Quick Models for Saccade Amplitude Prediction

This paper presents a new saccade amplitude prediction model. The model is based on a Kalman filter and regression analysis. The aim of the model is to predict a saccade’s am-plitude extremely quickly, i.e., within two eye position samples at the onset of a saccade. Specifically, the paper explores saccade amplitude prediction considering one or two sam-ples at the onset of a saccade. The models’ prediction performance was tested with 35 subjects. The amplitude accuracy results yielded approximately 5.26° prediction error, while the error for direction prediction was 5.3% for the first sample model and 1.5% for the two samples model. The practical use of the proposed model lays in the area of real-time gaze-contingent compression and extreme eye-gaze aware interaction applications. The paper provides theoretical evaluation of the benefits of saccade amplitude prediction to the gaze-contingent multimedia compression, estimating a 21% improvement in com-pression for short network delays

The lived experience of Black, Asian and Mixed-race girls in predominantly white secondary schools

This thesis explores the experiences of racialised girls in predominately white secondary schools in England. Using multiple qualitative methods, thematic analysis and informed by feminist Critical Race Theory, the thesis gives centre stage to the voices of girls who, seen through a 'white gaze', describe being racialised in schools using stereotypes, racial and gendered tropes, and constructions of 'outsider' and otherness. It addresses gaps in empirical data necessary to substantiate understandings of feminist Critical Race Theory with reference to Black, Asian and Mixed-race girls in relation to the specific context of the English predominantly white secondary school. I present evidence that reveals the effect of visible difference in fuelling assumptions and stereotypes about different racial groups. Racialisation leads to failures to 'see' each girl as an individual. This thesis therefore extends theoretical understandings of racialisation and racism as gendered, dependent on context, and experienced differently depending on which racial group individuals are visually most associated with, as seen through a white lens. Having established the importance of context and visual difference, I examine how white privilege, marginalisation, racism, racialised sexism and classism function in school. Still based on the thematic analysis of racialised girls' narratives, I present evidence which extends the understanding of key tenets of intersectionality and Critical Race Theory. Consideration of what constitutes a 'hostile environment' leads to an exploration of the ability of racism to morph and remain deeply embedded in structures and business-as-usual practices of schooling. I also develop empirically-based understandings of Critical Race Theory’s concepts of interest convergence, interest divergence, and retrenchment, showing the applicability of these concepts to understand a specifically UK context, and useful for analysis of the predominantly white secondary school as a hostile environment for Black, Asian and Mixed-race girls. Nonetheless, in this thesis, I argue that cognisant of constraints, racialised girls resist the harmful effects of a hostile environment. Despite wanting change, they do not centre all their efforts of resistance on addressing individual, institutional or systemic racism or sexism. Black, Asian and Mixed-race girls remain agentic, able to fashion their own individual and collective expressions of resistance to the circumstances that they face in the predominantly white secondary school, creating opportunities centred on their sense of who they are and their ambitions for the future

Globalizing Pakistani Identity Across The Border: The Politics of Crossover Stardom in the Hindi Film Industry

Few studies have examined how the changing landscape of cultural production in India shapes the negotiation of religious and national identities onscreen in an increasingly integrated media environment. This dissertation explores the representation and reception of three crossover stars in India: Ali Zafar, Fawad Khan, and Mahira Khan. These stars embody a new global imaginary for Pakistan that contradicts the ghettoized depictions of Pakistan as a terrorist state that continue to be perpetuated in both India and the West. What does it mean to be a Pakistani star in India, and which ‘identity’ takes precedence in popular discourse – national or religious, if any such distinction can be made? Pakistani crossover stars blur audiovisual boundaries between India, Pakistan and the West that problematize these questions of identity on multiple levels, a process mediated by globalization. At the same time, they expose conflicts over identity and belonging in an age when political nationalisms and global capitalism are colliding at an unprecedented rate

Movie / Cinema: Rearrangements of the Apparatus in Contemporary Movie Circulation

This thesis investigates how cinema’s specificities are defined in relation to technological developments. I propose that the most appropriate way to do this is by taking the whole cinematographic circuit into account – that is, the complete set of socio-technical operations that are involved in the medium, as remote as they might seem to be from actual cinematographic practices. I depart from the definition of circulation as a socio-technical continuum of the production, distribution, exhibition and evaluation of movies, explaining how these activities might be enacted in three different technological regimes: film, video and digital computation. Then, following an account of the early history of the pirate film society Cine Falcatrua (2003-2005), I show how the specificity of the medium is constituted and preserved throughout its technical progress. Acknowledging the limits of traditional film and screen studies to deal with these questions, I attempt to find an alternative research approach by engaging in practice-based investigation using curatorial strategies. By bringing together and analysing different film and art pieces in an exhibition entitled Denied Distances (2009), I propose a framework that allows an understanding of how media technology are defined in relation to one another, exposing how seemingly expanded practices such as installations and performances might be contained within conventional cinematographic apparatus. I conclude by suggesting that, in order to keep up with the ever-changing nature of the medium, the study of cinema would profit from engaging the extremes of scientific criticism and art practice

