Text to 3D Scene Generation with Rich Lexical Grounding

The ability to map descriptions of scenes to 3D geometric representations has many applications in areas such as art, education, and robotics. However, prior work on the text to 3D scene generation task has used manually specified object categories and language that identifies them. We introduce a dataset of 3D scenes annotated with natural language descriptions and learn from this data how to ground textual descriptions to physical objects. Our method successfully grounds a variety of lexical terms to concrete referents, and we show quantitatively that our method improves 3D scene generation over previous work using purely rule-based methods. We evaluate the fidelity and plausibility of 3D scenes generated with our grounding approach through human judgments. To ease evaluation on this task, we also introduce an automated metric that strongly correlates with human judgments.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figures, 3 tables. To appear in ACL-IJCNLP 201

Effects of Phase Decomposition on the Strength Of CoCrFeMnNi High Entropy Alloy

CoCrFeMnNi high entropy alloy (HEA) serves as a model material that researchers can utilize to gain better understanding of HEA-specific characteristics. When considering CoCrFeMnNi and other HEAs for load-bearing applications, it is necessary to understand possible phase decomposition and its potential influence on mechanical behavior. The aim of this study is to describe phase decomposition in coarse-grained equiatomic CoCrFeMnNi HEA after aging 360 h at 610 °C and 720 h at 700 °C, and show how the reported secondary phases influenced its mechanical behavior via Vickers microhardness and quasi-static tensile experimentation. A Cr-rich phase and MnS inclusion were observed in CoCrFeMnNi aged for 360 h at 610 °C. The magnitude of hardness for this aged material was statistically similar to that of the unaged material, indicating that the Cr-rich phase and MnS precipitates were too small to significantly affect the material hardness. Formation of Cr-rich phase resulted in precipitation strengthening where the yield strength increased by 9% with no significant loss in ductility. Precipitation of Cr-rich, FeCo-rich, and FeCr-rich phases and the MnS inclusion were observed after aging 720 h at 700 °C, resulting in a substantial decrease in yield strength from 291 MPa to 130 MPa. The ultimate tensile strength exhibited a shallower decline due in part to strength preservation via the extensive work hardening ability of CoCrFeMnNi. The significant decrease in strength was accompanied by reduction in ductility due to the overall brittle nature of the secondary phases and severe softening resulting from segregation of Ni. The effects of phase decomposition on the mechanical properties of CoCrFeMnNi after aging 720 h at 700 °C are consistent with reports concerning phase decomposed austenitic stainless steel, namely degradation of the material’s strength and ductility

Prophets & protest : the transformation of U.S. Christian activism, 1960-2000

textThe second half of the 20th century saw the emergence of consequential and diverse social movements inspired by Christian moral commitments, from anti-communism and temperance to Civil Rights and fundamentalism. Few studies, however, have systematically analyzed this important sector of activism adequately, though it lies at the intersection of two vital sociological areas: the sociology of religion and political sociology. This dissertation is the first comprehensive study of Christian activist organizations, creating and analyzing an electronic database of approximately 500 unique Christian social movement organizations along nearly 50 variables including overall population changes, denominational variation, geographic diffusion, tactical repertoires, and issues engaged. Findings indicate that changes originating in religious demographics and culture preceded and led to related changes in American politics, overall in a conservative direction. At a macro level, data also consistently point to a homeostatic, cybernetic effect generating medium-term cultural equilibrium between progressive and conservative Christian activists. At the micro-level, findings illustrate the essential role of cultural entrepreneurs motivated by religious values and identities in redefining, publicizing, and defending the moral boundaries which create and sustain social movements.Sociolog

Programmable N-body interactions with trapped ions

Trapped atomic ion qubits or effective spins are a powerful quantum platform for quantum computation and simulation, featuring densely connected and efficiently programmable interactions between the spins. While native interactions between trapped ion spins are typically pairwise, many quantum algorithms and quantum spin models naturally feature couplings between triplets, quartets or higher orders of spins. Here we formulate and analyze a mechanism that extends the standard M\o{}lmer-S\o{}rensen pairwise entangling gate and generates a controllable and programmable coupling between $N$ spins of trapped ions. We show that spin-dependent optical forces applied at twice the motional frequency generate a coordinate-transformation of the collective ion motion in phase-space, rendering displacement forces that are nonlinear in the spin operators. We formulate a simple framework that enables a systematic and faithful construction of high-order spin Hamiltonians and gates, including the effect of multiple modes of motion, and characterize the performance of such operations under realistic conditions