Becoming Animal: Karma and the Animal Realm Envisioned through an Early Yogacara Lens

In an early discourse from the Saṃyuttanikāya, the Buddha states: “I do not see any other order of living beings so diversified as those in the animal realm. Even those beings in the animal realm have been diversified by the mind, yet the mind is even more diverse than those beings in the animal realm.” This paper explores how this key early Buddhist idea gets elaborated in various layers of Buddhist discourse during a millennium of historical development. I focus in particular on a middle period Buddhist sūtra, the Saddharmasmṛtyupasthānasūtra, which serves as a bridge between early Buddhist theories of mind and karma, and later more developed theories. This third-century South Asian Buddhist Sanskrit text on meditation practice, karma theory, and cosmology psychologizes animal behavior and places it on a spectrum with the behavior of humans and divine beings. It allows for an exploration of the conceptual interstices of Buddhist philosophy of mind and contemporary theories of embodied cognition. Exploring animal embodiments—and their karmic limitations—becomes a means to exploring all beings, an exploration that can’t be separated from the human mind among beings

Diffusion of Helpdesk Systems – The Influence of Personal Networks on the Level of Adoption

The high importance of the availability of end user computing systems raises the need for effective and efficient helpdesk systems. However, research shows that the adoption and diffusion of such systems is surprisingly low. Classical approaches to deal with this problem solely focus on the system itself, especially by focusing on the quality of the helpdesk. But this neglects the fact, that problem solving often takes place in unofficial personal networks. This aspect gains importance due to the increasing relevance of team-based work structures. Motivated by this, we present a model of adoption of helpdesk system that considers the quality of personal networks as influencing factor for the level of adoption

“You sing, you / who also / wants:” Charles Olson, Harryette Mullen, and the representation of political communities in 20th century avant-garde American poetry

In this thesis, I examine the way in which avant-garde American poetry enacts an expansion of the community to which it speaks and desires to include, focusing on the first section of Charles Olson’s opus The Maximus Poems and Harryette Mullen’s Muse & Drudge. Specifically, in an argument parallel to Jacques Ranciére’s critique of an inherent, platonic ruling class, I explore how these poets enact an expansion of the distribution of the sensible, in an attempt to move beyond the conception of poetry as something that is done by a poetic elite for the benefit of a less capable majority. In explaining Olson’s solution to the existence of this dichotomy, I discuss Olson’s debt to Pound, and the ways in which the latter’s techniques become less elitist and more populist in the course of Olson’s poetic development. In essays such as “Projective Verse” and “Human Universe,” Olson outlines the way that poetry could allow for a conception of community that would contain active, self-sufficient and equal individuals. His poetics, I go on to argue, are brought to fruition in two poems entitled “Letter from Georges,” where Olson allows the historical voices of fishermen to replace his own. In ceding the voice of the poem to outside sources, Olson enacts the leveled community that he has been gesturing towards elsewhere in his writings, demonstrating how his own perspective is just one of the many necessary contributions that different individuals can offer to the community being outlined in the first book of the Maximus Poems. The later section of the essay is devoted to Mullen and how she engages issues of black femininity, representation, and the ways in which representations from outside the communities Mullen portrays flatten the inner lives of their members. My readings show how she critiques both those outside representations that would reduce black women to stereotypes, while also revealing how the voices of these women are already capable of self-representation. In juxtaposing the different communities of Mullen and Olson, the thesis demonstrates how the expansion of the poetic subject is an ongoing concern in a strain of avant-garde poetry

Creating a Secondary Plan for the South Basin Lake Manitoba Planning Area, Canada

Meeting: Celebrating Dialogue : An International SAS2 Forum, November 3, 2008, Carleton University, Ottawa, ON, CASAS reports are made available in order to provide timely access to the information by interested researchers. This report has been subject to an internal review process to ensure accuracy and quality

