The Function of Żegiestów as a Tourist Centre and Health Resort

W pracy podjęto próbę określenia funkcji turystyczno-uzdrowiskowej Żegiestowa, jednego z 39 statutowych uzdrowisk polskich. Podstawę analizy stanowią mierniki dotyczące: zagospodarowania turystycznego, udziału badanej funkcji w organizacji przestrzeni Żegiestowa, ruchu turystycznego oraz zatrudnienia w usługach turystycznych

“Lamentował Dawid żałobną pieśnią nad Saulem i Jonatanem, jego synem” — Davidic poetry reproduced in 2 Sm 1,17–27 as a Biblical example of a lamentation poem

The elegy in question presents and expresses in a poetic way the depth of feelings of a grieving man who suffers from the loss of his closest friends. The elegy belongs to the most illustrious achievements of early Hebrew lyric poetry and though it does not include distinct religious references in itself, it has to be understood within the context of the entire theology of the Old Testament that places God in the very centre of the life of the rulers of Israel and its people. The defeat in the battle so lamented in the Book by David himself is shown not as accidental or as a normal flow of things, but as part of God’s plan that, ultimately and paradoxically, helps the future king of Israel conquer his enemies and ascend to the throne. A characteristic feature of the lamentation is an exclusively favourable presentation of the main protagonists so that due honour, reverence and glory can be rendered to them. Therefore, the only way to treat the song is to consider it as one that expresses grief and mourning over the deceased, and not as a historically reliable review of their life. The way the lives of heroes is presented makes it possible to draw conclusions for the audience that may be important and may shape individual lives and their future progress. Undoubtedly, this is how David viewed his song to be delivered to the audience, as well: his access to rule the country was partly the result of the sacrifice paid by the two heroes slain in the battle

Friendship demands acquiescence and renouncement. A handful of aspects that refer to relationships between friends raised in the Bible

For Aristotle, the bond of a valuable friendship was created for the sake of its own value of giving friendship or the experience it furnishes, and not for the sake of expediency or the sheer joy of sharing friendship. A sustainable friendship basically finds its roots in what a human being is. Hence, it is loving rather than being loved that makes people real friends, ethically perfect. Biblical authors knew that a true friendship was difficult to obtain and that it could easily be lost. Thus, for their readers, to observe their advice means to obtain valuable hints and guidelines and to be protected from disillusionment. These guidelines had been drawn by them from the experience of everyday life, as a result of watching and drawing conclusions from what they saw following different man’s response to different situations. Might they have been victims to unjust action themselves, or had they committed something that made them feel ashamed, but kept that it in their mind as a warning to their prospective readers? Whatever the answer is, they managed to draw conclusions from the experience that, ultimately, could be helpful in making those who would perpetrate something that would hurt or kill a friendship repent

Ten thousand times faster: Classifying multidimensional data on a spiking neuromorphic hardware system.

Discrimination of sensory inputs is a computational task that biological neuronal systems perform very efficiently. Assessing the principles in those systems is a promising approach to develop technical solutions for many problems, such as data classification. A particular problem here is to train a classifier in a supervised fashion to discriminate classes in multidimensional data. We implemented a network of spiking neurons that solves this task using a neuromorphic hardware system, that is, analog neuronal circuits on a silicon substrate. This system enables us to do high-performance computation in a biologically inspired way, with spiking neurons as computational units. In this contribution, we illustrate solutions to technical challenges that occur when implementing a classifier on neuromorphic hardware. 

The network topology of the insect olfactory system provides a well suited template for a neuronal architecture processing multidimensional data. In our classifier network, the value of each dimension of a data vector determines the rate of a stochastically generated spike train. The spike trains are fed into non-overlapping populations of neurons. Those populations project onto an association layer with winner-take-all properties representing the output of the classifier. During classifier training, the weights in this projection are adjusted according to a firing-rate based learning rule. 

The values in multidimensional data sets are typically real numbers, but neuronal firing rates are restricted to values between zero and some maximal value. Hence, the data must be transformed into a positive, bounded representation. We achieved this by representing each data point as a vector of distances to a number of points in data space (“virtual receptors” [1]). The representation by virtual receptors inevitably introduces correlation between input dimensions. We reduced this correlation using lateral inhibition in the first neuronal layer, leading to a significant increase in classifier performance. We found that decorrelation was most efficient when we scaled the inhibitory weights according to the correlation between the connected populations. 

