Salient Part Research Articles

Climate Policy in the Trump Era: Carbon Tax Rising?

Climate policy in the United States always seems to face strong political headwinds. It is not so much that voters dismiss the threat of climate change, or that they believe climate change is a hoax, but coming up with a fair and effective policy has always seemed so daunting. This Article argues that the simplest answer is not, contrary to initial appearances, daunting at all. The most effective and most efficient climate policy at the federal, state, and local level is a carbon tax. Carbon taxation has always seemed politically implausible, due in large part to an inherent public aversion to taxes, but also due to a vicious campaign of misinformation, paralleling the campaign against climate change itself. An important way of countering this bias and this campaign is to emphasize the revenue side of carbon taxation. Without a robust discussion of the uses of carbon tax revenues, the only salient part of a carbon tax to voters is the all-too-apparent cost. There is no sense of the benefits of revenues. This Article fills this gap by presenting a menu of revenue options, along with a discussion of the macroeconomic and the distributional consequences of the different options. This analysis is an input into a political process, which must ultimately decide on the objective, but only with the guidance of some quantitative analysis. This article closes with an argument for a lump sum distribution approach, in which carbon tax proceeds are returned directly back to carbon taxpayers on a largely per-capita basis. This approach largely insulates the poorest two-thirds from increases in energy and other goods, and may not be macroeconomically inferior to other options, as economists have historically assumed.

Diversity induced matrix decomposition model for salient object detection

Over the past decade, salient object detection has attracted a lot of interests in computer vision. Although many models have been proposed to detect the salient object in an arbitrary image, this problem is still plagued with complex backgrounds and scattered objects. To address this issue, in this paper, we explore the information in cross features via a diversity-induced multi-view regularization under the Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Criterion (HSIC). Based on the diversity term, a new matrix decomposition based model is proposed for salient object detection. Furthermore, S1/2 regularizer is introduced to constrain the background part. This regularizer will make the background much cleaner in the saliency map. A group sparsity induced norm is imposed on the salient part in order to involve the potential spatial relationships of image patches. Our method is solved through an augmented Lagrange multipliers method, and high-level priors are also integrated to boost the performance. Experiments on the four widely used datasets show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art models.

Influence of Perceptual Saliency Hierarchy on Learning of Language Structures: An Artificial Language Learning Experiment.

Psychological experiments have revealed that in normal visual perception of humans, color cues are more salient than shape cues, which are more salient than textural patterns. We carried out an artificial language learning experiment to study whether such perceptual saliency hierarchy (color > shape > texture) influences the learning of orders regulating adjectives of involved visual features in a manner either congruent (expressing a salient feature in a salient part of the form) or incongruent (expressing a salient feature in a less salient part of the form) with that hierarchy. Results showed that within a few rounds of learning participants could learn the compositional segments encoding the visual features and the order between them, generalize the learned knowledge to unseen instances with the same or different orders, and show learning biases for orders that are congruent with the perceptual saliency hierarchy. Although the learning performances for both the biased and unbiased orders became similar given more learning trials, our study confirms that this type of individual perceptual constraint could contribute to the structural configuration of language, and points out that such constraint, as well as other factors, could collectively affect the structural diversity in languages.

Upper chromospheric magnetic field of a sunspot penumbra: observations of fine structure

