Space networks: towards hodological space design for urban man, starting with a cognitive / perceptual notation

The main purpose of this thesis on Space Networks is to make a contribution to urban design0A iming at the level of the urban designer's or architect's prestructure (after the site has been seen,and before any plan/section/elevation drawings are done),it is meant for those designers involved in res earth themselves,and who accept the idea that they are,in a way, the first users of what they design.The additional purpose is to provide a sociological, psychological,and spatial scale context for dynamic design. Space is looked upon as a network.Where the space-of-possible- movement (taking the shortest/most agreable/most energy demanding/etc way, depending whether you are in a hurry/strolling/exercising yourself/etc respectively) is called Hodological Space.Movement --through-space-with-intention is used as a generator for design.We start with a proposed cognitive/perceptual notation of four spatial conceptual components: First with Section-Perspective (by which we do away with the facades,and considering the building not in isolation ---in the form of an endless isometric). Then the Tube (employing the anticipation,cognitively,of the projecting brain of man for his path of action),and also the Sequential (progressive sequences) and Binary (visual contrasts of 'wholes')- -these perceived as man moves through his Hodological space.There are six Chapters and an Appendix.Chapter I is introductory,and its three parts are extended in the Chapters that follow: Movement Through Space in Chapters 3 and 4,Space- Movement Notation in Chapters 5 and 6,and the Intended Fieldwork And Pilot Questionnaires in the Appendix.In Chapter 2 the clarifying distinction is made between space for activity and space for profit.Which issue,far from a refinement,shifts the problem back to where it belongs: the society values --of which the designer himself partakes. ln Chapter 3 man is not seen from the stimulus -response,but the cognitive psychology side: not passive,but projecting his intentions into his environment --and if it goes a bit too far in that direction it is in compensation for the opposite view.ln Chapter 4 a comprehensive classification of space,into Hodological,Ambient,and Personal,is made for the designer's understanding and use.All three spaces are more fundamental to him than Euclidean space which is significant only in relation to them.ln Chapter 5 the four-component Notation is a rticulated into the cognitive /perceptual anthropological model of cognitive anticipation (see Tube),and perceptual experience (see Sequential and Binary),together with a comparative discussion of the other notatorst work,ranging between the scales of landscape design (Halprin) and microspace behaviour (Hall),In Chapter 6 the proposition of using the present anthropological model of a cognitive /perceptual notation of design-for-movement has been taken up as a process employed in experimental design.The program of designing for Hodological space --as well as for Ambient space which accompanies progress through Hodological space --links psychological research to design for the pedestrian