We ran our classifier network on a neuromorphic hardware system that runs at ten thousand times the speed of biological neurons, thus suited for high performance computing [2]. However, the considerable variance of rate-response sensitivity across hardware neurons decreased classification performance. We therefore developed a calibration routine to counteract the neuronal variance.

References

[1] Schmuker, M. and Schneider, G. (2007). Processing and classification of chemical data inspired by insect olfaction. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U S A 104, 20285-20289. 
[2] Brüderle, D., Bill, J., Kaplan, B., Kremkow, J., Meier, K., Müller, E. and Schemmel, J. (2010). Simulator-like exploration of cortical network architectures with a mixed-signal VLSi system. In Proc. of IEEE Intern. Symp. on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS), 2784–8787

Depth Perception in Driving: Alcohol Intoxication, Eye Movement Changes, and the Disruption of Motion Parallax

Motion parallax, the ability to recover depth from retinal motion, is acrucial part of the visual information needed for driving. Recent work indicatesthat the perception of depth from motion parallax relies on the slow eyemovement system. It is well known that that alcohol intoxication reduces the gainof this slow eye movement system, the basis for the horizontal gaze nystagmus field sobriety test. The current study shows that alcohol intoxication also impairsthe perception of depth from motion parallax due to its influence on the slow eyemovement system. Observer thresholds in both active and passive motion parallaxtasks are significantly increased by acute alcohol intoxication. Perhaps such afailure of motion parallax plays a role when intoxicated drivers must make quickjudgements with what could be inaccurate or missing perceptual information aboutthe location of obstacles around them

nanoT5: A PyTorch Framework for Pre-training and Fine-tuning T5-style Models with Limited Resources

State-of-the-art language models like T5 have revolutionized the NLP landscape, but their computational demands hinder a large portion of the research community. To address this challenge, we present nanoT5, a specially-optimized PyTorch framework for efficient pre-training and fine-tuning of T5 models. Drawing on insights from optimizer differences and prioritizing efficiency, nanoT5 allows a T5-Base model to be pre-trained on a single GPU in just 16 hours, without any loss in performance. With the introduction of this open-source framework, we hope to widen the accessibility to language modelling research and cater to the community's demand for more user-friendly T5 (Encoder-Decoder) implementations. Our contributions, including configurations, codebase, software/hardware insights, and pre-trained models, are available to the public, aiming to strike a balance between research accessibility and resource constraints in NLP

Changing the Face of the City

In this session we will discuss the changing of two existing corridors of one-way street pairs to bidirectional traffic flow and implementing a complete streets policy in South Bend, Indiana. The City also constructed three roundabouts and is building bicycle facilities in the in the downtown area

Accepting Blockchain Tech to Increase Bitcoin Acceptance

Cryptocurrencies, with Bitcoin leading the charge, are the beginning of something new because this ideology is attempting to change the way people store and use money - led by an influx of technological innovation and success. If executed accordingly, blockchain has the chance to completely change our world for the better. With Bitcoin being driven by advanced blockchain technology, this digital currency has the ability to decentralize one of the most important aspects of life - money. This in turn would allow for people to take direct control of their money without the need for being completely dependent on bank systems and government entities. Society is beginning to realize the full potential of blockchain technology and crypto as a whole, but lack of security may be the reason why sustained growth and mass adoption is happening at a slower rate than expected. Bitcoin and blockchain technology have life changing potential, but there are security issues holding back mass adoption and disallowing institutional money from flowing into the market. There is not a quick fix available, but starting at the root of the problem, which is in the areas surrounding education and awareness, would certainly create a solid foundation and help bridge the gap between this innovative technology and the end-user. Additionally, regulation and insurance against possible theft need to be fully established to give users the peace of mind to accept the technology. Lastly, advancements on the technical side of securing the blockchain also need to be properly executed for all of this to come together. Finding the proper balance between the technological innovation, user accessibility, and security is vital for the success of bitcoin and blockchain technology as a whole