The fine-structure of magnetic field of a sunspot penumbra in the upper chromosphere is to be explored and compared to that in the photosphere. High spatial resolution spectropolarimetric observations were recorded with the 1.5-meter GREGOR telescope using the GREGOR Infrared Spectrograph (GRIS). The observed spectral domain includes the upper chromospheric He I triplet at 1083.0 nm and the photospheric Si I 1082.7 nm and Ca I 1083.3 nm spectral lines. The upper chromospheric magnetic field is obtained by inverting the He I triplet assuming a Milne-Eddington type model atmosphere. A height dependent inversion was applied to the Si I 1082.7 nm and Ca I 1083.3 nm lines to obtain the photospheric magnetic field. We find that the inclination of the magnetic field shows variations in the azimuthal direction both in the photosphere, but also in the upper chromosphere. The chromospheric variations remarkably well coincide with the variations in the inclination of the photospheric field and resemble the well-known spine and inter-spine structure in the photospheric layers of penumbrae. The typical peak-to-peak variations in the inclination of the magnetic field in the upper chromosphere is found to be 10-15 degree, i.e., roughly half the variation in the photosphere. In contrast, the magnetic field strength of the observed penumbra does not show variations on small spatial scales in the upper chromosphere. Thanks to the high spatial resolution observations possible with the GREGOR telescope at 1.08 microns, we find that the prominent small-scale fluctuations in the magnetic field inclination, which are a salient part of the property of sunspot penumbral photospheres, also persist in the chromosphere, although at somewhat reduced amplitudes. Such a complex magnetic configuration may facilitate penumbral chromospheric dynamic phenomena, such as penumbral micro-jets or transient bright dots.

Inclusion of Specialist and Generalist Stimuli in Attract-and-Kill Programs: Their Relative Efficacy in Apple Maggot Fly (Diptera: Tephritidae) Pest Management.

Investigating the chemical ecology of agricultural systems continues to be a salient part of integrated pest management programs. Apple maggot fly, a key pest of apple in eastern North America, is a visual specialist with attraction to host fruit-mimicking cues. These cues have been incorporated into red spherical traps used for both monitoring and behaviorally based management. Incorporating generalist or specialist olfactory cues can potentially increase the overall success of this management system. The primary aim of this study was to evaluate the attractiveness of a generalist olfactory cue, ammonium carbonate, and the specialist olfactory cue, a five-component apple volatile blend, when included as a component of a red attracticidal sphere system. Secondly, we assessed how critical it was to maintain minimal deviation from the optimal, full-round specialist visual stimulus provided by red spheres. Finally, attracticidal spheres were deployed with specialist olfactory cues in commercial apple orchards to evaluate their potential for effective management of apple maggot. Ammonium carbonate did not increase residency, feeding time, or mortality in the laboratory-based trials. Field deployment of specialist olfactory cues increased apple maggot captures on red spheres, while the generalist cue did not. Apple maggot tolerated some deviation from the optimal visual stimulus without reducing captures on red spheres. Attracticidal spheres hung in perimeter trees in orchards resulted in acceptable and statistically identical levels of control compared with standard insecticide programs used by growers. Overall, our study contributes valuable information for developing a reliable attract-and-kill system for apple maggot.

An Efficient Data-Driven Clustering Technique to Detect Attacks in SCADA Systems

Supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems have become a salient part in controlling critical infrastructures, such as power plants, energy grids, and water distribution systems. In the past decades, these systems were isolated and use proprietary software, operating systems, and protocols. In recent years, SCADA systems have been interfaced with enterprise systems, which therefore exposed them to the vulnerabilities of the Internet and the security threats. Traditional security solutions (e.g., firewalls, antivirus software, and intrusion detection systems) cannot fully protect SCADA systems, because they have different requirements. This paper presents an innovative intrusion detection approach to detect SCADA tailored attacks. This is based on a data-driven clustering technique of process parameters, which automatically identifies the normal and critical states of a given system. Later, it extracts proximity-based detection rules from the identified states for monitoring purposes. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is tested by conducting experiments on eight data sets that consist of process parameters’ values. The empirical results demonstrated an average accuracy of 98% in automatically identifying the critical states, while facilitating the monitoring of the SCADA system.

Salience in Metonymy-motivated Constructional Abbreviated Form with Particular Attention to English Clippings

I have claimed in some of my earlier publications that abbreviated constructional forms (at any level from lexemes upwards) are motivated by a part-for-whole metonymy (salient part of form for whole form). But what exactly is meant by “salient part of form”? In this paper I report on unpublished research on the topic, with particular attention to clipped lexical forms. In that research, I propose a salience factor grid determining the saliency of a “natural” segment in a lexical form and showing that salience is relative, scalar, and multi-factorial.The paper illustrates how the application of the factor grid to two clippings (gas for gasoline and prof for professor) and other non-conventional segments of the same words (e.g. -line, -soline, and -essor) explains the motivated nature of the conventional clippings. Five tables sum up the application of the grid to these and other examples.

