Study of the method of geometric mean distances used in inductance calculations

The object of this thesis is to study the method of geometric mean distances as applied in the calculation of inductances of transmission line conductors and of multicircuit transmission lines. The thesis will consist of: (a) the derivation of some of the basic theorems and equations to be used, (b) the use of these theorems and equations in calculating the geometric mean distances of different transmission line conductors, and (c) practical application of geometric mean distances applied in the calculation of equivalent inductance of multicircuit transmission lines. The method of geometric mean distances as applied to individual conductors of single circuit lines is widely used on a well established basis. Methods and rules for application to multicircuit lines of various types are not so well formulated. It is hoped that these latter rules may be better developed in this thesis --Introduction, page 1

Glyphosate’s Suppression of Cytochrome P450 Enzymes and Amino Acid Biosynthesis by the Gut Microbiome: Pathways to Modern Diseases

Glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup[superscript ®], is the most popular herbicide used worldwide. The industry asserts it is minimally toxic to humans, but here we argue otherwise. Residues are found in the main foods of the Western diet, comprised primarily of sugar, corn, soy and wheat. Glyphosate's inhibition of cytochrome P450 (CYP) enzymes is an overlooked component of its toxicity to mammals. CYP enzymes play crucial roles in biology, one of which is to detoxify xenobiotics. Thus, glyphosate enhances the damaging effects of other food borne chemical residues and environmental toxins. Negative impact on the body is insidious and manifests slowly over time as inflammation damages cellular systems throughout the body. Here, we show how interference with CYP enzymes acts synergistically with disruption of the biosynthesis of aromatic amino acids by gut bacteria, as well as impairment in serum sulfate transport. Consequences are most of the diseases and conditions associated with a Western diet, which include gastrointestinal disorders, obesity, diabetes, heart disease, depression, autism, infertility, cancer and Alzheimer’s disease. We explain the documented effects of glyphosate and its ability to induce disease, and we show that glyphosate is the “textbook example” of exogenous semiotic entropy: the disruption of homeostasis by environmental toxins.Quanta Computer (Firm

Dialogue-Oriented Review Summary Generation for Spoken Dialogue Recommendation Systems

In this paper we present an opinion summarization technique in spoken dialogue systems. Opinion mining has been well studied for years, but very few have considered its application in spoken dialogue systems. Review summarization, when applied to real dialogue systems, is much more complicated than pure text-based summarization. We conduct a systematic study on dialogue-system-oriented review analysis and propose a three-level framework for a recommendation dialogue system. In previous work we have explored a linguistic parsing approach to phrase extraction from reviews. In this paper we will describe an approach using statistical models such as decision trees and SVMs to select the most representative phrases from the extracted phrase set. We will also explain how to generate informative yet concise review summaries for dialogue purposes. Experimental results in the restaurant domain show that the proposed approach using decision tree algorithms achieves an outperformance of 13% compared to SVM models and an improvement of 36% over a heuristic rule baseline. Experiments also show that the decision-tree-based phrase selection model can achieve rather reliable predictions on the phrase label, comparable to human judgment. The proposed statistical approach is based on domain-independent learning features and can be extended to other domains effectively

Utilizing Review Summarization in a Spoken Recommendation System

In this paper we present a framework for spoken recommendation systems. To provide reliable recommendations to users, we incorporate a review summarization technique which extracts informative opinion summaries from grass-roots users‘ reviews. The dialogue system then utilizes these review summaries to support both quality-based opinion inquiry and feature- specific entity search. We propose a probabilistic language generation approach to automatically creating recommendations in spoken natural language from the text-based opinion summaries. A user study in the restaurant domain shows that the proposed approaches can effectively generate reliable and helpful recommendations in human-computer conversations.T-Party ProjectQuanta Computer (Firm

The MIT Summit Speech Recognition System: A Progress Report

Recently, we initiated a project to develop a phonetically-based spoken language understanding system called SUMMIT. In contrast to many of the past efforts that make use of heuristic rules whose development requires intense knowledge engineering, our approach attempts to express the speech knowledge within a formal framework using well-defined mathematical tools. In our system, features and decision strategies are discovered and trained automatically, using a large body of speech data. This paper describes the system, and documents its current performance

Dos debates: Historia, hermenéutica y los orígenes de la representación.

In the last two decades there has been severe criticism of several projects in the area of cultural history which aim to provide an explanation of the histories of things in relation to the construction of modernity. This criticism centers on the error of studying commodities without revealing the meanings of their autonomy as markers of historical processes; in other words, without discovering their fetishistic forms. According to such critics, historical narrative should advocate a style of representation that is sufficiently reflexive to make its own production visible as knowledge that resists fetishistic forms and, at the same time, captures the historical resistance to processes of domination associated with the autonomy of commodities. In this article, such a cultural critique is examined in relation to a debate concerning the conditions of the possibility of symbolic representation and its codification. Without disqualifying any of the positions examined, it is shown that the cultural critique project itself is more limited in its aims and focus than the cultural history and cognitive science projects.En las últimas dos décadas se han hecho críticas severas a varios proyectos de la historia cultural que tratan de explicar las historias de las cosas en la construcción de la modernidad. Las críticas se centran en el error de estudiar mercancías sin revelar los sentidos de su autonomía como marcadores de procesos históricos, es decir, sin descubrir su forma-fetiche. Según los críticos, la narrativa histórica debe procurar un modo de representación suficientemente reflexivo para hacer visible su propia producción como conocimiento que se resiste a la forma-fetiche de la mercancía y, a la vez, captar las resistencias históricas a los procesos de dominación asociados con la autonomía de las mercancías. En este trabajo esa crítica cultural se examina con relación a un debate sobre las condiciones de posibilidad de la representación simbólica y su codificación. Sin descalificar ninguna de las posturas examinadas se establece que el proyecto mismo de la crítica cultural, en sus metas y enfoque, es más limitado que los proyectos de la historia cultural o de la ciencia cognoscitiv

Does Glyphosate Acting as a Glycine Analogue Contribute To ALS?

 Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) is a fatal neurodegenerative disease involving several protein mutations in glycine-rich regions with limited treatment options. 90 - 95% of all cases are non-familial with epidemiological studies showing a significant increased risk in glyphosate-exposed workers. In this paper, we propose that glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup®, plays a role in ALS, mainly through mistakenly substituting for glycine during protein synthesis, disruption of mineral homeostasis as well as setting up a state of dysbiosis. Mouse models of ALS reveal a pre-symptomatic profile of gut dysbiosis. This dysbiotic state initiate a cascade of events initially impairing metabolism in the gut, and, ultimately, through a series of intermediate stages, leading to motor neuron axonal damage seen in ALS. Lipopolysaccharide, a toxic by-product of dysbiosis which contributes to the pathology, is shown to be statistically higher in ALS patients. In this paper we paint a compelling view of how glyphosate exerts its deleterious effects, including mitochondrial stress and oxidative damage through glycine substitution. Furthermore, its mineral chelation properties disrupt manganese, copper and zinc balance, and it induces glutamate toxicity in the synapse, which results in a die-back phenomenon in axons of motor neurons supplying the damaged skeletal muscles