Hieroglyphic Semantics in Late Antiquity

The primary aim of this thesis is the reconstruction of a development in the history of the philosophy of language, namely an understanding of hieroglyphic Egyptian as a language uniquely adapted to the purposes and concerns of late Platonist metaphysics. There are three main reasons for this particular focus. First, the primary interest of philological criticism has emphasized the apparent shortcomings of the classical hieroglyphic tradition in light of the success of the modern decipherment endeavour. Though the Greek authors recognize a number of philologically distinctive features, they are primarily interested in contrasting hieroglyphic and Greek semantics. The latter is capable of discursive elaboration of the sapiential content to which the former is non-discursively adapted. Second, the sole surviving, fully extant essay in the exegesis of Egyptian hieroglyphs, the Hieroglyphica of Horapollo can be situated within the broader philosophical project in which the Neoplatonic commentators were engaged. As such, it draws on elements of the distinct traditions of Greek reception of Egyptian wisdom, 4th/5th century pagan revivalism under Christian persecution, and late Platonist logico-metaphysical methodological principles. Third, the rationale for Neoplatonic use of allegorical interpretation as an exegetical tool is founded on the methodological principle of ‘analytic ascent’ from the phenomena depicted, through the concepts under which they fall, to their intelligible causes. These three stages in the ascent correspond to the three modes of expression of which, according to Greek exegetes, hieroglyphic Egyptian, as composites of material images and intelligible content, is capable. Horapollo’s Hieroglyphica, I argue, maintains a tripartite distinction between linguistic expressions, their meanings, and the objects or name-bearers which they depict and further aligns that distinction with three modes of hieroglyphic expression: representative, semantic, and symbolic. I conclude, therefore, that a procedure of analytic explanatory ascent from empirical observation through discursive reason to metaphysical or cosmological insights is employed in the exegesis of the sapiential content of the hieroglyphs of which it treats

Government Support for 'Private Schools for the Poor': a case study in Mathare informal settlement, Kenya

This case study provides an exploration of the Ministry of Education's strategy of engagement with non-formal schools in Kenya, and the responses made by these schools. Non-formal schools in the informal settlements of Nairobi represent a form of low-cost private schooling, which is found in other urban centers in less developed countries. The ministry's program includes: school verification and validation, changes in school management and the provision of instructional materials' grants. The ministry began supporting NFS through an investment program included in the first Kenya Education Sector Support Program 2005-2010. The study findings have been directed towards the question of whether this government support to NFS influences the educational experience of the poor to their advantage. Some of the advantages identified include: greater financial stability in supported schools, which can be used to provide more concessionary places; eligibility of validated NFS for a national school feeding program through greater school legitimization; stronger support for school survival from parents and among pupils themselves because of the expectation of better academic results; higher teacher morale and greater teacher confidence; increased access to national exams through more NFS being granted exam center status and a reduction in exam fees and greater potential access to secondary school through an improvement in exam results. Disadvantages that are described include: the continuation of fees at the same levels as before the MoE support program; no substantive improvements in school conditions other than in teaching and learning materials; high rates of pupil transfer and an associated selection process, which is based on academic ability; tolerance of high rates of class repetition; increased academic pressure, translating into long school hours, class repetition and potential dropping out; modes of punishment that are not acceptable in public schools; deterioration of teacher: pupil ratio and the diversion of funds and support from other forms of non-formal education. The findings suggest that the MoE support program has resulted in some improvements in equality between pupils in NFS and those attending public primary schools, but has done little to address issues of equity amongst children growing up in these disadvantaged circumstances

Predicting dataset popularity for the CMS experiment

The CMS experiment at the LHC accelerator at CERN relies on its computing infrastructure to stay at the frontier of High Energy Physics, searching for new phenomena and making discoveries. Even though computing plays a significant role in physics analysis we rarely use its data to predict the system behavior itself. A basic information about computing resources, user activities and site utilization can be really useful for improving the throughput of the system and its management. In this paper, we discuss a first CMS analysis of dataset popularity based on CMS meta-data which can be used as a model for dynamic data placement and provide the foundation of data-driven approach for the CMS computing infrastructure.Comment: Submitted to proceedings of 17th International workshop on Advanced Computing and Analysis Techniques in physics research (ACAT

Virtual Circuits in PhEDEx, an update from the ANSE project

The ANSE project has been working with the CMS and ATLAS experiments to bring network awareness into their middleware stacks. For CMS, this means enabling control of virtual network circuits in PhEDEx, the CMS data-transfer management system. PhEDEx orchestrates the transfer of data around the CMS experiment to the tune of 1 PB per week spread over about 70 sites. The goal of ANSE is to improve the overall working efficiency of the experiments, by enabling more deterministic time to completion for a designated set of data transfers, through the use of end-to-end dynamic virtual circuits with guaranteed bandwidth. ANSE has enhanced PhEDEx, allowing it to create, use and destroy circuits according to it's own needs. PhEDEx can now decide if a circuit is worth creating based on its current workload and past transfer history, which allows circuits to be created only when they will be useful. This paper reports on the progress made by ANSE in PhEDEx. We show how PhEDEx is now capable of using virtual circuits as a production-quality service, and describe how the mechanism it uses can be refactored for use in other software domains. We present first results of transfers between CMS sites using this mechanism, and report on the stability and performance of PhEDEx when using virtual circuits. The ability to use dynamic virtual circuits for prioritised large-scale data transfers over shared global network infrastructures represents an important new capability and opens many possibilities. The experience we have gained with ANSE is being incorporated in an evolving picture of future LHC Computing Models, in which the network is considered as an explicit component. Finally, we describe the remaining work to be done by ANSE in PhEDEx, and discuss future directions for continued development

