Review of the mathematical foundations of data fusion techniques in surface metrology

The recent proliferation of engineered surfaces, including freeform and structured surfaces, is challenging current metrology techniques. Measurement using multiple sensors has been proposed to achieve enhanced benefits, mainly in terms of spatial frequency bandwidth, which a single sensor cannot provide. When using data from different sensors, a process of data fusion is required and there is much active research in this area. In this paper, current data fusion methods and applications are reviewed, with a focus on the mathematical foundations of the subject. Common research questions in the fusion of surface metrology data are raised and potential fusion algorithms are discussed

A Painter\u27s Brush That Also Makes Poems : Contemporary Painting After Northern Song Calligraphy

There is no Western equivalent to the practice of calligraphy in pre-modern China, an aesthetic form which does not resolve itself into a literary object or a visual one. Calligraphy was sustained by a rich and complex body of thought that can fully rival art criticism and theory in the West. To undertake this project, I immersed myself in the study of both key works of calligraphy and the aesthetic that sustained it during the Northern Song dynasty (960-1127) in China—not in order to practice calligraphy but to transform my own understanding of art and make contemporary Western paintings out of that immersion. Various elements of that aesthetic are studied. Among them are the relation of the Chinese writing system to the natural world; the belief that calligraphy displays the writer’s character; the role of calligraphy in sustaining social relationships; calligraphy’s particular temporality; its political role during the Northern Song; the belief that the different arts of the brush could be transmuted into each other; and its relation to the past. After outlining the Northern Song aesthetic, I examine two canonical works of calligraphy: Su Shi’s scroll, Rain on the Festival of Cold Food, and Huang Tingjian’s Scroll for Zhang Datong. Following this, my own practice is examined in one recent painting, The Declining Year at Hangzhou. This leads into a wider, fragmentary discussion of the influence of the Northern Song aesthetic in relation to contemporary practice. As a result of this immersion, art is understood as a form of conduct rather than as a subjective expression

Rethinking Secular Time in Victorian England

This open access book draws on conceptual resources ranging from medieval scholasticism to postmodern theory to propose a new understanding of secular time and its mediation in nineteenth-century technological networks. Untethering the concept of secularity from questions of ‘religion’ and ‘belief’, it offers an innovative rethinking of the history of secularisation that will appeal to students, scholars, and everyone interested in secularity, Victorian culture, the history of technology, and the temporalities of modernity.Rethinking Secular Time in Victorian EnglandpublishedVersio

Rethinking Secular Time in Victorian England

This open access book draws on conceptual resources ranging from medieval scholasticism to postmodern theory to propose a new understanding of secular time and its mediation in nineteenth-century technological networks. Untethering the concept of secularity from questions of ‘religion’ and ‘belief’, it offers an innovative rethinking of the history of secularisation that will appeal to students, scholars, and everyone interested in secularity, Victorian culture, the history of technology, and the temporalities of modernity

Rethinking Secular Time in Victorian England

This open access book draws on conceptual resources ranging from medieval scholasticism to postmodern theory to propose a new understanding of secular time and its mediation in nineteenth-century technological networks. Untethering the concept of secularity from questions of ‘religion’ and ‘belief’, it offers an innovative rethinking of the history of secularisation that will appeal to students, scholars, and everyone interested in secularity, Victorian culture, the history of technology, and the temporalities of modernity

Visual AI and Linguistic Intelligence Through Steerability and Composability

This study explores the capabilities of multimodal large language models (LLMs) in handling challenging multistep tasks that integrate language and vision, focusing on model steerability, composability, and the application of long-term memory and context understanding. The problem addressed is the LLM's ability (Nov 2023 GPT-4 Vision Preview) to manage tasks that require synthesizing visual and textual information, especially where stepwise instructions and sequential logic are paramount. The research presents a series of 14 creatively and constructively diverse tasks, ranging from AI Lego Designing to AI Satellite Image Analysis, designed to test the limits of current LLMs in contexts that previously proved difficult without extensive memory and contextual understanding. Key findings from evaluating 800 guided dialogs include notable disparities in task completion difficulty. For instance, 'Image to Ingredient AI Bartender' (Low difficulty) contrasted sharply with 'AI Game Self-Player' (High difficulty), highlighting the LLM's varying proficiency in processing complex visual data and generating coherent instructions. Tasks such as 'AI Genetic Programmer' and 'AI Negotiator' showed high completion difficulty, emphasizing challenges in maintaining context over multiple steps. The results underscore the importance of developing LLMs that combine long-term memory and contextual awareness to mimic human-like thought processes in complex problem-solving scenarios

Mapping physicochemical surface modifications of flame-treated polypropylene

The aim of this work was to investigate how the surface morphology of polypropylene (PP) is influenced by the surface activation mediated by a flame obtained using a mixture of air and propane under fuel-lean (equivalence ratio φ = 0.98) conditions. Morphological changes observed on flamed samples with smooth (S), medium (M), and high (H) degree of surface roughness were attributed to the combined effect of a chemical mechanism (agglomeration and ordering of partially oxidized intermediate-molecular-weight material) with a physical mechanism (flattening of the original roughness by the flame’s high temperature). After two treatments, the different behavior of the samples in terms of wettability was totally reset, which made an impressive surface energy of ~43 mJ•m–2 possible, which is typical of more hydrophilic polymers (e.g., polyethylene terephthalate – PET). In particular, the polar component was increased from 1.21, 0.08, and 0.32 mJ•m–2 (untreated samples) to 10.95, 11.20, and 11.17 mJ•m–2 for the flamed samples S, M, and H, respectively, an increase attributed to the insertion of polar functional groups (hydroxyl and carbonyl) on the C–C backbone, as demonstrated by the X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy results