Auditory Expectation: The Information Dynamics of Music Perception and Cognition
Following in a psychological and musicological tradition beginning with Leonard Meyer, and continuing through David Huron, we present a functional, cognitive account of the phenomenon of expectation in music, grounded in computational, probabilistic modeling. We summarize a range of evidence for this approach, from psychology, neuroscience, musicology, linguistics, and creativity studies, and argue that simulating expectation is an important part of understanding a broad range of human faculties, in music and beyond.
The Sentinel-1 Mission: New Opportunities for Ice Sheet Observations
The Sentinel satellite constellation series, developed by the European Space Agency, represents the dedicated space component of the European Copernicus program, committed to long-term operational services in a wide range of application domains. Here, we address the potential of the Sentinel-1 mission for mapping and monitoring the surface velocity of glaciers and ice sheets. We present an ice velocity map of Greenland, derived from synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data acquired in winter 2015 by Sentinel-1A, the first satellite of the Copernicus program in orbit. The map is assembled from about 900 SAR scenes acquired in Interferometric Wide swath (IW) mode, applying the offset tracking technique. We discuss special features of IW mode data, describe the procedures for producing ice velocity maps, and assess the uncertainty of the ice motion product. We compare the Sentinel-1 ice motion product with velocity maps derived from high resolution SAR data of the TerraSAR-X mission and from PALSAR data. Beyond supporting operational services, the Sentinel-1 mission offers enhanced capabilities for comprehensive and long-term observation of key climate variables, such as the motion of ice masses.
The Perception and Cognition of Environmental Distance: Direct Sources of Information
Research on direct sources of information for the perception and cognition of environmental distance is reviewed. Environmental distances are relatively large and cannot be perceived in entirety from a single place.Directly-acquired knowledge of environmental distance is based on the sensorimotor apprehension of information fromthe body or from the environment during locomotion. The paper is organized around the idea that distance knowledge is derived from multiple, partially redundant information sources. After briefly discussing general issues, I review literature on direct sources of distance information,including environmental features, travel time, and travel effort. Theories of how these sources provide information about distance are considered. To date, only information from environmental features has received much empirical support as a direct source of distance knowledge, particularly to the extent that the features segment routes into vistas. Key weaknesses in the empirical literatureare discussed, and importantresearch directions are identified.
Fraunhofer HHI at TRECVID 2004: Shot Boundary Detection System
This paper describes the shot boundary detection and determination system developed at the Fraunhofer Institute for Telecommunications, Heinrich-HertzInstitut, used for the evaluation at TRECVID 2004. The system detects and determines the position of hard cuts, dissolves, fades, and wipes. It is very fast and has proved to have a very good detection performance. As input for our system, we use luminance pixel values of sub-sampled video data. The hard cut detector uses pixel and edge differences with an adaptive thresholding scheme. Flash detection and slow motion detection lower the false positive rate. Dissolve and fade detection is done with edge energy statistics, pixel and histogram differences, and a linearity measure. Wipe detection works with an evenness factor and double Hough transform. The difference between the submitted runs is basically only different threshold settings in the detectors, resulting in different recall and precision values.
Subadult male orangutan sociality and reproductive behavior at Tanjung Puting
During a four‐year period at Tanjung Puting Reserve, Central Indonesian Borneo, subadult males were observed for 670.5 observation hours, 463 hours of which were as focal individuals. Subadult males were quite gregarious, participating in groupings for 40.9% of the time they were observed as targets. Subadult male sociality centered around females; 83% of the time subadult males spent in groupings was exclusively with females, as compared to 3% of contact time spent exclusively with other males. Much subadult male sociality can be understood in terms of male‐male competition for females. Interactions between adult and subadult males were almost entirely determined by the presence or absence of females. Adult males were more belligerent when females were present. Twenty‐two copulations or attempted copulations occurred during 16 subadult male‐female encounters, two of which were consortships. The majority of subadult male copulations (86%) were resisted matings. Outside of consortship, resisted matings (or the first in a series of resisted matings or attempts) usually took place at encounter or shortly thereafter. Subadult males also surreptitiously followed adult males and their consorts. Subadults frequently located receptive females before adult males did but were replaced by adult males when these appeared. Subadult male reproductive strategy consisted of both sneak/“rape” and consort tactics with sneak/“rape” predominating.
