POPULAR AMERICAN NEWS MEDIA EXPLAINED THROUGH Visual Arts: USING DRAWING AS A TOOL FOR HUMOROUS AND OBLIGATORY CULTURAL CRITIQUE

Through my drawings, I focus on jostling the passive American viewer out of her/his complacent acceptance of the images delivered by popular media outlets. Using humor as a multi-functional tool, I combine and reinterpret recognizable media artifacts to comment on the content that makes up American culture. This body of work is a cultural critique, pitting the ridiculous and superficial entertainment we (Americans) so easily ingest against current and crucial moments in time (i.e: political protests, violence, death, etc). Often times, the current media landscape is saturated with fast-cycling images and stories that do not promote careful contemplation. Instead, these hurried/short-lasting bits of information are consumed, providing momentary satiation until the next news is delivered. It is my intention to disrupt the flow of news as entertainment to create moments of critical awareness through visual work, while pointing out the disturbing methods news organizations employ to encourage and perpetuate a culture that lacks agency. I do this through my work and by citing relevant theoretical writing, current and historical artists and genres serving to bolster my critiques. I use multiple strategies to critique American media in a variety of ways. Beginning with the talking heads literally delivering the news, the anchorpersons and their feigned emotions, I use traditional aspects of portraiture to capture the disturbing theatrics so common in the news. Process, the way that I draw, the substrate, the scale of the images, and the media I use, are all integral elements that influence the meaning of my work. Another notion I investigate is the idea of paradox. Mixing and matching images that are silly or absurd with images that are horrifying is a common strategy used to provoke an unsettled response from a reticent viewer. An added intention of mine is to extract images from Internet-based news sources in order to change their original meaning. Rendering casualties from current wars and skirmishes, I relocate these figures to a serene space where they become memorialized. Through most of these methods, a simultaneously dissipating and resurfacing humor is intertwined in the work (with the exception of the war time casualties series). The images have many different/contrasting qualities and evoke different sentiments. The contrasts often equate to contradictory viewer responses. It is this method of cognitive dissonance that works to critique American News media and subverts the way news media is received. My overarching intention for this body of work is to mediate images seen on the news in order to provide viewers with opportunities for contemplation. I do this using a variety of drawing styles, different types of humor, mixing and matching images, and extracting and isolating images. My own cognitive dissonance, or, the discomfort I feel when experiencing contradictory thoughts, leads me to make peculiar decisions in my attempt to critique a disturbing part of American culture

A decentralized motion coordination strategy for dynamic target tracking

This paper presents a decentralized motion planning algorithm for the distributed sensing of a noisy dynamical process by multiple cooperating mobile sensor agents. This problem is motivated by localization and tracking tasks of dynamic targets. Our gradient-descent method is based on a cost function that measures the overall quality of sensing. We also investigate the role of imperfect communication between sensor agents in this framework, and examine the trade-offs in performance between sensing and communication. Simulations illustrate the basic characteristics of the algorithms

End-to-End Safe Reinforcement Learning through Barrier Functions for Safety-Critical Continuous Control Tasks

Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms have found limited success beyond simulated applications, and one main reason is the absence of safety guarantees during the learning process. Real world systems would realistically fail or break before an optimal controller can be learned. To address this issue, we propose a controller architecture that combines (1) a model-free RL-based controller with (2) model-based controllers utilizing control barrier functions (CBFs) and (3) on-line learning of the unknown system dynamics, in order to ensure safety during learning. Our general framework leverages the success of RL algorithms to learn high-performance controllers, while the CBF-based controllers both guarantee safety and guide the learning process by constraining the set of explorable polices. We utilize Gaussian Processes (GPs) to model the system dynamics and its uncertainties. Our novel controller synthesis algorithm, RL-CBF, guarantees safety with high probability during the learning process, regardless of the RL algorithm used, and demonstrates greater policy exploration efficiency. We test our algorithm on (1) control of an inverted pendulum and (2) autonomous car-following with wireless vehicle-to-vehicle communication, and show that our algorithm attains much greater sample efficiency in learning than other state-of-the-art algorithms and maintains safety during the entire learning process.Comment: Published in AAAI 201

