Applications of network optimization

Includes bibliographical references (p. 41-48).Ravindra K. Ahuja ... [et al.]

Applications of network optimization

Includes bibliographical references (p. 41-48).Ravindra K. Ahuja ... [et al.]

Enslaved Labor In The Gang and Task Systems: A Case Study In Comparative Bioarchaeology Of Commingled Remains

This study designs and tests an approach intended to confront one of the major problems faced within biological anthropology, the commingling or mixing of human skeletal remains. The first goal of the study is to implement an approach to sorting mixed human remains in order that they can be made amenable to comparative study. Bioarchaeologists depend on an array of measures, preserved in the human skeleton, to assess the lifestyles and identity of past human groups. As many of these measures are preserved within the morphology of different bones, it is imperative that the association and context of remains are known for purposes of study. Frequently, the effects of nature, human activity, recovery by untrained personnel, and long-term storage or curation, cause commingling among samples of skeletal remains, meaning that they often remain unstudied. Many of these skeletal samples have the potential to provide valuable information about past human biology and culture within our recent evolution. This study implements a combined method approach using traditional morphological and osteological methods for sorting mixed assemblages of remains, combined with elemental analysis of bones using portable X-ray Fluorescence (pXRF) in order to test its efficacy in sorting a sample of human remains that were mixed and damaged by modern construction. Elemental analysis with pXRF has shown potential in recent studies, but has not yet been employed within bioarchaeology for the purpose of facilitating comparative studies. The remains under study, the skeletons of enslaved African Americans who labored in the tidal rice fields of lowcountry South Carolina during the mid-nineteenth century, offer new insight into our understanding of the lifestyles and health of the enslaved in South Carolina. Following the implementation of an approach to sort these damaged remains into discrete individuals, this study then includes them in a comparative biocultural study designed to contribute to the growing body of temporal and regional studies of diasporic experiences of African, European, and Native American populations within the historic and formative periods of North America and the Caribbean. This study uses a biomechanical approach based on CT-scan derived images of human bone cross sections, in order to test historical questions using the sorted sample of human remains from a South Carolina rice plantation (Hagley Plantation) in a comparative framework with remains from a Barbadian sugar plantation (Newton Plantation). These two historical contexts involved characteristically-different labor regimes and social and economic arrangements according to historical sources. The current study tests questions based on the historical narrative using skeletal measures of functional adaptation designed to assess the effects of lifestyle and forced labor on these two groups within a comparative biohistorical framework

LIPIcs, Volume 274, ESA 2023, Complete Volume

LIPIcs, Volume 274, ESA 2023, Complete Volum

LIPIcs, Volume 244, ESA 2022, Complete Volume

LIPIcs, Volume 244, ESA 2022, Complete Volum

Choreographing the extended agent : performance graphics for dance theater

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2005.Includes bibliographical references (v. 2, leaves 448-458).The marriage of dance and interactive image has been a persistent dream over the past decades, but reality has fallen far short of potential for both technical and conceptual reasons. This thesis proposes a new approach to the problem and lays out the theoretical, technical and aesthetic framework for the innovative art form of digitally augmented human movement. I will use as example works a series of installations, digital projections and compositions each of which contains a choreographic component - either through collaboration with a choreographer directly or by the creation of artworks that automatically organize and understand purely virtual movement. These works lead up to two unprecedented collaborations with two of the greatest choreographers working today; new pieces that combine dance and interactive projected light using real-time motion capture live on stage. The existing field of"dance technology" is one with many problems. This is a domain with many practitioners, few techniques and almost no theory; a field that is generating "experimental" productions with every passing week, has literally hundreds of citable pieces and no canonical works; a field that is oddly disconnected from modern dance's history, pulled between the practical realities of the body and those of computer art, and has no influence on the prevailing digital art paradigms that it consumes.(cont.) This thesis will seek to address each of these problems: by providing techniques and a basis for "practical theory"; by building artworks with resources and people that have never previously been brought together, in theaters and in front of audiences previously inaccessible to the field; and by proving through demonstration that a profitable and important dialogue between digital art and the pioneers of modern dance can in fact occur. The methodological perspective of this thesis is that of biologically inspired, agent-based artificial intelligence, taken to a high degree of technical depth. The representations, algorithms and techniques behind such agent architectures are extended and pushed into new territory for both interactive art and artificial intelligence. In particular, this thesis ill focus on the control structures and the rendering of the extended agents' bodies, the tools for creating complex agent-based artworks in intense collaborative situations, and the creation of agent structures that can span live image and interactive sound production. Each of these parts becomes an element of what it means to "choreograph" an extended agent for live performance.Marc Downie.Ph.D

