Posting Straight from the Art: An Analysis of How Nonprofit Performing Arts Centers Use Social Media to Engage Audiences

With the NEA in jeopardy under President Donald Trump, nonprofit performing arts centers need to connect with potential donors now more than ever. Yet little research has been done into how venues should accomplish this. This project attempted to remedy that by analyzing what types of messages six nonprofit performing arts centers in the New York metropolitan area posted on Facebook and Twitter over a one-week period and which kinds of messages online audiences engaged with the most. Using the results, the study proposed seven recommendations public relations staff members can use to enhance their social media efforts and build strong relationships with patrons

High-resolution simulations of the final assembly of Earth-like planets 2: water delivery and planetary habitability

The water content and habitability of terrestrial planets are determined during their final assembly, from perhaps a hundred 1000-km "planetary embryos" and a swarm of billions of 1-10 km "planetesimals." During this process, we assume that water-rich material is accreted by terrestrial planets via impacts of water-rich bodies that originate in the outer asteroid region. We present analysis of water delivery and planetary habitability in five high-resolution simulations containing about ten times more particles than in previous simulations (Raymond et al 2006a, Icarus, 183, 265-282). These simulations formed 15 terrestrial planets from 0.4 to 2.6 Earth masses, including five planets in the habitable zone. Every planet from each simulation accreted at least the Earth's current water budget; most accreted several times that amount (assuming no impact depletion). Each planet accreted at least five water-rich embryos and planetesimals from past 2.5 AU; most accreted 10-20 water-rich bodies. We present a new model for water delivery to terrestrial planets in dynamically calm systems, with low-eccentricity or low-mass giant planets -- such systems may be very common in the Galaxy. We suggest that water is accreted in comparable amounts from a few planetary embryos in a "hit or miss" way and from millions of planetesimals in a statistically robust process. Variations in water content are likely to be caused by fluctuations in the number of water-rich embryos accreted, as well as from systematic effects such as planetary mass and location, and giant planet properties.Comment: Astrobiology, in pres

Injecting knowledge into deep neural networks

Much of the recent hype around artificial intelligence stems from recent advances in Neural Networks, currently the most widely used algorithm that succeeded where other approaches failed for decades. Neural Networks today can leverage large amounts of data to be trained to perform hard tasks such as recognising objects in an image or translating languages. The process they use to perform these tasks is equivalent to a complex pattern recognition procedure which uses some clever mathematics to expose the underlying structure in a body of data. Humans think in a more conceptual way. We build a mental model of our world. We have the ability to extract relationships such as causality between elements involved in learning to perform a task, and the ability to use background knowledge when learning. One of the key challenges in making more human-like artificial intelligence is incorporating these properties of natural learning into the neural network paradigm. Designing such a system which could utilise background knowledge in learning a new task would enable the networks to be trained on much less data, opening up a new world of opportunities for Neural Networks to be applied to tasks which were previously not feasible due to the scarce availability of data. In identifying these challenges, we have been inspired by recent seminal papers within the Deep Learning community, which call for new approaches to enhance deep representations with (common-sense) background knowledge. This is considered as a key enabler to significantly improve the ability of machines to learn new tasks faster and in a domain invariant way. The main practical challenges involved in this research are finding how best to extract and format relevant knowledge from a trained network, and finding how best to inject this knowledge into an untrained network

Antigen-Experienced CD4lo T Cells Are Linked to Deficient Contraction of the Immune Response in Autoimmune Diabetes

Following proper activation, naïve “CD4lo” T cells differentiate into effector T cells with enhanced expression of CD4 -“CD4hi” effectors. Autoimmune diabetes-prone NOD mice display a unique set of antigen-experienced “CD4lo” T cells that persist after primary stimulation. Here, we report that a population of such cells remained after secondary and tertiary TCR stimulation and produced cytokines upon antigenic challenge. However, when NOD blasts were induced in the presence of rIL-15, the number of antigen-experienced “CD4lo” T cells was significantly reduced. Clonal contraction, mediated in part by CD95-dependent activation-induced cell death (AICD), normally regulates the accumulation of “CD4hi” effectors. Interestingly, CD95 expression was dramatically reduced on the AICD-resistant NOD “CD4lo” T cells. Thus, while autoimmune disease has often been attributed to the engagement of robust autoimmunity, we suggest that the inability to effectively contract the immune response distinguishes benign autoimmunity from progressive autoimmune diseases that are characterized by chronic T cell-mediated inflammation

Tourists\u27 Photographic Constructions of Place in Ireland

This chapter explores notions of authenticity in terms of the photographs taken by tourists while on holiday. Some tourists photograph attributes of the host’s culture that they perceive as “authentic”, while ignoring, editing, or erasing aspects that conflict with their “imagined” views. Drawing upon methods of participant-informed photo-ethnography used in a study of US tourists’ holiday photographs of Ireland, tourists will be resituated in this chapter as “editors” in their own photographic reproductions of place. Moreover, by focusing attention to how they confer meaning on destinations and the people who live in them, through the embodied performance of photography, this chapter explores tourists’ notions of authenticity

Next generation of artificial intelligence: from pattern recognition towards conceptual model building

Much of the recent hype around artificial intelligence stems from recent advances in Neural Networks, currently the most widely used algorithm that succeeded where other approaches failed for decades. Neural Networks today can leverage large amounts of data to be trained to perform hard tasks such as recognising objects in an image or translating languages. The process they use to perform these tasks is equivalent to a pattern recognition procedure which uses some clever mathematics to expose the underlying structure in a body of data. However, humans think in a more conceptual way. We build a mental model of our world. We have the ability to extract relationships such as causality between elements involved in learning to perform a task, and the ability to use background knowledge when learning. The challenge in reaching the next generation of artificial intelligence is incorporating these properties of natural learning into the neural network paradigm. Designing such a system which could utilise background knowledge in learning a new task would enable the networks to be trained on much less data, opening up a new world of opportunities for Neural Networks to be applied to tasks which were previously not feasible due to the scarce availability of data

Ceramic micropalaentology : the analysis of microfossils in archaeological ceramics with special reference to its application in the southern Aegean.

Within the scientific analysis of archaeological ceramics, four principal aims can be specified: description, classification, the reconstruction of ceramic technology and the determination of provenance. In order to achieve these, sophisticated methods of thin section analysis have been developed which permit the retrieval of detailed information about the nature of the rock and mineral inclusions as well as the textural features of the ceramic micromass. One important group of inclusions which occur in many archaeological ceramics are the organic or mineralised remains of various microscopic animals and plants, collectively referred to as microfossils. Microfossils are studied in detail only rarely by ceramic petrographers, however they contain information pertaining to the geological age and palaeoenvironment in which their host sediment was deposited, and as such can be used to characterise and provenance the raw materials of ceramic manufacture. Whilst holding great potential for the analysis of archaeological pottery, there are also a variety of problems associated with these types of inclusions, such as their alteration and removal by various processes during the production and post-depositional history of ceramics. Specialist analyses of microfossils in archaeological ceramics are small in number and biased towards the investigation of diatoms from the Neolithic to Iron Age pottery of north-west Europe. This thesis represents the first comprehensive study of the occurrence and utility of all microfossils in archaeological ceramics and is divided into two main sections. The first comprises a detailed account of the occurrence, preservation, methods of analysis, behaviour upon firing, and utility of all groups of microfossils in archaeological ceramics. This reappraisal is followed by several individual case studies from the Bronze Age of Crete and elsewhere in the Mediterranean which utilise calcareous microfossils to address a variety of archaeological questions of varying geographical scale and detail concerning ceramic provenance and technology