Advances in Character Recognition

This book presents advances in character recognition, and it consists of 12 chapters that cover wide range of topics on different aspects of character recognition. Hopefully, this book will serve as a reference source for academic research, for professionals working in the character recognition field and for all interested in the subject

Developmental coordination disorder: a focus on handwriting

Background. Developmental coordination disorder (DCD), is the term used to refer to children who present with motor coordination difficulties, unexplained by a general-medical condition, intellectual disability or known neurological impairment. Difficulties with handwriting are often included in descriptions of DCD, including that provided in DSM-5 (APA, 2013). However, surprisingly few studies have examined handwriting in DCD in a systematic way. Those that are available, have been conducted outside of the UK, in alphabets other than the Latin based alphabet. In order to gain a better understanding of the nature of 'slowness' so commonly reported in children with DCD, this thesis aimed to examine the handwriting of children with DCD in detail by considering the handwriting product, the process, the child's perspective, the teacher's perspective and some popular clinical measures including strength, visual perception and force variability. Compositional quality was also evaluated to examine the impact of poor handwriting on the wider task of writing. Method. Twenty-eight 8-14 year-old children with a diagnosis of DCD participated in the study, with 28 typically developing age and gender matched controls. Participants completed the four handwriting tasks from the Detailed Assessment of Speed of Handwriting (DASH) and wrote their own name; all on a digitising writing tablet. The number of words written, speed of pen movements and the time spent pausing during the tasks were calculated. Participants were also assessed in spelling, reading, receptive vocabulary, visual perception, visual motor integration, grip strength and the quality of their composition. Results. The findings confirmed what many professionals report, that children with DCD produce less text than their peers. However, this was not due to slow movement execution, but rather a higher percentage of time spent pausing, in particular, pauses over 10 seconds. The location of the pauses within words indicated a lack of automaticity in the handwriting of children with DCD. The DCD group scored below their peers on legibility, grip strength, measures of visual perception and had poorer compositional quality. Individual data highlighted heterogeneous performance profiles in children with DCD and there was little agreement/no significant association between teacher and therapist's measures of handwriting. Conclusions. A new model incorporating handwriting within the broader context of writing was proposed as a lens through which therapists can consider handwriting in children with DCD. The model incorporates the findings from this thesis and discusses avenues for future research in this area

Instruments for New Music: Sound, Technology, and Modernism

Player pianos, radio-electric circuits, gramophone records, and optical sound film—these were the cutting-edge acoustic technologies of the early twentieth century, and for many musicians and artists of the time, these devices were also the implements of a musical revolution. Instruments for New Music traces a diffuse network of cultural agents who shared the belief that a truly modern music could be attained only through a radical challenge to the technological foundations of the art. Centered in Germany during the 1920s and 1930s, the movement to create new instruments encompassed a broad spectrum of experiments, from the exploration of microtonal tunings and exotic tone colors to the ability to compose directly for automatic musical machines. This movement comprised composers, inventors, and visual artists, including Paul Hindemith, Ernst Toch, Jörg Mager, Friedrich Trautwein, László Moholy-Nagy, Walter Ruttmann, and Oskar Fischinger. Patteson’s fascinating study combines an artifact-oriented history of new music in the early twentieth century with an astute revisiting of still-relevant debates about the relationship between technology and the arts

Together | Apart: Printmaking and the Space Between

In this practice-led creative research, being both artist and identical twin, I examine sameness and difference in the relationships between two people and between multiple objects/creative works. Through the inherent ability of printmaking processes to produce multiples and the attendant installation opportunities created by punctuated space, I unfold and re-tell a doubled and ambiguous understanding of being in the world. Martin Heidegger’s notion of Being-in-the-world (Dasein) underpins and situates my understanding of being in the world, thrown into a world as an individual, and my existence as a double: being in the world with others. I relate his thinking through Barbara Bolt’s interpretation of Heidegger’s Dasein to the artist’s making to seek new ways of understanding Dasein / being-there. The work I make is a metaphor for investigating how I understand the world around me. To do this, I discuss tacit methodology and draw together the ‘what’, ‘how’ and ‘why’, which forms and informs a praxical knowledge, a knowledge that comes from doing and its reflective dimension. By investigating practices by both historical and contemporary artists who employ the diptych as a device to present works as an interconnected pair, I position my forms of the diptych to create relationships of closeness and separation, together | apart. The space in between two people or artworks—a gap—becomes instrumental in separating while simultaneously relating to and evoking continuation and connection. Imagery derived from and alluding to the body, in a gap between figuration and abstraction, is developed in an iterative, open-ended series of prints. Academic discussions about the nature of studio research are applied and interpreted through creative practice, imparting and enabling both an informed, personally situated perspective and an appraisal of the engagement of other artists, such as Roni Horn, Lesley Duxbury, and Paul Uhlmann, whose practices of ambiguity, in-between spaces and gaps are embedded in the wider field of visual arts practices. This research contributes to a broader field of discussion of understandings of being in the world, of spaces in-between and impermanence as related to unique printmaking practices