Mental States Follow Quantum Mechanics During Perception and Cognition of Ambiguous Figures
Processes undergoing quantum mechanics exhibit quantum interference effects. In this case, quantum probabilities result to be different from classical ones because they contain an additional so-called quantum interference term. We use ambiguous figures to analyse if during perception-cognition by human subjects we can observe violation of the classical probability field and the presence of quantum interference. The experiments, conducted on a group of 256 subjects, evidence that we indeed have such a quantum effect. Therefore, mental states, during perception and cognition of ambiguous figures, appear to follow quantum mechanics.
Spoil Heaps From Brown Coal Mining: Technical Reclamation Versus Spontaneous Revegetation
Vegetation samples from either spontaneously revegetated or technically reclaimed spoil heaps of different ages in one of the largest active brown coal mining districts in Europe were analyzed and compared. The spoil heaps are located in the northwestern part of the Czech Republic and represent ages between 0 and 45 years. Ordination analysis (detrended correspondence analysis) showed that vegetation on technically reclaimed spoil heaps developed in a different way than that on spontaneously revegetated ones. The latter exhibited much higher species diversity in the oldest stages with the number of species doubled that of technically reclaimed sites. The oldest stages were also more advanced along an expected successional gradient as indicated by the ordination. Accelerating the vegetation development by technical reclamation was only of temporal character, whereas spontaneous succession proceeded further over the longer time scale. Spontaneous succession is advocated as an inexpensive and easy alternative to technical reclamation, because it leads to a more natural and rich vegetation cover. Unfortunately, technical reclamation is still the only approach considered in the present reclamation activities for this region.
Strain and rotation rate from GPS in Tibet, Anatolia, and the Altiplano
[1] Deformation measured by regional GPS networks in continental plateaus reflects the geologic and tectonic variability of the plateaus. For two collisional plateaus (Tibet and Anatolia) and one noncollisional (the Altiplano), we analyze the regional strain and rotation rate by inverting GPS velocities to calculate the full two-dimensional velocity gradient tensor. To test the method, we use gridded velocities determined from an elastic block model for the eastern Mediterranean/Middle East region and show that to a first order, the deformation calculated directly from the GPS vectors provides an accurate description of regional deformation patterns. Principal shortening and extension rate axes, vertical axis rotation, and two-dimensional (2-D) volume strain (dilatation) are very consistent with long-term geological features over large areas, indicating that the GPS velocity fields reflect processes responsible for the recent geologic evolution of the plateaus. Differences between geological and GPS descriptions of deformation can be attributed either to GPS networks that are too sparse to capture local interseismic deformation, or to permanent deformation that accrues during strong earthquakes. The Altiplano has higher internal shortening magnitudes than the other two plateaus and negative 2-D dilatation everywhere. Vertical axis rotation changes sign across the topographic symmetry axis and is due to distributed deformation throughout the plateau. In contrast, the collisional plateaus have large regions of quasi-rigid body rotation bounded by strike-slip faults with the opposite rotation sense from the rotating blocks. Tibet and Anatolia are the mirror images of each other; both have regions of positive dilatation on the outboard sides of the rotating blocks. Positive dilatation in the Aegean correlates with a region of crustal thinning, whereas that in eastern Tibet and Yunnan province in China is associated with an area of vertical uplift. Rollback of the Hellenic trench clearly facilitates the rotation of Anatolia; rollback of the Sumatra–Burma trench probably also enables rotation about the eastern syntaxis of Tibet.
