Historical Hindsight and the Media in Critical Elections

This thesis will aim to investigate the topics of critical elections and why we view them as such. It aims to closely examine two key elections, the 1964 election won by a Democrat, and the 1980 election won by a Republican, researching both the historical context of these elections that may have led them to become critical, and whether the way in which the elections were covered may provide any insight. To do this the editorial section of three newspapers, The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, and LA Times, will be examined to see if rhetoric varied at all between different sources about the election. The political editorials leading up to the elections will be analyzed, and through doing this it is seeking to learn whether the people of the time knew the potential impact of these elections or not. Some of the goals of this thesis are to investigate whether we can readily predict the historical impact of an event in the moment and seeks to find some information on why media assigns so much extreme rhetoric to elections. The expected result is to see that the newspaper editorials examined have some sort of indication that the upcoming election will be a critical one. After examining the editorials, it seems that the newspaper coverage of the campaigns does have some aspects in common. Namely, there is a large focus on foreign policy as well as a general air of political dissatisfaction throughout the editorials. It does seem that there are some indicators and consistencies when it comes to seeing if an election is critical in the moment, but to gain an even better understanding, examining the editorials of more elections may be necessary

Approaches to Safety in Inverse Reinforcement Learning

As the capabilities of robotic systems increase, we move closer to the vision of ubiquitous robotic assistance throughout our everyday lives. In transitioning robots and autonomous systems from traditional factory and industrial settings, it is critical that these systems are able to adapt to uncertain environments and the humans who populate them. In order to better understand and predict the behavior of these humans, Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) uses demonstrations to infer the underlying motivations driving human actions. The information gained from IRL can be used to improve a robot’s understanding of the environment as well as to allow the robot to better interact with or assist humans.In this dissertation, we address the challenge of incorporating safety into the application of IRL. We first consider safety in the context of using IRL for assisting humans in shared control tasks. Through a user study, we show how incorporating haptic feedback into human assistance can increase humans’ sense of control while improving safety in the presence of imperfect learning. Further, we present our method for using IRL to automatically create such haptic feedback policies from task demonstrations.We further address safety in IRL by incorporating notions of safety directly into the learning process. Currently, most work on IRL focuses on learning explanatory rewards that humans are modeled as optimizing. However, pure reward optimization can fail to effectively capture hard requirements, such as safety constraints. We draw on the definition of safety from Hamilton-Jacobi reachability analysis to infer human perceptions of safety and to modify robot behavior to respect these learned safety constraints. We also extend this work on learning constraints by adapting the framework of Maximum Entropy IRL in order to learn hard constraints given nominal task rewards, and we show how this technique infers the most likely constraints to align expected behavior with observed demonstrations

Surgical anatomy of the lower eyelid relating to lower blepharoplasty

The aim of this review is to familiarize the reader with the critical lower eyelid anatomy as is related to lower blepharoplasty or a midface lift. The contents include 1) the lacrimal canaliculus in the lower eyelid: the depth and width (diameter) of the vertical portion were 2.58±0.24 mm and 0.44±0.07 mm, respectively. A vertical portion of the canaliculus was about 1 mm (1.11±0.16 mm) deep, and the horizontal portion was about 2~3 mm (2.08±2.74 mm) long 2 mm below the mucocutaneous junction, which is where an incision may be made when performing epicanthoplasty. 2) Motor innervation to the lower orbiculis oculi muscle: the pretarsal and preseptal OOMs were innervated by five to seven terminal twigs of the zygomatic branches of the facial nerve that approached the muscle at a right angle. The mean horizontal distance between the lateral canthus and the zygomatic branch was 2.31±0.29 cm (range: 1.7~2.7 cm) and the vertical distance was 1.20±0.20 cm (range: 0.8~1.5 cm). 3) Sensory innervation of the lower eyelid skin: the majority of the terminal branches (93.8%) of the ION were distributed to the medial to the lateral canthus. Most (99.4%) of the terminal branches of the ZFN were distributed to lateral to the lateral canthus. 4) Retractor of the lower eyelid; capsulopalpebral fascia (CPF): the orbital septum blended with the CPF most closely at 3.7~5.4 mm beneath the lower tarsal border and differently at 3.7±0.7 mm on the medial limbus line, 4.3±0.8 mm on the midpupillary line and 5.4±1.0 mm on the lateral limbus line. 5) Arcuate expansion (AE): The AE was a fibrous band expanding from the inferolateral orbital rim to the medial canthal ligament. A sector (fan-shaped) of the AE originated in the angle of 5 to 80 degrees at the circumference of the inferolateral orbital rim circle, falling within the range of 3 to 5.5 o'clock, and then it tapered and attached to the inferior border of the medial canthal ligament. 6) Suborbicularis oculi fat (SOOF) in the lower eyelid: the SOOF was located in the inferolateral side of the orbit within a range between medial +15 and lateral -89 degrees to a vertical midpupillary line. Histologically, the SOOF was situated deep to the Orbicularis oculi muscle and superficial to the orbital septum and periosteum. The SOOF consisted more of fibrofatty tissue rather than being the pure fatty nature like orbital fat. I hope surgeons can achieve desirable outcomes with the knowledge reviewed in this article

