Kundera: action as Novel issue; an Arendtian reading of Kundera's approach to novel history

A main issue in Arendt writings is impossibility of action in modern bureaucratic society. Milan Kundera argued that a novel’s fundamental problem is action. This study discusses similarity between Arendt and Kundera's readings with reference to important Novels. Transition from epic world to Novel world means going beyond action and movement territory to reaction and ineffective territory. Adventures reduces to commands. Don Quixote, contrary to Homer heroes, has suffered a defeat at all. The despair of action, makes Flaubert novel’s character (Madame bovary) seek refuge in inside world and it makes her to withdraw from reality. Bureaucratization of life is allowed to dominate impersonal and unnamed powers over Kafka’s Novels personalities and they are no longer in touch with reality. Kafka’s Novels give us some examples for lack of action in a bureaucratic society. This world isnot tragic, but it is ironic. Considering Arendt and Kundera views, in bureaucratic world, action as poetical thing is revealed; not similar to Lyric poetic that Romantics promotes, but a surrealistic poetic: poetic as an unexpected events and surprising intersections and interrupting a dominant plot

An agent-based simulation approach to the facilitated industrial symbiosis in the presence of trust: NISP dataset

Abstract: Pollution is one of the most important challenging political and social issues of our day. Reducing or eliminating pollution and solid waste is a critical issue. Hence the current awareness about the environment encourages citizens, governments, and corporations to take drastic measures to minimize their environmental footprints. Industrial Symbiosis (IS) network is a subfield of Industrial Ecology which tries to develop exchanges between firms in order to reduce waste and material use. The goal is to encourage trading relationships between firms (networks) to avoid waste disposal to the environment. Ideally, these exchanges can also reduce or eliminate the use of new materials and reduce energy use. In our research, we use agent-based simulation to analyze how these networks function and what motivates firms to engage in industrial symbiosis (IS) networks. Active exchanges between firms are referred to as network synergy. We also evaluate the specific environmental benefits of these IS exchanges. We use these results to determine how existing IS networks can be improved and how new IS networks can be developed. Using a sensitivity analysis, we evaluate the impact of parameters changes to the level of material exchanges and environmental impacts in the IS network. In addition to parameters commonly modeled for IS exchanges such as the distance between firms, participation in IS information sessions, the similarity of waste streams, and landfill cost, we modeled the level of trust in the network and the impact of taxation for landfill use or avoidance. Significantly, our results indicate that increasing trust within the network has a significant effect on increasing synergy in the network. We tested our idea by using a large dataset from the National Industrial Symbiosis Program (NISP) network. NISP was a facilitated industrial symbiosis program in the UK from 2003 to 2012. We base our results on five geographic regions of the NISP network

Graph-based vulnerability assessment of resting-state functional brain networks in full-term neonates

Network disruption during early brain development can result in long-term cognitive impairments. In this study, we investigated rich-club organization in resting-state functional brain networks in full-term neonates using a multiscale connectivity analysis. We further identified the most influential nodes, also called spreaders, having higher impacts on the flow of information throughout the network. The network vulnerability to damage to rich-club (RC) connectivity within and between resting-state networks was also assessed using a graph-based vulnerability analysis. Our results revealed a rich club organization and small-world topology for resting-state functional brain networks in full term neonates, regardless of the network size. Interconnected mostly through short-range connections, functional rich-club hubs were confined to sensory-motor, cognitive-attention-salience (CAS), default mode, and language-auditory networks with an average cross-scale overlap of 36%, 20%, 15% and 12%, respectively. The majority of the functional hubs also showed high spreading potential, except for several non-RC spreaders within CAS and temporal networks. The functional networks exhibited high vulnerability to loss of RC nodes within sensorimotor cortices, resulting in a significant increase and decrease in network segregation and integration, respectively. The network vulnerability to damage to RC nodes within the language-auditory, cognitive-attention-salience, and default mode networks was also significant but relatively less prominent. Our findings suggest that the network integration in neonates can be highly compromised by damage to RC connectivity due to brain immaturity

Fully spatial and SNR scalable, SPIHT-based image coding for transmission over heterogenous networks, Journal of Telecommunications and Information Technology, 2003, nr 2

This paper presents a fully scalable image coding scheme based on the set partitioning in hierarchical trees (SPIHT) algorithm. The proposed algorithm, called fully scalable SPIHT (FS-SPIHT), adds the spatial scalability feature to the SPIHT algorithm. It provides this new functionality without sacrificing other important features of the original SPIHT bitstream such as: compression efficiency, full embeddedness and rate scalability. The flexible output bitstream of the FS-SPIHT encoder which consists of a set of embedded parts related to different resolutions and quality levels can be easily adapted (reordered) to given bandwidth and resolution requirements by a simple parser without decoding the bitstream. FS-SPIHT is a very good candidate for image communication over heterogenous networks which requires high degree of scalability from image coding systems

Wearable Devices in Health Monitoring from the Environmental towards Multiple Domains: A Survey