High-Speed Elliptic Curve and Pairing-Based Cryptography

Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC), independently proposed by Miller [Mil86] and Koblitz [Kob87] in mid 80’s, is finding momentum to consolidate its status as the public-key system of choice in a wide range of applications and to further expand this position to settings traditionally occupied by RSA and DL-based systems. The non-existence of known subexponential attacks on this cryptosystem directly translates to shorter keylengths for a given security level and, consequently, has led to implementations with better bandwidth usage, reduced power and memory requirements, and higher speeds. Moreover, the dramatic entry of pairing-based cryptosystems defined on elliptic curves at the beginning of the new millennium has opened the possibility of a plethora of innovative applications, solving in some cases longstanding problems in cryptography. Nevertheless, public-key cryptography (PKC) is still relatively expensive in comparison with its symmetric-key counterpart and it remains an open challenge to reduce further the computing cost of the most time-consuming PKC primitives to guarantee their adoption for secure communication in commercial and Internet-based applications. The latter is especially true for pairing computations. Thus, it is of paramount importance to research methods which permit the efficient realization of Elliptic Curve and Pairing-based Cryptography on the several new platforms and applications. This thesis deals with efficient methods and explicit formulas for computing elliptic curve scalar multiplication and pairings over fields of large prime characteristic with the objective of enabling the realization of software implementations at very high speeds. To achieve this main goal in the case of elliptic curves, we accomplish the following tasks: identify the elliptic curve settings with the fastest arithmetic; accelerate the precomputation stage in the scalar multiplication; study number representations and scalar multiplication algorithms for speeding up the evaluation stage; identify most efficient field arithmetic algorithms and optimize them; analyze the architecture of the targeted platforms for maximizing the performance of ECC operations; identify most efficient coordinate systems and optimize explicit formulas; and realize implementations on x86-64 processors with an optimal algorithmic selection among all studied cases. In the case of pairings, the following tasks are accomplished: accelerate tower and curve arithmetic; identify most efficient tower and field arithmetic algorithms and optimize them; identify the curve setting with the fastest arithmetic and optimize it; identify state-of-the-art techniques for the Miller loop and final exponentiation; and realize an implementation on x86-64 processors with optimal algorithmic selection. The most outstanding contributions that have been achieved with the methodologies above in this thesis can be summarized as follows: • Two novel precomputation schemes are introduced and shown to achieve the lowest costs in the literature for different curve forms and scalar multiplication primitives. The detailed cost formulas of the schemes are derived for most relevant scenarios. • A new methodology based on the operation cost per bit to devise highly optimized and compact multibase algorithms is proposed. Derived multibase chains using bases {2,3} and {2,3,5} are shown to achieve the lowest theoretical costs for scalar multiplication on certain curve forms and for scenarios with and without precomputations. In addition, the zero and nonzero density formulas of the original (width-w) multibase NAF method are derived by using Markov chains. The application of “fractional” windows to the multibase method is described together with the derivation of the corresponding density formulas. • Incomplete reduction and branchless arithmetic techniques are optimally combined for devising high-performance field arithmetic. Efficient algorithms for “small” modular operations using suitably chosen pseudo-Mersenne primes are carefully analyzed and optimized for incomplete reduction. • Data dependencies between contiguous field operations are discovered to be a source of performance degradation on x86-64 processors. Three techniques for reducing the number of potential pipeline stalls due to these dependencies are proposed: field arithmetic scheduling, merging of point operations and merging of field operations. • Explicit formulas for two relevant cases, namely Weierstrass and Twisted Edwards curves over and , are carefully optimized employing incomplete reduction, minimal number of operations and reduced number of data dependencies between contiguous field operations. • Best algorithms for the field, point and scalar arithmetic, studied or proposed in this thesis, are brought together to realize four high-speed implementations on x86-64 processors at the 128-bit security level. Presented results set new speed records for elliptic curve scalar multiplication and introduce up to 34% of cost reduction in comparison with the best previous results in the literature. • A generalized lazy reduction technique that enables the elimination of up to 32% of modular reductions in the pairing computation is proposed. Further, a methodology that keeps intermediate results under Montgomery reduction boundaries maximizing operations without carry checks is introduced. Optimized formulas for the popular tower are explicitly stated and a detailed operation count that permits to determine the theoretical cost improvement attainable with the proposed method is carried out for the case of an optimal ate pairing on a Barreto-Naehrig (BN) curve at the 128-bit security level. • Best algorithms for the different stages of the pairing computation, including the proposed techniques and optimizations, are brought together to realize a high-speed implementation at the 128-bit security level. Presented results on x86-64 processors set new speed records for pairings, introducing up to 34% of cost reduction in comparison with the best published result. From a general viewpoint, the proposed methods and optimized formulas have a practical impact in the performance of cryptographic protocols based on elliptic curves and pairings in a wide range of applications. In particular, the introduced implementations represent a direct and significant improvement that may be exploited in performance-dominated applications such as high-demand Web servers in which millions of secure transactions need to be generated

