The Evolution of Stop-motion Animation Technique Through 120 Years of Technological Innovations

Stop-motion animation history has been put on paper by several scholars and practitioners who tried to organize 120 years of technological innovations and material experiments dealing with a huge literature. Bruce Holman (1975), Neil Pettigrew (1999), Ken Priebe (2010), Stefano Bessoni (2014), and more recently Adrián Encinas Salamanca (2017), provided the most detailed even tough partial attempts of systematization, and designed historical reconstructions by considering specific periods of time, film lengths or the use of stop-motion as special effect rather than an animation technique. This article provides another partial historical reconstruction of the evolution of stop-motion and outlines the main events that occurred in the development of this technique, following criteria based on the innovations in the technology of materials and manufacturing processes that have influenced the fabrication of puppets until the present day. The systematization follows a chronological order and takes into account events that changed the technique of a puppets’ manufacturing process as a consequence of the use of either new fabrication processes or materials. Starting from the accident that made the French film-pioneer Georges Méliès discover the trick of the replacement technique at the end of the nineteenth century, the reconstruction goes through 120 years of experiments and films. “Build up” puppets fabricated by the Russian puppet animator Ladislaw Starevicz with insect exoskeletons, the use of clay puppets and the innovations introduced by LAIKA entertainment in the last decade such as Stereoscopic photography and the 3D computer printed replacement pieces, and then the increasing influence of digital technologies in the process of puppet fabrication are some of the main considered events. Technology transfers, new materials’ features, innovations in the way of animating puppets, are the main aspects through which this historical analysis approaches the previously mentioned events. This short analysis is supposed to remind and demonstrate that stop-motion animation is an interdisciplinary occasion of both artistic expression and technological experimentation, and that its evolution and aesthetic is related to cultural, geographical and technological issues. Lastly, if the technology of materials and processes is a constantly evolving field, what future can be expected for this cinematographic technique? The article ends with this open question and without providing an answer it implicitly states the role of stop-motion as a driving force for innovations that come from other fields and are incentivized by the needs of this specific sector

Decision-Makers' Underestimation of User Innovation

In the past few decades,much Research has documented the importance of users assources of innovations. Over the last 10 years, Research Policy alone has published 56 Research articles investigating this phenomenon. We ask to what degree the findings of users as Innovators have been absorbed by decision-makers responsible for new product development (managers) and by those who shape the contextual conditions for innovation (policy makers and public administration). A realistic perception of the sources of innovation is important as it con- stitutes the Basis for arational allocation of resources and thus indirectly Impacts the Innovation Performance of companies and societies at large. In a large-scale survey of n=1500 decision-makers, we found support for a substantial underestimation of users as a source of innovation: While the true proportion of user innovation among the most valuable 1678 innovations in nine industries is 54.4% (as established inexisting research articles), decision-makers estimate it to be 21.7%. A content analysis of transfer media (450 academic textbooks, popular innovation books, and business articles) underscores this theory-practice gap: Of 3469 text paragraphs dealing with the sources of innovation, only 2.7% mention users as innovators. We develop six propositions on the reasons for and con- sequences of this underestimation that may serve as a starting point for future research and practical con- sequences

Leveraging Billions of Faces to Overcome Performance Barriers in Unconstrained Face Recognition

We employ the face recognition technology developed in house at face.com to a well accepted benchmark and show that without any tuning we are able to considerably surpass state of the art results. Much of the improvement is concentrated in the high-valued performance point of zero false positive matches, where the obtained recall rate almost doubles the best reported result to date. We discuss the various components and innovations of our system that enable this significant performance gap. These components include extensive utilization of an accurate 3D reconstructed shape model dealing with challenges arising from pose and illumination. In addition, discriminative models based on billions of faces are used in order to overcome aging and facial expression as well as low light and overexposure. Finally, we identify a challenging set of identification queries that might provide useful focus for future research.Comment: 7 page

