AutoGraff: towards a computational understanding of graffiti writing and related art forms.

The aim of this thesis is to develop a system that generates letters and pictures with a style that is immediately recognizable as graffiti art or calligraphy. The proposed system can be used similarly to, and in tight integration with, conventional computer-aided geometric design tools and can be used to generate synthetic graffiti content for urban environments in games and in movies, and to guide robotic or fabrication systems that can materialise the output of the system with physical drawing media. The thesis is divided into two main parts. The first part describes a set of stroke primitives, building blocks that can be combined to generate different designs that resemble graffiti or calligraphy. These primitives mimic the process typically used to design graffiti letters and exploit well known principles of motor control to model the way in which an artist moves when incrementally tracing stylised letter forms. The second part demonstrates how these stroke primitives can be automatically recovered from input geometry defined in vector form, such as the digitised traces of writing made by a user, or the glyph outlines in a font. This procedure converts the input geometry into a seed that can be transformed into a variety of calligraphic and graffiti stylisations, which depend on parametric variations of the strokes

Diamond-based models for scientific visualization

Hierarchical spatial decompositions are a basic modeling tool in a variety of application domains including scientific visualization, finite element analysis and shape modeling and analysis. A popular class of such approaches is based on the regular simplex bisection operator, which bisects simplices (e.g. line segments, triangles, tetrahedra) along the midpoint of a predetermined edge. Regular simplex bisection produces adaptive simplicial meshes of high geometric quality, while simplifying the extraction of crack-free, or conforming, approximations to the original dataset. Efficient multiresolution representations for such models have been achieved in 2D and 3D by clustering sets of simplices sharing the same bisection edge into structures called diamonds. In this thesis, we introduce several diamond-based approaches for scientific visualization. We first formalize the notion of diamonds in arbitrary dimensions in terms of two related simplicial decompositions of hypercubes. This enables us to enumerate the vertices, simplices, parents and children of a diamond. In particular, we identify the number of simplices involved in conforming updates to be factorial in the dimension and group these into a linear number of subclusters of simplices that are generated simultaneously. The latter form the basis for a compact pointerless representation for conforming meshes generated by regular simplex bisection and for efficiently navigating the topological connectivity of these meshes. Secondly, we introduce the supercube as a high-level primitive on such nested meshes based on the atomic units within the underlying triangulation grid. We propose the use of supercubes to associate information with coherent subsets of the full hierarchy and demonstrate the effectiveness of such a representation for modeling multiresolution terrain and volumetric datasets. Next, we introduce Isodiamond Hierarchies, a general framework for spatial access structures on a hierarchy of diamonds that exploits the implicit hierarchical and geometric relationships of the diamond model. We use an isodiamond hierarchy to encode irregular updates to a multiresolution isosurface or interval volume in terms of regular updates to diamonds. Finally, we consider nested hypercubic meshes, such as quadtrees, octrees and their higher dimensional analogues, through the lens of diamond hierarchies. This allows us to determine the relationships involved in generating balanced hypercubic meshes and to propose a compact pointerless representation of such meshes. We also provide a local diamond-based triangulation algorithm to generate high-quality conforming simplicial meshes

Tenth annual report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution, showing the operations, expenditures, and condition of the institution, up to January 1, 1856. and the proceedings of the Board up to March 22, 1856.

835 S.misdoc.7334-1Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institution. [867] Research and publications relating to the American Indian.1856-9

Tenth annual report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution, showing the operations, expenditures, and condition of the institution, up to January 1, 1856. and the proceedings of the Board up to March 22, 1856.

Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institution. [867] Research and publications relating to the American Indian

Multi-Task Neuromuscular Generalization and Changes Through the Lifespan

Mobility in everyday life requires executing and shifting between a broad assortment of functional tasks and resisting disturbances that could cause falls. Though the importance of successfully performing a variety of functional tasks is recognized and incorporated in clinical assessments (e.g., the Timed-Up-and-Go Test, Berg Balance Scale), little is understood about the underlying neuromuscular control required, or how it changes with age. The neuromuscular control for functional tasks such as walking is typically studied in isolation, or with variations on the same task. Characterizing the coordination required to produce and shift between a wider variety of tasks and resist external disturbances is crucial to understanding mobility in daily life, not just within a controlled lab environment. In this work, we identify patterns of multi-muscle coordination (motor modules) across functional tasks in healthy young, middle-aged, and older adults. We demonstrate that healthy young adults recruit common motor modules across voluntary functional tasks (walking, turning, and chair transfers), and characterize changes associated with age. Additionally, we investigate whether motor modules are shared between reactive balance and these voluntary tasks, and whether there are age-related changes here. Identifying age-related changes in multi-muscle coordination can lead to a better understanding of the neuromuscular control underlying mobility changes due to normal aging. Further, fully characterizing changes in neuromuscular control that are due to normal aging can provide a basis for identifying the changes associated with impairments that commonly occur in older adults (e.g., stroke)

