CogTree: Cognition Tree Loss for Unbiased Scene Graph Generation

Scene graphs are semantic abstraction of images that encourage visual understanding and reasoning. However, the performance of Scene Graph Generation (SGG) is unsatisfactory when faced with biased data in real-world scenarios. Conventional debiasing research mainly studies from the view of balancing data distribution or learning unbiased models and representations, ignoring the correlations among the biased classes. In this work, we analyze this problem from a novel cognition perspective: automatically building a hierarchical cognitive structure from the biased predictions and navigating that hierarchy to locate the relationships, making the tail relationships receive more attention in a coarse-to-fine mode. To this end, we propose a novel debiasing Cognition Tree (CogTree) loss for unbiased SGG. We first build a cognitive structure CogTree to organize the relationships based on the prediction of a biased SGG model. The CogTree distinguishes remarkably different relationships at first and then focuses on a small portion of easily confused ones. Then, we propose a debiasing loss specially for this cognitive structure, which supports coarse-to-fine distinction for the correct relationships. The loss is model-agnostic and consistently boosting the performance of several state-of-the-art models. The code is available at: https://github.com/CYVincent/Scene-Graph-Transformer-CogTree.

Psychosocial or Mythological: Sam Shepard’s Kicking a Dead Horse as a Liberal Ironist

American West has conjured up a shining image in the media but a complex subject in the research studies. Among the iconic elements that represent the American West, the image of cowboy has occupied a unique place. Relatively, mythological or psychosocial methods may contribute to the comprehension of the image of cowboy. In this vein, an examination of cowboy with regard to the aforementioned perspectives are studied but proved insufficient because it is almost impossible to draw a fine distinction between these two matters. Nevertheless, the core of this study by attributing to one of Shepard’s late plays entitled Kicking a Dead Horse tries to address the issue of cowboy with regard to Richard Rorty’s liberal ironist to prove that neither mythological nor psychosocial approach is appropriate enough to study the image of cowboy whereas Shepard’s emphasis on self-creation as buttressed by Richard Rorty’s liberal ironist is the suitable method for analyzing the image of cowboy.

Mechanisms of Moral Disengagement in the Transition from Cybergossip to Cyberaggression: A Longitudinal Study

The internet is an area where young people establish relationships and develop socially, emotionally and morally, but it also gives rise to certain forms of online behaviour, such as cybergossip, which are associated with cyberaggression and other risky behaviour. The aims of this study were to verify whether a longitudinal association exists between cybergossip and cyberaggression, and to discover which mechanisms of moral disengagement may mediate this relationship. The final sample consisted of 1392 students (50% girls; Mage = 13.47; SD = 0.77), who were surveyed in a three-wave longitudinal study at six-month intervals. The results obtained confirmed a direct, positive relationship between cybergossip, subsequent cyberaggression and the mediation exerted by cognitive restructuring in this transition. We discuss the importance of recognizing and detecting the fine distinction between online gossip and cyberaggression with the intention of doing harm, and focus on the justifications used by young people to normalize online bullying. To sum up, there is a clear need to encourage ethical, responsible behaviour in online interactions in order to achieve well-balanced, more sustainable relationships in classrooms.

Application of Haralick’s Texture Features for Rapid Detection of Windthrow Hotspots in Orthophotos

Windthrow and storm damage are crucial issues in practical forestry. We propose a method for rapid detection of windthrow hotspots in airborne digital orthophotos. Therefore, we apply Haralick’s texture features on 50 × 50 m cells of the orthophotos and classify the cells with a random forest algorithm. We apply the classification results from a training data set on a validation set. The overall classification accuracy of the proposed method varies between 76% for fine distinction of the cells and 96% for a distinction level that tried to detect only severe damaged cells. The proposed method enables the rapid detection of windthrow hotspots in forests immediately after their occurrence in single-date data. It is not adequate for the determination of areas with only single fallen trees. Future research will investigate the possibilities and limitations when applying the method on other data sources (e.g., optical satellite data).

What Causes Populism?

Chapter 3 is largely about the essentials of populism—its nuts and bolts, so to speak, that are absolutely necessary to facilitate its emergence—including notions of the people, political leadership, and symbolic discourse. The chapter introduces a fine distinction of three different subtypes of “the people,” each with their own characteristics and political mindset, going beyond easy generalizations about alleged uniformity. A comparative analysis of populist leaders follows, which, based on an original reconceptualization of political charisma, demonstrates a surprisingly high correlation between extraordinary leadership and populist success. Ordinary people and extraordinary populist leaders forge their relationship through specific narratives that are based largely on individual fears and deeply held social resentment. The last section in the chapter models the causality of populism, which is also presented as a concise diagram.

Calibration of a three-dimensional photodynamic therapy illumination system and its segmentation assessment for port-wine stains

The uniformity of light dosimetry is an important parameter that affects the efficacy of photodynamic therapy (PDT). Although this uniformity can be improved by a three-dimensional (3D) digital PDT illumination system, it has a low field-of-view (FOV) utilization rate. A checkerboard calibration method using color coding is proposed to calibrate both the projector and camera of the system with a broad common FOV. Experiments reveal that the proposed method increases the utilization rate by up to three times compared with noncolor-coding methods with almost the same accuracy. A fine distinction of phantom lesions in the 3D system can be obtained by clustering, which may be used to optimize the treatment and light-dosimetry evaluation.

Tacto, promesa y convicción: Conjunción ética de tradición e innovación en Paul Ricoeur

The ethics of solicitude in Ricoeur combines a detailed articulation of three polarized moments which spring from fertile traditional sources: Aristotelian phrónesis, the Kantian deontological legacy, and the formulation of Hegelian Sittlichkeit. The Ricoeurian over-determination of these models exhibits a careful critical re-appropriation, whose hermeneutical originality takes account of its fertility philosophy to address current ethical demands and their more important oppositions. This overdeterminataion proposes a fine distinction of levels of mediation and stages of fulfillment. Practical wisdom is the result of this interpretation and the narrative genre is the most notable mediating element. The creative merit of this ethics proposal is the interpretation of ipseity, a pole of identity that is at the basis of the original ethical relation between oneself and another. Three exemplary moments in this path are: touch, the promise and conviction.

Phenomenality without access?

Block holds that there can be “phenomenology,” “awareness,” and even awareness of the phenomenology, without cognitive access by the subject. The subject may have an experience and be aware of the experience, yet neither notice it nor attend to it. How that is possible is far from clear. I invite Block to explain this very fine distinction.

Bias and Fraud in Medical Research: A Review

‘If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties' (Bacon 1605). Four centuries later, one of the greatest of contemporary philosophers — Sir Karl Popper — has consistently maintained that knowledge advances by refutation of false doctrines and not by verification of true ones (which, indeed, can never be completely verified). ‘Error is unavoidable; it can be rational, and when responsibly made and honestly reported, is not even culpable’ (Laor 1985). The desire to verify an hypothesis rather than to seek to refute it can be responsible for the suppression of deviant data. There is a fine distinction between bias, which may afflict honest investigators, and fraud, which is always dishonest. Even a true statement can be tainted by bias, and Ronald Fisher concluded that Mendel's published figures on the genetics of peas were so close to the expected ratio of 3:1 that it would have taken ‘an absolute miracle of chance’ to produce them (Hamblin 1981).