Contemporary arts practice: Disequilibrium/Limbo/Resistance

This exegesis proposes that conflict and tension are transformative factors in contemporary arts practice, from making through to methodologies; viewing the dialogic nature of art-making and the artist-in-the-world, linked to, yet separate from, surrounding entities. It is the culmination of conceptual research and creative production … the exegetical and the artwork … that together comprise an original contribution to new knowledge, with broad implications - and specific applications - significant to both practice and practitioner

Reports of planetary geology program, 1980

This is a compilation of abstracts of reports which summarize work conducted in the Planetary Geology Program. Each report reflects significant accomplishments within the area of the author's funded grant or contract

A Study of the Spiritual Influence of the Arts on Christian Liturgy: with Special Emphasis on the Impact of Architecture on Seventh-day Adventist Worship Practice

From its beginning the Seventh-day Adventist church has taken seriously the commission of Christ to proclaim the gospel to all the world. In this endeavor she has laid emphasis on the spoken word in evangelism. It is not so surprising then that the rather controversial area involving the role of art in the visual proclamation of the gospel has received only passing attention. In view of the keen interest, and in some cases excesses, in art and architecture among the Christian churches today, however, the Adventist church cannot stand aloof. She is bound to be influenced and, therefore, needs to give concerted study to the relationship of art and architecture to the proclamation of her unique message to the world. Administrators, pastors, and leading laymen have a significant responsibility today to give wise counsel for the building and furnishing of houses of worship that will rightly represent the teachings of the church. It has been the purpose of this project to stimulate this kind of study, and to this end a number of recommendations are submitted for consideration. The final result, within the limits of this project, is the submission of suggestive guidelines for building committees of Seventh-day Adventist church buildings. The pursuit of this goal has required a wide survey of historical and current literature pertaining to church art and architecture. Interviews with pastors, architects, and artists have yielded valuable information. The field component has involved the study of some forty churches, some reflecting the traditional styles and others the contemporary trends. The sample churches are only illustrative. Criteria for evaluating the quality and suitability of the churches charted has fallen into three main areas: theological, practical, and aesthetic. It is expected that the basic principles established will have application not only for the church in North America but also worldwide. The material is organized in four main sections which correspond to the content of the four chapters: (1) the role of art in worship, (2) a brief historical survey of the main types of church architecture, (3) a survey of contemporary trends, and (4) governing considerations for a Seventh-day Adventist church. A summary chart at the end of each chapter provides a quick overview of the points made. Diagrams, floor plans, and pictures serve to make references to visual images more comprehensible. The appendices present additional church plans, church building check lists, and an index to pertinent counsels from the writings of Ellen G. White. The ultimate aim of the project is to lead people to a keener understanding and appreciation of worship in the beauty of holiness. Art, when true to its purpose, will lead worshippers to a fuller ascription of praise to God, the Creator and Lover of Beauty

The Fifteenth Marcel Grossmann Meeting

The three volumes of the proceedings of MG15 give a broad view of all aspects of gravitational physics and astrophysics, from mathematical issues to recent observations and experiments. The scientific program of the meeting included 40 morning plenary talks over 6 days, 5 evening popular talks and nearly 100 parallel sessions on 71 topics spread over 4 afternoons. These proceedings are a representative sample of the very many oral and poster presentations made at the meeting.Part A contains plenary and review articles and the contributions from some parallel sessions, while Parts B and C consist of those from the remaining parallel sessions. The contents range from the mathematical foundations of classical and quantum gravitational theories including recent developments in string theory, to precision tests of general relativity including progress towards the detection of gravitational waves, and from supernova cosmology to relativistic astrophysics, including topics such as gamma ray bursts, black hole physics both in our galaxy and in active galactic nuclei in other galaxies, and neutron star, pulsar and white dwarf astrophysics. Parallel sessions touch on dark matter, neutrinos, X-ray sources, astrophysical black holes, neutron stars, white dwarfs, binary systems, radiative transfer, accretion disks, quasars, gamma ray bursts, supernovas, alternative gravitational theories, perturbations of collapsed objects, analog models, black hole thermodynamics, numerical relativity, gravitational lensing, large scale structure, observational cosmology, early universe models and cosmic microwave background anisotropies, inhomogeneous cosmology, inflation, global structure, singularities, chaos, Einstein-Maxwell systems, wormholes, exact solutions of Einstein's equations, gravitational waves, gravitational wave detectors and data analysis, precision gravitational measurements, quantum gravity and loop quantum gravity, quantum cosmology, strings and branes, self-gravitating systems, gamma ray astronomy, cosmic rays and the history of general relativity

