Linguistics and Information Theory: Analytic advantages

The analytic advantages of central concepts from linguistics and information theory, and the analogies demonstrated between them, for understanding patterns of retrieval from full-text indexes to documents are developed. The interaction between the syntagm and the paradigm in computational operations on written language in indexing, searching, and retrieval is used to account for transformations of the signified or meaning between documents and their representation and between queries and documents retrieved. Characteristics of the message, and messages for selection for written language, are brought to explain the relative frequency of occurrence of words and multiple word sequences in documents. The examples given in the companion article are revisited and a fuller example introduced. The signified of the sequence stood for, the term classically used in the definitions of the sign, as something standing for something else, can itself change rapidly according to its syntagm. A greater than ordinary discourse understanding of patterns in retrieval is obtained.

Analogies between linguistics and information theory

An analogy is established between the syntagm and paradigm from Saussurean linguistics and the message and messages for selection from the information theory initiated by Claude Shannon. The analogy is pursued both as an end itself and for its analytic value in understanding patterns of retrieval from full text systems. The multivalency of individual words when isolated from their syntagm is contrasted with the relative stability of meaning of multi-word sequences, when searching ordinary written discourse. The syntagm is understood as the linear sequence of oral and written language. Saussureâ??s understanding of the word, as a unit which compels recognition by the mind, is endorsed, although not regarded as final. The lesser multivalency of multi-word sequences is understood as the greater determination of signification by the extended syntagm. The paradigm is primarily understood as the network of associations a word acquires when considered apart from the syntagm. The restriction of information theory to expression or signals, and its focus on the combinatorial aspects of the message, is sustained. The message in the model of communication in information theory can include sequences of written language. Shannonâ??s understanding of the written word, as a cohesive group of letters, with strong internal statistical influences, is added to the Saussurean conception. Sequences of more than one word are regarded as weakly correlated concatenations of cohesive units.

BSP -Style Computation: A Semantic Investigation

A BSP (Bulk Synchronous Parallelism) computation is characterized by the generation of asynchronous messages in packages during independent execution of a number of processes and their subsequent delivery at synchronization points. Bundling messages together represents a significant departure from the traditional ‘one communication at a time’ approach. In this paper the semantic consequences of communication packaging are explored. In particular, the BSP communication structure is identified with a general form of substitution—predicate substitution. Predicate substitution provides a means of reasoning about the synchronized delivery of asynchronous communications when the immediate programming context does not explicitly refer to the variables that are to be updated (unlike traditional operations, such as the assignment $x := e$, where the names of the updated variables can be extracted from the context). Proofs of implementations of Newton's root finding method and prefix sum are used to illustrate the practical application of the proposed approach.

Description and search labor for information retrieval

Selection power is taken as the fundamental value for information retrieval systems. Selection power is regarded as produced by selection labor, which itself separates historically into description and search labor. As forms of mental labor, description and search labor participate in the conditions for labor and for mental labor. Concepts and distinctions applicable to physical and mental labor are indicated, introducing the necessity of labor for survival, the idea of technology as a human construction, and the possibility of the transfer of human labor to technology. Distinctions specific to mental labor, particular between semantic and syntactic labor, are introduced. Description labor is exemplified by cataloging, classification, and database description, can be more formally understood as the labor involved in the transformation of objects for description into searchable descriptions, and is also understood to include interpretation. The costs of description labor are discussed. Search labor is conceived as the labor expended in searching systems. For both description and search labor, there has been a progressive reduction in direct human labor, with its syntactic aspects transferred to technology, effectively compelled by the high relative costs of direct human labor compared to machine processes.

Searching and planning: Young children's reasoning about past and future event sequences

Six experiments examined children's ability to make inferences using temporal order information. Children completed versions of a task involving a toy zoo; one version required reasoning about past events (search task) and the other required reasoning about future events (planning task). Children younger than 5 years failed both the search and the planning tasks, whereas 5-year-olds passed both (Experiments 1 and 2). However, when the number of events in the sequence was reduced (Experiment 3), 4-year-olds were successful on the search task but not the planning task. Planning difficulties persisted even when relevant cues were provided (Experiments 4 and 5). Experiment 6 showed that improved performance on the search task found in Experiment 3 was not due to the removal of response ambiguity.

Domain Bundle Boundaries in Single Crystal BaTiO3 Lamellae: Searching for Naturally Forming Dipole Flux-Closure / Quadrupole Chains

Naturally occurring boundaries between bundles of 90o stripe domains, which form in BaTiO3 lamellae on cooling through the Curie Temperature, have been characterised using both piezoresponse force microscopy (PFM) and scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM). Detailed interpretation of the dipole configurations present at these boundaries (using data taken from PFM) shows that, in the vast majority of cases, they are composed of simple zigzag 180° domain walls. Topological information from STEM shows that, occasionally, domain bundle boundaries can support chains of dipole flux closure and quadrupole nanostructures, but these kinds of boundaries are comparatively rare; when such chains do exist, it is notable that singularities at the cores of the dipole structures are avoided. The symmetry of the boundary shows that diads and centres of inversion exist at positions where core singularities should have been expected.

