The Effects of First-Generation Status on Student Engagement and Outcomes at Liberal Arts Colleges

Using data from the Higher Education Data Sharing Consortium (HEDS) Senior Survey, I compared first-generation students’ self-reported levels of engagement and outcomes with those of continuing-generation students at 16 private liberal arts colleges (N=7,611). Membership in the first-generation group demonstrated significant, positive main effects on interactions with diversity, satisfaction with career services, and institutional preparation for career path. On a few variables, significant factor interactions were found between first-generation status and gender and first-generation status and race/ethnicity; no particular first-generation subgroup by gender or race/ethnicity appears to be systematically disadvantaged or advantaged relative to the continuing-generation peer subgroup

Reducing false wake-up in contention-based wake-up control of wireless LANs

This paper studies the potential problem and performance when tightly integrating a low power wake-up radio (WuR) and a power-hungry wireless LAN (WLAN) module for energy efficient channel access. In this model, a WuR monitors the channel, performs carrier sense, and activates its co-located WLAN module when the channel becomes ready for transmission. Different from previous methods, the node that will be activated is not decided in advance, but decided by distributed contention. Because of the wake-up latency of WLAN modules, multiple nodes may be falsely activated, except the node that will actually transmit. This is called a false wake-up problem and it is solved from three aspects in this work: (i) resetting backoff counter of each node in a way as if it is frozen in a wake-up period, (ii) reducing false wake-up time by immediately putting a WLAN module into sleep once a false wake-up is inferred, and (iii) reducing false wake-up probability by adjusting contention window. Analysis shows that false wake-ups, instead of collisions, become the dominant energy overhead. Extensive simulations confirm that the proposed method (WuR-ESOC) effectively reduces energy overhead, by up to 60% compared with state-of-the-arts, achieving a better tradeoff between throughput and energy consumption

Improving performance of pedestrian positioning by using vehicular communication signals

Pedestrian-to-vehicle communications, where pedestrian devices transmit their position information to nearby vehicles to indicate their presence, help to reduce pedestrian accidents. Satellite-based systems are widely used for pedestrian positioning, but have much degraded performance in urban canyon, where satellite signals are often obstructed by roadside buildings. In this paper, we propose a pedestrian positioning method, which leverages vehicular communication signals and uses vehicles as anchors. The performance of pedestrian positioning is improved from three aspects: (i) Channel state information instead of RSSI is used to estimate pedestrian-vehicle distance with higher precision. (ii) Only signals with line-of-sight path are used, and the property of distance error is considered. (iii) Fast mobility of vehicles is used to get diverse measurements, and Kalman filter is applied to smooth positioning results. Extensive evaluations, via trace-based simulation, confirm that (i) Fixing rate of positions can be much improved. (ii) Horizontal positioning error can be greatly reduced, nearly by one order compared with off-the-shelf receivers, by almost half compared with RSSI-based method, and can be reduced further to about 80cm when vehicle transmission period is 100ms and Kalman filter is applied. Generally, positioning performance increases with the number of available vehicles and their transmission frequency

Deep Cross-Modal Correlation Learning for Audio and Lyrics in Music Retrieval

Deep cross-modal learning has successfully demonstrated excellent performance in cross-modal multimedia retrieval, with the aim of learning joint representations between different data modalities. Unfortunately, little research focuses on cross-modal correlation learning where temporal structures of different data modalities such as audio and lyrics should be taken into account. Stemming from the characteristic of temporal structures of music in nature, we are motivated to learn the deep sequential correlation between audio and lyrics. In this work, we propose a deep cross-modal correlation learning architecture involving two-branch deep neural networks for audio modality and text modality (lyrics). Data in different modalities are converted to the same canonical space where inter modal canonical correlation analysis is utilized as an objective function to calculate the similarity of temporal structures. This is the first study that uses deep architectures for learning the temporal correlation between audio and lyrics. A pre-trained Doc2Vec model followed by fully-connected layers is used to represent lyrics. Two significant contributions are made in the audio branch, as follows: i) We propose an end-to-end network to learn cross-modal correlation between audio and lyrics, where feature extraction and correlation learning are simultaneously performed and joint representation is learned by considering temporal structures. ii) As for feature extraction, we further represent an audio signal by a short sequence of local summaries (VGG16 features) and apply a recurrent neural network to compute a compact feature that better learns temporal structures of music audio. Experimental results, using audio to retrieve lyrics or using lyrics to retrieve audio, verify the effectiveness of the proposed deep correlation learning architectures in cross-modal music retrieval

論《長生殿》

《長生殿》[1] 是劇作家洪昇 (1645 - 1703) 的作品。洪昇字昉思，出身於士大夫家庭，出生在明朝滅亡後的第二年，此乃兵荒馬亂的時期。而洪昇的成長階段，都是充滿漢族反抗清朝的鬥爭，長大後，他面對外族統治的政權，這個漢、滿民族矛盾尖銳的清代， 就深深影響著洪昇對《長生殿》的創作。正如雅斯培 (Karl Jaspers) 所說： 希臘和現代的偉大悲劇卻在年代的轉換之際孕生。 [2] 根據徐靈昭《長生殿.序》說： 歲戊辰 (1688) 先生 (洪昇) 皇取而更定之 。而第三年就發生了佟皇后喪期期間內演唱《長生殿》之禍，所以，《長生殿》大約完成於康熙二十七年。就創作過程，洪昇自言： 蓋經十餘年，三易稿而始成 (《長生殿﹒例言))。其中，第一稿是洪昇偶感李白之遇，而作《沉香亭》；第二稿《舞霓裳》則省去李白部分，而加入李泌輔肅宗中興；直至第三稿，洪昇 念情之所種，在帝主家罕有 (《長生殿.例言》) ，而創作了《長生殿》。 除此之外，在洪昇的《長生殿》之前，已經有不少以李、楊的愛情故事為內容的作品。尤為重要的有唐代白居易《長恨歌》、元代白樸《梧桐雨》、明代吳世美《驚鴻記》及屠隆《綵毫記》。 而《長生殿》面世後，隨即受到廣大觀眾所愛戴。有 一時朱門綺席，酒社歌樓，非此曲不奏，纏頭為之增價 (徐麟《長生殿.序》)。其後更與《桃花扇》的劇作家孔尚任，並稱 南洪北孔 。一般更有“論文者崇孔，言律者尊洪 的說法。然而，《長生殿》 除了音律堪稱外，其他部分也是不容忽視的。以下我會對《長生殿》 的悲劇結構、悲劇元素和人物性格作出探討