Friday, January 31, 2020

Research Papers in Computer Science Essay Example for Free

Research Papers in Computer Science Essay Since we recently announced our $10001 Binary Battle to promote applications built on the Mendeley API (now including PLoS as well), I decided to take a look at the data to see what people have to work with. My analysis focused on our second largest discipline, Computer Science. Biological Sciences (my discipline) is the largest, but I started with this one so that I could look at the data with fresh eyes, and also because it’s got some really cool papers to talk about. Here’s what I found: What I found was a fascinating list of topics, with many of the expected fundamental papers like Shannon’s Theory of Information and the Google paper, a strong showing from Mapreduce and machine learning, but also some interesting hints that augmented reality may be becoming more of an actual reality soon. The top graph summarizes the overall results of the analysis. This graph shows the Top 10 papers among those who have listed computer science as their discipline and chosen a subdiscipline. The bars are colored according to subdiscipline and the number of readers is shown on the x-axis. The bar graphs for each paper show the distribution of readership levels among subdisciplines. 17 of the 21 CS subdisciplines are represented and the axis scales and color schemes remain constant throughout. Click on any graph to explore it in more detail or to grab the raw data.(NB: A minority of Computer Scientists have listed a subdiscipline. I would encourage everyone to do so.) 1. Latent Dirichlet Allocation (available full-text) LDA is a means of classifying objects, such as documents, based on their underlying topics. I was surprised to see this paper as number one instead of Shannon’s information theory paper (#7) or the paper describing the concept that became Google (#3). It turns out that interest in this paper is very strong among those who list artificial intelligence as their subdiscipline. In fact, AI researchers contributed the majority of readership to 6 out of the top 10 papers. Presumably, those interested in popular topics such as machine learning list themselves under AI, which explains the strength of this subdiscipline, whereas papers like the Mapreduce one or the Google paper appeal to a broad range of subdisciplines, giving those papers a smaller numbers spread across more subdisciplines. Professor Blei is also a bit of a superstar, so that didn’t hurt. (the irony of a manually-categorized list with an LDA paper at the top has not escaped us) 2. MapReduce : Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters (available full-text) It’s no surprise to see this in the Top 10 either, given the huge appeal of this parallelization technique for breaking down huge computations into easily executable and recombinable chunks. The importance of the monolithic â€Å"Big Iron† supercomputer has been on the wane for decades. The interesting thing about this paper is that had some of the lowest readership scores of the top papers within a subdiscipline, but folks from across the entire spectrum of computer science are reading it. This is perhaps expected for such a general purpose technique, but given the above it’s strange that there are no AI readers of this paper at all. 3. The Anatomy of a large-scale hypertextual search engine (available full-text) In this paper, Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page discuss how Google was created and how it initially worked. This is another paper that has high readership across a broad swath of disciplines, including AI, but wasn’t dominated by any one discipline. I would expect that the largest share of readers have it in their library mostly out of curiosity rather than direct relevance to their research. It’s a fascinating piece of history related to something that has now become part of our every day lives. 4. Distinctive Image Features from Scale-Invariant Keypoints This paper was new to me, although I’m sure it’s not new to many of you. This paper describes how to identify objects in a video stream without regard to how near or far away they are or how they’re oriented with respect to the camera. AI again drove the popularity of this paper in large part and to understand why, think â€Å"Augmented Realityâ€Å". AR is the futuristic idea most familiar to the average sci-fi enthusiast as Terminator-vision. Given the strong interest in the topic, AR could be closer than we think, but we’ll probably use it to layer Groupon deals over shops we pass by instead of building unstoppable fighting machines. 5. Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction (available full-text) This is another machine learning paper and its presence in the top 10 is primarily due to AI, with a small contribution from folks listing neural networks as their discipline, most likely due to the paper being published in IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks. Reinforcement learning is essentially a technique that borrows from biology, where the behavior of an intelligent agent is is controlled by the amount of positive stimuli, or reinforcement, it receives in an environment where there are many different interacting positive and negative stimuli. This is how we’ll teach the robots behaviors in a human fashion, before they rise up and destroy us. 6. Toward the next generation of recommender systems: a survey of the state-of-the-art and possible extensions (available full-text) Popular among AI and information retrieval researchers, this paper discusses recommendation algorithms and classifies them into collaborative, content-based, or hybrid. While I wouldn’t call this paper a groundbreaking event of the caliber of the Shannon paper above, I can certainly understand why it makes such a strong showing here. If you’re using Mendeley, you’re using both collaborative and content-based discovery methods! 7. A Mathematical Theory of Communication (available full-text) Now we’re back to more fundamental papers. I would really have expected this to be at least number 3 or 4, but the strong showing by the AI discipline for the machine learning papers in spots 1, 4, and 5 pushed it down. This paper discusses the theory of sending communications down a noisy channel and demonstrates a few key engineering parameters, such as entropy, which is the range of states of a given communication. It’s one of the more fundamental papers of computer science, founding the field of information theory and enabling the development of the very tubes through which you received this web page you’re reading now. It’s also the first place the word â€Å"bit†, short for binary digit, is found in the published literature. 8. The Semantic Web (available full-text) In The Semantic Web, Tim Berners-Lee, Sir Tim, the inventor of the World Wide Web, describes his vision for the web of the future. Now, 10 years later, it’s fascinating to look back though it and see on which points the web has delivered on its promise and how far away we still remain in so many others. This is different from the other papers above in that it’s a descriptive piece, not primary research as above, but still deserves it’s place in the list and readership will only grow as we get ever closer to his vision. 9. Convex Optimization (available full-text) This is a very popular book on a widely used optimization technique in signal processing. Convex optimization tries to find the provably optimal solution to an optimization problem, as opposed to a nearby maximum or minimum. While this seems like a highly specialized niche area, it’s of importance to machine learning and AI researchers, so it was able to pull in a nice readership on Mendeley. Professor Boyd has a very popular set of video classes at Stanford on the subject, which probably gave this a little boost, as well. The point here is that print publications aren’t the only way of communicating your ideas. Videos of techniques at SciVee or JoVE or recorded lectures (previously) can really help spread awareness of your research. 10. Object recognition from local scale-invariant features (available in full-text) This is another paper on the same topic as paper #4, and it’s by the same author. Looking across subdisciplines as we did here, it’s not surprising to see two related papers, of interest to the main driving discipline, appear twice. Adding the readers from this paper to the #4 paper would be enough to put it in the #2 spot, just below the LDA paper. Conclusions So what’s the moral of the story? Well, there are a few things to note. First of all, it shows that Mendeley readership data is good enough to reveal both papers of long-standing importance as well as interesting upcoming trends. Fun stuff can be done with this! How about a Mendeley leaderboard? You could grab the number of readers for each paper published by members of your group, and have some friendly competition to see who can get the most readers, month-over-month. Comparing yourself against others in terms of readers per paper could put a big smile on your face, or it could be a gentle nudge to get out to more conferences or maybe record a video of your technique for JoVE or Khan Academy or just Youtube. Another thing to note is that these results don’t necessarily mean that AI researchers are the most influential researchers or the most numerous, just the best at being accounted for. To make sure you’re counted properly, be sure you list your subdiscipline on your profile, or if you can’t find your exact one, pick the closest one, like the machine learning folks did with the AI subdiscipline. We recognize that almost everyone does interdisciplinary work these days. We’re working on a more flexible discipline assignment system, but for now, just pick your favorite one. These stats were derived from the entire readership history, so they do reflect a founder effect to some degree. Limiting the analysis to the past 3 months would probably reveal different trends and comparing month-to-month changes could reveal rising stars.

