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What is generally referred to by the public-at-large as “modernism” is thought (by it) to be based upon the denial and contradiction of the fundamental principles of musical art. But it would be a grave error to assume from this that the present age differs in the attitude toward modernism very considerably from any other, except perhaps in degree. The general intellectual or artistic niveau of any period whatsoever is almost inevitably a low one, apart from a few outstanding figures -- rarely exceeding two or three in any single generation -- who impart most of the significance to it. One is too prone to forget that art is somewhat different from other human activities in that the achievement of one man of genius far outweighs that of any number of mediocrities put together, even though he may be outnumbered by them in the ratio of a thousand to one. Even though it is rare, if not impossible, to find a man of solitary genius who is not indebted to at least one or several lesser men for his achievements it still holds true that a thousand noughts added together only amount to nothing in the end. It is the inability to recognize this simple truth that is primarily responsible for the all-too-familiar charge of decadence which is increasingly brought by each successive generation against its contemporary artists, even in the most incomparably fertile periods of artistic activity. In Bartok’s music one can feel a rich humaneness. The mechanization of music as found in Stravinsky, and the constructivism of Schoenberg in later years, are equally alien to Bartok. No matter how new his music, no matter how far he ventures into unexplored tonal spheres, his music never loses its inherent warmth. His keen mind, thinking clearly and surely, does not chill the emotion and does not allow the soul to freeze, as do the intellect of Schoenberg and the calculated objectivity of Stravinsky. Regardless of how much Bela Bartok condenses music and reduces it to the very essential of tone and rhythm, and even when he seeks heights where the atmosphere becomes thin and cold, music remains an art of the soul, of its grief and sorrow. The songs of the people, from whom Bela Bartok is descended, still resound into the lonely spheres in which the spirit of a great composer sought a new truth

This dissertation as a whole aims to provide the means to better understand hot-Jupiter planets through observing, performing thermochemical calculations, and modeling their atmospheres. We used Spitzer multi-wavelength secondary-eclipse observations to characterize planetary atmospheres. We chose targets with high signal-to-noise ratios, as their deep eclipses allow us to detect signatures of spectral features and assess planetary atmospheric structure and composition with greater certainty. Chapter 1 gives a short introduction. Chapter 2 presents the Spitzer secondary-eclipse analysis and atmospheric characterization of WASP-14b. The decrease in flux when a planet passes behind its host star reveals the planet dayside thermal emission, which, in turn, tells us about the atmospheric temperature and pressure profiles and molecular abundances. WASP-14b is a highly irradiated, transiting hot Jupiter. By applying a Bayesian approach in the atmospheric analysis, we found an absence of thermal inversion contrary to theoretical predictions. Chapter 3 describes the infrared observations of WASP-43b's Spitzer secondary eclipses, data analysis, and atmospheric characterization. WASP-43b is one of the closest-orbiting hot Jupiters, orbiting one of the coolest stars with a hot Jupiter. This configuration provided one of the strongest signal-to-noise ratios. The atmospheric analysis ruled out a strong thermal inversion in the dayside atmosphere of WASP-43b and put a nominal upper limit on the day-night energy redistribution. Chapter 4 presents an open-source Thermochemical Equilibrium Abundances (TEA) code and its application to several hot-Jupiter temperature and pressure models. TEA calculates the abundances of gaseous molecular species using the Gibbs free-energy minimization method within an iterative Lagrangian optimization scheme. The thermochemical equilibrium abundances obtained with TEA can be used to initialize atmospheric models of any planetary atmosphere. The code is written in Python, in a modular fashion, and it is available to the community via http://github.com/dzesmin/TEA. Chapter 5 presents my contributions to an open-source Bayesian Atmospheric Radiative Transfer (BART) code, and its application to WASP-43b. BART characterizes planetary atmospheres based on the observed spectroscopic information. It initializes a planetary atmospheric model, performs radiative-transfer calculations to produce models of planetary spectra, and using a statistical module compares models with observations. We describe the implementation of the initialization routines, the atmospheric profile generator, the eclipse module, the best-fit routines, and the contribution function module. We also present a comprehensive atmospheric analysis of all WASP-43b secondary-eclipse data obtained from the space- and ground-based observations using BART.

