President’s Column (2015) 50 Page 111

It has been my privilege to represent the American Judges Association at a great many meetings and conferences over the past year. Our organization is widely respected. The organization and its leadership are acknowledged as an effective “Voice of the Judiciary®,” for “Making Better Judges®,” for high-quality conferences, for excellent judicial-education programs, and for the developing AJA brand in the area of procedural fairness. At our midyear meeting in May, the new Arizona Chief Justice, Scott Bales, particularly commented on the value of Court Review, our quarterly journal, as a scholarly yet practical tool for judges at all levels to learn more about cutting-edge topics such as those in this edition. During the many conversations I’ve had with judicial leaders, I’ve often heard the statement, “We need to collaborate.” AJA is establishing itself as an important collaborator in the constellation of organizations seeking to improve access to fair and impartial justice for all

President’s Column: WE’RE IN TOUCH, SO YOU BE IN TOUCH

It is a privilege and honor to begin my term as your president, especially at a time when AJA is so well respected and highly regarded as the largest judge-only organization in North America. As I write, I have recently returned from the fantastic 53rd education conference in Hawaii where we were honored by welcoming letters from Hawaii Governor Neil Abercrombie, U.S. Senator Brian Schatz, and U.S. Representative Colleen Hanabusa. Hawaii Chief Justice Mark Recktenwald came in person to open the conference. If you missed this uplifting event and the chance to interact with more than 150 of the best judges in North America and the stellar faculty of 29 distinguished experts in their respective fields, take a moment to go to the “Conference” section of our website (www.amjudges.org) to explore the educational materials from the conference. You too will be proud to say that you are an AJA member! During the business meetings in Hawaii, the members of the Executive Committee and the Board of Governors had a chance to review AJA’s current statement of purpose, which is “to promote and improve the effective administration of justice; to maintain the status and independence of the judiciary; to provide a forum for the continuing education of its members and the general public; and for the exchange of new ideas among all judges.

Probing energy barriers and quantum confined states of buried semiconductor heterostructures with ballistic carrier injection: An experimental study

A three-terminal spectroscopy that probes both subsurface energy barriers and interband optical transitions in a semiconductor heterostructure is demonstrated. A metal-base transistor with a unipolar p-type semiconductor collector embedding InAs/GaAs quantum dots (QDs) is studied. Using minority/majority carrier injection, ballistic electron emission spectroscopy and its related hot-carrier scattering spectroscopy measures barrier heights of a buried AlxGa1-xAs layer in conduction band and valence band respectively, the band gap of Al0.4Ga0.6As is therefore determined as 2.037 +/- 0.009 eV at 9 K. Under forward collector bias, interband electroluminescence is induced by the injection of minority carriers with sub-bandgap kinetic energies. Three emission peaks from InAs QDs, InAs wetting layer, and GaAs are observed in concert with minority carrier injection.Comment: 11 pages, 4 figures, submitted to Physical Review

NASA Science Mission Directorate Rideshare Office

A Rideshare Office has been recently established within NASA’s Science Mission Directorate (SMD) and is focused on implementing the SMD-wide rideshare strategy outlined in the SMD Rideshare Policy (Science Policy DirectiveSPD-32). The goal of the office is to foster the maximizing of science, exploration, and technology return on investment by enabling rideshare or accommodation opportunities for secondary payloads on SMD primary mission launches. Sharing access to space is possible when a primary payload’s launch configuration has excess performance that can be shared with compatible secondary payloads. The SMD Rideshare Office will serve as the single point of contact in SMD for coordinating the rideshare opportunities between compatible payloads and the SMD launch opportunities. SMD’s policy also supports rideshare partnerships across NASA, other U.S. Government Agencies, and NASA’s international partners. The Rideshare Office coordinates and guides rideshare opportunities through: the SMD Rideshare 101 document, which outlines the basic definitions of rideshare; the SMD Do No Harm Requirements and Rideshare User Guide documents, which outlines requirements and specifications to ensure all mission partners that payloads will do no harm to each other and which offers guidelines for rideshare missions to design their secondary payloads for maximum compatibility. The Rideshare Office is also working to standardize Announcement of Opportunity language and requirements to further enhance the development of rideshare payload candidates. The SMD Rideshare Office is supporting current rideshare opportunities on upcoming SMD missions, including the IMAP, SPHEREx, PUNCH, and Psyche launches. By providing a leadership role across SMD and the rideshare community, the Rideshare Office will provide consolidated resources for guidance and solutions to the unique challenges of rideshare

Near-infrared absorption and semimetal-semiconductor transition in 2 nm ErAs nanoparticles embedded in GaAs and AlAs

Journal ArticleWe report strong near-infrared absorption peaks in epitaxial films of GaAs and AlAs containing approximately 0.5-5% of the semimetal ErAs. The energy of the resonant absorption peak can be changed from 0.62 to 1.0 eV (2.2-1.4 μm) by variation of the ErAs volume fraction and the substrate temperature. We interpret the infrared absorption in terms of transitions across an energy gap caused by a confinement-induced semimetal-semiconductor transition. An effective mass model relates the changes in nanoparticle diameter observed in transmission electron microscopy to the energy gap

Analyse temporelle et sémantique des réseaux sociaux typés à partir du contenu de sites généré par des utilisateurs sur le Web