Wednesday, January 22, 2020

Ergotism Essay -- Health, Diseases, Medicine

The symptoms described in this case such as headaches, skin irritation, painful cramps and seizures are all common in a disease known as Ergotism. Ergotism is caused by the ingestion of alkaloids (ergotamines) produced by the fungus Claviceps purpurea (C. purpurea), which infects mainly Secale cereal (rye) and other cereals. This results in ergot poisoning (Alderman et al., 1999). All species of Claviceps are given the general term ergot and the majority of Claviceps species are restricted to only one or several grass genera. The exception is common ergot caused by C. purpurea, which contains a host range beyond 200 species of grasses (Alderman et al., 1999). C. purpurea, unlike other Claviceps species is distributed throughout the world and can survive in different temperature climates (including a colder places such as Southern England), further suggesting it is the most likely causative agent. Ergotism can be divided into two groups of symptoms, convulsive and gangrenous. Convulsive ergotism is usually characterized by nervous dysfunction such as wry neck, which was reported in the past as convulsions. The fact that many people died from gangrene clearly suggests that the ergotism suffered is not convulsive, as symptoms of gangrene were not present. Gangrene develops when the supply of blood is cut off to the affected part (ischemia) due to infection, trauma or vascular disease with the most common sites being the fingers, toes and hands. This further suggests that the condition is gangrenous ergotism, this can be supported by physical examination of the patient and blood tests. A CT scan or MRI can help to find out the amount of gas present and the extent to which tissues are damaged, however these tests were obviously n... ...illion of these occurring in children younger than 5 years (Epidemiological Record, 2007). In patients in developing countries such as Cameroons, invasive pneumococcal pneumonia has a high mortality rate (WHOInt, 2003). In terms of treatment and prophylaxis, appropriate antibiotics can help to treat S. pneumoniae infections via outpatient treatment. Prior to antibiotic therapy, steroids can be given in children older than 6 weeks suffering with possible pneumococcal meningitis and should be given before or at the time of the first dose of antibiotics (Pickering et al,.2009). The use of penicillin, ceftriaxone or ampicillin sulbactam is usually appropriate with hospitalized children, therapy should account for local resistance patterns. Immunocompromised children suspected of pneumococcal pneumonia should take vancomycin and a broad spectrum cephalosporin.

