From contrastive rhetoric to intercultural rhetoric: Why intercultural rhetoric needs to reframe the concept of culture

Udostępnienie publikacji Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego finansowane w ramach projektu „Doskonałość naukowa kluczem do doskonałości kształcenia”. Projekt realizowany jest ze środków Europejskiego Funduszu Społecznego w ramach Programu Operacyjnego Wiedza Edukacja Rozwój; nr umowy: POWER.03.05.00-00-Z092/17-00

Environment-induced mixing processes in quantum walks

The mixing process of discrete-time quantum walks on one-dimensional lattices is revisited in a setting where the walker is coupled to an environment, and the time evolution of the walker and the environment is unitary. The mixing process is found to be incomplete, in the sense that the walker does not approach the maximally mixed state indefinitely, but the distance to the maximally mixed state saturates to some finite value depending on the size of the environment. The quantum speedup of mixing time is investigated numerically as the size of the environment decreases from infinity to a finite value. The mixing process in this unitary setting can be explained by interpreting it as an equilibration process in a closed quantum system, where subsystems can exhibit equilibration even when the entropy of the total system remains zero.Comment: 11 pages. Same as the published versio

Discovering Evolutionary Stepping Stones through Behavior Domination

Behavior domination is proposed as a tool for understanding and harnessing the power of evolutionary systems to discover and exploit useful stepping stones. Novelty search has shown promise in overcoming deception by collecting diverse stepping stones, and several algorithms have been proposed that combine novelty with a more traditional fitness measure to refocus search and help novelty search scale to more complex domains. However, combinations of novelty and fitness do not necessarily preserve the stepping stone discovery that novelty search affords. In several existing methods, competition between solutions can lead to an unintended loss of diversity. Behavior domination defines a class of algorithms that avoid this problem, while inheriting theoretical guarantees from multiobjective optimization. Several existing algorithms are shown to be in this class, and a new algorithm is introduced based on fast non-dominated sorting. Experimental results show that this algorithm outperforms existing approaches in domains that contain useful stepping stones, and its advantage is sustained with scale. The conclusion is that behavior domination can help illuminate the complex dynamics of behavior-driven search, and can thus lead to the design of more scalable and robust algorithms.Comment: To Appear in Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO 2017

Restoring Self-Sufficiency with Suboxone Group Therapy

No different than many other Northeastern states, Maine continues to face an opioid epidemic. Drug-induced deaths continue to rise each year and Lewiston, ME remains no exception. In 2017 Maine saw 418 deaths related to drugs, a number that is only increasing every year. There remains a rising need for effective treatments such as medically assisted therapy. Starting in 2018, the Family Medicine Residency at the Central Maine Medical Center created such a group and began treating patients. The scope of this research is to track improvements in self-sufficiency among patients and to aide in advertisement of the program. Programs like this often remain unknown to those seeking treatment.https://scholarworks.uvm.edu/fmclerk/1408/thumbnail.jp

Agent-based simulation of open source evolution

We present an agent-based simulation model developed to study how size, complexity and effort relate to each other in the development of open source software (OSS). In the model, many developer agents generate, extend, and re-factor code modules independently and in parallel. This accords with empirical observations of OSS development. To our knowledge, this is the first model of OSS evolution that includes the complexity of software modules as a limiting factor in productivity, the fitness of the software to its requirements, and the motivation of developers. Validation of the model was done by comparing the simulated results against four measures of software evolution (system size, proportion of highly complex modules, level of complexity control work, and distribution of changes) for four large OSS systems. The simulated results resembled the observed data, except for system size: three of the OSS systems showed alternating patterns of super-linear and sub-linear growth, while the simulations produced only super-linear growth. However, the fidelity of the model for the other measures suggests that developer motivation and the limiting effect of complexity on productivity have a significant effect on the development of OSS systems and should be considered in any model of OSS development