The specific aim of this project was to evaluate how children coordinate movements that combine reaching and whole-body turning. When adults perform turn and reach (T&R) movements, they rotate their torso and extend their arm simultaneously rather than sequentially, generating large Coriolis forces. These Coriolis forces do not degrade reaching movement endpoint accuracy or curvature indicating an adult capacity for context-specific dynamic motor compensation. Our motivation for studying T&R performance in children came from studies showing that such context-specific motor adaptation is a developmental achievement which emerges around the age of eight years. We predicted that children older than eight years would conduct T&R movements simultaneously, like adults, and that younger children would coordinate T&R movements in a sequenced fashion in order to minimize Coriolis force. An alternate prediction was that all children would coordinate T&R movements synchronously and thereby self-generate Coriolis forces but that children older than eight years would reach accurately while younger children would show deviations in their movements correlated with the magnitude of Coriolis force generated. We were unable to obtain results for younger children due to poor tracking data. We found that children 8-12 years old conduct T&R movements in a synchronous fashion and generate Coriolis forces comparable to adults when taking their proportionate size into account. However, their movement curvatures were altered by their selfgenerated Coriolis forces, a result which is not seen in adults. Future studies will improve the recording methodology to explore the developmental patterns of T&R movements in the youngest children.


Analyzing your website traffic is importance for several reasons. It is quite difficult to know the number of guests visiting your website (or blog) and how did they reach on that specific website. I will show you Realurl.com how to count the number of online visitors, see where they are from (on a map) and where they are right now on your website.
That's it! It is time to try your own.
How to Show your Recent Comments on your Blogger blog?
Blogger is a free service that allows others to publish a blog. There's a hard way to do this too, by typing in html codes, but I will show you an easy way to show your five most recent comments in your Blogger blog.
Log into your Blogger account. Make sure you are on your Dashboard area. Under the Manage blogs, click on Layout.
Pick out where you want to show off your recent comments, and click on the 'Add a Gadget'.
Scroll down a little and choose the Feed option by clicking on the blue plus (+) sign.
Change the 'YOURBLOGURL' to your blog URL and hit continue.
You can title it 'Recent Comments' or whatever you like, choose how many comments (1-5) and if you want to show dates and authors. Click Save when you are done.Save it and view your blog.
You should see the latest comments now!


Abnormal psychology is a part of psychology. People who study abnormal psychology are psychologists. They are scientists that investigate the mind using the scientific method. Different cultures tend to have different ideas of how strange (abnormal) any behaviour is considered. This tends to change over time within cultures, so people that live in a country at one time in history might consider abnormal what people who live in the same country consider normal years before or years later.
Abnormal psychology is often used to understand or to treat people with mental disorders to make life better for them. This is because abnormal behaviour is often defined as when someone is not able to change how they behave to fit different settings. This is often also used to define some mental disorders. When someone cannot change their behaviour to fit the people and situations around them when they need to, it can cause suffering, and the person may be uncomfortable when around people. Their behaviour can be unreasonable and hard to understand. Their behaviour can even be dangerous.
Not everyone with a mental disorder is unable to adjust to their surroundings. People who can change to fit their the environment around them more easily than most people can also have behaviour that is considered abnormal and might also have an easier life with the help of a psychologist.
A supernatural belief is a belief in a force that is beyond scientific understanding. There are a lot of cultures that believe in supernatural events. These cultures include religious cultures, as well as the Ancient Chinese, Ancient Egyptians, Hebrews, and Ancient Greeks. These cultures have writings that say abnormal behaviour in the form of supernatural events created demons or Gods that would take over a person and act through those people. This was called possession. In the Roman Catholic Church, exorcisms were done to make these demons leave the body of the individuals they possessed. Exorcism involved prayer, noises and potions.p. 11 People who had abnormal behaviour were often told they were possessed.
In some cultures, trepanation was often used. This was when a hole was made in someone's head to release the "bad spirit".
"Lunatic asylums" were buildings that kept patients that had abnormal behaviour. They became popular in Europe with the Madhouse Act of 1774, although they did exist before the Act. Asylums were meant to look after people who could not take care of themselves. But they were known for being cruel and abusive to their patients. The buildings were often dirty and not looked after very well.
During the late 1700s, William Tuke made a religious retreat for patients. This was a turn away from the horrors of mental asylums.p. 14 Also, in the late 1700s, Philippe Pinel started to encourage better treatment of the mentally insane.
Today the 18th-century lunatic asylum does not exist. Most of the asylums were closed in the late 1900s because of the invention of antipsychotic medicines. Today, there are psychiatric hospitals for people with mental illness. This includes Broadmoor Hospital, which houses some of Britain's the most dangerous criminals with mental illnesses.
In the 1800s, Dorothea Dix fought against the bad treatment of patients in mental asylums. She started a "mental hygiene" group to encourage politicians to change the treatment of mental patients in the United States. When people became aware of the wrongdoing in mental asylums, money was raised to improve the treatment of patients and the asylums. Dix is thought to have helped to create 32 mental hospitals. By 1940 there were more than 400,000 patients living in mental asylums.
Most treatments were still cruel to patients and were not effective. The asylums were quickly becoming overcrowded. Mary Jane Ward wrote a book in 1946 called "The Snake Pit" that raised awareness of the inhumane treatment of mental patients.
The National Institute of Mental Health was created the same year. The organisation provided training and support for mental patients and workers that cared for them. The Hill-Burton Act was passed to give money to the mental health hospitals.
In the past there were three ways to explain abnormal behaviour. These were supernatural, biological, and psychological explanations. Western medicine no longer uses supernatural explanations. Instead we use biological and psychological explanations. Biological explanations use genetics and neuroscience to explain abnormal behaviours. The biological explanation is based on how the brain works and how genes change the way it works. Psychological explanations use how the mind works to explain abnormal behaviours.
Early cultures believed that abnormal behaviour was from demons, spirits and astrology. Trepanation was when a hole was drilled in a person's head. This was done to let the spirits or demons out of the person's head.
Exorcism was practiced mainly by the Catholic Church. Exorcism was believed to ward the spirits out of the person that they possessed.
These practices were normal during the Middle Ages. This was when abnormal behaviour was thought to be a religious issue rather than a psychological one. Some abnormal behaviour was thought to be witchcraft. People accused of witchcraft were almost always punished for the acts. In many cases, the punishment was to be murdered.
The Biological approach to explaining abnormal behaviour assumes that the behaviour can be explained by physical factors. Hippocrates was a man who lived during the 5th century and is thought by many to be the father of modern medicine. He did not accept that evil spirits or astronomy were the causes of psychological disorders. Hippocrates believed that there were natural causes for the disorders and appropriate treatments could be found. He focused on the "four humors" of the brain. He believed that the four humours must be balanced for healthy mental states and when one humour was stronger, various disorders would appear. To balance the humors, Hippocrates would tell patients to change their lifestyles.p. 11 There are now new ideas when talking about the biological explanations of psychological disorders. But, Hippocrates' focus on mental processes and clinical practice was a revolutionary concept.
Psychological explanations for abnormal behavior sometimes take a behavioral approach in which the positive behaviors are reinforced and negative ones are not. This approach is more focused on changing the actual behavior of a person than the true cause of it.
The North American reference book used by psychiatrists and psychologists to diagnose and treat psychological disorders is known as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). It is produced by the American Psychiatric Association (APA). The most recent version was released in May of 2013 and is known as the DSM-5. The DSM is relied upon by clinicians, health insurance companies, medicine companies, and the legal system as a reference for understanding and identifying mental disorders. The DSM divides mental disorders into groups and provides descriptive signs and symptoms that define each disorder. In addition, it lists statistics for each disorder ranging from its frequency in the general population to the most effective form of treatment.
Is distinct from other conditions, and is considered treatable.
Axis I contains all categories of mental disorder except mental retardation and personality disorders. A disorder within this axis is similar to an illness or disease in general medicine, and includes depression, anxiety disorder, autism spectrum disorder, bipolar disorder, and anorexia.
Axis II contains mental retardation and personality disorders such as paranoid personality disorder, antisocial personality disorder, and obsessive-compulsive personality disorder. This axis contains a large number of disorders, all of which relate to how a person thinks and acts with the world.
Axis III contains general medical conditions, minor medical conditions and any physical disorders of the individual. When the first three axes are used, relationships can be seen and it becomes easier for professionals to find the cause for mental disorder and treat a person effectively.
Axis IV contains any environmental or social factors that could play a role in diagnosing an individual. Poor social relationships, the death of a loved one, or being fired from work are all stressful factors that may aid in the development of mental disorder.
Axis V is used by professionals for individuals under the age of 18. Children are graded on how well they currently handling their situation. The Global Assessment of Functioning used a scale of 0-100, but has been replaced in the DSM-5 by a survey and check box that is less subjective.
The separate axes of the DSM are often linked together in the development of mental disorders.
Psychoanalysis is a form of therapy based on psychoanalytic theory. This theory states that human behavior is controlled by unconscious forces such as instinct and that there is no such thing as free will. Many ideas found in the Psychoanalytic theory can be traced back to the famous psychologist Sigmund Freud. Freud believed mental disorders are a result of repressed memories and emotions from childhood; psychoanalysis is designed to search for these hidden memories and emotions and bring them to the patient's attention. Techniques such as hypnosis are used to tap into the unconscious mind with the hopes that the source of the disturbance is found. Freud also believed dreams had hidden meanings, and often asked patients to record their dreams for analysis. Because of the lack of scientific evidence supporting most Freudian ideas, psychoanalysis is rarely used by clinical psychologists and has been replaced by more effective forms of therapy.
Applied behavior analysis (ABA) uses a form of operant conditioning where positive reinforcement is used to modify behavior.
Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) focuses on conditioning the negative thoughts and feelings behind patients' behavior in order to alter that behavior.
Social learning theory is used in the treatment and understanding of anxiety disorders. It goes beyond the traditional classical conditioning assumption that fear and anxiety must be learned directly; social learning theory suggests that a child could acquire a fear of snakes, for example, by observing a family member show fear in response to snakes.
Humanistic therapy is a method taken from Carl Rogers, which aims to focus on a client as a human rather than the problem that they have. A therapist can adjust the environment and mood of a session in a way that mimics normal conversation. This often helps the patient realize the issues they have, and share them with the therapist more successfully than in a traditional counseling session. Humanistic therapy creates an effective means of getting to the source of a problem and treating it properly.
Roger's own term was "client-centered therapy", which has the idea that the therapist is helping the client to become a genuine psychological adult.
↑ 4.0 4.1 Beidel, Deborah C. et al 2013. Abnormal Psychology, 3rd edition. Pearson. ISBN 978-0205966547.
↑ "Mental Health Parity". www.psychiatry.org. American Psychiatric Association. 2016. Retrieved January 12, 2016.
↑ Cockerham, William C. (2002). Sociology of Mental Disorder (6th Edition). Prentice Hall. ISBN 978-0130979599.
↑ Niolon, Ph.D., Richard (August 2004). "DSM IV TR: A Thumbnail Sketch". PsychPage.com. Retrieved January 12, 2016.
↑ "Frequently Asked Questions about DSM-5 Implementation – For Clinicians" (PDF). www.dsm5.org. American Psychiatric Association. August 1, 2013. Retrieved January 12, 2016.
↑ "ICD vs. DSM". October 2009 Monitor on Psychology (American Psychological Association) 40 (9): 63. October 2009. http://www.apa.org/monitor/2009/10/icd-dsm.aspx. Retrieved January 12, 2016.
↑ "International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems 10th Revision (ICD-10) Version for 2010". apps.who.int. World Health Organization. 2010. Retrieved January 12, 2016.
↑ Freud, Sigmund; Breuer, Joseph (1895). Studies on Hysteria. Basic Books, Inc. ISBN 0-465-08275-0.
↑ Herkov, Ph.D., Michael (2013). "About Behavior Therapy". www.psychcentral.com. Psych Central. Retrieved January 12, 2016.
↑ Mineka, S.; Zinbarg, R. (January 2006). "A contemporary learning theory perspective on the etiology of anxiety disorders: It's not what you thought it was". American Psychology (U.S. National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health) 61 (1): 10-26. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16435973. Retrieved December 13, 2015.
↑ "Humanistic therapies". Counselling Directory. Retrieved January 12, 2016.
This page was last changed on 7 October 2018, at 04:30.


