Plant ‘thermometer’ triggers springtime budding by measuring night-time heat

source: Cambridge University    2016年10月28日
A photoreceptor molecule in plant cells has been found to moonlight as a thermometer after dark – allowing plants to read seasonal temperature changes. Scientists say the discovery could help breed crops that are more resilient to the temperatures expected to result from climate change.
Find out more here: http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/pl...

The attractions of magnetism: chips, cancer and crime

source: The Royal Society   2016年10月26日
Clifford Paterson Lecture 2016 by Professor Russell Cowburn FRS.
Magnetism is a very old subject and it is sometimes thought that there is little left to discover. All of that changes when nanotechnology and magnetism are brought together – without the technologies that have come out of that meeting we wouldn’t have social media, the Cloud or even the Internet.
In this talk, Professor Cowburn will explain the new physics which is currently emerging from the rapidly changing research field of nanostructured magnetic materials, and how that new physics finds use in computer memory, in novel biomedical technologies and in detecting counterfeit documents and smuggled goods.
Image credit: Chris van der Linden.

Patrik Schumacher, Elia Zenghelis, Xin Zhang, “Zaha Hadid: A Celebration”

source: Harvard GSD     2016年10月27日
This event will focus on the extraordinary contributions of Zaha Hadid as an architect. Elia Zenghelis, one of Hadid’s early teachers, will share his reflections on Zaha both as a student and as an internationally recognized architect. Patrik Schumacher, Hadid’s professional partner, will discuss their collaboration and the shifts over the years in the direction of the practice’s design approach. Zenghelis and Schumacher will then engage in a conversation together with Xin Zhang, Hadid’s close friend and client, whose company SOHO China commissioned several of her significant projects.

Grammatical Framework: Formalizing the Grammars of the World

source: GoogleTechTalks    2016年9月15日
A Google TechTalk, 9/7/2016, presented by Professor Aarne Ranta, University of Gothenburg.
Speaker's errata:
4:57: “sixteen forms” should be “twenty-six”
19:32: “more than 2000 members” should be “200” as on the slide

ABSTRACT: GF (Grammatical Framework) is a grammar formalism that was first released at Xerox Research in 1998 and later became an open-source collaborative project. GF is thus at least a decade younger than the major grammar formalisms (LFG, HPSG, TAG, CCG) and has grown up in an era when computational linguistics is dominated by statistical methods rather than grammars. Its background is in fact quite different from the major grammar formalisms, as its roots are in theorem provers and compiler construction rather than theoretical linguistics.
The original mission of GF was to make it easy to implement multilingual controlled language systems, where a semantic interlingua serves as a hub between multiple languages. In such a system, translation works as parsing the source language into an interlingua followed by generation into the target language. Unlike in many other interlingual systems, the interlingua is not fixed but can be easily changed e.g. to adapt to application domains. Thus GF has been used to implement software specification systems, spoken dialogue systems, mathematical teaching tools, tourist phrasebooks, and many other applications, in which up to 30 parallel languages are involved.
In recent years, GF has also scaled up to wide-coverage parsing and translation, resulting for instance in the mobile app GF Offline Translator. While not quite as good in open-domain tasks as state-of-the-art statistical systems, the GF translator has some advantages: compact size (15 languages available offline in 30 megabytes), inspectability (via syntax trees and other grammatical information), and domain-adaptability. The traditional weakness of grammars, their labour intensiveness, is relieved by software techniques that make the development of grammars in GF orders of magnitude faster than with traditional methods.
Another emerging usage of GF is dependency parsing. The booming initiative of Universal Dependencies (UD) has turned out to be very similar to the interlingua used in the wide-coverage GF translator, so that GF trees can be automatically converted to UD trees. Since GF trees support generation in addition to parsing, the mapping makes it possible to bootstrap UD treebanks for new languages. More generally, the use of UD data in combination with GF grammars suggests a way to build hybrid systems that combine data-driven UD parsing with the precise semantic analysis and generation of GF.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Aarne Ranta is Professor of Computer Science at the University of Gothenburg. He defended his PhD at the University of Helsinki in 1990. After seven years as Junior Fellow of the Academy of Finland, he worked at Xerox Research Centre Europe in Grenoble in 1997-1999, starting the development of Grammatical Framework (GF), after which he joined the Department of Computing Science of Chalmers University of Technology and University of Gothenburg. Ranta’s research interests have covered type theory, functional programming, compiler construction, and, as his main field, computational linguistics. His has followed the mission to formalize the grammars of the world and make them available for computer applications. In this work, he has been helped by 10 PhD graduates and by a community of over 200 GF contributors. Ranta is currently on a partial leave from the university to work for the start-up company Digital Grammars AB, which develops reliable language technology for producers of information.

