Individualism and Nonconformity in Ralph Waldo Emerson\u27s ‘Self-Reliance\u27

My presentation utilizes the etymology of the word genius to explore Emerson’s “Self-Reliance.” Emerson would empower the individual in a conformist society to find harmony through nonconformity. The etymology of genius as a spiritual guide reinforces his stance on individualism, namely by qualifying the spirit, or the individual’s discretion, as all-powerful and constant. The word is rooted in the belief that a “spirit attendant” overlooks and guides the host body of each individual. Genius has also been defined as the “personification of a person’s natural appetites.” In terms of Emerson’s genius, man’s inherent appetite to belong to a collective reinforces the necessity of self-reliance. In an article from the Berkeley-based Greater Good Magazine, Zaid Jilani explains that The power of conformity . . . has deep implications for polarization.

ATOMIC: An Atlas of Machine Commonsense for If-Then Reasoning

We present ATOMIC, an atlas of everyday commonsense reasoning, organized through 877k textual descriptions of inferential knowledge. Compared to existing resources that center around taxonomic knowledge, ATOMIC focuses on inferential knowledge organized as typed if-then relations with variables (e.g., "if X pays Y a compliment, then Y will likely return the compliment"). We propose nine if-then relation types to distinguish causes vs. effects, agents vs. themes, voluntary vs. involuntary events, and actions vs. mental states. By generatively training on the rich inferential knowledge described in ATOMIC, we show that neural models can acquire simple commonsense capabilities and reason about previously unseen events. Experimental results demonstrate that multitask models that incorporate the hierarchical structure of if-then relation types lead to more accurate inference compared to models trained in isolation, as measured by both automatic and human evaluation.Comment: AAAI 2019 C

Individualism and Nonconformity in Ralph Waldo Emerson\u27s Self-Reliance

My presentation utilizes the etymology of the word genius to explore Emerson’s “Self-Reliance.” Emerson would empower the individual in a conformist society to find harmony through nonconformity. The etymology of genius as a spiritual guide reinforces his stance on individualism, namely by qualifying the spirit, or the individual’s discretion, as all-powerful and constant. The word is rooted in the belief that a “spirit attendant” overlooks and guides the host body of each individual. Genius has also been defined as the “personification of a person’s natural appetites.” In terms of Emerson’s genius, man’s inherent appetite to belong to a collective reinforces the necessity of self-reliance. In an article from the Berkeley-based Greater Good Magazine, Zaid Jilani explains that The power of conformity . . . has deep implications for polarization.

Adapting Open Information Extraction to Domain-Specific Relations

Information extraction (IE) can identify a set of relations from free text to support question answering (QA). Until recently, IE systems were domain specific and needed a combination of manual engineering and supervised learning to adapt to each target domain. A new paradigm, Open IE, operates on large text corpora without any manual tagging of relations, and indeed without any prespecified relations. Due to its open-domain and open-relation nature, Open IE is purely textual and is unable to relate the surface forms to an ontology, if known in advance. We explore the steps needed to adapt Open IE to a domain-specific ontology and demonstrate our approach of mapping domainindependent tuples to an ontology using domains from the DARPA Machine Reading Project. Our system achieves precision over 0.90 from as few as eight training examples for an NFL-scoring domain

Is xylem of angiosperm leaves less resistant to embolism than branches? Insights from microCT, hydraulics, and anatomy

According to the hydraulic vulnerability segmentation hypothesis, leaves are more vulnerable to decline of hydraulic conductivity than branches, but whether stem xylem is more embolism resistant than leaves remains unclear.Drought-induced embolism resistance of leaf xylem was investigated based on X-ray computed tomography (microCT) for Betula pendula, Laurus nobilis, and Liriodendron tulipifera, excluding outside-xylem, and compared to hydraulic vulnerability curves for branch xylem. Moreover, bordered pit characters related to embolism resistance were investigated for both organs. Theoretical P50-values (i.e., the xylem pressure corresponding to 50% loss of hydraulic conductance) of leaves were generally within the same range as hydraulic P50 values of branches. P50 values of leaves were similar to branches for L. tulipifera (-2.01 vs. -2.10 MPa, respectively), more negative for B. pendula (-2.87 vs. -1.80 MPa), and less negative for L. nobilis (-6.4 vs. -9.2 MPa). Despite more narrow conduits in leaves than branches, mean interconduit pit membrane thickness was similar in both organs, but significantly higher in leaves of B. pendula than branches. This case study indicates that xylem shows a largely similar embolism resistance across leaves and branches, although differences both within and across organs may occur, suggesting interspecific variation to the hydraulic vulnerability segmentation hypothesis