Math in Motion

Everything we know about the universe rests on the foundation of mathematics. Somehow, though, the magic of mathematics – the true power of numbers and their beautiful wildness – gets lost in math class. Children, our most magical thinkers, get turned off math in grade school and miss out on a language through which they could learn to read and change the world. VCU Math In Motion will generate a creative, dynamic STEM education initiative within the Richmond community using an innovative curriculum and a customized mobile unit to bring the beauty of math to Richmond region school children in grades 5-9, through partnerships across VCU and within the local school system

Spin polarized liquid 3He

We have employed the constrained variational method to study the influence of spin polarization on the ground state properties of liquid $^3{\rm He}$. The spin polarized phase, we have found, has stronger correlation with respect to the unpolarized phase. It is shown that the internal energy of liquid $^3{\rm He}$ increases by increasing polarization with no crossing point between polarized and unpolarized energy curves over the liquid density range. The obtained internal energy curves show a bound state, even in the case of fully spin polarized matter. We have also investigated the validity of using a parabolic formula for calculating the energy of spin polarized liquid $^3{\rm He}$. Finally, we have compared our results with other calculations.Comment: 16 pages, 6 figure

Running on Empty: The Problem with Politicians and Stealing (Music)

This Comment explores the legal issues arising from unauthorized use of musical compositions during political campaigns and rallies. Focusing on John McCain’s use of Jackson Brown’s song “Running on Empty” during his political campaign, the article examines why such uses are problematic and proposes remedies for preventing future unauthorized use

POTLoc: Pseudo-Label Oriented Transformer for Point-Supervised Temporal Action Localization

This paper tackles the challenge of point-supervised temporal action detection, wherein only a single frame is annotated for each action instance in the training set. Most of the current methods, hindered by the sparse nature of annotated points, struggle to effectively represent the continuous structure of actions or the inherent temporal and semantic dependencies within action instances. Consequently, these methods frequently learn merely the most distinctive segments of actions, leading to the creation of incomplete action proposals. This paper proposes POTLoc, a Pseudo-label Oriented Transformer for weakly-supervised Action Localization utilizing only point-level annotation. POTLoc is designed to identify and track continuous action structures via a self-training strategy. The base model begins by generating action proposals solely with point-level supervision. These proposals undergo refinement and regression to enhance the precision of the estimated action boundaries, which subsequently results in the production of `pseudo-labels' to serve as supplementary supervisory signals. The architecture of the model integrates a transformer with a temporal feature pyramid to capture video snippet dependencies and model actions of varying duration. The pseudo-labels, providing information about the coarse locations and boundaries of actions, assist in guiding the transformer for enhanced learning of action dynamics. POTLoc outperforms the state-of-the-art point-supervised methods on THUMOS'14 and ActivityNet-v1.2 datasets

ADM-Loc: Actionness Distribution Modeling for Point-supervised Temporal Action Localization

This paper addresses the challenge of point-supervised temporal action detection, in which only one frame per action instance is annotated in the training set. Self-training aims to provide supplementary supervision for the training process by generating pseudo-labels (action proposals) from a base model. However, most current methods generate action proposals by applying manually designed thresholds to action classification probabilities and treating adjacent snippets as independent entities. As a result, these methods struggle to generate complete action proposals, exhibit sensitivity to fluctuations in action classification scores, and generate redundant and overlapping action proposals. This paper proposes a novel framework termed ADM-Loc, which stands for Actionness Distribution Modeling for point-supervised action Localization. ADM-Loc generates action proposals by fitting a composite distribution, comprising both Gaussian and uniform distributions, to the action classification signals. This fitting process is tailored to each action class present in the video and is applied separately for each action instance, ensuring the distinctiveness of their distributions. ADM-Loc significantly enhances the alignment between the generated action proposals and ground-truth action instances and offers high-quality pseudo-labels for self-training. Moreover, to model action boundary snippets, it enforces consistency in action classification scores during training by employing Gaussian kernels, supervised with the proposed loss functions. ADM-Loc outperforms the state-of-the-art point-supervised methods on THUMOS14 and ActivityNet-v1.2 datasets

