Pattern Project - Change

The Pattern Project explores the process of developing visual patterns, intended for the built interior environment, through both hand and digital crafts. Inspirations evolve into pattern concepts that inform message and intention. The intended message then informs motif, color, density, composition, line, repetition, hierarchy, and texture. Drawing from history, designers assess the role of pattern within the built environment and its connection to architecture and building occupants. Traditional handcrafts have evolved and are now used in contemporary processes while new digital crafts have emerged as pattern-making tools. The patterns developed through the Pattern Project were produced to scale on paper or textile measuring approximately 24 wide x 60 long.https://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/pp/1004/thumbnail.jp

Enhanced Deep Residual Networks for Single Image Super-Resolution

Recent research on super-resolution has progressed with the development of deep convolutional neural networks (DCNN). In particular, residual learning techniques exhibit improved performance. In this paper, we develop an enhanced deep super-resolution network (EDSR) with performance exceeding those of current state-of-the-art SR methods. The significant performance improvement of our model is due to optimization by removing unnecessary modules in conventional residual networks. The performance is further improved by expanding the model size while we stabilize the training procedure. We also propose a new multi-scale deep super-resolution system (MDSR) and training method, which can reconstruct high-resolution images of different upscaling factors in a single model. The proposed methods show superior performance over the state-of-the-art methods on benchmark datasets and prove its excellence by winning the NTIRE2017 Super-Resolution Challenge.Comment: To appear in CVPR 2017 workshop. Best paper award of the NTIRE2017 workshop, and the winners of the NTIRE2017 Challenge on Single Image Super-Resolutio

커피와 녹차 섭취와 사망 위험 간 연관성 연구

학위논문 (석사)-- 서울대학교 대학원 : 의과학과 의과학전공, 2016. 8. 박수경.Background: Both coffee and green tea are popular beverages worldwide. However, the effect of these beverages on death remains unclear. Therefore, we aimed to investigate the association between coffee and green tea drinking and all‐cause and cause‐specific death. Materials and Methods: The Korean Multi‐center Cancer Cohort (KMCC) study, a population‐based prospective cohort study, commenced from 1993 to 2005. Death was ascertained by means of linkage to Nationwide Death Certificate database in Korea until December 31, 2014. We used 11,877 individuals (4,615 men and 7,262 women) for analysis. The risks of all‐cause, cancer, cardiovascular disease and other particular caused death were assessed by estimating hazard ratios (HRs) and their 95% confidence intervals (95% CIs) using cox proportional hazard model adjusted for potential confounders such as age, sex, cigarette smoking, alcohol consumption, body mass index and comorbidity index (consisted of history of bronchopneumonia, chronic liver disease, hypertension, ischemic heart diseases, stroke and diabetes). Results: 2,326 participants (1,331 men and 995 women) died until the end point of follow-up (December 31, 2014). Multivariate adjusted HRs (95% CIs) for all‐cause death were 0.91 (0.81 - 1.03) for 2-4 cups of coffee/month, 0.79 (0.69 - 0.91) for 2-6 cups of coffee/week, 0.83 (0.75 - 0.92) for 1≤cup of coffee/day (p for trend<0.001) compared with those who drank ≤1 cup of coffee/month. Corresponding to green tea, multivariate adjusted HRs (95% CIs) were 0.94 (0.84-1.06), 0.82 (0.70-0.96) and 0.76 (0.63-0.93) (p for trend<0.001). Inverse association were also observed between coffee drinking and death due to chronic liver disease. As compared person who drank ≤1 cup of coffee/month, multivariate adjusted HRs (95% CIs) for chronic liver disease related death were 0.88 (0.44-1.77) for 2-4 cups of coffee/month, 0.47 (0.18-1.22) for 2-6 cups of coffee/week, 0.51 (0.27-0.97) 1≤cup of coffee/day. Neither coffee nor green tea drinking were not significantly associated with cancer death. Conclusions: Our community based prospective cohort study suggested that coffee and green tea drinking was associated with reduced risk of all‐cause death. Furthermore, coffee drinking was inversely associated with chronic liver disease related death.1. Introduction 1 1.1 Components of coffee and green tea 1 1.2 The relationship between coffee and green tea and death 3 1.2.1 The relationship between coffee or green tea and allcause death 3 1.2.2 The relationship between coffee and green tea and causespecific death 4 1.3 Objectives 6 2. Methods and Materials 7 2.1 Study design and study population 7 2.2 Follow up and outcome ascertainment 11 2.3 Assessment of exposure and potential confounding factors 12 2.4 Statistical analysis 14 3. Results 16 3.1 Baseline characteristics of study participants 16 3.2 Association between frequency of coffee drinking and allcaused and cancer, CVD, noncancer nonCVD mortality 18 3.3 Association between frequency of green tea drinking and allcaused and cancer, CVD, noncancer nonCVD mortality 20 3.4 Association between frequency of coffee drinking and detailed causespecific mortality 23 3.5 Association between frequency of green tea drinking and detailed causespecific mortality 26 4. Discussion 29 4.1 Summary of the results 29 4.2 Interpretation of the results and comparison with prior studies 30 4.2.1 Association between coffee drinking and allcause death 30 4.2.2 Association between green tea drinking and allcause death 32 4.2.3 Association between coffee drinking and CVD death 33 4.2.4 Association between green tea drinking and CVD death 35 4.2.5 Association between coffee drinking and cancer death 36 4.2.6 Association between green tea drinking and cancer death 38 4.2.7 Association between coffee and green tea drinking and causespecific death 39 4.3 Possible mechanisms 42 4.4 Limitations and strength of our study 44 4.5 Conclusion 46 5. References 47 초록 63Maste

