34,012 research outputs found
Some Notes on Replicating Prehistoric Pottery
My interest in pottery replication began about 30 years ago. As an archeologist, I was often required to analyze collections of prehistoric pottery. My analytical techniques were limited but standard for the day and usually involved classifying pottery according to previously defined pottery types and varieties. While this type of classification helps archeologists develop chronologies and determine cultural affiliation, it provides little understanding of how pottery was actually made. I felt that I might be able to enhance my analytical skills and possibly glean a little more from the archeological record if I could learn more about how pottery was made. So in 1978, I gathered some alluvial clay from the Arkansas River floodplain and began my long journey. My primary objective has been to try and reproduce, as closely as possible, what I see in the archeological record in hopes that it might give me and others a better understanding of all the processes involved in the manufacture of prehistoric pottery. I sometimes find that I canât see what I am looking at in sufficient detail until I am faced with the task of having to draw or make it. Replication forces us to take a closer look at things and then allows us to see a little more clearly. Replication also connects you to the past and allows you to learn directly from the original artist. For me, it was simply not enough to just study pottery â I had to experience it.
During my journey, I have drawn information from a variety of resources. These include a careful analysis of prehistoric pottery, an extensive review of archeological and ethnographic documentation regarding Indian pottery manufacture in the Southeast, studying modern cultures that still use traditional pottery making techniques, consulting with Indian potters, archeologists other replicators and through trial and error coupled with careful observation and comparison (basic Experimental Archeology)
The formation of the Christian biblical canon
Reviewed Book: McDonald, Lee M. The formation of the Christian biblical canon. Peabody, Mass: Hendrickson Pubs, 1995
Class numbers of totally real fields and applications to the Weber class number problem
The determination of the class number of totally real fields of large
discriminant is known to be a difficult problem. The Minkowski bound is too
large to be useful, and the root discriminant of the field can be too large to
be treated by Odlyzko's discriminant bounds. We describe a new technique for
determining the class number of such fields, allowing us to attack the class
number problem for a large class of number fields not treatable by previously
known methods. We give an application to Weber's class number problem, which is
the conjecture that all real cyclotomic fields of power of 2 conductor have
class number 1.Comment: Accepted for publication by Acta Arithmetic
Amos: a commentary
Reviewed Book: Paul, Shalom M. Amos: a commentary. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1991. Hermeneia
A Promise of Hope: A Call to Obedience: Joel and Malachi
Reviewed Book: Deutsch, Richard R. A Promise of Hope: A Call to Obedience: Joel and Malachi. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans; Edinburgh: Handsel Press, 1987. International theological commentary
Liquidity when it matters : QE and Tobinâs q
When financial markets freeze in fear, borrowing costs for solvent governments may fall towards zero in a flight to quality â but credit-worthy private borrowers can be
starved of external funding. In Kiyotaki and Moore (2008), where liquidity crisis is captured by the effective rationing of private credit, tightening credit constraints have
direct effects on investment. If prices are sticky, the effects on aggregate demand can be pronounced â as reported by FRBNY for the US economy using a calibrated
DSGE-style framework modified to include such frictions.
In such an environment, two factors stand out. First the recycling of credit flows by central banks can dramatically ease credit-rationing faced by private investors: this is
the rationale for Quantitative Easing. Second, revenue-neutral fiscal transfers aimed at would-be investors can have similar effects. We show these features in a stripped- down macro model of inter-temporal optimisation subject to credit constraints
Globally Normalized Reader
Rapid progress has been made towards question answering (QA) systems that can
extract answers from text. Existing neural approaches make use of expensive
bi-directional attention mechanisms or score all possible answer spans,
limiting scalability. We propose instead to cast extractive QA as an iterative
search problem: select the answer's sentence, start word, and end word. This
representation reduces the space of each search step and allows computation to
be conditionally allocated to promising search paths. We show that globally
normalizing the decision process and back-propagating through beam search makes
this representation viable and learning efficient. We empirically demonstrate
the benefits of this approach using our model, Globally Normalized Reader
(GNR), which achieves the second highest single model performance on the
Stanford Question Answering Dataset (68.4 EM, 76.21 F1 dev) and is 24.7x faster
than bi-attention-flow. We also introduce a data-augmentation method to produce
semantically valid examples by aligning named entities to a knowledge base and
swapping them with new entities of the same type. This method improves the
performance of all models considered in this work and is of independent
interest for a variety of NLP tasks.Comment: Presented at EMNLP 201
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