From phlogiston to caloric and oxygen

Arthur Donovan, Antoine Lavoisier: Science, Administration, and Revolution. Blackwell, Oxford, 1993. Pp. xv+351. £35.00. ISBN 0-631-178877-2 Arthur Donovan marks the 250th anniversary of the birth of Antoine Lavoisier (1743-1794) with a historical biography for readers who are already acquainted with the technical and scientific aspects of the Chemical Revolution and wish to know more of Lavoisier’s principal career as an administrator and financier in the terminal decades of the ancien régime and the opening years of the French Revolution. Although Lavoisier was a driven experimental scientist from his early days, and soon became wealthy enough to run a well-equipped laboratory with assistants, he was far too busy with technocratic administration to carry out much practical chemistry. His primary scientific strength lay in a critical assessment of the promise offered by new experimental results, discovered by other chemists, for some alternative to prevailing chemical ideas, which he had come to regard in youth as inadequate and flawed from a wide knowledge of the state of the art and a judicious repetition of previous experiments.

2007 ◽  
Vol 66 (4) ◽  
pp. 303-321
Author(s):  
Lode Wils

In het tweede deel van zijn bijdrage 1830: van de Belgische protonatie naar de natiestaat, over de gebeurtenissen van 1830-1831 als slotfase van een passage van de Belgische protonatie doorheen de grote politiek-maatschappelijke en culturele mutaties na de Franse Revolutie, ontwikkelt Lode Wils de stelling dat de periode 1829-1830 de "terminale crisis" vormde van het Koninkrijk der Verenigde Nederlanden. Terwijl koning Willem I definitief had laten verstaan dat hij de ministeriële verantwoordelijkheid definitief afwees en elke kritiek op het regime beschouwde als kritiek op de dynastie, groeide in het Zuiden de synergie in het verzet tussen klerikalen, liberalen en radicale anti-autoritaire groepen. In de vervreemding tussen het Noorden en het Zuiden en de uiteindelijke revolutionaire nationaal-liberale oppositie vanuit het Zuiden, speelde de taalproblematiek een minder belangrijke rol dan het klerikale element en de liberale aversie tegen het vorstelijk absolutisme van Willem I en de aangevoelde uitsluiting van de Belgen uit het openbaar ambt en vooral uit de leiding van de staat.________1830: from the Belgian pre-nation to the nation stateIn the second part of his contribution 1830: from the Belgian pre-nation to the nation state, dealing with the events from 1830-1831 as the concluding phase of a transition of the Belgian pre-nation through the major socio-political and cultural mutations after the French Revolution, Lode Wils develops the thesis that the period of 1829-1830 constituted the "terminal crisis" of the Kingdom of the United Netherlands. Whilst King William I had clearly given to understand that he definitively rejected ministerial responsibility and that he considered any criticism of the regime as a criticism of the dynasty, the synergy of resistance increased between the clericalists, liberals and radical anti-authoritarian groups in the South. In the alienation between the North and the South and the ultimate revolutionary national-liberal opposition from the South the language issue played a less important role than the clericalist element and the liberal aversion against the royal absolutism of William I and the sense of exclusion of the Belgians from public office and particularly from the government of the state.


The principal architects of the ‘chemical revolution’ may well be said to have been Antoine Laurent Lavoisier (1743-1794) and Antoine Francois Fourcroy (1755-1809). The former by the intuitive genius of his brain, the extraordinary manipulative skill of his hands and the impeccable logic of his mind elaborated and set forth those truths on which modem chemistry was founded. The latter used his ingratiating and flexible personality, oratorical ability and facile pen to publicize the new chemistry and see that it was embodied in the educational curriculum. Lavoisier helped Fourcroy during his earlier years and used his prestige and influence to advance the younger man and obtain financial preferment for him. Under the ancien régime Lavoisier was rich, respected and influential; Fourcroy led a struggling existence for many years. The French Revolution was to bring Lavoisier misery and legal assassination; the same period saw Fourcroy’s prestige and power rise to a maximum. The relationship existing between the two men presents an as yet unsolved puzzle. Fourcroy’s biography still has to be written, as does an authoritative one of Lavoisier, when all the material is available. The latter’s standard biographer, Edouard Grimaux, wrote three-quarters of a century ago and his work needs to be superseded by an objective and fully documented modern study. Grimaux strongly condemned Fourcroy for allowing Lavoisier to be sent to the guillotine and implies that, possibly motivated by jealousy, he may have helped to speed him on his way. Modern scholars are inclined to the opinion that Grimaux maligned Fourcroy unjustifiably. The charge, however, was evidently current shortly after Lavoisier’s death, for in a speech delivered only two years after the lamentable event Fourcroy felt constrained to defend himself against an accusation which was to haunt him for the rest of his days and pursue him from his own death until the present day.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (23) ◽  
pp. 11344
Author(s):  
Wei Ke ◽  
Ka-Hou Chan

Paragraph-based datasets are hard to analyze by a simple RNN, because a long sequence always contains lengthy problems of long-term dependencies. In this work, we propose a Multilayer Content-Adaptive Recurrent Unit (CARU) network for paragraph information extraction. In addition, we present a type of CNN-based model as an extractor to explore and capture useful features in the hidden state, which represent the content of the entire paragraph. In particular, we introduce the Chebyshev pooling to connect to the end of the CNN-based extractor instead of using the maximum pooling. This can project the features into a probability distribution so as to provide an interpretable evaluation for the final analysis. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed approach, being compared to the state-of-the-art models.


2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Jiaxi Ye ◽  
Ruilin Li ◽  
Bin Zhang

Directed fuzzing is a practical technique, which concentrates its testing energy on the process toward the target code areas, while costing little on other unconcerned components. It is a promising way to make better use of available resources, especially in testing large-scale programs. However, by observing the state-of-the-art-directed fuzzing engine (AFLGo), we argue that there are two universal limitations, the balance problem between the exploration and the exploitation and the blindness in mutation toward the target code areas. In this paper, we present a new prototype RDFuzz to address these two limitations. In RDFuzz, we first introduce the frequency-guided strategy in the exploration and improve its accuracy by adopting the branch-level instead of the path-level frequency. Then, we introduce the input-distance-based evaluation strategy in the exploitation stage and present an optimized mutation to distinguish and protect the distance sensitive input content. Moreover, an intertwined testing schedule is leveraged to perform the exploration and exploitation in turn. We test RDFuzz on 7 benchmarks, and the experimental results demonstrate that RDFuzz is skilled at driving the program toward the target code areas, and it is not easily stuck by the balance problem of the exploration and the exploitation.


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (8) ◽  
pp. 2864 ◽  
Author(s):  
Muhammad Asad ◽  
Ahmed Moustafa ◽  
Takayuki Ito

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been applied to solve various challenges of real-world problems in recent years. However, the emergence of new AI technologies has brought several problems, especially with regard to communication efficiency, security threats and privacy violations. Towards this end, Federated Learning (FL) has received widespread attention due to its ability to facilitate the collaborative training of local learning models without compromising the privacy of data. However, recent studies have shown that FL still consumes considerable amounts of communication resources. These communication resources are vital for updating the learning models. In addition, the privacy of data could still be compromised once sharing the parameters of the local learning models in order to update the global model. Towards this end, we propose a new approach, namely, Federated Optimisation (FedOpt) in order to promote communication efficiency and privacy preservation in FL. In order to implement FedOpt, we design a novel compression algorithm, namely, Sparse Compression Algorithm (SCA) for efficient communication, and then integrate the additively homomorphic encryption with differential privacy to prevent data from being leaked. Thus, the proposed FedOpt smoothly trade-offs communication efficiency and privacy preservation in order to adopt the learning task. The experimental results demonstrate that FedOpt outperforms the state-of-the-art FL approaches. In particular, we consider three different evaluation criteria; model accuracy, communication efficiency and computation overhead. Then, we compare the proposed FedOpt with the baseline configurations and the state-of-the-art approaches, i.e., Federated Averaging (FedAvg) and the paillier-encryption based privacy-preserving deep learning (PPDL) on all these three evaluation criteria. The experimental results show that FedOpt is able to converge within fewer training epochs and a smaller privacy budget.


Physics ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-66 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vyacheslav I. Yukalov

The article presents the state of the art and reviews the literature on the long-standing problem of the possibility for a sample to be at the same time solid and superfluid. Theoretical models, numerical simulations, and experimental results are discussed.