The Impact of Non-Audit Services on Earning Response Coefficient

The present study aims to investigate the impact of non-audit services on earnings response coefficient. It is a library and analytical-scientific research and is based on panel data analysis. In this study, the financial data of 74 companies accepted in Tehran Stock Exchange during the period 2011-2016 have been reviewed.The results demonstrate that non-audit services have a significant negative relationship with earnings response coefficient.Although non-audit services will have benefits such as increased financial statements understandability, auditors’ knowledge-sharing, better relationships between managers and auditors and reduced agency costs, this type of services threatens auditor independence and subsequently, earnings quality will be affected. Thus,the findings of the present study confirm the view thatby providing non-audit services, auditor independence is affected, resulting in a negative reaction to earnings.

Seismic Soil Structure Interaction Analyses of an Office Building in Oakland, California

This paper discusses soil-structure interaction (SSI) analyses for a 10-story office building with three levels of basement (10 meters) located in downtown Oakland, California. The objectives of these analyses were to assess the effects of SSI on the response of the building and to develop ground-level input earthquake motions at the base of the building for use by the project structural engineer. The SSI analyses were conducted using the two-dimensional finite element program FLUSH. The results of these analyses indicate that SSI has a negligible effect on horizontal ground motions at and near the building’s predominant period (T ~ 1.8 seconds). Minor but unfavorable SSI effects were found at higher frequencies. The effects of SSI on the vertical motions in the building were for practical purposes, negligible. Parametric studies indicate that more favorable SSI effects may have been realized if the building was surrounded by softer soils

Scientific Documents clustering based on Text Summarization

In this paper a novel method is proposed for scientific document clustering. The proposed method is a summarization-based hybrid algorithm which comprises a preprocessing phase. In the preprocessing phase unimportant words which are frequently used in the text are removed. This process reduces the amount of data for the clustering purpose. Furthermore frequent items cause overlapping between the clusters which leads to inefficiency of the cluster separation. After the preprocessing phase, Term Frequency/Inverse Document Frequency (TFIDF) is calculated for all words and stems over the document to score them in the document. Text summarization is performed then in the sentence level. Document clustering is finally done according to the scores of calculated TFIDF. The hybrid progress of the proposed scheme, from preprocessing phase to document clustering, gains a rapid and efficient clustering method which is evaluated by 400 English texts extracted from scientific databases of 11 different topics. The proposed method is compared with CSSA, SMTC and Max-Capture methods. The results demonstrate the proficiency of the proposed scheme in terms of computation time and efficiency using F-measure criterion

Application of frontal solution method in Dam-Reservoir problem

Solution of the total equations of the phenomenon in time domain is the main target in the current study. The advantages of the method are high accuracy comparing with iterative methods, and possibility of handling the nonlinear affects. Deficiencies are due to high system requirement, the use of same formulation either Lagrangian or Eulerian which are suitable for the structure or reservoir respectively, and solving the variables with very different orders. The proposed method is to take advantage of frontal solution scheme. In this solution method some of the variables are gathered in a front, and solution is performed each time for successive fronts. The size of the front is different for each problem, but it is much less than total variables. Therefore, computational requirement is limited without losing accuracy. The hydrodynamic pressure variables are chosen to be located in front. Therefore some notable changes had to be made in formal scheme. In common version the choosing the variables and placing them in the front is done automatically. While in proposed application the hydrodynamic pressure variables are forced to be located in front. Other advantages are also achieved. Having the hydrodynamic pressure variables, the structure and reservoir are solved separately using their suitable formulations. This paper studies two methods for analysis of the dam-reservoir system. The first method is based on using frontal method, while the other utilizes iterative schemes. A typical dam-reservoir system is performed by five different meshes. These analyses are compared from efficiency point of view. Frontal method requires less system requirement than iterative methods. CPU time are calculated for two approaches. All the execution times are calculated on the same hardware to achieve an appropriate criterion for comparison purposes. Compared to iterative scheme, CPU time is decrease in frontal method. As the number of the elements are 2 increase, execution time is saved more in frontal method even up to 90 percent