text:
"use strict";

function reportError(e) {
    dump("dactyl: command-line-handler: " + e + "\n" + (e.stack || Error().stack));
    Cu.reportError(e);
}

var global = this;
var NAME = "command-line-handler";
var { classes: Cc, interfaces: Ci, utils: Cu } = Components;

Components.utils.import("resource://gre/modules/XPCOMUtils.jsm");

function init() {
    Cu.import("resource://dactyl/bootstrap.jsm");
    require("config", global);
    require("util", global);
}

function CommandLineHandler() {
    this.wrappedJSObject = this;
}
CommandLineHandler.prototype = {

    classDescription: "Dactyl command line Handler",

    classID: Components.ID("{16dc34f7-6d22-4aa4-a67f-2921fb5dcb69}"),

    contractID: "@mozilla.org/commandlinehandler/general-startup;1?type=dactyl",

    _xpcom_categories: [
        {
            category: "command-line-handler",
            entry: "m-dactyl"
        },

        // FIXME: Belongs elsewhere
         {
            category: "profile-after-change",
            entry: "m-dactyl"
        }
    ],

    observe: function observe(subject, topic, data) {
        if (topic === "profile-after-change") {
            init();
            require(global, "main");
        }
    },

    QueryInterface: XPCOMUtils.generateQI([Ci.nsIObserver, Ci.nsICommandLineHandler]),

    handle: function (commandLine) {
        init();
        try {
            var remote = commandLine.handleFlagWithParam(config.name + "-remote", false);
        }
        catch (e) {
            util.dump("option '-" + config.name + "-remote' requires an argument\n");
        }

        try {
            if (remote) {
                commandLine.preventDefault = true;
                require(global, "services");
                util.dactyl.execute(remote);
            }
        }
        catch (e) {
            util.reportError(e);
        }

        try {
            this.optionValue = commandLine.handleFlagWithParam(config.name, false);
        }
        catch (e) {
            util.dump("option '-" + config.name + "' requires an argument\n");
        }
    },

    get helpInfo() {
        return "  -" + config.name + " <opts>" +
               "             Additional options for " +
               config.appName + " startup\n".substr(config.name.length);
    }
};

if (XPCOMUtils.generateNSGetFactory)
    var NSGetFactory = XPCOMUtils.generateNSGetFactory([CommandLineHandler]);
else
    var NSGetModule = XPCOMUtils.generateNSGetModule([CommandLineHandler]);
var EXPORTED_SYMBOLS = ["NSGetFactory", "global"];

// vim: set fdm=marker sw=4 sts=4 ts=8 et:

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


text:
A heute () a német ZDF közszolgálati televízió híradója, amely minden nap 19:00-kor kerül adásba.

Története

1963 óta fut a ZDF műsorán 25-30 perces kiadásban. A műsor főcíme eleinte a Tagesschauból ismert gongütéssel kezdődött, utána elhangzott a Hier ist das Zweite Deutsche Fernsehen (Ez itt a Második Német Televízió) nevű mondat, megkülönböztetésként az ARD Tagesschau hírműsorától.

A főkiadás mellett jelentkezett egy 5 perces kiadás 18:30-kor és a késő esti kiadás 22:00-kor. A kezdeti években a heute adásai a Frankfurt melletti Eschbornban található stúdióban készültek.

Az első stúdió meglehetősen egyszerű berendezésű volt: egy irodahelyiséget alakítottak ki, ahova nagy függönyöket és két egyszerű asztalt helyeztek el. A főkiadásban a bemondó mellett a főszerkesztő is adásban volt. A heute végén az időjárás-jelentést egy meteorológus mondta el két tábla előtt, az egyiken az 1937-es német, a másikon Európa-térkép volt.

1964 áprilisában a heute a ZDF-fel együtt átkerül Wiesbadenbe.

1970-től a heute adásai színesben készülnek.

1973 októberében a heute főkiadása 19:00-tól kezdődik.

1978-ban elindult a heute szerkesztőségének háttérműsora, a Heute Journal, amely az ARD Tagesthemen elindítására volt válaszreakció. Ugyanekkor dőlt meg a férfidominancia a műsorvezetők közt, mert két női műsorvezetője lett a heute műsorának Ulrike von Möllendorff és Rut Speer személyében.

1986-ban a heute főcíme megváltozik: 3D-s számítógépes animációként ugrik elő a TV-óra után a heute felirat.

1987-ben már 6 kiadással jelentkezett a heute: a 10 órás délelőtti, 13 órakor egy 15 perces híradó, 16 és 17 órakor 5-5 perces hírösszefoglaló, 19 órakor a főkiadás és este 22 órakor a késő esti kiadás.

1992-ben megváltozott a stúdió háttere: a kék háttérbe bekerül zöldes motívum is, és dátum megjelenik a képernyőn.

1998-ban a Frankfurti tőzsdéről napi kapcsolás indul, és augusztusban teljesen megváltozik a heute díszlete és főcíme: a háttérben levő térkép bluebox technikával készül, és a heute főcímébe bekerül a földgömb-motívum.

2001-ben a ZDF csatorna új narancsszínű logót kapott, amihez a heute is igazodott. A stúdióban a kék és narancsszín lett az uralkodó a berendezés nem változott meg.

2009 júliusában új 330 négyzetméteres stúdióba költözött a heute és új, bluebox technikájú hátteret kapott a stúdió.

Műsorvezetői

Érdekességek

 A heute műsorvezetője volt 2003 és 2010 között Steffen Seibert, aki 2010. augusztus 11-e óta kormányszóvivő.

További információk
Hivatalos oldal

Televíziós hírműsorok

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


Religion and politics represent two different worlds; two different kinds of power. History clearly demonstrates that when governments try to mix politics with religion, people's individual rights are trampled upon and the church loses credibility. A good example of this is found in the life of Roger Williams, a pivotal figure in the establishment of religious liberty in the United States. From the very beginning he was spurned by the religious and civil authorities of his time.
Roger Williams was a rebel with a cause! His convictions not only endeared him to the native American people, but helped set this country on a course that would eventually ensure religious freedom for everyone.
The political leaders of the United States need to carefully protect The Bill of Rights to make sure that no one faith or religious ideology is endorsed by our government. Hopefully we will not forget the lessons painfully learned by our founding fathers.


text:
Follow @BonnieSCha
Recent Posts by Bonnie Cha
Nokia Adds to the Windows Phone Family With Lumia 720, 520
February 24, 2013 at 11:45 pm PT
Nokia believes that you shouldn't have to pay top dollar to enjoy some of the latest smartphone technology, so today the company introduced two new Lumia handsets that deliver higher-end features at lower-end prices.
The first of the devices is the Lumia 720. Priced at around $329 before taxes and carrier discounts, the Windows Phone 8 handset is designed for those looking for a quality cameraphone.
It has a 6.7-megapixel camera on back that incorporates technology to help take better pictures day or night. Meanwhile, the front-facing 1.3-megapixel camera delivers HD-quality images and has a wide-angle lens.
It's also the first Lumia device to offer a microSD expansion slot.
Other features include a 4.3-inch, 800 by 480 pixel touchscreen, a dual-core 1GHz Snapdragon processor and NFC technology. The smartphone also provides access to Nokia's various services, including Nokia Music and the Here location suite, which offers turn-by-turn directions.
I had an opportunity to briefly check out the handset here at Mobile World Congress, and I'll admit I was smitten. It has the stylings of the flagship Lumia 920 but in a much sleeker and lighter package. The smartphone also felt very responsive and fluid, though, of course, I would need more time to test the device to say so for sure.
The Lumia 720 is expected to be available in Hong Kong, Vietnam and Singapore in the first quarter of this year, and will roll out to other markets, such as Europe, Africa and India, in the second quarter. North American plans were not announced at this time.
Meanwhile, the Lumia 520 will definitely be coming to the U.S. via T-Mobile in the second quarter. Pricing was not announced today, but I wouldn't be surprised if was free with a two-year contract. Global pricing is set at 139 euros ($183 U.S.), and Nokia says it's the most affordable Lumia yet.
As with the Lumia 720, advanced camera technology is also a highlight of the Lumia 520. The smartphone's main five-megapixel camera uses the same digital lenses as the Lumia 920. There's also built-in software that allows you to add different filters to images, accentuate certain features and more.
Aside from a smaller, four-inch, 800 by 480 pixel touchscreen, the Lumia 520 matches the Lumia 720's feature set listed above. Neither of the smartphones are 4G LTE capable.
Nokia said it hopes these new devices and price points will drive more people to try Windows Phone. But the company has already tried wooing customers with wallet-friendly prices. The Lumia 920 is $100 on contract with AT&T, while the midrange Lumia 820 is $50 on contract, and free on Verizon Wireless.
Offering a variety of devices is great, and giving customers choices is certainly nice, but it remains to be seen whether the new handsets can do anything to lift the visibility of Windows Phone.
In addition to Lumia 520 and 720, Nokia also introduced two basic handsets for emerging markets.
The Nokia 105 is designed for the first-time cellphone buyer, and has a 1.45-inch color screen, FM radio, alarm clock and other essentials. It will be available in the first quarter in markets such as Indonesia, Nigeria and Vietnam. The Nokia 301 adds a larger 2.4-inch color screen, a Web browser and a 3.2-megapixel camera. It's expected to ship in the second quarter in more than 120 countries.
Google's Rubin: No Need For Retail Stores
Andy Rubin: Samsung's Android Success Mostly About Just Executing Well
Google's Andy Rubin on Firefox OS: "In General, I Feel Friendly"
Viking's Vision for a Cellphone-Free Future
Apple Now a Bit Easier to Deal With, and Other Observations From France Telecom's Straight-Talking CEO
Asus Tries Another Phone-Tablet Hybrid, This One With Intel Inside
Visa Taps Samsung for NFC Payment Deal
Nokia CEO: Windows Phone Line Needs to Still Hit Lower Prices Over Time
webOS Finds New Life Yet Again, This Time in LG Televisions
Sony Xperia Tablet Z Set to Make Splash in U.S. This May
With New Windows Phone Models, Nokia Aims to Better Compete on Price
GM Says AT&T's 4G LTE Will Replace Verizon Service at Heart of OnStar
Intel Still Nibbling Around the Edges in Mobile
Yep, Samsung's Galaxy S IV to Launch at March 14 Event in New York
Surprise! HP's New Slate 7 Tablet Runs on Android.
Meet Mozilla's Host of New Mobile Partners
Samsung Takes Aim at iPad Mini With Galaxy Note 8.0
What to Expect When You Are Expecting a Lot of News Out of Barcelona
Mobile World Congress: The Event You Don't Want to Miss — Or Launch a Product At
Qualcomm's New Snapdragon Processor Packs Two More Surprises
Tagged with: cellphones, Lumia 520, Lumia 720, MWC2013, Nokia, Nokia 105, Nokia 301, smartphones, Windows Phone
Qualcomm's Toq Smartwatch Needs More Time
They're Baaaack. Tabs Return to Yahoo Mail.
Sony PlayStation 4 Makes Right Play for Gamers
api-video/find_all_videos.asp&fields=id,videoStillURL,thumbnailURL,guid,video320kMP4Url,name,duration&count=4&doctype=128
I think the NSA has a job to do and we need the NSA. But as (physicist) Robert Oppenheimer said, "When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and argue about what to do about it only after you've had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb."
— Phil Zimmerman, PGP inventor and Silent Circle co-founder, in an interview with Om Malik