GRACE-Based Estimates of Terrestrial Freshwater Discharge from Basin to Continental Scales
In this study, new estimates of monthly freshwater discharge from continents, drainage regions, and global land for the period of 2003–05 are presented. The method uses observed terrestrial water storage change estimates from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) and reanalysis-based atmospheric moisture divergence and precipitable water tendency in a coupled land–atmosphere water mass balance. The estimates of freshwater discharge are analyzed within the context of global climate and compared with previously published estimates. Annual cycles of observed streamflow exhibit stronger correlations with the computed discharge compared to those with precipitation minus evapotranspiration (P − E) in several of the world’s largest river basins. The estimate presented herein of the mean monthly discharge from South America (∼846 km3 month−1) is the highest among the continents and that flowing into the Atlantic Ocean (∼1382 km3 month−1) is the highest among the drainage regions. The volume...
Physiological and biochemical aspects of pre-sowing seed treatments in fine rice (Oryza sativa L.)
The effects of pre-sowing seed treatments on the germination and emergence of fine rice and on reducing, nonreducing and total sugars and α-amylase activity were studied. Fine rice seeds were either soaked in tap water by a traditional method, hardened for 18 or 24 h (two cycles) or osmoconditioned (-1.1 MPa KNO3) for 24 or 48 h. Seed hardening (24 h) and the traditional soaking treatments resulted in a higher germination percentage, germination index and energy of germination and lower mean germination time and mean emergence time. Performance was slightly better in seeds subjected to hardening for 24 h than the traditional soaking because of lower T50 and non-reducing sugars and higher reducing and total sugars and α-amylase activity. In seeds subjected to osmoconditioning for 48 h seed performance was impaired possibly because of KNO3 toxicity.
Inferring changes in terrestrial water storage using ERA-40 reanalysis data: The Mississippi River Basin
Terrestrial water storage is an essential part of the hydrological cycle, encompassing crucial elements of the climate system, such as soil moisture, groundwater, snow, and land ice. On a regional scale, it is however not a readily measured variable and observations of its individual components are scarce. This study investigates the feasability of estimating monthly terrestrial water-storage variations from water-balance computations, using the following three variables: water vapor flux convergence, atmospheric water vapor content, and river runoff. The two first variables are available with high resolution and good accuracy in the present reanalysis datasets, and river runoff is commonly measured in most parts of the world. The applicability of this approach is tested in a 10-yr (1987–96) case study for the Mississippi River basin. Data used include European Centre for Medium- Range Weather Forecasts 40-yr reanalysis (ERA-40) data (water vapor flux and atmospheric water vapor content) and runo...
GRACE satellite observations of terrestrial moisture changes for drought characterization in the Canadian Prairie
The essence of this paper is to undertake an investigation of the recent Canadian Prairie drought by employing total water storage anomalies obtained from gravity recovery and climate experiment (GRACE) remote sensing satellite mission. In order to successfully retrieve average terrestrial water storages from gravity measurements, a necessary procedure is to undertake the transformation of the GRACE geopotential spherical harmonic coefficients into spatially varying time series of geopotential heights that were subsequently converted into water equivalent amounts. These obtained GRACE-based total water storages were thereafter validated using storages estimated from the atmospheric-based water balance P - E computation in conjunction with the measured streamflow records for the Saskatchewan River Basin at its Grand Rapids outlet in Canada. Interestingly, the results from this study corroborate the potential of GRACE-based technique as a veritable tool for the characterization of the 2002/2003 Canadian Prairie droughts. Especially, this approach would prove resourceful for other regions globally where soil moisture availability is sparing or worst still, inexistent thereby making such studies impossible.
Designing and Implementing Combinator Languages
Ever since the Computer Science community has discovered the concept of a programming language there has been a continuous quest for the ideal, all-encompassing programming language; despite this we have been overwhelmed by an everlasting flow of all kinds of special purpose programming languages. Attempts to bridge this gap between a single language and infinitely many caused research into so-called extensible programming languages.
Identification of rice seed varieties using neural network.
