Learning a Partitioning Advisor with Deep Reinforcement Learning

Commercial data analytics products such as Microsoft Azure SQL Data Warehouse or Amazon Redshift provide ready-to-use scale-out database solutions for OLAP-style workloads in the cloud. While the provisioning of a database cluster is usually fully automated by cloud providers, customers typically still have to make important design decisions which were traditionally made by the database administrator such as selecting the partitioning schemes. In this paper we introduce a learned partitioning advisor for analytical OLAP-style workloads based on Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL). The main idea is that a DRL agent learns its decisions based on experience by monitoring the rewards for different workloads and partitioning schemes. We evaluate our learned partitioning advisor in an experimental evaluation with different databases schemata and workloads of varying complexity. In the evaluation, we show that our advisor is not only able to find partitionings that outperform existing approaches for automated partitioning design but that it also can easily adjust to different deployments. This is especially important in cloud setups where customers can easily migrate their cluster to a new set of (virtual) machines

A graphic identity program for the Judicial Commission

None provided

Simplicity in form: functional and sculptural

None provided

Parenting Stress and Child Disruptive Behaviors: The Mediating Role of Parental Negative Talk

High parental stress and child disruptive behaviors tend to coexist. Furthermore, parental negative talk towards children cam impair child functioning later in life. In the present study, we sought to determine whether parental negative talk was a mediating variable between parenting stress and child disruptive behaviors. Fifty-two parent-child dyads from Eastern Kentucky participated in an analog Parent-Child Interaction Therapy (PCIT) behavioral observation and parents were given self-report measures for parenting stress and child disruptive behaviors. Bivariate and multiple regression analyses were used to predict variance in child disruptive behaviors based on parenting stress with parental negative talk as a mediating variable. Bivariate regression analysis revealed a significant relationship between parenting stress and child disruptive behaviors, t(1, 50)= 4.646, p \u3c .000, but multiple regression analysis did not support mediation by parental negative talk in this relationship, t(2,46)= 1.941, p \u3c .058. Findings supported the hypothesis that increased levels of parenting stress are related to increased levels of child disruptive behaviors, but findings did not support the hypothesis that parental negative talk during Parent Led Play mediates between parenting stress and child disruptive behaviors

Waves and Words: Oscillatory activity and language processing

Successful language comprehension depends not only on the involvement of different domain-specific linguistic processes, but also on their respective time-courses. Both aspects of the comprehension process can be examined by means of event-related brain potentials (ERPs), which not only provide a direct reflection of human brain activity within the millisecond range, but also allow for a qualitative dissociation between different language-related processing domains. However, recent ERP findings indicate that the desired one-to-one mapping between ERP components and linguistic processes cannot be upheld, thus leading to an interpretative uncertainty. This thesis presents a fundamentally new analysis technique for language-based ERP components, which aims to address the ambiguity associated with traditional language-related ERP effects. It is argued that this new method, which supplements ERP measures with corresponding frequency-based analyses, not only allows for a differentiation of ERP components on the basis of activity in distinct frequency bands and underlying dynamic behaviour (in terms of power changes and/or phase locking), but also provides further insights into the functional organisation of the language comprehension system and its inherent complexity. On the basis of 5 EEG experiments, I show (1) that it is possible to dissociate two superficially indistinguishable language-related ERP components on the basis of their respective underlying frequency characteristics (Experiment 1), thereby resolving the vagueness of interpretation inherent to the ERP components themselves; (2) that the processing nature of the ‘classical’ semantic N400 effect can be unambiguously specified in terms of its underlying frequency characteristics, i.e. in terms of (evoked and whole) power and phase-locking differences in specific frequency bands, thereby allowing for a first interpretative categorisation of the N400 effect with respect to its underlying neuronal processing dynamics; and (3) that frequency-based analyses may be employed to distinguish the semantic N400 effect from N400-like effects that appear in contexts which cannot readily be characterised as semantic-interpretative processes. Experiments 2 – 5 investigated the processing of antonym relations under different task conditions. Whereas in Experiment 2, the processing of antonym pairs (black – white) was compared to that of related (black – yellow) and non-related (black – nice) word pairs in a sentence context, Experiments 3 to 5 presented isolated word pairs. The frequency-based analysis showed that the observed N400 effects were not uniform in nature, but rather resulted from the superposition of functionally different frequency components. Task-relevant targets elicited a specific frequency modulation, which showed up as a P300-like positivity in terms of ERP measures. In addition, lexical-semantic processing elicited a pronounced increase in a different frequency range that was independent of the experimental context. For antonyms (Experiments 2 and 3), the task-related positive component appeared almost simultaneously to the N400 deflection for non-related words, thereby giving rise to a substantial N400 effect. In contrast, for pseudowords (Experiment 5), this positivity appeared in temporal succession to the N400. In sum, in the present results provide converging evidence that N400 effects should not be regarded as functionally uniform. Depending on the respective task and stimulus manipulations, the N400 effect appears as a result of the superposition of functionally different activities, which can be clearly distinguished in terms of their underlying frequency characteristics. In this way, the proposed frequency-based methods directly bear upon the interpretation of language-related ERP effects and thus have straightforward consequences for psycholinguistic theory. In view of the phenomenon that language-related processes have, in a number of cases, been directly attributed to the lexical-semantic processing domain on account of the observation of an N400, these results not only call for a reinterpretation of previous findings but also for a reinterpretation of their theoretical consequences

Islam in History [4th grade]

Students will probe the questions of what exactly makes up a religion & how belief systems shape worldviews, spread, and interact as they learn about the founding and spread of Islam. Students will recognize that different belief systems meet similar needs and share common elements, learning Students will explore the history of Islam s origins and its spread and variation up to the present day. They will look at how its ideas have spread, as well as how they were received in different areas of the world. Students will also look at the Crusades as an example of beliefs in conflict, exploring various possible perspectives on the events and situations these invasions produced. In two performance assessments, students will take their new understanding of Islam to more applied settings. First, they will pose as travelers visiting Islamic lands, producing a travel log and interpreting their experience through various scrapbook items from their journeys that stress perspective. Second, students will role play all elements of Meccan society just before Muhammad returned to Mecca and established it as the center of the Islamic Faith

Outlines on Gospels Adopted by Synodical Conference

Outlines on Gospels Adopted by Synodical Conferenc

Age changes in shape and morphology in Arikara subadult ilia

This study examines the growth of the ilium in an American Indian skeletal series. This study was done because of the lack of previous study in this area using statistical interpretation of the changes. The samples consists of subadults from four Arikara cemeteries found in northern South Dakota; two of the samples are separate occupations of the same site. An unknown age and sex sample was used because of its availability and because of the unavailability of known subadult skeletal samples. Eight measurements were taken on each ilium and two non-metric traits recorded. Maximum femur lengths, gathered in a previous study, were then matched with their corresponding ilia. Femur length was used as an indication of biological age and used to hold age changes constant. Logrithmic transformation of the raw data was performed to eliminate non-linear trends in the femur length to iliac relationships