Les teneurs élevées en fer et en zinc peuvent être combinées avec des caractères agronomiques améliorés. L'Irri a identifié du riz amélioré associant une bonne aptitude au rendement et des grains à concentration élevée en fer et en zinc dans les grains. Compte tenu de l'importance de la consommation de riz dans les pays en développement, des variétés à teneurs élevées en fer et en zinc pourraient avoir un impact significatif sur la nutrition et la santé des populations concernée

Improving iron and zinc value of rice for human nutrition

Micronutrient deficiency 'hidden hunge' + affects more than 3.7 billion people worldwide, predominantly women and children because of their physiological needs. Iron and zinc deficiencies cause impaired immune function, complications in pregnancy and childbirth, poor child growth and learning ability, and reduce labor productivity. In 1992, IRRI began to examine the effect of certain soil characteristics on the iron content in the grain and was expanded in 1995 to include zinc and collaboration with university of Adelaide, Australia for mineral analysis. Germplasm screening showed large genetic variation for Fe and Zn in brown rice. Common cultivars contain about 12mg kg-1 of iron and 25mg kg-1 Zn. Some traditional varieties have doubled these amounts. Genetics of high Fe trait showed the importance of additive and dominance gene action but less affected by environment. Moreover three QTLS for high Fe trait were tagged in rice chromosomes. High iron and zinc traits can be combined with improved agronomic traits. IRRI identified improved rice with good yielding ability and high concentration of iron and zinc in the grain. Because of the high consumption of rice in developing countries, the extra iron and zinc would have meaningful impact on human nutrition and healt

X-Ray Imaging for the Observation of Mode I Fracture in Fibre Reinforced Concrete

In this study X-ray imaging is used to investigate the mechanisms of fracture in fibre reinforced concrete. The investigation looks at the performance of discrete end-hooked fibres crossing a cracking plane at various angles and loaded normal to the plane. The angle of a fibre crossing a crack is found to be an important parameter in determining the mode of failure and bending of the fibres were observed up to approximately 5 mm into the matrix from the fibre exit point. The tests show a probability that some fibres pullout from longer embedded side under Mode I fracture. In the non-destructive observation procedure presented here, the internal actions of the fibres at the various stages of loading can be determined. X-Ray imaging is shown to be a valuable tool in understanding steel fibre-concrete behaviour

Effect of using performance-based approach for seismic design of tall building diaphragms

This paper presents how performance-based design (PBD) approaches can help to improve the structural performance and cost effectiveness in design of floor diaphragms of tall buildings under earthquakes. In contrast to the prescriptive design approaches, performance-based design provides a systematic methodology for assessing the performance capability of overall building system and its components. The performance-based design explicitly evaluates the response of the building under the potential seismic hazard, considering the probable site-specific seismic demands as well as the uncertainties in the post-yielding response and behaviour of the building under seismic events. Case study of 57-story reinforced concrete residential building with 4 basement levels is presented. The building was designed for Design Basis Earthquake (DBE) level in accordance with traditional code-based design procedures at the preliminary design stage. After preliminary design, the performance of the building was checked explicitly at Service Level Earthquake (SLE) (43-year return period) and Maximum Considered Earthquake (MCE) level (2475-year return period), using linear and nonlinear response history procedures. Diaphragm design forces at podium level and tower levels were explicitly checked at site-specific MCE level event rather than application of code-specified modification factors to estimate the forces and deformation under code-specified earthquake level. Cost effectiveness of the design was evaluated by comparison of the indicative quantities and parameters between the code-based design and the modified design based on PBD