Energy-Efficient Power Delivery System Paradigms for Many-Core Processors

The design of power delivery system plays a crucial role in guaranteeing the proper functionality of many-core processor systems. The power loss suffered on power delivery has become a salient part of total power consumption, and the energy efficiency of a highly dynamic system has been significantly challenged. Being able to achieve a fast response time and multiple voltage domain control, on-chip voltage regulators (VRs) have become popular choices to enable fine-grain power management, which also enlarge the design space of power delivery systems. This paper analytically studies different power delivery system paradigms and power management schemes in terms of energy efficiency, area overhead, and power pin occupation. The analysis shows that compared to the conventional paradigm with off-chip VRs, hybrid paradigms with both on-chip and off-chip VRs are able to maintain high efficiency in a larger range of workloads, though they suffer from low efficiency at light workload. Employed with the quantized power management scheme, the hybrid paradigm can improve the system energy efficiency at light workload by a maximum of 136% compared to the traditional load balanced scheme. Besides this, the in-package (iP) hybrid paradigm further shows its advantage in reducing the physical overheads. The results reveal that at 120 W workload, it occupies only a 10.94% total footprint area or 39.07% power pins of that of the off-chip paradigm. We conclude that the iP hybrid paradigm achieves the best tradeoffs between efficiency, physical overhead, and realization of fine-grain power management.

Auditory Discrimination of Natural and High-Pass Filtered Bark Vocalizations in a California Sea Lion (Zalophus californianus).

A California sea lion performed a psychophysical auditory discrimination task with a set of six stimuli: three barks recorded from conspecific males and high-pass filtered versions of the barks that removed the majority of energy at fundamental frequencies. Discrimination performance and subject reaction times (RTs) suggested that the vocalizations were all perceived as fairly dissimilar. This preliminary study hints that low-frequency components are a salient part of the California sea lion bark despite elevation of this species' aerial hearing thresholds and the potential for elevated environmental noise levels at frequencies below 1 kHz.

World Civic Politics in China: Assessing International NGOs’ Influence

The operation of international non-government organisations (INGOs) in China has become a salient part of the country’s globalisation. This article deploys the prism of “world civic politics”, a major theoretical development in studying transnational civil society, to examine INGOs’ activism in Chinese societal realms. INGOs do not work solely to change state behaviour. Other politically meaningful actions include shifting the public mood, reforming corporate behaviour, and empowering local NGOs and communities. The theory suggests useful lenses to study societal aspects of transnational activism in China and impart political meaning, while also highlighting Western-centrism that is common in the theorisation of transnational politics.

Human-Centered Saliency Detection.

We introduce a new concept for detecting the saliency of 3-D shapes, that is, human-centered saliency (HCS) detection on the surface of shapes, whereby a given shape is analyzed not based on geometric or topological features directly obtained from the shape itself, but by studying how a human uses the object. Using virtual agents to simulate the ways in which humans interact with objects helps to understand shapes and detect their salient parts in relation to their functions. HCS detection is less affected by inconsistencies between the geometry or topology of the analyzed 3-D shapes. The potential benefit of the proposed method is that it is adaptable to variable shapes with the same semantics, as well as being robust against a geometrical and topological noise. Given a 3-D shape, its salient part is detected by automatically selecting a corresponding agent and making them interact with each other. Their adaption and alignment depend on an optimization framework and a training process. We demonstrate the detected salient parts for different types of objects together with the stability thereof. The salient parts can be used for important vision tasks, such as 3-D shape retrieval.