Aluminium: Flexible and Light, Towards Sustainable Cities

Aluminium: Flexible and Light is book four in the Towards Sustainable Cities series. It demonstrates the flexibility of aluminium in the many production and fabrication processes that can be used to transform and deploy this light and durable metal, from casting, roll forming, extruding, spinning and direct digital printing. Fabrication processes include: laser and water jet cutting, welding, friction stir welding. The role of aluminium in creating thermally efficient yet highly transparent glazing systems is discussed. Key case studies demonstrating and quantifying the carbon savings arising from the specification of aluminium based architecture include: Kielder Probes by sixteen*(makers), Guy’s Hospital Tower by Penoyre & Prasad, dlr Lexicon by Carr Cotter & Naessens, i360 by Marks Barfield Architects and the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Included in this book is the first complete history of the use of aluminium in bridge construction from 1933 to the second decade of the twenty-first century

Pre-processing, classification and semantic querying of large-scale Earth observation spaceborne/airborne/terrestrial image databases: Process and product innovations.

By definition of Wikipedia, “big data is the term adopted for a collection of data sets so large and complex that it becomes difficult to process using on-hand database management tools or traditional data processing applications. The big data challenges typically include capture, curation, storage, search, sharing, transfer, analysis and visualization”. Proposed by the intergovernmental Group on Earth Observations (GEO), the visionary goal of the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS) implementation plan for years 2005-2015 is systematic transformation of multisource Earth Observation (EO) “big data” into timely, comprehensive and operational EO value-adding products and services, submitted to the GEO Quality Assurance Framework for Earth Observation (QA4EO) calibration/validation (Cal/Val) requirements. To date the GEOSS mission cannot be considered fulfilled by the remote sensing (RS) community. This is tantamount to saying that past and existing EO image understanding systems (EO-IUSs) have been outpaced by the rate of collection of EO sensory big data, whose quality and quantity are ever-increasing. This true-fact is supported by several observations. For example, no European Space Agency (ESA) EO Level 2 product has ever been systematically generated at the ground segment. By definition, an ESA EO Level 2 product comprises a single-date multi-spectral (MS) image radiometrically calibrated into surface reflectance (SURF) values corrected for geometric, atmospheric, adjacency and topographic effects, stacked with its data-derived scene classification map (SCM), whose thematic legend is general-purpose, user- and application-independent and includes quality layers, such as cloud and cloud-shadow. Since no GEOSS exists to date, present EO content-based image retrieval (CBIR) systems lack EO image understanding capabilities. Hence, no semantic CBIR (SCBIR) system exists to date either, where semantic querying is synonym of semantics-enabled knowledge/information discovery in multi-source big image databases. In set theory, if set A is a strict superset of (or strictly includes) set B, then A B. This doctoral project moved from the working hypothesis that SCBIR computer vision (CV), where vision is synonym of scene-from-image reconstruction and understanding EO image understanding (EO-IU) in operating mode, synonym of GEOSS ESA EO Level 2 product human vision. Meaning that necessary not sufficient pre-condition for SCBIR is CV in operating mode, this working hypothesis has two corollaries. First, human visual perception, encompassing well-known visual illusions such as Mach bands illusion, acts as lower bound of CV within the multi-disciplinary domain of cognitive science, i.e., CV is conditioned to include a computational model of human vision. Second, a necessary not sufficient pre-condition for a yet-unfulfilled GEOSS development is systematic generation at the ground segment of ESA EO Level 2 product. Starting from this working hypothesis the overarching goal of this doctoral project was to contribute in research and technical development (R&D) toward filling an analytic and pragmatic information gap from EO big sensory data to EO value-adding information products and services. This R&D objective was conceived to be twofold. First, to develop an original EO-IUS in operating mode, synonym of GEOSS, capable of systematic ESA EO Level 2 product generation from multi-source EO imagery. EO imaging sources vary in terms of: (i) platform, either spaceborne, airborne or terrestrial, (ii) imaging sensor, either: (a) optical, encompassing radiometrically calibrated or uncalibrated images, panchromatic or color images, either true- or false color red-green-blue (RGB), multi-spectral (MS), super-spectral (SS) or hyper-spectral (HS) images, featuring spatial resolution from low (> 1km) to very high (< 1m), or (b) synthetic aperture radar (SAR), specifically, bi-temporal RGB SAR imagery. The second R&D objective was to design and develop a prototypical implementation of an integrated closed-loop EO-IU for semantic querying (EO-IU4SQ) system as a GEOSS proof-of-concept in support of SCBIR. The proposed closed-loop EO-IU4SQ system prototype consists of two subsystems for incremental learning. A primary (dominant, necessary not sufficient) hybrid (combined deductive/top-down/physical model-based and inductive/bottom-up/statistical model-based) feedback EO-IU subsystem in operating mode requires no human-machine interaction to automatically transform in linear time a single-date MS image into an ESA EO Level 2 product as initial condition. A secondary (dependent) hybrid feedback EO Semantic Querying (EO-SQ) subsystem is provided with a graphic user interface (GUI) to streamline human-machine interaction in support of spatiotemporal EO big data analytics and SCBIR operations. EO information products generated as output by the closed-loop EO-IU4SQ system monotonically increase their value-added with closed-loop iterations