Literary excavations : the text-based art of Brigitte Radecki

Brigitte Radecki (1940- ) is a German-born Montréal artist whose installations explore the interface between text and visual art by juxtaposing abstract paintings with citations from classic, but largely forgotten, twentieth-century literature. As an artist and a feminist, Radecki takes an archeological approach to exploring the human condition--excavating the past and incorporating references to mythology, literature, painting and historical events that have shaped today's culture. I study Radecki's oeuvre through an analysis of two installations: Miss Lonelyhearts (1998) based on the eponymous 1933 ironic novel by American writer Nathanael West (1903-1940), and The Black Notebooks based on By Grand Central I Sat Down and Wept (1945), Canadian writer Elizabeth Smart's (1913-1986) lightly-veiled autobiographical novel. Stylistically Radecki is an abstractionist. She has a personal affinity for abstract expressionism; however she labels herself a postmodernist, and seeks to rupture the insularity of abstract expressionism and open it up to context and wider social concerns--the most important of which, to Radecki, is the status of women in contemporary society. Methodologically, Radecki's discourse combines difficult-to-interpret literary citations and iconography. Her philosophy is to create synergies redolent of myriad subtleties questioning human interconnectedness and complexity--to study the past in order to understand the present

Digital Pathology: The Time Is Now to Bridge the Gap between Medicine and Technological Singularity

Digitalization of the imaging in radiology is a reality in several healthcare institutions worldwide. The challenges of filing, confidentiality, and manipulation have been brilliantly solved in radiology. However, digitalization of hematoxylin- and eosin-stained routine histological slides has shown slow movement. Although the application for external quality assurance is a reality for a pathologist with most of the continuing medical education programs utilizing virtual microscopy, the abandonment of traditional glass slides for routine diagnostics is far from the perspectives of many departments of laboratory medicine and pathology. Digital pathology images are captured as images by scanning and whole slide imaging/virtual microscopy can be obtained by microscopy (robotic) on an entire histological (microscopic) glass slide. Since 1986, services using telepathology for the transfer of images of anatomic pathology between detached locations have benefited countless patients globally, including the University of Alberta. The purpose of specialist recertification or re-validation for the Royal College of Pathologists of Canada belonging to the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada and College of American Pathologists is a milestone in virtual reality. Challenges, such as high bandwidth requirement, electronic platforms, the stability of the operating systems, have been targeted and are improving enormously. The encryption of digital images may be a requirement for the accreditation of laboratory services—quantum computing results in quantum-mechanical phenomena, such as superposition and entanglement. Different from binary digital electronic computers based on transistors where data are encoded into binary digits (bits) with two different states (0 and 1), quantum computing uses quantum bits (qubits), which can be in superpositions of states. The use of quantum computing protocols on encrypted data is crucial for the permanent implementation of virtual pathology in hospitals and universities. Quantum computing may well represent the technological singularity to create new classifications and taxonomic rules in medicine

Developing effective hospital management information systems: A technology ecosystem perspective

This thesis presents the results of the program of research performed in the completion of a Doctor of Philosophy (Business) entitled: Developing Effective Hospital Management Information Systems: A Technology Ecosystem Perspective. The central contention of this thesis is that the current ecosystem models in the information technology (IT) and information systems (IS) literature can be extended and improved. In turn they can be better applied to the field of IS and the development and implementation of information systems. This research seeks to highlight an example of how these models can be extended, through an analysis of the specific context of the hospital management information system environment, using the technology ecosystems model (TEM) of Adomavicius et al (Adomavicius et al., 2005). The environment in which hospital managers operate is characterised by high demand pressures, strong public service expectations, and an ever diminishing income stream (in relative terms) with which to provide services. Even in private hospital care, many of these pressures still apply, as well as a pressure to maintain profit margins. The agenda context here is a complex one, particularly when one considers the role of hospitals in this context. Hospitals have multiple competing priorities when viewed from a management perspective. This is despite the fact that the core mission of the hospital is to provide timely, safe care within available human and financial resources, to patients who present for care. This care can be across multiple care settings inside the hospital including the inpatient space, the operating theatres, the intensive care unit, and the emergency department; and in outreach settings. Hospitals however, have been described as a series of cottage industries each loosely coupled with a common objective of supplying care to patients. All of these factors combine to mean that managing a hospital with the above-mentioned aim in mind, is a very difficult task. Nakagawa et al (Nakagawa et al., 2011) talk specifically to this difficulty. In this research I undertake this examination through 2 core exercises. Firstly I examine the literature – both the information related and health care literature, for insights into the questions at hand. Secondly I examine the lessons learned from five Case Studies (CSs). The first four of these are based in physical hospital facilities across three Australian states. The final one is a “virtual CS” in which the views of multiple parties, not centred on any given physical institution, are sought and examined in relation to these questions. Based on the data collected in both the literature review and the CS’, and through a process of triangulation and research model validation, I conclude that a hospital management technology ecosystem (a HOME) can be described. Its existence thus validates the core TEM, and in fact the findings support some meaningful extensions to the TEM. The HOME is predominantly characterised by the presence of strong drivers of change that arise from outside the immediate hospital environment. Examples include changes in the labour market, and the skill sets of workers; changes in the broader development and availability of technology (for example – think of the effects of the rise of smart phones), and changes in government policies and funding arrangements. In the majority of cases these broader influencing forces (Environment Shaping Forces – ESF’s) can be seen to act on the local management environment and the role of technology in that environment, through describable intermediaries. A very obvious example of this is the effect of a global financial downturn - eventually this wide reaching force could be expected to affect hospitals (be they private or public) through struggling performance of a parent company, or state government funding cutbacks. In turn this could easily lead to reduced spending on IT in a given hospital. These findings, along with those around services provided by the ecosystem, and the measurement of ecosystem success or failure, add substantially to the IS knowledge base in this area. This research thus acts as a sound basis for further research in this new direction, but also provides a usable conceptual and practical framework within which stakeholders – managers, clinicians, beauracrats and the software development community - can view the management of hospitals and the technologies in support of that management