Wedeven Associates: Finding New Ways to Develop Novel Solutions to Persistent, Intractable Problems

Wedeven Associates is a small tribology research and engineering consulting firm located near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The company faced a variety of challenges associated with the COVID-19 pandemic as did most small businesses in 2020. As the company became fully operational again, Wedeven Associates was approached by a longtime client to solve a tribological problem the client’s engineers had been trying to address for many years. The catch: Wedeven Associates only had a little over 2 months to do the work while complying with pandemic-related travel and meeting restrictions. This case tells the story of how the Wedeven Associates team met the challenge using virtual tools and a collaborative approach built on first principles. Readers are introduced to “tribology” as an engineering discipline and “first principles” as a problem-solving approach.

Disparity Estimation of High-Resolution Remote Sensing Images with Dual-Scale Matching Network

As an essential task in remote sensing, disparity estimation of high-resolution stereo images is still confronted with intractable problems due to extremely complex scenes and dynamically changing disparities. Especially in areas containing texture-less regions, repetitive patterns, disparity discontinuities, and occlusions, stereo matching is difficult. Recently, convolutional neural networks have provided a new paradigm for disparity estimation, but it is difficult for current models to consider both accuracy and speed. This paper proposes a novel end-to-end network to overcome the aforementioned obstacles. The proposed network learns stereo matching at dual scales, in which the low one captures coarse-grained information while the high one captures fine-grained information, helpful for matching structures of different scales. Moreiver, we construct cost volumes from negative to positive values to make the network work well for both negative and nonnegative disparities since the disparity varies dramatically in remote sensing stereo images. A 3D encoder-decoder module formed by factorized 3D convolutions is introduced to adaptively learn cost aggregation, which is of high efficiency and able to alleviate the edge-fattening issue at disparity discontinuities and approximate the matching of occlusions. Besides, we use a refinement module that brings in shallow features as guidance to attain high-quality full-resolution disparity maps. The proposed network is compared with several typical models. Experimental results on a challenging dataset demonstrate that our network shows powerful learning and generalization abilities. It achieves convincing performance on both accuracy and efficiency, and improvements of stereo matching in these challenging areas are noteworthy.

'Midwife for Power': Towards a Mujerista / Womanist Model of Community Organizing

In recent years, communities have responded to police violence in U.S. cities through confrontational models of community organising that evolved from patriarchal and male approaches. Very often, these approaches have not produced the hoped-for outcomes. In this article, I argue that a women-led community organising model, grounded in feminine relational power-with epistemologies, can lead to innovative policy changes, including in contexts of intractable problems, such as police misconduct. This article presents the Midwife for Power community organising model, which creates space for women organisers to nurture solidarity and creativity across all lines of difference, centres personal testimony and uses collective inquiry to create relational power to address injustice. Theoretically, this model draws on the rich insights of Black and Latina organisers and scholars, as well as traditions of intersectional solidarity. In order to illustrate the model, this article presents an empirical case study of a successful police accountability campaign.

Coordination Conflicts between Urban Resilience and Urban Land Evolution in Chinese Hilly City of Mianyang

Urban resilience, the combinational characteristic of nature and society, that reflects the dynamic accumulation process that is multi-level and multi-dimensional. Particularly, the rational spatial distribution structure of land mixture and compactness is an effective way to improve urban resilience because the evolution of morphology and density of the urban land blocks in the process of land spatial conversion reflect the performance characteristics of complexity, diversity, stability, compactness, and connectivity. Therefore, we evaluated the relationship between urban resilience and land use and land cover (LULC) change, to find the keys to resilient urban development for urban land and space planning. In this study, taking the Chinese hilly city of Mianyang as an example, the results show: (1) the complexity of homogeneous patch shape and heterogeneous patch combination leads to the decrease of urban morphology resilience. (2) the development trend of LULC spatial layout and structure ratio were more rational with the increased of land mixing degree. (3) the speed and intensity of urban expansion were basically coordinated with the development of urban resilience. The research provides the new ideas, approaches, and toolkits for solving the intractable problems of urban spatial planning based on coordinating conflicts between urban resilience and urban land evolution.

P Systems with Evolutional Communication and Division Rules

A widely studied field in the framework of membrane computing is computational complexity theory. While some types of P systems are only capable of efficiently solving problems from the class P, adding one or more syntactic or semantic ingredients to these membrane systems can give them the ability to efficiently solve presumably intractable problems. These ingredients are called to form a frontier of efficiency, in the sense that passing from the first type of P systems to the second type leads to passing from non-efficiency to the presumed efficiency. In this work, a solution to the SAT problem, a well-known NP-complete problem, is obtained by means of a family of recognizer P systems with evolutional symport/antiport rules of length at most (2,1) and division rules where the environment plays a passive role; that is, P systems from CDEC^(2,1). This result is comparable to the one obtained in the tissue-like counterpart, and gives a glance of a parallelism and the non-evolutionary membrane systems with symport/antiport rules.