Local Histories of Composition and the Student Writer: Women Students Writing Within, Against, and Beyond Required Classroom Genres

This study argues for the importance of analyzing individual students’ responses to writing instruction in crafting histories of the field of rhetoric and composition. I engage in an archival study of student writing at the University of Kansas during the turn from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, specifically through a genre-based local history analysis of a course called “Advanced English Composition” and two women writers who were enrolled in it. In particular, I examine the ways in which these students write within, against, and even beyond the genres they are required to complete for their courses. Recent histories of the field of rhetoric and composition have taken a revisionist turn, examining the contributions to writing instruction’s past of more diverse sites and subjects than those studied in the 1980s and 1990s. Even within this revisionist turn, however, the degree to which student writings play a role in these histories varies widely. Sometimes student writing serves as briefly-mentioned artifacts used in service of other research goals, such as recovering the work of teachers. Other times, students and their writings are scarcely mentioned at all. This is especially problematic in that rhetoric and composition claims to be a field that heavily values student writing. If rhetoric and composition is as closely reliant on students and their writing as it professes, if student texts truly are what Joseph Harris calls “a form of currency in the knowledge economy of composition” (Harris 667), the same ought to be said of the narratives produced of composition’s past. In the first part of this study, I provide a larger contextualization of writing instruction at the University of Kansas during this particular time period. I examine archival materials within this genre system, such as course catalogues, instructor diaries, department of English publications, faculty meeting minutes and more, all of which allowed me to situate student writings more fully within the contexts and genre system of their production. In the second part of this study, I analyze the writings of two women students enrolled in “Advanced English Composition,” Margaret Kane and Kate Hansen, using rhetorical genre theory and theories of uptake. I perform an extensive analysis of two sets of genres that these women were required to produce as part of their courses—the 1899 course notes of Margaret and the 1900 course papers of Kate. I argue that these women’s writings illustrate the phenomenon of uptake chains, and that the individual genres in which Margaret and Kate compose both enable and constrain their responses in differing ways, as well as carry and impart ideological beliefs. However, I likewise demonstrate that Margaret’s and Kate’s responses are unique and worthy of careful analysis; each woman manages to write herself within the genres they were required to produce, modifying genres even in small ways to fit their individual responses to the writing instruction they received, and occasionally even to carry out their own goals and purposes. This study as a whole cultivates a more inclusive, representative narrative of the field’s history that values the experiences of women students, rather than assuming that students responded to instruction in the same ways, likewise carrying implications for writing teachers today

Congo style: from Belgian Art Nouveau to Zaïre’s Authenticité

A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand, In fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Art History), September 2017This thesis analyzes how the Congo has been represented in modernist design situations, from colonial depictions to variegated forms of Congolese self representation. Architecture and art exhibitions in Euro-America and the Democratic Republic of the Congo are approached as points of contestation and intersection. The aim is to look at mutual dependencies and interrelations in modernist forms and spatial practices that migrate and mutate across huge distances and time spans. Links and recurring tropes are located in Art Nouveau total artworks in Belgium (circa 1890 -1905), Congolese objects in 20th century gallery space (from MOMA in the 1930s to 1970s Kinshasa), imperial remains from the early 1900s (in present day Mbanza Ngungu and Kinshasa) and the Africanist aesthetics of Mobutu Sese Seko’s era of retour a l’authenticité (1970s). In revisiting historic representations of the Congo, certain forms and spatial practices emerge, whose meanings are revealed according to how they engage with and are acted upon by their different contexts and temporalities.XL201