Biogeochemical calcium cycling of Andropogon scoparius Michx. in two contrasting soil types

Techniques of dry ashing plant material and column extracting soil material were developed to convert ⁴⁵Ca to a chloride salt. Calcium-45 recovery efficiency was approximately 90% for plant material and 95% for soil. Movement and distribution within Andropogon scoparius Michx. tillers, clones, and associated ecosystems were investigated in greenhouse and field studies using ⁴⁵Ca as a tracer. Two contrasting soil types, Heiden-Hunt clay and Tabor fine sandy loam, were utilized. Calcium-45 introduction was achieved by both foliar and soil application techniques. Initial movement of foliar applied ⁴⁵Ca was rapid in greenhouse-grown tillers. Movement from point of introduction was basipetal and acropetal with activity observed in every tiller compartment and the soil within 1 hour following isotope introduction. Temporary redistribution was observed between leaf and sheath (major compartments of accumulation) during 100.5 hr following isotope introduction. Over time ⁴⁵Ca was immobilized and accumulated in the leaf, sheath, and senescent material. Calcium in the sheath was remobilized and transported to developing seed culms. Field studies indicated ⁴⁵Ca distribution within clonal tillers was similar to that observed in greenhouse-grown tillers. Over 56% of foliar applied ⁴⁵Ca had been transferred from clay-grown clones to the soil compartment while 11% was in the associated vegetation compartment after 4 mo. The sand soil compartment contained over 63% of the total applied activity with 8% in the associated vegetation compartment. At the end of the second growing season, the soil compartment contained about 85% of the applied ⁴⁵Ca, regardless of soil type. An active calcium cycle on the clay ecosystem was not identified, while a rapid cycle was documented on the sand ecosystem.

Biogeochemical calcium cycling of Andropogon scoparius Michx. in two contrasting soil types

Techniques of dry ashing plant material and column extracting soil material were developed to convert ⁴⁵Ca to a chloride salt. Calcium-45 recovery efficiency was approximately 90% for plant material and 95% for soil. Movement and distribution within Andropogon scoparius Michx. tillers, clones, and associated ecosystems were investigated in greenhouse and field studies using ⁴⁵Ca as a tracer. Two contrasting soil types, Heiden-Hunt clay and Tabor fine sandy loam, were utilized. Calcium-45 introduction was achieved by both foliar and soil application techniques. Initial movement of foliar applied ⁴⁵Ca was rapid in greenhouse-grown tillers. Movement from point of introduction was basipetal and acropetal with activity observed in every tiller compartment and the soil within 1 hour following isotope introduction. Temporary redistribution was observed between leaf and sheath (major compartments of accumulation) during 100.5 hr following isotope introduction. Over time ⁴⁵Ca was immobilized and accumulated in the leaf, sheath, and senescent material. Calcium in the sheath was remobilized and transported to developing seed culms. Field studies indicated ⁴⁵Ca distribution within clonal tillers was similar to that observed in greenhouse-grown tillers. Over 56% of foliar applied ⁴⁵Ca had been transferred from clay-grown clones to the soil compartment while 11% was in the associated vegetation compartment after 4 mo. The sand soil compartment contained over 63% of the total applied activity with 8% in the associated vegetation compartment. At the end of the second growing season, the soil compartment contained about 85% of the applied ⁴⁵Ca, regardless of soil type. An active calcium cycle on the clay ecosystem was not identified, while a rapid cycle was documented on the sand ecosystem.

On a Conjecture Concerning Dyadic Oriented Matroids

A rational matrix is totally dyadic if all of its nonzero subdeterminants are in f\Sigma2 k : k 2 Zg. An oriented matriod is dyadic if it has a totally dyadic representation A. A dyadic oriented matriod is dyadic of order k if it has a totally dyadic representation A with full row rank and with the property that for each pair of adjacent bases A 1 and A 2 2 \Gammak fi fi fi fi det(A 1 ) det(A 2 ) fi fi fi fi 2 k : In this note we present a counterexample to a conjecture on the relationship between the order of a dyadic oriented matroid and the ratio of agreement to disagreement in sign of its signed circuits and cocircuits (Conjecture 5.2, Lee (1990)). A rational matrix is totally dyadic if all of its nonzero subdeterminants are in f\Sigma2 k : k 2 Zg. An oriented matriod is dyadic if it has a totally dyadic representation A. A dyadic oriented matriod is dyadic of order k if it has a totally dyadic representation A with full row rank and with the property that for each ..

Thelypteris palustris

Pteridophyte