A Kleinian analysis of Lamentations

The Book of Lamentations is incoherent, illogical, unstable and contradictory, with disjunctive and unitary tendencies. There have been many attempts to define its tensions. They all have something interesting to say, but some are more persuasive than others. I read Lamentations as a lament over the severing of an individual’s bond with his God, which reprises the severing of the bond with his mother and loss of his idealised good object. Of Lamentations’ various tensions, I highlight the tension between form and content – a highly controlling (unitary) acrostic form and a highly labile (disjunctive) emotional content. I relate these to Melanie Klein’s ‘depressive’ and ‘paranoid-schizoid’ positions, two configurations of early experience, which are constructed from the psychological mechanisms of projection and introjection. I consider Klein’s view that art is an attempt to repair the internal object, which arises in the guilt of the depressive position. I also consider the work of art critic Adrian Stokes, who draws heavily on Klein, and for the first time extend his celebrated distinction between modelling and carving into poetry, arguing that the acrostic is a literary version of stone. I contend that Lamentations is a form of survival literature whose acrostic performs several important, complex, unconscious, functions related to the Poet’s need to control and repair the sources of his emotional pain. The tension between the unstable shapelessness of emotional pain found in its content and the firm acrostic lines of the recreated object found in its acrostic form are a literary equivalent of the tension between the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions. The acrostic becomes a substitute object, which needs to be carefully preserved. While the conscious hopefulness of Lamentations has been over-read, the Poet’s use of the acrostic to draw a perfect and undamaged breast makes Lamentations a powerful, unconscious, expression of hope

Analysis and Geometric Optimization of Single Electron Transistors for Read-Out in Solid-State Quantum Computing

The single electron transistor (SET) offers unparalled opportunities as a nano-scale electrometer, capable of measuring sub-electron charge variations. SETs have been proposed for read-out schema in solid-state quantum computing where quantum information processing outcomes depend on the location of a single electron on nearby quantum dots. In this paper we investigate various geometries of a SET in order to maximize the device's sensitivity to charge transfer between quantum dots. Through the use of finite element modeling we model the materials and geometries of an Al/Al2O3 SET measuring the state of quantum dots in the Si substrate beneath. The investigation is motivated by the quest to build a scalable quantum computer, though the methodology used is primarily that of circuit theory. As such we provide useful techniques for any electronic device operating at the classical/quantum interface.Comment: 13 pages, 17 figure

Cryogenic propellant management: Integration of design, performance and operational requirements

The integration of the design features of the Shuttle elements into a cryogenic propellant management system is described. The implementation and verification of the design/operational changes resulting from design deficiencies and/or element incompatibilities encountered subsequent to the critical design reviews are emphasized. Major topics include: subsystem designs to provide liquid oxygen (LO2) tank pressure stabilization, LO2 facility vent for ice prevention, liquid hydrogen (LH2) feedline high point bleed, pogo suppression on the Space Shuttle Main Engine (SSME), LO2 low level cutoff, Orbiter/engine propellant dump, and LO2 main feedline helium injection for geyser prevention

Truncating and Oversampling OFDM Signals in White Gaussian Noise Channels

This work introduces a modified version of the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) signal by truncating OFDM symbols in the time domain. Sub-carriers are no longer orthogonally packed in the frequency domain as time samples are only partially transmitted, leading to improved spectral efficiency. In this work, mathematical expressions are derived for the newly proposed Truncated OFDM (TOFDM) signal, followed by interference analysis and performance comparisons. We also consider optimal and practical decoder architectures. Results from a Sphere Decoder-based decoder indicate that truncation length can significantly affect the error performance. With short truncation length, using a purpose designed detector, signals can be recovered even with truncated symbol transmission

Aspirin Use in Children for Fever or Viral Syndromes

Aspirin should not be used to treat acute febrile viral illness in children. (Strength of Recommendation [SOR]: C, based on case- control studies). Although no causal link has been proven, data from case-control and historic cohort studies demonstrate an association between aspirin use and Reye syndrome

Hyperparameter Importance Across Datasets

With the advent of automated machine learning, automated hyperparameter optimization methods are by now routinely used in data mining. However, this progress is not yet matched by equal progress on automatic analyses that yield information beyond performance-optimizing hyperparameter settings. In this work, we aim to answer the following two questions: Given an algorithm, what are generally its most important hyperparameters, and what are typically good values for these? We present methodology and a framework to answer these questions based on meta-learning across many datasets. We apply this methodology using the experimental meta-data available on OpenML to determine the most important hyperparameters of support vector machines, random forests and Adaboost, and to infer priors for all their hyperparameters. The results, obtained fully automatically, provide a quantitative basis to focus efforts in both manual algorithm design and in automated hyperparameter optimization. The conducted experiments confirm that the hyperparameters selected by the proposed method are indeed the most important ones and that the obtained priors also lead to statistically significant improvements in hyperparameter optimization.Comment: \c{opyright} 2018. Copyright is held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here for your personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive Version of Record was published in Proceedings of the 24th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery & Data Minin

Hydrodynamic object recognition using pressure sensing

Hydrodynamic sensing is instrumental to fish and some amphibians. It also represents, for underwater vehicles, an alternative way of sensing the fluid environment when visual and acoustic sensing are limited. To assess the effectiveness of hydrodynamic sensing and gain insight into its capabilities and limitations, we investigated the forward and inverse problem of detection and identification, using the hydrodynamic pressure in the neighbourhood, of a stationary obstacle described using a general shape representation. Based on conformal mapping and a general normalization procedure, our obstacle representation accounts for all specific features of progressive perceptual hydrodynamic imaging reported experimentally. Size, location and shape are encoded separately. The shape representation rests upon an asymptotic series which embodies the progressive character of hydrodynamic imaging through pressure sensing. A dynamic filtering method is used to invert noisy nonlinear pressure signals for the shape parameters. The results highlight the dependence of the sensitivity of hydrodynamic sensing not only on the relative distance to the disturbance but also its bearing

Controlled single electron transfer between Si:P dots

We demonstrate electrical control of Si:P double dots in which the potential is defined by nanoscale phosphorus doped regions. Each dot contains approximately 600 phosphorus atoms and has a diameter close to 30 nm. On application of a differential bias across the dots, electron transfer is observed, using single electron transistors in both dc- and rf-mode as charge detectors. With the possibility to scale the dots down to few and even single atoms these results open the way to a new class of precision-doped quantum dots in silicon.Comment: 3 figures, 3 page