We propose an approach to detect topics, overlapping communities of interest, expertise, trends andactivities in user-generated content sites and in particular in question-answering forums such asStackOverFlow. We first describe QASM (Question & Answer Social Media), a system based on socialnetwork analysis to manage the two main resources in question-answering sites: users and contents. Wealso introduce the QASM vocabulary used to formalize both the level of interest and the expertise ofusers on topics. We then propose an efficient approach to detect communities of interest. It relies onanother method to enrich questions with a more general tag when needed. We compared threedetection methods on a dataset extracted from the popular Q&A site StackOverflow. Our method basedon topic modeling and user membership assignment is shown to be much simpler and faster whilepreserving the quality of the detection. We then propose an additional method to automatically generatea label for a detected topic by analyzing the meaning and links of its bag of words. We conduct a userstudy to compare different algorithms to choose the label. Finally we extend our probabilistic graphicalmodel to jointly model topics, expertise, activities and trends. We performed experiments with realworlddata to confirm the effectiveness of our joint model, studying the users’ behaviors and topicsdynamicsNous proposons une approche pour détecter les sujets, les communautés d'intérêt non disjointes,l'expertise, les tendances et les activités dans des sites où le contenu est généré par les utilisateurs et enparticulier dans des forums de questions-réponses tels que StackOverFlow. Nous décrivons d'abordQASM (Questions & Réponses dans des médias sociaux), un système basé sur l'analyse de réseauxsociaux pour gérer les deux principales ressources d’un site de questions-réponses: les utilisateurs et lecontenu. Nous présentons également le vocabulaire QASM utilisé pour formaliser à la fois le niveaud'intérêt et l'expertise des utilisateurs. Nous proposons ensuite une approche efficace pour détecter lescommunautés d'intérêts. Elle repose sur une autre méthode pour enrichir les questions avec un tag plusgénéral en cas de besoin. Nous comparons trois méthodes de détection sur un jeu de données extrait dusite populaire StackOverflow. Notre méthode basée sur le se révèle être beaucoup plus simple et plusrapide, tout en préservant la qualité de la détection. Nous proposons en complément une méthode pourgénérer automatiquement un label pour un sujet détecté en analysant le sens et les liens de ses mots-clefs.Nous menons alors une étude pour comparer différents algorithmes pour générer ce label. Enfin, nousétendons notre modèle de graphes probabilistes pour modéliser conjointement les sujets, l'expertise, lesactivités et les tendances. Nous le validons sur des données du monde réel pour confirmer l'efficacité denotre modèle intégrant les comportements des utilisateurs et la dynamique des sujet

非凸行列正則化によるスパース特徴選択を用いた深層学習

機械学習において、ニューラルネットワーク（neural network, NN）は優れたデータフィッティング能力を持つため広く使われているが、過学習しやすい問題がある。過学習の二つの主な原因は、ノイズ、と多くの無関係な特徴がモデル訓練に使われることである。センサーやIoT（Internet of Things）技術がデータ収集に重要な役割を果たすようになった一方、環境条件などの制約により、データ収集の過程にノイズの混入が不可避である。ニューラルネットワークモデルを訓練するとき、識別などの訓練目的と無関係な特徴が用いられる。特徴選択は、収集されたデータの特徴集合から有用な特徴を選択する。特徴選択は学習過程を加速すること、データ記憶コストを減らすこととノイズや過学習の緩和などが可能であり、頑健なモデルを構築するために不可欠なプロセスである。L2,1-2 ノルムのスパースを利用した特徴選択がMiao らによって提案され、良いパフォーマンスを示した。本研究は、L2,1-2 ノルムを用いて、ニューラルネットワークに特徴選択を導入する手法を提案する。スパース性を持つL2,1 ノルムと比べて、L2,1-2 ノルムはよりスパースな解が得られる。このため、L2,1-2 ノルムを用いるとき、より強い特徴選択効果とノイズの影響を減少することができると考えられる。提案法は特徴選択が目的であるため、モデルの構造として、入力層だけL2,1-2 ノルムを加える。そして、より頑健なモデルを得るため、他の層にL2,2 ノルム（Frobenius norm）正則化項を加える。提案法は、L2,2 ノルム正則化より高い分類精度を得られる方法と考えられる。五つのオープンデータセットを用いて実験を行った。正則化項なし、全部層がL2,2 ノルム正則化、入力層L2,1 ノルム正則化他の層がL2,2 ノルム正則化と提案法合わせて四組の実験を行った。五分割交差検定の結果より、提案法が一番良い分類精度が得られた。L2,1 ノルムのスパース特性に関する実験も行い、提案法がよりスパースな解とより高い分類精度が得られた。提案法とL2,2 ノルム正則化についてｔ検定も行い、有意差が示された。結論として、提案法がL2,2 ノルム正則化と比べて、分類精度がより高く、より頑健なモデルを構築することができた。電気通信大学202

Teachers' experiences of teacher-led professional development programs :an exploratory study of two clusters in the Mthatha district

Professional growth of teachers is not new, but in recent years, the way in which it is structured and delivered has been reconceptualised. As part of the education reform process, many nations are investing in teacher education as a major engine for driving the changes in the classrooms to ensure learners’ academic success. South Africa is no exclusion to this trend of education reforms, hence, the founding of many professional growth initiatives. Most of these initiatives are aimed at Science and Maths teachers. This was mostly because the majority of Science and Maths teachers in South Africa are considered either under-qualified or not qualified to teach the subject. Yet, despite the efforts and enthusiasm, very little seems to have shifted in the teachers’ practices. Much of the literature still shows that even clusters are not effective in changing the situation completely. Using a qualitative case study design, the researcher explored teachers’ views on their clustering experience, and the benefits such participation and experience brings to their classroom instruction. The major findings of the study show that teachers find clustering as a tool that enriches their teaching, thus, both the content knowledge as well as their pedagogical strategies. The findings also show a consensus of teachers who need the cluster programs done continuously. The researcher concludes that teachers are still not happy with the professional development that is offered to them, and therefore recommends that such programs be offered according to teacher’s need