Mary Murillo

In March 1918, Moving Picture World heralded British screenwriter Mary Murillo as a “remarkable example” of “the meteoric flights to fame and fortune which have marked the careers of many present day leaders in the motion picture profession” (1525). This was more than just promotional hyperbole, since, in just four years, Murillo had penned over thirty features, including a highly successful adaptation of East Lynne (1916) starring Theda Bara and the original story for Cheating the Public (1918), “which proved a sensation” at its New York debut according to Moving Picture World (1525). Murillo wrote or adapted over fifty films from 1913 to 1934 in the United States, England, and France, including slapstick comedies, melodramas, fairy tale adaptations, and vehicles for female stars such as Bara, Ethel Barrymore, Clara Kimball Young, Olga Petrova, and Norma Talmadge. As a scenarist, her range included several films focused on contemporary issues—gender equality, women’s suffrage, economic progressivism, and labor reform—while others, such as the child-oriented adaptation of Jack and the Beanstalk (1917), seem to have been meant to appeal as pure escapism. In the latter half of her career, Murillo left the United States for England where she joined several ventures, but never equaled her American output

Deep Learning Relevance: Creating Relevant Information (as Opposed to Retrieving it)

What if Information Retrieval (IR) systems did not just retrieve relevant information that is stored in their indices, but could also "understand" it and synthesise it into a single document? We present a preliminary study that makes a first step towards answering this question. Given a query, we train a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) on existing relevant information to that query. We then use the RNN to "deep learn" a single, synthetic, and we assume, relevant document for that query. We design a crowdsourcing experiment to assess how relevant the "deep learned" document is, compared to existing relevant documents. Users are shown a query and four wordclouds (of three existing relevant documents and our deep learned synthetic document). The synthetic document is ranked on average most relevant of all.Comment: Neu-IR '16 SIGIR Workshop on Neural Information Retrieval, July 21, 2016, Pisa, Ital

Entropy and Graph Based Modelling of Document Coherence using Discourse Entities: An Application

We present two novel models of document coherence and their application to information retrieval (IR). Both models approximate document coherence using discourse entities, e.g. the subject or object of a sentence. Our first model views text as a Markov process generating sequences of discourse entities (entity n-grams); we use the entropy of these entity n-grams to approximate the rate at which new information appears in text, reasoning that as more new words appear, the topic increasingly drifts and text coherence decreases. Our second model extends the work of Guinaudeau & Strube [28] that represents text as a graph of discourse entities, linked by different relations, such as their distance or adjacency in text. We use several graph topology metrics to approximate different aspects of the discourse flow that can indicate coherence, such as the average clustering or betweenness of discourse entities in text. Experiments with several instantiations of these models show that: (i) our models perform on a par with two other well-known models of text coherence even without any parameter tuning, and (ii) reranking retrieval results according to their coherence scores gives notable performance gains, confirming a relation between document coherence and relevance. This work contributes two novel models of document coherence, the application of which to IR complements recent work in the integration of document cohesiveness or comprehensibility to ranking [5, 56]

Sediment Microbiomes Associated with Critical Habitat of the Juvenile American Horseshoe Crab; Limulus Polyphemus

Plumb Beach, Brooklyn, New York in USA is an important horseshoe crab breeding and nursery ground that has experienced substantial anthropogenic influence, including pollution, erosion and subsequent restoration. Since little is known about the relationship between sediment microbial communities and juvenile horseshoe crab survival, next generation sequencing was used to characterize and compare the sediment microbiome of three distinct areas of Plumb Beach:- a tidal creek with abundant juveniles, East Beach with moderate number of juveniles, and West Beach- a highly disturbed area where juvenile crabs are rarely seen. The microbiome of juvenile crab intestinal content (both dissected gut content and fecal flush content) from the tidal creek site was also examined. The results showed that in our 2017 survey, the overall dominant sediment orders at all beach sites were Vibrionales (30%), Flavobacteriales (22%) and Alteromonadales (21%). Although alpha diversity was similar among the three beach sites, Bray-Curtis distances assessed by Permanova revealed significant differences in Beta diversity, with a unique microbial assemblage found in the tidal creek. Both crab gut and fecal flush samples did not sequence well, showing low species diversity and very high variability. This study is the first to use next generation sequencing to characterize Plumb Beach sediment microbes and the first attempt to examine the gut microbiome of juvenile horseshoe crabs. This information will contribute to understanding the relationships between sediment microbial assemblages and juvenile crab populations within this important urban habitat

