Symbolic Compression Research Articles

The New Cultural Geology

Paraphrasing a remark Freud makes in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, we could say: the last resort, what has left its mark on the development of thought must be the history of the earth we live on and its relation to the sun. --Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound (223) In the early morning darkness of May 3, 2003 the New Hampshire geological formation known as the Old Man of the Mountain crumbled to the ground. It was an ignominious end to a famously lofty visage, and one I would like to link, however improbably, to the ongoing decay of the postmodern as the leading description of the contemporary cultural-historical moment. To do so, as we shall see, is to posit that what enables the perception of the postmodern-as-past is a new cultural geology, by which I mean a range of theoretical and other initiatives that position culture in a time-frame large enough to crack open the carapace of human self-concern, exposing it to the idea, and maybe even the fact, of its external ontological preconditions, its ground. This is as much to say that there has always been something residually humanist and even romantic in the leading formulations of the postmodern; and that the ongoing advent of post-post-modern has something to do with the profound challenge that cultural geological thinking poses to that residual humanism. But it is also to admit up front that this challenge is already as it were there as a latency in the postmodern, in fact already there in the discourse of the modern, whose narrative of the progressive domination of nature by science has long been ironized by the discovery, in that very process, of the bizarrely humiliating length of geologic time, the staggering vastness and complexity of the known universe, the relative puniness of the human in the play of fundamental and evolutionary forces. (1) Realism, naturalism, primitivism, literary modernism, and postmodernism--these are some of the cultural formations where that irony has been fitfully recorded, and their accumulation must give one pause before declaring the arrival of something new term I would apply to this not-newness, the exomodern, positions itself strategically outside of rather than after the modern and postmodern, displacing postmodernism's notorious pillaging of past historical styles by trying to imagine what lies beyond or alongside style. A projection of posthumanist thinking into the cultural realm, exomodernism is however not so much a period or school of artistic endeavor as a name for the glimpses we hallucinate, in various cultural works, of the unincorporated remainder of the work of all periods and schools. Even more than in Eliot's symbolic compression of thousands of years into the moment of Waste Land (1922), the of the exomodern is perforce a long now, a now whose duration is hard to measure but which is unquestionably eventful. Seen from the right angle and distance, the jutting slabs of granite near Franconia Notch had suggested a human head seen in profile against the sky, heavy-browed, as though (it was said) pondering infinity. It was an enormous and enormously appealing profile, and what it looked upon (or so it seemed to those below) was a reassuring--a romantic--infinity. Noticed by some surveyors in the area, the Old Man had entered the historical record in 1805, and was made famous when it was observed, in a paean attributed to the statesman Daniel Webster, that men hang out their signs indicative of their respective trades; shoe makers hang out a gigantic shoe; jewelers a monster watch, and the dentist hangs out a gold tooth; but up in the Mountains of New Hampshire, God Almighty has hung out a sign to show that there He makes men. (qtd. in Miner 478) Having secured its renown as a kind of commercial advertisement for the human beings of the region, the formation's meaning shifted somewhat when it was featured as a prophetic image of yeoman wisdom in Hawthorne's 1849 story, The Great Stone Face. …

High-performance, low-cost joint equalizer and trellis decoder for 1000BASE-T gigabit Ethernet transceiver

This article presents an M-algorithm (MA) decoder with 4 survival paths (MA4) for Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 802.3ab 1000BASE-T gigabit Ethernet (GbE) transceiver. To fulfill the entire requirements, various methods were introduced to accelerate the MA4 decoder while retaining the desired high performance and low complexity. Optimized look-ahead architecture was employed to solve the critical path problem with minimal gate consumption. Symbol compression methods saved registers during pipeline stages. A sorting network accelerated the kernel sorting operation at low hardware cost by utilizing the special characteristics of MA4. Simulations and synthesis results show that the proposed decoder achieves 125 MHz clock frequency and 1 Gb/s throughput in 1.8 V 0.18 μm standard cell complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) process. It achieves additional 0.4 dB coding gain over 14tap parallel decision feedback decoder (PDFD) with 39% area reduction.

MicroRNA target detection and analysis for genes related to breast cancer using MDLcompress.

