Does Being Bilingual Make You Better At Math?

The purpose of this study is to examine if there is any relationship between being bilingual, defined as speaking your native language at home and another language in school, and your mathematical ability. Data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health was used to compare the math grades of students who were not born in the US and speak English, Spanish, or Other at home. Also, data from the Bryant University first year students was used to test if students who speak a different language at home have a higher mathematical average than their monolingual peers. Results show that students who are classified as balanced bilinguals perform better at math than monolingual or one-dominant bilingual students

Reduction of binary forms via the hyperbolic center of mass

In this paper we provide an alternative reduction theory for real, binary forms with no real roots. Our approach is completely geometric, making use of the notion of hyperbolic center of mass in the upper half-plane. It appears that our model compares favorably with existing reduction theories, at least in certain aspects related to the field of definition. Various tools and features of hyperbolic geometry that are interesting in themselves, but also relevant for our and various other reduction theories papers (\cite{julia} and \cite{SC}), are also treated in detail and in a self-contained way here.Comment: 15 pages, 5 figure

OVERVIEW OF EUROPEAN GEOPOLITICS. GEOPOLITICAL SCENARIOS AND THEIR IMPACT ON ESDP

Albania is prepared and recently hopes to receive the invitation for the EU candidate membership, that means not only removal of countries state barriers and borders, but above all the integration process means the approach to the fundamental values on which it was built and breath this great organization. As such process, we need to deepen and widen the economical, political, social and security reform programs. The Integration process itself includes a wide range of activities and actors contribution, which must be taken in consideration by not avoiding them when it comes to focus to geopolitics as a concept, but also challenges that faces our country, Albanian people in their European integration, without neglecting the analysis process of scenarios associated with strategic allies choice for Albania , Kosovo and their issue as a whole. The recent debate and not only political view on these strategic alliances, on which will be the primary on the list of priorities, bring to the scene the debate of geopolitics itself, its current focus, as a methodical tool to analyze our foreign policy, trying to explain and anticipate regional and international developments, mainly geographical elements, like position, size, climate, topography, demography, natural resources, but she also includes geopolitical interests focused on common geopolitical system, which includes a geographical region, the cultural dimension etc. Geopolitics gets boost from the history and historical events. It reflects the connections of interests and elements of national power, political and strategic decision-making process in geographical contexts. Based on that issue and sensitivity, I will try to give these considerations, of course not in an exhaustive way, a thorough overview of geopolitics in general and especially in Europe with focus to the possible scenarios and impact to the common policy and defense security. In a panoramic way I will bring a historical and evolutionary concept of geopolitics , its significance and its links to the other related discipline as Geo-strategy, etc. Geopolitical factors and methods together with key theory and respective representatives will be part of this analysis, focusing on the geopolitics of EU, its origin and internal dynamics. We retrospective way we give a summary of EU history,its configuration process, their institutions, such as EU Parliament, the European Council, the EU Commission etc. The Common Policy and Defense security given in the Treaty of Maastricht and then the evolution related to the role of Western European Union (WEU) in the development of the EU Defense policy. Later on the emerge of European security and defense policy (Declaration of St–Malo Treaty) . Several geopolitical scenario and their general and particular impacts to ESDP are given and analyzed in the contexts, by highlights of the perceptions and perspectives of geopolitical schools representatives in the past and also contemporary with their assessments and predictions for the future of the EU. Geopolitical Strategies are associated with the development and coherence of those member countries and those countries seeking membership by accepting this continental project as necessity and not supporting the dissolution or disintegration of EU. The end of cold war brought about the disappearance of ideological divisions and conflicts between the two main blocs led by two superpowers. After this period, Globalization phenomena took unprecedented proportions, with all its dimensions and appearance, economic, political, social, cultural and security. This situation prompted the re-dimensioned of geopolitics in its role and mission in a new international environment, where the number the actors their interests was continuously increasin

CIAGAN: Conditional Identity Anonymization Generative Adversarial Networks

The unprecedented increase in the usage of computer vision technology in society goes hand in hand with an increased concern in data privacy. In many real-world scenarios like people tracking or action recognition, it is important to be able to process the data while taking careful consideration in protecting people's identity. We propose and develop CIAGAN, a model for image and video anonymization based on conditional generative adversarial networks. Our model is able to remove the identifying characteristics of faces and bodies while producing high-quality images and videos that can be used for any computer vision task, such as detection or tracking. Unlike previous methods, we have full control over the de-identification (anonymization) procedure, ensuring both anonymization as well as diversity. We compare our method to several baselines and achieve state-of-the-art results.Comment: CVPR 202