Poetry's Afterlife: Verse in the Digital Age

At a time when most commentators fixate on American poetry's supposed ""death,"" Kevin Stein's Poetry's Afterlife instead proposes the vitality of its aesthetic hereafter. The essays of Poetry's Afterlife blend memoir, scholarship, and personal essay to survey the current poetry scene, trace how we arrived here, and suggest where poetry is headed in our increasingly digital culture. The result is a book both fetchingly insightful and accessible. Poetry's spirited afterlife has come despite, or perhaps because of, two decades of commentary diagnosing American poetry as moribund if not already deceased. With his 2003 appointment as Illinois Poet Laureate and his forays into public libraries and schools, Stein has discovered that poetry has not given up its literary ghost. For a fated art supposedly pushing up aesthetic daisies, poetry these days is up and about in the streets, schools, and universities, and online in new and compelling digital forms. It flourishes among the people in a lively if curious underground existence largely overlooked by national media. It's this second life, or better, Poetry's Afterlife, that his book examines and celebrates

The Social Self: Hawthorne, Howells, William James, and Nineteenth-Century Psychology

American literary history of the nineteenth-century as a conflict between individualistic writers and a conformist society. In The Social Self, Joseph Alkana argues that such a dichotomy misrepresents the views of many authors. Sudden changes caused by the industrial revolution, urban development, increased immigration, and regional conflicts were threatening to fragment the community, and such writers as Nathaniel Hawthorne, William James, and William Dean Howells were deeply concerned about social cohesion. Alkana persuasively reintroduces Common Sense philosophy and Jamesian psychology as ways to understand how the nineteenth-century self/society dilemma developed. All three writers believed that introspection was the proper path to the discovery of truth. They also felt, Alkana argues, that such discoveries had to be validated by society. In these sophisticated readings of Hawthorne\u27s short stories and The Scarlet Letter, Howells\u27s utopian Altrurian romances, and James\u27s The Principles of Psychology, it becomes obvious that characters who isolate themselves from the community do so at considerable psychological risk. The Social Self links these writers\u27 interest in contemporary psychology to their concern for history and society. Alkana\u27s argument that nineteenth-century expressions of individualism were defensive responses to the fear of social chaos radically revises the traditional narrative of American literary culture. Joseph Alkana is associate professor of English at the University of Miami. Through intensely close readings of texts, Alkana traces the alternate concept of \u27the social self.\u27 In this time of militant groups resistant to conceptions of the self as interdependent from society, the issue is significant. —Choice Dense with fascinating and innovative variations on familiar themes and works. It is well worth the read. —JASAT Alkana freshly examines connections between selfhood and society as he negotiates a conceptual passageway between humanist definitions of selfhood . . . and poststructuralist claims of a \u27new liberation\u27 from the \u27tyranny of the philosophical subject. —South Atlantic Review Alkana offers a provocative, alternative reading of the individualist movement in nineteenth-century literary and intellectual circles. —Year’s Work in English Studies Alkana\u27s project does identify and explore the ongoing challenge of reconciling our critical and pedagogical methodologies and reminds us that the \u27self,\u27 in one form or another, remains central to this enterprise. —American Literaturehttps://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_english_language_and_literature_north_america/1041/thumbnail.jp

Perspectives on Contemporary Literature: Literature and the Other Arts

Today’s music, painting, and film share with literature in the development of a new aesthetic, even as these other arts influence (and are influenced by) literary themes and structures. And at the same time the music and art of the past continue to re-echo in twentieth-century letters. The thirteen essays gathered here open a fine and varied view of the ways in which contemporary literature interacts with the other arts. Surrealism in French painting and literature, collage theory and the cutups of William Burroughs, texts of Butor as shaped by works of Duchamp—this volume offers a rich harvest of perceptive studies on these and other aspects of a fascinating topic. David Hershberg is director of the Center for International Studies and Programs at the University of Louisville.https://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_comparative_literature/1003/thumbnail.jp