We describe initial results of miRNA sequence analysis with the optimal symbol compression ratio (OSCR) algorithm and recast this grammar inference algorithm as an improved minimum description length (MDL) learning tool: MDLcompress. We apply this tool to explore the relationship between miRNAs, single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), and breast cancer. Our new algorithm outperforms other grammar-based coding methods, such as DNA Sequitur, while retaining a two-part code that highlights biologically significant phrases. The deep recursion of MDLcompress, together with its explicit two-part coding, enables it to identify biologically meaningful sequence without needlessly restrictive priors. The ability to quantify cost in bits for phrases in the MDL model allows prediction of regions where SNPs may have the most impact on biological activity. MDLcompress improves on our previous algorithm in execution time through an innovative data structure, and in specificity of motif detection (compression) through improved heuristics. An MDLcompress analysis of 144 over expressed genes from the breast cancer cell line BT474 has identified novel motifs, including potential microRNA (miRNA) binding sites that are candidates for experimental validation.

Symbolic Compression and Processing of Document Images

In this paper, we describe a compression and representation scheme which exploits the component-level redundancy found within a document image. The approach identifies patterns which appear repeatedly, represents similar patterns with a single prototype, stores the location of pattern instances, and codes the residuals between the prototypes and the pattern instances. Using a novel encoding scheme, we provide a representation that facilitates scalable lossy compression and progressive transmission and supports document image analysis in the compressed domain. We motivate the approach, provide details of the encoding procedures, report compression results, and describe a class of document image understanding tasks that operate on the compressed representation.

Helmet-mounted display attitude symbology: An evaluation of compression ratio

This study addressed the development and evaluation of empirically-based helmet-mounted display (HMD) symbology sets. Three attitude formats and three altitude formats were evaluated within a composite tactical aircraft symbology layout. The attitude formats varied in basic shape and symbol compression ratio (SCR = ratio of the angle represented by the symbol to the symbol's subtended visual angle). Symbols which incorporate high SCR represent large angles and have a slow rate-of-motion relative to uncompressed formats. The altitude symbologies were formed of vertical scale and dial formats and included vertical velocity indicators. Subjects performed a flight-path maintenance task within sessions of differing “real” horizon presence and orientation. The formats were evaluated under a task which was designed to require both gross and precise responses. The results showed that performance was influenced by the manipulation of the attitude symbology formats, and suggest that symbol compression may be advantageous.

Toward an Empirically Based Helmet-Mounted Display Symbology Set

The helmet-mounted display (HMD) affords continuous availability of critical flight information independent of head orientation. With appropriate information presented on a HMD, aircraft control can be maintained regardless of where the pilot is looking. This research addresses the development of an empirically based HMD symbol set. Three attitude formats and three altitude formats were evaluated within a composite fixed-wing HMD symbology layout. The attitude formats varied in basic form and symbol compression ratio. Symbol compression ratio is the ratio of the angle represented by the symbol to the symbol's subtended visual angle. High symbol compression results in symbols which represent large angles, and therefore have slow rate-of-motion relative to their uncompressed counterparts. The altitude symbologies were formed of both vertical scale and dial formats and included vertical velocity indicators. Subjects performed a flight-path maintenance task within sessions of differing “real” horizon presence and orientation. The formats were evaluated under a task which was designed to require high-accuracy flight-path maintenance. This type of task is traditionally thought to require less symbol compression. The results showed that performance was influenced by the manipulation of the attitude symbology formats. The results also suggest that symbol compression may be advantageous.

A Fake Process Approach to Data Compression

The problem of designing a good decoder for a timeinvariant tree-coding data compression system is equivalent to that of finding a good low rate "fake process" for the original source, where the fake is produced by a time-invariant nonlinear filtering of an independent, identically distributed sequence of uniformly distributed discrete random variables and "goodness" is measured by the <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">\bar{\rho}</tex> -distance between the fake and the original source. Several simple ad hoc techniques for obtaining such fake processes are introduced and shown by simulation to provide an improvement of typically 1-2 dB over optimum quantization, delta modulation, and predictive quantization for one-bit per symbol compression of Gaussian memoryless, autoregressive, and moving average sources. In addition, the fake process viewpoint provides a new intuitive explanation of why delta modulation and predictive quantization work as well as they do on Gaussian autoregressive sources.