Managing Software Requirements Changes Based On Negotiation-Style Revision

For any proposed software project, when the software requirements specification has been established, requirements changes may result in not only a modification of the requirements specification but also a series of modifications of all existing artifacts during the development. Then it is necessary to provide effective and flexible requirements changes management. In this paper, we present an approach to managing requirements changes based on Booth’s negotiation-style framework for belief revision. Informally, we consider the current requirements specification as a belief set about the system-to-be. The request of requirements change is viewed as new information about the same system-to-be. Then the process of executing the requirements change is a process of revising beliefs about the system-to-be. We design a family of belief negotiation models appropriate for different processes of requirements revision, including the setting of the request of requirements change being fully accepted, the setting of the current requirements specification being fully preserved, and that of the current specification and the request of requirements change reaching a compromise. In particular, the prioritization of requirements plays an important role in reaching an agreement in each belief negotiation model designed in this paper.

N-epsilon-(carboxymethyl)lysine content of foods commonly consumed in a Western style diet

The potential adverse effects on health of diet-derived advanced glycation end-products (AGEs) is of current interest, due to their proposed involvement in the disease progression of diabetic and uraemic conditions. However, accurate information about levels of AGEs in foods is lacking. The objective of this investigation was to determine the level of one particular AGE, N-epsilon-(carboxymethyl)lysine (CML), a marker of AGE formation, in a wide range of foods commonly consumed in a Western style diet. Individual foods (n = 257) were mixed, lyophilised, ground, reduced, fat-extracted, hydrolysed, and underwent solid-phase extraction. Extracts were analysed by ultra-performance liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (UPLC-MS/MS). Cereal (2.6 mg/100 g food) and fruit and vegetable (0.13 mg/100 g food) categories had the highest and lowest mean level of CML, respectively, when expressed in mg/100 g food. These data can be used for estimating potential consumer intakes, and provide information that can be used to educated consumers on how to reduce their CML intake. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Domain Bundle Boundaries in Single Crystal BaTiO3 Lamellae: Searching for Naturally Forming Dipole Flux-Closure/Quadrupole Chains

Naturally occurring boundaries between bundles of 90° stripe domains, which form in BaTiO3 lamellae on cooling through the Curie Temperature, have been characterized using both piezoresponse force microscopy (PFM) and scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM). Detailed interpretation of the dipole configurations present at these boundaries (using data taken from PFM) shows that in the vast majority of cases they are composed of simple zigzag 180° domain walls. Topological information from STEM shows that occasionally domain bundle boundaries can support chains of dipole flux closure and quadrupole nanostructures, but these kinds of boundaries are comparatively rare; when such chains do exist, it is notable that singularities at the cores of the dipole
structures are avoided. The symmetry of the boundary shows that diads and centers of inversion exist at positions where core singularities should have been expected.

The syntax of concealment:Reliable methods for plain text information hiding

Many plain text information hiding techniques demand deep semantic processing, and so suffer in reliability. In contrast, syntactic processing is a more mature and reliable technology. Assuming a perfect parser, this paper evaluates a set of automated and reversible syntactic transforms that can hide information in plain text without changing the meaning or style of a document. A large representative collection of newspaper text is fed through a prototype system. In contrast to previous work, the output is subjected to human testing to verify that the text has not been significantly compromised by the information hiding procedure, yielding a success rate of 96% and bandwidth of 0.3 bits per sentence. © 2007 SPIE-IS&T.

Building information modeling based building design optimization for sustainability

Environmental problems, especially climate change, have become a serious global issue waiting for people to solve. In the construction industry, the concept of sustainable building is developing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In this study, a building information modeling (BIM) based building design optimization method is proposed to facilitate designers to optimize their designs and improve buildings’ sustainability. A revised particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm is applied to search for the trade-off between life cycle costs (LCC) and life cycle carbon emissions (LCCE) of building designs. In order tovalidate the effectiveness and efficiency of this method, a case study of an office building is conducted in Hong Kong. The result of the case study shows that this method can enlarge the searching space for optimal design solutions and shorten the processing time for optimal design results, which is really helpful for designers to deliver an economic and environmental friendly design scheme.

Searching for swept-up hydrogen and helium in the late-time spectra of 11 nearby Type Ia supernovae

The direct detection of a stellar system that explodes as a Type Ia supernova (SN Ia) has not yet been successful. Various indirect methods have been used to investigate SN Ia progenitor systems but none have produced conclusive results. A prediction of single-degenerate models is that H- (or He-) rich material from the envelope of the companion star should be swept up by the SN ejecta in the explosion. Seven SNe Ia have been analysed to date looking for signs of H-rich material in their late-time spectra and none were detected. We present results from new late-time spectra of 11 SNe Ia obtained at the Very Large Telescope using XShooter and FORS2. We present the tentative detection of Hα emission for SN 2013ct, corresponding to ∼0.007 M_{style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline-style: none; font-size: 0.85em; font-family: "Lucida Grande", "Lucida Sans Unicode", Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 0;">⊙} of stripped/ablated companion star material (under the assumptions of the spectral modelling). This mass is significantly lower than expected for single-degenerate scenarios, suggesting that >0.1 M_{style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline-style: none; font-size: 0.85em; font-family: "Lucida Grande", "Lucida Sans Unicode", Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 0;">⊙} of H-rich is present but not observed. We do not detect Hα emission in the other 10 SNe Ia. This brings the total sample of normal SNe Ia with non-detections (<0.001–0.058 M_{style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline-style: none; font-size: 0.85em; font-family: "Lucida Grande", "Lucida Sans Unicode", Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 0;">⊙}) of H-rich material to 17 events. The simplest explanation for these non-detections is that these objects did not result from the explosion of a CO white dwarf accreting matter from a H-rich companion star via Roche lobe overflow or symbiotic channels. However, further spectral modelling is needed to confirm this. We also find no evidence of He-emission features, but models with He-rich companion stars are not available to place mass limits.