The Story of the Zeal of Phinehas and Congregational Weeping at Bethel

This article suggests taking the story of Phinehas’s zeal (Num 25:6-13) as having originated at the sanctuary of Bethel where its setting was to explain the appointment of the local priesthood. It is further suggested adding this story, that depicts the Israelite congregation as weeping, to the group of traditions that relate weeping to the city of Bethel (Gen 36:8; Judg 20:23, 26; 21:2; Hos 12:5; Judg 2:4 [lxx]; Mi 1:10). Added to this group, and read in its context, the Phinehas story strengthens the impression that weeping at Bethel was congregational and practiced as a salient part of the local congregational custom.

Using instruments to understand argument structure: Evidence for gradient representation

The arguments of a verb are commonly assumed to correspond to the event participants specified by the verb. That is, drink has two arguments because drink specifies two participants: someone who drinks and something that gets drunk. This correspondence does not appear to hold, however, in the case of instrumental participants, e.g. John drank the soda with a straw. Verbs such as slice and write have been argued to specify an instrumental participant, even though instruments do not pattern like arguments given other criteria. In this paper, we investigated how instrumental verbs are represented, testing the hypothesis that verbs such as slice encode three participants in the same way that dative verbs such as lend encode three participants. In two experiments English-speakers reported their judgments about the number of participants specified by a verb, e.g. that drink specifies two participants. These judgments indicate that slice does not encode three distinct arguments. Nonetheless, some verbs were systematically more likely to elicit the judgment that the instrument is specified by the verb, a pattern that held across individual subjects. To account for these findings, we propose that instruments are not independent verbal arguments but are represented in a gradient away: an instrument may be a more or less salient part of the force exerted by an agent. These results inform our understanding of the relationship between argument structure and event representation, raising questions concerning the role of arguments in language processing and learning.

Chemical Reaction Optimization for Feature Combination in Bio-inspired Visual Attention

Bio-inspired visual attention models human visual system to detect the most salient part of a visual field. In the existing diversified computational models, bottom-up visual attention that works out a saliency map to indicate the conspicuity of visual stimuli in an image has gained much popularity. This paper introduces a task-driven training procedure into the basic bottom-up computational model to make bio-inspired visual attention more intelligent and appropriate for a particular visual task. Chemical Reaction Optimization (CRO) is a recently proposed evolutionary metaheuristic, simulating the dynamic interaction of molecules in a chemical reaction. In this paper, CRO algorithm is used to optimize the weight coefficients for feature combination through the training procedure. Experimental results show that CRO algorithm outperforms other evolution algorithms in bio-inspired visual attention.

Building simulation model of infant-incubator system with decoupling predictive controller

This paper introduces theoretical modelling working on the thermal behavior of the premature infant. This study aims at developing a model useful for the prediction and design of the appropriate controller in objective to reduce evaporative heat loss. A calculation code has been developed to simulate the thermal response of a premature baby to climatic solicitation inside the incubator system. The model allows us to take into consideration radiative, conductive, convective, and evaporative heat transfers inside the incubator system. The air temperature and the humidity rate, which play a salient part in the convective and evaporative exchanges, are calculated by a coupled transfer function. At present, the environmental conditions (temperature and humidity) inside incubator are controlled with a classical Proportional Integral Differential (PID). In this work, we proposed a decoupling Generalized Predictive Controller (DGPC) based on the model described below to achieve an optimal thermal conditions (36.5–37.5) for immature newborn infants (birthweight <1000grams). Real and simulations results prove the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed model and controller.

Friendship networks and achievement goals: an examination of selection and influence processes and variations by gender.

Interactions with friends are a salient part of students' experience at school. Thus, friends are likely to be an important source of influence on achievement goals. This study investigated processes within early adolescent friendships (selection and influence) with regard to achievement goals (mastery, performance-approach, and performance-avoidance goals) among sixth graders (N = 587, 50% girls at wave 1, N = 576, 52% girls at wave 2) followed from fall to spring within one academic year. Students' gender was examined as a moderator in these processes. Longitudinal social network analysis found that friends were similar to each other in mastery goals and that this similarity was due to both selection and influence effects. Influence but not selection effects were found for performance-approach goals. Influence effects for performance-approach goals were stronger for boys compared to girls in the classroom. Neither selection, nor influence, effects were found in relation to performance-avoidance goals. However, the higher a student was in performance-avoidance goals, the less likely they were to be named as a friend by classmates. Implications for early adolescents' classroom adjustment are discussed.

