Human Crowds Estimation based on Mobile Sensing

University of Tokyo(東京大学

Professional Wrestling: Local Performance History, Global Performance Praxis

Professional Wrestling: Local Performance History, Global Performance Praxis, is a work of interdisciplinary scholarship (combining elements of theatre history, performance studies, and philosophy) that addresses an area of performance currently under-researched within the liberal arts and humanities: professional wrestling. My dissertation directs much-needed attention to the fact that professional wrestling is the only kind of live drama many Americans ever see (or even want to see). Although it is no doubt easy for theatre historians and performance theorists to dismiss this performance practice because of its location somewhere between “illegitimate sport” and “lowbrow popular entertainment,” I contend that United States professional wrestling is a sophisticated performance form that boasts a rich history whose study yields vital insights about how movement-centric performances are staged in commercialized spectacles. My dissertation archives the history of Louisiana professional wrestling and sheds light upon the repertoire of performance practices passed down from one generation to the next. In this dissertation I argue that the death of Louisiana professional wrestling provides an archetype for how the performance of professional wrestling transitioned from a local performance practice viewed live in a community to a televised, globalized product watched around the world. I argue that this transition can best be understood through the lenses of analytic philosophy of dance and the establishment of mass art forms in tandem with the development of mass technologies, rather than through primarily semiotic analyses popularized during the 1960s by Roland Barthe

Group Analytic Hierarchy Process Sorting II Method: an Application to Evaluate the Economic Value of a Wine Regions Landscape

In the ongoing context of climate change, there is an increasing need to support decision-making processes in the domain of landscape planning and management. Suitable evaluation techniques are needed to take into account the interests of actors and stakeholders in shared policy decisions. An important methodological contribution to the field is given by the Multicriteria Decision Analysis (MCDA), due to its ability to combine multiple aspects of a decision problem with the values and opinions expressed by different Decision Makers. The present paper develops the “Group Analytic Hierarchy Process Sorting II method” (GAHPSort II), which aims to sort a group of municipalities included in the UNESCO site “Vineyard Landscape of Piedmont: Langhe-Roero, and Monferrato” (Italy) according to the economic attractiveness of the landscape. Extending the previous versions AHPSort I, AHPSort II and GAHPSort, the GAHPSort II optimizes multi-stakeholder evaluations on large databases by reducing the number of comparisons. Moreover, the GAHPSort II method is proposed as a novel spatial decision support system because it combines a set of economic indicators for landscape and GIS methods for aiding the Decision Makers to better understand the case study and to support the definition and localization of policies and strategies of landscape planning and management

The middle of everything

The Middle of Everything is a collection of personal essays about language, place, and memory. The thesis is framed by stories of Alzheimer\u27s disease and divided into sections that travel to different places to consider what memories, stories, and people are important. The settings of the essays range from Wisconsin to Spain, from Iowa to Mexico, and the narrator explores the relationship between people and places, the way place influences individuals and the way individuals impact place. The collection is also a personal journey about learning to deal with losses and about learning what home means. It explores personal history alongside the history of cities and societies

Kyiv, Ukraine - Revised Edition

The unrest and violence in Ukraine in recent years shocked the world, and the region's long-term future remains troublingly uncertain. Focusing on the difficulty of Kiev's transition from socialism to market democracy, this book demonstrates how Ukraine reached this turbulent point. Roman Adrian Cybriwsky delves deeply into the changing social geography of the city, recent urban development, and critical problems such as official corruption, inequality, sex tourism, and the heedless destruction of the city's historical architecture - all difficulties that have contributed incrementally to Ukrainian citizens' anger against their government. This thoroughly revised edition brings Cybriwsky's account of events and their ramifications fully up to date, offering the clearest picture we've had yet of what has happened - and what is likely still to come - in Ukraine

Kyiv, Ukraine - Revised Edition

The unrest and violence in Ukraine in recent years shocked the world, and the region's long-term future remains troublingly uncertain. Focusing on the difficulty of Kiev's transition from socialism to market democracy, this book demonstrates how Ukraine reached this turbulent point. Roman Adrian Cybriwsky delves deeply into the changing social geography of the city, recent urban development, and critical problems such as official corruption, inequality, sex tourism, and the heedless destruction of the city's historical architecture - all difficulties that have contributed incrementally to Ukrainian citizens' anger against their government. This thoroughly revised edition brings Cybriwsky's account of events and their ramifications fully up to date, offering the clearest picture we've had yet of what has happened - and what is likely still to come - in Ukraine