A Course in Miracles with Charles Whitfield

source: New Thinking Allowed    2016年3月27日
Charles Whitfield, MD, is a board certified internist who transitioned into psychiatry. He is author of Choosing God: A Bird’s Eye View of A Course in Miracles. He is also author of the best-selling book, Healing the Child Within. His numerous other books include Teachers of God: Further Reflections on a Course in Miracles, The Truth About Depression, The Truth About Mental Illness, Not Crazy: You May Not Be Mentally Ill, and – co-authored with his wife, Barbara Harris Whitfield, The Power of Humility.
Here he describes his own journey from an atheist to a Course in Miracles teacher. He points out the power of acknowledging that there is more in the universe than we can know. He summarizes the essence of the Course as making the choice, moment by moment, to allow the holy spirit of god into one’s life. He also discusses the significance of A Course in Miracles as a tool for overcoming the effects of trauma and addiction. In addition, he maintains that the Course is an excellent text in ego psychology.

New Thinking Allowed host, Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD, is author of The Roots of Consciousness, Psi Development Systems, and The PK Man. Between 1986 and 2002 he hosted and co-produced the original Thinking Allowed public television series. He is the recipient of the only doctoral diploma in "parapsychology" ever awarded by an accredited university (University of California, Berkeley, 1980). He serves as dean of transformational psychology at the University of Philosophical Research. He teaches parapsychology for ministers in training with the Centers for Spiritual Living through the Holmes Institute. He has served as vice-president of the Association for Humanistic Psychology, and is the recipient of its Pathfinder Award for outstanding contributions to the field of human consciousness. He is also past-president of the non-profit Intuition Network, an organization dedicated to creating a world in which all people are encouraged to cultivate and apply their inner, intuitive abilities.
(Recorded on March 1, 2016)

Alfredo Jaar. Art today. How to? 2016

source: European Graduate School Video Lectures   2016年10月2日
http://www.egs.edu Alfredo Jaar, Chilean artist, architect, and filmmaker who presently lives and works in New York. Professor at The European Graduate School / EGS. Public open lecture for the students of the Division of Philosophy, Art & Critical Thought at the European Graduate School EGS. Saas-Fee Switzerland and Valetta/Malta. March 31 2016.
Alfredo Jaar's oeuvre is unquestionably politically motivated, often exploring the very notions of politics, ethics, and representation, and complex issues such as genocide, political corruption, humanitarian crises, and the relationship between geography, power, and exploitation. Alfredo Jaar is a devoted educator, and has made approximately sixty public interventions in his career. For him, there is a strong connection between art and thinking: “I strongly believe that artists are thinkers, as opposed to object makers. My working process is 99% thinking and 1% making. That thinking process is at the core of what I do and this process is always triggered by a specific site or issue. In my career, I have been incapable of creating a single work of art out of nothing. That is why I am not a studio artist: I define myself as a project artist. I try to propose, with my projects, a creative model that responds to the particulars of a given situation. That model can then be projected into the world. I believe that this is what artists do: with each project we propose a new conception of the world; and that new conception is a new way of looking at the world. That is why I believe that we create models of thinking the world.”

Media @ McGill - Edward Snowden

source: McGill University    2016年11月4日
Media@McGill invited Edward Snowden to give a free, public talk (via videoconference). Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, best known for leaking documents in 2013 about NSA surveillance activities, talks about surveillance in Canada.
The talk was held on Wednesday, November 2, 2016, 7 p.m. in Leacock 132, McGill University