Creating Home-Plate in America: American Exceptionalism and Baseball as Imperialistic Home in Irwin Shaw\u27s Short Fiction, August Wilson\u27s Fences, and William Kennedy\u27s Ironweed

Baseball has often been viewed as unique among the pantheon of American organized sports. Perhaps this view was spawned from baseball\u27s supposedly pastoral origins, but the sport undeniably carries, as Allen Guttmann mentions, a brand as America\u27s pastime (51). For millions of immigrants who entered America during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, baseball was the first and primary institution that provided them with a sense of belonging to America. Foreigners ascribed tremendous value to baseball in the nineteenth century, leading the French philosopher Jacques Barzun to comment that no other sport seemed genuinely entwined with a nation\u27s identity (13). Baseball is unique in that it, as a sport, is situated as an institution that embodies the tenets of American exceptionalism by espousing a gospel of belonging. For writers Irwin Shaw, August Wilson, and William Kennedy, baseball operates in a unique function as imperialistic and exceptional, rendering their works subject and dependent to the societal need to belong within baseball that influenced their immigrant forebears. Baseball stadiums and culture eventually rivaled the Protestantism of American exceptionalism as the primary identifier of one\u27s Americanness. Ultimately, for these men, how one relates to baseball is a valid means of judging one\u27s worth to society and to humanity

Near-Threshold Computing: Past, Present, and Future.

Transistor threshold voltages have stagnated in recent years, deviating from constant-voltage scaling theory and directly limiting supply voltage scaling. To overcome the resulting energy and power dissipation barriers, energy efficiency can be improved through aggressive voltage scaling, and there has been increased interest in operating at near-threshold computing (NTC) supply voltages. In this region sizable energy gains are achieved with moderate performance loss, some of which can be regained through parallelism. This thesis first provides a methodical definition of how near to threshold is "near threshold" and continues with an in-depth examination of NTC across past, present, and future CMOS technologies. By systematically defining near-threshold, the trends and tradeoffs are analyzed, lending insight in how best to design and optimize near-threshold systems. NTC works best for technologies that feature good circuit delay scalability, therefore technologies without strong short-channel effects. Early planar technologies (prior to 90nm or so) featured good circuit scalability (8x energy gains), but lacked area in which to add cores for parallelization. Recent planar nodes (32nm – 20nm) feature more area for cores but suffer from poor delay scalability, and so are not well-suited for NTC (4x energy gains). The switch to FinFET CMOS technology allows for a return to strong voltage scalability (8x gain), reversing trends seen in planar technologies, while dark silicon has created an opportunity to add cores for parallelization. Improved FinFET voltage scalability even allows for latency reduction of a single task, as long as the task is sufficiently parallelizable (< 10% serial code). Finally, we will look at a technique for fast voltage boosting, called Shortstop, in which a core's operating voltage is raised in 10s of cycles. Shortstop can be used to quickly respond to single-threaded performance demands of a near-threshold system by leveraging the innate parasitic inductance of a dedicated dirty supply rail, further improving energy efficiency. The technique is demonstrated in a wirebond implementation and is able to boost a core up to 1.8x faster than a header-based approach, while reducing supply droop by 2-7x. An improved flip-chip architecture is also proposed.PhDElectrical EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/113600/1/npfet_1.pd

Everybody\u27s Magazine: American Modernist Concerns in the Creative Content

Undergraduate Textual or Investigativ

Poetry as Social Justice in The English Review

Undergraduate Textual or Investigativ

Looking Ahead: Anticipating Pedestrians Crossing with Future Frames Prediction

In this paper, we present an end-to-end future-prediction model that focuses on pedestrian safety. Specifically, our model uses previous video frames, recorded from the perspective of the vehicle, to predict if a pedestrian will cross in front of the vehicle. The long term goal of this work is to design a fully autonomous system that acts and reacts as a defensive human driver would --- predicting future events and reacting to mitigate risk. We focus on pedestrian-vehicle interactions because of the high risk of harm to the pedestrian if their actions are miss-predicted. Our end-to-end model consists of two stages: the first stage is an encoder/decoder network that learns to predict future video frames. The second stage is a deep spatio-temporal network that utilizes the predicted frames of the first stage to predict the pedestrian's future action. Our system achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on pedestrian behavior prediction and future frames prediction on the Joint Attention for Autonomous Driving (JAAD) dataset