CloudTree: A Library to Extend Cloud Services for Trees

In this work, we propose a library that enables on a cloud the creation and management of tree data structures from a cloud client. As a proof of concept, we implement a new cloud service CloudTree. With CloudTree, users are able to organize big data into tree data structures of their choice that are physically stored in a cloud. We use caching, prefetching, and aggregation techniques in the design and implementation of CloudTree to enhance performance. We have implemented the services of Binary Search Trees (BST) and Prefix Trees as current members in CloudTree and have benchmarked their performance using the Amazon Cloud. The idea and techniques in the design and implementation of a BST and prefix tree is generic and thus can also be used for other types of trees such as B-tree, and other link-based data structures such as linked lists and graphs. Preliminary experimental results show that CloudTree is useful and efficient for various big data applications

On the Cost of Negation for Dynamic Pruning

Negated query terms allow documents containing such terms to be filtered out of a search results list, supporting disambiguation. In this work, the effect of negation on the efficiency of disjunctive, top-k retrieval is examined. First, we show how negation can be integrated efficiently into two popular dynamic pruning algorithms. Then, we explore the efficiency of our approach, and show that while often efficient, negation can negatively impact the dynamic pruning effectiveness for certain queries

Austen Goes Pop: The Evolution of Jane Austen from Rural Writer to Contemporary Icon

Living in rural England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Jane Austen had a very quiet life. She was pretty far removed from the strife and turmoil that existed during her lifetime. She never went to college. She never married and never had children. She never traveled outside of England. However, the idea that Austen had no life is simply a misnomer. If her novels were any indication of her world, Austen had a very rich life. Given that her novels are still being read and discussed today, they are many universal themes applicable to today. When Austen died in 1817, few people knew her name. During her lifetime, she gained very little fame for her six novels, quietly publishing anonymously as “A Woman.” After her death, Austen’s sister Cassandra published her last two novels, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. Those books sold well, but modestly. Only when Walter Scott, a great literary critic in England, praised the books in an article in 1837 was more attention paid to her work (Tomalin 273). Moving forward to contemporary times, Austen’s novels have a life of their own, being adapted into movies. Some of these try to remain true to her world, while others take her themes and adapt them to different places and time periods. Her novels have also spawned sequels and other novels that pay tribute to her world. After almost a century of scholars and readers believing Austen had no life, there has also been a renewed interest in the woman herself. Some of the intense fandom has grown separately around Pride and Prejudice’s Mr. Darcy, especially as portrayed by Colin Firth in 1995 BBC miniseries. While most of her fans are in Great Britain and the United States, Austen remains popular in many parts of the English-speaking world. She has emerged from being an author to become a pop culture figure

Statistics and semantics in the acquisition of Spanish word order: testing two accounts of the retreat from locative overgeneralization errors

Native speakers of Spanish (children aged 6–7, 10–11 and adults) rated grammatical and ungrammatical ground- and figure-locative sentences with high frequency, low frequency and novel verbs (e. g., Lisa llenó/forró/nupó la caja con papel; *Lisa llenó/forró/nupó papel en la caja, ‘Lisa filled/ lined/nupped the box with paper’; ‘Lisa filled/lined/nupped paper into the box’) using a 5-point scale. Echoing the findings of a previous English study (a language with some important syntactic differences relevant to the locative), participants rated errors as least acceptable with high frequency verbs, more acceptable with low frequency verbs, and most acceptable with novel verbs, suggesting that learners retreat from error using statistically-based learning mechanisms regardless of the target language. In support of the semantic verb class hypothesis, adults showed evidence of using the meanings assigned to novel verbs to determine the locative constructions in which they can and cannot appear. However, unlike in the previous English study, the child groups did not. We conclude that the more flexible word order exhibited by Spanish, as compared to English, may make these types of regularities more difficult to discern. Keywords: child language acquisition, Spanish, locatives, argument structure overgeneralization errors, verb semantics, statistical learning, entrenchment, pre-emptio

Unusual Behavior in Parental Care by a House Wren (Troglodytes aedon): Post Fledging Use of an Old Nest During Cold Nights

I report on the unusual behavior of an adult House Wren (Troglodytes aedon) leading recently fledged young back to the nest for two consecutive nights. The ambient temperature reached below 0°C during both nights. Despite disadvantages associated with remaining in the nest, this observation suggests that adult birds may assess trade-offs between perceived risks versus the benefits of engaging in other activities, in this case roosting communally for thermoregulation

A comparison of evaluation measures given how users perform on search tasks

Information retrieval has a strong foundation of empirical investigation: based on the position of relevant resources in a ranked answer list, a variety of system performance metrics can be calculated. One of the most widely reported measures, mean average precision (MAP), provides a single numerical value that aims to capture the overall performance of a retrieval system. However, recent work has suggested that broad measures such as MAP do not relate to actual user performance on a number of search tasks. In this paper, we investigate the relationship between various retrieval metrics, and consider how these reflect user search performance. Our results suggest that there are two distinct categories of measures: those that focus on high precision in an answer list, and those that attempt to capture a broader summary, for example by including a recall component. Analysis of runs submitted to the TREC terabyte track in 2006 suggests that the relative performance of systems can differ significantly depending on which group of measures is being used

A Characterization of West Virginia Coyotes (Canis Latrans) Utilizing Skull Morphology

Coyotes (Canis latrans) are now found throughout North and Central America, but before European colonization were restricted to west of the Mississippi. Migration occurred in two major paths to the East; north over the Great Lakes (through Canada) and south below the Great Lakes. The location of these routes is significant because those migrating north interbred with the wolves that reside there. These hybrid animals are larger and behaviorally different from their western counterparts. It is possible to differentiate these hybrids morphologically and genetically. Hybrids are known to be located in Maine, New York, and Pennsylvania, but the interest of this study was to determine if their range has spread to include West Virginia. Fourteen measurements were taken by hand using digital calipers on 126 skulls from West Virginia and Ohio and 25 domestic dog skulls. Utilizing PCA, ANOVAs, and multivariate allometry, these data were compared to data collected on coyote populations from western and northeastern North America. Results conclude that while West Virginia coyotes show some similarities to both comparative populations, they are a distinct population with unique morphological variation, and additionally show no similarities to dogs. The distinct morphology of West Virginia coyotes may be due to ecological pressure to adapt that varies from the West and is influenced to lesser degree by admixture with other species than the Northeast

Relevance thresholds in system evaluations

We introduce and explore the concept of an individual's relevance threshold as a way of reconciling differences in outcomes between batch and user experiments