LESSONS

I am learning through these lessons. The following document includes my convoluted musings about my work, making process, and body leading up to my thesis exhibition, Avoidance Kitchen. My struggle with my reflected image comes from my struggle with my self-perceived physical image. What does it mean for a piece to disappear, only to find the reflection of someone else\u27s work or body in its place? Is my craft rendered obsolete if all you want to do is take a funny selfie? Is my work unacknowledged if all you see is the sculpture across the room, in reverse? What happens when an object or installation is elevated and ignored within the same space

Whose knowledge is of most worth? The importance of listening to the voice of the learner.

This paper discusses some of the data produced in the course of a research study that examined the perceptions that primary school aged children (7-13 year olds) had about their learning in health education. The study explored children's knowledge about their own health, their issues and concerns about health and health education and what they thought they should be learning about in health education at school. The research used mixed methods to collect data and several themes emerged that were central to listening to children and gaining their perceptions. The importance of understanding children and taking time to listen to what they were saying was the major theme and also the negation of children's views in favour of adult agendas. This study has shown that children have opinions and they also have something to say, and that what they have to say is worth listening to. Moreover, children possess knowledge that can contribute to classroom health lessons and health curriculum design

Let Me Tell You a Story: A Journalist\u27s Pursuit of Redemptive Storytelling

This thesis will explore, and attempt to define, what redemptive storytelling is within the field of journalism. Storytelling is a practice as old as humanity itself. Indeed, it is ancient, originating in the mind of God, the author of the greatest story ever told. Books written by experts in the field of storytelling, as well as scholarly articles, will be utilized. Aside from journalism, aspects of psychology, theology, and philosophy will be included in the consideration of what makes a story redemptive. This thesis also probes the reasons why stories are so crucial to the human experience, and how God uses them for his redemptive purposes around the world

Changes in Sexuality of Castration-Resistant Prostate Cancer Patients Under Hormone Therapy in Japan: a Case Study

Background: Hormone therapy is an important treatment for male patients with prostate cancer. However, it can produce changes in the genitalia and sexuality of the patients. Purpose: This study aimed to investigate the relations between changes in male genitalia and sexuality in the castration-resistant prostate cancer patients. It also proposed concrete interventions to ease pain and fear towards body image changes. Methods: This study used a descriptive qualitative design. The subjects were two castration-resistant prostate cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy and endocrine therapy. The data were collected through semi-structured interviews and analyzed using verbatim reports and content analysis. Results: The study indicated that the effects of hormone therapy treatment on the sexuality were largely categorized as: “surprises and anxieties about the shrinkage of male genitalia”, “masculinity loss”, “difficulty adapting the situation”, and “connection with others”. Conclusion: It became clear that the prostate cancer patients had pains not only for prognosis, but also for physical changes, relationship changes with others and sexuality changes through their treatments

Ego-Downward and Ambient Video based Person Location Association

Using an ego-centric camera to do localization and tracking is highly needed for urban navigation and indoor assistive system when GPS is not available or not accurate enough. The traditional hand-designed feature tracking and estimation approach would fail without visible features. Recently, there are several works exploring to use context features to do localization. However, all of these suffer severe accuracy loss if given no visual context information. To provide a possible solution to this problem, this paper proposes a camera system with both ego-downward and third-static view to perform localization and tracking in a learning approach. Besides, we also proposed a novel action and motion verification model for cross-view verification and localization. We performed comparative experiments based on our collected dataset which considers the same dressing, gender, and background diversity. Results indicate that the proposed model can achieve $18.32 \%$ improvement in accuracy performance. Eventually, we tested the model on multi-people scenarios and obtained an average $67.767 \%$ accuracy

The Tell-Tale Hand: Gothic Narratives and the Brain

The opening story in Winesburg, Ohio (1919) by Sherwood Anderson is called simply “Hands.” It is about a teacher’s remarkable hands that sometimes seem to move independently of his will. This essay explores some of the relevant contexts and potential links, beginning with other representations of teachers’ hands, such as Caravaggio’s St. Matthew and the Angel, early efforts to establish a sign-language for the deaf, and including the Montessori method of teaching children to read and write by tracing the shape of letters with their hands on rough emery paper. The essay then explores filmic hands that betray or work independently of conscious intentions, from Dr Strangelove, Mad Love, to The Beast With Five Fingers. Discussion of the medical literature about the “double” of our hands in the brain, including “phantom hands,” leads on to a series of images that register Rodin’s lifelong fascination with sculpting separate hands

End-to-end Recovery of Human Shape and Pose

We describe Human Mesh Recovery (HMR), an end-to-end framework for reconstructing a full 3D mesh of a human body from a single RGB image. In contrast to most current methods that compute 2D or 3D joint locations, we produce a richer and more useful mesh representation that is parameterized by shape and 3D joint angles. The main objective is to minimize the reprojection loss of keypoints, which allow our model to be trained using images in-the-wild that only have ground truth 2D annotations. However, the reprojection loss alone leaves the model highly under constrained. In this work we address this problem by introducing an adversary trained to tell whether a human body parameter is real or not using a large database of 3D human meshes. We show that HMR can be trained with and without using any paired 2D-to-3D supervision. We do not rely on intermediate 2D keypoint detections and infer 3D pose and shape parameters directly from image pixels. Our model runs in real-time given a bounding box containing the person. We demonstrate our approach on various images in-the-wild and out-perform previous optimization based methods that output 3D meshes and show competitive results on tasks such as 3D joint location estimation and part segmentation.Comment: CVPR 2018, Project page with code: https://akanazawa.github.io/hmr

Storytelling, Folktales and the Comic Book Format

The reading process in comics is an extension of text. In text alone the process of reading involves word-to-image conversion. Comics accelerate that by providing the image. When properly executed, it goes beyond conversion and speed and becomes a seamless whole. In every sense, this misnamed form of reading is entitled to be regarded as literature because the images are employed as a language. There is a recognizable relationship to the iconography and pictographs of oriental writing. When this language is employed as a conveyance of ideas and information, it separates itself from mindless visual entertainment. This makes comics a storytelling medium