Social media is a significant factor in information distribution today, and this information landscape contains a lot of different posts that compete for the user’s attention. Different factors can help catch the interest of the user, and one of them is the headline of the message. The headline can be more or less eye-catching, which can make the reader more or less interested in interacting with the post. The theme of this study is the automatized creation of eye-catching headlines that stay truthful to the content of the articles using Automatic Text Summarization. The exact method used consisted of fine-tuning the BART model, which is an existing model for Text Summarization. Other papers have been written using different models to solve this problem with more or less success, however, none have used this method. It was deemed an interesting method as it is less time- and energy-consuming than creating and training a new model entirely from scratch and therefore could be easily replicated if the results were positive. The BartForConditionalGeneration model implemented by the HuggingFace library was fine-tuned, using the Popular News Articles by Web.io. This method showed positive results. The resulting headlines were deemed faithful to the original ones, with a ROUGE-2 recall score of 0.541. They were comparably eye-catching to the human-written headlines, with the human respondents ranking them almost the same, with an average rank of 1.692 for the human-written headlines, and 1.821 for fine-tuned BART, and also getting an average score of 3.31 on a 1 to 5 attractiveness score scale. They were also deemed very comprehensible, with an average score of 0.95 on a scale from 0 to 1. / Sociala medier är idag en viktig faktor i distributionen av information. Detta nya landskap innehåller många olika inlägg som tävlar om användarens uppmärksamhet. Olika faktorer kan hjälpa till att fånga användarens blick till specifika inlägg eller artiklar, och en av dessa faktorer är rubriken. Rubriken kan vara mer eller mindre fängslande, och göra läsaren mer eller mindre intresserad av att interagera med inlägget. Temat för denna studie är att automatiskt skapa iögonfallande och intressanta rubriker, som beskriver innehå llet i artiklarna på ett korrekt sätt. Den valda metoden är automatisk textsamman fattning, och mer specifikt finjusterades BART-modellen, som är en existerande modell för textsammanfattning. Andra metoder har använts tidigare för att lösa denna problematik med mer eller mindre framgång, men ingen studie hade använt den här. Den ansågs vara intressant eftersom den är mindre tids- och energikrävande än vad det skulle vara att skapa en ny modell från grunden, och därför skulle den lätt kunna replikeras om resultatet var positivt. BartForConditionalGeneration-modellen implementerad av HuggingFace-bib lioteket finjusterades därför med hjälp av artiklar och rubriker från datasetet ’Popular News Articles’ av Web.io. Metoden visade positiva resultat. De resulterande rubrikerna ansågs trogna de ursprungliga, med en ROUGE-2 recall score på 0,541. De var jämförbart iögonfallande gentemot de mänskligt skrivna rubrikerna, då respondenterna rankade dem nästan likadant, med en genomsnittlig rankning på 1,692 för de mänskligt skrivna rubrikerna och 1,821 för rubrikerna som finjusterade BART genererade. De fick också ett genomsnittligt betyg av 3,31 på en poängskala från 1 till 5. De ansågs dessutom vara mycket lättbegripliga, med ett medelpoäng på 0,95 på en skala från 0 till 1.

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No description available.

French colonial regimes in West Africa and the Caribbean left the diverse populations fragmented without a central set of cultural values to unify them. The search for identity permeates postcolonial francophone literature with the mother symbol at its center. Coinciding with popular ideologies, the portrayal of motherhood has evolved from the source of ancient roots in traditional African society to the enterprise of the future by cultivating their own mores. By analyzing the mother symbol in a variety of texts from West Africa and the Caribbean and by situating them in their historical and social context, I will assess the role of the mother in the quest for a new identity. The earlier works written by male authors in the l 940s and 1950s tend to associate the mother figure with nostalgia for the native land and tradition, and gave her stereotypical characterizations of femininity such as docility, smothering sentimentality, and dependence. The more contemporary works show mothering outside of the conventional practices, especially the female authors who include a variety of mother figures in their texts in an attempt to dispel repressive definitions. Nevertheless, all of the literary works in the study equate mothering with a prospect of hope.

