Large-scale carbon-cycle feedbacks within Earth’s climate system can be inferred from the statistical correlation of atmospheric CO2 and other climate observations. These statistical relationships can serve as validation targets for global carbon-cycle models. Fourier-transform coherence between atmospheric CO2 measured at Mauna Loa, Hawaii, and Hadley Centre global-average temperatures changed...

In this paper, the author will discuss two popular terms, i.e. organized civil society and global governance and their relations. The paper is mainly about organized civil society (international non-governmental organizations) and democracy in global governance. First, the author will provide a few related definitions. These terms, although are highly contested, need to be identified to avoid c...

This paper studies the problem of sentencelevel semantic coherence by answering SATstyle sentence completion questions. These questions test the ability of algorithms to distinguish sense from nonsense based on a variety of sentence-level phenomena. We tackle the problem with two approaches: methods that use local lexical information, such as the n-grams of a classical language model; and metho...

In normal viewing, the visual system effortlessly assigns approximately constant attributes of color and shape to perceived objects. A fundamental component of this process is the compensation for illuminant variations and intervening media to recover reflectance properties of natural surfaces. We exploited the phenomenon of transparency perception to explore the cortical regions implicated in ...

The core of most registration algorithms aligns scan data by pairs, minimizing their relative distance. This local optimization must generally pass through a validation procedure to ensure the global coherence of the resulting alignments. This work introduces an iterative framework to guarantee the global coherence of the registration process. The iteration alternates registration and reconstru...

Significant research has focused on determining efficient methodologies for retrieving images in large image databases. This thesis addresses the design and implementation of a new image abstraction technique based on compact signature bit-strings and an appropriate similarity metric. Performance evaluation of image retrieval on a large heterogeneous database of up to 50,000 images demonstrated...

The purpose of the current study was to investigate the maturation of form and motion perception, specifically the component visual abilities involved in the identification of motion-defined form, in children ranging in age from 3 to 12 years. Experiment 1 compared the maturation of motion-defined and texture-defined shape identification. Minimum speed thresholds on the motion-defined shape tas...

Models of discourse and narration elaborated within the classical compositional framework have been characterized as bottom-up models, according to which discourse analysis proceeds incrementally, from phrase and sentence local meaning to discourse global meaning. In this paper we will argue against these models. Assuming as a case study the issue of discourse coherence, we suggest that the ass...

I argue that the presence of magnetic fields around evolved stars, e.g., asymptotic giant branch stars, and in PNe, does not necessarily imply that the magnetic field plays a global dynamical role in shaping the circumstellar envelope. Instead, I favor magnetic fields with small coherence lengths, which result from stellar magnetic spots or from jets blown by an accreting companion. Although th...

Entity disambiguation works by linking ambiguous mentions in text to their corresponding real-world entities in knowledge base. Recent collective disambiguation methods enforce coherence among contextual decisions at the cost of non-trivial inference processes. We propose a fast collective disambiguation approach based on stacking. First, we train a local predictor g0 with learning to rank as b...