Amador Moreno, Carolina P. Hiberno-English in the Early Novels of Patrick MacGill. Bilingualism and Language Shift from Irish to English in County Donegal

Amador Moreno, Carolina P. Hiberno-English in the Early Novels of PatrickMacGill. Bilingualism and Language Shift from Irish to English in County Donegal. Wales, UK: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2006

Self-Stabilizing Clock Synchronization in Dynamic Networks

We consider the fundamental problem of periodic clock synchronization in a synchronous multi-agent system. Each agent holds a clock with an arbitrary initial value, and clocks must eventually be congruent, modulo some positive integer P. Previous algorithms worked in static networks with drastic connectivity properties and assumed that global informations are available at each node. In this paper, we propose a finite-state algorithm for time-varying topologies that does not require any global knowledge on the network. The only assumption is the existence of some integer D such that any two nodes can communicate in each sequence of D consecutive rounds, which extends the notion of strong connectivity in static network to dynamic communication patterns. The smallest such D is called the dynamic diameter of the network. If an upper bound on the diameter is provided, then our algorithm achieves synchronization within 3D rounds, whatever the value of the upper bound. Otherwise, using an adaptive mechanism, synchronization is achieved with little performance overhead. Our algorithm is parameterized by a function g, which can be tuned to favor either time or space complexity. Then, we explore a further relaxation of the connectivity requirement: our algorithm still works if there exists a positive integer R such that the network is rooted over each sequence of R consecutive rounds, and if eventually the set of roots is stable. In particular, it works in any rooted static network

Salvo Micciché et Stefania Fornaro, Scicli. Storia, cultura e religione (v-xvi secc.)

L’objectif de cet ouvrage est de réunir en un volume unique toutes les données fragmentaires et dispersées sur l’histoire de la petite ville de Scicli, l’une des principales du comté de Modica, le plus important état féodal de la Sicile médiévale. Couvrant un long Moyen Âge (du ve s. à la fin du xvie s.), le livre se veut pluridisciplinaire et convoque des sources diverses. L’intention est salutaire quand on connaît les sources siciliennes qui se caractérisent précisément par leur caractère l..

The Untaken Photograph: Framing Women in Hugo Hamilton’s Fiction

Le travail d’Ariella Azoulay, théoricienne de la photographie, sur l’absence de preuves photographiques de viols de femmes dans l’Allemagne de l’après-guerre, nous incite à repenser notre conception de la photographie. Celle-ci n’est plus un support qui fournit une preuve, mais un support qui reflète un choix. L’événement qui n’entre pas dans le cadre photographique n’est pas nécessairement celui qui n’a pas eu lieu, mais peut être celui que l’on ne veut pas voir. Les mémoires d’enfance de Hugo Hamilton mettent en avant l’écriture comme moyen de raconter l’histoire, jusqu’alors restée sous silence, du viol de sa mère en Allemagne pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale. Ses romans allemands lèvent également le voile du silence sur les histoires de viols en temps de guerre. Hamilton se sert de sa propre expérience d’exclusion dans son roman Hand in the Fire (2010) pour s’attaquer au silence persistant sur le sort des mères célibataires dans l’Irlande du XXe siècle, et faire rentrer leurs histoires à l’intérieur du cadre.Photography theorist Ariella Azoulay’s study of the absence of photographic evidence of women being raped in post-war Germany prompts a reassessment of our understanding of photography, moving away from that of a purely evidentiary medium to one which reflects a choice. That which does not make it into the photographic frame is not necessarily that which did not happen, but may be that which has not been acknowledged. Hugo Hamilton’s childhood memoirs foreground writing as a means to tell the previously untold story of his mother’s rape in Germany during the second world war. His German novels also lift the veil of silence on stories of wartime rape. Hamilton uses his own experience of exclusion in his 2010 novel Hand in the Fire to take on the silence around the plight of unmarried mothers in post-independence Ireland, and bring their stories fully into the frame

De la détection d'évènements sonores violents par SVM dans les films

National audienceThis article studies the behaviour of a state-of-the-art support vector machine audio event detection approach, applied to violent event detection in movies. The events we are trying to detect are screams, gunshots, explosions. Contrary to others studies, we show that the state-of-theart approach does not lead to good results on this task. A study on the repartition of samples into subsets in a cross validation protocol helps explain those results and highlights a generalisation problem due to a polymorphism of considered classes. This polymorphism is demonstrated by the computation the divergence between the samples of the test database and the training database.Cet article étudie le comportement d'une approche classique, à l'état de l'art, pour la détection d'événements sonores par machines à vecteurs supports, appliquée à la détection d'événements violents dans les films. Les événements sonores considérés, liés à la présence de violence, sont les Cris, les Coups de feu et les Explosions. Nous montrons que, contrairement aux résultats d'autres études, l'approche état de l'art ne donne pas de bons résultats sur cette tâche. Une étude sur la répartition des échantillons en sous-ensembles dans un protocole de validation croisée permet d'expliquer ces résultats et met en évidence un problème de généralisation, dû au polymorphisme des classes considérées. Ce polymorphisme est démontré par un calcul de divergence entre les échantillons de la base de test et ceux de la base d'apprentissage

