Injection, detection and repair of aesthetics in home movies

This paper details the design of an algorithm for automatically manipulating the important aesthetic element of video, visual tempo. Automatic injection, detection and repair of such aesthetic elements, it is argued, is vital to the next generation of amateur multimedia authoring tools. We evaluate the performance of the algorithm on a battery of synthetic data and demonstrate its ability to return the visual tempo of the final media a considerable degree closer to the target signal. The novelty of this work lies chiefly in the systematic manipulation of this high level aesthetic element of video

Annual reports town of Wakefield, New Hampshire for the the fiscal year ending December 31, 1998, vital statistics for 1998.

This is an annual report containing vital statistics for a town/city in the state of New Hampshire

Tempest: Geometries of Play

Atari’s 1981 arcade hit Tempest was a “tube shooter” built around glowing, vector-based geometric shapes. Among its many important contributions to both game and cultural history, Tempest was one of the first commercial titles to allow players to choose the game’s initial play difficulty (a system Atari dubbed “SkillStep”), a feature that has since became standard for games of all types. Tempest was also one of the most aesthetically impactful games of the twentieth century, lending its crisp, vector aesthetic to many subsequent movies, television shows, and video games. In this book, Ruggill and McAllister enumerate and analyze Tempest’s landmark qualities, exploring the game’s aesthetics, development context, and connections to and impact on video game history and culture. By describing the game in technical, historical, and ludic detail, they unpack the game’s latent and manifest audio-visual iconography and the ideological meanings this iconography evokes

Computational Media Aesthetics for Media Synthesis

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

The New Aesthetic and Art: Constellations of the Postdigital

The case for the new aesthetic -- Manifestations of the new aesthetic -- Glitch ontology and the new aesthetic -- Setting the stage : the new precursorsand boundaries for a new aesthetic art -- Letting go : new aesthetic artists and the new aesthetic art that works -- Teleology and the new aesthetic -- Conclusion -- References -- Biographies. The new aesthetic and art: constellations of the postdigital is an interdisciplinary analysis focusing on new digital phenomena at the intersections of theory andcontemporary art. Asserting the unique character of New Aesthetic objects, Contreras-Koterbay and Mirocha trace the origins of the New Aesthetic in visual arts, design, and software, find its presence resonating in various kinds of digital imagery, and track its agency in everyday effects of the intertwined physical world and the digital realm. Contreras-Koterbay and Mirocha bring to light an original perspective that identifies an autonomous quality in common digital objects and examples ofart that are increasingly an important influence for today\u27s culture and society.https://dc.etsu.edu/etsu_books/1118/thumbnail.jp

A Spectatorship-based Approach to Undoing Blindness Stereotypes in Documentary Practice

The research is presented as an audio-visual thesis, consisting of a 62,000-word thesis and two documentary film artefacts (forty-five and forty-eight minutes, respectively). The equal ratio of theory and practice symbiotically combines the background research, written analysis and practical experimentation. The portrayal of blind people in Western media largely conforms to stereotypical representations that oscillate between two poles: either as unfortunate, disabled and deprived, or exotic, mysterious and in touch with the supernatural. This ‘othering’ of blindness in documentaries is the symptom and partial cause of socio-cultural stigmatisation and ‘ableist’ hegemony. Challenging this hegemony, the thesis proposes the adoption of a spectatorship-based approach to film practice. It first identifies a range of stereotypes in mainstream documentaries, revealing the overwhelming use of formulaic narratives that foreground either tragic or heroic, goal-oriented plot trajectories, and stylistic devices that objectify blind characters. These insights frame the making of my own documentary films about two blind people. The aim is the mediation of everyday experience from the characters’ own perspective, with the result that the spectator experiences them as ordinary people, performing ordinary activities, albeit with extraordinary bodies. The films focus on everyday objects and spaces, and use narrative fragmentation to elicit a temporal sense of ‘everydayness’. The methodology operates on two levels of filmic mediation: the pre-filmic, comprising my first-person encounters with the subjects, and the post-filmic that addresses the mediation of pre-filmic experience to the audience via the film. The pre-filmic level makes use of phenomenological methods; the post-filmic implements a range of methods adapted from cognitive film studies. This spectatorship-focused model offers a new way of representing and communicating the ordinary ‘everyday’ of the two blind characters, undoing the stereotypes that consistently ‘other’ members of this community