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


Barbara Elaine Petrisko, 76, of Dagsboro, Del., passed away on Wednesday, Oct. 31, 2018, at Coastal Hospice at the Lake, at Deers Head Hospital, in Salisbury, Md. She was born in West Mifflin, Pa., on June 12, 1942, daughter of the late John Madeya and Martha (Czepiec) Madeya.
Petrisko graduated from Slippery Rock University in Pennsylvania, in the Class of 1964. She made her career as a teacher and later worked in retail sales. In her spare time, she loved gardening, going to the beach and walking on the boardwalk. She was a member of St. Ann's Catholic Church in Bethany Beach, Del., where she loved being involved in the church activities.
Petrisko is survived by her loving husband, Edwin Michael Petrisko of Dagsboro; her children, Jennifer Petrisko of Annapolis Md., Jill Petrisko of Long Beach, Calif., and Michael Petrisko of State College, Pa.; and her siblings, Robert Madeya of Marana, Ariz., Virginia Keck of Pittsburgh, Pa., Marion Madeya of West Mifflin, Pa., William Madeya of Elizabeth, Pa., Lucille Smith of Irwin, Pa., and John Madeya of Louisville, Ky.
A Mass of Christian Burial will be held on Friday, Nov. 16, 2018, at 11 a.m., at St. Ann Catholic Church, 691 Garfield Parkway, Bethany Beach, Del., where friends may visit beginning at 10 a.m. Interment will follow the Mass, at Gate of Heaven Cemetery, 32112 Vines Creek Road, Dagsboro, Del. In lieu of flowers, memorial contributions may be made to St. Jude Children Hospital; 501 St Jude Pl.; Memphis, TN 38105. Arrangements were by Parsell Funeral Homes & Crematorium, Clarksville Chapel, Ocean View, Del. Condolences may be sent online at www.parsellfuneralhomes.com.


text:
Why Houston
TMC Initiatives
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Garth Davis, M.D., Medical Director of the Bariatric Surgery Program at Memorial Hermann Memorial City Medical Center; Assistant Professor of Surgery with McGovern Medical School at UTHealth; a member of UT Physicians.
Janet Braam, Ph.D., shopping for vegetables from Atkinson Farms at the Rice University Farmers Market.
Is Your Cabbage Asleep? Adventures in Plant-Based Medicine
By Christine Hall November 1, 2016
When bariatric surgeon Garth Davis was 35 years old, he took a health screening for a life insurance policy. The results were anything but positive.
"I didn't think I was unhealthy, but my cholesterol was through the roof, I was hypertensive and I had a fatty liver," Davis said. "Shocked, I went to see an internal medicine friend of mine, and he told me I could take all of these medicines for my problems, but I knew that would just lead to more and more medicine throughout my life."
Davis, the medical director of the Bariatric Surgery Program at Memorial Hermann Memorial City Medical Center, didn't want to be medicated for the rest of his life. So he went looking for some answers.
He discovered that the United States is one of the least healthy countries in the world and that Americans have some of the lowest life expectancies on the planet. So which countries were healthy, Davis wondered, and how did they get that way?
His research led him to author Dan Buettner's Blue Zones study on the world's happiest and longest-living cultures. One of the things these cultures had in common was diets based mainly on plants and carbohydrates.
"I was kind of surprised because I had been telling all of my patients not to eat carbs, and I had purposefully avoided them myself," said Davis, also an assistant professor of surgery with McGovern Medical School at UTHealth and a member of UT Physicians.
Particularly inspiring to Davis were the Okinawans of Japan, who live an average of 10 to 15 years longer than Americans. Staples
of their diet include low-calorie seaweed and yams. Davis was also fascinated by the Seventh-Day Adventists of Loma Linda, Calif., a religious group that mixes spirituality with healthy living. They consume a lot of beans, soy milk and tomatoes, shown to help reduce the risk of certain cancers and heart disease.
Davis also considered the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC) study, jointly coordinated by Imperial College London and the International Agency for Research on Cancer in Lyon, France. The study followed some 370,000 men and women in 10 European countries for five years and found that meat consumption was linked to weight gain—even chicken, one of the lean proteins Davis often recommended to his patients.
"It got me thinking that maybe everything I was told before was completely wrong," Davis said.
The ultimate irony for Davis: As a bariatric surgeon, he performs surgery on the stomach and intestines of patients to induce weight loss. His work addresses the effects of a poor diet. But what about the causes?
What if he could catch patients before bariatric surgery was necessary? Or at least teach his patients how to eat healthier after their surgeries?
No simple magic bullet
Humans have always used plants to treat illness and disease. Many of our most common medicines come from plant extracts or synthetic plant compounds. Aspirin is derived from willow bark. Quinine, which is used to treat malaria, comes from the bark of the cinchona tree. Muscle creams, cold medicines and lozenges often contain mint.
Today, diet plays a key role in plant-based medicine, a growing industry made popular by people craving healthier lifestyles. The dietary supplements business earns $37 billion a year, according to the National Institutes of Health, and $5.7 billion of that is spent on multivitamins.
But there is a lot of misinformation out there about what eating certain plants can and cannot do, said Roderick Dashwood, Ph.D., director of the Center for Epigenetics & Disease Prevention in the Institute of Biosciences and Technology at Texas A&M University. Some people expect a "simple magic bullet," and are disappointed when they don't get the results they anticipated.
Dashwood is researching how phytochemicals—chemical compounds that occur naturally in fruits, vegetables, grains and other plant foods—have been linked to reduction in the risk of major chronic diseases. Some researchers have even created genetically engineered plants with increased levels of a certain phytochemical.
Organizations including the National Institutes of Health and the American Cancer Society generally recommend that people consume five to nine servings of fruits and vegetables per day, Dashwood said. But he was intrigued by an American Institute of Cancer Research study that asked: "What if people actually followed that recommendation? Would it really show a benefit?"
"They found out that yes, indeed it does," Dashwood said. "If you switched from a bad diet to one of these improved diets, there was reduction in certain cancers. However, people improving their diets also did other things like quit smoking, limit their alcohol intake and get on the treadmill for the first time at the gym. So it is hard to say it was just the plant-based diet."
Meanwhile, Davis found similar studies that showed eating plants helped lower blood pressure, cure diabetes and prevent heart disease and hypertension. His search for randomized controlled trials, one of the least biased methods of experimentation, also proved fruitful.
"It blew my mind," Davis said. "Putting heart disease patients on a plant-based diet showed a regression of plaque in the vessels—not just a stabilization, but regression. Trials showed unbelievable weight loss, showed people with prostate cancer reversal or regression. There was a study that found total lengths of chromosomes grew longer with a plant-based diet."
Wake up your vegetables
Plants, like people, have a circadian clock, a day-and-night cycle. To protect themselves during the day—when they're most prone to insects, bacteria and viruses—plants release phytochemicals to defend themselves from these pests. In some edible plants, these same health-active compounds have potent anti-cancer properties for people.
Scientists at Rice University are exploring the health value of vegetables at different times of the day. Janet Braam, Ph.D., Weiss
Professor and chair of the department of BioSciences, wondered what would happen if a plant's day-and-night cycle was reversed.
Using Arabidopsis plants, Braam and her graduate student Danielle Goodspeed found that if a plant thought it was night, it would not produce enough phytochemicals to ward off insects that attack during the day.
"Eventually, we realized that the plants' clocks were controlling the level of defense chemicals, so at the time of day the insects eat, the plants accumulated these phytochemical just in case the insects attacked," Braam explained.
The Arabidopsis plant is related to cruciferous vegetables like cabbage, broccoli and cauliflower, so Braam's team headed off to the market to buy cabbage heads. They brought cabbages back to the lab, reset their clocks and confirmed their theory that even cabbages that had already been picked could be retrained to produce insect-repelling phytochemicals.
They found that the circadian clock of the vegetables, which is affected by light and temperature, could cause the vegetables to produce more or less of the phytochemical depending on the time of day.
"Our research showed it could make sense to eat the cabbage in the middle of the day when we found that the phytochemical implicated in anti-cancer efforts were the most abundant," Braam said.
After working with cabbage, the team decided to try their technique on other fruits and vegetables, including spinach, lettuce, zucchini, sweet potatoes, blueberries and carrots.
All of them were able to show time-dependent changes similar to the cabbage, Braam said.
Her team is still working to determine the optimal time to eat fruits and vegetables. But Braam thinks this type of research could help food producers target the peak time to freeze or preserve certain plants—to capture them when their health-active compounds are most potent.
"Plants have the potential for providing health-active compounds that could affect certain diseases, but whether the plant circadian clock is enough to have a big health or nutritional impact, we don't know yet," she said.
Beautiful bowls of lentils
Cruciferous vegetables also played a key role in a 2015 study by Dashwood and his colleagues, including Praveen Rajendra, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the Institute of Biosciences and Technology at Texas A&M. Published in Clinical Epigenetics, the study asked whether sulforaphane—a type of phytochemical—helped to reduce indicators of cancer risk. Sulforaphane occurs naturally in broccoli and other cruciferous vegetables such as Brussels sprouts, kale, cauliflower and cabbage.
To conduct their research, Dashwood and Rajendran asked patients scheduled for routine colonoscopies to complete a detailed food questionnaire. Those that ate more servings of cruciferous vegetables were shown to have higher expression levels of a tumor suppressor gene called p16 than those who ate few or no servings.
Dashwood and Rajendran also found that the p16 enhancement benefits continued even after the vegetables were not consumed every day.
"Our research hints at the possibility that epigenetic mechanisms (how genes are read by cells) are initially triggered by sulforaphane and could be sustained, at least in the short-term, even after compounds are eliminated from the body," Rajendran said.
Though further research is needed, Rajendran said an effective broccoli pill or supplement may help prevent tumor growth.
In the meantime, individuals who follow nutrient-rich plant-based diets enjoy prolonged health benefits. Dr. Garth Davis has maintained his plant-based diet for a decade. He didn't just drop meat cold turkey, but reduced consumption gradually over time. Today, both his cholesterol and blood pressure are normal, and he no longer has a fatty liver.
Davis also stopped using the word "protein" when discussing food plans with patients. Instead he pitches beans, grains, fruits and vegetables, something that has revolutionized his medical practice, he said. Through social media, support meetings, tips for success, nutrition education and tasty recipes, Davis helps patients and the community with healthier choices.
People tell Davis he must have great willpower to avoid meat, but he says willpower has nothing to do with it. He just likes the way he feels.
He craves fruits and vegetables, and the thought of eating cheeseburgers—his former favorite food—actually repulses him.
"I'm not out to create new vegetarians or vegans, just better plates for my patients," Davis said. "We have grown up where animal protein is the center of the meal, but now I eat beautiful bowls of lentils and yams and vegetables, and it tastes great."
Good Bacteria
Eating well doesn't just help fight disease. It helps the body perform. Healthy people have close to 500 species of bacteria living in harmony in their stomachs.
Problems occur when that harmony is disrupted, either by genetics or the wrong food, says Jeff Tabor, Ph.D., assistant professor of bioengineering at Rice University. Disruption can cause inflammation, which could lead to intestinal issues such as Crohn's disease or diverticulitis.
Eating probiotics—live micro-organisms commonly found in yogurt and other dairy products—has been widely shown to help remedy the disruption in gut bacteria and stimulate the growth of good bacteria.
"Certain foods encourage the growth of good bacteria," Tabor said. "For example, plants have fiber, like those long, stringy parts of celery. We can't break that fiber down, but the good gut bacteria can, and can then make beneficial molecules that are important to us."
Tabor wants to engineer diagnostic gut bacteria. That way, if a doctor suspects a problem, a patient could take a drink home that would produce a visible blue pigment in his or her stool. In just one day, the doctor would know if additional tests were needed.
Tags | food, Memorial Hermann, UTHealth
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Bas-Lag es el universo ficticio en el que tienen lugar varias novelas del autor británico China Miéville. En Bas-Lag coexisten la magia (conocida como «taumaturgia») y la tecnología steampunk, y es el hogar de muchas especies inteligentes. En las novelas ambientadas en Bas-Lag se tratan numerosos temas y tópicos de los géneros y subgéneros de la ciencia ficción, la fantasía y el terror.