Letter from C. H. Wildish to John Muir, 1862 Jun 2

[4] I have not got my certificate yet I am going after it next Saturday. Send Davids AddressMine is Sussex [Wankesha?] Co. Wis.00297[1] School Room June 2nd/62 Dear [Muhis?] I have got my dollar and what is better your letter too. All your apologies for not sending it before are useless for I knew that it would have been forth coming before if something was not the matter. But enough about the old dollar suffice it to say that it has given me no trouble and that should you be placed in like circumstances again I shall-if it is in my power-only be to happy to oblige you again. Now Johnny what-ever betook you to say that my laugh used to shake those old huge limestone walls. I think perhaps that your mind was deeply absorbed in some interesting chemical expriment. Perhaps you were trying to find out the inherent properties of [Deflogisticated Muritic Reid Sas?] [2] or Su[illegible] [illegible]. I was glad to hear that the wheels of the old University mill continue to go. Wonder if Muirs old clock still clicks and wheels turn round yet. Hope they do. Glad to hear that [Bread?] tickets were so cheap for when tickets and crackers are plentiful Muir says-begone dull care.- Do you go bathing of a morning how I should to go to do you all at the top of the stairs for W[illegible] I was very sorry that I was not able to be amongst you the present term for I had calculated on a good time but a fit of sickness in the Spring kept me so long from my good Mother that I felt somewhat weaned but Oh how I long for the good old pass again. I am teaching school in my own neighborhood. Say Muir what do you think. that girl of mine comes to my school. what do you think of that. Isnt it nice.[3] Say Muir I have something to ask of you wont you do it. I want you when the term is out to come and see me down in my home. It will not be much out of your road home for you can come to Waukesha on the cars I will fetch you with a team from there to our house and then carry you safely - that is after you have made a visit - to a station on the Sa Crosse Road. What do you say. Write and let me know Now do [come?] If you don\u27t - well no matter what Give my love to all my college friends G[illegible]old and S[illegible] in particular. I shall be up there next term if all is well. And now may heavens choisests blessings attend you and yours while travelling through the world of woes and may you with the rest of good men be gathered into the [illegible] of the Lord From your Dear Friend [C. H. Wildish?

Modeling Large Sparse Data for Feature Selection: Hospital Admission Predictions of the Dementia Patients Using Primary Care Electronic Health Records

A growing elderly population suffering from incurable, chronic conditions such as dementia present a continual strain on medical services due to mental impairment paired with high comorbidity resulting in increased hospitalization risk. The identification of at risk individuals allows for preventative measures to alleviate said strain. Electronic health records provide opportunity for big data analysis to address such applications. Such data however, provides a challenging problem space for traditional statistics and machine learning due to high dimensionality and sparse data elements. This article proposes a novel machine learning methodology: entropy regularization with ensemble deep neural networks (ECNN), which simultaneously provides high predictive performance of hospitalization of patients with dementia whilst enabling an interpretable heuristic analysis of the model architecture, able to identify individual features of importance within a large feature domain space. Experimental results on health records containing 54,647 features were able to identify 10 event indicators within a patient timeline: a collection of diagnostic events, medication prescriptions and procedural events, the highest ranked being essential hypertension. The resulting subset was still able to provide a highly competitive hospitalization prediction (Accuracy: 0.759) as compared to the full feature domain (Accuracy: 0.755) or traditional feature selection techniques (Accuracy: 0.737), a significant reduction in feature size. The discovery and heuristic evidence of correlation provide evidence for further clinical study of said medical events as potential novel indicators. There also remains great potential for adaption of ECNN within other medical big data domains as a data mining tool for novel risk factor identification

PhEDEx Data Service

The PhEDEx Data Service provides access to information from the central PhEDEx database, as well as certificate-authenticated managerial operations such as requesting the transfer or deletion of data. The Data Service is integrated with the SiteDB service for fine-grained access control, providing a safe and secure environment for operations. A plug-in architecture allows server-side modules to be developed rapidly and easily by anyone familiar with the schema, and can automatically return the data in a variety of formats for use by different client technologies. Using HTTP access via the Data Service instead of direct database connections makes it possible to build monitoring web-pages with complex drill-down operations, suitable for debugging or presentation from many aspects. This will form the basis of the new PhEDEx website in the near future, as well as providing access to PhEDEx information and certificate-authenticated services for other CMS dataflow and workflow management tools such as CRAB, WMCore, DBS and the dashboard. A PhEDEx command-line client tool provides one-stop access to all the functions of the PhEDEx Data Service interactively, for use in simple scripts that do not access the service directly. The client tool provides certificate-authenticated access to managerial functions, so all the functions of the PhEDEx Data Service are available to it. The tool can be expanded by plug-ins which can combine or extend the client-side manipulation of data from the Data Service, providing a powerful environment for manipulating data within PhEDEx

Neotenorchestia Wildish, 2014 is a junior synonym of Orchestia Leach, 1814

Neotenorchestia Wildish, 2014 and N. kenwildishi Wildish, 2014 (Crustacea, Amphipoda, Talitridae) are junior synonyms of Orchestia Leach, 1814 and Orchestia mediterranea A. Costa, 1853 respectively, based on revised genetic evidence