Complexes of iron and cobalt with new tripodal amido-polyphosphine hybrid ligands

Divalent complexes of iron and cobalt with new, monoanionic tripodal amido-polyphosphine ligands have been thoroughly characterized, and XRD analysis reveals geometries that are distinct for this class of ligand

La Rue House

La Rue House is a collection of short fictional stories set in and around a homeless shelter for adolescents

Miscalibrated: A Search for Better Outcomes in Legal Punishment, Pretrial Systems, and Beyond

The seeds of this project were sown in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania in 2017. Having recently graduated high school, I found myself in a studio apartment. I was enrolled at Harrisburg Area Community College and wanted to devote all my time to school so that I could transfer to a nice university. I had signed a lease and had to come up with rent each month. This resulted in an unfortunate reality: given that I was only a high school graduate, it was nearly impossible for me to command an hourly rate high enough to cover my expenses without working at least 30 hours a week. With 30 hours as the minimum workload and a heavy incentive to work as few hours as possible to maximize my academic performance, my life seemed to be defined by a very thin financial margin each month and all the stress associated with it

La Rue House

La Rue House is a collection of short fictional stories set in and around a homeless shelter for adolescents

Semi-supervised sequence tagging with bidirectional language models

Pre-trained word embeddings learned from unlabeled text have become a standard component of neural network architectures for NLP tasks. However, in most cases, the recurrent network that operates on word-level representations to produce context sensitive representations is trained on relatively little labeled data. In this paper, we demonstrate a general semi-supervised approach for adding pre- trained context embeddings from bidirectional language models to NLP systems and apply it to sequence labeling tasks. We evaluate our model on two standard datasets for named entity recognition (NER) and chunking, and in both cases achieve state of the art results, surpassing previous systems that use other forms of transfer or joint learning with additional labeled data and task specific gazetteers.Comment: To appear in ACL 201

Upside and Downside Risk Exposures of Currency Carry Trades via Tail Dependence

Currency carry trade is the investment strategy that involves selling low interest rate currencies in order to purchase higher interest rate currencies, thus profiting from the interest rate differentials. This is a well known financial puzzle to explain, since assuming foreign exchange risk is uninhibited and the markets have rational risk-neutral investors, then one would not expect profits from such strategies. That is, according to uncovered interest rate parity (UIP), changes in the related exchange rates should offset the potential to profit from such interest rate differentials. However, it has been shown empirically, that investors can earn profits on average by borrowing in a country with a lower interest rate, exchanging for foreign currency, and investing in a foreign country with a higher interest rate, whilst allowing for any losses from exchanging back to their domestic currency at maturity. This paper explores the financial risk that trading strategies seeking to exploit a violation of the UIP condition are exposed to with respect to multivariate tail dependence present in both the funding and investment currency baskets. It will outline in what contexts these portfolio risk exposures will benefit accumulated portfolio returns and under what conditions such tail exposures will reduce portfolio returns.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1303.431

Hegel and the Problem of the Multiplicity of Conflicting Philosophies

As Hegel notes in his long Introduction to the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, the problem of the multiplicity of conflicting philosophies presents a particularly urgent problem to the very discipline of philosophy itself. For, from the viewpoint of what Hegel would refer to as “ordinary consciousness”, the fact that there are so many different philosophies which seem constantly to disagree can only lead to one conclusion: philosophy itself is a futile enterprise. Hegel, perhaps more than any previous philosopher, was sensitive to this charge of futility levelled against philosophy. In response, he provided an explanatory account of the multiplicity of philosophies. This dissertation seeks to explicate Hegel’s effort in this regard. Hegel’s basic argument is that the multiplicity of philosophies is to be explained as expressions of the dialectical and polymorphic development of the mind. The mind advances through stages, each one of which is capable of expressing itself in some determinate philosophy. Insofar as this is the case, however, philosophy can be shown to be not merely a haphazard succession of conflicting viewpoints but rather the manifestation of the mind in its historical development. The chapters of this dissertation each examine crucial elements to Hegel’s overall theory of the development of the mind. They also demonstrate how Hegel thereby explains the very emergence of, and intelligible correlations among, the various philosophies

Wireless Personal Area Network-Based Assistance for the Visually Impaired

In this dissertation, a system allowing a visually impaired person to interact with his environment is developed using modern, low-power wireless communications techniques. With recent advances in wireless sensor networks, open-source operating systems, and embedded processing technology, low-cost devices have become practically feasible as a personal notification system for impaired people. Additionally, text-to-speech capabilities can now be employed without special application specific integrated circuits (ASICs), allowing low-cost, general-purpose processors to fill a niche that once required expensive semiconductors. The system takes advantage of 802.15.4 and media access control (MAC) protocols offered by the open source operating system TinyOS. Important characteristics of these new standards that make them ideal for interface with humans are short range, low- power, and open-source software. To facilitate research and development in use and integration of such devices, we developed a hardware platform to allow exploration of possible future network architectures with multiple options for interfacing with the user. Our Visually Impaired Notification System (VINS) allows unprecedented awareness of the environment and has been simulated with multiple nodes using a modification of the TinyOS Dissemination protocol. This dissertation outlines the hardware platform, demonstration of a working prototype, and simulations of how the system would work in its intended environment. We envision this system being used as a testbed allowing further research of other communications and message-delivery techniques. Additionally, the research has contributed directly to the TinyOS project and offered new insight into power management in embedded systems. Finally, through the research effort we were able to contribute to the open source movement and have produced software in four languages used in three countries with over 1500 downloads

Reducing Computation Time of Vortex Position For Helicopter Flight Simulations

The purpose of this investigation was to reduce the computational cost of vortex mapping for helicopter flight simulators, with the particular case of landing a helicopter on a moving ship. We pursued this goal by modeling the velocity using a series of Fourier transforms, linear fits, and Legendre polynomial fits. The end result was a matrix of 9 coefficient values which could be used to recreate the vortex behavior of the original data set with some accuracy. This technique will allow flight simulators to generate vortex data quickly to improve their effectiveness in training pilots