Ephemera as a Versatile Primary Resource: A Case Study of the Nancy Tucker Postcard Collection

Ephemera are rich primary sources too often overlooked within archival materials and at collecting institutions. This case study argues that archivists and librarians should recognize ephemera, specifically postcards, as powerful historical documents worthy of scholarly investigation. By analyzing a sample set of digitized postcards held at the New Mexico State University Library, we show how scholars can use postcards to develop evidence-based arguments. Through the images, printed texts, and hand-written inscriptions found on these early 20th century postcards, we demonstrate how researchers can examine the pro-development messages found in southern New Mexico postcards

Managing Projects with Stochastic Durations

This research addresses analyzing and responding to uncertainty in projects with stochastic task durations. First we examine the effect of contractor flexibility (or agility) on project completion times. We find that this impact can be significant depending on the size and the structure of the project network.Next we study a stochastic time-cost trade-off problem with penalties for exceeding a project deadline. In considering this problem, we take a contingency approach to decision making where crashing decisions are made dynamically throughout project execution. For serial projects we develop a dynamic programming algorithm as well as a variety of heuristic methods. Extending and modifying these methods for general projects allows us to deal with more complex network structures. Specifically, we propose hybrid dynamic programming/linear programming algorithms and simulation-based algorithms. We perform computational studies to assess the performance of each method and to compare the contingency approach with a static approach (where all crashing decisions are made before the project start time). Finally, we study the case with penalties, incentives, and overhead costs. We find that when the project cost function is not convex, the dynamic programming solution may become non-monotonic, which requires further modification of the methods. We show that the performance of our algorithms does not deteriorate with inclusion of additional parameters. In fact, the gaps between the case with perfect information and the methods presented herein seem to be smaller than in the penalty only case

Performance of horn-coupled transition edge sensors for L- and S-band optical detection on the SAFARI instrument

We describe the geometry, architecture, dark- and optical performance of ultra-low-noise transition edge sensors as THz detectors for the SAFARI instrument. The TESs are fabricated from superconducting Mo/Au bilayers coupled to impedance-matched superconducting ß-phase Ta thin-film absorbers. The detectors have phonon-limited dark noise equivalent powers of order 0.5 - 1.0 aW/$\sqrt{Hz}$ and saturation powers of order 20 - 40 fW. The low temperature test configuration incorporating micro-machined backshorts is also described, and construction and typical performance characteristics for the optical load are shown. We report preliminary measurements of the optical performance of these TESs for two SAFARI bands; L-band at 110 - 210 µm and S-band 34 - 60 µm .European Space AgencyThis is the final version of the article. It first appeared from SPIE via http://dx.doi.org/10.1117/12.223274

Can chilling tolerance of C4 photosynthesis in \u3ci\u3eMiscanthus\u3c/i\u3e be transferred to sugarcane?

The goal of this study was to investigate whether chilling tolerance of C4 photosynthesis in Miscanthus can be transferred to sugarcane by hybridization. Net leaf CO2 uptake (Asat) and the maximum operating efficiency of photosystem II (ФPSII) were measured in warm conditions (25 °C/20 °C), and then during and following a chilling treatment of 10 °C/5 °C for 11 day in controlled environment chambers. Two of three hybrids (miscanes), ‘US 84-1058’ and ‘US 87-1019’, did not differ significantly from the chilling tolerant M. xgiganteus ‘Illinois’ (Mxg), for Asat, and ΦPSII measured during chilling. For Mxg grown at 10 °C/5 °C for 11 days, Asat was 4.4 μmol m-2 s-1, while for miscane ‘US 84-1058’ and ‘US 87-1019’, Asat was 5.7 and 3.5 μmol m-2 s-1, respectively. Miscanes ‘US 84-1058’ and ‘US 87-1019’ and Mxg had significantly higher rates of Asat during chilling than three tested sugarcanes. A third miscane showed lower rates than Mxg during chilling, but recovered to higher rates than sugarcane upon return to warm conditions. Chilling tolerance of ‘US 84-1058’ was further confirmed under autumn field conditions in southern Illinois. The selected chilling tolerant miscanes have particular value for biomass feedstock and biofuel production and at the same time they can be a starting point for extending sugarcane’s range to colder climates

Deep Gate Recurrent Neural Network

Abstract This paper explores the possibility of using multiplicative gate to build two recurrent neural network structures. These two structures are called Deep Simple Gated Unit (DSGU) and Simple Gated Unit (SGU), which are structures for learning long-term dependencies. Compared to traditional Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU), both structures require fewer parameters and less computation time in sequence classification tasks. Unlike GRU and LSTM, which require more than one gate to control information flow in the network, SGU and DSGU only use one multiplicative gate to control the flow of information. We show that this difference can accelerate the learning speed in tasks that require long dependency information. We also show that DSGU is more numerically stable than SGU. In addition, we also propose a standard way of representing the inner structure of RNN called RNN Conventional Graph (RCG), which helps to analyze the relationship between input units and hidden units of RNN