The Fifteenth Marcel Grossmann Meeting

The three volumes of the proceedings of MG15 give a broad view of all aspects of gravitational physics and astrophysics, from mathematical issues to recent observations and experiments. The scientific program of the meeting included 40 morning plenary talks over 6 days, 5 evening popular talks and nearly 100 parallel sessions on 71 topics spread over 4 afternoons. These proceedings are a representative sample of the very many oral and poster presentations made at the meeting.Part A contains plenary and review articles and the contributions from some parallel sessions, while Parts B and C consist of those from the remaining parallel sessions. The contents range from the mathematical foundations of classical and quantum gravitational theories including recent developments in string theory, to precision tests of general relativity including progress towards the detection of gravitational waves, and from supernova cosmology to relativistic astrophysics, including topics such as gamma ray bursts, black hole physics both in our galaxy and in active galactic nuclei in other galaxies, and neutron star, pulsar and white dwarf astrophysics. Parallel sessions touch on dark matter, neutrinos, X-ray sources, astrophysical black holes, neutron stars, white dwarfs, binary systems, radiative transfer, accretion disks, quasars, gamma ray bursts, supernovas, alternative gravitational theories, perturbations of collapsed objects, analog models, black hole thermodynamics, numerical relativity, gravitational lensing, large scale structure, observational cosmology, early universe models and cosmic microwave background anisotropies, inhomogeneous cosmology, inflation, global structure, singularities, chaos, Einstein-Maxwell systems, wormholes, exact solutions of Einstein's equations, gravitational waves, gravitational wave detectors and data analysis, precision gravitational measurements, quantum gravity and loop quantum gravity, quantum cosmology, strings and branes, self-gravitating systems, gamma ray astronomy, cosmic rays and the history of general relativity

Aeronautical engineering: A continuing bibliography with indexes (supplement 322)

This bibliography lists 719 reports, articles, and other documents introduced into the NASA scientific and technical information system in Oct. 1995. Subject coverage includes: design, construction and testing of aircraft and aircraft engines; aircraft components, equipment, and systems; ground support systems; and theoretical and applied aspects of aerodynamics and general fluid dynamics