Felicia Martinez

Increasing attention has been paid to the prediction of earthquakes with data mining techniques during the last decade. Several works have already proposed the use of certain features serving as inputs for supervised classifiers. However, they have been successfully used without any further transformation so far. In this work, the use of principal component analysis to reduce data dimensionality and generate new datasets is proposed. In particular, this step is inserted in a successfully already used methodology to predict earthquakes. Tokyo, one of the cities mostly threatened by large earthquakes occurrence in Japan, is studied. Several well-known classifiers combined with PCA have been used. Noticeable improvement in the results is reported.

What does it mean to know who you are? Is it a matter of knowing your name? The things that you’ve done? The people you love? Such indispensible knowledge is somehow not enough; I can know all of these things, and still feel puzzled about who I am. “I am not the person I once was,” “I am not myself today,” and “I am learning who I am,” are all commonplace poems of a kind: expressive sentences completely at home both in literature and ordinary life. Such a poem is the sentence “I know who I am.” This last is one of the many grand and emblematic boasts of Miguel de Cervantes’s hilariously self-fashioned knight, Don Quixote de la Mancha, a boast that can seem both impossible and yet utterly sensible, part quixotic and...

A common contention of literary criticism is that literary forms can express, reflect, shape, represent or otherwise give form to human life. Literature can seem to offer the same idea as a promise of life’s meaningfulness; where expressive form is powerful, life need not be empty. Can literary forms give form to human life? I will argue for one sense in which this is true. As will become clear, at stake in this inquiry is not simply an idea about the meaningfulness of literature’s poetry, but a way of answering the question of what it means to be human.