Distancing Strategies, Exclusive Clusters and Other Ironies of my American Peers

Being able to study abroad is a huge privilege. I am very lucky to have been given that privilege twice. I was accepted to Gettysburg College two and a half years ago, and studied abroad in the United States. Now, I am studying abroad again in Copenhagen, Denmark with a program that connects many colleges and universities in the US. It has been a month now and I am having a good time. But my first few weeks in Copenhagen were not the same as my first few weeks in Gettysburg. Strangely enough, it was much more uncomfortable and harder to adjust. [excerpt

Efficient maximum likelihood estimation for L\'{e}vy-driven Ornstein-Uhlenbeck processes

We consider the problem of efficient estimation of the drift parameter of an Ornstein-Uhlenbeck type process driven by a L\'{e}vy process when high-frequency observations are given. The estimator is constructed from the time-continuous likelihood function that leads to an explicit maximum likelihood estimator and requires knowledge of the continuous martingale part. We use a thresholding technique to approximate the continuous part of the process. Under suitable conditions, we prove asymptotic normality and efficiency in the H\'{a}jek-Le Cam sense for the resulting drift estimator. Finally, we investigate the finite sample behavior of the method and compare our approach to least squares estimation.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.3150/13-BEJ510 the Bernoulli (http://isi.cbs.nl/bernoulli/) by the International Statistical Institute/Bernoulli Society (http://isi.cbs.nl/BS/bshome.htm

MISO Capacity with Per-Antenna Power Constraint

We establish in closed-form the capacity and the optimal signaling scheme for a MISO channel with per-antenna power constraint. Two cases of channel state information are considered: constant channel known at both the transmitter and receiver, and Rayleigh fading channel known only at the receiver. For the first case, the optimal signaling scheme is beamforming with the phases of the beam weights matched to the phases of the channel coefficients, but the amplitudes independent of the channel coefficients and dependent only on the constrained powers. For the second case, the optimal scheme is to send independent signals from the antennas with the constrained powers. In both cases, the capacity with per-antenna power constraint is usually less than that with sum power constraint.Comment: 7 pages double-column, 3 figure

The Pragmatics of Arabic Religious Posts on Facebook: A Relevance-Theoretic Account

Despite growing interest in the impact of computer-mediated communication on our lives, linguistic studies on such communication conducted in the Arabic language are scarce. Grounded in Relevance Theory, this paper seeks to fill this void by analysing the linguistic structure of Arabic religious posts on Facebook. First, I discuss communication on Facebook, treating it as a relevance-seeking process of writing or sharing posts, with the functions of ‘Like’ and ‘Share’ seen as cues for communicating propositional attitude. Second, I analyse a corpus of around 80 posts, revealing an interesting use of imperatives, interrogatives and conditionals which manipulate the interpretation of such posts between descriptive and interpretive readings. I also argue that a rigorous system of incentives is employed in such posts in order to boost their relevance. Positive, negative and challenging incentives link the textual to the visual message in an attempt to raise more cognitive effects for the readers

Study Day

Postcard from Mai Doan, during the Linfield College Semester Abroad Program in Aix-en-Provence, Franc

I Hope

As I have gotten older, I have learned that no matter how hard I try, I am never going to be able to repay my mother for everything that she did for me. The blood, sweat, and tears she put into nurturing the sick and troublesome, five-year-old me, the rebellious and lazy fifteen-year-old me, and the clumsy, and sometimes lost me now, are insurmountable. I know she had more trouble raising me than she was supposed to. I know her first five years of being a mother did not include taking me to the park, sitting down on a park bench, and having a family picnic in the sun. Most of it was watching me struggle on the white sheet of the hospital bed. That is why I have always felt obligated to be her perfect child, to be a daughter so good that no one would be able to say that she had not done a good job raising me. And it was an obligation that I was very happy to fulfill, because I honestly loved being in the mold that she put me in. [excerpt

Concentration of Hot Water Extracts of Anthocyanins obtained from Muscadine Grape Pomace using Membrane-Osmotic Distillation

Anthocyanins are well known for their health-promoting benefits. The goal of this study was to evaluate a distillation-based membrane technology to concentrate aqueous anthocyanins extracted from muscadine grape pomace using polypropylene (PP) or ethylene chlorotrifluoroethylene (ECTFE) membranes. A hot water extraction method was utilized to extract the anthocyanins from the pomace. A pre-experimental run using DI water as feed was conducted to optimize the NaCl brine concentration for osmotic distillation and it was determined that 4M was the optimal concentration. The aqueous anthocyanins extraction was filtrated through a series of filter of different pore sizes before the distillation process. Membrane distillation (MD), osmotic distillation (OD), and membrane osmotic distillation (OMD) were all carried out over a 6-hour period to determine the optimal distillation process. Among the three processes, OMD demonstrated the highest permeate flux value, therefore, it was utilized to conduct the concentration using either PP or ECTFE membranes. The anthocyanins contents before and after the concentration process were measured by High Performance Liquid Chromatography machine. The result shows that OMD paired with ECTFE membrane concentrated the aqueous anthocyanins up to 196% but OMD with PP membrane exhibited a better performance. Concentrating the aqueous anthocyanin extract 280% over a 12-hour period. In addition, the quality of the concentrate was also investigated in terms of NaCl transferring across the membrane to the feed solution. only 0.02% - 0.03% of NaCl was transferred across the membrane to the feed side, indicating it is feasible to obtain concentrated anthocyanin extracts with low salt concentratio