Una nota sobre la terminología

La información de este artículo ha sido extraída de fuentes anglófonas y muchos de los términos usados no son los de las traducciones al español de las novelas.

Las novelas de Bas-Lag

Hasta el momento existen tres novelas ambientadas en Bas-Lag. Son:

La estación de la calle Perdido (2000)
La cicatriz (2002)
El consejo de hierro (2004)

Además, el relato corto "Jack", que aparece en la colección de 2005 Buscando a Jake, es también una historia de Bas-Lag.

Geografía

Bas-Lag tiene varios continentes. Dos grandes masas de tierra, Rohagi y Bered Kai Nev, aparecen mencionadas en las tres novelas, aunque muchas otras masas de tierra y estructuras únicas juegan también un importante papel.

Rohagi

La geografía y dimensiones exactas de Rohagi son desconocidas, pero se conocen algunos lugares.

La ciudad-estado de Nueva Crobuzón está situada unas diez millas tierra adentro de su costa oriental, que linda con el Océano Hinchado. Inmediatamente al sur de Nueva Crobuzón está el Bosque Turbio, tras el cual se encuentran las Colinas Mendicantes. Al norte de Nueva Crobuzón, siguiendo la costa pero separada de la ciudad por las Colinas Bezhek, están las ruinas de Suroch. Al oeste, a unas mil millas de Nueva Crobuzón y mucho más allá de las Montañas del Zapato Danzante, se encuentra el Lago de la Garra Fría, un lago de agua dulce de cuatrocientas millas de ancho. Al norte del lago se extiende el Mar de la Garra Fría, un vasto mar interior unido al lago por un estrecho homónimo. El Mar de la Garra Fría mide ochocientas millas de este a oeste y tiene forma de garra, estrechándose hacia el este, donde casi conecta con el Océano Hinchado antes de curvarse hacia el sur durante doscientas millas, donde finalmente termina, unas setecientas millas al norte de Nueva Crobuzón. Esta curva hacia el sur es el Gengris, y está poblado por los peligrosos e impredecibles grindylow.

Según un protagonista de El Consejo de Hierro, tanto Cobsea como Myrshock se hallan a unas setecientas cincuenta millas al sur de Nueva Crobuzón. Cobsea está en el interior y limita con la Mancha Cacotópica, un gigantesco erial creado por la inestable energía mágica conocida como "la Torsión". Myrshock se halla en la costa septentrional del Mar Magro. Como se descubre en El Consejo de Hierro, un próspero industrial pretendió construir un ferrocarril continental que uniría Nueva Crobuzón con Cobsea y Myrshock, socios comerciales, pero esta empresa no tuvo éxito. Sin embargo, el final de la novela apunta a un segundo intento, usando la información reunida por los agentes de este industrial a través del desarrollo del libro.

Al sur del Mar Magro se encuentra el Cymek, un desierto hogar de los nómadas garuda. El Cymek también alberga la ciudad portuaria de Shankell (al norte), conocida por sus brutales combates de gladiadores, y la ciudad de Dreer Samheer (al sur), ambas habitadas mayormente por cactacae.

Al oeste del Cymek está la Sabana de Galaggi, donde se halla la ciudad-estado de Tesh, vecina de la Brujocracia. Tesh controla los Estrechos de Fuegagua, que llevan a un mar continental no identificado que conecta con el Océano Hinchado. El control de los Estrechos de Fuegagua llevó a una guerra entre Nueva Crobuzon y Tesh, cuyos resultados son parte de la trama de El Consejo de Hierro. La victoria crobuzina se deduce del fracaso del ataque taumatúrgico de Tesh contra la ciudad. Los Estrechos de Fuegagua son llamados "Estrechos Sanguíneos" durante el curso de la guerra, debido a la ferocidad y el coste de las batallas navales para controlarlos para controlarlos (un enfrentamiento que termina, de nuevo, en victoria crobuzina).

Bered Kai Nev

Bered Kai Nev es un continente al este de Rohagi. Los khepri son considerados nativos de ese continente, pero fueron expulsados de él por un acontecimiento de naturaleza desconocida denominado "la Voracidad", y ahora viven como refugiados en varias ciudades de Rohagi, aunque se rumorea que todavía hay khepri primitivos viviendo en Bered Kai Nev. No se ha dado ninguna otra información sobre este continente.

Otras masas de tierras y estructuras habitadas

La ciudad pirata de Armada es una ciudad-estado móvil compuesta de un sinnúmero de barcos que han sido atados juntos para formar un gran asentamiento continuo. Está dividida en pequeños distritos autónomos, como el Alto Cromlech, gobernados por sus propios gobernantes. Armada se mueve por el Océano Hinchado gracias a una pequeña flota de barcos remolcadores, y es el principal escenario de La Cicatriz. Los orígenes de Armada son desconocidos, pero ha existido en una u otra forma desde hace al menos mil años. Al inicio de La Cicatriz, su población era de varios cientos de miles de habitantes. La ciudad en sí sólo tiene una milla de diámetro, aunque uno de los personajes del libro afirma que "probablemente haya tantas millas de calles aquí como en Nueva Crobuzón" debido a todas las "capas y capas de cubiertas".

Gnurr Kett es una isla que se halla a dos mil millas al sur de Nueva Crobuzón y a quinientas millas al este del desierto del Cymek. La isla es conocida por su reputación erudita y por el conocimiento que alberga su capital, Kohnid. Parte de este conocimiento deriva de una colonia de anophelii que habita la Isla de los Anophelii, bajo dominio de Gnurr Kett. Esta colonia es el único vestigio conocido del antiguo Reino Malarial, un régimen brutal que dominó la mayoría de las regiones de Bas-Lag con un clima cálido.

Las Islas Jheshull son un trío de pequeñas islas que se encuentran cerca de la costa de Rohagi. Estuvieron involucradas en las Guerras Pirata y se considera que están en declive debido a su participación contra la vencedora, New Crobuzon.

Nova Esperium es una de las colonias de Nueva Crobuzón. Muy pocos eligen ir a Nova Esperium por voluntad propia, por el largo viaje y a las epidemias y otras amenazas que hacen de ella un lugar duro para vivir, pero el gobierno de Nueva Crobuzón paga el pasaje a cualquier voluntario. No se ha dado la localización exacta de Nova Esperium, aunque se sabe que se encuentra a una gran distancia al sureste de Nueva Crobuzón.

Pobladores

Las especies inteligentes conocidas de Bas-Lag son:

Los anophelii

Los anophelii (singular 'anophelius') son seres con partes de mosquito (y, de hecho, su nombre viene de un género de mosquitos, los Anopheles). Las hembras parecen mujeres escuálidas con enormes alas como remos con las que vuelan detrás de su presa. De sus bocas pueden extender una especie de trompa ósea que clavan en su presa para succionarla hasta dejarla seca. Las hembras de los anophelii son crueles, sedientas de sangre y muy peligrosas salvo justo después de alimentarse, cuando demuestran una inteligencia igual a la de los machos. Los machos son hombres bajos y fornidos que parecen no diferenciarse en nada de los hombres, salvo por su boca en forma de esfínter. Los anophelii viven actualmente confinados en una isla bajo el dominio de Gnurr Kett, donde conservan los amplios conocimientos de su cultura, pero en épocas pasadas gobernaron gran parte del mundo a través de su imperio, el Reino Malarial. La amenaza de un resurgir de este Reino es la causa de la estricta cuarentena bajo la que vive su isla.

Los cactacae

Los cactacae (singular 'cactaca') son humanoides con rasgos de cactus, enormes plantas normalmente más altas que los seres humanos. Aunque sus jóvenes crecen del suelo (de bulbos), sus métodos de crianza son los propios de los mamíferos. Los cactacae tienen savia en lugar de sangre. Son conocidos por su fuerza, y son frecuentemente empleados como trabajadores o guardaespaldas. Los cuerpos de los cactacae son fibrosos, con huesos de madera, lo que les hace notablemente difíciles de matar o herir con armas normales; las balas pasan a través de ellos sin apenas causarles daño. La comunidad de cactacae de Nueva Crobuzón se sitúa en torno al Invernadero, y le ha sido permitido existir como una comunidad nominalmente independiente dentro de la ciudad. Sus armas predilectas son los "rivebows", ballestas de gran tamaño que disparan un disco de metal giratorio capaz de cortar los miembros de los cactacae.

