12,275 research outputs found
When Politicians Talk About Politics: Identifying Political Tweets of Brazilian Congressmen
Since June 2013, when Brazil faced the largest and most significant mass
protests in a generation, a political crisis is in course. In midst of this
crisis, Brazilian politicians use social media to communicate with the
electorate in order to retain or to grow their political capital. The problem
is that many controversial topics are in course and deputies may prefer to
avoid such themes in their messages. To characterize this behavior, we propose
a method to accurately identify political and non-political tweets
independently of the deputy who posted it and of the time it was posted.
Moreover, we collected tweets of all congressmen who were active on Twitter and
worked in the Brazilian parliament from October 2013 to October 2017. To
evaluate our method, we used word clouds and a topic model to identify the main
political and non-political latent topics in parliamentarian tweets. Both
results indicate that our proposal is able to accurately distinguish political
from non-political tweets. Moreover, our analyses revealed a striking fact:
more than half of the messages posted by Brazilian deputies are non-political.Comment: 4 pages, 7 figures, 2 table
A holistic approach to the evaluation of sustainable housing
Residential housing is often evaluated against single or at best a limited number of similar criteria. These include quantifiable indicators such as energy use and its associated greenhouse gas emissions. It might also include material consumption from an embodied energy or resource use perspective. Social factors or qualitative indicators may be evaluated but are rarely placed or juxtaposed alongside these quantifiable indicators. A one-dimensional approach will be limiting because sustainable development includes both environmental and social factors. This paper describes the methodologies that have been developed to assess housing developments against five quite different criteria. These are: energy use, resource use, neighbourhood character, neighbourhood connectedness and diversity. In each case, high and low sustainability practice has been identified so that ranking is possible. These methodologies have then been tested by evaluating a typical precinct (approximately 400 m by 400 m) of a 1970-80s housing development in a suburb of Geelong. The rankings of the particular precinct have then been combined in a visual way to assist in the evaluation of the housing in a more holistic way. The results of this evaluation method are presented, along with a discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of the methodologies. The research is the outcome of collaboration by a cross-disciplinary group of academics within Deakin’s School of Architecture and Building
Fault Localization in Multi-Threaded C Programs using Bounded Model Checking (extended version)
Software debugging is a very time-consuming process, which is even worse for
multi-threaded programs, due to the non-deterministic behavior of
thread-scheduling algorithms. However, the debugging time may be greatly
reduced, if automatic methods are used for localizing faults. In this study, a
new method for fault localization, in multi-threaded C programs, is proposed.
It transforms a multi-threaded program into a corresponding sequential one and
then uses a fault-diagnosis method suitable for this type of program, in order
to localize faults. The code transformation is implemented with rules and
context switch information from counterexamples, which are typically generated
by bounded model checkers. Experimental results show that the proposed method
is effective, in such a way that sequential fault-localization methods can be
extended to multi-threaded programs.Comment: extended version of paper published at SBESC'1
Verification of Magnitude and Phase Responses in Fixed-Point Digital Filters
In the digital signal processing (DSP) area, one of the most important tasks
is digital filter design. Currently, this procedure is performed with the aid
of computational tools, which generally assume filter coefficients represented
with floating-point arithmetic. Nonetheless, during the implementation phase,
which is often done in digital signal processors or field programmable gate
arrays, the representation of the obtained coefficients can be carried out
through integer or fixed-point arithmetic, which often results in unexpected
behavior or even unstable filters. The present work addresses this issue and
proposes a verification methodology based on the digital-system verifier
(DSVerifier), with the goal of checking fixed-point digital filters w.r.t.
implementation aspects. In particular, DSVerifier checks whether the number of
bits used in coefficient representation will result in a filter with the same
features specified during the design phase. Experimental results show that
errors regarding frequency response and overflow are likely to be identified
with the proposed methodology, which thus improves overall system's
reliability
Accretion and photodesorption of CO ice as a function of the incident angle of deposition
Non-thermal desorption of inter- and circum-stellar ice mantles on dust
grains, in particular ultraviolet photon-induced desorption, has gained
importance in recent years. These processes may account for the observed gas
phase abundances of molecules like CO toward cold interstellar clouds. Ice
mantle growth results from gas molecules impinging on the dust from all
directions and incidence angles. Nevertheless, the effect of the incident angle
for deposition on ice photo-desorption rate has not been studied. This work
explores the impact on the accretion and photodesorption rates of the incidence
angle of CO gas molecules with the cold surface during deposition of a CO ice
layer. Infrared spectroscopy monitored CO ice upon deposition at different
angles, ultraviolet-irradiation, and subsequent warm-up. Vacuum-ultraviolet
spectroscopy and a Ni-mesh measured the emission of the ultraviolet lamp.
Molecules ejected from the ice to the gas during irradiation or warm-up were
characterized by a quadrupole mass spectrometer. The photodesorption rate of CO
ice deposited at 11 K and different incident angles was rather stable between 0
and 45. A maximum in the CO photodesorption rate appeared around
70-incidence deposition angle. The same deposition angle leads to the
maximum surface area of water ice. Although this study of the surface area
could not be performed for CO ice, the similar angle dependence in the
photodesorption and the ice surface area suggests that they are closely
related. Further evidence for a dependence of CO ice morphology on deposition
angle is provided by thermal desorption of CO ice experiments
Time reversibility from visibility graphs of nonstationary processes
Visibility algorithms are a family of methods to map time series into
networks, with the aim of describing the structure of time series and their
underlying dynamical properties in graph-theoretical terms. Here we explore
some properties of both natural and horizontal visibility graphs associated to
several non-stationary processes, and we pay particular attention to their
capacity to assess time irreversibility. Non-stationary signals are
(infinitely) irreversible by definition (independently of whether the process
is Markovian or producing entropy at a positive rate), and thus the link
between entropy production and time series irreversibility has only been
explored in non-equilibrium stationary states. Here we show that the visibility
formalism naturally induces a new working definition of time irreversibility,
which allows to quantify several degrees of irreversibility for stationary and
non-stationary series, yielding finite values that can be used to efficiently
assess the presence of memory and off-equilibrium dynamics in non-stationary
processes without needs to differentiate or detrend them. We provide rigorous
results complemented by extensive numerical simulations on several classes of
stochastic processes
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