A study of social relations in the recording of popular music

The production of recordings is examined from a social production perspective. It is argued that "conventional sociology of art" presents a partisan view of creative activity which prevents it acknowledging the reality of cultural production today as exemplified by the recording of popular music. Some recent developments in related intellectual traditions show how "art" and "artists" are social constructions and lead towards a more inclusive, phenomenologically influenced, "social production" perspective. It is argued that the production of recordings takes place in the shadow of earlier work, within a structure of aesthetics and concepts of creativity created by the various institutions of the "art world", especially those of the cultural market place. The development of recording as a business in the U.K. is traced and contexted within the contemporary development of both national and international entertainment and cultural industries. The impact of business arrangements on the production and distribution of recordings is examined. Wider social concerns are shown to be assimilated into the finished recording through the structure of the work organisation responsible for its production. This incorporates both the characteristic capitalist division of labour and the related artistic division of labour, which affect the finished recording through the impact of specific working relations and practices on the distribution of opportunities for decision making on aesthetic matters amongst recording personnel. Similarly, the technology of recording which has a profound effect on the shape of the finished artifact is shown to mediate the priorities of capitalist organisations. Differing aesthetics adopted by recording personnel are shown to be related to the dominant technology of the time

A sociological study of the educational and career routes of a group of Indian secondary school students in the Durban area : the transition from school to work.

Thesis (Ph.D.) - University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 1988.This longitudinal study on the transition from school to work of a group of Indian school-leavers from two co-educational schools in Durban is an attempt to analyse the processes underlying the construction of educational and career routes. It deals with the lived experiences of boys and girls from different social-class backgrounds within the school, the family, and the work situation. This passage from school to work, which also includes the experiences of unemployment, is examined against the background of social interactions in micro settings, as well as the influences of social, structural and cultural forces. In particular, the career pathways are studied within the context of the cultural background of Indians, and their socio-historical location in the South African society as a minority and an intermediate status group in a racially-divided society. As the students proceeded through the last three years at school and into the first few months of work various qualitative, field research methods were used to get some insight into the changing and complex nature of the transitional process. These methods included participant observation, focus sed and unfocussed interviews, and discussions. Such qualitative research methods were valuable for an understanding' of the meanings and values on which the students' actions were based. The structural and interpretive analysis of the family, the school, the labour market, and a patriarchal, capitalist, apartheid society points to the significance of ideological values, hegemony, class relations, racial, gender, and political and economic influences on the construction of educational and career identities. The analysis also indicates the close relationship which exists on the one hand between the cultural interpretations and practices of various social actors; and on the other hand, the structural conditions in which these are located. The findings provide some account of how social-class relations are continued and sustained via related and different inequalities such as race and gender. Race, class and gender exist side by side in this reproduction process. By focussing on the close relationship which exists between the actions and decisions of the students, and the structures of society, this study attempts to bridge the gap between structural and interpretive explanations. The students' interpretations of their educational and career choices are brought into a closer relationship with the structures of society

PIAAC Bibliography - 2008-2019

In order to enhance the performance of rehabilitation robots, it is imperative to know both force and motion caused by the interaction between user and robot. However, common direct measurement of both signals through force and motion sensors not only increases the complexity of the system but also impedes affordability of the system. As an alternative of the direct measurement, in this work, we present new force and motion estimators for the proper control of the upper-limb rehabilitation Universal Haptic Pantograph (UHP) robot. The estimators are based on the kinematic and dynamic model of the UHP and the use of signals measured by means of common low-cost sensors. In order to demonstrate the effectiveness of the estimators, several experimental tests were carried out. The force and impedance control of the UHP was implemented first by directly measuring the interaction force using accurate extra sensors and the robot performance was compared to the case where the proposed estimators replace the direct measured values. The experimental results reveal that the controller based on the estimators has similar performance to that using direct measurement (less than 1 N difference in root mean square error between two cases), indicating that the proposed force and motion estimators can facilitate implementation of interactive controller for the UHP in robot-mediated rehabilitation trainings