Author(s):  
Michael Lauener

Abstract Protection of the church and state stability through the absence of religious 'shallowness': views on religion-policy of Jeremias Gotthelf and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel out of a spirit of reconciliation. The article re-examines a thesis of Paul Baumgartner published in 1945: "Jeremias Gotthelf's, 'Zeitgeist and Bernergeist', A Study on Introduction and Interpretation", that if the Swiss writer and keen Hegel-opponent Jeremias Gotthelf had read any book of the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, some of this would have received his recognition. Both Gotthelf and Hegel see the Reformation to be the cause of the emergence of a strong state. For Gotthelf, this marks the beginning of a process of strengthening the state at the expense of the church. Hegel, on the other hand, considers the modern state to be the reality of freedom, produced by the Christian 'religion of freedom' (Rph, §270 Z., p. 430). In contrast to Gotthelf, for whom only Christ can reconcile the state and religion, Hegel praises the French Revolution as "reconciliation of the divine with the world". For Gotthelf, the French Revolution was only a poor imitation of the process of spiritual and political liberation initiated by the Reformation, through which Christ reduced people to their original liberty. Nevertheless, both Gotthelf and Hegel want to protect the state and the church from falling apart, they reject organizational unity of state – religion – church in the sense of a theocracy, and demand the protection of church communities.


Author(s):  
Rung-Tzuo Liaw ◽  
Chuan-Kang Ting

Evolutionary multitasking is a significant emerging search paradigm that utilizes evolutionary algorithms to concurrently optimize multiple tasks. The multi-factorial evolutionary algorithm renders an effectual realization of evolutionary multitasking on two or three tasks. However, there remains room for improvement on the performance and capability of evolutionary multitasking. Beyond three tasks, this paper proposes a novel framework, called the symbiosis in biocoenosis optimization (SBO), to address evolutionary many-tasking optimization. The SBO leverages the notion of symbiosis in biocoenosis for transferring information and knowledge among different tasks through three major components: 1) transferring information through inter-task individual replacement, 2) measuring symbiosis through intertask paired evaluations, and 3) coordinating the frequency and quantity of transfer based on symbiosis in biocoenosis. The inter-task individual replacement with paired evaluations caters for estimation of symbiosis, while the symbiosis in biocoenosis provides a good estimator of transfer. This study examines the effectiveness and efficiency of the SBO on a suite of many-tasking benchmark problems, designed to deal with 30 tasks simultaneously. The experimental results show that SBO leads to better solutions and faster convergence than the state-of-the-art evolutionary multitasking algorithms. Moreover, the results indicate that SBO is highly capable of identifying the similarity between problems and transferring information appropriately.


Electronics ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (10) ◽  
pp. 258 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abdus Hassan ◽  
Umar Afzaal ◽  
Tooba Arifeen ◽  
Jeong Lee

Recently, concurrent error detection enabled through invariant relationships between different wires in a circuit has been proposed. Because there are many such implications in a circuit, selection strategies have been developed to select the most valuable implications for inclusion in the checker hardware such that a sufficiently high probability of error detection ( P d e t e c t i o n ) is achieved. These algorithms, however, due to their heuristic nature cannot guarantee a lossless P d e t e c t i o n . In this paper, we develop a new input-aware implication selection algorithm with the help of ATPG which minimizes loss on P d e t e c t i o n . In our algorithm, the detectability of errors for each candidate implication is carefully evaluated using error prone vectors. The evaluation results are then utilized to select the most efficient candidates for achieving optimal P d e t e c t i o n . The experimental results on 15 representative combinatorial benchmark circuits from the MCNC benchmarks suite show that the implications selected from our algorithm achieve better P d e t e c t i o n in comparison to the state of the art. The proposed method also offers better performance, up to 41.10%, in terms of the proposed impact-level metric, which is the ratio of achieved P d e t e c t i o n to the implication count.


Author(s):  
Tianxing Wu ◽  
Guilin Qi ◽  
Bin Luo ◽  
Lei Zhang ◽  
Haofen Wang

Extracting knowledge from Wikipedia has attracted much attention in recent ten years. One of the most valuable kinds of knowledge is type information, which refers to the axioms stating that an instance is of a certain type. Current approaches for inferring the types of instances from Wikipedia mainly rely on some language-specific rules. Since these rules cannot catch the semantic associations between instances and classes (i.e. candidate types), it may lead to mistakes and omissions in the process of type inference. The authors propose a new approach leveraging attributes to perform language-independent type inference of the instances from Wikipedia. The proposed approach is applied to the whole English and Chinese Wikipedia, which results in the first version of MulType (Multilingual Type Information), a knowledge base describing the types of instances from multilingual Wikipedia. Experimental results show that not only the proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art comparison methods, but also MulType contains lots of new and high-quality type information.


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