26,376 research outputs found
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Writing space, living space: time, agency and place relations in Herodotusâs Histories
This chapter examines lived space in Herodotusâs Historiesâ and explores how the picture that emerges differs from abstract depictions of space. Such overly schematic representations we see articulated by the Persians at the very beginning of the Histories, or explicitly challenged by Herodotus when he âlaughs atâ the maps produced by his Ionian contemporaries that similarly divide the world into two regions of equal size (4.36.2), or more subtly undercut when Aristagoras turns up with just such a map and puts it to service an argument in favour of conquest. In particular, we want to challenge conventional readings of a polarised world of East versus West, which, while grounded in Herodotusâs concern to show how âGreeks and barbarians came into conflict with each otherâ (1.1), fail to take into account either Herodotusâs implicit rejection of the Persian model of an Asia-Europe divide in favour of an inquiry that recognises that places change over time, or the extent to which Herodotus or his historical agents relate those places to each other. Using key features of lived spaceâtime, agency and relationâ, we sketch out the beginnings of a network analysis of book 5, backed up by a close textual study of the bookâs opening episode. Both methods help to unpack the idea of the Historiesâ lived space that underpins and greatly complicates the historical agentsâ own understanding of the world around them
Addressing housing needs in minimising the problems of post conflict housing reconstruction
Depleted human and social capital, displacement of people, destruction of property, weakened
institutions and ruined economy are some of the legacies of conflicts. Within this context, post
conflict reconstruction contributes to overcome the legacies of conflict through reactivating the
development process that has been disrupted by the conflict. Among the post conflict reconstruction
interventions, post conflict housing reconstruction is paramount important as it contributes to
development and peace through restoring the economic and social life of conflict affected people.
Despite the importance, the success of post conflict housing reconstruction is hindered by a number
of problems such as lack of strategies to address the unique challenges faced by vulnerable
households, lack of involvement of local people, lack of use of local building material and
technology, lack of local economic development, lack of community linkages, lack of cultural and
local consideration, overlooked socio-economic conditions of occupants, standardised housing
models, housing models imported from different cultures, lack of beneficiary consultation, poor
performance of agencies, bribery and corruptions and lack of post occupancy evaluation. If not
properly managed, these issues lead to hinder the success of post conflict housing reconstruction and
its contribution to the development and peace. This paper argues that lack of concern on housing
needs has directly or indirectly given rise for most of these issues through a comprehensive literature
review on post conflict housing reconstruction and housing needs. The paper establishes the link
between the problems of housing reconstruction and lack of addressing housing needs. Accordingly,
it concludes that adequate housing measures provide a general guideline in addressing housing needs
and addressing such needs leads to minimise the problems of post conflict housing reconstruction
Behavioral biases when viewing multiplexed scenes:scene structure and frames of reference for inspection
Where people look when viewing a scene has been a much explored avenue of vision research (e.g., see Tatler, 2009). Current understanding of eye guidance suggests that a combination of high and low-level factors influence fixation selection (e.g., Torralba et al., 2006), but that there are also strong biases toward the center of an image (Tatler, 2007). However, situations where we view multiplexed scenes are becoming increasingly common, and it is unclear how visual inspection might be arranged when content lacks normal semantic or spatial structure. Here we use the central bias to examine how gaze behavior is organized in scenes that are presented in their normal format, or disrupted by scrambling the quadrants and separating them by space. In Experiment 1, scrambling scenes had the strongest influence on gaze allocation. Observers were highly biased by the quadrant center, although physical space did not enhance this bias. However, the center of the display still contributed to fixation selection above chance, and was most influential early in scene viewing. When the top left quadrant was held constant across all conditions in Experiment 2, fixation behavior was significantly influenced by the overall arrangement of the display, with fixations being biased toward the quadrant center when the other three quadrants were scrambled (despite the visual information in this quadrant being identical in all conditions). When scenes are scrambled into four quadrants and semantic contiguity is disrupted, observers no longer appear to view the content as a single scene (despite it consisting of the same visual information overall), but rather anchor visual inspection around the four separate âsub-scenes.â Moreover, the frame of reference that observers use when viewing the multiplex seems to change across viewing time: from an early bias toward the display center to a later bias toward quadrant centers
Exploring the turning points in researchersâ lives: using the three-scene storyboarding technique
This publication sets out an approach to careers work called three scene storyboarding. Storyboarding aims to help researchers to set down their experiences, to think about their careers and to take action based on this reflection. Storyboarding is a creative technique which asks researchers to think about their lives in narrative terms and to set down their experience in the form of drawings. This is an innovative technique that asks them to think about their careers in an unfamiliar way. It can therefore be a challenging technique for professionals to get started with. However, this report shows that the storyboarding approach can be useful and that it can expand any researcher's career-management repertoire.Vita
Attentive monitoring of multiple video streams driven by a Bayesian foraging strategy
In this paper we shall consider the problem of deploying attention to subsets
of the video streams for collating the most relevant data and information of
interest related to a given task. We formalize this monitoring problem as a
foraging problem. We propose a probabilistic framework to model observer's
attentive behavior as the behavior of a forager. The forager, moment to moment,
focuses its attention on the most informative stream/camera, detects
interesting objects or activities, or switches to a more profitable stream. The
approach proposed here is suitable to be exploited for multi-stream video
summarization. Meanwhile, it can serve as a preliminary step for more
sophisticated video surveillance, e.g. activity and behavior analysis.
Experimental results achieved on the UCR Videoweb Activities Dataset, a
publicly available dataset, are presented to illustrate the utility of the
proposed technique.Comment: Accepted to IEEE Transactions on Image Processin
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Divine Narratives in Xenophon's <i>Anabasis</i>
This paper builds on recent work that has focused on the interplay between Xenophon the narrator and Xenophon the character in the Anabasis. It illustrates how crucial the divine is in the construction of Xenophonâs character and the overall shape of the narrative. By referring to oracles, dreams and sacrifices, as well as his divine estate at Scillus, Xenophon the narrator contributes substantively towards wider thematic concerns in the narrative: the meaningful rĂŽle of the divine in warfare; Xenophonâs stellar record during this opaque foreign campaign, and the signal connection between piety and good leadership
Migration as a Political and Public Phenomenon: The Case of Slovak Republic
Publication within the project âThe V4 towards migration challenges in Europe. An analysis and recommendationsâ is financed by Visegrad Fund
The âNegro Bookâ of Ansel Adams and Nancy Newhall: Photography, Race, and Civil Rights in Early Cold War-Era America
Between 1945â1957 Ansel Adams and his friend and collaborator, Nancy Newhall, worked on a project they referred to in their letters as âThe Negro Book.â Although this work never saw the light of day (publishers refused to print it), their letters provide a fascinating glimpse into their concern for the rights of Americans of color, their worry about the changing political climate post-WWII, and their struggle to embrace documentary photography as an art form even as they sought to use it for social good. Prolific and passionate writers, they corresponded frequently, sometimes daily, resulting in a corpus of over one hundred relevant extant letters. Distilling their correspondence to reveal their chief concerns, both political and artistic, and telling their story within the context of the broader social milieu, this article brings to light little-known dimensions of their long and productive careers
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