Snow Leopard Permutations and Their Even and Odd Threads

Caffrey, Egge, Michel, Rubin and Ver Steegh recently introduced snow leopard permutations, which are the anti-Baxter permutations that are compatible with the doubly alternating Baxter permutations. Among other things, they showed that these permutations preserve parity, and that the number of snow leopard permutations of length $2n-1$ is the Catalan number $C_n$. In this paper we investigate the permutations that the snow leopard permutations induce on their even and odd entries; we call these the even threads and the odd threads, respectively. We give recursive bijections between these permutations and certain families of Catalan paths. We characterize the odd (resp. even) threads which form the other half of a snow leopard permutation whose even (resp. odd) thread is layered in terms of pattern avoidance, and we give a constructive bijection between the set of permutations of length $n$ which are both even threads and odd threads and the set of peakless Motzkin paths of length $n+1$.Comment: 25 pages, 6 figures. Version 3 is modified to use standard Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science but is otherwise unchange

Image and video processing using graphics hardware

Graphic Processing Units have during the recent years evolved into inexpensive high-performance many-core computing units. Earlier being accessible only by graphic APIs, new hardware architectures and programming tools have made it possible to program these devices using arbitrary data types and standard languages like C. This thesis investigates the development process and performance of image and video processing algorithms on graphic processing units, regardless of vendors. The tool used for programming the graphic processing units is OpenCL, a rela- tively new specification for heterogenous computing. Two image algorithms are investigated, bilateral filter and histogram. In addition, an attempt have been tried to make a template-based solution for generation and auto-optimalization of device code, but this approach seemed to have some shortcomings to be usable enough at this time

Snow Leopard Permutations and Their Even and Odd Threads

Caffrey, Egge, Michel, Rubin and Ver Steegh recently introduced snow leopard permutations, which are the anti-Baxter permutations that are compatible with the doubly alternating Baxter permutations. Among other things, they showed that these permutations preserve parity, and that the number of snow leopard permutations of length $2n-1$ is the Catalan number $C_n$. In this paper we investigate the permutations that the snow leopard permutations induce on their even and odd entries; we call these the even threads and the odd threads, respectively. We give recursive bijections between these permutations and certain families of Catalan paths. We characterize the odd (resp. even) threads which form the other half of a snow leopard permutation whose even (resp. odd) thread is layered in terms of pattern avoidance, and we give a constructive bijection between the set of permutations of length $n$ which are both even threads and odd threads and the set of peakless Motzkin paths of length $n+1$

Ways of making: producing artworks in the studio in response to experiential walking

This thesis includes a body of paintings, drawings and assembled objects that have been made in response to the Crossing England walks (2014 - 2018). This body of work is entitled The English Diagrams (2018). The research draws upon the varied perspectives of Fine Art, Performance Studies and Cultural Geographies, to examine the relationship between the activities of walking as art, and making in the studio. Drawing from experiential phenomenology, I set out a model for rigorous, reflexive, creative practice and map the looping affiliations between the embodied world of the walked landscape, the subjective terrain of the practitioner, and the fabrication of paintings, drawings and assemblage within the studio. This interdisciplinary study takes a neo-vitalist approach, tracking a series of walks on a single route across England. Artist and terrain are explored as integrated, the boundaries between them fluid or porous, Autobiographical story, personal mythology, and sediments of collective memory interred within the earth are drawn out by the sensory, somatic rhythms of walking, and through selection of specific materials found along the way. Through studying bodily, psychical and material fluxes and flows within the studio, the thesis considers optimal conditions for flow in practice, and scrutinizes interrelations between the space of the studio and the body/mind of the practitioner, during the production of drawings, paintings and assemblage. It explores how the fields, gaps, lines and folds of the landscape can be translated into a bricolage of visual and painterly languages that is as heterogeneous as the terrain it refers to. The research shows how a sustained and looping threefold process of walking, reflective writing and making can lead not just to new ways of fabricating, but of surveying and plotting human experience. This renewed, unified sensibility, is subsequently conveyed back outside to the landscape during new walks, offering altered perceptions and new readings of the landscape. This is a study with potential to be of interest for creative practitioners from a variety of disciplines, and to theorists and scholars of artistic process

Socioecological learning at Lakshmi Ashram : with an emergent methodology of ethical intercultural research

Following the United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (2005–2014), reviews identified a continuing lack of place-based and socioecological learning in culturally diverse contexts. It was suggested that local contexts, divergent cultural voices and alternative pedagogies could provide creative responses to current challenges to planetary wellbeing. This research focuses on one such instance of an alternative educational approach in a girls’ school in India, asking the questions, “What is the experience of community/place pedagogy at this school?” and “What is it to be and become in this intercultural space?” Taking an ethnographic approach in a different culture required particular attention to an ethical intercultural research practice. The emerging theoretical field of postqualitative inquiry, with its relational and processual ontology, offered such a practice. The onto-epistemological insights offered by Karen Barad and Gilles Deleuze, and then considered in the light of India’s own ancient Vedic philosophy, provided an ethical way forward. The research takes the shape of an “unravelling” ethnographic inhabitation of a girls boarding school located in the Lesser (but still very high) Himalayan foothills of Uttarakhand. Run along the lines of Gandhian thinking on education, Lakshmi Ashram concerns itself with the development of head, hands and heart, activating that development with service in the wider community towards socio-economic and environmental justice. I am interested in the experience of place pedagogy and intercultural space in what presents as a socioecological learning community, porous and responsive to the surrounding environment, villages and region. This intimate research aims to contribute to more culturally inclusive educational imaginaries in a global landscape of initiatives to support planetary wellbeing. It contributes to the field as an instance of an educational community that is socioecological in attending to care of self and others, visitors, communities and the environment. It proposes literacies of affect and ethical intercultural (research) practice, to support the work of other researchers in other educational spaces and times. Accounting for the everyday intimacies of pedagogy in this one place, this thesis aims to provide an impetus for thinking differently about education: at the everyday level of enacting pedagogy in diverse cultural contexts, and in a wider landscape of developing humans able to think-otherwise in meeting the world

