1,850 research outputs found

    Selling Out to Silence

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    Robert Samuelson of The Washington Post suggests that “Our leading politicians engage in consensual censorship to skip issues that involve distasteful choices or that require deferred gratification.” On the surface, we blame the silence on the deceitful politicians who use rhetoric to avoid answering certain questions. But if we look at the situation more closely, we discover a bigger issue: our current political and electoral process does not allow for discussion of complex and emotional issues. Tim Brooks is a freshman from Falls Church, VA, and a member of JMU\u27s first class of engineering majors. Tim, who is minoring in business management,believes writing is a skill that is required to succeed in any and all disciplines

    Hallucinating Pose-Compatible Scenes

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    What does human pose tell us about a scene? We propose a task to answer this question: given human pose as input, hallucinate a compatible scene. Subtle cues captured by human pose -- action semantics, environment affordances, object interactions -- provide surprising insight into which scenes are compatible. We present a large-scale generative adversarial network for pose-conditioned scene generation. We significantly scale the size and complexity of training data, curating a massive meta-dataset containing over 19 million frames of humans in everyday environments. We double the capacity of our model with respect to StyleGAN2 to handle such complex data, and design a pose conditioning mechanism that drives our model to learn the nuanced relationship between pose and scene. We leverage our trained model for various applications: hallucinating pose-compatible scene(s) with or without humans, visualizing incompatible scenes and poses, placing a person from one generated image into another scene, and animating pose. Our model produces diverse samples and outperforms pose-conditioned StyleGAN2 and Pix2Pix baselines in terms of accurate human placement (percent of correct keypoints) and image quality (Frechet inception distance)

    East-West Trade Regulation in the United States (1974 Trade Act, Title IV)

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    The Orchard Sports Injury Classification System (OSICS) is one of the world’s most commonly used systems for coding injury diagnoses in sports injury surveillance systems. Its major strengths are that it has wide usage, has codes specific to sports medicine and that it is free to use. Literature searches and stakeholder consultations were made to assess the uptake of OSICS and to develop new versions. OSICS was commonly used in the sports of football (soccer), Australian football, rugby union, cricket and tennis. It is referenced in international papers in three sports and used in four commercially available computerised injury management systems. Suggested injury categories for the major sports are presented. New versions OSICS 9 (three digit codes) and OSICS 10.1 (four digit codes) are presented. OSICS is a potentially helpful component of a comprehensive sports injury surveillance system, but many other components are required. Choices made in developing these components should ideally be agreed upon by groups of researchers in consensus statements

    3D Printing As A Consumer Technology Business Model

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    Although the technology for 3D printing has been around for more than three decades, its full potential is just beginning to be realized in the business world.  Ideas for 3D printing run the gamut from the hobbyist printing jewelry and toys to the medical industry researching 3D printing of human organs. One way businesses are utilizing 3D printing is through support services within their own business processes, referred to in this paper as a consumer technology business model. As with any emerging use of a technology, legal and ethical issues will arise. This paper shows how 3D printing has evolved, why businesses are realizing the strategic potential for 3D printing to create a competitive advantage using a consumer technology business model and why this could raise legal and ethical issues associated with existing laws related to the use of 3D technology

    Study of low flow rate ladle bottom gas stirring using triaxial vibration signals

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    Secondary steelmaking plays a great role in enhancing the quality of the final steel product. The metal quality is a function of metal bath stirring in ladles. The metal bath is often stirred by an inert gas to achieve maximum compositional and thermal uniformity throughout the melt. Ladle operators often observe the top surface phenomena, such as level of meniscus disturbance, to evaluate the status of stirring. However, this type of monitoring has significant limitations in assessing the process accurately especially at low gas flow rate bubbling. The present study investigates stirring phenomena using ladle wall triaxial vibration at a low flow rate on a steel-made laboratory model and plant scale for the case of the vacuum tank degasser. Cold model and plant data were successfully modeled by partial least-squares regression to predict the amount of stirring. In the cold model, it was found that the combined vibration signal could predict the stirring power and recirculation speed effectively in specific frequency ranges. Plant trials also revealed that there is a high structure in each data set and in the same frequency ranges at the water model. In the case of industrial data, the degree of linear relationship was strong for data taken from a single heat

    Health impacts of pesticide exposure in a cohort of outdoor workers.

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    We compared mortality of 1,999 outdoor staff working as part of an insecticide application program during 1935-1996 with that of 1,984 outdoor workers not occupationally exposed to insecticides, and with the Australian population. Surviving subjects also completed a morbidity questionnaire. Mortality was significantly higher in both exposed and control subjects compared with the Australian population. The major cause was mortality from smoking-related diseases. Mortality was also significantly increased in exposed subjects for a number of conditions that do not appear to be the result of smoking patterns. Compared with the general Australian population, mortality over the total study period was increased for asthma [standardized mortality ratio (SMR) = 3.45; 95% confidence interval (CI), 1.39-7.10] and for diabetes (SMR = 3.57; 95% CI, 1.16-8.32 for subjects working < 5 years). Mortality from pancreatic cancer was more frequent in subjects exposed to 1,1,1-trichloro-2,2-bis(p-chlorophenyl)ethane (SMR = 5.27; 95% CI, 1.09-15.40 for subjects working < 3 years). Compared with the control population, mortality from leukemia was increased in subjects working with more modern chemicals (standardized incidence ratio = 20.90; 95% CI, 1.54-284.41 for myeloid leukemia in the highest exposure group). There was also an increase in self-reported chronic illness and asthma, and lower neuropsychologic functioning scores among surviving exposed subjects when compared with controls. Diabetes was reported more commonly by subjects reporting occupational use of herbicides. These findings lend weight to other studies suggesting an association between adverse health effects and exposure to pesticides

    Case of Nigeria-Acquired Human African Trypanosomiasis in United Kingdom, 2016.

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    Human African trypanosomiasis has not been reported in Nigeria since 2012. Nevertheless, limitations of current surveillance programs mean that undetected infections may persist. We report a recent case of stage 2 trypanosomiasis caused by Trypanosoma brucei gambiense acquired in Nigeria and imported into the United Kingdom
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