Expressionism in furniture

In the first 25 years of my life, I always thought I was a free man, I followed my passion to choose art and design as my career, and strived to enter the best design school. However, until I moving to Providence, and fished on a beach over the midnight, I finally realized, actually I am the victim in dilemma who is always paralyzed by the standards we created. In that midnight, I realized time is not only a number, it can be the track of galaxy or the fluctuation of tide. And I introspected myself why my schools are the best, just because people defined they are? Did I contemplate about whether they are the most suitable for me? The answer is clear, I always follow suit which is defined by other people, and actually I don’t have my own judgment, I’m living in standards we created. But, I’m lucky, at last, I realize it. Most of time, we need to ‘See through the appearance to perceive the essence’, find the truth which belongs to ourselves. Just like Expressionism, artists create projects to express emotion through abundant color and exaggerated figure rather than depicting objective things. We need to directly rethink the essence of our world without any appearances

Improving the Immunity of Hybrid SET/MOS Circuits Using Boltzmann Machine Network

Rapid progress in the fabrication technology of silicon nano devices has pushed the device dimension toward 1- 100nm length scale, which renders the basic working principles of CMOS devices more dependent upon quantum effects and doping fluctuations. When device dimensions are scaled down to a few nanometers, quantum effects such as single electron tunneling (SET) and energy quantization lead to interesting new device characteristics that can be exploited to create extremely compact circuits. The SET is one type of nanoscale electronic devices based on quantum tunneling and Coulomb blockade effect, where one or more Coulomb islands are sandwiched between two tunnel junctions which connect respectively with the drain electrode and the source electrode, and are capacitively coupled with one or more gate electrodes. However, both pure SET devices and hybrid SET-MOS circuits face a big problem – the background charges, which influence the accuracy of the circuit. In order to improve their immunity against these charges, we introduce the neuron network ‘Boltzmann machine’ into the circuit. This idea is to improve the accuracy with increasing time redundancy. Single-electron circuits show stochastic behaviors in their operation because of the probabilistic nature of electron tunneling phenomena. They can therefore be successfully used for implementing the stochastic neuron operation of Boltzmann machines. This thesis proposes applications of Boltzmann machine network to improve the immunity of hybrid SET/MOS circuits to overcome random background charges. Detailed unit neuron block and whole neuron network model are used to design hybrid SET/MOS circuits. Two applications based on Boltzmann machine are proposed: (1) Multi-bit A/D converter, and (2) One-bit full adder. Simulation was done using Cadence Spectre simulator with 180nm CMOS model and SET MIB macro model for performance evaluation. And it is expected that our idea can be extended to other hybrid SETMOS

Self-Effacement in Christian Mysticism: A Case Study of Teresa of Ávila and Simone Weil

The neoliberal society we live in encourages a constant maximization of the “project of the self.” The tradition of Christian mysticism, centered on self-denial and passivity, provides an alternative understanding of the self. In this essay, I draw testimonial and theoretical accounts of mysticism from the autobiography of a 16th-century Spanish nun, Teresa of Ávila, and essays from a 20th-century French philosopher, Simone Weil. By bringing these two authors in conversation, I hope to illuminate three aspects of self-effacement in the Christian mystical tradition. I first start with discussing the idea of labor as a means to prepare for self-annihilation by rendering the self porous through trauma, which heightens the self’s awareness of its own limit and dependence. The second section argues that the crux of Teresa and Weil’s self-effacement lies in their understanding of Christ’s incarnation and a desire to imitate him. This is done through identifying with Christ’s suffering body or mirroring Christ’s relinquishment of divinity to descend into the human world. Lastly, I explore apophatic language as a suitable mode of representing self-effacement. Teresa and Weil’s use of apophatic language reflects an understanding of God as something beyond the capacity of human intellect and justifies their desire in passively receiving the divine. Throughout this essay, I critically examine the notion of passivity both as internalized by these two mystics as well as sometimes performative and constructed

Sharper Model-free Reinforcement Learning for Average-reward Markov Decision Processes

We develop several provably efficient model-free reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms for infinite-horizon average-reward Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). We consider both online setting and the setting with access to a simulator. In the online setting, we propose model-free RL algorithms based on reference-advantage decomposition. Our algorithm achieves $\widetilde{O}(S^5A^2\mathrm{sp}(h^*)\sqrt{T})$ regret after $T$ steps, where $S\times A$ is the size of state-action space, and $\mathrm{sp}(h^*)$ the span of the optimal bias function. Our results are the first to achieve optimal dependence in $T$ for weakly communicating MDPs. In the simulator setting, we propose a model-free RL algorithm that finds an $\epsilon$-optimal policy using $\widetilde{O} \left(\frac{SA\mathrm{sp}^2(h^*)}{\epsilon^2}+\frac{S^2A\mathrm{sp}(h^*)}{\epsilon} \right)$ samples, whereas the minimax lower bound is $\Omega\left(\frac{SA\mathrm{sp}(h^*)}{\epsilon^2}\right)$. Our results are based on two new techniques that are unique in the average-reward setting: 1) better discounted approximation by value-difference estimation; 2) efficient construction of confidence region for the optimal bias function with space complexity $O(SA)$

Correlation between Parenting Styles and Learning Stress Junior High School Chinese class Students in Zibo City, China

In this study, we investigate the significance of parenting styles in the educational development of junior high school students, recognizing the vital role of family education during this formative period. As the primary educators of their children, parents wield considerable influence on their offspring’s lives, with family education offering distinct advantages over other forms of education. The status and role of family education remain undisputed. Parenting styles encompass a combination of upbringing concepts, behaviors, and emotional expressions toward children. We examine the characteristics and determining factors of different parenting styles, focusing on three typical family upbringing patterns: authoritative, Authoritarian, and democratic. Additionally, we explore the significant impact of these diverse parenting styles on students’ stress levels related to learning Chinese. The paper delves into the essential role of effective and suitable parenting styles in fostering comprehensive and healthy development in students. Furthermore, we elucidate the strategies and methods for establishing positive parenting styles. This quantitative correlational research involved a random sample of 330 participants, collected from three junior middle schools in Zibo City. Utilizing SPSS, we analyzed the relationship between parenting styles and Chinese learning stress among junior high school student

Bandwidth Tunable Optical Filter Based on the Quad-Mode Resonator

An innovative bandwidth tunable optical filter with controllable bandwidth, center frequency, and transmission zero is proposed in this paper. The proposed filter utilizes a quad-mode resonator to achieve a wideband filter centered at 2.42 GHz. By incorporating varactor diodes into the open branches of the resonator, the proposed filter's center frequency and bandwidth can be dynamically adjusted via the voltage applied to the diodes. This tunable filter exhibits low insertion loss of less than 2 dB, return loss exceeding 10 dB, and a relative bandwidth of up to 40%