An Analysis of Face Recognition under Face Mask Occlusions

The face mask is an essential sanitaryware in daily lives growing during the pandemic period and is a big threat to current face recognition systems. The masks destroy a lot of details in a large area of face and it makes it difficult to recognize them even for humans. The evaluation report shows the difficulty well when recognizing masked faces. Rapid development and breakthrough of deep learning in the recent past have witnessed most promising results from face recognition algorithms. But they fail to perform far from satisfactory levels in the unconstrained environment during the challenges such as varying lighting conditions, low resolution, facial expressions, pose variation and occlusions. Facial occlusions are considered one of the most intractable problems. Especially when the occlusion occupies a large region of the face because it destroys lots of official features.

Samvete i Sverige. Om frihet och lydnad från medeltiden till idag

In recent years, ideas of conscience and the liberty of conscience have become ever more salient in public discourse. Historically, these concepts have been used to mark out a certain scope of freedom and protection in moral, political and legal conflicts. In our time, individual conscience is frequently used to legitimate objections to, for instance, military service and medical interventions like abortion and vaccination. So too in Sweden – a country widely described as one of the most modern and secularized societies in the world. In this volume, a group of researchers in history, human rights, law, ethics and sociology of religion address some of the most central issues around conscience and the liberty of conscience in Sweden from the middle ages to the present. By situating conscience and liberty in wider intellectual, social and political settings, the essays provide alternative ways of thinking about the most intractable problems surrounding these concepts – the relationship between law and morality, the tension between individual and collective freedom, as well as the role of religion in public affairs. This volume will create new avenues of research for scholars and students interested in challenges related to conscience and liberty: both those in ethics, politics and law seeking a historical perspective, and those in history who want to tie their studies to the present.

The intractable problems with brain death and possible solutions

Brain death has been accepted worldwide medically and legally as the biological state of death of the organism. Nevertheless, the literature has described persistent problems with this acceptance ever since brain death was described. Many of these problems are not widely known or properly understood by much of the medical community. Here we aim to clarify these issues, based on the two intractable problems in the brain death debates. First, the metaphysical problem: there is no reason that withstands critical scrutiny to believe that BD is the state of biological death of the human organism. Second, the epistemic problem: there is no way currently to diagnose the state of BD, the irreversible loss of all brain functions, using clinical tests and ancillary tests, given potential confounders to testing. We discuss these problems and their main objections and conclude that these problems are intractable in that there has been no acceptable solution offered other than bare assertions of an ‘operational definition’ of death. We present possible ways to move forward that accept both the metaphysical problem - that BD is not biological death of the human organism - and the epistemic problem - that as currently diagnosed, BD is a devastating neurological state where recovery of sentience is very unlikely, but not a confirmed state of irreversible loss of all [critical] brain functions. We argue that the best solution is to abandon the dead donor rule, thus allowing vital organ donation from patients currently diagnosed as BD, assuming appropriate changes are made to the consent process and to laws about killing.

Pornography

This book assesses American, Canadian, and Swedish legal challenges to the explosive spread of pornography and its contribution to violence against women within their significantly different democratic systems and constructs a political and legal theory for effectively challenging the sex industry under law. The obstacles are exposed as more ideological and political than strictly legal, although they often play out in the legal arena. The pornography industry is documented to exploit vulnerable populations in making its materials. A thorough analytical review of empirical studies that use complementing methods demonstrates that using pornography substantially contributes to consumers becoming more sexually aggressive, on average desensitizing them and contributing to a demand for more subordinating, aggressive, and degrading materials. Consumers often wish to imitate pornography with unwilling partners; many demand sex from prostituted people, who have few or no alternatives. Most young men regularly consume pornography. Legal challenges to the harms are shown to be more effective under legal systems that promote equality and when the laws empower those most harmed, in contrast to state-enforced regulations (e.g., criminal obscenity laws). Drawing on feminist theory, among others, this book argues that pornography is among the linchpins of sex inequality, contending that a civil society forum can empower those harmed, with representatives who have more substantial incentives to address them. This book explains why democracies fail to address the harms of pornography and offers a political and legal theory for making the necessary changes. The insights can be applied to other intractable problems of hierarchy.

Introduction

The introduction sets out the parameters for the inquiry. It summarizes part I on the harms of pornography, including the sexual aggression against women it engenders and its production’s exploitative abuses. The findings canvassed are situated in the context of gender-based violence and sex discrimination, pornography being found to be one of the more potent linchpins in this hierarchy of oppression that contemporary democracies allow, despite their equality ideals. A problem-driven approach is taken to answer what is in the way for democracies to address pornography’s harms legally. A theory of hierarchy to be tested and applied is summarized, including its postmodern and classical liberal critics. The analytical leverage gained by comparing most similar systems of democracies with significant constitutional and legal differences is explained. Solving the equation of the competing interests involved is considered to provide insights to unraveling other intractable problems of oppression by legal means.