The World Health Organization (WHO) recognizes the environmental, behavioral, physiological, and psychological domains that impact adversely human health, well-being, and quality of life (QoL) in general. The environmental domain has significant interaction with the others. With respect to proactive and personalized medicine and the Internet of medical things (IoMT), wearables are most important for continuous health monitoring. In this work, we analyze wearables in healthcare from a perspective of innovation by categorizing them according to the four domains. Furthermore, we consider the mode of wearability, costs, and prolonged monitoring. We identify features and investigate the wearable devices in the terms of sampling rate, resolution, data usage (propagation), and data transmission. We also investigate applications of wearable devices. Web of Science, Scopus, PubMed, IEEE Xplore, and ACM Library delivered wearables that we require to monitor at least one environmental parameter, e.g., a pollutant. According to the number of domains, from which the wearables record data, we identify groups: G1, environmental parameters only; G2, environmental and behavioral parameters; G3, environmental, behavioral, and physiological parameters; and G4 parameters from all domains. In total, we included 53 devices of which 35, 9, 9, and 0 belong to G1, G2, G3, and G4, respectively. Furthermore, 32, 11, 7, and 5 wearables are applied in general health and well-being monitoring, specific diagnostics, disease management, and non-medical. We further propose customized and quantified output for future wearables from both, the perspectives of users, as well as physicians. Our study shows a shift of wearable devices towards disease management and particular applications. It also indicates the significant role of wearables in proactive healthcare, having capability of creating big data and linking to external healthcare systems for real-time monitoring and care delivery at the point of perception

Hardware Prototype for Wrist-Worn Simultaneous Monitoring of Environmental, Behavioral, and Physiological Parameters

We designed a low-cost wrist-worn prototype for simultaneously measuring environmental, behavioral, and physiological domains of influencing factors in healthcare. Our prototype continuously monitors ambient elements (sound level, toxic gases, ultraviolet radiation, air pressure, temperature, and humidity), personal activity (motion tracking and body positioning using gyroscope, magnetometer, and accelerometer), and vital signs (skin temperature and heart rate). An innovative three-dimensional hardware, based on the multi-physical-layer approach is introduced. Using board-to-board connectors, several physical hardware layers are stacked on top of each other. All of these layers consist of integrated and/or add-on sensors to measure certain domain (environmental, behavioral, or physiological). The prototype includes centralized data processing, transmission, and visualization. Bi-directional communication is based on Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) and can connect to smartphones as well as smart cars and smart homes for data analytic and adverse-event alerts. This study aims to develop a prototype for simultaneous monitoring of the all three areas for monitoring of workplaces and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) patients with a concentration on technical development and validation rather than clinical investigation. We have implemented 6 prototypes which have been tested by 5 volunteers. We have asked the subjects to test the prototype in a daily routine in both indoor (workplaces and laboratories) and outdoor. We have not imposed any specific conditions for the tests. All presented data in this work are from the same prototype. Eleven sensors measure fifteen parameters from three domains. The prototype delivers the resolutions of 0.1 part per million (PPM) for air quality parameters, 1 dB, 1 index, and 1 °C for sound pressure level, UV, and skin temperature, respectively. The battery operates for 12.5 h under the maximum sampling rates of sensors without recharging. The final expense does not exceed 133€. We validated all layers and tested the entire device with a 75 min recording. The results show the appropriate functionalities of the prototype for further development and investigations

Yield Stability in Chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.) and Study Relationship among the univariate and multivariate stability Parameters

Chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.) is traditionally grown as a rain fed crop globally,specifically in Middle East. Its seed is a rich source of protein for human consumption indeveloping countries such as Iran. The development of genotypes, which can be adaptedto a wide range of diversified environment, is the ultimate goal of plant breeders in a cropimprovement program. In this study, several univariate and multivariate stabilitymethods were used to evaluate the genotype × environment (GE) interaction in 17chickpea genotypes. Field experiments were carried out in 16 environments of Iran’schickpea producing areas to characterize GE interaction on grain yield of 17 chickpeagenotypes. Combined analysis of variance across environments indicated that bothenvironments and GE interactions influenced significantly the genotypes performancefor yield. Twenty univariate and multivariate stability methods and techniques were usedto describe the GE interaction and to define stable genotypes in relation to the yieldconsidered in this study. The different stability statistics which measured the differentaspects of stability was substantiated by Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient.According to Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient three groups of stability parameterscan be defined that the results of these different stability methods were variable. We usedgroup 1, include Lin and Binns superiority measure ( i P ), Hernandez et al (1993) parameter( i D ), GGE Biplot method and Principal coordinate method for introduction somegenotypes to farmers. The identified superior genotypes significantly differ from thelocal check cultivars and therefore farmers in semi arid areas of Iran can use thesegenotypes

A Distributed Compressed Sensing-based Algorithm for the Joint Recovery of Signal Ensemble

This paper considers sparsity-aware adaptive compressed sensing acquisition and the joint reconstruction of intra- and inter-correlated signals in the wireless sensor networks via distributed compressed sensing. textcolor{red}{ Due to the different sparsity order of the finite-length signals, we develop an adaptive sensing framework based on the sparsity order, in which sensor readings are sampled according to its own sparsity order measure.} On the decoder side, utilizing a distributed compressive sensing scheme, a joint reconstruction method is proposed to recover signal ensemble even in imperfect data communication. textcolor{red}{Moreover, we explore that by adapting the sampling rate of the sensed signals, not only the whole required number of measurements is reduced, but also the reconstruction performance is significantly improved. Numerical experiments verify that our proposed algorithm achieves higher reconstruction accuracy with a smaller number of required transmission, and with lower complexity as compared to those of the state of the art CS methods

Mitosis Detection from Breast Cancer Histology Slide Images using Particle Swarm Optimization and Support Vector Machine

This paper introduces a new strategy for the purpose of automatic mitosis detection from breast cancer histopathology slide images. In this method, a new approach for reducing the number of false positive using Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) is proposed. The proposed system is implemented on the histopathology slide images acquired by Aperio XT scanner (scanner A). In PSO algorithm the number of false positive objects or non-mitosis are defined as a cast function and by the minimization it the most of the non-mitosis candidates will be removed. Then some color, texture features such as co-occurrence and ru