Breaking organizational barriers for greening Australian campuses

Sustainability is an issue for everyone. For instance, the higher education sector is being asked to take an active part in creating a sustainable future, due to their moral responsibility, social obligation, and their own need to adapt to the changing higher education environment. By either signing declarations or making public statements, many universities are expressing their desire to become role models for enhancing sustainability. However, too often they have not delivered as much as they had intended. This is particularly evident in the lack of physical implementation of sustainable practices in the campus environment. Real projects such as green technologies on campus have the potential to rectify the problem in addition to improving building performance. Despite being relatively recent innovations, Green Roof and Living Wall have been widely recognized because of their substantial benefits, such as runoff water reduction, noise insulation, and the promotion of biodiversity. While they can be found in commercial and residential buildings, they only appear infrequently on campuses as universities have been very slow to implement sustainability innovations. There has been very little research examining the fundamental problems from the organizational perspective. To address this deficiency, the researchers designed and carried out 24 semi-structured interviews to investigate the general organizational environment of Australian universities with the intention to identify organizational obstacles to the delivery of Green Roof and Living Wall projects. This research revealed that the organizational environment of Australian universities still has a lot of room to be improved in order to accommodate sustainability practices. Some of the main organizational barriers to the adoption of sustainable innovations were identified including lack of awareness and knowledge, the absence of strong supportive leadership, a weak sustainability-rooted culture and several management challenges. This led to the development of a set of strategies to help optimize the organizational environment for the purpose of better decision making for Green Roof and Living Wall implementation

User characteristics for customer involvement in innovation processes : deconstructing the Lead User-concept

Despite the growing evidence of the beneficial nature of customer and user involvement in new product or service development, research into user types and customer characteristics for innovation is still scarce. One notable exception can be found in the literature dealing with the so-called Lead User. Although there is a substantial research corpus dealing with Lead User innovation, the integration of Lead Users or Lead User-methods is definitely not common within most firms. We believe that disentangling the Lead Userconcept into more concrete user types and customer characteristics would benefit and optimize user involvement in innovation processes. Within this paper, we describe six user types based on five dimensions, associated with the Lead User-concept and abstracted from various literature streams. We further propose some guidelines for an optimal integration of these users within innovation methodologies and sketch out some lines for future research

Emergent Innovation—a Socio-Epistemological Innovation Technology. Creating Profound Change and Radically New Knowledge as Core Challenges in Knowledge Management

This paper introduces an alternative approach to innovation: Emergent Innovation. As opposed to radical innovation Emergent Innovation finds a balance and integrates the demand both for radically new knowledge and at the same time for an organic development from within the organization. From a knowledge management perspective one can boil down this problem to the question of how to cope with the new and with profound change in knowledge. This question will be dealt with in the first part of the paper. As an implication the alternative approach of Emergent Innovation will be presented in the second part: this approach looks at innovation as a socio-epistemological process of “learning from the future”.\ud Keywords:\ud Innovation, radical innovation, emergent innovation, knowledge creation, change

Financial innovation and arbitrage in the Spanish bond market

This paper empirically tests the level of sequential arbitrage in the Spanish bond market. The test is implemented by drawing on default free and option free pure discount and coupon bonds issued by the Spanish government. This fact seems to be a clear distinction between this paper and the related empirical literature since there are no risky bonds or derivative securities involved in our analysis. As a consequence, the sequential arbitrage absence is just equivalent to the existence of a term structure of interest rates matching the whole set of bond prices as provided by The Bank of Spain. Thus, the main conclusions seem to be robust because they only depend on very general and simple hypotheses and, particularly, no dynamic assumptions are required. The results of the empirical analysis may be useful to traders and researchers since it seems to reveal the existence of sequential arbitrage. Furthermore, the number of arbitrage opportunities significantly increased in 1998, when important innovations were implemented and, amongst other new possibilities, agents began trading each whole bond and its coupons (strips) separately. The inexperience associated with financial innovations may lead to ine¢ciencies in the market

Inovasi Produk Asuransi Umum Syariah

Sharia insurance has become known in Indonesia since the establishment of the Takaful Company in 1994 to meet the growing need for insurance services for both individuals and businesses in Indonesia. Insurance is a financial means in managing household life, both in facing basic risks or in dealing with risks to assets owned. This paper tries to read and see between the opportunities and challenges of sharia insurance which is an external assessment of the current condition of sharia insurance and the future that will affect the process of achieving the goals of a sharia financial institution. By reviewing and reading the situation, the characteristics of the strengths and weaknesses of sharia insurance will be obtained, based on the strength of the analysis of the internal and external environment. This paper also discusses the opportunities and challenges of sharia general insurance product innovation so that product and service innovations emerge that are truly extracted from the basic concepts of sharia and also describe several things that are the cause of the relatively low penetration of the sharia insurance market at this time