A digital image analysis algorithm based color and morphological features was developed to identify the six varieties (ey7954, syz3, xs11, xy5968, xy9308, z903) rice seeds which are widely planted in Zhejiang Province. Seven color and fourteen morphological features were used for discriminant analysis. Two hundred and forty kernels used as the training data set and sixty kernels as the test data set in the neural network used to identify rice seed varieties. When the model was tested on the test data set, the identification accuracies were 90.00%, 88.00%, 95.00%, 82.00%, 74.00%, 80.00% for ey7954, syz3, xs11, xy5968, xy9308, z903 respectively.
Graph Decomposition is NP-Complete: A Complete Proof of Holyer's Conjecture
An H-decomposition of a graph G=(V,E) is a partition of E into subgraphs isomorphic to H. Given a fixed graph H, the H-decomposition problem is to determine whether an input graph G admits an H-decomposition. In 1980, Holyer conjectured that H-decomposition is NP-complete whenever H is connected and has three edges or more. Some partial results have been obtained since then. A complete proof of Holyer's conjecture is the content of this paper. The characterization problem of all graphs H for which H-decomposition is NP-complete is hence reduced to graphs where every connected component contains at most two edges.
DeepDeSRT: Deep Learning for Detection and Structure Recognition of Tables in Document Images
This paper presents a novel end-to-end system for table understanding in document images called DeepDeSRT. In particular, the contribution of DeepDeSRT is two-fold. First, it presents a deep learning-based solution for table detection in document images. Secondly, it proposes a novel deep learning-based approach for table structure recognition, i.e. identifying rows, columns, and cell positions in the detected tables. In contrast to existing rule-based methods, which rely on heuristics or additional PDF metadata (like, for example, print instructions, character bounding boxes, or line segments), the presented system is data-driven and does not need any heuristics or metadata to detect as well as to recognize tabular structures in document images. Furthermore, in contrast to most existing table detection and structure recognition methods, which are applicable only to PDFs, DeepDeSRT processes document images, which makes it equally suitable for born-digital PDFs (as they can automatically be converted into images) as well as even harder problems, e.g. scanned documents. To gauge the performance of DeepDeSRT, the system is evaluated on the publicly available ICDAR 2013 table competition dataset containing 67 documents with 238 pages overall. Evaluation results reveal that DeepDeSRT outperforms state-of-the-art methods for table detection and structure recognition and achieves F1-measures of 96.77% and 91.44% for table detection and structure recognition, respectively. Additionally, DeepDeSRT is evaluated on a closed dataset from a real use case of a major European aviation company comprising documents which are highly unlike those in ICDAR 2013. Tested on a randomly selected sample from this dataset, DeepDeSRT achieves high detection accuracy for tables which demonstrates the sound generalization capabilities of our system.
The Psychology of Being " Right " : The Problem of Accuracy in Social Perception and Cognition
Several difficulties are noted with general questions psychologists have been asking about human accuracy, such as whether people are typically accurate or inaccurate, what the boundary conditions for accuracy are, or the general process whereby accuracy may be improved. Instead, a situationally specific approach to accuracy is adopted in which a central role is assigned to the judgmental process. Accordingly, two general paradigms are distinguished addressing accuracy from realistic and phenomenal perspectives. The realist paradigm focuses on subjects' judgments and the degree to which these correspond to an external criterion. The phenomenal paradigm focuses on subjects' internal criterion as well as their perceptions of the target judgment and the judgment-to-criterion correspondence. Research possibilities in each paradigm are noted. It is suggested that attention to judgmental factors may extend accuracy work in previously unexplored directions.
Existence Dependency: The Key to Semantic Integrity Between Structural and Behavioral Aspects of Object Types
In object-oriented conceptual modeling, the generalization/specialization hierarchy and the whole/part relationship are prevalent classification schemes for object types. This paper presents an object-oriented conceptual model where, in the end, object types are classified according to two relationships only. Existence dependency and generalization/specialization. Existence dependency captures some of the interesting semantics that are usually associated with the concept of aggregation (also called composition or Part Of relation), but in contrast with the latter concept, the semantics of existence dependency are very precise and its use clear cut. The key advantage of classifying object types according to existence dependency are the simplicity of the concept, its absolute unambiguity, and the fact that it enables to check conceptual schemes for semantic integrity and consistency. We will first define the notion of existence dependency and claim that it is always possible to classify objects according to this relationship, thus removing the necessity for the Part Of relation and other kinds of associations between object types. The second claim of this paper is that existence dependency is the key to semantic integrity checking to a level unknown to current object-oriented analysis methods. In other words: Existence dependency allows us to track and solve inconsistencies in an object-oriented conceptual schema.