Los ge'ain

En las comunidades de cactacae de la sabana, y puede que en otros lugares, viven los llamados ge'ain, cuya traducción aproximada es "tardíos". Los ge'ain son cactacae cuya salida del bulbo ha sido artificialmente retrasada durante meses, manteniéndolos bajo tierra, donde sus cuerpos siguen creciendo. Una vez nacidos, crecen hasta alcanzar dimensiones gigantescas (hasta 7'5 m), tienen una fuerza monstruosa (pueden usar grandes árboles como armas) y sus sentidos son más afinados, pero son retrasados, deformes y tullidos, y su piel está cubierta por una capa superficial de excrecencias. Todo esto les causa gran aflicción. Son los guardiantes de sus pueblos, rehuidos y reverenciados, tabú. No tienen nombres.

Los cray

Especie acuática de aspecto humano de cintura para arriba (salvo por las branquias que tienen tras las orejas) y de langosta de roca de cintura para abajo. Domestican calamares para cazar. La mayoría viven en su ciudad submarina, Salkrikaltor, que rivaliza con la propia Nueva Crobuzón en tamaño.

Los dracos

Son criaturas voladoras semi-inteligentes con aspecto de gárgolas. No miden más de un pie de alto y tienen una brillante piel roja y alas de murciélago. Son brutos y vulgares, se ríen de cualquier cosa y su capacidad de habla es limitada. A veces son usados por otras especies como exploradores y recaderos.

Los elementales

Son la encarnación de sus respectivos elementos. Aunque los taumaturgos llamados elementarii (singular 'elementarius') se especializan en invocarlos y liberarlos contra sus enemigos, son salvajes e indómitos en su mayoría. Aparentemente hay elementales de una amplia gama de conceptos y cosas: en El Consejo de Hierro aparecen elementales de historia, madera y cristal, entre otros.

Los garuda

Los garuda son aves de presa humanoides, como seres humanos alados con cabeza y patas de pájaro. (Su nombre está tomado de Garudá, una dios-ave de la mitología hindú.) La mayoría proceden del desierto Cymek, donde viven en tribus nómadas de cazadores que se organizan según una especie de anarcocomunismo rudimentario: defienden ferozmente su individualismo, pero las posesiones individuales son vistas como obstáculos para la libertad individual. Existe en Nueva Crobuzón un pequeño gueto de garudas, y se sabe por El Consejo de Hierro que otros pocos viven cerca de la Mancha Cacotópica. La ley garuda se basa en el principio de libertad de elección: todos sus crímenes son formas de "robo de elección", el denegar a otra persona su derecho a elegir en total libertad.

Los grindylow

Son peces humanoides (una mezcla de anguila y pez víbora) muy poderosos, misteriosos y sádicos que aparecen en La Cicatriz. Son capaces de sobrevivir tanto en agua salada como en agua dulce, o incluso al aire, y pueden comunicarse telepáticamente con toda una variedad de especies acuáticas, incluidas ballenas y cray.  Los grindylow usan una poderosa magia chamánica, cuyo uso puede deformar a los practicantes humanos. (Aunque su nombre viene de una criatura de los cuentos infantiles ingleses, los grindylow de Mieville tienen cierta similitud con los Profundos de los Mitos de Cthulhu.)

Los hotchi

Los hotchi son hombre-erizo. Se conoce una comunidad en el Bosque Turbio, al suroeste de Nueva Crobuzón. Su sociedad es tribal y su nivel de desarrollo tecnológico, bajo. Los guerreros hotchi de Bosque Turbio emplean arcos como armas y montan grandes gallos de combate llamados galli. También construyen algo llamado "fosos de lucha", presuntamente usados para algún tipo de combate con galli.

Los humanos

Los humanos de Bas-Lag parecen ser idénticos a los humanos del mundo real en todo, excepto porque muchos tienen la capacidad de usar magia. Son la especie dominante de Nueva Crobuzón, y quizás lo son de Bas-Lag también.

Los khepri

Los khepri son una especie de escarabajos humanoides. (Están inspirados en el dios Khepri de la mitología egipcia.) Las hembras khepri poseen cuerpos de mujer, salvo por su piel carmesí y el escarabajo que tienen por cabeza. Se comunican entre sí por medio de movimientos de las patas de su cabeza y por emisiones de sustancia químicas. Las hembras khepri son notables artistas usando cierta excreción biológica de sus cabezas para realizar obras sobrecogedoras de escultura orgánica. Los machos khepri, por otro lado, son escarabajos no-inteligentes del tamaño de langostas, sin un cuerpo humanoide anexo. Se aparean con las hembras pegándose a la cabeza-escarabajo de estas y fertilizándolas.

Los lanzancudos

Los lanzancudos son criaturas cuadrúpedas con patas de insecto terminadas en manos radialmente simétricas (una palma circular con dedos brotando de ella como si fuera una estrella, unidas a la pata por el reverso) que pueden convertirse en lanzas, con las que cazan. Segregan taumaturgones de sus glándulas, lo que les da la capacidad de camuflarse en el bosque. Poseen habilidades místicas, como la capacidad de crear golems mediante magia de tipo "somatúrgica" o la capacidad de "despegar el tiempo" mediante una especie de cánticos, algo de lo que se benefician para cazar. Fueron llevados al borde de la extinción después de que el ferrocarril destruyera sus tierras pantanosas natales.

Los manecros

Los manecros son manos sin cuerpo, inteligentes y parásitas, que controlan la mente de su anfitrión. Hay dos tipos: los zurdos, la casta noble, y los diestros, la casta guerrera. Cuando poseen un cuerpo, los diestros pueden usar varias habilidades sobrenaturales, como el vuelo, el aliento de fuego y la fuerza aumentada. Diestros y zurdos suelen emparejarse para maniobras de exploración o combate: los zurdos tienen el mando de la pareja, mientras que los diestros realizan la mayoría de las acciones ofensivas.

Los scabmettlers

Son seres fornidos de apariencia humana, de piel gris, cuya sangre, cuando aflora, se convierte inmediatamente en una capa protectora sólida. Mediante el uso de una hierba especial que retrasa la coagulación, los scabmettlers son capaces de moldear su sangre para crear elaboradas armaduras. Practican una arte marcial única orientada al combate en arenas llamada "mortu crutt", que hace hincapié en los golpes contundentes, debido a que las armas de filo, por las características especiales de su sangre, son prácticamente inútiles contra ellos.

Las Tejedoras

Son gigantescas arañas multidimensionales que ven la vida en Bas-Lag como una obra de arte en curso. Utilizan sus considerables poderes para interferir en los acontecimientos según su criterio estético individual. Las Tejedoras tienen una forma de hablar inconexa y balbuceante, como un flujo balbuceante de pseudo-poesía, y son totalmente impredecibles.

Los vodyanoi

Los vodyanoi son un pueblo acuático. (Tomados de los vodianoi del folclore ruso.) Son gordos y con forma de rana, con manos y pies palmeados. Controlan la "acuotecnia", magia del agua, lo que les permite de dar moldear objetos de agua temporalmente sólidos fuera de ésta. Los vodyanoi normalmente no pueden sobrevivir fuera del agua más de un día, y no pueden vivir en agua salada.

Casos especiales

Los rehechos

Los rehechos son generalmente, pero no siempre, las víctimas del sistema penal de Nueva Crobuzón y otros lugares. Esto se debe a que, antes que meter a los criminales en prisiones, el sistema los envía a "fábricas de castigo" donde los "biotaumaturgos" retuercen y deforman sus cuerpos de muchas maneras diferentes. Algunos son combinados con maquinaria y son esclavizados con algún propósito concreto. Otros consiguen extrañas extremidades u órganos injertados en sus cuerpos, convirtiéndose en aberraciones de la naturaleza. Los rehechos son principalmente un grupo triste y patético pero algunos rehechos, como el famoso Jack Media-Oración, han puesto su rehechura a su servicio, convirtiéndose en justicieros enmascarados y llamándose a sí mismos "libRehechos".

Los thanati

Mièville los describe como "liches con las bocas cosidas, con ropas elegantes y la piel como cuero conservado". Los thanati ('tanathus' en singular, que viene de Tánatos, el daimon o personificación griega de la muerte no violenta) de Alto Cromlech son los señores supremos de la ciudad, una nobleza de no-muertos.

Los vampiros

Son parecidos a los vampiros de las tradiciones occidentales: poseen gran velocidad y fuerza, lenguas bifurcadas, ciertos poderes mágicos y son capaces de vivir indefinidamente. El vampirismo en Bas-Lag es causado por una bacteria, y el término técnico para la enfermedad es "hemofagia fotofóbica".

Historia

La historia conocida de Bas-Lag incluye estos tres períodos:

Época del Imperio Espectrocéfalo

Más de tres mil años antes de los acontecimientos de La Cicatriz, poderosos seres de otro plano de existencia gobernaron sobre todo Bas-Lag durante un período de quinientos años. Los espectrocéfalos, como fueron conocidos, vinieron de otro mundo en un plano de existencia diferente en algún lugar del extremo oriental del universo. Buscando un lugar para vivir más benévolo que su mundo natal, desgarrado por un cruel ciclo de días y noches que creaba océanos de hierro fundido y congelaba la mismísima atmósfera, los espectrocéfalos construyeron un "pez de metal" y lo usaron para encontrar Bas-Lag. Su llegada creó la Cicatriz, una enorme grieta física y dimensional en la superficie de Bas-Lag por la cual se filtran diferentes posibilidades existenciales. Los espectrocéfalos aprovecharon la energía de la Cicatriz mediante un proceso llamado "minería posibilística", y usaron su poder para tomar el control de todo Bas-Lag, manipulando las posibilidades a su favor. El Imperio Espectrocéfalo fue finalmente destruido por una rebelión llamada la Contumacia, que fue seguida de la Muda. La historia del Imperio sobrevive mucho tiempo después de su caída en documentos como el Canon Imperial y en tecnologías y estructuras perdidas, como las "espadas posibles" y las "torres posibles", todavía dispersos en lugares ocultos a lo largo de Bas-Lag.

Época del Reino Malarial

El Reino Malarial (en inglés, "Malarial Queendom") fue un imperio de corta duración construido por los anophelii, con territorios en Rohagi, Shoteka y los Fragmentos (siempre en zonas de clima cálido). Unos dos mil años antes de La Cicatriz, el Reino colapsó y los anophelii fueron prácticamente erradicados. Los anophelii supervivientes fueron llevados a una pequeña isla al sur de Gnurr Kett, donde son mantenidos en aislamiento como eruditos prisioneros de la nobleza gnurr-kettí.

Primera Edad Úmbrica

El período de tiempo en el que las historias de las novelas tienen lugar, la Primera Edad Úmbrica, se caracteriza por las luchas internas y disputas entre varias entidades políticas de Rohagi surgidas después de la caída del Imperio Espectrocéfalo. El calendario usado en Nueva Crobuzón cuenta los años desde el comienzo de esta Primera Edad Úmbrica.