Learning cognitive maps: Finding useful structure in an uncertain world

In this chapter we will describe the central mechanisms that influence how people learn about large-scale space. We will focus particularly on how these mechanisms enable people to effectively cope with both the uncertainty inherent in a constantly changing world and also with the high information content of natural environments. The major lessons are that humans get by with a less is more approach to building structure, and that they are able to quickly adapt to environmental changes thanks to a range of general purpose mechanisms. By looking at abstract principles, instead of concrete implementation details, it is shown that the study of human learning can provide valuable lessons for robotics. Finally, these issues are discussed in the context of an implementation on a mobile robot. © 2007 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

Archaeological Investigations between Cayenne Island and the Maroni River

Stratigraphic archaeological research in French Guiana is barely 50 years old and has been conducted primarily in the coastal zone, stretching approximately between 5 and 50 kilometres from the Atlantic coast to the Precambrian Shield. This bias, mainly caused by means of modern infrastructure, has sketched an archaeological record concerning pre-Columbian French Guiana focussing on the Late Ceramic Age (AD 900-1500) of Cayenne Island as well as the western Holocene coastal plains. The present study contains the results of six archaeological investigations, conducted from a compliance archaeological perspective, in order to enhance our knowledge of the afore-mentioned coastal area. It not only presents us with fresh archaeological data on the (Late) Archaic and Early Ceramic Age, a hiatus that is now partially filled up, but also sheds new light on the Late Ceramic Age of this specific region concerning funerary rites, ceramic series and subsistence economy. Martijn van den Bel studied History and Archaeology of Indigenous America at Leiden University and graduated in 1995 with an ethnoarchaeological study on the Palikur potters of French Guiana. Currently he works as a project leader for Inrap in French Guiana. He carries out compliance archaeological research in the French Guiana and the French Lesser Antilles. Next to archaeology, Martijn is interested in the early history of the Guianas and the Lesser Antilles, notably the encounter between Amerindians and Europeans during the 16th and 17th century, resulting in various publications

Buildings, beauty, and the brain: psychological responses to architectural design

People today spend most of their lives in buildings. The design of the built environment can impact mood, behavior, and wellbeing. The evidence discussed in Chapter 1 suggests that the perceived beauty of an environment may influence wellbeing more than any single design variable considered in isolation. Some researchers have leveraged empirical methods of neuroscience and psychology to identify aesthetic features of architecture that support healthy psychological experiences. However, this line of inquiry faces persistent challenges in terms of a) measuring the environment itself and b) evaluating acute psychological responses relevant to design. This dissertation addresses both of these gaps in the literature by using pattern theory and image statistics to quantify aesthetic properties of architectural scenes (Chapters 4-5), and by advancing our understanding of how specific neural networks and psychological processes contribute to architectural experience (Chapters 2-3). Chapter 2 outlines the first neuroscientific model of architectural encounters. According to this aesthetic triad framework, three large-scale neural systems generate aesthetic experiences in the built environment: sensorimotor, emotion-valuation, and knowledge-meaning systems. The chapter explores how design features interact with each of these neural systems to influence mental states and behaviors and investigates how emerging technologies like virtual reality and brain imaging could be leveraged in future research on the neuroscience of architecture. Building from this neural model, Chapter 3 investigates the core psychological dimensions of architectural experience within the context of the aesthetic triad framework. In a pair of experiments, participants rated architectural images on a series of diverse psychological measures. A Principal Components Analysis yielded three components that explained most of the variance in ratings: fluency (ease with which one organizes and comprehends a scene), fascination (a scene’s informational richness and generated interest), and hygge (extent to which the scene reflects a warm, personal environment). Whereas fluency and fascination are well-established dimensions in assessing natural scenes and visual art, hygge emerged as a new dimension in relation to architectural scenes. In Chapters 4 and 5, the focus shifts from measuring the brain to measuring the environment. Specifically, these chapters investigate whether people are innately attuned to nature-like visual patterns in architecture. Chapter 4 introduces Christopher Alexander’s theory of natural structure and reviews past literature linking biophilic design and wellbeing. In Chapter 5, a series of experiments are presented suggesting that subjective perceptions of naturalness are strongly predicted by low-level visual features of architectural scenes. Furthermore, naturalistic scaling and contrast features – two of Alexander’s proposed patterns of natural structure – are found to reliably predict similarity evaluations (derived from an image arrangement task) and aesthetic preference ratings of architectural scenes. The results of a final experiment suggest that preferences for nature-like architectural patterns may be associated with feelings of comfort and excitement that such patterns generate. This research adds to a growing body of literature showing how aesthetic qualities of architecture impact human experiences. Novel theoretical frameworks are proposed for researchers to contextualize empirical studies on the psychology and neuroscience of architecture. New methods of image analysis are also used to quantify aesthetic properties of the built environment and to investigate how nature-like patterns in architecture influence psychological experiences. Together, these chapters provide new insight into the psychological influence of our physical surroundings, and they offer new research tools to inform the design of beautiful and brain-friendly buildings.Cambridge International Scholarship (Cambridge Trusts

Exploration and survey of the Valley of the Great Salt Lake of Utah, including a reconnoissance of a new route through the Rocky Mountains.

Contains Fold-Out ChartMissing pages 473-480.32-SpecialStansburg's Expedition to the Great Salt Lake of Utah, and through the Rocky Mountans. [608] Encounters with Pawnee, Sioux, Utah, Shoshone, and other Indian tribes; descriptions of Indian life-styles, language, etc.1851-3