Using combined eye tracking and word association in order to assess novel packaging solutions: A case study involving jam jars
The present study utilized the techniques of eye tracking and word association in order to collect attentional information and freely-elicited associations from consumers in response to changing specific attributes of the product packaging (jam jars). We assessed the relationship between the data obtained from these two measures in a non goal-directed (or choice-based) task. Additionally, we addressed the question of which packaging attributes affected the consumers’ self-reported willingness to try the product. To relate how each element variation contributed to the focusing of participants’ attention on each area of interest to the immediate message that they conveyed and to the participants’ willingness to try, the rich mixed data obtained were analysed by means of conjoint analysis and multiple factor analysis. The results demonstrated that certain elements of the product packaging can be used to drive visual attention to one element or another; for instance, the ridged surface of certain jars contributed to spread the gaze; however, an important part of the associations that these formats elicited were related to the ridges or to unusualness of the packaging, suggesting that these “secondary” stimuli also captured attention. Though this case study does not provide direct guidelines for packaging design, it does shed light on the importance of knowing how to combine the appropriate design elements to predetermine consumers’ gaze patterns in order to convey the desired messaging on product packaging.
Knee hyaline cartilage evaluated with MR imaging: a cadaveric study involving multiple imaging sequences and intraarticular injection of gadolinium and saline solution.
Magnetic resonance (MR) imaging of cadaveric knees was performed to determine optimal sequences for visualization of hyaline cartilage. Six fresh-frozen cadaveric knees were imaged with a 1.5-T imager by means of standard and hybrid fat suppression (HFS) spin-echo techniques, with and without intraarticular injection of saline solution and gadopentetate dimeglumine. The knees then were sectioned at 4-mm intervals. Both the real and the imaged cartilage thicknesses were measured. Areas of cartilage thinning and focal defects seen in the cadaveric sections were most accurately matched, in both the presence and the absence of intraarticular saline solution simulating joint fluid, by images obtained with the T1-weighted HFS sequences. Accurate imaging of hyaline cartilage thickness with differentiation of cartilage from fluid was possible routinely. Standard and HFS spin-echo images obtained after intraarticular injection of gadopentetate dimeglumine depicted cartilage less accurately than HFS sequences either with or without saline injection. MR imaging with T1-weighted HFS sequences provided superior visualization of cartilage, enabling accurate measurements of cartilage thickness and differentiation of cartilage from saline solution simulating joint fluid.
neural network sensor network wireless sensor network wireless sensor deep learning comparative study base station information retrieval feature extraction sensor node programming language cellular network random field digital video number theory rate control network lifetime river basin hyperspectral imaging distributed algorithm chemical reaction carnegie mellon university fly ash visual feature boundary detection video retrieval diabetes mellitu semantic indexing oryza sativa water storage user association efficient wireles shot boundary shot boundary detection data assimilation system retrieval task controlled trial terrestrial television video search gps network sensor network consist efficient wireless sensor information retrieval task concept detection video captioning retrieval evaluation rice seed safety equipment endangered species station operation case study involving dublin city university high-level feature seed germination brown coal high plain study involving structure recognition climate experiment gravity recovery table structure land data assimilation instance search combinatorial number randomised controlled trial recovery and climate randomised controlled combinatorial number theory adult male high-level feature extraction complete proof music perception robust computation optimization-based method perception and cognition global land datum social perception terrestrial water storage trec video retrieval terrestrial water object-oriented conceptual video retrieval evaluation trec video seed variety base station operation table structure recognition transgenic rice concept detector total water storage groundwater storage regional gp grace gravity randomized distributed algorithm ibm tivoli workload scheduler cerebrovascular accident case study united state