Social Stratification in Jaffna: A Survey of Recent Research on Caste

AbstractSince 1983, war has dominated the perception of Sri Lanka. This has affected scholarship on the country, such that the subjects of an overwhelming number of research proposals and publications have been on the war and the prospects and prescriptions for peace. This survey paper is an attempt to locate the system of caste in transition in the Jaffna Peninsula by reviewing recent literature written after the commencement of the war. While detailed ethnographies of caste in Jaffna may have temporarily come to a halt, caste practices have not and remain a salient part of everyday life among the Tamils in Sri Lanka. As the war ended in 2009, it is therefore important that social scientists on Sri Lanka revisit the topic of caste, that is an integral part of not just Tamil culture or society, but being Tamil itself. As the study of caste is dominated by research in India, a microanalysis of Jaffna and Sri Lanka, particularly the nuances of this system in transition due to war and militancy, could contribute to the macro‐study of caste at a sub‐continental perspective.

Do Recommender Systems Manipulate Consumer Preferences? A Study of Anchoring Effects

Recommender systems are becoming a salient part of many e-commerce websites. Much research has focused on advancing recommendation technologies to improve accuracy of predictions, although behavioral aspects of using recommender systems are often overlooked. In our studies, we explore how consumer preferences at the time of consumption are impacted by predictions generated by recommender systems. We conducted three controlled laboratory experiments to explore the effects of system recommendations on preferences. Studies 1 and 2 investigated user preferences for television programs across a variety of conditions, which were surveyed immediately following program viewing. Study 3 investigated the granularity of the observed effects within individual participants. Results provide strong evidence that the rating presented by a recommender system serves as an anchor for the consumer's constructed preference. Viewers' preference ratings are malleable and can be significantly influenced by the recommendation received. The effect is sensitive to the perceived reliability of a recommender system and, thus, not a purely numerical or priming-based effect. Finally, the effect of anchoring is continuous and linear, operating over a range of perturbations of the system. These general findings have a number of important implications (e.g., on recommender systems performance metrics and design, preference bias, potential strategic behavior, and trust), which are discussed.

Beyond ‘Great Marriage’: collective involvement, personal achievement and social change in Ngazidja (Comoros)

The sumptuous ‘Great Marriage’ celebration in Ngazidja, Comoros, is a very dynamic social practice, but it is difficult to comprehend its attraction given the increasing cost. This paper argues that the ‘Great Marriage’ is the most salient part of an age system that should be carefully examined. The framework, in which collective commitment and individual achievement are managed simultaneously, and gendered conception of personhood and of human temporality are put into action, has no equivalent in Western life. Grounded in historical hierarchies, these institutions change under various influences without abandoning the core values on which they are based, which explains their enduring success.

Community and Ritual Within the Mississippian Center at Town Creek

AbstractThis article evaluates aspects of an occupational history that was developed for the Town Creek site, a small Mississippian center in the North Carolina Piedmont that was occupied sometime between A.D. 1150–1400. Town Creek’s occupational history suggests that its Mississippian community consisted of multiple, discrete household groups, and that these groups were important throughout the center’s existence. Analyses of architectural, mortuary, and ceramic data indicate that Town Creek began as a town with a substantial domestic population, but it evolved into more of a vacant center later in time. This decline in domestic population coincided with significant evidence for site-wide ritual activity that included the construetion of a platform mound and the use of cemeteries in former house locations. Parallels between the small center at Town Creek and some of the largest Mississippian centers, especially the persistence of household-group spaces and an emphasis on ritual activities later in time, suggest that interaction among discrete social groups within a ritual context was a salient part of being Mississippian.