Abstract Young drivers between the ages of 15 and 24 are overrepresented in automobile crash statistics worldwide. Despite the common assumption that young drivers are more at risk of crashing than older drivers due to inexperience, age appears to be the main factor influencing crash risk, even after experience has been taken into account. It is possible that young drivers are involved in a high number of crashes because of their risk-taking tendencies. Accident involvement is not so much influenced by errors and lapses by the driver, but by the willingness to commit driving violations intentionally. However, studies that attempted to measure the risk-taking tendencies of drivers have so far used mainly self-report questionnaires, which are limited in their ability to predict real-world behaviour. This thesis used a new behavioural measure of risk-taking known as the Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART). In this task, participants engage in computer simulation where a balloon is pumped in order to accumulate money, but when the balloon is pumped too high it explodes, and the money that could have been gained is lost. A group of 50 male drivers were the participants of this study, and these were separated into three age groups: adolescents, aged 16-17, young adults, aged 20-21, and older adults, aged 25 years and over. In addition to the BART, the participants answered a series of questionnaires that focused on risk-related constructs, such as impulsiveness and subjective risk assessment, as well as driving attitudes and intentions. The expectation was that younger drivers would be shown to have greater risk-taking tendencies than older drivers. The results showed that the BART showed no relationship with either driving attitude scores (apart from a small correlation with attitudes towards close following), or any of the self-reported measures of risk. The other self-report risk measures, however, showed many correlations with various aspects of driving attitudes and intentions. Over age groups, the level of impulsiveness was found to decrease, and the attitudes became less in favour of taking physical risks. Adolescents were also found to be more approving of using a cell phone while driving, and of overtaking in risky circumstances. They had greater intentions to commit violations in the future, and were more likely to get a thrill from driving. The failure of the BART to reveal any significant findings may have been because so far it has only been shown to correlate with self-reported real-world behaviour, and not so much with attitudes and risk-related constructs. The other suggestion of this thesis was that the BART does not simulate risk-taking in the truest sense because there are no specific negative consequences for risk taking, only the removal of a possible benefit. The finding of greater risk taking in adolescent drivers was discussed in relation to Risk Homeostasis Theory and Problem Behaviour Theory, with a focus on how age-related factors might influence driver risk taking. As further discussed, these age-related factors might include the effect of incomplete brain development, the motives for driving, and the lifestyle of the individual.

Problem: Real-time process and destructive test data were collected from a wood composite manufacturer in the U.S. to develop real-time predictive models of two key strength properties (Modulus of Rupture (MOR) and Internal Bound (IB)) of a wood composite manufacturing process. Sensor malfunction and data “send/retrieval” problems lead to null fields in the company’s data warehouse which resulted in information loss. Many manufacturers attempt to build accurate predictive models excluding entire records with null fields or using summary statistics such as mean or median in place of the null field. However, predictive model errors in validation may be higher in the presence of information loss. In addition, the selection of predictive modeling methods poses another challenge to many wood composite manufacturers. Approach: This thesis consists of two parts addressing above issues: 1) how to improve data quality using missing data imputation; 2) what predictive modeling method is better in terms of prediction precision (measured by root mean square error or RMSE). The first part summarizes an application of missing data imputation methods in predictive modeling. After variable selection, two missing data imputation methods were selected after comparing six possible methods. Predictive models of imputed data were developed using partial least squares regression (PLSR) and compared with models of non-imputed data using ten-fold cross-validation. Root mean square error of prediction (RMSEP) and normalized RMSEP (NRMSEP) were calculated. The second presents a series of comparisons among four predictive modeling methods using imputed data without variable selection. Results: The first part concludes that expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm and multiple imputation (MI) using Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) simulation achieved more precise results. Predictive models based on imputed datasets generated more precise prediction results (average NRMSEP of 5.8% for model of MOR model and 7.2% for model of IB) than models of non-imputed datasets (average NRMSEP of 6.3% for model of MOR and 8.1% for model of IB). The second part finds that Bayesian Additive Regression Tree (BART) produced most precise prediction results (average NRMSEP of 7.7% for MOR model and 8.6% for IB model) than other three models: PLSR, LASSO, and Adaptive LASSO.

In this essay I plan to show how Wharton, through Lily, criticised society, and more specifically its expectations of women. My thesis is that Wharton and her character Lily exposed the upper class society of New York, and its ruthlessness, by voicing a woman’s point of view. Therefore, the main purpose here is to reveal the complexity of the lives women led in order to fulfil society’s expectations and I thereby plan to explore what it was like living in a world governed by strict rules of conduct.