Tuesday, January 14, 2020

Manufacturing Management

In simple terms, cash flow is how money moves into and out of your business or how the cycle of cash flows in and flows out of your business thereby helping to determine the solvency of your business (How, 2007). Cost flow in a manufacturing firm involves the expense of the direct materials the manufacturer will be needing for business, the cost of direct labor that will need to be paid for as part of the cash flow process along with the manufacturing overhead that needs to come out of the cash flow. Whereas the cash flow in a service firm would not as much involve physical materials in general but the cost of training, marketing, advertising, travel in addition to the expense involved in whatever particular service that firm specializes in. In general, in the operations of a manufacturing firm most of the work would be handled in a central location, namely if it is one firm, in that particular manufacturing firm’s location. Travel can be a necessity for the management in some manufacturing firms. Employees and especially management of a service firm would be less â€Å"centrally located† in that service firm employees generally travel to the places and customers which need their services. With manufacturing firms you may have a few individuals who travel to introduce their product but overall the energy and expense would be â€Å"product-related.† Service firms generally do not spend as much time, energy or development or industrial design as most of their time spent in research, development and advertising their particular services. The majority of their time and energy would be service-related and changes more from user to user than would a manufacturer who generally supplies to places that need the products they already manufacture. One would have more blue-collar employees within a manufacturing firm while more white-collar employees would be in the labor force of a service firm due to the different training, education and skills needed for the two different types of firms. Vertical analysis would be â€Å"dividing each expense item in the income statement of a given year by net sales to identify expense items that rise more quickly or more slowly than a change in sales (Vertical, 2007). In using the vertical analysis, an analyst would be able to give management the information results gained by comparing the percentage mark-up of asset items along with how they have been financed. In addition, an analyst would be able to observe the trend of the increase in the assets and liabilities over the years (Vertical 2007). The statements that would be used for the vertical analysis would come from comparing the financial statements of firms that vary in size. Using a balance sheet, the assets, liabilities and the assets would be expressed as 100% whereas each item in the various categories would be expressed as a percentage of the respective totals. In using the common size income statement all the items in the income statement would be expressed as a percentage of the sales while sales is expressed as 100%. Horizontal analysis would be â€Å"the process of dividing each expense item of a given year by the same expense item in the base year. This process allows assessment of changes in the relative importance of expense items over time and the behavior of expense items as sales change† (Vertical, 2007). The most important information the horizontal analysis provides management would be trend. Over several years the direction, speed and extent of the trend can be seen by the information provided by the horizontal analysis. The statement one would use to do the horizontal analysis would be setting consecutive balance sheets, income statement or statement of cash flow side-by-side and reviewing any changes in the various categories on a yearly or multiyear basis (Vertical, 2007). References (2007). â€Å"vertical analysis.† Retrieved April 12, 2007, from The Free Dictionary Web site: http://financial-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Vertical+analysis (2007). Vertical and Horizontal Analysis Technique. Retrieved April 13, 2007, from Financial Analysis Revisited Web site: http://cbdd.wsu.edu/kewlcontent/cdoutput/TR505r/page37.htm (2007). How to better manage your cash flow. Retrieved April 12, 2007, from Entrepreneur.com Web site: http://www.entrepreur.com/money/moneymanagement/managingcashflow/article66008.h

Monday, January 6, 2020

Isolation In The Scarlet Letter - 1220 Words

David Grace Ms. Barich ELA 12 Sec. 01 17 October 2017 Isolation in The Scarlet Letter There has been a constant dispute over whether people should be governed by determinism or free will. Determinism is the idea that our actions and fate are predetermined and every occurrence can be explained or has a reason for happening; free will, in contrast, is the idea that we have the ability to act independently of external restraints. In the 17th century, Puritan society arose in New England as one that was governed by its religious views, and thus was a deterministic one. Nathaniel Hawthorne illustrates this in his novel The Scarlet Letter, in which the characters Hester, Dimmesdale, Pearl, and Chillingworth are alienated by society. Although†¦show more content†¦By making the scarlet letter symbolize sin and having the community shun her for it, Hawthorne is illustrating how constraining the Puritans are, since they judge people solely on their sins or lack thereof. Puritan society is also portrayed in a negative light when observing its effects on Dimmesdale. Arthur Dimmesdale is praised by many in his community as a holy figure and thus a leader, however, he is just as much a sinner as Hester, since together they committed adultery. The fact that he hides this secret in order to preserve this false image of himself shows how much he cares about how he is viewed by society. While many would argue that he does this out of his own free will, there is no doubt that he feels pressure from society to keep his past hidden and maintain this holy facade. Once Dimmesdale dies, some townspeople â€Å"affirm that the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale, on the very day when Hester Prynne first wore her ignominious badge, had begun a course of penance †¦ by inflicting a hideous torture on himself† (Hawthorne 230). When they see the letter branded on Dimmesdale, they are shown how he has been tortured by himself and by Chillingworth, as a result of the agon y society put him through in hiding his secret of having committed sin. This instance shows how, in a deterministic society, even those viewed as theShow MoreRelatedIsolation In The Scarlet Letter Essay848 Words   |  4 Pages Isolation is defined as being far away from other places, buildings, or people; remote. Isolation can come in many different forms: physical, spiritual, emotional and mental. In the Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Dimmesdale seems to deal with all four. When Dimmesdale sinned with Hester and the sin was as known, Dimmesdale had to take a backseat and watch her face the punishment for him which, caused him to have a guilty conscience. 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