Audio Event Detection in Movies using Multiple Audio Words and Contextual Bayesian Networks

International audienceThis article investigates a novel use of the well known audio words representations to detect specific audio events, namely gunshots and explosions, in order to get more robustness towards soundtrack variability in Hollywood movies. An audio stream is processed as a sequence of stationary segments. Each segment is described by one or several audio words obtained by applying product quantization to standard features. Such a representation using multiple audio words constructed via product quantisation is one of the novelties described in this work. Based on this representation, Bayesian networks are used to exploit the contextual information in order to detect audio events. Experiments are performed on a comprehensive set of 15 movies, made publicly available. Results are comparable to the state of the art results obtained on the same dataset but show increased robustness to decision thresholds, however limiting the range of possible operating points in some conditions. Late fusion provides a solution to this issue

Closer to Brussels than to Rome? The EU as the new external referent for a secularised Irish society and a redefined Catholic identity

As soon as Ireland submitted its first application for EEC membership in 1961, Brussels became another external referent alongside Rome for an Irish society that increasingly looked to outside influences. If the Irish Catholic Church first was reluctant for Ireland to join in the European project, it soon realised the importance of embracing the project, if only to control it. Brussels has nonetheless seriously challenged Rome’s position as Ireland’s main external point of reference in the last four decades, to the extent that the Irish Catholic Church is now perceived as yet another institution. It remains, however, quite influential in Irish politics and so a force to be reckoned with when it comes to analysing the island’s perception of the European project. The present article consists above all of a general review of the way EEC membership has transformed the relationship between Church and State in Ireland for almost fifty years now.Dès que l’Irlande soumit sa première demande d’adhésion à la CEE, Rome cessa d’être la principale source de référence étrangère pour faire place à Bruxelles dans cette société s’ouvrant progressivement sur l’extérieur. Si l’Église catholique d’Irlande vit tout d’abord d’un mauvais œil cette volonté de l’île de se joindre au projet européen, elle se rendit tout de même vite compte de l’importance d’embrasser l’initiative, ne serait-ce que pour mieux la contrôler. Bruxelles n’en est pas moins devenue un sérieux adversaire de l’hégémonie romaine en Irlande depuis bientôt un demi-siècle, à tel point que l’Église catholique y est désormais perçue comme une institution parmi d’autres. Cependant, son influence en politique persiste et elle demeure une force non négligeable pour toute analyse de la perception de l’Europe par l’Irlande. Le présent article se veut avant tout une revue générale de la manière dont l’adhésion à la CEE a fait évoluer la relation entre Eglise et Etat en Irlande depuis un peu moins de cinquante ans maintenant

New developments of the Extended Quadrature Method of Moments to solve Population Balance Equations

Population Balance Models have a wide range of applications in many industrial fields as they allow accounting for heterogeneity among properties which are crucial for some system modelling. They actually describe the evolution of a Number Density Function (NDF) using a Population Balance Equation (PBE). For instance, they are applied to gas–liquid columns or stirred reactors, aerosol technology, crystallisation processes, fine particles or biological systems. There is a significant interest for fast, stable and accurate numerical methods in order to solve for PBEs, a class of such methods actually does not solve directly the NDF but resolves their moments. These methods of moments, and in particular quadrature-based methods of moments, have been successfully applied to a variety of systems. Point-wise values of the NDF are sometimes required but are not directly accessible from the moments. To address these issues, the Extended Quadrature Method of Moments (EQMOM) has been developed in the past few years and approximates the NDF, from its moments, as a convex mixture of Kernel Density Functions (KDFs) of the same parametric family. In the present work EQMOM is further developed on two aspects. The main one is a significant improvement of the core iterative procedure of that method, the corresponding reduction of its computational cost is estimated to range from 60% up to 95%. The second aspect is an extension of EQMOM to two new KDFs used for the approximation, the Weibull and the Laplace kernels. All MATLAB source codes used for this article are provided with this article

An assessment of methods of moments for the simulation of population dynamics in large-scale bioreactors

A predictive modelling for the simulation of bioreactors must account for both the biological and hydrodynamics complexities. Population balance models (PBM) are the best approach to conjointly describe these complexities, by accounting for the adaptation of inner metabolism for microorganisms that travel in a large-scale heterogeneous bioreactor. While being accurate for solving the PBM, the Class and Monte-Carlo methods are expensive in terms of calculation and memory use. Here, we apply Methods of Moments to solve a population balance equation describing the dynamic adaptation of a biological population to its environment. The use of quadrature methods (Maximum Entropy, QMOM or EQMOM) is required for a good integration of the metabolic behavior over the population. We then compare the accuracy provided by these methods against the class method which serves as a reference. We found that the use of 5 moments to describe a distribution of growth-rate over the population gives satisfactory accuracy against a simulation with a hundred classes. Thus, all methods of moments allow a significant decrease of memory usage in simulations. In terms of stability, QMOM and EQMOM performed far better than the Maximum Entropy method. The much lower memory impact of the methods of moments offers promising perspectives for the coupling of biological models with a fine hydrodynamics depiction