Antiretroviral Therapy Initiation Following Policy Changes: Observations From China.

China's HIV/AIDS treatment policies have been evolving over the preceding decade. This study describes patterns of antiretroviral therapy (ART) initiation for a sample of people living with HIV/AIDS (PLHIV) in rural Anhui, China, where most PLHIV were infected via paid plasma donation during the 1990s. A total of 481 PLHIV who were receiving ART were included in our analyses. Times between HIV diagnosis and the initiation of ART were examined relative to the time points when major ART-related policies changed in China. More than half (53%) of PLHIV who had been diagnosed by 2003 received ART within 6 months, whereas 93% of PLHIV who had been diagnosed in 2010 or later received ART within 6 months. The study results provide additional support that the "Four Frees and One Care" policy in 2003 and the relaxation of ART eligibility in 2010 have facilitated the initiation of treatment for PLHIV in China

Visionary Art as Evolving Consciousness

Visionary art is art that is not confined by form, it argues that the artist who creates spiritual art allows the spirit to guide them, rather than relying on traditional form or technique. This can result in art that is incredibly unique and expressive, as it comes from a place of pure creativity and intuition. It also examines the visionary art of Alex Grey whose works offer a gateway into a different state of consciousness, where the viewer can access new insights and perspectives. In in a world that is becoming increasingly disconnected from the creative body, visionary art can be a source of hope and inspiration

Evolving Practices in Art Education

More than 100 years ago, university-dominated educational commissions began ascribing a priority to school subjects in primary and secondary education. In defining the roles and purposes of the modern secondary school, educators struggled with how best to determine the relative importance of individual school subjects. In 1894, Harvard president Charles Eliot led the Committee of Ten on Secondary School Studies, established by the NEA to recommend that all secondary school students study a common curriculum focusing on sciences, history, reading, writing and arithmetic. Art and music were eventually placed in positions of curricular inferiority

Arcadiana

WE LOVE NEW YORK, 2010: two works exhibited in this group exhibition, (14 exhibitors), first shown at Broadway Gallery, New York, then toured to Gallery North, University of Northumbria, Newcastle, 2010. "Broadway Gallery is an open space for experimentation founded on the collaboration between artists, curators and writers, providing an ever-evolving dialogue on the contemporary art world"

The Art of Evolving Consciousness

This paper supports the position that the arts have the capacity not only to give us information intellectually about the evolution of the human endowment of consciousness, but can also evoke a felt sense of previous stages and anticipate transitions and emerging stages. In this paper I give examples of artworks that suggest each stage of the evolution described in the writings of Jean Gebser. For purposes of this paper the artworks are limited to visual arts and sculpture. I think that much of humankind’s vast historical and multicultural endowment of the arts can remind us of previous periods of development as well as assist in our appreciation for and integration of previous stages of consciousness while incorporating the emerging stage of integral structure of consciousness. Gebser writes, “Only when they (all the structures) are integrated via a concretion can they become transparent in their entirety and present, or diaphanous (and are not, of course, merely illuminated by the mind). (Gebser, 1984, p. 99). I believe that works of art can facilitate that concretion and integration of previous structures, and play a critical role in the emergence of an integral structure of consciousness

The hand that turns the handle: camera operators and the poetics of the camera in pre-revolutionary Russian film

This article seeks to chart the evolving nature of the camera operator's function at a time when Russian cinema was facing the challenge of self-definition, not only in relation to other art forms, but also in relation to world cinema. It will challenge the conventional notion of the cameraman as merely a ‘hand that turns the handle’, a technician (if not automaton) who was responsible only for the correct speed of shooting and exposure of the print. If camera operation started out as a rudimentary craft, one that was nevertheless valued because the mechanisms of the cinematograph were little understood, it rapidly became an art-form as the language of silent cinema acquired sophistication. This article will analyse the evolving nature of the relationship between the director and the camera operator, and the development of certain conventions which pertained to the role of the camera and controlled the expression of dramatic ideas in visual form. It will also seek to identify the reasons for a number of major aesthetic shifts which took place in Russian cinema during the period concerned, and the importance of the visual arts—in particular painting and still photography—in determining those shifts

SamBaTen: Sampling-based Batch Incremental Tensor Decomposition

Tensor decompositions are invaluable tools in analyzing multimodal datasets. In many real-world scenarios, such datasets are far from being static, to the contrary they tend to grow over time. For instance, in an online social network setting, as we observe new interactions over time, our dataset gets updated in its "time" mode. How can we maintain a valid and accurate tensor decomposition of such a dynamically evolving multimodal dataset, without having to re-compute the entire decomposition after every single update? In this paper we introduce SaMbaTen, a Sampling-based Batch Incremental Tensor Decomposition algorithm, which incrementally maintains the decomposition given new updates to the tensor dataset. SaMbaTen is able to scale to datasets that the state-of-the-art in incremental tensor decomposition is unable to operate on, due to its ability to effectively summarize the existing tensor and the incoming updates, and perform all computations in the reduced summary space. We extensively evaluate SaMbaTen using synthetic and real datasets. Indicatively, SaMbaTen achieves comparable accuracy to state-of-the-art incremental and non-incremental techniques, while being 25-30 times faster. Furthermore, SaMbaTen scales to very large sparse and dense dynamically evolving tensors of dimensions up to 100K x 100K x 100K where state-of-the-art incremental approaches were not able to operate