Los Años Plenos

Los Años Plenos fueron la época dorada de Nueva Crobuzón, en los que la ciudad logró increíbles avances en ciencia, tecnología y taumaturgia. Sin embargo, el declive llegó a finales del siglo XV, y algunos de estos conocimientos se perdieron. Desesperada por demostrar que su época dorada no tenía fin, Nueva Crobuzón construyó un gigantesco barco, el mayor del mundo por aquel entonces, con la intención de que fuera la cúspide de la industria de la ciudad: la Grand Easterly. Sin embargo, fue un despilfarro, y tenía varios defectos de diseño. Fue brevemente usado como ineficaz nave de guerra durante las Guerras Pirata, y terminó "hundiéndose" unos pocos años más tarde. (En realidad, el barco fue capturado por Armada sin el conocimiento de Nueva Crobuzón.)

Las Guerras Piratas

También conocidas como "la Guerra Lenta" o "la Guerra Falsa", las Guerras Pirata fueron un conflicto prolongado entre la Ciudad-Estado y República de Nueva Crobuzón y las ciudades de Suroch y Jheshull. Las Guerras técnicamente terminaron en el año 1544, cuando el ejército de Nueva Crobuzón lanzó bombas de Torsión sobre Suroch con horrorosos resultados. En 1545, tratando de cubrir las atrocidades creadas por las bombas de Torsión, Nueva Crobuzón lanzó bombas cromáticas sobre las ruinas de Suroch, pero dos de ellas erraron; la tercera explotó según lo planeado, ocultando sólo unas pocas millas cuadradas de los que quedaba de Suroch. Cuando las heliografías de la destrucción y de los efectos de la Torsión tomadas por un equipo de investigación del ejército se filtraron y fueron conocidas por la sociedad de Nueva Crobuzón un siglo después, disturbios generalizados casi derrocan al gobierno en 1689. Las investigaciones sobre la Torsión se estancaron permanentemente cuando los patrocinadores abandonaron el proyecto, asustados de la vehemente aversión de la opinión pública.

La Voracidad

En torno al año 1679 (aproximadamente un siglo antes de los acontecimientos de La estación de la calle Perdido), la civilización khepri de Bered Kai Nev fue arrasada por una catástrofe descrita únicamente como "la Voracidad". Este fue el desencadenante de "la Travesía Trágica" y la llegada durante los siguientes veinticinco años de cientos de barcos de refugiados khepri a Nueva Crobuzón. La Voracidad fue un acontecimiento tan traumático que prácticamente todos los supervivientes khepri han olvidado o incluso rehúsan hablar de mil años de historia khepri; como consecuencia, la mayor parte de la cultura khepri se ha perdido para siempre

1779-1780

Los acontecimientos de La estación de calle Perdido tienen lugar en estos años, seguidos unos meses después por los acontecimientos de La Cicatriz.

1804

Los acontecimientos de El Consejo de Hierro tienen lugar en este año.

Geopolítica

Actuales

Entidades políticas conocidas de Bas-Lag en la época de las novelas:

Alto Cromlech

Casi todo lo que se sabe del Alto Cromlech viene de Uther Doul, uno de los personajes principales de La Cicatriz. Doul nació y creció en Alto Cromlech. Él la describe como una nación de castas, gobernada por una nobleza no-muerta llamada los thanati, que describe como "liches con las bocas cosidas, vestidos con hermosas ropas y la piel como cuero conservado".
Los vivos (llamados "los rápidos") son una minoría en Alto Cromlech. La mayoría son aparentemente alimentados y mantenidos "granjas", y son finalmente "liquidados y revividos como zombis". Algunos son educados por los thanati para ser "muertos y recibidos en la sociedad muerta" una vez llegan a cierta edad. No obstante, una pequeña fracción de los vivos nacen libres y sobreviven realizando tareas que requieres demasiada destreza (o son muy peligrosas) para los semi-inteligentes zombis. Los zombis parecen ser la principal mano de obra de Alto Cromlech.
En lo más bajo de la pirámide social de Alto Cromlech están los vampiros, mencionados como "a-muertos" para distinguirlos de los thanati. Según la descripción de Doul, aparentemente los vampiros son considerados poco más que vagabundos y adictos. Se les describe viviendo en barrios de chabolas, de los que salen por la noche para mendigar sangre a los vivos.

Bocalquitrán

Bocalquitrán está situada en la desembocadura del Gran Alquitrán, en la costa oriental de Rohagi, diez millas al este de Nueva Crobuzón. El protagonista de La Cicatriz la describe como "un pueblo feo y violento" usado por corsarios y filibusteros como puerto seguro. Además de la "la prostitución y la piratería", Bocalquitrán vive de la construcción de barcos, gracias al patronazgo de Nueva Crobuzón.

El Gengris

La expresión "el Gengris" puede referirse tanto a la zona como a la ciudad que hay en dicha zona, así como a la especie acuática que lo habita, los grindylow. El Gengris es descrito cruce entre una isla y una ciudad semi-sumergida en el extremo sudoriental del Mar de la Garra Fría, a unas setecientas millas al norte de Nueva Crobuzón. Poco más se sabe sobre la ciudad en sí misma, excepto que en ella se pueden encontrar "capillas de malaquita", "granjas de extremidades" y "talleres de bilis". Los grindylow del Gengris comercian voluntariamente con mercaderes foráneos, que se ven recompensados generosamente con rarezas tales como barriles llenos a partes iguales de sal y perlas de vidrio. Sin embargo, frecuentemente se elimina a los extranjeros "trangresores": la naturaleza de las transgresiones es comúnmente opaca para todos salvo para los propios grindylow, por lo que este comercio es extremadamente arriesgado para los forasteros.

Gharcheltist

En El Consejo de Hierro Gharcheltist es mencionada como "la acuópolis", y presuntamente se trata de una ciudad de los vodyanoi.

Los Hermanos

En El Consejo de Hierro se refieren a ella como "la dual-ciudad [?] de los cocodrilos", y se dice que se halla en la costa oeste de Rohagi, más allá de la Mancha Cacotópica.

El Infierno

Como se indica en La estación de la calle Perdido, el Infierno tiene una embajada en Nueva Crobuzón.

Khadoh

Los mercaderes de Khadoh comercian con Nueva Crobuzón.

Maru'ahm

Maru'ahm se encuentra teóricamente en la costa occidental de Rohagi, más allá de la Mancha Cacotópica. En La estación de la calle Perdido se dice que se gobierna mediante un parlamento-casino, "donde las leyes se ponen en juego mediante ruletas". Este rumor es confirmado en El Consejo de Hierro, en la que un personaje que ha visitado Maru'ahm afirma que ha hecho apuestas por leyes de propiedad y "un lote completo de legislación". El mismo personaje menciona una reina y unos senadores-tahúres, lo que implicaría que el gobierno de Maru'ahm es algún tipo de monarquía constitucional o electiva.

Nueva Crobuzón

La ciudad-estado de Nueva Crobuzón es un elemento principal en las tramas de las tres novelas ambientadas en Bas-Lag, y una parte sustancial de todo lo que se conoce de Bas-Lag a través de las novelas. Está situada en el noreste del continente de Rohagi, en la confluencia de los ríos Alquitrán, Cancro y Gran Alquitrán, unas diez millas al oeste de la costa del Océano Hinchado. Aunque su sistema político es el de una república parlamentaria sui generis, el gobierno de Nueva Crobuzón está más próximo a una oligarquía con fuertes ambiciones imperialistas. El sistema político de Nueva Crobuzón está fuertemente sesgado hacia la mayoría humana, y sólo aquellos situados en lo más alto de la sociedad, junto a unos pocos elegidos en una "lotería de sufragio", podían votar. El partido político en el gobierno durante las tres novelas es el partido del Sol Grueso, pero se conocen también otros partidos, como el xenófobo partido de la Nueva Pluma (llamado "de las Tres Plumas" en La estación de la calle Perdido) y el xenotolerante Tendencia Diversa.
El protagonista de La Cicatriz dice que Nueva Crobuzón es la mayor ciudad de Bas-Lag, pero su opinión está sustancialmente sesgada. Sin embargo, Nueva Crobuzón es sin duda uno de los estados económica y militarmente más poderosos de Bas-Lag. En La Cicatriz, es capaz de enviar una flota al otro lado del mundo para combatir a la ciudad pirata de Armada. En El Consejo de Hierro, mantiene una guerra prolongada con la lejana ciudad-estado de Tesh, mientras aplasta militarmente una rebelión interna.

Qé Banssa

Qé Banssa está construida sobre los picos colgantes de la Isla del Pájaro Bailarín* ("Dancing Bird Island", en el original). Un protagonista de La Cicatriz dice de ella que es un "pobre, pequeño y feo puerto de pescadores". Como Tarmuth, Qé Banssa parece también sobrevivir debido a la buena voluntad de Nueva Crobuzon.

Salkrikaltor

La República Cray de Salkrikaltor se halla bajo las olas del Océano Hinchado, entre las islas de Bartoll y Gnomon Tor, lejos de Nueva Crobuzón en dirección este. Salkrikaltor y Nueva Crobuzón son descritas en La Cicatriz como socios comerciales que mantienen relaciones en términos amistosos.

La capital de la república es Ciudad Salkrikaltor. La mayor parte de Ciudad Salkrikaltor se encuentra bajo el agua, aunque existe un distrito superior para las criaturas no-acuáticas que buscan hacer negocios con los cray. La parte sumergida de la Ciudad es descrita en La Cicatriz como "complicada e interconectada", con "pequeñas plazas ajardinadas con algas" y "patios de coral". El distrito sobre las aguas se dice que consiste principalmente en torres escavadas en roca y coral, "una masa de estilos contrapuestos", con plataformas flotantes y edificios sustentados por contrafuertes y columnas.

Troglodópolis

Troglodópolis es mencionada en La estación de la calle Perdido como una "madriguera ctónica".

Vadaunk

Vadaunk se sitúa en algún lugar al sur de New Crobuzon, más allá de la Mancha Cacotópica. Según la propaganda gubernamental en La estación de la calle Perdido, allí el cambio de las estaciones "trae una avalancha de represión supersticiosa". En El Consejo de Hierro se le llama "el reino mercenario".

Otra entidades políticas

Entre otras entidades de las que apenas se sabe nada se encuentra Yoraketche.

Históricas

De los tiempos anteriores a las historias de las novelas sólo se conocen algunas pocas entidades políticas.

El Imperio Espectrocéfalo

El Imperio Espectrocéfalo fue el imperio de extensión mundial de los espectrocéfalos, unas entidades de otra dimensión.

El Reino Malarial

El Reino Malarial fue el imperio que establecieron los anophelii sobre gran parte de las zonas cálidas de Bas-Lag.

Suroch

Suroch fue una ciudad que se enfrentó a Nueva Crobuzón en una serie de guerras conocidas como las Guerras Pirata, que concluyeron en victoria crobuzina. Durante el período de tiempo cubierto por las novelas de Bas-Lag, Suroch ya hace mucho tiempo que fue destruida y es inhabitable debido a los efectos de armas mágicas de destrucción masiva, como las bombas cromáticas y de Torsión, usadas contra ella en la guerra. En este sentido, Suroch es el único lugar en las novelas con una contaminación de la Torsión parecida a la de la Mancha Cacotópica, y tormentas de Torsión la azotan de forma aleatoria. En La estación de calle Perdido se mencionan "árboles-cucaracha" y "rebaños de lo que una vez pudieron ser seres humanos" en las ruinas de Suroch. La publicación en el periódico ilegal Sacramundi Report de heliografías de la contaminación por Torsión en Suroch puso fin a los experimentos con la Torsión en Nueva Crobuzón.