Understanding Modi and Minorities: the BJP-led NDA Government in India and Religious Minorities

In the May 2014 general elections in India, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) emerged as the majority party. The BJP has formed a coalition with regional parties (the National Democratic Alliance), but many view the event as a “critical election,” presaging the realignment of Indian politics along Hindu nationalist values. This article reviews the approaches used to understand the BJP-led NDA government’s policies toward religious minorities and argues that far from marking a radical departure, there are more continuities than discontinuities in these policies with previous administrations

Intercomparison of Downscaling Techniques for Satellite Soil Moisture Products

During recent decades, various downscaling methods of satellite soil moisture (SM) products, which incorporate geophysical variables such as land surface temperature and vegetation, have been studied for improving their spatial resolution. Most of these studies have used least squares regression models built from those variables and have demonstrated partial improvement in the downscaled SM. This study introduces a new downscaling method based on support vector regression (SVR) that includes the geophysical variables with locational weighting. Regarding the in situ SM, the SVR downscaling method exhibited a smaller root mean square error, from 0.09 to 0.07m(3).m(-3), and a larger average correlation coefficient increased, from 0.62 to 0.68, compared to the conventional method. In addition, the SM downscaled using the SVR method had a greater statistical resemblance to that of the original advanced scatterometer SM. A residual magnitude analysis for each model with two independent variables was performed, which indicated that only the residuals from the SVR model were not well correlated, suggesting a more effective performance than regression models with a significant contribution of independent variables to residual magnitude. The spatial variations of the downscaled SM products were affected by the seasonal patterns in temperature-vegetation relationships, and the SVR downscaling method showed more consistent performance in terms of seasonal effect. Based on these results, the suggested SVR downscaling method is an effective approach to improve the spatial resolution of satellite SM measurement

The Role of Status Differentials and Homophily in the Formation of Social Support Networks of a Voluntary Organization

Given the important implications of social support on managing volunteers and their organizational commitment, we investigated how members of a Korean immigrant church (N = 178) exchanged two distinctive kinds of social support (i.e., informational and tangible). We used theories of centrality and homophily to hypothesize patterns of social connections among organizational members. Employing exponential random graph modeling (ERGM), the current study estimated the likelihood of age and gender homophily/heterophily in forming supportive ties while considering structural parameters. The results of analysis of variance showed that members with higher socioeconomic status and in official staff positions in the church were more central in the informational support exchange. However, ERGM for both types of support networks did not show hypothesized gender and age homophily/heterophily of Korean immigrants’ support exchange, suggesting the importance of other potential organizational and cultural influences. The findings shed light on the internal structuring of organizational support networks and suggest practical implications for managing organizational volunteers