Secure Multiparty Computations on Bitcoin

Bitcoin is a decentralized digital currency, introduced in 2008, that has recently gained noticeable popularity. Its main features are: (a) it lacks a central authority that controls the transactions, (b) the list of transactions is publicly available, and (c) its syntax allows more advanced transactions than simply transferring the money. The goal of this paper is to show how these properties of Bitcoin can be used in the area of secure multiparty computation protocols (MPCs). Firstly, we show that the Bitcoin system provides an attractive way to construct a version of timed commitments where the committer has to reveal his secret within a certain time frame, or to pay a fine. This, in turn, can be used to obtain fairness in some multiparty protocols. Secondly, we introduce a concept of multiparty protocols that work directly on Bitcoin . Recall that the standard definition of the MPCs guarantees only that the protocol emulates the trusted third party . Hence ensuring that the inputs are correct, and the outcome is respected is beyond the scope of the definition. Our observation is that the Bitcoin system can be used to go beyond the standard emulation-based definition, by constructing protocols that link their inputs and the outputs with the real Bitcoin transactions. As an instantiation of this idea we construct protocols for secure multiparty lotteries using the Bitcoin currency, without relying on a trusted authority (one of these protocols uses the Bitcoin-based timed commitments mentioned above). Our protocols guarantee fairness for the honest parties no matter how the loser behaves. For example: if one party interrupts the protocol then her money is transferred to the honest participants. Our protocols are practical (to demonstrate it we performed their transactions in the actual Bitcoin system), and can be used in real life as a replacement for the online gambling sites. We think that this paradigm can have also other applications. We discuss some of them

SODA: Bottleneck Diffusion Models for Representation Learning

We introduce SODA, a self-supervised diffusion model, designed for representation learning. The model incorporates an image encoder, which distills a source view into a compact representation, that, in turn, guides the generation of related novel views. We show that by imposing a tight bottleneck between the encoder and a denoising decoder, and leveraging novel view synthesis as a self-supervised objective, we can turn diffusion models into strong representation learners, capable of capturing visual semantics in an unsupervised manner. To the best of our knowledge, SODA is the first diffusion model to succeed at ImageNet linear-probe classification, and, at the same time, it accomplishes reconstruction, editing and synthesis tasks across a wide range of datasets. Further investigation reveals the disentangled nature of its emergent latent space, that serves as an effective interface to control and manipulate the model's produced images. All in all, we aim to shed light on the exciting and promising potential of diffusion models, not only for image generation, but also for learning rich and robust representations

Multi-zone trapped-ion qubit control in an integrated photonics QCCD device

Multiplexed operations and extended coherent control over multiple trapping sites are fundamental requirements for a trapped-ion processor in a large scale architecture. Here we demonstrate these building blocks using a surface electrode trap with integrated photonic components which are scalable to larger numbers of zones. We implement a Ramsey sequence using the integrated light in two zones, separated by 375 $\mu$m, performing transport of the ion from one zone to the other in 200 $\mu$s between pulses. In order to achieve low motional excitation during transport we developed techniques to measure and mitigate the effect of the exposed dielectric surfaces used to deliver the integrated light to the ion. We also demonstrate simultaneous control of two ions in separate zones with low optical crosstalk, and use this to perform simultaneous spectroscopy to correlate field noise between the two sites. Our work demonstrates the first transport and coherent multi-zone operations in integrated photonic ion trap systems, forming the basis for further scaling in the trapped-ion QCCD architecture.Comment: 15 pages, 10 figure

Analysis of the Dispersion of Electrical Parameters and Characteristics of FinFET Devices, Journal of Telecommunications and Information Technology, 2009, nr 4

Extensive numerical simulations of FinFET structures have been carried out using commercial TCAD tools. A series of plasma etching steps has been simulated for different process conditions in order to evaluate the influence of plasma pressure, composition and powering on the FinFET topography. Next, the most important geometric parameters of the FinFETs have been varied and the electrical characteristics have been calculated in order to evaluate the sensitivity of the FinFET electrical parameters on possible FinFET structure variability