Lengua

El ragamol es la lengua común en Nueva Crobuzón. Parece ser además una lengua ampliamente hablada en Bas-Lag oriental por miembros de todas las especies.

Del mismo modo, el sal es el idioma del Océano Hinchado, hablado por piratas, marineros y miembros de pueblos marítimos. En La Cicatriz, el sal es descrito como una lengua hecha de retales, que toma prestados aspectos de otras lenguas, principalmente del ragamol.

Los anophelii mantienen un lenguaje escrito llamado alto kettai, que es usado por varios eruditos y casas editoriales. Se da a entender que el alto kettai se declina, ya que se sabe que posee un "caso irónico". El bajo kettai es el dialecto más ampliamente entendido del alto kettai.

El quiesy (también llamado "muertés") es la principal lengua del Alto Cromlech. Dado que muchos de sus hablantes tienen, ya sea cosida la boca, ya las laringes demasiado deterioradas para formar los sonidos correctamente, consiste en una serie de gruñidos, toses e intrincadas y calculadas pausas. También se puede usar este idioma totalmente en silencio, con gestos o movimientos de los ojos.

Los khepri se comunican a través de un lenguaje de signos y de esencias químicas, debido a que sus cabezas de insecto no permiten la vocalización. También mantienen un lenguaje escrito llamado alto khepri.

Los vodyanoi hablan al menos tres lenguas propias diferentes: la primaria, que es el lubbok, y otras dos llamadas félido y sureño.

El lenguaje tradicional de los cactacae es el sunglari.

Los garuda del Cymek hablan un idioma sin nombre.

La gente de Tesh, la gente de Khadoh, los cray de Salkrikaltor y los hotchi del Bosque Turbio también tienen sus propios idiomas epónimos.

En La estación de la calle Perdido se mencionan al menos otros dos idiomas: el bajo cymek (presuntamente hablado en el Cymek) y el perrickiano.

Ciencia, tecnología y "taumaturgia"

La tecnología en Bas-Lag es amplia y variada, y evoluciona a lo largo de las novelas.

Ciencia

Una fuente de energía, mencionada ya en La estación de la calle Perdido, es la Torsión, que azota la Mancha Cacotópica y que podría ser comparable a la radiación atómica. La Torsión produce extrañas mutaciones, alterando tanto a las criaturas vivas como al entorno inanimado. Por ejemplo, durante El Consejo de Hierro, un vagón del ferrocarril y sus tres ocupantes son transformados por la Torsión en una masa de materia semi-sólida con tres núcleos. Los mutantes producto de la Torsión son llamados "torqueados". La Torsión es capaz de provocar tal destrucción que Nueva Crobuzón tiró bombas cromáticas sobre la ciudad de Suroch para ocultar los efectos del arma de Torsión empleada allí (algo que se mantuvo en secreto a la opinión pública, pero fue posteriormente revelado por un oponente anónimo en las Guerras Pirata).

Tecnología

En La estación de la calle Perdido, la pieza principal del armamento es el mosquete de chispa de pedernal; en El Consejo de Hierro, el ejército va armado con lo que parece ser armamento de cápsula fulminante en la forma de "motorguns" y revólveres pimenteros.

Otra tecnología presente es la de las llamadas cromatobombas o bombas cromáticas, cuya naturaleza exacta es desconocida, pero parece que uno de sus efectos es causar un cambio de color de la piel. Una cosa curiosa es que, mientras que en El Consejo de Hierro llaman a esta tecnología "ciencia perdida", en La estación de la calle Perdido Isaac dice: "Ahí es donde tiraron la bomba cromática en 1545. Dijeron que lo hacían para poner fin a las Guerras Pirata, pero para ser sinceros, Yag, ya habían terminado hacía casi un año cuando...".

En las novelas también hay diversas menciones a joyas de relojería, metarelojería, constructos pseudo-robóticos inteligentes funcionando mediante diferentes sistemas, y muchos otros ejemplos inexplicables o fantásticos de ciencia, magia o una combinación de ambas.

Taumaturgia

En El Consejo de Hierro, Miéville dedica mucha atención al arte mágico de la golemancia, explicando la lógica detrás de esta técnica y su diferencia con la invocación y control de elementales. En los libros también se habla de la biotaumaturgia (presuntamente la capacidad de modelar y afectar con magia a la materia viva), usada para crear a los rehechos, y la subvocalurgia (el arte de susurrar directamente a la mente de una persona, incluso a mucha distancia, y manipularla contra su voluntad; es considerada un arte de bandoleros). Los subvocalurgos son llamados "susurreros".

Referencias
Bas-Lag Wiki - Wiki sobre Bas-Lag (en inglés).

Universos de ciencia ficción
Novelas distópicas
Steampunk
Series de novelas de ciencia ficción
Universos fantásticos


text:
\section{Introduction}
The aim of Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) is to interpret the intention of the user's utterance.
More specifically, a SLU system attempts to find a mapping from user's utterance in natural language, to the limited set of concepts that is structured and meaningful for the computer.
As an example, for the sample utterance:\\
\makebox[0.4\textwidth][c]{\emph{I want to return to Dallas on Thursday}}\\
It's corresponding output would be:\\
\texttt{GOAL : RETURN\\
TOLOC.CITY = Dallas \\
RETURN.DATE = Thursday.\\
}
SLU can be widely used in many real world applications; however, data processing costs may impede practicability of it.
Thus, attempting to train a SLU model using less training data is a key issue.

The first statistical SLU system was based on hidden Markov model and modeled using a finite state semantic tagger employed in AT\&T's CHRONUS system \cite{pieraccini1992}.
Their semantic representation was flat-concept; but, later \newcite{he2005} extended the representation to a hierarchical structure and modeled the problem using a push-down automaton.
There are other works which have dealt with SLU as a sequential labeling problem.
\newcite{ray2007} and \newcite{wang2006} have fully annotated the data and trained the model in discriminative frameworks such as CRF.
CRF captures many complex dependencies and models the sequential relations between the labels; therefore, it is a powerful framework for SLU.

The Semi-Supervised Learning (SSL) approach has drawn a raft of interest among the machine learning community basically because of its practical application \cite{cha2006semi}.
Manual tagging of data can take considerable effort and time; however, in the training phase of SSL, a large amount of unlabeled data along with a small amount of labeled data is provided.
This makes it more practicable and cost effective than providing a fully labeled set of training data; thus, SSL is more favorable.

Graph-based SSL, the most active area of research in SSL in the recent years, has shown to outperform other SSL methods \cite{cha2006semi}.
Graph-based SSL algorithms are generally run in two steps: graph construction and label propagation.
Graph construction is the most important step in graph-based SSL; and, the fundamental approach is to assign labeled and unlabeled examples to nodes of the graph.
Then, a similarity function is applied to compute similarity between pairs of nodes.
The computed similarities are then assigned as the weight of the edges connecting the nodes \cite{zhu2003semi}.
Label propagation operates on the constructed graph.
Based on the constraints or properties derived from the graph, labels are propagated from a few labeled nodes to the entire graph.
These constraints include smoothness \cite{zhu2003semi,subra2010,talukdar2008weakly,garrette2013learning}, and sparsity \cite{das2012graph,zeng2013graph}.

Labeling unaligned training data requires much less effort compared to aligned data \cite{he2005}.
Nevertheless, unaligned data cannot be used to train a CRF model directly since CRF requires \emph{fully-annotated} data.
On the other hand, robust parameter estimation of a CRF model requires a large set of training data which is unrealistic in many practical applications.
To overcome this problem, the work in this paper applies semi-supervised CRF on unlabeled data.
It is motivated by the hypothesis that data is aligned to labels in a monotone manner, and words appearing in similar contexts tend to have same labels.
Under these circumstances, we were able to reach 1.64\% improvement on the F-score over the supervised CRF and 1.38\% improvement on the F-score over the self trained CRF.

In the following section we describe the algorithm this work is based on and our proposed algorithm.
In Section \ref{sec:results} we evaluate our work and in the final section conclusions are drawn.

\section{Semi-supervised Spoken Language Understanding}\label{sec:sslcrf}

The input data is unaligned and represented as a semantic tree, which is described in \cite{he2005}.
The training sentences and their corresponding semantic trees can be aligned monotonically; hence, we chose IBM Model 5 \cite{khadivi2005automatic} to find the best alignment between the words and nodes of the semantic tree (labels).
Thus, we have circumvented the problem of unaligned data.
More detailed explanation about this process can be found in our previous work \cite{moli}.
This data is then used to train the supervised and semi-supervised CRFs.

\subsection{Semi-supervised CRF}
The proposed semi-supervised learning algorithm is based on \cite{subra2010}.
Here, we quickly review this algorithm (Algorithm \ref{alg:1}).

\begin{algorithm}
  \caption{Semi-Supervised Training of CRF}
  \label{alg:1}
    \begin{algorithmic}[1]

\STATE $\Lambda_{(n=0)} = \mbox{TrainCRF}(\mathcal{D}_l)$
\STATE
      $\mbox{G} = \mbox{BuildGraph}(\mathcal{D}_l \cup \mathcal{D}_u)$ \\
\STATE
      $\{\mbox{r}\} = \mbox{CalcEmpiricalDistribution}(\mathcal{D}_l)$\\

\WHILE{not converged}
\STATE
      $\{\mbox{m}\} = \mbox{CalcMarginals}(\mathcal{D}_u, \Lambda_{n})$ \\
\STATE
      \{q\} = AverageMarginals(m) \\
\STATE
      $\{\hat{\mbox{q}}\}$ = LabelPropagation(q, r) \\
\STATE
      $\mathcal{D}_u^{v}$ = ViterbiDecode(\{$\hat{\mbox{q}}$\}, $\Lambda_{n}$)
\STATE
      $\Lambda_{n+1} = \mbox{RetrainCRF}(\mathcal{D}_l \cup \mathcal{D}_u^v, \Lambda_n);$
\ENDWHILE\label{mainwhile}\\
\STATE Return final $\Lambda_n$
   \end{algorithmic}
\end{algorithm}

In the first step, the CRF model is trained on the labeled data ($\mathcal{D}_l$) according to \eqref{eq:crf}:
\begin{equation}
\label{eq:crf}
\Lambda^\ast = \argmin_{\Lambda \in \mathbb{R}^{K}} \Big[ -\sum_{i=1}^{l} \log \mathrm{p}(\mathbf{y_i} | \mathbf{x_i};\Lambda) + \gamma \|\Lambda\|^2 \Big],
\end{equation}
where $\Lambda^\ast$ is the optimal parameter set of the base CRF model and $\|\Lambda\|^2$ is the squared $\ell_2$-norm regularizer whose impact is adjusted by $\gamma$.
At the first line, $\Lambda^\ast$ is assigned to $\Lambda_{(n=0)}$ i.e. the initial parameter set of the model.

