Quantification and the language of later Shakespeare

In this paper we consider the status of quantitative evidence in literary studies, with an example from our own work using the software package Docuscope to investigate chronological ‘periods’ in Shakespeare’s career. We argue that quantitative evidence has a function in literary studies, not as an end in itself, but as a starting point for traditional interpretative literary analysis. In our example, we show that linguistic analysis suggests three periods in Shakespeare’s career, defining a ‘period’ as a group of plays with similar linguistic features. We focus on the latest period, as this is the largest, and suggest that the ‘late style’ of Shakespeare may begin much earlier than traditionally thought. We analyse the features that the later plays share, and argue that from the late 1590s Shakespeare can be seen to be adopting features which are (a) closer to speech, and (b) indicate a shift from real-world denotation to a focus on communicating the subjectivity of the speaker

Basic gestures as spatiotemporal reference frames for repetitive dance/music patterns in samba and charleston

THE GOAL OF THE PRESENT STUDY IS TO GAIN BETTER insight into how dancers establish, through dancing, a spatiotemporal reference frame in synchrony with musical cues. With the aim of achieving this, repetitive dance patterns of samba and Charleston were recorded using a three-dimensional motion capture system. Geometric patterns then were extracted from each joint of the dancer's body. The method uses a body-centered reference frame and decomposes the movement into non-orthogonal periodicities that match periods of the musical meter. Musical cues (such as meter and loudness) as well as action-based cues (such as velocity) can be projected onto the patterns, thus providing spatiotemporal reference frames, or 'basic gestures,' for action-perception couplings. Conceptually speaking, the spatiotemporal reference frames control minimum effort points in action-perception couplings. They reside as memory patterns in the mental and/or motor domains, ready to be dynamically transformed in dance movements. The present study raises a number of hypotheses related to spatial cognition that may serve as guiding principles for future dance/music studies

Event segmentation and biological motion perception in watching dance

We used a combination of behavioral, computational vision and fMRI methods to examine human brain activity while viewing a 386 s video of a solo Bharatanatyam dance. A computational analysis provided us with a Motion Index (MI) quantifying the silhouette motion of the dancer throughout the dance. A behavioral analysis using 30 naïve observers provided us with the time points where observers were most likely to report event boundaries where one movement segment ended and another began. These behavioral and computational data were used to interpret the brain activity of a different set of 11 naïve observers who viewed the dance video while brain activity was measured using fMRI. Results showed that the Motion Index related to brain activity in a single cluster in the right Inferior Temporal Gyrus (ITG) in the vicinity of the Extrastriate Body Area (EBA). Perception of event boundaries in the video was related to the BA44 region of right Inferior Frontal Gyrus as well as extensive clusters of bilateral activity in the Inferior Occipital Gyrus which extended in the right hemisphere towards the posterior Superior Temporal Sulcus (pSTS)

Explaining Leibniz-equivalence as difference of non-inertial appearances: dis-solution of the Hole Argument and physical individuation of point-events

"The last remnant of physical objectivity of space-time" is disclosed in the case of a continuous family of spatially non-compact models of general relativity (GR). The {\it physical individuation} of point-events is furnished by the intrinsic degrees of freedom of the gravitational field, (viz, the {\it Dirac observables}) that represent - as it were - the {\it ontic} part of the metric field. The physical role of the {\it epistemic} part (viz. the {\it gauge} variables) is likewise clarified as emboding the unavoidable non-inertial aspects of GR. At the end the philosophical import of the {\it Hole Argument} is substantially weakened and in fact the Argument itself dis-solved, while a specific four-dimensional {\it holistic and structuralist} view of space-time, (called {\it point-structuralism}), emerges, including elements common to the tradition of both {\it substantivalism} and {\it relationism}. The observables of our models undergo real {\it temporal change}: this gives new evidence to the fact that statements like the {\it frozen-time} character of evolution, as other ontological claims about GR, are {\it model dependent}. \medskip Forthcoming in Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern PhysicsComment: 37 pages, talk at Oxford Conference on Spacetime (2004), to appear in Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics. Affiliations Correcte

Segmentation algorithms of biomedical images: development and quantitative evaluation

The article presents the comparative analysis of the biomedical image segmentation methods. The work discusses segmentation methods on the basis of previous labeling and spatial moments. The experimental results show that the developed methods have higher accuracy by signal-noise ratio compared to the nowadays known. Moreover the authors have developed the quantitative evaluation of the segmentation algorithms based on the metrical approach.У статті представлений порівняльний аналіз методів сегментації біомедичних зображень. У роботі досліджуються методи сегментації на основі попередньої розмітки та просторових моментів. Експериментальні результати показують, що розроблені методи мають більш високу точність за співвідношенням сигнал-шум у порівнянні з відомими. Крім того, автори розробили алгоритм кількісної оцінки алгоритмів сегментації на основі метричного підходу.The proposed research has been developed within the state budget project "Hybrid Intelligent Information Technology Diagnosing of Precancerous Breast Cancer Based on Image Analysis" (state registration number 1016U002500)