Robert Wilson and an Aesthetic of Human Behaviour in the Performing Body

This practice-based research investigates movement and gesture in relation to the theatre work of Robert Wilson. A group of performers was established to explore Wilson’s construction of a code of movement during a series of over fifty workshops and films including: a feature film Oedipus; a live performance Two Sides to an Envelope; and a theatre production The Mansion’s Third Unbridled View. The creation of an embodied experience for the spectator, perceived through the senses, is central to Wilson’s theatre. Integral to this are the relationships between drama and image, and time and space. Wilson’s images, in which the body is presented in attitudes of stillness and repetition, are created through these transitional structures. Taking these structures as a starting point for my own performative work, the research led to an abstracted form of natural behaviour, where the movements and arrangements of bodies defined specific movement forms. Subsequently, the relationship between movement and images in Wilson’s theatre was reconsidered through Deleuze’s analysis of the cinematic image. Deleuze identifies subjectivity with the ‘semi-subjective image’, in which traces of the camera’s movements are imprinted in the film. In films made to register these movements, images of moving bodies evincing a sense of time passing were also created. This led to my discovery of film as a direct embodiment of performance, rather than as a form of documentation. Critical to these films, the theatre production, performances, and workshops was the relationship between images and continuous motion predicated upon Wilson’s idea of space, the horizontal: and time, the vertical. This idea enabled me to consider Wilson’s theatre and video works in relation to Bergson’s philosophy concerning duration. The research discovered new ways of interpreting Wilson’s aesthetic through Bergson’s idea that motion is an indivisible process which can also be perceived in relation to the position of bodies in space. Through this understanding, an original performance language was created based on the relationship between stasis and motion, and the interplay between the immersive, semiotic and instrumental modes of gestural communication

Cinema of Confinement

In this book, Thomas J. Connelly draws on a number of key psychoanalytic concepts from the works of Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Žižek, Joan Copjec, Michel Chion, and Todd McGowan to identify and describe a genre of cinema characterized by spatial confinement. Examining classic films such as Alfred Hitchcock's Rope and Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, as well as current films such as Room, Green Room, and 10 Cloverfield Lane, Connelly shows that the source of enjoyment of confined spaces lies in the viewer's relationship to excess.  Cinema of Confinement offers rich insights into the appeal of constricted filmic spaces at a time when one can easily traverse spatial boundaries within the virtual reality of cyberspace

Camera Creatures: Rhetorics of Light and Emerging Media

Camera Creatures addresses the new media landscape in which cameras, in most situations, outnumber pens. The dissertation argues that despite the accessibility and power of imagemaking devices, there persists in the humanities and social sciences a hesitation to engage the possibilities for composing with optical media. A number of factors contributing to this trend are addressed, including the preference for image analysis over imagemaking practices, persistent assumptions of the camera\u27s mechanical objectivity, and a tendency to teach visual invention as collage. As a counter-measure, a proposal is made for investment in the mediation of light, or \u27photonic rhetorics.\u27 To explore these effects in visual communication and the possibility of bringing them into practice, three emerging camera technologies are examined. The first, the photo app, focuses on the controversy surrounding embedded journalists who use social networks and the Hipstamatic camera phone application to relay stories of U.S. Marines deployed in Afghanistan. The chapter argues that the filters and shooting styles of these mobile apps encourage fluencies in the persuasive effects of light. The second camera technology, the video clip, addresses the long take as the predominant technique of everyday video-making. Film theory, video sharing trends, and circadian science contribute to a discussion of the rhythms of long-take shooting and its capability to expose both visual habits and the contingencies capable of disrupting them. The third site turns to video game \u27shooters\u27 and the virtual camera\u27s construction of \u27surrogate vision,\u27 which the author argues is a critical tool for understanding the future of mediated interactivity in both physical and digital landscapes. The dissertation concludes with a pedagogical section devoted to conscientious cheating. Alongside theories of deliberate practice, \u27cheating\u27 is repurposed for education, offering new ways of testing the \u27rules\u27 of optical composition while discovering opportunities to intervene in light\u27s constant mediation of perception

The autism diagnostic encounter in action: Using video reflexive ethnography to explore the assessment of autism in the clinical trial

Despite the increasing visibility of autism, this disorder has resisted a consistent and stable diagnostic definition, treatment approaches, and biomedical and genetic attempts to make sense of how it manifests within the body. That this confusion remains despite the enormous biosocial productivity of the category indicates that there is likely a unique set of circumstances, an “epistemic murk” (Eyal et al 2014), in which autism exists, and perhaps thrives. Given there is limited understanding of how clinicians diagnose ASD in practice, especially within the diagnostic encounter of the clinical trial, this thesis focuses on the contention and “epistemic murk” that surrounds autism as the object of the clinical trial and the paradoxical attempts by medicine and the psy-sciences to codify, standardise and quantify this heterogeneous disorder. Using a video-reflexive ethnographic (VRE) approach, I observed and videoed 22 diagnostic sessions with parents and children over two years as part of a randomised double blind placebo-controlled drug trial in a children’s hospital in New South Wales, Australia. Edited clips from these videos were later played back to the clinician in reflexive one-on-one feedback sessions with the researcher, allowing the collaborative analysis of complex diagnostic data. This video data provides a rich, negotiated, embodied and socially nuanced picture of the autism diagnostic encounter in action within the clinical trial. In this context, autism is no longer perceived solely as a set of observable behaviours, but rather a disorder that is firmly located within the brain and its processes. ASD medication, the disorder itself, and the individual ASD brain cannot be properly conceptualised without each other, with each element feeding into a classificatory loop. This data also demonstrates how participants must constantly negotiate between the inherently qualitative nature of the diagnosis in practice and the standardised agenda of the clinical trial, which views disorder as a quantitative deviation from a statistical norm. The thesis argues that during the diagnosis, the clinician must filter, categorise and quantify this complex, inter-subjective, experiential knowledge to fit with what counts as measurable evidence. However, it is behind the scenes that the real labour of the clinical trial occurs. This labour generates data through participants’ value-orientation, their experiences, stories, and corporeal translation of knowledge. This diagnostic work is above all complex, value-laden and qualitative