How To Hit The Ground: Motion And Measurement In Moving Pictures Before The Great Crash

How to Hit the Ground: Motion and Measurement in Moving Pictures before The Great Crash Will Schmenner Karen Redrobe, Advisor On December 21, 1914, the Keystone Film Company released Tillie’s Punctured Romance, directed by Mack Sennett. Roughly seven weeks later, depending on where one lived in North America, D.W. Griffith released The Birth of a Nation (1915). For cinema and media studies, this moment launched the form of the classical Hollywood feature-length narrative—the roughly ninety-minutes to three-hour film that since became ubiquitous. The two movies, despite sharing a longer-than-normal duration, could hardly be more different. The Birth of a Nation purports to be history. President Woodrow Wilson was famously quoted as saying, “It’s like writing history with lightning.” Griffith carefully designed his broad overarching themes about race and gender so that they would drive the narrative. On the other hand, Tillie’s Punctured Romance pieces together a narrative that is often seen as secondary, at best, to the slapstick comedy animating the picture. My dissertation delves into this difference, which cannot be solely contributed to slapsticks desire to burlesque Griffith. By building up an argument from the forms that bodily motion took in the shots, across the edits, and in the narrative structure of Buster Keaton’s 1920s features, I argue that cinema and media studies needs to reconsider how it thinks about so-called non-narrative techniques and passive audiences. In short, Keaton worked with the visual habits of his audiences to create a set of non-narrative techniques that make up the very narrative structure of his movies. By engaging with the bio-politics of bodily motion in the 1920s, Keaton was able to take the well-established visual habits of an industrializing America and tactically alter them to critique how bodies are moved and monitored, who controls the moving of those bodies, and who sets the understanding of efficient, permissible, and effective motions. In the context of The First Red Scare (1920 – 1921) and what John Dos Passos called “the deportations delirium,” Keaton’s comedy offered a more realistic depiction of how disjointed, contingent and chaotic the experience of everyday life could be

Patterns of injury and violence in Yaoundé Cameroon: an analysis of hospital data.

BackgroundInjuries are quickly becoming a leading cause of death globally, disproportionately affecting sub-Saharan Africa, where reports on the epidemiology of injuries are extremely limited. Reports on the patterns and frequency of injuries are available from Cameroon are also scarce. This study explores the patterns of trauma seen at the emergency ward of the busiest trauma center in Cameroon's capital city.Materials and methodsAdministrative records from January 1, 2007, through December 31, 2007, were retrospectively reviewed; information on age, gender, mechanism of injury, and outcome was abstracted for all trauma patients presenting to the emergency ward. Univariate analysis was performed to assess patterns of injuries in terms of mechanism, date, age, and gender. Bivariate analysis was used to explore potential relationships between demographic variables and mechanism of injury.ResultsA total of 6,234 injured people were seen at the Central Hospital of Yaoundé's emergency ward during the year 2007. Males comprised 71% of those injured, and the mean age of injured patients was 29 years (SD = 14.9). Nearly 60% of the injuries were due to road traffic accidents, 46% of which involved a pedestrian. Intentional injuries were the second most common mechanism of injury (22.5%), 55% of which involved unarmed assault. Patients injured in falls were more likely to be admitted to the hospital (p < 0.001), whereas patients suffering intentional injuries and bites were less likely to be hospitalized (p < 0.001). Males were significantly more likely to be admitted than females (p < 0.001)DiscussionPatterns in terms of age, gender, and mechanism of injury are similar to reports from other countries from the same geographic region, but the magnitude of cases reported is high for a single institution in an African city the size of Yaoundé. As the burden of disease is predicted to increase dramatically in sub-Saharan Africa, immediate efforts in prevention and treatment in Cameroon are strongly warranted

06. 2010 IMSAloquium Student Investigation Showcase

https://digitalcommons.imsa.edu/class_of_2010/1004/thumbnail.jp