In the next step, the k-NN similarity graph (G) is constructed (line 2), which will be discussed in more detail in Section \ref{simgraph}.
In the third step, the empirical label distribution (r) on the labeled data is computed.
The main loop of the algorithm is then started and the execution continues until the results converge.

Marginal probability of labels (m) are then computed on the unlabeled data ($\mathcal{D}_u$) using Forward-Backward algorithm with the parameters of the previous CRF model ($\Lambda_n$), and in the next step, all the marginal label probabilities of each trigram are averaged over its occurrences (line 5 and 6).

In label propagation (line 7), trigram marginals (q) are propagated through the similarity graph using an iterative algorithm.
Thus, they become smooth.
Empirical label distribution (r) serves as the priori label information for labeled data and trigram marginals (q) act as the seed labels.
More detailed discussion is found in Section \ref{propagation}.

Afterwards, having the results of label propagation ($\hat{\mbox{q}}$) and previous CRF model parameters, labels of the unlabeled data are estimated by combining the interpolated label marginals and the CRF transition potentials (line 8). For every word position $j$ for $i$ indexing over sentences, interpolated label marginals are calculated as follows:
\begin{eqnarray}
\label{eq:viterbi}
\hat{\mathrm{p}}(y_i^{(j)} = y | \mathbf{x}_i) = \alpha \mathrm{p}(y_i^{(j)} = y | \mathbf{x}_i ; \Lambda_n) \nonumber \\ + ~ (1 - \alpha)\hat{\mathrm{q}}_{T(i,j)} (y),
\end{eqnarray}
where $T(i,j)$  is a trigram centered at position $j$ of the $i$th sentence and $\alpha$ is the interpolation factor.

In the final step, the previous CRF model parameters are regularized using the labels estimated for the unlabeled data in the previous step (line 9) as follows:
\begin{eqnarray}
\label{crfretrain}
\Lambda_{n+1} = \argmin_{\Lambda \in \mathbb{R}^{K}} \Big[ -\sum_{i=1}^{l} \log \mathrm{p}(\mathbf{y_i} | \mathbf{x_i};\Lambda_n)\nonumber \\ ~~~-\eta \sum_{i=l+1}^{u} \log \mathrm{p}(\mathbf{y_i} | \mathbf{x_i}; \Lambda_n) + \gamma \|\Lambda\|^2 \Big],
\end{eqnarray}
where $\eta$ is a trade-off parameter whose setting is discussed later in Section \ref{sec:results}.

\subsection{CRF Features}
By aligning the training data, many informative labels are saved which are omitted in other works \cite{wang2006,ray2007}.
By saving these information, the first order label dependency helps the model to predict the labels more precisely.
Therefore the model manages to predict the labels using less lexical features and the feature window that was [-4,+2] in previous works is reduced to [0,+2].
Using smaller feature window improves the generalization of the model \cite{moli}.

\subsection{Similarity Graph}\label{simgraph}
In our work we have considered trigrams as the nodes of the graph and extracted features of each trigram $x_2 ~ x_3 ~ x_4$ according to the 5-word context $x_1 ~ x_2 ~ x_3 ~ x_4 ~ x_5$ it appears in.
These features are carefully selected so that nodes are correctly placed in neighborhood of the ones having similar labels.
Table \ref{tab:features} presents the feature set that we have applied to construct the similarity graph.

\begin{table}
\renewcommand{\arraystretch}{1.1}
\centering
  \begin{tabular}{|c|c|}
   \hline
  \bfseries Description & \bfseries Feature \\
\hline\hline
  Context & $x_1\ x_2\ x_3\ x_4\ x_5$ \\
\hline
  Left Context & $x_1\ x_2$ \\
\hline
  Right Context & $x_4\ x_5$ \\
\hline
  Center Word in trigram & $\_\ x_3\ \_$ \\
\hline
Center is Class & $IsClass(x_3)$ \\
\hline
 Center is Preposition & $IsPreposition(x_3)$ \\
\hline
  Left is Preposition & $IsPreposition(x_2)$ \\
 \hline \end{tabular}
\caption{Context Features used for constructing the similarity graph} \label{tab:features}
\end{table}

 $IsClass$ feature impacts the structure of the graph significantly.
 In the pre-processing phase specific words are marked as classes according to the corpus' accompanying database.
As an example, city names such as Dallas and Baltimore are represented as \emph{city\_name} which is a class type.
 Since these classes play an important role in calculating similarity of the nodes, $IsClass$ feature is used to determine if a given position in a context is a class type.

 Furthermore, prepositions like \emph{from} and \emph{between} are also important, e.g. when two trigrams like "\emph{from Washington to}" and "\emph{between Dallas and}" are compared.
 The two trigrams are totally different while both of them begin with a preposition and are continued with a class.
 Therefore, $IsPreposition$ feature would be particularly suitable to increase the similarity score of these two trigrams.
In many cases, these features have a significant effect in assigning a better similarity score.

To define a similarity measure, we compute the Pointwise Mutual Information (PMI) between all occurrences of a trigram and each of the features.
The PMI measure transforms the independence assumption into a ratio \cite{lin1998automatic,razmara2013}.
Then, the similarity between two nodes is measured as the cosine distance between their PMI vectors.
We carefully examined the similarity graph on the training data and found out the head and tail trigrams of each sentence which contain \emph{dummy} words, make the graph sparse.
Hence, we have ignored those trigrams.

\subsection{Label Propagation}\label{propagation}
After statistical alignment, the training data gets noisy.
Hence, use of traditional label propagation algorithms causes an error propagation over the whole graph and degrades the whole system performance.
Thus, we make use of the Modified Adsorption (MAD) algorithm for label propagation.

MAD algorithm controls the label propagation more strictly.
This is accomplished by limiting the amount of information that passes from a node to another \cite{talukdar2010}.
Soft label vectors $\hat{Y_v}$ are found by solving the unconstrained optimization problem in (\ref{eq:mad}):
\begin{eqnarray}\label{eq:mad}
\min_{\hat{Y}} \quad \sum_{l \in C}\Big[ \mu_{1} (Y_{l}-\hat{Y_{l}})^\top S~ (Y_{l}-\hat{Y_{l}})~ \nonumber \\
 + ~\mu_{2}\hat{Y_{l}}^\top L' \hat{Y_{l}}~ + ~ \mu_{3} \big\|\hat{Y_{l}} - R_{l} \big\|^2 \Big],
\end{eqnarray}
where $\mu_i$ are hyper-parameters and $R_l$ is the empirical label distribution over labels i.e. the prior belief about the labeling of a node.
The first term of the summation is related to label score injection from the initial score of the node and makes the output match the seed labels $Y_l$ \cite{razmara2013}.
The second term is associated with label score acquisition from neighbor nodes i.e. smooths the labels according to the similarity graph.
In the last term, the labels are regularized to match a priori label $R_l$ in order to avoid false labels for high degree unlabeled nodes.
A solution to the optimization problem in \eqref{eq:mad} can be found with an efficient iterative algorithm described in \cite{talukdar2009new}.

Many errors of the alignment model are corrected through label propagation using the MAD algorithm; whereas, those errors are propagated in traditional label propagation algorithms such as the one mentioned in \cite{subra2010}.

\subsection{System Overview}
We have implemented the Graph Construction in Java and the CRF is implemented by modifying the source code of CRFSuite \cite{oka2007}.
We have also modified Junto toolkit \cite{talukdar2010} and used it for graph propagation.
The whole source code of our system is available online\footnote{\url{https://github.com/maxxkia/g-ssl-crf}}.
The input utterances and their corresponding semantic trees are aligned using GIZA++ \cite{och2000}; and then used to train the base CRF model.
The graph is constructed using the labeled and unlabeled data and the main loop of the algorithm continues until convergence.
The final parameters of the CRF are retained for decoding in the test phase.

\section{Experimental Results}\label{sec:results}
In this section we evaluate our results on Air Travel Information Service (ATIS) data-set \cite{dahl1994} which consists of 4478 training, 500 development and 896 test utterances. The development set was chosen randomly.
To evaluate our work, we have compared our results with results from Supervised CRF and Self-trained CRF \cite{yarowsky1995}.

\begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c|c|c|c|}
\cline{2-4}
& \multicolumn{3}{ c| }{\% of Labeled Data} \\
\cline{2-4}
& 10 & 20 & 30 \\
\cline{2-4}
\cline{1-4}
\multicolumn{1}{|c|}{Supervised CRF} & $86.07$ & $87.69$ & $88.64$ \\
 \cline{1-4}
\multicolumn{1}{|c|}{Self-trained CRF} & $86.34$ & $87.73$ & $88.64$ \\
 \cline{1-4}
\multicolumn{1}{|c|}{Semi-supervised CRF} & $87.72$ & $88.75$ & $89.12$ \\
 \cline{1-4}
\end{tabular}
\caption{Comparison of training results. Slot/Value F-score in \%.} \label{tab:results}
\end{table}

For our experiments we set hyper-parameters as follows: for graph propagation, $\mu_1 = 1, \mu_2 = 0.01$, $\mu_3 = 0.01$, for Viterbi decoding, $\alpha = 0.1$, for CRF-retraining, $\eta = 0.1$, $\gamma = 0.01$.
We have chosen these parameters along with graph features and graph-related parameters by evaluating the model on the development set.
We employed the L-BFGS algorithm to optimize CRF objective functions; which is designed to be fast and low-memory consumer for the high-dimensional optimization problems \cite{bertsekas1999}.

We have post-processed the sequence of labels to obtain the slots and their values. The slot-value pair is compared to the reference test set and the result is reported in F-score of slot classification.
Table \ref{tab:results} demonstrates results obtained from our semi-supervised CRF algorithm compared to the supervised CRF and self-trained CRF.
Experiments were carried out having 10\%, 20\% and 30\% of data being labeled.
For each of these tests, labeled set was selected randomly from the training set.
This procedure was done 10 times and the reported results are the average of the results thereof.
The Supervised CRF model is trained only on the labeled fraction of the data.
However, the Self-trained CRF and Semi-supervised CRF have access to the rest of the data as well, which are unlabeled.
Our Supervised CRF gained 91.02 F-score with 100\% of the data labeled which performs better compared to 89.32\% F-score of \newcite{ray2007} CRF model.

As shown in Table \ref{tab:results}, the proposed method performs better compared to supervised CRF and self-trained CRF. The most significant improvement occurs when only 10\% of training set is labeled; where we gain 1.65\% improvement on F-score compared to supervised CRF and 1.38\% compared to self-trained CRF.

\section{Conclusion}\label{sec:conc}
We presented a simple algorithm to train CRF in a semi-supervised manner using unaligned data for SLU.
By saving many informative labels in the alignment phase, the base model is trained using fewer features.
The parameters of the CRF model are estimated using much less labeled data by regularizing the model using a nearest-neighbor graph.
Results demonstrate that our proposed algorithm significantly improves the performance compared to supervised and self-trained CRF.

\bibliographystyle{acl}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaArXiv


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