"Get Listenin' Kids!": Independence as Social Practice in American Popular Music

This dissertation examines the concept of independence--defined as alternative approaches to the creation, distribution and consumption of music that actively resist cultural hegemonies--as an ongoing tradition in American popular music. While previous studies of independence have focused on specific independent record labels or eras, this project views independence as a historical trajectory that extends to the beginnings of the recording industry. Pierre Bourdieu's concept of the social field frames my investigation of the ways in which independence becomes socially and musically manifested in communities of musicians, mediators and audiences. I explore how these communities articulate their distinction within the dominant music industry by responding to the social and aesthetic chasms created by the centralization of media. This study is divided into two sections. The first focuses on independent record labels and local radio broadcasts in the first half of the twentieth century, when "independent" referred to either a record label that distributed outside major label channels, or a radio station unaffiliated with a network. In the second section, I show how the modern concept of independence became more overtly political with the emergence of the punk movement of the late 1970s. I follow the subsequent development of independent underground networks in the 1980s through their present-day fragmentation in twenty-first century internet culture. I conclude with an ethnographic examination of independent music performances in order to show that, while independence remains situated in ideas about community, authenticity and autonomy, it is subjectively understood and constructed by individual members of independent communities. The primary research for this study draws from eight years of personal experience as a freeform DJ and active consumer of independent music, as well as seven years working as a sound archivist at the University of Maryland Broadcasting Archives. Because this is a study of popular music, I engage with several interdisciplinary theoretical areas, including ethnomusicology, musicology, sociology and media studies, in order to conceptualize some of the patterns that shape independent social practices

The Chronicle [February 1, 2010]

The Chronicle, February 1, 2010https://repository.stcloudstate.edu/chron/1738/thumbnail.jp

Maximum risk reduction with a fixed budget in the railway industry

Decision-makers in safety-critical industries such as the railways are frequently faced with the complexity of selecting technological, procedural and operational solutions to minimise staff, passengers and third parties’ safety risks. In reality, the options for maximising risk reduction are limited by time and budget constraints as well as performance objectives. Maximising risk reduction is particularly necessary in the times of economic recession where critical services such as those on the UK rail network are not immune to budget cuts. This dilemma is further complicated by statutory frameworks stipulating ‘suitable and sufficient’ risk assessments and constraints such as ‘as low as reasonably practicable’. These significantly influence risk reduction option selection and influence their effective implementation. This thesis provides extensive research in this area and highlights the limitations of widely applied practices. These practices have limited significance on fundamental engineering principles and become impracticable when a constraint such as a fixed budget is applied – this is the current reality of UK rail network operations and risk management. This thesis identifies three main areas of weaknesses to achieving the desired objectives with current risk reduction methods as: Inaccurate, and unclear problem definition; Option evaluation and selection removed from implementation subsequently resulting in misrepresentation of risks and costs; Use of concepts and methods that are not based on fundamental engineering principles, not verifiable and with resultant sub-optimal solutions. Although not solely intended for a single industrial sector, this thesis focuses on guiding the railway risk decision-maker by providing clear categorisation of measures used on railways for risk reduction. This thesis establishes a novel understanding of risk reduction measures’ application limitations and respective strengths. This is achieved by applying ‘key generic engineering principles’ to measures employed for risk reduction. A comprehensive study of their preventive and protective capability in different configurations is presented. Subsequently, the fundamental understanding of risk reduction measures and their railway applications, the ‘cost-of-failure’ (CoF), ‘risk reduction readiness’ (RRR), ‘design-operationalprocedural-technical’ (DOPT) concepts are developed for rational and cost-effective risk reduction. These concepts are shown to be particularly relevant to cases where blind applications of economic and mathematical theories are misleading and detrimental to engineering risk management. The case for successfully implementing this framework for maximum risk reduction within a fixed budget is further strengthened by applying, for the first time in railway risk reduction applications, the dynamic programming technique based on practical railway examples