Studerendes tanker om den tredje Internationale Psykologi Konference i Rom

Det var med stor nysgerrighed, at vi, fem psykologistuderendepå professionsprogrammet KAiO (Konsultativt Arbejde i Organisationer), forlod Aalborg og vendte snuden mod Rom. Her skulle den tredje Internationale Coaching Psykologi Konference afholdes d. 16. og 17. maj, 2013. Værtskabet stod SCPItaly (Society for Coaching Psychology Italy) for, og begivenheden blev organiseret af og afholdt for professionelle coaching psykologer og andre interesserede inden for feltet af coaching. Konferencen havde tre hovedtemaer med ”Surfing the Edge ofChaos”, som omhandlede kompleksiteten i organisatoriskeog socioøkonomiske kontekster, ”Third Generation Coaching”, med fokus på personlig og kollektiv meningsskabelse, og slutteligt et gennemgående tema med en ”Evidence-Based Approach”

Operationalizing resilience for conservation objectives: the 4S’s

Although resilience thinking is increasingly popular and attractive among restoration practitioners, it carries an abstract quality that hinders effective application. Because resilience and its components are defined differently in social and ecological contexts, individual managers or stakeholders may disagree on the definition of a system’s state, occurrence of a state change, preferred state characteristics, and appropriate methods to achieve success. Nevertheless, incentives and mandates often force managers to demonstrate how their work enhances resilience. Unclear or conflicting definitions can lead to ineffective or even detrimental decision-making in the name of resilience; essentially, any convenient action can be touted as resilience-enhancing in this case. We contend that any successful resilience management project must clearly identify up-front the stressors of concern, state traits, scales of appropriate management, and success indicators (the 4S’s) relevant to the management targets. We propose a deliberate process for determining these components in advance of resilience management for conservation. Our recommendations were inspired and informed by two case studies wherein different definitions of stressors, state, scales, and success would result in very different management choices, with potentially serious consequences for biodiversity targets

Use of Dual-Polarization Radar Variables to Assess Low-Level Wind Shear in Severe Thunderstorm Near-storm Environments in the Tennessee Valley

The upgrade of the National Weather Service (NWS) network of S ]band dual-polarization radars is currently underway, and the incorporation of polarimetric information into the real ]time forecasting process will enhance the forecaster fs ability to assess thunderstorms and their near ]storm environments. Recent research has suggested that the combination of polarimetric variables differential reflectivity (ZDR) and specific differential phase (KDP) can be useful in the assessment of low level wind shear within a thunderstorm. In an environment with strong low ]level veering of the wind, ZDR values will be largest along the right inflow edge of the thunderstorm near a large gradient in horizontal reflectivity (indicative of large raindrops falling with a relative lack of smaller drops), and take the shape of an arc. Meanwhile, KDP values, which are proportional to liquid water content and indicative of a large number of smaller drops, are maximized deeper into the forward flank precipitation shield than the ZDR arc as the smaller drops are being advected further from the updraft core by the low level winds than the larger raindrops. Using findings from previous work, three severe weather events that occurred in North Alabama were examined in order to assess the utility of these signatures in determining the potential for tornadic activity. The first case is from October 26, 2010, where a large number of storms indicated tornadic potential from a standard reflectivity and velocity analysis but very few storms actually produced tornadoes. The second event is from February 28, 2011, where tornadic storms were present early on in the event, but as the day progressed, the tornado threat transitioned to a high wind threat. The third case is from April 27, 2011, where multiple rounds of tornadic storms ransacked the Tennessee Valley. This event provides a dataset including multiple modes of tornadic development, including QLCS and supercell structures. The overarching goal of examining these three events is to compare dual ]polarization features from this larger dataset to previous work and to determine if these signatures can be a useful indication of the potential for tornadic activity associated with the amount of low ]level wind shear in the near ]storm environment