Situational reasoning for road driving in an urban environment

Robot navigation in urban environments requires situational reasoning. Given the complexity of the environment and the behavior specified by traffic rules, it is necessary to recognize the current situation to impose the correct traffic rules. In an attempt to manage the complexity of the situational reasoning subsystem, this paper describes a finite state machine model to govern the situational reasoning process. The logic state machine and its interaction with the planning system are discussed. The approach was implemented on Alice, Team Caltech’s entry into the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge. Results from the qualifying rounds are discussed. The approach is validated and the shortcomings of the implementation are identified

An Outcome-Based Perspective Of Leadership: Investigating The Direct Effects Of Corporate Leaders On The Firms Financial Outcome

Current leadership theories appear to have not kept up with modern theories of the firm and modern financial approaches.  Now there appears to be a major disconnect between leadership measures and the firm’s financial performance.  This situation can be seen through the general practice of closely identifying leaders with their firms, and yet, relying on organizational/market/industry variables to investigate the financial results of the firm in empirical business studies which directly points toward the need for an outcome-based perspective of leadership theory.  This can be achieved by the assessment of their resource utilization and value-adding propensity in the course of performing their ‘stewardship’ and ‘agency’ roles.  This paper proposes a framework for a leadership perspective, based on organizational results, using the financial signature concept.  A sample from Fortune 500 companies was used in the study.  The results show that leaders, by playing a dual roles of agent and steward, not only have a strong influence on their firm’s financial outcome, but also exhibit specific level of propensity to conserving or spending resources that is a direct reflection of their ability to govern in relation to their stakeholders expectations.  This finding has many implications in understanding corporate behavior and public perception.  It could also provide important elements to studying ethical and finance behavioral issues that affect many modern corporations in recent years

Modelling and experimental investigation of carangiform locomotion for control

We propose a model for planar carangiform swimming based on conservative equations for the interaction of a rigid body and an incompressible fluid. We account for the generation of thrust due to vortex shedding through controlled coupling terms. We investigate the correct form of this coupling experimentally with a robotic propulsor, comparing its observed behavior to that predicted by unsteady hydrodynamics. Our analysis of thrust generation by an oscillating hydrofoil allows us to characterize and evaluate certain families of gaits. Our final swimming model takes the form of a control-affine nonlinear system

The VISTA spacecraft: Advantages of ICF (Inertial Confinement Fusion) for interplanetary fusions propulsion applications

Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF) is an attractive engine power source for interplanetary manned spacecraft, especially for near-term missions requiring minimum flight duration, because ICF has inherent high power-to-mass ratios and high specific impulses. We have developed a new vehicle concept called VISTA that uses ICF and is capable of round-trip manned missions to Mars in 100 days using A.D. 2020 technology. We describe VISTA's engine operation, discuss associated plasma issues, and describe the advantages of DT fuel for near-term applications. Although ICF is potentially superior to non-fusion technologies for near-term interplanetary transport, the performance capabilities of VISTA cannot be meaningfully compared with those of magnetic-fusion systems because of the lack of a comparable study of the magnetic-fusion systems. We urge that such a study be conducted

the Psychology of Breakup Sex: Exploring the Motivational Factors and Affective Consequences of Post-breakup Sexual Activity

Popular culture has recently publicized a seemingly new postbreakup behavior called breakup sex. While the media expresses the benefits of participating in breakup sex, there is no research to support these claimed benefits. The current research was designed to begin to better understand this postbreakup behavior. In the first study, we examined how past breakup sex experiences made the individuals feel and how people predict they would feel in the future (n = 212). Results suggested that men are more likely than women to have felt better about themselves, while women tend to state they felt better about the relationship after breakup sex. The second study (n = 585) investigated why men and women engage in breakup sex. Results revealed that most breakup sex appears to be motivated by three factors: relationship maintenance, hedonism, and ambivalence. Men tended to support hedonistic and ambivalent reasons for having breakup sex more often than women. The two studies revealed that breakup sex may be differentially motivated (and may have different psychological consequences) for men and women and may not be as beneficial as the media suggests

Nonholonomic mechanics and locomotion: the snakeboard example

Analysis and simulations are performed for a simplified model of a commercially available variant of the skateboard, known as the Snakeboard. Although the model exhibits basic gait patterns seen in a large number of locomotion problems, the analysis tools currently available do not apply to this problem. The difficulty lies primarily in the way in which the nonholonomic constraints enter into the system. As a first step towards understanding systems represented by their model the authors present the equations of motion and perform some controllability analysis for the snakeboard. The authors also perform numerical simulations of possible gait patterns which are characteristic of snakeboard locomotion