Creative Caprice: Intrinsic Interest; States of Consciousness; Emotion & Practice-led Phenomenological Inquiry

This research project is a practice-led investigation of how strong emotion influences my creative actions. Through the development and articulation of a methodology for facilitating creative activity, the project considers how these emotions determine which intrinsic interests compel me to create works of art and design. Fundamental to the development of the methodology was the formulation of a comprehensive walking method designed to engage the body, awaken the mind and, through the designation of markers, establish consistently accessible mental/physical spaces wherein creative thinking can be fostered. Given the current interest in the role that walking can play in facilitating creative thought, (Oppezzo and Schwartz, 2014) I argue that my establishing of route markers into such processes, and incorporating individualized meditative techniques represents a significant contribution to this debate. Through my experimentation with walking as research method, I exposed the profound influence past traumatic childhood experiences have had on my creative choice-making, which is also closely linked to a personal identity that derives from the culture I was raised in and my faith traditions. An awareness of the dynamic between cultural shaping of personal identity and the impact of past trauma is key to the potential transfer of the methodology to others. My developing understanding of my practice drew on commentary on artists, including Richard Long, Paul Klee and Joseph Beuys. My research draws on a range of theories of creativity as diverse of those of Margaret A. Boden and David Bohm; writings on walking, such as the work of Rebecca Solnit; ideas on making by Timothy Ingold, and philosophical writings by Jean Paul Sartre and Soren Kierkegaard, among others. My findings are presented as a series of iterations in different media, which invite the reader to consider successively closer approximations to the experience of my research-based discoveries. Enhanced by the application of my methodology, my art-making was invigorated both personally and in my role as a college professor. In summary, this thesis distills the comprehensive nature of my investigation and reveals how intrinsic interest, creative states of consciousness, emotion and practice-led phenomenology intersect

"Imbued with the science of Venus": Female Fallenness, Sexual Pedagogy, and Victorian Pornography

As a decidedly heterogeneous genre, Victorian pornography offers a wide range of sexual narratives, including those that directly challenge both real and fictional narrative constructions of female fallenness by foregrounding female sexual education and contraception practice. However, Victorian pornography is far too often reduced to an analysis of male-driven, fetish-driven, or fantasy-driven narratives. Fastening pornography to the fantasy realm of the imaginary removes the ability to critically read variation within the genre for the real-life cultural work the explicitly tangible directives do, especially regarding the "problems of sex" as they connect to protective female sexual pedagogy as a route to avoid a sexual and social fall. As a reader, critic, and scholar of Victorian pornography, I contend that within the expansive narrative boundaries of the genre there exists a direct challenge to female fallenness, an active, purposeful "writing back" to a restrictive, sadistic narrative of scandalous pregnancy and public shame

Theatres of migritude: towards a dramaturgy of African futures

The thesis aims to contribute to the genre of black migrant cultural production called migritude, developed largely in African diasporic literary circles and tracing its evolution from the Négritude movement. It will mobilize Shailja Patel's significant work to shape a new migritude that stands in continuation and in contestation with the older version of this artistic project. The research question at the heart of the thesis is, what does it mean to have a migrant attitude for theatre and performance making? The thesis explores an approach to thinking about how a relationship between migration and African futurism can be put towards a dramaturgical practice mobilized in the direction of possibility, potential and a more hopeful future. The quest undertaken here is to find out what alternative understandings of African migrancy exist in the spirit of the five case studies, namely Migritude by Shailja Patel, Every Year, Every Day I am Walking by Magnet Theatre, Moj of the Antartctic: An African Odyssey by Mojisola Adebayo, Afrogalactica Deep Space Scrolls by Kapwani Kiwanga and Astronautus Afrikanus, devised by a group of students at Rhodes University under my direction. By analysing each of these performance texts through a different lens, the thesis aims to develop a pliable dramaturgical framework for a migrant attitude which leverages some of the aesthetic features of migritude artistic work as noted by Vanita Reddy (2020). These include defining Africa by movement, linking the concept of migrant with the concept of colonial history and the diasporic refusal of return. Here a migrant attitude also includes Thomas Nail (2015) and Veejay Prashad's (2010) contentions that the migrant is central to a project of social re-imagining, as well as Mark Fleishman's (2015) notion of a dramaturgy of displacement where movement and migration form a core part of both the form and content of the work

Snow Leopard Permutations and Their Even and Odd Threads

Caffrey, Egge, Michel, Rubin and Ver Steegh recently introduced snow leopardpermutations, which are the anti-Baxter permutations that are compatible withthe doubly alternating Baxter permutations. Among other things, they showedthat these permutations preserve parity, and that the number of snow leopardpermutations of length $2n-1$ is the Catalan number $C_n$. In this paper weinvestigate the permutations that the snow leopard permutations induce on theireven and odd entries; we call these the even threads and the odd threads,respectively. We give recursive bijections between these permutations andcertain families of Catalan paths. We characterize the odd (resp. even) threadswhich form the other half of a snow leopard permutation whose even (resp. odd)thread is layered in terms of pattern avoidance, and we give a constructivebijection between the set of permutations of length $n$ which are both eventhreads and odd threads and the set of peakless Motzkin paths of length $n+1$.Comment: 25 pages, 6 figures. Version 3 is modified to use standard Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science but is otherwise unchange