Cross border conservation - China - North Korea border

Earth today faces an accelerated species extinction problem because of human presence, which is 1,000 to 10,000 times higher than the natural extinction rates. Over 27.8% of species are threatened (IUCN). An increased extinction rate will cause the ecosystem to lose its balance and break the shield for most species, including human beings. (Wilson, 2017) Conservation is one of the most important methods to save species; conserving in transboundary areas will increase efficiency. These areas are untouched and protected, forming a new biodiversity paradise. The Transboundary conservation project would benefit the ecology aspect and social, cultural, and political. This thesis will use one of the most endangered species on earth, the crane, as the target species to design a conservation project along the China and North Korea border

When Equity Is Optional: Does Accountability Drive School Spending?

This analysis explores whether state accountability systems effectively drive additional resources to low-performing schools identified for support under the Every Student Succeeds Act

Educating designers through Materials Club

[EN] Material education is becoming a crucial element in the process of change that is involving the teaching in the field of design. The affirmation of fab labs in design education is increasingly manifested both in traditional classroom didactics and prototyping practices in studio. The growth number of fab labs in universities, have a high potential to change the original material didactics into participatory activities. Based on this situation, this paper aims to analysis how existing fab lab systems can be reframed to maximize benefits in the material education in design domain. As a result, we elaborate the concept of Materials Club as an enabling system to support design students developing their design projects with materials and being highly involvement inside the co-creative study community. In conclusion, Materials Club as an optimize of the fab lab system, can increase the effectiveness in material education. This scenario also promotes us to think about a universal method, which is valorizing the resources which already exist in university and integrate them in a virtuous system for reinforcing the design and material education.http://ocs.editorial.upv.es/index.php/HEAD/HEAD18Zhou, Z.; Rognoli, V.; Ayala-García, C. (2018). Educating designers through Materials Club. Editorial Universitat Politècnica de València. 1367-1375. https://doi.org/10.4995/HEAD18.2018.8206OCS1367137

Improving Generalization in Language Model-Based Text-to-SQL Semantic Parsing: Two Simple Semantic Boundary-Based Techniques

Compositional and domain generalization present significant challenges in semantic parsing, even for state-of-the-art semantic parsers based on pre-trained language models (LMs). In this study, we empirically investigate improving an LM's generalization in semantic parsing with two simple techniques: at the token level, we introduce a token preprocessing method to preserve the semantic boundaries of tokens produced by LM tokenizers; at the sequence level, we propose to use special tokens to mark the boundaries of components aligned between input and output. Our experimental results on two text-to-SQL semantic parsing datasets show that our token preprocessing, although simple, can substantially improve the LM performance on both types of generalization, and our component boundary marking method is particularly helpful for compositional generalization.Comment: 9 pages, to be published in ACL202

From biomaterial-based data storage to bio-inspired artificial synapse

The implementation of biocompatible and biodegradable information storage would be a significant step toward next-generation green electronics. On the other hand, benefiting from high density, multifunction, low power consumption and multilevel data storage, artificial synapses exhibit attractive future for built-in nonvolatile memories and reconstructed logic operations. Here, we provide a comprehensive and critical review on the developments of bio-memories with a view to inspire more intriguing ideas on this area that may finally open up a new chapter in next-generation consumer electronics. We will discuss that biomolecule-based memory employed evolutionary natural biomaterials as data storage node and artificial synapse emulated biological synapse function, which is expected to conquer the bottleneck of the traditional von Neumann architecture. Finally, challenges and opportunities in the aforementioned bio-memory area are presented